Artiste
...
TAPE: Pinkler
Sure, I knew Uncle Dénes had a car. It's not like he kept it a secret, but he just doesn't look the type. He went partners with this guy in the catering business. Not that Uncle Dénes forgets who he is. No, he'll always have the soul of an artist. Dresses that way, too. It doesn't matter he struck it rich, he kept working at the girls' home. He could have left, like that, but he wouldn't leave us high and dry. Not him.
And it's not just any car he's got. It's a Porsche. At least I think so.
It's been at least a few weeks since he caught me there outside the Transitional. He said:
"Don't try anything dumb, Pinkler."
Then we got in his car. And there was Kati, too. That took me for a loop. When we got in, Uncle Dénes only took the cuff off his own wrist, I figured that if I got the chance, I'd slip away and have my very own set of handcuffs.
"I don't even care if my mama locks me out," Kati grumbled to Uncle Dénes as we got in, because even now she was caught up in her own problems. She was dressed really nice, miniskirt, high-heeled shoes, chains. When I got in the car, Uncle Dénes introduced her to me, because he didn't know that Kati and I were like sisters. But we didn't stick that under his nose. He told Kati that we just about ran right into Gelencsér's arms. But Kati wasn't paying attention. Uncle Dénes pressed something into her hand, I didn't see what, maybe money, and Kati calmed down a bit. Kati has it good, getting rides from Uncle Dénes too, if she's in trouble... Because Kati's got her regular man to drive her around. She gave Johnny Boy this spiel about how that guy, whoever he is, is her dad's best friend, how he's like a relative. Of course she admitted to me later that he's no relative, that she just hooked up with him one time. An older dude. He's got a bar or something. She can always count on him. Her guardian angel. All she's got to do is call him up, and then this guy takes her everywhere, gives her lifts here and there. Takes care of her. She just calls him, and that's that. Along the way, Kati pockets a bit of spending money, a few cigarettes, a little booze, this and that. And that dude buys her anything she wants. She can talk over everything with him, and he gives her good advice. In return for a little compensation... Kati hates him when that happens, yeah, she's all grossed out by him and by herself too, but the only way she can get her hands on money is by doing everything he asks for. For money. Not that you can understand. I mean, this doesn't mean a thing to me. If you've been into so much, anyway, you don't care no more. All you can think of is you're hungry. Or that you need cigs. Nothing else counts for shit.
Sure, maybe it was different for Kati. Maybe it got to her more, because she thought about it. I mean, she told me, and then of course begged me to keep it our secret. I got a few... not secrets, really... stuff I couldn't give a shit about... Anyway, what she told me, I put that there, too. Kati gave me all sorts of things. I didn't even have to ask; all I had to do was listen to her. She even cried, asking me to get it through my head that her guardian angel always pulls her out of trouble when she turns to him, and that's why she feels like she owes him. And that's how her guardian angel feels too, seeing as he helped so much, with money or whatever, when it was needed. But nowdays it's not just Kati's body on his mind. The last few weeks, when I ended up sacking out with Kati and that guy Arsenic and them, she told me her guardian angel was acting funny. He was giving her more and more, and wanting-demanding-more and more of Kati's time. He badmouthed every friend of hers she told him about, and sometimes he locked her in the car, and that's not all. He went dead nuts over Kati. We were worried he'd break down the door on us and go ape shit, and then Johnny Boy would find out. Well, then either Johnny Boy would send Kati packing, or else her guardian angel would bump her off. But the guy wasn't completely cracked, no, he just got a kick out of giving Kati the creeps. He was grilling her all the time and pawing away at her. She told me he'd go grubbing into her sex life especially:
"What did you and your pals do?"
He meant with us, where we were staying, with Arsenic and them. And with Johnny.
"Nothing. We just hit the booze and party."
"And of course you are all screwing away."
"Like I told you, I didn't make it with him!"
"You can lie all you want!"
It went on like this, because after a while Kati told her guardian angel everything about us, she let him in on everything, and it's not like she could have done anything else, because the guy just didn't let up on her. Some guardian angel!
"You'd be better off looking somewhere else for Mr. Right," the guy would shout at her.
I didn't tell Kati what to do, though. No, I just listened. She could tell me what she wanted, and what she didn't want to tell me, well, she didn't. I don't even know the guardian angel's name, never saw him. When he rang the doorbell, Kati went running. Sometimes he dragged her down for a quickie just out of jealousy.
"That's not the bunch for you... and that little shit..." he'd say, meaning Johnny Boy. "Hell, girl... he's a Roma."
But already the guy would be pulling down Kati's panties and then he'd get to banging away.... That's how he is. It did no good, Kati reminding him that he agreed not to butt into her life, by then the rat got out the booze and had her drink up, and soon the mood mellowed. And Kati would say:
"Thanks for the lift. And I'm going to thank you."
And he:
"You'd better."
So that's what their kind is like. I never could stand that bastard, Kati's secret guardian angel... Disgusting. True, I never did see him.
If you don't want me to I won't talk about Kati. But it's like, she was sitting there in Uncle Dénes's car.
Uncle Dénes, he's something else, he's really cool. The best I ever met. Everyone knows and loves him. But all I could fix on just then as I sat there in that classy car of his was, when could I slip away?
Lights, Shadows
"I've been asked to play the lead in an art film," Uncle Dénes told Kati with a look of satisfaction.
The car snaked its way forward through the jam. Uncle Dénes drove impatiently, cutting out of the lane and then forcing his way back in. The sunlight bounced erratically off the windshields of the cars they passed, reddish spears under Pinkler's closed eyelids. Whenever she opened her eyes, there was always someone watching from the car beside: a sad-looking pony-tailed girl, a schoolboy, the unworried face of a baby. As the sun penetrated the gaps between the buildings lining the road, a peculiar web of images and sounds took shape in each dismembered molten space, the crude assault of colors still had a lulling effect.
"The role fits me to a tee," explained Uncle Dénes, "like it was made for me. I practically don't have to act, but just be myself." His glance shot back from the rearview mirror into his words. His hand fluttered from the gearshift onto Kati's knee.
"It's a modern Don Quixote story."
Uncle Dénes's words cut through the engine's drone. Pinkler leaned her head against the quivering window.
"It all seems to be coming together all at once," said Uncle Dénes, suddenly pressing the gas and shouting, "Stop puttering around, cocksucker!"
With the stopping and starting, the street, the snippets of words from Uncle Dénes, Kati's over-eager expression, the repeated cycle of acceleration and braking morphed into a chain of tired disjointed signs, a broken string of pearls scattered about the car's leather seats and floor carpeting.
"The business is taking off, better still, my career as a creative artist is taking off too."
Uncle Dénes's smile swam toward Kati and Pinkler from out of the rear-view mirror, the windshield, the windows.
"Hajni is a dumb slut, and that's that. She's got it coming to her," growled Mariann.
"Cut it out, you're all jealous," said Pinkler, waking up.
In the bedroom at the Sodrás Street Home for Girls, Márti was painting her nails, and Berti, Hajni's younger sister, was drawing in a crumpled-up notebook. Hajni was sitting on the edge of her bed, lined with Teddy bears, talking with Uncle Dénes, but her words congealed instantly in the evening's smudgy silence, freezing into the stillness of the walls towering above her.
"Time to decide who your best friend is, Pinkler, for fuck's sake, and act like it," snapped Mariann. Her voice was just as clear and exaggerated, like a crazy person's, as Pinkler remembered it.
Uncle Dénes laughed, but neither his lips nor eyes quivered, the laugh wasn't his, no one heard it, it came from nowhere at all. Night was plunging clumsily down with shades of blue that seemed to shatter the windows, leaving slivers of sun like sharp blades scattered over the floor, the windowsills, and the musty bed sheets smelling of earth.
Pinkler's eyelids drooped once again. Hajni was still snivelling away so softly that she seemed to be her own invisible, unrecognisable form: inextricably tangled cords or etchings on a diaphanous sheet of paper. Hajni's shadow was cast beside Uncle Dénes's on the linoleum, and the meaning of what Pinkler heard had nothing to do with what she thought she saw.
"Dad killed Mum. After locking the door to the clinic, Dad sat down in the kitchen. And that's when it began." Hajni's whispering voice faded and then grew strong, her words both tapping about like crutches that hold you steady and scratching about like the white ants that chew through and destroy everything in their way. "'Come here and sit in my lap, my girl,' said Dad. 'Maybe you love me, at least.' Mum didn't say a thing. She stood with her back to him and went on washing the dishes. She kept splashing more and more water so we wouldn't hear her crying. She had to be careful, because Dad didn't like clattering. It was the same that night. 'What are you crying for? Maybe I'm not good enough for the two of you? Maybe I don't bring home the money? I don't help you along in your career, do I? Do I let you correspond with your colleagues? Wouldn't I deserve a bit of love from my family? A little peace? Why don't you go in and quiet down that kid? Can't you hear she's crying?' The snow behind the garage had just about melted. Our feet sank all the way into the slush. The winter fields seemed lit up, in the ditches scrub pierced the whiteness. The baby plopped into the snow like a tiny sack, turned all red and started to sob hysterically. 'Take it, take it all from me, scram, fuckit, take off after your lover!' Dad kicked Mum before stooping right there on the threshold and whimpering away. The next morning all the neighbors invited the crazy mailman inside as he made his rounds and sat him down at their kitchen tables, everyone in every single house made him tell everything he'd seen, and then he had to sit there over and over again listening to what everyone said: 'That lady, the doctor's wife, was strange, she was, and that's not saying much. She didn't say nothing to nobody.' 'The doctor's wife, she kept her nose stuck up high. She figured her kids were eighth wonders of the world, with those brains of theirs.'"
It was as if bird feathers were fluttering against the steep walls of the bedroom.
"They were already outside in the yard, in the dark..." Hajni went on, "and all I could hear were Dad's fingers digging into Mum, and Mum rattling on in this frantic voice. 'This won't do you any good, either,' says Dad. 'You make me puke.' Then something cracked. The crazy mailman told me everything the neighbors said. He didn't believe a thing. Sure, they talked it up in the village, 'She must have had a lover. For sure. Otherwise where would she have gone all dressed up like that all the time? You never did see an apron or a dressing-gown on her, nope. Why, she washed the dishes in shorts. She was a stranger. Not from here. A foreigner.' When the mailman shouted, the neighbors came up really close. They looked in the fridge and in the closets and tried turning the knob of the clinic door-it was locked. Then they called the ambulance and the police. They all wanted to talk at the same time: 'I swear that woman could have spelled even more trouble. She didn't feed her kids or husband right. Seeds, herbs, whatever, she mixed into their food. She was sly, she was smart. Some foreign professor. Left all that for this good doctor, it's no wonder, is it, giving up her career. If this hadn't happened, I swear, she would have done something or other with those unfortunate children. Why, the way she dragged that little baby along with her in the snow. Terrible.' 'The doctor, he deserved a better wife. He was decent from head to toe. You could go to see him any time, he never told you to go away. His wife had him licking her ass, she did. And he was like an angel with his kids. That's a lot for one man. Terrible. It wasn't right, the way they were living.' 'Why, sure. Who's normal round here these days? Madness, it's like an epidemic, like TB used to be.' 'It's no use leaving here if you don't know what to do with yourself. That's how things are. Fear, force. The menfolk are panicking, the women too. Everyone. Force is good, it sets limits. A slap on the face is nothing, you can live with that. We know all about that. That's us.'"
Hajni fell silent, and then came the sound of Uncle Dénes's even breathing.
"I don't know what we were thinking..." Hajni's voice now seemed to come from somewhere farther off.
Maybe she'd leaned her head on Uncle Dénes, and her words were smothered into his neck. "What were the others thinking? How can you live like that? Mum said, 'This is like an incurable disease. But it doesn't kill you, either. You can learn to live with it.' And, in the end, she was the one who had to do everything. Mum. Dad could complain all he wanted about doing everything, but he didn't do a thing. Mum did everything. 'I was wrong', said Mum, 'but there's nothing to be done anymore'".
"Mum's in heaven, right?" asked Berti, without opening her eyes.
"Yeah," said Pinkler, half asleep, turning.
"They're taking us for a prison visit tomorrow," Hajni went on. "And Dad's gonna say, 'I'll be out in no time, and then we'll be a real family at last. Don't you two worry, you won't have to stay in the institution for long'".
Uncle Dénes kept quiet. Hajni's voice had a peculiar ring to it, strange and shiny once again.
"I dream the same thing all the time."
"Me too," thought Pinkler, the cold plastic buttons of the light cotton-case around her pillow pressing against her face.
"My fingers curl tight around his throat. Clutching his neck like that I start pounding his head against the trunk of the apple tree. Dad doesn't even try to defend himself. The crumbly bark comes off in mossy green flakes that stick to his forehead, but before they can fall to the ground, I bang them against the tree trunk. Dad doesn't get injured, though, because the tree's too springy. Dad doesn't defend himself. Not even when I am grabbing his throat. There's just one throbbing vein, right in the middle of his neck, soft, like a sponge. I can feel my own nails pressing against my palm. His eyes are open and his nostrils are wide, hard, pulsating. He's still breathing. His eyes are unmoving, red slits..."
Pinkler awakened from her own restless dream to the sound of sobbing. Turning on her side, she saw what seemed like a whale thrashing on Hajni's bed in the dark. The sniffling now faded away, and Pinkler's merciful sense of ambiguity saved her from comprehension and returned her to the realm of dreams.
It was only at the third time he drove through Blaha Lujza Square that Uncle Dénes finally found a parking space in a side street. While Kati stayed in the car, Uncle Dénes woke up Pinkler and pulled her off the back seat before clicking the empty cuff hanging from her hand once again around his own wrist.
"Do you really need to go and do that?" cried Pinkler, jerking away her hand. "I mean it now, it's not like this is some movie. Get that through your head."
Uncle Dénes gave a laugh and headed off without a word. They walked for twenty minutes all the way to the Oktogon. Uncle Dénes stopped at a stone bench in front of the statue of Ady.
"It's in your own interest," he said, looking meaningful at Pinkler and then the handcuffs. He then sat down. "Whenever I sit here, I can feel the poet behind me."
Pinkler shrugged, and sat down beside Uncle Dénes.
"We'll talk over what next, because it's not so simple. You want to come back to the Sodrás Street Home? Well, you have to deserve it."
Pinkler pursed her lips. Uncle Dénes's face told Pinkler he hadn't noticed.
"You won't believe it," he drawled. "All that traffic out there, all that commotion and noise-but here, inside me, it's quiet." Uncle Dénes tapped two fingers against his chest, right about where his heart was. The spiralling form of the snail pictured on his batik shirt seemed to swallow the gesture whole. The city sizzled in the sweltering heat. "I can sit here for an hour or two, just as if I'm sitting on a bench in a cemetery." Uncle Dénes looked right through the tangle of pedestrians scurrying by and the clamorous shuddering mass of stop-and-go traffic. "You know, one of your problems is that you are in serious need of suitable examples to steer by."
Pinkler didn't know what to say to this. Maybe she did have someone, something, some place, she thought to herself-or, more precisely, she felt this, for the sensations flitted about inside her without either words or images to accompany them. Someone, something, or some place, even more enormous than it seemed, that ripped right through the fabric of her present life, leaving a bottomless depth and a resounding height: a space without points of reference, like...
Uncle Dénes stared straight ahead, unperturbed-but suddenly his eyes latched on to a conspicuously raw-boned, warmly dressed boy hurrying along the opposite side of the street. Pinkler knew Sweater, who dressed even on the hottest summer days in a sweater and long pants or a sweat-suit.
Uncle Dénes was just mumbling this under his breath about how, "if I was sitting at a cemetery... if there's quiet in today's world even in cemeteries. Who knows..." And about how Pinkler was still hopelessly gaga over Attila József when Sweater suddenly appeared before them.
Uncle Dénes gave Sweater a wad of cash as he snatched a package from Sweater's hand lightning-fast. And then he continued, "Who knows..." But not once did he look at Sweater. No, Uncle Dénes looked right through Sweater's brown T-shirt, right through his sickly-looking skin, his scraggy ribs, and his tiny heart, though it seemed his eyes paused there momentarily, perhaps caught up by the pulse and swept along by Sweater's tired blood pumping its way through poisoned internal organs. Uncle Dénes's inexplicable behaviour now cut through Pinkler's cool indifference. She feared that everything would collapse in no time, that this morning of hers was about to come apart at the seams, and that nothing would remain even of her bygone fleeting life except for debris scattered all over the place. Sure, she'd go charging somewhere or other in the turmoil, but all the while the serenity of freedom would float motionless above her, out of reach, like a balloon. And then Sweater vanished, as if he'd never been there to begin with. Uncle Dénes gave a big, sad sigh, and everything that Sweater had uncovered, confused, or covered up for a few moments now became crystal-clear anew. 
Translated by Paul Olchvary
Kriszta Bódis
is a novelist, poet and maker of documentary films. Her second novel, Artista, from which the first four chapters are extracted here, was published in 2006.
