Zsolt Láng

The Birth of Emma Kovács

(Short story)

...

4

Kiddo Kovács had at first wanted to marry his elder sister. He planned that they would have just one child, one just like he was at the age of five. He was going to school by the time he transferred affections from his sister to his cousin. His cousin seemed to be willing as well, and once, amidst the lilac bushes, had even shown him how she did her number ones. It was a more complex phenomenon than might have been reckoned on, for something in his body had started to tingle even before the onset of the jet, giving Kiddo no small pause to think. But to revert to his dealings with women, his face was already showing a growth of stubble by the time he first ventured out into foreign realms - in a manner of speaking, since Sophie Boros was not a total stranger either. They went together for piano lessons at Auntie Mary's, an unfrocked nun. The entire town respected anyone who sent their child to Auntie Mary's for piano lessons. Auntie Mary would point to the score with a cane. When she rapped down on those fingers, her football-sized bun would quiver. To be more precise, the cane only rapped Kiddo's knuckles because everyone spoke with Sophiekins as though she were a delicate porcelain figurine - handmade so to say. Kiddo too was badly smitten by this protectiveness toward Sophiekins. At the high-school ball they only got as far as snogging, after which they went out with one another for six years until they finally became engaged. Both the Boros and the Kovács family saw themselves as leading lights: to be sure, from being an insignificant teacher in the old regime, Mr Boros's appointment - against the opposition of a substantial portion of the teaching staff - as headmaster could be put down to his family's former connections as county sheriff. Sophie was not admitted to university in the capital; she was only able to take an extramural degree locally, whilst Kiddo studied at an even more dubious polytechnic college, where the only concern was how to rake in the tuition fees. At the engagement party, Pa Boros read the following saying from his notebook with the checked cover: "A secret lies in wedlock, though whether that is a heavenly or earthly secret, it matters not: just be curious about it." After the engagement, Sophie announced that henceforth Kiddo would be sleeping at their place. Pa Boros acceded without kicking up the least fuss; indeed, he tearfully announced that he would like first a grandson, then a granddaughter, then another boy and finally another girl. The Kovács parents did not go to the engagement party because Kiddo forgot to tell them. It may well be that they harboured some old antipathy, from those high-sheriff days, but no matter.
Their lovemaking was tortuous and a failure. Sophie was never satisfied, even though Kiddo strove to do her every bidding. Sophie had read that if she received the seed whilst lying on her right side, the child she bore would be male.
For months, therefore, Emma Kovács was a boy. She wasn't even called Emma but Ernest. Or Thomas. Or Mark. Or Nicholas. Or Peter. Or David. Or Christianandrasultan. Or Raymond. Pa Boros would have liked to see him given a nice Hungarian name, Ma Boros, a Catholic one. Kiddo didn't care; he just nodded enthusiastically. The time when Sophie had changed her mind by the hour (which Kiddo supported) having long elapsed, his sustained affirmation had turned into opposition that was to be overcome. I don't know how anyone can have such rotten taste, Sophie, forehead blazing, tore a strip off him.
Emma Kovács was an infinite radiating sphere that was elongating steadily. For Sophie's name-day a girlfriend gave her a four-week-old Pekinese pup in a basket lined with pink silk. The whole thing was tiny enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She could feel the beating of the dog's heart even through the bast. This touch captivated her, so it was no mere chance that for several days Emma Kovács resembled a puppy dog. Then in early June, a film star - the one who played Spiderman. In the days that followed the parish fair, she was like the infant in Mary's arms in the fresco behind the altar at St Anthony's. For a single hour she waved like a thoroughgoing yet likeable banker from afar. During the St Stephen's Day festivities the entire gallery of Hungarian historical portraits - as in the sombre-toned paintings of the Romantic school - found their way onto the sphere's wall. The next week they were joined by world-famed notables, Einstein among them, whom Sophie recognised only from his portrait and believed to be an over-the-hill rock star.

5

Kiddo Kovács headed back home without the barbecue grill. He was sidling a little beside his bicycle because his groin was giving him a twinge or two. These days he and Sophie tended to have a lie-down after lunch as well, though in that regard there was no question of resting. Sophie would arrange herself on her right side, so he had to lie on his left, which was not medically advisable as he had suffered an episode of myocarditis when in high-school and had been exempted from gym that year. He would therefore raise his right foot at a forty-five degree angle and kick in the air. Hup-two-three, hup-two-three, he would say over and over again to himself in the same tone as Nyéki, the rough-spoken gym teacher. He pretended that he too was working away, Hup-two-three, hup-two-three. He came round to find Sophie pushing him away from beside her. You've gone and done it on me again, she rebuked him, giving another shove so she might turn comfortably onto her back and, for want of anything else, trust gravity to bring the spermatozoon safely to port. She helped it on its way with her tiny finger all the same, indeed even started humming an ancient incantation: Little seed, little seed, make your way through., was all that Kiddo Kovács picked out before snoozing off again.
Yawning away, he trudged along Vihar Road, screwing his eyes up in the strong September sunshine. Though there was nothing to divulge that the street's inhabitants had been evicted and others moved in to take up their places, strange pairs of eyes were spying from the windows. No, maybe not so strange after all, for they had greeted him countless times before from the shelves and glass-paned cabinets of the stockroom. For instance, a feral cat was gazing out of Aunt Teri's window, a long-eared owl from Auntie Nanci's, the nursery teacher's, an ostrich from Frankie Semsey's, a lynx from the Gózners' place. At the corner of Kölcsey Street the town's solitary traffic lamp, which had changed from red to green just as slowly ever since his childhood, reminded him of Gonzo, the one-eyed orang-utan. Pallay had scratched out the other eye and sold it for a silver coin of Franz Joseph vintage. Two thirds of the way down the street, opposite the cobbler's shop, a crucifix was still standing from the times when that had marked the town's boundary. Christ's green eyes looked as though they wished to communicate something. What they signalled to Kiddo, in any event, was that there were only four houses to go and he would soon be home. A bird huddled on the top of the stone cross. It lowered the lids of its eyes like some sort of resigned, self-important writer: when the world is enthusing about the latest sensation, he pooh-poohs it, having already written it up a long time back. For my part, I can say without complacency that I even know the bird's name. Everyone called it Jókai, same as the writer.
As a matter of fact, not many birds had lived in the town since, on the occasion of a visit by some party secretary-general or other in the early Seventies, Kálmán Nyéki, who later became director of the Sports Academy, got the idea from abroad of dyeing them red with aniline. Red being the colour of loyalty in those days. The birds for their part fled, and the behaviour of those that stayed showed aggressiveness combined with confusion. Zakariás knows how many times he has had to call out a glazier because the high school had a first-floor window on the Vizafogó Street façade, alongside the canal, that they would dive-bomb, kamikaze-like, every month.
Kiddo Kovács could have found his way home from the high school with his eyes shut. It was as if a fine thread, spun from a silvery, wet mass, were reeling him in. Yet the dangers lying in wait for him were truly not negligible. Though accidents were uncommon in V., were the town to be enlarged merely to moderate size, their number would multiply alarmingly. At least three tiles on the roof of the Uszkais' house were ready to hurtle down at any moment, to say nothing of old Ma Surányi's hovel, one of whose walls would have been demolished by the gentlest of earth tremors. Even that afternoon there were at least three people driving whilst drunk, one of whom ended up on the river bed after smashing through the Castle Hill Street parapet. He might also have run Kiddo over. At the same time, one should not lose sight of the internal catastrophes that befall the human body. It could have happened (after all it was the end of a tiring day) that a capillary burst in his brain, or his heart stopped. What is more, the probability of a meteor falling on his head could not be said to be absolutely nil. Last but not least, one could not entirely eliminate street disturbances or spontaneous demonstrations; crowds are unpredictable and can crush even innocent bystanders. Were I able to follow Kiddo's path, not from down below but right up on high - let's suppose from a space station in terrestrial orbit - I would be able to report on a labyrinth spiked with obstacles, forks and pitfalls in which reaching the goal was far more improbable than stood to reason from V.'s scale.
Since the sun was still shining, he pushed his bike into the woodshed then, without looking in to greet his parents, who had already installed themselves in front of the TV, he climbed the cherry-tree to enter the comfortable hut he had fashioned for himself. The sparrows under the eaves started clamouring. He took his catapult off its peg, dug up a pebble from a tin can, and fired at the gutter. The metal gave a big ping after which there was silence.
The sky overhead was lighted up like on a huge cinema screen. Light poured upwards, leaving the bottom of the gardens in darkness. Blinding flashes chased about angrily and jeeringly. They failed to find a single cloud on which they would have been able to settle and so they excited floating specks of dust with their caresses. Kiddo too longed to be up on the very roof of the sky. For twenty years he had forged his dreams, and every time he jumped down he was suffused by the hope that he would start to float and also slowly and ceremonially sink towards the depths of the sky. As he was continually racking his brains about inventions, he imagined he ought to become electrostatically charged. He shut his eyes, poked his index finger over his head out of the regular sphere of the cherry-tree and, taking deep breaths, imagined that an enormous ebonite rod touched him, whereupon he would start to flutter toward the sky like a scrap of paper.
A smell of cabbage and pasta eddied around the courtyard. Kiddo's stomach rumbled loudly, his eyelashes flew open. The stellar phenomena that took the place of the flitting specks of dust sparkled in the ophthalmoscope. Anyone living in a small town on a flat plain knows how many of them fit onto a sky that reaches down so far. Kiddo called the Big Dipper the Goose, whilst Cygnus was the Carbuncle. What appeared on maps as the Little Bear was the Water Spider, Cassiopeia he called Little Eight. With his extensible spy-glass he made a separate telescopic visit to each of Lyra's stars, addressing them as Springwater, Wildflower, Tear, Earthworm, Mole Ear, Stysihunter. If he was in a good mood, he bestowed names non-stop and remembered all of them the next day.
He grabbed a horizontal branch, pushed himself off and lunged forward in a wide arc. For a single minute, floating above the darkness, he felt that the earth's strength had slackened and was exceptionally releasing him. But that much daydreaming was a lot for him for that day, and his arm had also been weakened, so he flopped down on the ground.
And in the very moment that he flopped down the infinite radiating sphere of Emma Kovács shrank to a size of two millimicrons in a negative explosion.

6

The moment of the sphere's collapse was followed by a renewed explosion, this time positive in direction. The name of this new, expanding sphere was none other than hunger. An eating frenzy took over two millimicron-sized Emma Kovács, and she gobbled up everything she came across. She had the delirious experience of how easy it was to come across companions in this furious gorging, and how easy to reach agreement with them. New cables interwove, new channels were built, mouths and stomachs scooped out at a dizzying pace. A high degree of understanding, occasionally a noble solidarity, called the labourers together, as if one and the same song were resounding within them. No one was familiar with the plan, and yet arms grew like a very triumph of methodicalness in order to be able to grasp the nutriments, legs sprouted so as to reach fresh fields, brains fizzed so as to devise the most titillating flavours that would inject new juices into a slackening stomach. Emma Kovács wanted to recover the infinite radiatingness, not a centimetre smaller.
By the time Kiddo had eaten a second helping of cabbage and pasta, Emma Kovács, surpassing all expectations, had swollen to the size of an ant's egg whilst her shape resembled one of those bogeys that Kiddo, having picked from his nose, would flick by the dozen from his comfortable tree-house. By the time Kiddo had drunk his mint tea, brushed his teeth and gone to bed, the ant's egg had rolled over into its new abode and made acquaintance with the unfamiliar climate there; she messed herself in her excitement when a stranger into whom she had bitten did not just spurn her approach but by way of a warning gesture opened a shielding umbrella over her head.

7

Kiddo Kovács's former friends were ashamed about returning to a world of catapults, tiddlywinks, catching butterflies and climbing trees. What would their children say if they couldn't flick a ten-point button two metres? If instead of hitting the badminton shuttle they were to thrash empty air. Nor did new friends turn up for Kiddo so no one found it odd that he was staying at his parents' house all the time. Even Sophie did not miss him, what's more; it did not even register on her that he had not been to their place for weeks on end.
He spent the warm, honey-coloured afternoons of autumn in his tree-house, studying the life of a new generation of sparrows with his telescope. Things went back to the way they had been before Sophie singled him out.
The weather grew colder in the last days of October. The leaves turned yellow and were shed from the trees in a single night. November arrived with its rime and hoar-frost. The copious rains that had long been waited that autumn definitively failed to arrive, and the ground froze hard as rock. The Kovács family prepared for All Souls' Day. On these occasions, Kiddo's sister also came home from the other end of the country, where she worked as a geologist for a mining company, along with her husband. Over the past year she had doubled in weight because she had only been given office work and had no field trips.
Kiddo Kovács liked to gaze at candle flames and he collected the strange wax forms that trickled down the sides in a matchbox. He would linger by the home-constructed lanterns that protected the easily chilled little flames from the wind.
His family prepared in a grim mood for the afternoon outing, though he did not notice any of that. Admittedly, his father had spoken to him balefully, but only on setting off, whilst they were bundling themselves into their Skoda, saying that he didn't even deserve to be taken with them. He asked why they had said that, whereupon his father replied that he must know full well why.
They stood speechless around the grave. Shortly afterwards, his brother-in-law went off to the grave of his own relatives, so they were left to themselves. That is when his mother started. Eyes flashing with anger, she hissed, "What's up with Celia?" Kiddo did not understand what she was getting at, though meanwhile of course the penny dropped. "Why would anything be up?", he mechanically flung the question back. His mother's face started to fume mutely. He was only too familiar with that phase, or rather the ghastly one that was to come; little wonder that he cast an imploring look at his sister then at his father. He had always been able to count on his father to remain neutral but, sooner or later, to side with him. This time, however, his father wrinkled his brow questioningly, then as if he couldn't bear to wait until the scene that was getting under way had reached its climax, spat out, "You good-for-nothing!" Kiddo's mother, angry at being pre-empted, huffed her way to the front and began strewing her epithets almost incoherently on that filthy, broken-healed, crackbrained little whore.
"Hussy," the sister slid in. This was the first time Kiddo had heard the word, but he was able to infer its meaning straight from his sister's face. Still, he raised an eyebrow uncomprehendingly, because he had often found that his sister would forget about promised clips round the ear if she was able to preen herself by explaining something to him. Hussy, a daft slut, can't keep her knickers on, their mother took over again.
Keeping his head down, Kiddo Kovács stood hemmed in among the graves. He was growing smaller by the minute. He was pole-axed by the news that he too had suspected for at least a fortnight. Celia had constantly skirted around it, going down more than once into the workshop, and if he took to his heels, as he always did, she would dispatch in his wake a curious gesture of pretending to stroke an imaginary swollen belly. He would eventually catch on to everything, of course, with his sixth sense, if not his conscious mind. Why had he gone to the school that afternoon? If it hadn't been for that barbecue, or if Sophie would have left him in peace, or if the light had not been on, or he had not looked up, or if Zakariás had secured the doors. The heavy sands of two weeks of self-deception landed with a thud around his shoulders. He hoped nothing had happened, that warm summer evenings would last forever.
He looked out from among the graves to the gravel path, where an old woman dressed in black was slowly crunching her way toward them, shifting her body from one leg to the other. He shivered with cold because he felt he was naked. Celia's belly was like an X-ray machine. He was standing there before the prying eyes, and it was useless trying to cover up his crotch, a draught was fanning his backside, a pair of stained pyjamas was dangling in his hands, he was doggedly crumpling them, in his nostrils the unsettling smell that was presumably being picked up not just by his parents but also the neighbours. He was bathed in sweat. He was shuddering from the freezing wind that was buffeting him. He hoped that by the evening he would have a fever so he could stay in bed. Yet that was no good either, because then his mother would stay beside him, nursing him and scanning him with her X-ray eyes. There were no secrets before her. She knew about everything but would still carry on castigating him to spill it all out. Gone was the customary All Souls' Day mood. Futile his dreams of candles. The wind whistled ghostlike on the pipes that were welded together to make the crosses. If only the earth would swallow him up! It might sort out the situation if a single small clod were to shift. Except everything is covered in concrete, carefully swept with a feather-duster. The handles on the grave vaults were so rusty not even a monkey-wrench would shift them. Interesting, it suddenly crossed his mind, they were not in the habit of ever mentioning the dead. They would get to the state of the grave at most, the work of the cemetery's caretaker, the quality of the wreaths, but not so much as a single word about the residents of the graves.
His mother fell silent, then asked him something to which admittedly he could not supply an answer, but at least he had a chance to get a word in edgeways.
"What month is she in?"
"Where do you get this stuff from?"
"Come off it, son, even the dicky birds are talking about it."
That was one of his mother's pet phrases, and when she trotted it out one knew that she was no longer in the grip of anger. "It can't be too many," she replied in her son's stead. The anger had also drained from her voice; she had become pensive, as if something else were on her mind. A favourable state to come, the wheels start spinning and grind the flour for the paste of the solution.
The usual family council sat, with everyone chipping in something, out of which emerged an idea, conceived in the spirit of their shared headache, for reaching a solution one way or another. They also managed to solve nebulous and complicated issues because even though failing to alight upon a tangible result, they would have shifted out of their lethargy and, being in motion, would be able to look on things from a new angle. When his grandmother was found to have cancer and they all knew there was nothing that could be done to help her, they had still managed to sweep on past the impasse, persuading grandma that she should elect to have the operation, even though it was pointless. The burial had gone like clockwork then, and even Kiddo drank a glass of brandy at the wake. By the time his brother-in-law got back the teeth-baring was over; they jolted homewards in a distinctly cheery mood.

8

Celia arrived at 6 p.m., as Kiddo had told her on the telephone. She had already seen Kiddo's mother earlier - a proud woman, who kept her back straight as a poker even when bending down to pick out potatoes at the market. Nor did the mother stand on ceremony on being introduced, immediately reaching out to her stomach.
Celia had washed her hair with the nettle shampoo that Zacharias gave her for Christmas. Otherwise she habitually used soap. She had put on a fluffy, puff-sleeved cardigan; for underwear, leaving nothing to chance, she had on black lace panties. How right she was. She had also made up her eyes with a black liner.
Kiddo's mother tugged out the white blouse beneath the sweater to plant her warm palm under the waistband of the skirt and panties. Soft, she said to her daughter, who had stayed on a few days because work at the mine was suspended due to some accident and only her husband had to return. "See for yourself!"
"No, it's not soft," thus Kiddo's sister as her hand also made its way under the sweater. "It's quite firm."
Celia herself palpated her own tummy and nodded.
Finally Kiddo's mother came across the spot; her palm stopped dead and her brow darkened. "Firm," she nodded grimly. At this, Celia unbuttoned her cardigan and pushed down the waistband of her panties in order to give better access to her belly. Also present was Kiddo's father, who after being forced to interrupt his studies at the Technological University had become a salesman in the porcelain department at the Vasudvar; so, he had a good eye for the wares, for one thing, and for another, he had a splendid feel for the language of the customers, which is to say he got on well with people. He was able to convince even the most stubborn that a cracked jug was an advantageous purchase, and in any case that little crack was only a scratch which would soon wear away with usage. He did not even have to feel the belly; he could see how firm it was.
And indeed, Emma Kovács was already bigger than a pea in Celia's tummy. She most closely resembled three grains of pearl barley that have stuck together, a bigger one and two smaller ones. As if sensing the looks of interest, she thrust out her chest. Life for her was intoxicating, more and more intoxicating from one day to the next. The primeval infinite radiating sphere did not shatter completely; its memory oscillated in the aether, or to be more precise, each particle of the ether preserved traces in its frequency of oscillation.
A great many hours had ensued after this 6 p.m. on Perpeter's face, probably several tens of thousands, by the time Emma Kovács got to hear those oscillations with her own ears. A man was whispering something to her, and in that whisper (to say nothing of the aniseed odour of the breath, at which the dress had already fallen away from her more than once) she satisfied herself about the existence of the infinite radiating sphere. What an afternoon that was! A crazy happiness was staining the sky crimson - so much so that one ought to trumpet out to people to come with buckets and blankets, take it away, there was plenty for them too. She had not yet been in love that morning, nor at noon, but by the afternoon, yes. Nor did she understand it. The light shone for days, she knew neither day nor night. At night she filled up four notebooks with her writing;
the next morning she could barely make out the words. She did not manage to get on with the story, although it was more real, more horrific, more glittering, more compact and more secretive than the others. The hell with it! Someone else would write it.
The three fused grains again soiled themselves in their excitement. They went limp for a second but then hastened to preen themselves. The skin on Celia's belly quivered. "There!" Kiddo's mother poked at it, though in such a way that her finger did not come to a stop at the skin but hit with an impetus gathered from a fair distance away.
"It has to slacken. It will hold fast as long as it's firm!"
The kitchen table was the father's idea. He helped Celia step onto it from the kitchen stool and later to get to her feet from the kitchen flags. And he was the first to palpate. "Keep lifting rather," said Kiddo's mother.
Nothing useful came into Kiddo Kovács's mind. He was ashamed that he of all people was so powerless. although he was the one who should be taking the lead. His sister, of course! She was extremely well up in this subject, and just how well was now becoming clear. It was she who suggested the chaise longue, given that one only has to reach under it, it is comfortable to the touch, and it is already heavier if someone is sitting on it, indeed it makes a difference where the person sits. At last Kiddo too was also able to set himself into service. It was he who hit upon the idea of jumping on the bed to produce a shock-wave type of reverberation that would bring even bridges crashing down. His father, fearful for the springs, talked him out of that however. What matters is the effort, the sister fussed, one has to sweat.
Celia groaned loudly so they could see the effort. Her face became flushed; later a lazy moistness of some kind began to run down her thigh and she grew alarmed. Just the sweat trickling down from her back; no result. Kiddo's mother again came up with the new idea that what was needed was some direct action, a more precise one that would act where it was needed. She already knew, of course, what she wanted but would have preferred that she did not have to start. Her daughter guessed what she was thinking and, having told Celia to get her stuff together and hold it up, prodded her there with a lightning-quick thrust of the right fist from which the knuckle of the middle finger protruded.
They did not lose patience throughout the entire evening, and if they sometimes got tangled up with one another, that was merely because they all had the same wish and a common intent to prove it, wishing to signal to the others that they were doing everything they possibly could in the interests of success. Even Celia was sucked into this maelstrom and was by now willingly pummelling her own stomach. Her fist would keep on amusingly bouncing back as though from a ball. That was when Kiddo's father, fed up with all the inaccuracy, slammed her with a deliberate right jab, from close to but with all his might. Celia doubled up, even lost consciousness for a second and dropped to her knees, but looking up straight away to say, "No harm done. In fact maybe now. Yes, it's definitely softened," and she exposed her bad teeth to laugh through the tears that had sprung involuntarily to her eyes. Kiddo's mother eagerly made a grab. They watched intently. No, it hasn't loosened, came the verdict. A shadow of alarm passed over Celia expression, but all the same she happily raised her rags and turned her belly once more towards the Vasudvar salesman.
Kiddo Kovács marked time with growing impatience by the kitchen table. Though he tried to dismiss it, he could picture to himself the scene when his father had angrily dismantled the prop-driven aircraft that Kiddo had once put together from a sewing machine - with what even his father had admitted were considerable engineering precision and masterly inventiveness for an eleven-year-old kid. It annoyed him that they were again ruining something that was, after all, his business. He got angry at his father, who wanted to be a jack of all trades yet was incapable of doing quite basic repairs. His eyes were no longer any good, and he was lazy in his aim. Jumping in ahead of his father, therefore, he let fly an irascible blow, having seen that it needed to be at least two finger-breadths lower down. He aimed two finger-breadths lower down and he was spot on. This time Celia really did faint away. Panickily, they cleaned up and sat her down on the chaise longue. Kiddo's sister offered her a nip of brandy, and later on they made her down a mug of tea. They agreed that they would carry on the next day, but Kiddo's mother recommended in the meantime mustard seed tea and a scalding-hot bath. You have a bathroom? Water from the hot tap isn't hot enough; you have to heat a panful on the stove. And come here again tomorrow, after dusk.

9

In her state of euphoria Emma Kovács always reached a stage of philosophical reflection. She chewed over the idea that solicitude, being evenly distributed in the world, accumulates all that lies at hand with its goodness. Or to put it another way, if an existing being presents itself to solicitude, then the existing will be "at hand" in principle. She became utterly intoxicated at all the attention that was being directed towards her. Then from the first she glimpsed stars. She did not understand how they had reappeared; before they had twinkled on the wall of the infinite radiating sphere. It's hardly surprising, then, that she was immediately brushed by the butterfly wings of hope: well now, little girl, you've achieved what you longed for so much, you've regained your sphere. Shortly afterwards, however, darkness moved in to replace the stars, and the three fused grains of pearl barley writhed in the icy squalor of pain. Bound together as they were by the suggestive whispering of desires and the noble silver threads of health, the cells would have taken flight in all directions with almost prodigal impudence. What up till now had united them in delicate balance would have run away. The past stepped into the present, the future shrouded the ancient. Emma Kovács resembled a bird, huddled on the crucifix, legs growing on its shivering back, so that on taking to the air it looked as if it were flying tail first on its back. Matter decomposed and time along with it. God himself would not have been able to make anything of the chaos. I was able to say what the bird's name was, but I had no hope that I might have any insight into Emma Kovács's mind. I can only suggest what she pictured to herself. She stood before a horse, across from the former cobbler's shop in Vihar Road, with her back to the cross. The horse was stretched out on the road, raising its head from time to time. No, to start with it was still standing. Beside it was a cart, with billets of wood strewn around the cart. A stubble-chinned man who stank like a brewery was beating the horse with a bludgeon thick as your arm. The protagonists in the scene also show the extent to which time has stood still in V.: wood is the fuel for heating and horse-and-carts were still going round the streets even then. The sole change in the picture is the internet café that has opened where the cobbler's shop was. The carter was ceaselessly belabouring the horse about the head. The horse's eyes were swimming in blood but the eyeballs were protruding from the pool of blood and gazed clearly at Emma Kovács. At whom else could they have gazed? Aunt Theresa was standing there but she was just laughing. Likewise Uncle Steve Gózner. Dessie Kodra was also laughing even as he tossed a greeting out to her: "Hi, there, Emmy, I hope you're not bunking off school!" Beside him was his wife, Aunt Elly Kodra, who wasn't entirely sober even now but still gave a friendly smile; if she really had taken a drop too much, she would go into the classroom and, her skinny arms or not, was quite capable of making mincemeat of Túróczi or Judit Kádas. A namesake, Enid Kovács, and Kovieni were laughing as well. The truth is Emma Kovács never did have a sense of humour. Transfixed to the spot, she watched brewery-breath panting as he thrashed the horse's head; his dirt-caked donkey-jacket emitted an irritating swishing sound. God's teeth - that's what he kept on yelling. Emma Kovács was not a churchgoer, nor was she in the habit of praying, but an icy thunderbolt ran through her at the words. She plugged her ears but she did not want to cover her eyes, because she feared the next blow would be for her. She ought to have moved on but was unable to stir from the place. She had no idea how this day would end. Would she get home at all? After which she became accustomed to the spectacle, even started to become annoyed: if the horse was capable of standing the roughest blows without kicking out, biting or running away, then surely it couldn't take any more effort for it to knuckle down and do whatever it was that would assuage brewery-breath's fit of rage. Although she soon reached home, because a neighbour who happened to be going that way took her by the hand and brought her back, the story continued the whole evening, the whole of the night and the next day as well. It continues to the present moment. One may also question why, if it was incapable of kicking back or running away, it did not perish? That was almost the most dreadful aspect of all. Why didn't it give up the ghost? She knew the answer, was fully alive to it, even whilst having not the foggiest idea.
The second blow was also unexpected, the third too. By the fourth, though, she was expecting it. What a turn-up! She was nonplussed and gritted her teeth, hanging on with pig-headed determination. She did nothing special, having no stratagem of any kind. Perhaps it was not she herself but what arose from the desire to recover the infinite radiating sphere - yes, anger, stubborn anger that stiffened like a concrete post within her, embracing her. A grown-up person who does not take a breath of air for two minutes will have a notion of how serious her determination was. You ask how long two minutes is? Eight swings of the pendulum for Perpeter, or a sentence of moderate length. It was never the blows that tested her, that was almost gratifying, but the ensuing reaction, which, gaining energy from the nearby elastic walls, magnified the force of the waves so that the oscillation could smash into the depths with self-destructive triumph like a tidal bore that has been whipped up to the point of being able to dump all the water in the ocean onto the coast.

10

Sophie first thought of Kiddo when, after weeks had gone by, news of Celia's condition came to her attention. She threw a fit, ranted and raved until it made her ill. As she was leaning over the toilet bowl to vomit, the thought took on colour like a soap bubble, that the true cause of her indisposition could be nothing other than the longed-for pregnancy. She even felt that her belly was larger than usual, her breasts too. Even a bead of milk formed on her nipple.
If she was counting back correctly, several due dates had already gone.
A gold chain glittered on the wrist of Gábor Bátori, a gynaecologist with a name of venerable distinction. It was on Sophie's account that he went to his surgery on Boxing Day. She had been waiting agitatedly since the morning.
"A Jew," Sophie's mama appended to the name under her breath as if she were talking about a sore hidden beneath one's clothing. Although no one had expressly forbidden Sophie to have anything to do with him, her mother's voice and expression had been enough to deter her. Gábor for his part would gladly have wooed her, for in any case he too had marvelled at the boyishly slender body straining under the backboard during basketball games. It was quite probably Sophie who made Gábor become a gynaecologist. The things a rejected lover is capable of dreaming up!
He hid his discomposure with pompous small talk. Medical science had achieved its greatest successes in its studies of the female body. It was an incontestable fact that the human hormonal system had been most thoroughly studied through the secretions of the female organism. When Sophie slipped out of her knickers to step behind the screen, Gábor, left alone with the blue glow of the underwear, could not resist the temptation: at a single twitch of the pituitary the intoxicating hormone whistled like a black arrow to the gonads, causing even the hairs on his close-cropped head to stand on end. Trembling, he leaned over and brushed the hem of the silk with his lips. With him all but passing out from its fragrance, the muscular tone of the quiver hit its peak. He stood for a while and looked up the ceiling, focusing his attention on a missing screw-head on the light fitting. He stepped behind the screen with a deep sigh, mechanically smeared white jelly over Sophie's abdomen, then pressed the head of the ultrasound scanner onto that.
Long minutes passed. In Gábor's brain the profound and heavy scent flushed out the heavy alluvium from ever deeper down. A provocative, wild, audacious scent! It would strike him down, but he did not mind becoming her eternal slave. If only.
You would be ready to give birth tomorrow. You have the dilatation for it too. I'll crack the cervical index in a moment, but the sponginess can be picked out even by ultrasound. The mouth of the womb has almost vanished. The glands of the uterine tube are squelching in anticipation, the muscles of the base of the pelvis have become distended. I'm amazed there are no labour-pains. I see the perineum has also thickened. You would be ready to give birth today - even right now, never mind tomorrow. It's just that there is nothing there. A false pregnancy. It looks as though you wanted it very much, or else were very frightened of it.
"I want it very much! Want it!"
Gábor Bátori completed yet another a cowardly circuit on the outside of the screen, tottered over to his desk, rummaged through the index cards then went back and clumsily flopped on Sophie, burying his head and inhaling her scent, inhaling it deeply. I can help, he croaked.
Sophie did not dare fall asleep for two days because if she did fall asleep, she would see Gábor's face bobbing up from between her thighs as if she were giving birth to him. She regretted having gone to him and felt a sense of shame, or maybe it was that childhood aversion of hers. She despised herself. She took a shower every two hours. Finally, during the afternoon of the last New Year's Eve of the old millennium she discovered with relief that her menstrual bleeding had come. She gazed tearfully at the pink-tinted drops that were dripping into the bath then said out loud, "No mercy. I'm going to get Kiddo Kovács booted out, that's for sure. And as long as there's breath left in my body, I'll make his bastard my business!"

11

Emma Kovács noticed that she had a new sphere. A garish neon-blue one.
She could not compare the pain with any other pain and yet she was quite sure that the greatest pain of all had fallen to her lot.
After a blow bigger than any hitherto, it flashed through her mind that annihilation would be a solution. If everything were to disintegrate, the pain would also come to an end. She resolved not to cling on, not to shrink, not to harden; like the horse, she would allow herself to be beaten. The enraged, obdurate matter within her, though, would not permit this: it kept on kicking back.
And there was another thing too. Through the intimidating numbness of the pain, she sensed the warmth of the kind hand that had guided her home from beside the horse-beating carter; she felt the warm silkiness of the palm of that hand. Then there were two outstretched palms that clung to one another, into which someone buried their head and, bowing low, shouted out that they would give everything they had, even life itself, in exchange for hers.
Then there were distant beings who jerked their heads up uneasily each and every time her condition tipped threateningly and the threads snapped dangerously. Their faces were captivatingly one and the same face, her wizened, deformed, semi-finished face. The huge heads of ring-dove nestlings, animated little hammers. And as to how big a distance the dynamics of connections act across, a good example is the restlessness of the silver macaques that live in Japanese forests. They are said to have been human beings once upon a time, but then they became animals and yet a divine clear-sightedness still resides within them. When Emma Kovács got into trouble and had ambitions for her own destruction, they disclosed a secret source of power out of which they pumped over the energy required. Matter from Emma Kovács kicked back, anti-poisons were elaborated to smother the injected snakes. Her muscles twined around the column of immovability like the sinewy arms of apes. After a while, she was taking so much delight in her strength as to make mountains even out of molehills, hitting back lustily at even the gentlest touch.

12

Two months passed, then another two, during which things took a rest; even the sphere of pain did not grow. A single thought, or more particularly hunch, is worth mentioning. Emma Kovács could justifiably suspect that she too had something to do with this tranquillity. Maybe she did not win with her obstinacy but with something else. But what? She would not see it if she looked in a mirror, yet it was written on her face. If she reached out for it, it would melt away; if she nevertheless managed to capture it, it would instantly transform. It did not slake thirst or relieve hunger yet when it was lacking it was still possible to feel hunger and thirst.
And then the things that had not recurred for two months bore down on her all in one go. This hit her unexpectedly; it was awful. The light that blazed up in her eyes was awful. An enormous force took hold of her and with elementary force tore her away, like a mere slip of paper, from the column of her stubbornness and pushed her forward in such a way that she slid along on her nose.
It was awful and yet she felt a relief as never before. Maybe it was from then on that the word elementary became familiar to her. There are words that are not fully articulated. They have a meaning, that's true, but more important than that is their music. If they were to be collected from all sorts of spoken tongues, the primeval state of the world could be described. Ígéret, 'promise', is a splendid word, but so is tyúkszemirtó, 'corn remover', or Schurkenstreich, 'villainy', to one who hears in them the sounds of the infinite.
From that second, every path down which an enormous force sweeps became familiar to Emma Kovács. Thus, Vihar Road with its silvery texture became familiar. Another street with another house. Sugár Avenue, on which a lily-white taxi speeds with her to hospital. A flight of steps, the number of whose stairs she wants to count but gets mixed up. An anyway uncongenially narrow corridor that leads into a floodlit room. She was able to walk down paths that carried her to the deepest depths of hells and the flowery meadows of heaven as if she had already stepped upon them. If a map of her life had become indecipherably shaded in by a confused jumble of little lines, these luminous straight lines burned through the paper.
Naturally, she also knew the path that had led her back from this life to the infinite radiating sphere. Knew it well, though that's by the bye.
At last, she thought, and a scalding-hot weeping welled up from inside her. At last everything will become clear.
She found out what she was able to find out. Nothing really well. It's not worth being made of the world's matter. Other might hosanna it, but not she. The fault was in the matter! In the admired laws. There is plain bad abiding in mass attraction, in causality, in interaction. Transformation is attended by annihilation, annihilation by pain. The worm resides in the laws. It's bad that one plus one makes two. It's bad that an electric current is induced in an electromagnetic field. It's bad that carbon and silicon atoms burn more violently than all this; others only dare to flicker on tiptoe. It's bad that even the smallest grain of dust behaves in the same way as the largest. It's bad that this whole world is the same. It's bad that it's not possible to move away to somewhere else because the world lets no one escape from it. Its prisoner remains its prisoner forever.
All of a sudden, her skull jammed, got wedged. She started to wriggle. She could feel a painful thump, this time from inside herself. Maybe her heart had throbbed that hard. She froze, at which she sank further in, or in other words it became clear that she was flailing in the wrong direction, and as soon as she stopped doing that she slid on further with ease. A renewed sense of relief precipitated new waves of weeping. She hiccuped, blubbered and growled like an angry little marmoset. The midwives who thronged from all around took a peek inside with tight-lipped, horrified expressions at what sort of monster was on its way, ready to make a dash for it at the first sign of trouble. That day, as it happened, Gábor Bátori was the on-duty obstetrician, but why he was not there is another story. My God, my God, Celia cried out, and at this the room expanded, growing deeper towards the ceiling, as if a real sky were enveloping it above. In that spaciousness there was a lessening of the pain that had up till now been forcing her thighs apart when she would rather have drawn them together but was unable to do so because she was strapped down. Wide apart, that's right! She was trembling as if she were actually coming off . Emma Kovács also senses it is easier. She is no longer being tugged by that force, but it is enough to recollect it for just a single second, the memory alone is enough to bundle it off. What a ghastly light! Her body becomes rigid, she can't move either arms or legs, the crying is trapped in her chest though her soul demands its long-due right. She tumbles out like some sort of flagstone, all but plopping into the slops bucket. Only when a hand pats her back and sprinkles cold water over her does the trapped air howl out of her, with a great many tears, vomit, snot, mess and blood - so violently that it spatters even those standing further off. For a moment the atmosphere is frigid, as when a stranger drops into a room that not long before had still been cosily intimate. "There now, got you!" exclaims the midwife, holding her on her palm of her hand. Then her body again cramps up. Her mouth is open and yet she is not breathing in. She looks as if she were smiling. She has power over her own will; she is able to issue commands to her muscles. No doubt she feels that there never was - and never again will be - such a victor; that now, for once, her fate is in her own hands. All she has to do is not draw a breath of air. She constrains her lungs under her own dominion. forces her muscles into submission. It'll be a doddle doing it, however much her body might protest. So drunk is she with happiness she can hardly rejoice that her eyesight is dimming again. Then, even more rapturously, she glimpses the renewed brightness of darkness. She had come to this world in order to turn back straight away, incinerating even the useless experience of getting out in the approaching brilliance. The light is terrifying, the brilliance of the darkness intoxicating. She does not know what is beyond it. There is something. When a smack stronger than all this jolted her out of herself, she was nowhere. But she had to be somewhere, because after she had returned she remembered that she had been nowhere. Now she would be able to find everything out. Perhaps another story exists in which she can emerge once again. Bye-bye, Emma Kovács!
At that decisive moment a sound broke through to her ear. Right then, in the next-door bay, they were unstrapping the other mother who had been giving birth in parallel, meanwhile laying the crimson infant briefly on her panting belly. They stick a piece of sticking plaster to the infant's wrist and on that wrote its name in ink: Lazarus Szabó, and he starts crying his eyes out at being pestered this way. He is not consoled by his mother's touch but reaches the height of despair, as if he had been placed at the breast of his murderer. Emma Kovács recognises the bad, recognises the infinite radiating sphere, in these sounds. She herself does not understand why her hand should stir, her muscles relax, a spot of light trickle onto the pupils of her eyes, or she should take a breath of air: she too strikes up. She feels sorry for the weeper, sorry for the weeper's deathly pale mother, sorry for her own, sorry for the midwives. Her weeping is a single cry, but it swells like a throbbing grand aria that takes the public's breath away. It grows quiet in the delivery room. The tepid rainfall of true relief begins to flow, arms and legs relax, and a reassuring shiver runs lightly down moist spines.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Zsolt Láng
is a native of Transylvania, Romania. He works as an editor of the Hungarian literary journal Látó at Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mures¸). His books include four volumes of fiction and a collection of essays.