Best European Fiction 2013 (17 page)

Then I take a pen in my fair hand and do something that I have never done before.

At least a week goes by, and I do not count the evenings when I see all sorts of things before I am finally switched off. I do not understand where this comes from—there shouldn’t be anything new, no updates or anything like them in my systems.

One time he is actually like me, someone with an outer casing, we are equal.

One time the sky is full of terrifying things, wings, shadows.

One time I stand in the kitchen, but it is dark, so dark that I cannot find myself.

Fortunately these views never last long.

One day he comes back from his trip and is silent. We are both capable of silence, that is the same in both of us. Outside it is cold, twenty-six degrees Celsius less than the interior norm, and the cold has entered him, I sense it as soon as I take his coat. Moves more slowly than usual—perhaps he is suffering from stiffness. Does not want his usual cup of coffee but leads me to the living room. Holds a hand to my side, I follow. He sighs.

He keeps me by him even as he sits down.

“You know—” he begins, but how should I know, “—lately I have been short of money.” I have not thought about such things. I am stunned for a moment. Perhaps this is just part of listening. I pull myself back together, however, as one should. “I have decided—” he continues, but falls silent, this is so completely new that I do not remember anything similar. Then he takes up a defiant position, raises his chin and straightens his back. “I am going to have to sell you.”

What I find myself thinking is, sell, that’s what’s done to things, because he often comes back from shops where he has been sold food and bottles and small objects.

“One of those men wants to buy you.”

“Who?” he lets me ask—he wouldn’t always have done s0; now the situation is quite different and I sense it under my casing. I feel petrified now too—it starts gently in my heel and creeps from there through the groin joints to my innards. I think, and then ask further: “It’s the pantshitter, isn’t it?”

Stands up, furious: “Is that what you call my friends, you—” he doesn’t finish his sentence but hits me, hits me really proper, BANG, so that my seams shudder. I fall on to the floor and clatter and have no understanding of how I have offended against my programming. My temples feel tight, there must be something wrong inside my head.

Then he says nothing, I continue with former commands at least until evening and do not know what happens after that.

Electricity is what I need, that and sometimes other things too, orders preferably, because otherwise my existence fragments and goes off the rails and I am no longer as I was intended. Volatility, that is the danger—I easily begin to drift if rules and meaning are taken away. My borders move too much. Everything spins in my head, all that I have read and all the things I have stored away, I have experienced too much and I have perhaps not edited it sufficiently.

But through the sight, that fortified itself / In me by looking, one appearance only
—I fumble for a moment in my memory—
To me was ever changing as I changed.

Men with horns on their heads, myself with wings, he with a case

and children who are proud of what they have done

and a funnyman who smiled his face in two

and he paces around me and polishes me

But my own wings were not enough for this, / Had it not been that then my mind there smote

I grow dark.

A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish
I shut down once more for the night.

In the morning the stakes are high. I am not intended for anywhere but here. Elsewhere I would be senseless, unknown. As useless as a house that does not offer shelter from the rain, a car with no room for passengers. It is necessary to have a reason, a task.

I begin the morning with perfection. I execute my routines like an automaton, with unprecedented accuracy. Surely he will be dazzled, for life with me runs so smoothly.

When I have finished all that is expected, I offer him a surprise. He doesn’t expect anything of the sort, believes I am still the untalented beetle he manufactured for himself. Standing in the hallway, about to go out, I walk up to him, almost in front of him.

“I have become masterly,” I say, but politely all the same. He smiles, just a little. He continues to think he will leave, but I stand very fast in front of the door.

“I can create too.” That is what I tell him, and I smile as well, trying to look new.

“Oh, but you can’t do that.” I amuse him; he trembles now as he sometimes does while watching TV.

“Oh yes I can,” I say, holding my head up straighter than ever. He notices it, his eyes flashing, although he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Allows himself to be led away from the hallway into the living room. There I sit him down on the chair and remember to smile all the time. Smile smile, be beautiful, he used to say it himself. Light floods in through the window, too bright, it forces him to screw up his eyes although I would like him to keep them open, more open than before. But that is how a soft-surface is, afraid of light. I open a drawer, in the desk, and stretch my hand inside it.

The smallest child said, “I drawed a horsey.” “A horse,” the woman laughed, “—that’s lovely!”

I listened my surface off.

… as I changed …

No, it didn’t happen until later.

I draw out my creation—in a moment he will be dazzled.

He raises his face and moves his eyes out of the sun’s path. Laughs until he’s doubled over, guffaws himself into exhaustion like a blocked drain I had to clean once. “I thought you were serious!” His words remain in the shade because the sound of his laughter is so loud, but I know all about shady things, I do. “That kind of scribble, you can’t even draw a straight line!”

I turn my drawing toward my own visual sensors: it shows galloping dog-snakes, mouse-people, trees blossoming gaily, cloud-light birds flying in the sky. My arm twitches.

“It is the world’s most beautiful picture. I created it.” I speak slowly, for clarity. He does not always understand me if I get upset, my skill is to be quick and accurate. I step closer, perhaps the sun is bothering him again.

“You don’t know how to create! Even babies can draw better.” He grabs the picture from my hands, dropping it, torn, on the floor. The sun strikes my sensors, too, as I bend down to pick up the piece of paper. Something twitches inside me, in all my systems, no longer just in my arm.

“My creator,” I cry in my steely voice, beautiful and piercing. I reach out my arm.

TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY
HILDI HAWKINS AND SOILA LEHTONEN

memory

[HUNGARY]

MIKLÓS VAJDA

Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame

She stands in the kitchen, in a kitchen, not our kitchen, not the old kitchen, not any of our old kitchens, but her own kitchen, an unfamiliar one, not mine, and she cooks, stirs something. She is cooking for me. That’s another new thing, a strange thing. But there she stands, repeating anything I want, anywhere, whatever I happen to want most, at the time I want it. I am still here: she is not. And there are things I do want. But even if I didn’t want them she would carry on coming and going, doing this and that, entering my head, calling me, talking, listening, now in delight, now in pain, thinking of me or looking at me, ringing me up, asking me things, writing to me as if she were alive. I am insatiable: I am interested in all that is not me, in what is private, in affairs before me and after me, in her existence as distinct from mine, and I try to fit the jigsaw together, but nowadays, whatever she is doing—and I can’t do anything about this—is always, invariably done for me, because of me, to me, with me, or on my behalf—or rather, of course, for me.

At this very moment I want her to stand there, in that kitchen, stirring away. Let’s have her cooking one of those dishes she learned abroad, let her make a caper sauce to go with that sizzling grilled steak. But I often have her repeat a great many other things too: for example, I have recently taken to observing her secretly from my bed as she slowly removes her make-up at the antique dressing table with the great gilded antique silver-framed standing mirror before her, going about her task in a businesslike manner, applying cream with balls of cotton wool, her hands working in a circular motion, efficiently, always in exactly the same way, pulling faces if need be, puffing out a cheek, rubbing her skin then smearing it with, among other things, a liquid she refers to as her “shaking lotion” and which dries immediately so she looks like a white-faced clown. Then she wipes it off and I fall asleep again. The room is full of mirrors, each of the six doors of the built-in cupboard is a full length mirror.

My bed is there in her bedroom: my own bedroom is being used by the German
Fräulein
. Sometimes I wake late at night just as she enters from the bathroom, wearing her yellow silk dressing gown, and I hear her as she applies creams and lotions for the night before going to bed, as she moves around, gets comfortable, clears her throat, and gives a good sigh before falling sound asleep, her mouth open, contented, exhaling loudly, exactly the way I catch myself doing nowadays.

Or I am watching her at eleven in the morning as she steps into the car, fully made up, elegantly dressed, wearing hat and gloves and high-heeled shoes, as she throws back the fashionable half-veil, pulls out of the garage, turns in the drive, takes the left-hand lane—the traffic is still driving on the left—and sets off from our Sas Hill villa in the Buda hills into the city center to do her shopping before meeting her friends in the recently opened Mignon Espresso—the first of its kind in Hungary—or at the Gerbeaud patisserie where she might go on to meet my father who sometimes strolls over from his office to talk over their plans for the next day or whatever else is on their minds. Then they come home together and eat. Or I see her in Márianosztra, or possibly, later, in Kalocsa, at the end of the monthly visiting time, led away by a guard armed with a submachine gun, out of the hall that is divided in half by a partition of wire netting, leaving through double steel doors, overlooked by enormous portraits of Stalin and Rákosi, and I catch a glimpse of her as she is shepherded away in a procession of prisoners and guards, and she freezes for a moment, conscious perhaps of me looking at her, to look back over her shoulder, sensing me standing there, staring at her. The guard’s flat cap is covering half her face but her slight squint, her nod, her faint smile, and her suspiciously shining eyes tell me more than she could say to me in the fifteen allotted minutes in the presence of the guard.

Never in my life have I seen her cry. She did not cry when my father died, nor when her sister died. She cannot, she could not, perhaps she never wanted or allowed herself to give direct expression to intense feeling, not in words and certainly not in wild gestures. When either of us was going away on a longer trip she would embrace me and give me a light, brief kiss while gently patting my back by way of encouragement, then drawing a little cross on my forehead with her thumb. That’s how we parted in December 1956 at the Southern Terminal, both of us in ruins, like the town itself, silently, crying without tears, since we both knew we would not see each other again for years, maybe never. Nor did I ever hear her sing or hum. Or, and this is another scene I often conjure, the telephone is ringing there, at her home in New York, and she looks at me in confusion, pleading with me once again silently rather than in words to answer it again because she has difficulty, particularly on the telephone, in understanding the language. Most of the time, of course, the caller is Hungarian. She hardly knows anyone here who is not Hungarian. Nowadays I have her pull this pleading face time and again, as if repeating a scene on DVD; I torture myself with it, it is my punishment. I always regret it but once or twice I rebuke her rather sharply for not having in all that time learned the language properly. But no sooner have I said the words than I am already regretting them: I don’t know what has made me say them, made me want to lecture and criticize her, what makes me want to assert my independence, to push her away from me time after time. It’s some obscure, as-yet-inexplicable urge I have to prod her where she is most vulnerable and often I am unable to resist it. I see she resents it; that I have hurt her; that it saddens her, that it makes her suffer, and that she closes up, but, wisely, accepts the latest rebuke, generously adding it to the rest. Perhaps she understands this instinctively better than I do. Even in the years before prison I was subjecting her to these low tricks; she bore the pain, but maybe, at that time, she could inwardly smile at the thought that her biological destiny had presented her with such a difficult adolescent. Very quickly though we’re back to the usual way of doing things. Her patience, her calm, her seemingly endless wisdom in understanding, spring from a source deep within her. But she will never be more demonstrative than this. There are no sudden embraces, no pet-names, no uncalled-for affectionate kisses, no light laughter, no playful teasing, no letting-one’s-hair down, no messing about.

Nor was there ever. I myself lack the capacity for at least two or three of those. We live in conditions of withdrawal and reserve, which is not the same as living in solemnity or dullness or indifference, nor does it exclude—not by any means—warmth, kindness, solicitude, gaiety, and a sense of humor cloaked in delicate irony, something I am particularly fond of. I have instinctively grown used, to some degree at least, to seeking what was missing in her in others: ever since I was born I have received generous helpings of them from Gizi, my godmother whom I adore, and, in her simple, modest way, from
Fräulein
too. Later I look for these qualities in girls, in women, with wildly varying results. But all in vain, since anything you were not given by your mother, indeed anything she did actually give you, will not be found anywhere else. That is my definitive experience. I have been feeling closer to her recently, ever since she died in fact. For a long time I believed she was a simple soul: that she lived by instinct alone, was prejudiced, was incapable of articulating her feelings, impressions, and passions, or only doing so when she was forced to and absolutely had to take a position on something. Then I realised I was wrong. She had a complex, rich, many-layered inner life, consisting not only of immediate feeling but of the tastes and ways of thinking traditional to her family and class. Over and over again in my head I replay the most memorable things she said, examining and analyzing them, and I always come to the same conclusion. Her opinions were thought through, never spur-of-the-moment or improvised, but properly considered and, when called upon, she could present excellent, concise arguments for them. She had outstanding moral judgment, impeccable taste, and her understanding of human character was all but infallible. She was not a snob but open and kindly, never condescending even in the genteel role of “madam,” as she was to the servants for example. She was no blue-stocking, of course, but was reasonably well-read. It was thanks to her that I was introduced to Balzac and Dickens in my early adolescence, at a time when I was still reading Karl May and Jules Verne. In her later years she enjoyed reading Churchill’s memoirs. She had studied at a girls’ grammar school in Arad, her Transylvanian hometown, and, after the Romanian occupation, when her family—a fully Hungaricized landowning family of ancient Serbian origin, some of whose members played important roles in Hungarian history—fled to Pest, she studied the violin with Hubay, as long as they could afford it, which was not long. The photograph of the long-haired, slender, beautiful teenage girl passionately playing her violin—if one can go by such evidence—seems to indicate that she was deeply imbued with the love of music.