György Dragomán

House Searchies

Short story

Mother generally used to talk everything over with me, often being in the habit of saying why something was the way it was, explaining things to me, sometimes even answering my questions, or if she didn't, I knew that was because she felt it was better for us not to talk about it since what I didn't know I couldn't blab out to others, and I had to admit she was right on that because I knew there really were things that it was dangerous even to mention, such as what exactly had happened during the civil war, or who could procure meat or coffee for how much, or who could be bribed for how much, or why the Party secretary-general and the commander in chief of the armed forces was a treacherous brute, or whom amongst the people we knew had been hauled off, or who had been subjected to a house search and why. Whenever I asked anything to do with that sort of thing, Mother would just say either that it was a serious matter and we ought not to speak about it or I should wait and ask my father as and when he eventually came home. Often, though, she didn't even have to say that much; I could tell from the way she looked at me that it would be better not even to start asking any questions.
That was also how it was when Mother came home one Thursday and asked if I had any money saved, and how much, for I could already sense from her tone of voice that she wasn't asking for fun, so I told her the truth, which was that I had two tenners, though I didn't say where I had got them because I knew she wouldn't be too happy to learn that I had got one from my grandfather whilst I had won the other playing cards, because in principle I wasn't supposed either to play cards or to accept money from my grandfather; but Mother herself must have realised it was better not to ask how come I happened to have such a huge amount of money, because she said nothing, merely went into the living room, made straight for Father's photograph, took it down from the wall, and stuck to the back of the picture with insulating tape was an envelope that she opened to extract a bundle of bank notes then lick her index finger and swiftly count the money, having done which I heard her murmur quietly five hundred and twenty-five plus twenty gives five hundred and forty-five, which means one thousand four hundred and fifty-five have to be scraped together to bring it to two thousand, so I should go and scout around in my room for anything I could do without, she herself would pick through her own clothes and gather together the things she supposed she might get a good price for and we could get by without, and I shouldn't make any plans for Sunday morning because we would be going to the flea market as the money had to be found by Monday.
I just nodded at this, went to my room, opened the cupboard, pulled out my desk drawers, looked all through the bookshelf and round the walls, my posters over the bed, the bird trophies and the weapons, but my eyes lighted on nothing that I would have wanted to sell, so I perched on the bed, settled back and tried to run through in my mind all my possessions in order: my tin soldiers, my matchbox collection, my bubble-gum wrappers, my tennis racquet, my badminton racquet and table-tennis bat, my balls, the sculptures that I had made long ago as a Pioneer, the hand-painted cartoon-character badges that I cut out of plywood with a fret-saw, the French, German, American and Yugoslav comic books that I had been given by Father's old colleagues at work, my hunting knife, my tomahawk, my slingshot, my arrow, my toy revolver, the spent rifle bullets that I had dug out of the wall in the clay pit, my three shove-soccer button teams, the hand-carved chess set which was for checkers inside, all my posters in turn, the pocket diary of nudes that I stashed away under the lowest drawer, the thirty-six-colour stylo of which only the turquoise now wrote-there I sat and scrutinised each item after the other in turn, trying to imagine what it would be like if the item were not there, whether I would look for it or want to play with it at all, as I hadn't taken the matchboxes out of the drawer for at least a year, for instance, and as for badminton it had been a long time since I had played that, whilst I knew most of the comic books off by heart and only very rarely looked at them, yet no way was I capable of imagining what sort of feeling it might be to pull out the matchbox drawer and see it was completely empty, or to cast a glance over to the shelf and see no comic books at all on it.
Meanwhile I heard Mother in the living room, pulling open wardrobes and yanking out drawers, tossing out her clothes and other things, and I pictured that she was unhanging her old two-piece costumes one after the other and setting each of them out on the settee, so I leaned back against the wall, drew my legs up and just sat there on the bed, hugging my knees and listening to the swishing of clothes in the living room, after which Mother went out to the closet, with a squeak of the closet door, a big groan, and I knew she was lifting the suitcase down from the top shelf, then there was a trundling of the wheels on the bottom of the suitcase on the kitchen flagstones as Mother hauled it into the room, which is when it occurred to me that it might even be possible she was not only picking through her own clothes but also looking at Father's clothes, his shirts, neckties, shoes, belts and suits. Before then we had never so much as touched Father's things, it was not permitted even to open his wardrobe or pull out the drawers of his desk, so that on his return he would find everything as he had left it the day they had come for him from the state security office and invited him for a little talk, since when many had been the times I had stopped before Father's wardrobe and gazed into the shiny polish of its door as if into a mirror, and I would call to mind the wardrobe's odour when Father opened it to produce a hoarded sweet or stick of chewing gum from behind the shirts, and I would try to imagine Father was standing there, behind me, and the only reason I couldn't see him was because the polish was too gleaming, and as I was perched there on my bed and heard Mother packing the suitcase I made another effort to review my belongings properly, one after the other, because I knew that I had to pick something out, come what may, but with each and every item what came to mind was when I had been given it or where I had procured it, as well as what I had done or planned to do with it, and I knew that this was going to come to no good, because I was again not going to scrape anything together, be able to select a single thing, and it was then that I distinctly heard Mother opening the door of Father's wardrobe, heard her let out a big sigh, and heard the swoosh of Father's suits as Mother tossed them in succession onto the sofa, at which I got to my feet, stood in the middle of my room and took a long, slow look around as if I were playing a game of house searchies or, say, I were a thief; as if this were not even my room but some stranger's; as if I knew nothing as to what anything was, where it came from or what its purpose was, but was simply looking for something and everything else was in the way, and from the living room I heard Mother quietly sniffling, from which I could tell for certain that she was packing up Father's clothes, and at that I bent down to pull out from under the bed the empty cardboard box that I had wanted to cut into a suit of armour for the fancy-dress party, then went over to my shelf and started taking the things off it, one after the other, tossing them indiscriminately into the box, the comic books, the model aircraft, my hand-painted tin soldiers, not even stopping when I took hold of my old stamp album but chucking that too into the box, then my catapult and pea-shooter as well, the books about Red Indians and hunting, systematically one by one, after which I went over to my desk, pulled out the matchbox drawer and tipped every single matchbox into the box, then saw that the red Ford with the opening doors had accidentally fallen beside it, so I bent down and put that too in along with the rest, then lay the drawer on the floor, stepped onto the bed and tried to detach my posters from the wall, except that couldn't be done so slapdashly because I was worried they would be ripped as I didn't have drawing pins and so had glued them to the wall, the centre-fold spreads of football teams and the cinema posters of Wild West films being the ones I was most concerned about, together with that picture of the national team goalie whose autograph had been specially printed over the picture-those had to be pulled off with particular care, in such a way that it was better the paint peeled from the wall than the pictures were torn, so I leaned against the wall and slipped the palm of my hand under the posters at the side to prise them gingerly off, one after the other, depositing each of them on my bed, laying one on the other, then rolling them all up in one go before placing the whole bundle in one corner of the box, after which I went over to my desk and took down from the shelf over it the badminton racquets, then my genuine Vietnamese reverse-rubber table-tennis bat and my yellow match balls, all four of them, and laid all of those too in the box, after which I opened the cupboard and took out my shove-soccer box, containing the proper net goals that I had fashioned from copper wire and nylons and the three championship teams of buttons, and I chucked that too into the box, and I could hear the buttons scattering and knew that the teams were becoming mixed up but didn't care, and then I took out of the cupboard my artificial leather pistol holster with the two cap-firing plastic guns, and then I also fished out my straw cowboy hat with the deer-skin appliqué trimmings, and as I held it by the copper toggle of the chinstrap it occurred to me that one of the pistols must still be charged with the red phosphorus powder I had scraped off those match heads, and I was just about to grasp the pistol butt when I heard Mother slam down the lid of the suitcase in the living room, so I tossed the holster too into the box and on top of it the cowboy hat, and although the hat almost dropped off, because the box was now very full, the chinstrap snagged on the roll of posters and so dangled off that, and then I heard the suitcase in the living room first snap to then spring open again, because the locks were weak and it took two people to close it, with one pressing it to and the other locking it with the key, and I could hear Mother slamming the lid to over and over again and panting as she tried to snap the locks shut, and I knew she wouldn't call out for help, but I would go and help her anyway.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

György Dragomán
was born in Transylvania but has been living in Budapest since 1988. He studied English literature at ELTE University and published a novel, his only book so far. He is at work on a volume of short stories.