Zsuzsa Rakovszky

The Year of the Falling Star

(Excerpts from a novel)

 

B o r d e r s

The world is sliced up by invisible lines. To every single piece there corresponds a word pair: sweet-bitter, cold-warm, good-bad, weekday-holiday, city-forest, body-spirit, dark-light. When they pushed open the heavy, green gate (blackly curling iron scrolls imprisoned in a glass oblong), they were still at home; when it closed behind them, no longer. At noon (if the window was open, the chiming of the bells drifted in from several quarters), for a fraction of a second, time would balance, like a see-saw, between morning and afternoon. Then the morning would prove the lighter and rise into the air, and people would start to slip on afternoon's steep slope toward evening. The same also happened at night, while she slept; Monday would surreptitiously turn into Tuesday, Saturday into Sunday. The ant that, taking fright at their shadows, scurries over the kitchen flags is at one moment still alive and at the next, having been smeared into a splotch of black jam under the soles of young Gabika, the little boy next door, no longer. The moon, as it floated up yellow and terrifyingly from behind the Holpárs' fence, would be still flawlessly, perfectly round one night, but by the next day a fingernail sliver would be missing from it. It was winter or summer now, yet only just before it had still been autumn and spring; it was night-time, yet only just before it had still been daytime.
There are things that have disappeared, been lost, but return: in time it will be Tuesday again, and Sunday the fingernail sliver of the waning moon will again fill out, her mother goes away in the morning but in the evening comes home from the office. At another time, in an unguarded moment, things slip over the border. The crushed ant, or the cockchafer that had been shut up in an empty matchbox and forgotten, the porcelain figurine in crinoline and wig which had fallen down and snapped in two at the waist, the withered, petal-shedding posy that she had already got bored with while they were strolling and thrust into her mother's hand - these had finally and irredeemably slipped out of themselves to become something else, the sort of thing that maybe didn't even have a name. Each and every time something like that happened, and she could do something about it - and sometimes even when she couldn't - she would feel a heart-tugging, tormenting sense of guilt.
"They'll revive, if we put them in water, won't they?" "It can be glued back together, can't it?" It was mainly the ingenuousness of things that would sharply pierce her heart, and the thought that they could all have been otherwise: just before there had been no trouble, yet now everything was irreparable. She would try, over and over again, to turn time back to the point where everything was still in order - there was seemingly no obstacle to that, the imagined happening was just as clear and plausible as what actually happened - and yet on every occasion she would come up against some invisible barrier, like a fly against a window pane. When we cross a borderline, we cross it completely. Even if she were only to bark her knee, she would be afraid she was going to die, because she was no longer perfect - she had crossed the borderline dividing good from bad, the intact from the damaged. Because it was not just things; she herself was not safe, something irreversible could happen to her too at any time. Her body was what exposed her to the accidental, to corruption and death; her soul roamed freely here and there in this world sliced into pieces, it might be everything at once, every character of every story. But her body pegged her to her name (Piroska), to her age (five years), to her mousy-brownness, to her wearing of glasses, and to the fact that she had a protuberant front tooth, and her shoelaces were always undone (but only if she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror or shop window, otherwise she could be what and how she wanted to be). Her body was a suspicious and treacherous power, delivering her up to the outside world, to the possibility of pain and shame (she would often believe that others maybe had different sorts of bodies, that only with hers did all kinds of shameful things happen). Her body could easily be driven into a corner as it was corruptible and fragile - softer and more defenceless than the needle with which inoculations were administered, the handle of the teaspoon with which her tongue would be depressed, or the gleaming metal tweezers that approached her defenceless nostril in order to extract the wad of cotton wool that had been stuck up it (she had pushed it into her nose so as herself to duplicate the border violation that the external world was in the habit of committing against her, so that she herself might be both assailant and assailed).
The most important borderline is death. "No one lives forever," her great-aunt was in the habit of saying when she heard that one or another of her acquaintances had "thrown in their hand." "In a long time, a very long time," her mother would reply (and she never lied) when she pestered her about whether they too would die one day. It was usually the elderly who died, but not just them. People might burn to death inside a house on fire, a train might run someone over (who had climbed over the lowered level-crossing barrier and got their foot stuck between the rails), a pan of boiling water had tipped over one child, and another child had drowned in the waters of a swimming pool (ownerless sandals and short trousers in the changing room, wax-yellow child's corpse floating with arms extended in the bottle-green water in which they too had bathed during the summer). A soda siphon had exploded in someone's hands, someone else had swallowed a wasp that stung their throat on the inside. A working man fell off the roof of a house, an infant died of whooping cough. Someone scratched their hand on a rusty nail and died of blood poisoning.
The thought that everyone will die one day was so absurd and frightening, because if it were true, then it went for her mother too; yet it was easier for her to conceive of the world without herself than without her mother. Everything that aroused mysterious and solemn delight - sunset, Christmas, falling snow, the sparkling porcelain dancing girl in the display case that she was allowed to touch on rare occasions - but also things that were happily accustomed and secure - their room, her bed, the light indoors when it was dark outside and they were drinking tea and eating fried bread and garlic under the standard lamp - all these things were connected with her mother and were sustained by her existence, indeed in some way were equivalent to her. When Mother was nearby, she wasn't afraid of all those myriad things (spiders and the dark, lightning and falling asleep, illnesses and the moon, especially full moons) of which she would otherwise be petrified. If her mother sometimes, very seldom, left home without her, she would scream and howl as she accompanied her to the gate, clinging to her dress and hugging her waist so that Nanny could hardly drag her back into the house. Mother would not smack her on these occasions, nor even yell at her, but try to talk some sense into her with patient words, but she would see the impatience in her eyes and that would make her howl and rage even more, because she would take fright at Mother's glance. She would dimly sense at these times that the person she was seeing was maybe not her mother, that she had been substituted, that another being had donned her mother's body, some cold, evil and merciless being with a close affinity to hell and darkness, lightning, illness and the full moon - indeed was in some manner maybe equivalent to them. The suspicion and fear would not dissipate until Mother had returned home and sat down on the edge of the bed to sing to her.

Recurrent things

Things vanish and return. All of a sudden it is evening once more: Nanny or Mother switches on the lights. The candelabra hovers in the middle of the ceiling like a many-armed sea beast. The limit of its realm is marked by a liver-hued stripe that runs around the four walls, some two palm spans from the upper edge of the wall: below the stripe the wall is pale yellow, above it white; starting from the corner, a network of thicker or thinner cracks wriggle higgledy-piggledy to cut across the white band, crossing the liver-hued borderline and meandering for a bit in the ochre vertical desert before thinning and petering out. The sea beast hovering on high sleeps by day, the pointed white eyes sprouting at the end of its black arms receding into the gloom of the ceiling, only glimmering with baleful yellow light in the evening. Sometimes they would only switch on the standard lamp, bringing to life the big red flowers on the lacquered yellow lampshade stretched over the wire frame. Mother would curl up on the divan, under the lamp, and lay out her patience cards, black queen on red king, red jack on the queen.
Her bed was not there, in the living room, but on the far side of the doubleleafed door, in the small room, at least during spring and summer. In the autumn, with Nanny's assistance, Mother would drag it into the living room, because they didn't heat the small room. At those times the communicating door between the two rooms would be kept open at night, with Nanny puffing and snoring under two eiderdowns in the rapidly dwindling warmth. (Nanny was not much taller than her, but she was old now, though it may have been that she was born that way, wrinkled and toothless, with sparse grey hair which she plaited and pinned up in a skimpy wreath over her brow. "My old nurse!" is how Mother used to introduce her, if someone not already acquainted with her paid them a visit.)
She preferred to sleep in the living room because here the darkness was not total even behind closed shutters: the dying embers of the fire would cast a wan patch of light through the iron stove's rotating round spyhole onto the iron sheet that was placed before the stove as a fireguard. If she sat up, she could sometimes still see for an instant the patterns on the carpet, the dark, angular birds and long-necked, four-legged animals. In truth, it was her mother she would want to see, whether she was still there and had not been abducted in the dark by some unknown power. Brown locks floated on the faded-pink billows of the washed-out bedclothes, a slender hand might break the surface, or an arm slipped into in an eggshell-coloured pyjama top, as her mother tossed and turned in her dreams. The pyjama would slip up the wrist, and clearly she did not take off her wristwatch even at night: if it were just a tiny bit lighter, she would be able to see the whisker-fine second hand that time, even at this hour, when no one was paying any attention, would be stubbornly and surreptitiously pulsing round and round. Sometimes Mother would turn onto her back, in which case she could see her face as well, but the sight of the still face with its closed eyes was not reassuring, it was scary rather.
On Sunday mornings Mother didn't have to go to the office; when she awoke, there she would be in the other bed. Sometimes, if she woke earlier and tried to rouse her, it might happen that Mother's face would remain still for a few more seconds. She would start shaking her arm, and if that didn't help either, she would try to lift her head, in case the poisoned apple core popped out of her throat. She would grasp it between her two hands and lift the head with the closed eyes slightly off the pillow, after which it would sink back ponderously with a muffled thud, the eyes still closed, the features unmoving, though seemingly with a faint, barely perceptible smile. She would throw herself sobbing on her, the universe contracting into a single fizzing, black turmoil below her breastbone. A few endless seconds; then, when she would no longer be expecting it, Mother's eyes would open and, no doubting it now, she would smile, "You really aren't going to let me sleep in, are you?"
On weekday mornings, Mother would have disappeared by the time she awoke. Nanny would be stooped before the cylindrical iron stove, shovelling the cold, acrid cinders into a bucket. Or if she awoke even later, the fire would already be blazing and Nanny would be tipping a further charge of dusty briquettes into the furnace through the stove's steeply racked upper chute, so that the fire would turn black, angrily spitting and billowing smoke with a hiss, the flames licking the as yet intact black stone eggs, wriggling their way into cracks, splintering them into glowing fragments, then flaring up with a sudden shrilling glee. (What's all this, then? Are you going to sleep in again till noon? Be a good girl and get dressed! Tie up my shoelaces! She would hold out her foot with tyrannical condescension. Me-e? A big girl like you and still can't do up her own shoes! Can, only I don't feel like it now!) They go off to the market, sometimes queue up at the butcher's (blood-smeared tiles, blood-stained aprons, impatient, bow-legged women). They would have lunch at the kitchen table, squatting on the two stools. After that she would immediately begin waiting for her mother. She knows that she'll come in the afternoon, and after lunch is already afternoon. (When'll she be here? How should I know? She'll be here when she's here! I'm bored! Let's play Ludo I don't feel like it now. Why don't you feel like it? Just because! That's no answer: just because! You have to have some idea why don't you feel like it! Because I don't! You're not going to throw a tantrum if you lose, like you did the last time! You'll knock the men off, then I can go hunting for them under the bed! No, I'm not! Blind chance controls everything on the tattered folding board: good and bad luck, pursuer and pursued. Piroska tries to get blind chance on her side. Her blue man is standing by the entrance to the house and Nanny's red man panting on the trail, four squares behind. She closes her eyes and prays fervently: Nanny mustn't throw a five. She opens her eyes but doesn't want to believe it: a white spot at each of the four corners of the notched black square and one in the middle as well! You cheated! she screams, blinded by tears, and sweeps the board clear with a single swing of the arm.
A squared battlefield of red and blue cylindrically bodied, round-headed dead men, all smaller than her little finger. I told you, didn't I! Four dead blue and three dead red men, the fourth having rolled beyond the boundary of the table-top universe and disappeared somewhere into the dustball underworld of chair legs.
Look for it! No, you look for it, I'm not going to crawl around on my hands and knees! Just this once more! Over the next half hour they slither around on all fours, rake about under the beds with the brass-knobbed poker. "And what would you two be up to?" They had become so absorbed in the hunt that they did not hear the key turning in the lock. Mother was standing there in the room, she had already sloughed her leather coat, her splendid hair, transformed into glistening, writhing black snakes, was clinging round her face: evidently it was raining.) On weekday evenings she would have a wash-down in the living room. Mother would spread open a newspaper near the stove, place the wash basin on it, then pour in the water that had been heating up on the cooker. She would stand in the basin, in the yellow and fire-red light of the standard lamp, the warmth of the water gripping her feet, the gentle heat from the stove wafting over her right side, the left side shivering slightly from the cold of the unheated room. Finally, she would sit cross-legged in the by now tepid water, with the water's boundary line slopping this way and that, its lukewarm tongue lapping her secret places. She would feel that sweet, forbidden and shameful excitement and immense sleepiness.
On Saturday evenings Nanny would light the bathroom boiler. The bathtub stood on clawed lion's feet of metal on the suspiciously mucky stone tiles, the pattern of which had gone black in the dank darkness under the tub. If she looked upwards while crawling about in the warm water, clutching the India-rubber fish with the golden red scales, she could see, at an infinite height overhead, a bare light bulb hanging on a black wire and, higher up still, the cracks in the ceiling sketching a galloping horseman, a serpent-bodied lion, and the head of a hooknosed old woman in a headscarf on the blistered whitewash. The bathroom is at the far end of the flat, over toward the courtyard. It has a second, double-leafed door that opens onto the terrace: in the glazed upper part, as one sat in the lukewarm bath water, one looked out through the gaps between old towels and bath robes onto the baring branches of the big walnut tree and the stars that had fallen (like flies into a spider's web) into the latticework of the branches. To get to the bathroom from the living room, they had to pass through the unheated little room and the even colder, dark lumber room. After she had bathed, Mother would roll her up in a big, fluffy bath towel, take her in her arms, and run with her through the two dark and cold rooms as if they were being chased.
On Sundays, if the weather was fine, they would go for a walk. They would turn out of their street: at the corner the blue-eyed India-rubber woman in the window of the maternity shop looks into nothingness beneath the painted eyelashes, her hair likewise India-rubber, the same colour as her skin. Beside her is a India-rubber child in a sunbathing suit with straps and beside it a bucket, as if the window's lino flooring were a sandy beach and the funereal blue neon light were glaring waterside sunshine. The butcher's shop: between two giant portraits a single limp, nebulously wilting, fern in a pot. They go right round a square in which there are lilac-bushes and rainbow-breasted pigeons, then another where there are a fountain and a turreted little house that tells the time. Beyond the railway crossing one already comes upon detached houses with gardens: showy little villas with columns and arches, as if made of building bricks, some of them even having a pointed, round tower, as if there were a Sleeping Beauty asleep in each and every one.
Past the Tourist Hostel comes the forest, though there seem to be gaps along the border separating the forest from the town, with the town infiltrating at one point and another. A rickety circular bench around an oak-tree, with big, abstruse nails driven into decaying planks. On one sign is a coloured silhouette of flames, on another, a silhouette of cyclamen, both crossed out with a fat X: no laying of fires or collecting cyclamen. At the well they drink water from the cupped palms of their hands (if she sticks her hand over the iron pipe's angled opening for a while, the water assails the palm in pulses; on taking it away, the water indignantly splashes frothily out). They go along a narrow path, Mother with lengthened even steps, herself leaping and clinging to her mother's waist in such a way that Mother can hardly walk. Blotches of light dance on Mother's cardiganclad arm, on her legs in the lace-up shoes, and on her hand with the chewed fingernails - as if the sunshine up above were being stuffed into the mincer of the tree branches and were tumbling out, down below, broken up into blotches. To get to the look-out, they first have to clamber up broad stone steps, then a perilously twisting, booming iron staircase to step out onto a balcony and what, after semi-darkness, is an almost unbearable brightness. Down below is one green billow on top of another, while the most distant billow, the one over which the late-afternoon sun is standing (one could almost look into it without the eyes starting to fill with tears) - that is another country.
Sometimes there would be a big clean-up instead of the usual brushing and dusting. ("Nanny, for God's sake, not just the bits everyone can see!") Nanny would lower herself to her knees and sigh as she rolled up one rug after the other, flung the heavy bundle on her shoulder and carried it out into the yard. There she would unroll them again before angrily setting about them with that odd-looking carpet-beater with the handle, the plaited canes of which reminded her of crowning braids of hair. The carpet would cower and, by way of protest, puff a cloud of dust from itself. Indoors, Mother would slip one of her slender feet into the strap on the square brush with the worn bristles and, with the other foot treading on a duster, slither about on the row of diagonally laid parquet blocks. Her delicately jointed foot and slim hips would wiggle right and left in a demented dance, though her beautiful face would be obdurately grave, almost grim, from the effort of concentration.
Every so often they would take out of the cupboard the silverware that they never used and polish it: they would rub off the grey tarnish, the sediment of the monotonous minutes and hours spent in the captivity of the cupboard. A pervasive stench of silver dip would spread throughout the house, but the bonehandled teapots, elaborate little baskets and lacy silver platters mounted on clawed lion's feet would sparkle anew, the pink splotches of their cheeks reflecting in them as elongated, sunken on both sides, with a frightening huge nose and tiny, far-off eyes (and upside down in spoons).
Sometimes, when half asleep, she would see Mother in an odd pose in the standard lamp's cone of light, hunched forward toward the kitchen stool, her face not visible, only the nape of the neck, as if she were waiting to be sacrificed to some bloodthirsty power. Her hair would not be rippling forward in big, loose brunette waves, as it usually did, but as if there were countless thin, shiny black snakes wriggling on her head and drooping in the air, perhaps because they wanted to drink from the bowl placed on the stool.
A diminutive figure steps out of the darkness; an enormous shadow faithfully matches her movements on the ceiling. The round, wrinkled face under the chaplet of silvery locks is now expressionless, almost cruel. The two old hands with the nails clipped back to the quick slowly lift some object carefully up on high, as if it were an appurtenance needed for performing a sacrifice: the water-scaled kitchen pot. Raising it above the bowed head, she tips it a little, and the sudden, steaming cascade pours onto the wriggling black snakes. The tiny figure with the empty pot bends with a groan then pulls out from somewhere a fluffy, faded-pink towel and lays it over the glistening black snakes from which heavy droplets are still dripping, ever fewer and further between, into the bowl.
When Mother straightens up, her beautiful face is encircled by a faded-pink turban, the sort worn in the illustrated storybook by that Mahmoud who had never seen a cow. Nanny cautiously balances with the full bowl on her way out. Mother sits there on the edge of the divan, looking somewhere into the distance, before shaking herself like someone startled from a dream, undoing the faded-pink turban with hasty movements, and starting furiously to rub her head as if it belonged to someone else, a person she was angry at, or as if she wished to punish herself for the sacrifice that had come to nothing, which she had learned, from some sign comprehensible only to herself, had not been favourably received. Sometimes a parcel would arrive from Italy, sent by her half-sister. This halfsister was little more than a year or two younger than Mother and lived with her family somewhere far away, by the sea. The parcel usually contained food: Dutch cocoa, on the brown box of which a many-masted ship floated with swelling sails in an elliptical white patch of sky, or sardines, on the oval tin of which was pasted, who knows why, the picture of a ballerina in a tutu. (In times past, she had pestered Nanny a lot to cut the ballerina out for her, but she no longer did so; the ballerina's flexed legs would always snap at the ankles, and meanwhile the little face in its curly locks would carry on grinning flirtatiously and unsuspectingly: "What are you grizzling about now? A big girl like you whining over such a silly thing!") Every now and then there would be clothes in the parcel. She would gaze at these with covetous wonder, because they were utterly different from the dreary and boring items of clothing, shabby-looking even when new, in the shop windows and streets where they lived. Yellow, blue and red butterflies fluttering on a crazy brown skirt, a fringe of gleaming black horsehair around the lower hem on another, a shiny dress of taffeta and on the little jacket that went with it ("A bolero!") the patches of a tangle of enormous flowers in crimson and bright green flaring out of the black background. There were ridiculous little handbags in the shape of a mushroom and a cylinder, and big, crinkly beach bags on round horn handles that were segmented like the spinal column of some ring-shaped animal, then a swimming costume, fluffy on the inside, into the white of which red and green fishes had been frozen, round-eyed in wonderment, once and for all time. Yet what amazed her most of all were the petticoats of a pale, diaphanous material, which seemed as if they were not made for clumsy, fleshand- blood women, but for ethereal spirits, fairies or water-sprites. She would have liked for these fairytale items of clothing to stay with them, but in vain. Each and every time a parcel arrived, it would not be long before someone rang the doorbell: sometimes it would be one of Mother's woman friends, but usually an unknown woman who would be standing hesitantly in the doorway, ready to run off and stuttering in her embarrassment, divulging with the haste of an inexperienced conspirator who she had got the address from, while Mother, no less embarrassed, would invite her to come in. Once inside, the guest would cower on the edge of a chair, clutching her handbag to her stomach, and strive with polite hesitation to turn to the purpose of her visit: "How can I put it, perhaps I'll have a look at that bag..." "Actually, I was thinking of a skirt, something like the one Ersi bought the last time..." "I heard from Irén that there might be a housecoat that's a cut above the average; my daughter's about to get married..." At which Mother, like a magician, would produce the desired article from the chest of drawers: "Is it something like this you were thinking of?" The guest would let slip a quiet cry of rapture, greedily grab the diaphanous petticoat or mushroomshaped handbag from Mother's hands and start turning it over inquisitively in the light of the standard lamp. Mother would mumble something quietly, eyes downcast, and the guest would ponder with a shake of the head then come to a decision and hurriedly dig out her purse. She would scrawl down on a scrap of wrapping paper where Mother could get hold of her the next time "there might be something". When she left, she would take with her the skirt with the butterflies, the mushroom bag or the diaphanous petticoat. Piroska's heartache would only be allayed somewhat by the knowledge that the following day they would have frankfurters with mustard for supper, instead of the usual bread and dripping with onions.

The courtyard

Home is like an extension of her own body, or perhaps more familiar even than that. In the helically recurved elbow-rest of the divan are two sea-horseshaped hollows, scars, where bare wood peeks from under the gleaming skin of French polish. "The Russkies," Nanny was in the habit of replying, if badgered about the two axe marks, and she would speak about some war in which foreign soldiers wanted to chop up the divan and other pieces of furniture for firewood. Those soldiers had also taken a shot at the picture that was hanging in the hallway, in which a big girl in a folk-style head-dress and costume pores over a book, there being a black hole with singed edges in the middle of the forehead, under the head-dress. This had all happened sometime a long, long time ago, the shooting and axe blows, and not even here but somewhere else, far away, in Pest, which she too had visited, though she didn't remember too much about it, and from where their furniture had subsequently found its way here. The fact that the furniture had at one time been in another house she was prepared to believe, but in the same way as she used to believe fairy stories: she knew that in truth all of these - the standard lamp, the divan, the tapestry of a snow-covered windmill in its heavy, ornamental gilt frame - had always been exactly where they were now, and were exactly the same as they had been from the very beginning of the world: they were so brimful of themselves that no room was left for chance or change.
The courtyard belonged, at one and the same time, to the external and inner worlds: a snippet of captured forest. In the middle stood a walnut-tree and the remnants of a rock garden - a few large chunks of natural stone piled on top of one another - from olden days. Fallen walnut blossoms would squirm greenishblack in the dust; before reaching out to touch one she would fear, for a shuddery moment, that perhaps it was a caterpillar, after all. If she turned over a stone or half-brick from the soil near the cellar entrance, pale wood-lice would crawl out from under it. Spiders would scuttle away along the fence on their numerous crooked wan legs; on the sight of them her stomach would start to turn queasy and her scalp prickle in disgust. After a fall of rain there would be snails crawling everywhere, their silvery trails crossing one another any old how on the burdock leaves, a brownish-white frilly-edged gelatinous foot poking out of a shell's opening, with a darker shadow in the translucent gobbet of muscle being the snail's internal organs. But there were also spellbinding beetles with greenish-gold backs and white cabbage butterflies, their loathsome soft, hairy bodies fluttering on creamy-white, ragged-edged petal-like wings. And once a stone-dead pigeon had been stretched out there for a couple of days; when she went near it she saw the lively, pink heaving among the remaining feathers and bones. (What were those? Maggots, don't look... But why...? I told you, don't look!)
She would spend hours on her own in the courtyard, waiting for young Gabika to come down, her best friend, her love and her exclusive property. Young Gabika was a weedy little blond boy with an eternal sniffle; he often left his mouth hanging open, and sunlight shone ruby-red though his ears. Piroska was bitterly jealous of anyone who disputed her rights to ownership of Gabika, most particularly Mrs Pászler, Gabika's mother. If young Gabe did not come, she would be forced to play ball on her own. She would throw the ball time and time again at the wall backing on to Mrs Hajnal's place (You'll smash the window one of these days! Won't!) and try to catch the rebounding ball before it hit the ground. If she missed, she would start all over again. A shadow spreads across the yard, the sunlit bit becoming ever narrower, as if a light-coloured carpet were being slowly rolled up and another, darker one were being unfolded just as slowly. Every now and then, the gate at the far end of the gloomy corridor would open. She would spin her head that way in hope, but it was only the old woman coming back from walking the dog and, tangled up in the dog lead, struggling with the latch, or Mrs Hajnal tottering home, shopping bag in hand, with a vacant look in her eyes. There were cases when the darkness would gather around her outside; Nanny would try and persuade her to come in, but to no avail. She had long become bored with throwing the ball, but she felt that if she were to go indoors it would be conceding that it was already evening and Mother was still not home. The hugely expanded light of the kitchen window lay over the dark grass, reaching almost all the way to the fence opposite, the shadows of the cross-bars chopping it into four parts, with the shadow of the lace curtains stirring and twitching in the lower half. The moon would cast off from the chimney on the Holpárs' house to float up yellow and blotched like a dead face. She is reminded of what Nanny had threatened: if she were to carry on gazing at the moon, she would become moonstruck, a somnambulist, with the full moon luring her onto the roof in her dreams, and then they would not be able to shout out to her because she would fall off. She runs into the corridor and starts hammering on the door with her fists (she cannot reach the door bell as yet).

Santa Claus at the firm

A clatter of typewriters in the corridor, little barred windows on the white doors. "Right, this is the door! You can find your own way in from here."
"I should go in alone?" "They're not going to bite your head off, you know! So, ta-ta then." The diminutive, stooped figure of her aunt scurries away down the olive-green linoleum of the long corridor. In her heart, Piroska would run off after her, but she doesn't dare. For a while she just stands in front of the door and hopes that someone will come out and ask what she wants, but no one does. She hears snatches of conversation from the far side of the door, laughter, but try as she might she cannot pick out Mother's voice from the hubbub. She knocks, rapidly tapping the door several times with the knuckle of a curled index finger in the hope that they will hear inside, but also that maybe they won't hear, after all. She waits a little but the door doesn't open and no one comes along; she is quite alone in the whole endlessly long corridor. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and pushes the handle down.
Inside, there seem to be a hundred women, blondes and brunettes, fat ones and thin ones, in smocks and cardigans, bent over writing desks, tidying things away in drawers, grubbing for a cigarette lighter in the depths of a handbag. Paper clips glint in black bakelite trays, cigarette smoke swirls pallidly in the inanimate, bluish-grey light of the neon strips. After a few endless seconds, the swirl of heads, feet and tresses of hair coheres into five female figures: five totally unknown faces are turned toward her. There is also a sixth woman in the room, but she cannot see her face because she has her back turned to the others as she combs her hair in a rectangular mirror screwed to the wall. Her back, though, seems vaguely familiar. Piroska's heart seems to sink to her boots: she has been abandoned, left here, among these strangers. From the far corner of the room she hears an insistent, prolonged bubbling rattle, as if a mortally wounded jinn were trying with its last ounce of strength to escape from a glass vessel placed on a metal stand. A lady with close-cropped greying hair is fussing around the retort, obviously the jinn's owner. "The coffee's ready, girls!" The four strange faces swivel round toward the retort as if pulled by a magnet. Piroska resolves on flight; she backs away to the door but trips on the sneakily curly leg of the coatstand. The wobbly construction, loaded with dark and dank winter coats, topples toward her; at the last moment she manages to catch its slippery metal shaft and swing it back into its place.
"And who might you be?"
The playfully surprised voice seems almost as though it were not addressing her but the others, as if seeking to amuse them at her expense. The high-piled brown hair of the woman bent over her passes back from her brow in magnificent reddish-tinted waves. Her mouth is a vivacious scarlet butterfly, as if ready at any moment to flutter off from its narrow, far too white face. Her ten falcon's talons are ten little droplets of blood: pretty but evil.
"Looking for your mummy?"
Piroska nods mutely. Could it be she is in the wrong place, that her aunt has mistakenly brought her to the wrong place, and no one here has even heard of her mother?
"Auntie Elsa...," she moans.
"Elsa? Is that your mummy's name?"
Nonplussed, Piroska vigorously shakes her head.
"What is her name then?"
She searches desperately in her memory but finds nothing in it other than darkness. At other times, of course, she would know, but right now it seems incredible that her mother too has a name like other people, that she is just one of these Ellies and Titches and Babses whom she loathes from the bottom of her heart.
"You don't know what your mummy is called?" the close-cropped, greying lady looks at her in scoffing astonishment. "You know your own name though?"
"Piroska! Kiddies, we have here a Red Riding Hood without an owner! Who can give her a grandma?" The red-nailed woman hoots. "Or a wolf," interjects another, thin-lipped and with a spiteful look in her eyes.
"Maybe one of the Wolff kids? Are you looking for Daddy? Has old Wolff been round here today?" This a gentle, venomous murmur, the voice's owner frail and wan, like the image of another woman reflected in water. An evil little smile on the withered, finely chiselled face.
"Did any of you girls see old Wolff today? You didn't see him by any chance, Médi?" This was the grey-haired one asking, sweet as honey, speaking to the back of the one titivating herself in the mirror, but she did not so much as turn round, just disdainfully carried on combing her hair. A gust of laughter. Piroska tries to protest against being given away to an unknown wolf, suspecting that this is more than likely some person by the name of Wolff, but no sound emerges from her throat.
"But kiddiwinks, this is Flora's little girl!" The woman with the comb had finally turned round, and Piroska is immeasurably relieved to see the familiar scraggy blonde curls over the high brow, the familiar, shy blue eyes. "Dear Jesus, but you've grown since the summer! Come, I'll take you in to your mother!" the disconcertedly soft, saccharine voice declares. She takes her hand, and they set off toward the far end of the room and a closed door behind which can be heard a persistent noise reminiscent of a rattle of firearms. She had already noticed it when she entered, but it was only now that she truly woke up to the fact that she was hearing it.
"Flora, your daughter's here!"
At first she sees nothing at all inside there, just a general chaos: a flashing, rhythmic beating, a slumbering daisy chain of paper clips coiled up and glinting in a black tray, a pale-lilac sheet of carbon paper, punched full of holes, floating languidly to the floor in the draught that springs up through the open door. Then she spots Mother: she is sitting by the window, behind a desk with many drawers, riveting her unwavering attention on the paper on the desk top while her two hands, as if they were creatures summoned into an autonomous existence, independent of her, furiously paw the typewriter's keyboard. Out of the machine's innards spring crooked black arms, black birds' beaks, to peck lightning-fast on the hurriedly shifting roller before falling back into the maw. Piroska is hoping her mother will leap to her feet straight away, run across to hug her and make it clear to these strange women how much more important she is than they are and all that she is forced to occupy herself with here.
Mother, however, does not so much as lift her eyes from the paper: her ten fingers carry on their wild dance on the keys. Piroska feels a dull, hollow sense of pain and tormenting shame, as if her mother had betrayed her and left her in the lurch. The typewriter bell dings, and Mother, as if she were only now waking up to what her fingers were up to on the keys, raises her hand, yanks the metal lever, then, after a brief, even more energetic burst of tapping than before, rips the paper from the machine in a single flourish. The electric lights are reflected many times over in the edges of the metal buttons of the keys, now left alone: tiny light-sparrows, perched at regular distances from one another, lining up on four rows of electric wires. Mother draws the cover over the machine; its brilliant twittering falls silent. In one hand are the white rectangular sheets that have been pulled from the machine and laid in a pile, in the other is a longish, black object, something like a miniature black crocodile: Mother slides the shorter side of the sheet into the crocodile's mouth and snaps the black jaws to. The crocodile bites into the white sheets, leaving as a trace of its grip a metallic black scar on the uppermost sheet. Now, at last, Mother turns toward her while she races over and gabbling, almost drawing no breath, starts to tell her, in order to shake off the shame of banishment and to make a show of demanding her back from these strangers. She gabbles something about the cat, about the snow, and about the frozen bird she has seen on her way here at the foot of a bush in Deák Square, because she hopes Mother will reassure her and cheer her up. Mother, though, is only abstractedly paying attention, because she is tidying up something in her drawers.
"How she's grown, this young girl!" Blonde Médi is pushing her toward her mother with a distinct bewildered enthusiasm, as if she were offering something for sale that the other might not even need. "Can I come with you?" she laughs shyly at Mother. "My parents are not expecting me until six, so I was supposed to be putting in some overtime..."
A padded door facing the one through which she entered opens: until now she had not noticed it was there. The two women freeze in the poses in which the opening door has caught them, the way she and little Éva did in the yard when they played Statues. A squat, broad-faced, crew-cut man bustles out among them at headlong pace, casting his tiny, reddened, whey-coloured eyes around. The whites are so bloodshot that the eyes as a whole seem to take on a red colour.
Piroska feels Mother placing a hand on her shoulder, maybe to signal her to be quiet, or as if she wanted to protect her, though still a little bit as though Mother were hanging on to her. The crew-cut man's glance briskly sweeps quizzically round the room and finally comes to rest on Piroska. He looks piercingly at her for a heartbeat: the posture of the two statues suddenly changes without their moving a fraction: they are poised to jump, as if they wanted the next instant to fling themselves between her and the red-eyed man, to screen her with their bodies or to tug her away from the spot and stuff her into a drawer so as not to be on view. Then the red-eyed man slowly and slyly, as though well aware that this was what the two women would be least expecting, breaks into a smile. That somehow brings a cat to mind, a fat, sly, well-fed tom. Piroska feels the muscles relaxing in the hand gripping her shoulder.
"That your little girl, colleague?" The red-eyed man now turns to Piroska's mother. The hoarse whisper of his voice has trouble articulating the words, as if he has something piping hot in his mouth.
"My sister-in-law was looking after her, but she has to go to the doctor's for four..." Mother was also finding it difficult to speak, as if her lips were numb following a visit to the dentist. She tries to smile, but it's as if her facial muscles had rusted up, like the Tin Man's in that film she was in the habit of mentioning: it extends just a fraction upward at the corner of the mouth.
"What a big girl you have, one would never think it to look at you! Are you going to school already?" Piroska is startled to realise that the sly, hoarsely whispering voice is speaking to her this time. Mother squeezes her shoulder by way of a warning, but she can't utter a sound, only shakes her head mutely.
"So, have you been a good little girl? Because if you haven't, then Father Frost won't be bringing any sweets!" Another cat's grin. "Though no doubt it's Santa Claus who visits your home, am I right?"
She stares horror-stricken, speechless, at the broad, bristly face, not knowing whether the man really is expecting an answer from her. Seemingly not, because he turns on his heels and sets off outside with springy steps, and only as he is going raises a hand in some form of leave-taking. At the outer door he suddenly looks back over his shoulder and winks at the group of statues that had just been preparing to come to life, but with that glance again turns to stone.
"Don't imagine I didn't notice that there are still three full minutes until four o'clock!" The group of statues again springs to life, this time with ridiculous alacrity: its limbs yank out desk drawers and snatch for files. Yet the bloodshot pair of eyes has already switched away from them. "Well all right, I don't mind, you can get ready. Just this once, as an exception!" he gives a dismissive wave of royal magnanimity as the door slams to behind him with a bang. The submissive, rusted-up Tin Man's smile is stuck on her mother's face for another moment before it vanishes: now her features are like a mask that expresses nothing at all.
Mother tugs the heavy plate-glass door open and they cross the snow-covered factory courtyard, the snow shining blue under the rapidly darkening sky, then she pushes another heavy glass door and, joining the crowd that was streaming in, they too work their way into a big, bleak hall abuzz with the sounds of shuffling, shoving, and creaking seats.
A smell of damp coats.
A forest of tightly packed knees. Puddles of melting snow around boots between the rows of seats. Cotton-wool snowballs hanging down on threads over the platform at the end of the hall. They squeeze into a row of seats, with blonde Médi ending up on Mother's left, she on her right. The woman in the well-pressed outfit and her son are being carried along there in the jostling throng. She discovers them with strident soldierly jubilation. In the dreadful racket, Mother makes it clear by sign language that there are still two empty seats beside them.
A rapturous, expectant hum is running through the hall.
"He's not real! They just dress someone up!" young Emil looks disdainfully at her from under half-closed eyelids. Only now does she catch sight of the red suited, red-capped figure; he must have stepped out of some secret rear door onto the stage at the end of the hall and is now lowering himself with welldisposed, muttering awkwardness into the armchair that had been set out there in advance. He had just beforehand lowered the barrel from his shoulder and set it down beside the chair leg. In truth, Piroska too is well aware the person in the armchair there could not be the real Santa Claus, yet at the same time nonetheless is him, in some inexplicable way, at least as long as he is wearing the red suit and red cap with the white pompon. The real Santa Claus, the one that puts presents in the shoes placed between the panes of the double window back home in the evening, she has never managed to see face to face: somehow she was always missing the right moment.
"Aren't they sweet?" she heard Médi's gushy sniffling. The pompon-capped old man raises a sheet of paper before his nose, half-buried as it is in a luxuriant white beard, and from that reads out a list of names, and the owners of the names that have been read out present themselves in order before the armchair throne, then, clutching a transparent red bag, return to the rows of seats. The pair of siblings - the confidently strutting, stocky, black-haired little boy with the thick eyebrows and the graceful thin-faced, blue-eyed girl - were now returning to the rows where they were seated, the little girl wriggling onto the lap of a lithe, slim, dark-haired man, the little boy having the collar of his shirt tidied by a pleasantly cat-faced, elegant woman with a dark crown of hair, "The Bodrog children!
How wonderfully the little girl walks! They send her to ballet classes, I've heard..." She hears her own name; she would like to hide away, but friendly hands that brook no denial give her a gentle but firm shove, and she stumbles her way out between the backs of chairs and knees that have been pulled to one side. As she leaves the very first row of seats behind, some invisible rubber band between her and the onlookers packed into the rows of seats snaps, and she bursts into the void between auditorium and armchair. She senses in her back the looks of those sitting in the hall, as if they had all coalesced into one enormous eye. That eye is looking at her and for certain sees her the way she sees herself mirrored in the windowpane of the culture hall, wearing a sailor blouse and round spectacles, a big, crumpled ribbon hanging on her hair, the lace on one of her lace-ups adrift, and through her translucent wraith's body are outlined the snow-dusted black branches of the trees along the deserted railway embankment and the street on the far side of the embankment - the shabby, ornamental houses as if they were cardboard cut-outs - and the lighted window of the hairdresser's shop. She is not the least bit glad of that, it is as if they are taking away from her the possibility to be who she wants to be and pegging her forcibly to this gawky, sailor-bloused figure. She starts to hurry in order to be over with the thing as soon as possible. "The little greedy-guts!" she picks up a joyous, jolly whisper from behind her back.
"What I've heard about you is that you can't do up your own shoelaces." she hears the drawling, kindly, faltering mutter. As the red-cloaked figure bends toward her, her nostrils are assailed by a strong whiff of rum: Mother sometimes puts rum in her tea, that's how she recognises the smell.
Or might he be the real article, after all? How's she to know anyway, she broods in perplexity. She lifts her eyes off the floor and looks straight into the unexpectedly youthful pair of eyes hiding under the white cotton-wool eyebrows. The stubby-fingered hand with a signet ring on the ring finger hurriedly offers her the red cellophane bag in which there is an apple, four fondants and a bar of chocolate wrapped in rough paper bearing a picture of a boy bowling a hoop. "Now tell me, how's that for dirty! He tries to winkle out of the child that Santa Claus calls at your place, and not Father Frost!" blonde Médi whispers. Hanging on to one another, they are slipping and sliding homeward in a dark Deák Square on snow that has frozen into a crust of black ice.
"Just drop it!" Mother's voice is very weary. Her gloved hand is hanging limply at her side and she is not squeezing back. "I think that for once he really was trying to be nice..."
"True, maybe he doesn't dare to badger you that much, as long as Bodrog is around... When is it that they're going to Pest?"
"April."
"Is it true that he's going to be the manager there?"
"Yes, it's true."
"Kicked upstairs," blonde Médi nodded with satisfaction. "But I suppose when all's said and done he's. a party-member-but-still-a-decent-bloke!" she stuttered conscientiously, like a compulsory spell against the evil eye. "And he hasn't asked you? He was so pleased with you when you were in the secretary's office, quite beside himself about not having come across a typist who was as quick and accurate..."
"Typists can be found anywhere."
"Still, if he were to offer anyway? Would you leave here? After all, it's where you grew up. And you and Bartha would be closer..."
"I don't think that would count for much... There would only be gossip, you know what people are like."
"In a big city like that? Often even next-door neighbours don't know one another! People aren't spying out all the time who's visiting you... Daddy," she whispers, having taken a look around but seen nothing suspicious either on the deserted street or amidst the square's dark, snow-covered bushes, "they've again been informing the police that all sorts of suspicious elements are dropping in to see him! To conspire! There's an old ex-army pal with whom he's in the habit of playing chess, and that's your all-sorts-of-suspicious-elements."
"You get neighbours everywhere. And concierges."
"That's true. But at least there everybody doesn't know everybody else...
You can safely go into a café with someone, if you want to chat."
"Maybe..."
"That reminds me, you haven't told me yet... Was he here last week?"
"No, he couldn't come in the end... Maybe in January."
"Still, you were so looking forward to it, weren't you."
"Oh, it's not so bad."
"And anyway, where can you go when he's here? Where can you have a quiet chat? Where did you go the last time?"
A brief silence.
"We went for a walk," Mother finally confessed reluctantly.
"You went for a walk? In this weather?" There is a wondering tone of incredulity and recognition in blonde Médi's voice. "You must be mad..."
"Well, it's true the weather was ghastly. You know, as the saying goes, if the wind's not blowing here, then they're ringing the bells. We were almost swept off the lookout tower."
"The lookout tower? You went up to the lookout tower at this time of the year?"
"Sure we did. He said he's never been there before. Lucky it was open..."
"And what if it hadn't been open?" Blonde Médi shakes her head with a smile.
"I envy you," she adds, though more in sorrow.
"Come off it, what's to envy. I was weeping it was so cold. The wind blew my shawl off and swept it off the path, I could see it catch on a bush down that steep hillside. I can't imagine what people who stroll that way are going to think: the path and then a fawn shawl with a brown pattern caught on a bare branch halfway down to the bottom of the ravine."
"Didn't he go down and get it?" blonde Médi smirks.
"He wanted to, but I didn't let him. It's dreadfully steep, and it was getting dark by then... What was I going to do if he went and sprained an ankle on me?"
"You'd have hauled him up on your back. Love makes everything possible."
"Love, my foot." Mother winces as if she had been slapped. "Just because we've talked about it once or twice... And what about you two? How are things with you? Has there been any development?"
"With Wolff?"
"Uhuh. Hasn't he invited you to the tea-room recently?"
"Actually, yes, the other day, when we were on overtime."
"And.?"
"Lord Almighty, what can you be thinking! Daddy would tear me limb from limb..."
Piroska tries to imagine Médi torn limb from limb, Bodrog being kicked upstairs, the fawn shawl on the steep slope overgrown with thorny bushes. But even that thought was nothing like as unsettling as the memory of Mother's apologetic, submissive Tin Man smile.
"What's this, then? Aren't you even going to have a look and see if Santa Claus has been?" Nanny grouses.
Mother and grandmother stand behind her with tender smiles as she races over to the window and pries open the shutters. Her shoes are lined up on the long rectangular bolster that is stuffed between the two windowpanes every year as soon as the weather turns cold. She had set them out early that afternoon; was it possible they were still standing there empty? No, she could already see an unaccustomed glitter in front of the background of the snow-covered fence that backs onto the timber yard. This year there is again a mass of glinting gold and silver things that have sprouted from the shoes, as from magic flowerpots, candy-fruits in fringed wrappers dangling on rod-branches and bright red, slightly dopey chocolate old duffers, smiling with red hilarity. But once again she has not managed to catch Santa Claus, the real one, in the act: again all that was to be found of him were his footprints, the real miracle had slipped through her fingers.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Zsuzsa Rakovszky
is an outstanding, widely translated poet and translator whose award-winning first novel A kígyó árnyéka (The Shadow of the Serpent, 2002) was translated into German. A hullócsillag éve (The Year of the Falling Star, 2005) is her second novel.