The bone fire, p.36
The Bone Fire, page 36
He takes out a bottle, rips off the foil and wire from the top, and once again he says don’t be afraid; he shakes it once, the bottle shoots out the cork with a bang, and the liquid spills out, foamy and frothy, onto Péter’s hand. He laughs, and he says, To your health, and he gives me the bottle. I take it, and I say, It’s not my birthday. He says that’s not why he said it, he’s just happy that he can be here with me, happy that we’re alive.
As I raise the bottle to my lips, I recall that the last time I drank champagne was two years ago, on New Year’s Eve, with Mother and Father. I don’t want to think about that now. I raise the bottle; the champagne, bubbling, pours into my mouth, it’s sweet and very sparkling, it goes straight to my nose, making me sneeze and laugh. Péter takes the bottle from my hand, drinks from it as well, puts it on the ground, then he looks at my face; I don’t know what it must look like in this blue hovering light. Suddenly he says, You’re beautiful.
My nose is still filled with the bubbles of the champagne, my laughter is loud and sharp, but at least I’m not giggling; I laugh, and I smile, looking at Péter. With a clumsy movement he picks up the bottle and takes a huge gulp.
As he puts down the bottle, I think about what he’s going to say now. I quickly ask him, What about those stars? I don’t see even one.
Péter says that he has a telescope in his bag, but it’s possible that he might not be able to show me the rings of Saturn tonight. This time of year, in August, the most beautiful thing to see are the falling stars.
He reaches into his pocket again; it’s chock-full of sparklers. He divides the bundle in two, gives me half. There’s no point in bothering with them one by one, I should just hold all of them at once into the flame of the gas burner.
The blue flames lick all around the ends of the sparklers. I watch them as they slowly turn red, then white; in a moment they will ignite. I look down at the city and I can’t bear it anymore, so I stand up, I swing my arm around, and the sparklers, making cracking sounds, begin to throw out their sparks. As I fling them into the air, on the ground far below us, the bells of the great temple begin to ring; they strike half past; my sparklers are flying; Péter throws his own sparklers among mine, and I hear as he cries out, Saturn, Saturn, Saturn, I love you, I love you, I love you. I cry out with him, I look at the sparklers’ streaks of orange and white and yellow, they are blinding, but I don’t even blink.
Then Péter turns toward me, and I know what’s going to happen, he’s going to kiss me on the mouth, he’s going to embrace me.
I see the beginning of his movement, I know it’s going to happen—I’m going to want him, I will let him. I won’t be afraid, I won’t snatch my hand away, I won’t close my mouth, I won’t clench my teeth, I won’t hide behind my crossed arms, I won’t hide my breasts, I won’t cross my legs. I won’t turn my head away at the very last moment, I won’t push him away. I’m going to kiss him back. I will embrace him back.
He pulls me toward himself, he kisses me, he squeezes me tight.
His kiss tastes like smoke, like sparklers.
I let him—I want him.
* * *
The flame of the gas stove is still burning. Finally the moon has peeked out from behind the clouds. From somewhere far away the wind brings the sound of thunder. Péter turns in that direction; he listens in the darkness. He says that it’s a rifle going off. If you’ve ever heard that sound, he says, you will always know it. It could be the ironworkers; it seems like they were able to get hold of some weapons again from somewhere.
He gazes into the darkness. He says that it was good during the revolution, because during those four days, he at least knew who stood with whom.
He says that he will never in his whole life ever forget that feeling when they broke through the gates of the secret police building. In that moment he knew exactly what freedom was. And what it meant.
Now, however, he says, he’s not so sure. He thought he was fighting so that no one would ever have to go without again, so that no one would have to be afraid anymore. Not so that people like Iván’s father—people who weren’t even there—could slowly but surely buy up half the city. He’s heard that he has bought not only the tannery but also the ice-skating rink. He shakes his head; why does anyone need such a huge business like that, an entire factory? He’ll never be able to understand. And how can a factory even belong to anyone? He certainly had not faced death so that all of this would belong to one single person.
I ask if he wasn’t afraid he might die.
Péter says no, he wasn’t afraid at all. He smiles, he licks his mouth, then his face grows serious; he looks at me, then he says that it isn’t true, what he just said a moment ago isn’t true. He was afraid, he was so afraid that he pissed his pants, literally, and when Feri, one of his best friends, who was running beside him was shot in the chest, he was so afraid that he thought he was going to collapse, as if he were the one who had been shot. He was more afraid than he’d ever been in his entire life.
I reach over to the nape of his neck; I allow my supple fingers to run through his hair. I caress his head; the tips of my fingers touch his scalp. Everything’s fine, I whisper, don’t worry.
Péter takes my hand; his eyes flash for a second, and he says, Don’t think that I’m a coward.
I smile at him, and I say that I know he isn’t. I know he’s very brave.
I don’t believe you, says Péter. His face grows tense, and he says he can see it in my eyes—I think he’s a coward.
Don’t be ridiculous, I say.
I’m not, he says, this is really serious. He tells me to look into his eyes and tell him sincerely that I think he’s a coward.
Stop it already, I tell him, I’m sorry I even asked.
Too late now, he says. I should tell him the truth.
As he speaks, his voice is trembling.
Once again I tell him not to be an idiot, not to do this to me.
He’s not doing anything, he says, I’m the one who is doing it. He was sincere with me, and I’m not being sincere with him.
I ask him to please stop.
He says that there’s nothing to stop, because he didn’t start anything, I started it when I said he was a coward.
I tell him I never said anything like that. I would really like it now if he would stop. And I have no idea why he’s doing this.
He says it’s because he’s not a coward, he is in no way a coward, he never was one, and he will never be one, and I should know this.
It’s as if he isn’t speaking to me but to someone else. I sense that no matter what I say, it won’t be any good.
He jumps up next to me, knocking over the champagne bottle; the last of the champagne pours out, foaming up, onto the concrete. Péter says that if I don’t believe him, he’ll show me, he will prove to me that he truly is afraid of nothing. By then he’s standing on the balcony, which has no railing; he’s standing on the very edge of the concrete platform, then he steps out above the depths, and he’s standing there in the air, in the void of the darkness.
I feel like I can’t catch my breath; my lungs are full, but I can’t expel the air, it’s as if I am standing there on the edge, and I have to look down into the darkness. I think of flying, I think of that dream in which I flew above our darkened neighborhood, but now the depths, heavy and giddy, are dragging me down, he’s going to fall, I know he’s going to fall, and I feel the plunge in my own stomach.
The champagne bottle rolls to the edge of the balcony; Péter looks at me, and slowly he holds out both his arms; he is still standing there in the void, he still hasn’t fallen. This is impossible, I think, and I look at his legs—he’s standing on something, I see it now, from the concrete panel of the balcony there is a long iron tube extending toward the depths. I know what it is, it’s a water-drainage pipe, we had one on our old balcony; Péter is balancing on that.
Slowly, he raises both his hands above his head; he’s standing there like a dancer, and he smiles at me.
My stomach is convulsing in fear; he’s certainly going to fall; the champagne bottle rolls to the edge of the balcony, slips over the edge, and disappears, but I don’t hear the sound of it shattering on the ground, because then Péter steps to the side, off the pipe, out into the void, and plunges down like a piece of stone.
I shriek, I don’t want to see this, I don’t want it to be true, but it is true, it really is true that Péter stepped off the pipe, plunged down beside it, then, at the very last moment, he grabbed hold of it with one hand, and there he is hanging by one hand from the balcony on the sixteenth floor.
He snorts once; he reaches up with his other hand, grabs the edge of the concrete balcony, slowly pulls himself up, changes his grip, turns onto the side, puts one foot up onto the concrete edge, and climbs back. He crouches, gasping for breath, at the edge of the balcony; he looks at me and then stands up.
I feel the anger tingling all the way from the roots of my hair all across my face. I grimace, yell at him: You stupid idiot! I want to attack him, I want to punch him in the stomach, I want to slap him, I want to tear him apart, pinch him, kick him, bite him. And I want to tell him to never do anything like that to me ever again, he has no right to torture me. It won’t make me love him any more. I stand there and I watch as he steps toward me—You stupid idiot, I say, you absolutely stupid idiot.
34
On my thumb there’s a small brown scar where I stabbed it with the packing needle. My other wounds healed quickly, but this one didn’t want to heal at all; it was still forming pus, then Grandmother saw how I was scratching it, so she gave me some common gypsyweed to put on it. Now it’s completely healed; it just itches a bit from time to time.
I’m alone; outside it’s raining, the weather is chilly, as if it isn’t the end of August.
I want to make some tea for myself; I’m going to put a lot of sugar in it and a bit of rum too, that’ll warm me up nicely.
The tea tin is empty. As I put it back on the credenza, I see that in the back, on the same shelf, there is a much bigger tin box with the same kind of tea inside.
I take it and open it, and I see that there are no tea leaves inside but pieces of paper torn into tiny scraps.
I know what this is. It can only be the papers that the guest ripped up. I grab a handful of them; I didn’t know they were still here.
I take the box to the kitchen table, and I look at all the scraps of paper. I see tiny black letters, pale typewritten letters; I pour it all out until it stands in a small pile.
I spread out the scraps of paper on the oilcloth; one by one I turn them over so that the sides without writing face upward.
And at last the entire table is covered with them.
I lean on the table with my elbows, I look at the torn strips, their creases.
They are gray, white, and yellowish pieces of paper, I look at them, and I don’t know what to do with them.
I reach over, clear a small space for myself on the oilcloth; with my index finger I move a scrap of paper into the middle of the table, then another one, and I place the first next to the second—they don’t fit together.
I select another scrap, then a third, fourth; none of them fit together. I place more scraps in front of myself, push them with my hands. I create patterns, circles that then create spirals, and then they extend into stars, growing tentacles; the tentacles intertwine, the pattern disappears; I begin again, the oilcloth murmurs as I shift the scraps of paper here and there, none of them are fitting together.
I recall the jigsaw puzzle that I got for my sixth birthday. Mother found it somewhere, and when it was all put together, it formed the image of a painting; on the box there was a picture of it, showing many village children playing a whole bunch of different games.
It had more than a thousand pieces, and for a long time I didn’t even dare open it; I just looked at the box, I looked at all the children, wondering what they were doing. There was a river on it, and on the bank of the river sat two little girls wearing big round skirts, and their skirts were spread out all around them, but you couldn’t tell what they were playing. I liked to look at them the best; I imagined that once I put together the puzzle, I would be able to tell what they were playing, but I didn’t dare begin.
Then one day, when Mother wasn’t home, Father saw me looking at the box, and he asked me if I had put the puzzle together yet, and I said I hadn’t, and then Father said let’s do it together. Father said I would see what a good puzzle it is, I should bring it into the living room, he was coming too, he was just going to get himself a beer. There wasn’t enough room on the small table because it was filled with books and newspapers and empty bottles, but we pulled away the carpet next to the divan, and we opened the box, and we dumped the puzzle pieces onto the floor, and I sat cross-legged; Father lay on his side next to me.
I quickly reached into the puzzle pieces and began looking for those pieces that showed the two girls, but I couldn’t find even one of them. Then Father said that wasn’t the way to do it, just randomly, that first we had to find the sides of the puzzle and the corners, assemble the edges of the picture, and then when that came together, we could begin to work inward. He showed me how to find the pieces that had at least one straight side. From that point on we looked for those pieces, but I still would have preferred to find the pieces that showed the girls in the round skirts sitting by the bank of the river. Then, once we had collected all the edge pieces and the corner pieces, Father said that we could start putting it together, and we began to, but somehow none of the pieces fit together. Father had finished his beer and sent me out to the kitchen to get him another, and now he’d also finished his second beer, but the perimeter of the puzzle still wasn’t complete, only one corner was, and Father was trying to fit the small pieces together with increasing anger. I saw how a whole bunch of them really didn’t fit together at all, he had to keep forcing the rounded tabs of the puzzle into the slots with his thumb; I saw how angrily he was holding his head, just like when he shouted and yelled, so I tried to help as best I could, but no matter how much I tried, the pieces wouldn’t fit together, and when they did fit together, the edge of the picture didn’t form a straight line, so I had to take them apart again, and then I noticed, in the pile, two pieces of one of the girls in the round skirt. I reached over and grabbed them, and they fit each other perfectly, there was half the body of one of the girls, and a big piece of her skirt; then I saw half her head, so I reached over to take that as well, and then Father yelled at me, asking me what was I doing, hadn’t he told me that we had to complete the edges before working on the center parts? And he reached over, and, with an angry movement, he swept the pieces of the girl back into the pile with all the other puzzle pieces, and I thought that I would never find them ever again, and I began to cry; I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stop myself, and then Father leaped up from the floor, and he yelled at me to stop bawling already, but I could see that he would be only too happy to give a good kick to that pile of puzzle pieces, that’s how angry he was; still, though, he didn’t kick it, he just turned around and crouched down next to me and told me now it was time to stop. He really smelled like beer, and he was holding his head in such a way that I knew he was going to start yelling again. I squeezed my mouth together and I swallowed back my tears, I wanted it to pass, and it did pass, and then Father said, That’s the way, good girl.
I look at the scraps of paper now; I think of the puzzle, and I think about how I never took it out again, I shoved it into a secret hiding place behind the drawers of the linen chest. I’m thinking of the girls as they sat there in their swirling skirts on the banks of the river.
I wipe my eyes with my fists; the scraps of paper are spread out all over the oilcloth, and I know that I won’t be able to fit even one piece with another.
I squint, wipe my eyes again, and then I see that one of the scraps of paper is moving. It’s slowly turning in a circle; I know I’m just imagining it, but then I see that another scrap of paper is moving too, it’s heading toward the first; they reach each other, they circle around each other; they join up together; they fit into each other perfectly. Then a third scrap of paper moves. I lean in closer, and I see that among the scraps of paper there are tiny black dots moving. They are ants—many tiny black ants.
Ever since Grandmother poured boiling water on the anthill, I haven’t seen any ants in the garden. But now here they are again, they’re faster and blacker. I watch how they arrive, climbing up one of the table legs. I push back the chair but don’t stand up; sitting, I lean to the side, supporting myself with one hand on the floor. The ants are climbing out from the cracks in the floor, then climbing up the table leg and onto the oilcloth.
Now the entire table is full of them. They clamber between the scraps of paper; every scrap is moving, around each other, above each other, below each other; they slowly move here and there, they turn this way and that, they merge together, then they come apart again, the scraps of paper make rustling and swishing sounds. I watch as they move, I don’t dare touch the table; the slow swirling of the scraps of paper is making me dizzy, I feel as if the kitchen is moving around me, and I have to lean on the table; I sense something scratching the side of my palm. I look down; next to my hand a gray scrap of paper is moving. I see that two of its edges are straight, it’s the corner of one page; as it turns, its tip once again touches the side of my hand, then it slowly sets off for the middle of the table to another gray scrap of paper; it stops beside it, they fit together perfectly, there’s a third one already right next to them; slowly the edge of the paper comes together; I keep watching, getting dizzier and dizzier.
* * *
The scraps of paper are whirling in my head; sometimes I touch one or the other with the tip of my finger, let it carry my hand. Outside there’s thunder, there’s lightning too, then the rain begins to pour down. I hear the wind dashing the drops of rain against the windowpanes, and yet I can’t look away from the table.
