by Simon Avery
Paperback original published in 2017 by TTA Press
Ebook published in 2018 by TTA Press
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Copyright © Simon Avery 2017
Copyright © Richard Wagner 2017
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THE TEARDROP METHOD BY SIMON AVERY
TTA NOVELLA 4
TTA PRESS
COPYRIGHT SIMON AVERY AND RICHARD WAGNER 2018
PUBLISHED BY TTA PRESS AT SMASHWORDS
THE TEARDROP METHOD
SIMON AVERY
for Mum, Dad and Gavin
and for Amanda, with love
1
Krisztina heard the song and she followed it across the city. The threads of it led her through the park of Városliget, from Heroes’ Square and out the other side. The snow had been falling all week in Budapest and it seemed to freeze in the streetlights like static against the pale sky as they flickered to life. Krisztina took a taxi across town. The cab smelled of sweat and cigar smoke. She felt the back wheels sliding as they crawled around corners, and she held her breath. Listening to the notes of the song, she directed the cab driver from one street to the next. They passed an accident in the northern part of Váci utca: an ancient Skoda had fishtailed into the back of a tram. A knot of passengers stood around muttering to each other, their breath misting from their mouths. No one seemed to know what to do. No one had died. This wasn’t the source of the song she heard.
But the song was close. It was clearer here, louder. She hoped she’d find it in time. She could hear the first narcotic notes repeating again, calling out to her. Krisztina paid the cab driver and made her way across the street to the steamy heat and light of a coffee house. The waiters were standing out in the cold, discussing the accident until the proprietor came out and clapped his hands, herding them back inside to take orders. Krisztina stamped the snow from her boots and entered the cafe. The smell of chocolate and marzipan and damp clothes greeted her. She studied the faces of the customers. The song belonged to none of them. But it was close. It was coming to her, she was sure of it. He was coming to her. So here she would wait.
Krisztina sat, sipping the froth from her coffee for a while until she spotted a man by the roadside. While a group of people attempted to push the Skoda away from the tram, the wheels spinning wildly, this man was standing in the snow, utterly still. He was wearing a mask. It was porcelain, expressionless. Krisztina couldn’t see his eyes but she could tell that he was staring at her. He became obscured as an ambulance arrived; the men stood around laughing and smoking cigarettes when they realised there was no one to take to hospital. The crowds dispersed gradually but the tram remained with the car pressed into its side. It looked like an elaborate art installation. It looked like so many things that Krisztina didn’t care to remember.
The window misted over with condensation, and when Krisztina cleared it, the man in the mask was gone. But when she turned the song and its host had arrived. She watched József enter the coffee house. Krisztina had first seen him at a theatre, some weeks ago. He was an older man. He’d been a soldier during the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1958, the specifics of which eluded her. Now he was a playwright who in recent years had fallen on hard times. She’d been hearing his song ever since she’d met him: no more than two or three notes that threatened to become the loose threads of a melody. It was the eighth song she had heard in this manner. Soon, she supposed it might be her way back into the world, for better or worse. She’d hidden away from it for so long only to discover it wasn’t waiting for her anymore. It had turned its back on her and she hadn’t realised.
József stood in the doorway, removed his hat, loosened his scarf, and stamped his boots. He peered into the café, and looked delighted when he saw Krisztina. She nodded at him and he made his way through the tight throng of tables and diners and seated himself opposite her.
“Krisztina,” he offered. “What a surprise! I’m so happy to see you again.”
She smiled, and then glanced away, out of the window, wondering what was expected of her. She suspected that she’d forgotten how to communicate with people. Finally she returned her attention to József. His face was flushed in the sudden heat of the café. Or perhaps it was her presence. She was uncertain. People had stopped being flustered in her company; she was no longer famous. But József knew her. He owned her record, This is Krisztina; he’d barely been able to contain his delight when he’d first approached her in the theatre foyer. He had told her that she reminded him of someone he’d known when he was a young man. He didn’t elaborate but she suspected he meant an old lover. He played her songs at least once a week, even now. Even now, she had thought. This long after the fact. She was, at best, a cult artist by this time. A handful of lost souls had kept the faith, kept her close to their heart and hoped for more; the rest of the world had simply moved on to the next thing.
But this song: it was the eighth that she’d decided to pursue, and now she almost had an album’s worth. The music that defined these last few weeks came from József. He’d left the fingerprints of his life all over the city and for the time she’d been unable to hear anything else. He was unaware of this, of course. She was the only one who heard the song. Songs of mortality. She tried to imagine how she could ingratiate herself into his life in order to pursue the song to its bitter end. Eventually it struck her, and despite it being the obvious route, it really didn’t much appeal to her. Needs must when the devil drives, she thought. After a moment’s hesitation, Krisztina reached across and took József’s huge hands in hers. Ignoring the feeling that she must look over his shoulder to be sure that no one would steal him away, she said: “I’ve been thinking about you, József. Since we first bumped into each other. It’s no accident that we’ve met again.”
“Really?” Whatever József was anticipating, these were not the words he expected to hear coming from her mouth. He shrugged his large shoulders. She could see snow shining on his patterned pullover. “You’ve been thinking? About me?”
“Is that so strange?” She squeezed his hands and tried to adopt a coquettish manner. She tried to visualise Catherine Deneuve or Anita Ekberg in her mind. She enjoyed the old movies. She was fairly certain she had none of those actresses’ allure, but perhaps she didn’t really need any charm at all in this instance.
***
Evidently, she was correct. József took Krisztina across the river in a battered old Renault filled with fast food wrappers and Pepsi cans. The snow was fluttering out of the sky and then sweeping upwards at the
windscreen. Krisztina felt herself being hypnotised by the rhythm of the wiper blades and the smothering heat rushing from the dashboard. Beyond the wall of snow, the lights of the city were diminishing, and soon all that remained were the identical grey tower blocks of District VIII, whose windows were filled with rusted bikes and dead plants and frozen washing lines. Thousands of marginalised lives being lived in the shadow of the city she knew. Migrants and the poor, the prostitutes and the career criminals. Surely no one could be following them this far from town. But she’d seen the man in the porcelain mask several times in the past few months. She wondered what would happen if she simply approached him. If in fact, the scenario was some kind of cruel construct of her mind. Perhaps it was crumbling like the snow on the windscreen.
József had in recent times been reduced to living in two narrow rooms in a tower block – a living area with a kitchen, and a bathroom. It smelled of stewed vegetables. He had tacked up a poster from the theatre he had worked in but the damp had made it bulge away from the wall. There were pizza boxes, coffee ring stains and cigarette burns on the table, dirty plates and cutlery piled up in the sink. The linoleum underfoot was stained and split, black underneath. Krisztina had studied the doors of the other flats as she’d followed József up to his flat. There was no one else around. That was good. The song was louder now that it was so close to its conclusion, and the melody was gradually revealing itself to her. But not enough for her to simply walk away and call it József’s song. It didn’t work that way. She wondered how long she would have to wait. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was too close here. Too close to death. It was no way to live.
József cleared the detritus of clothes and crumpled paper from the couch, tossed them onto the floor. There was an old typewriter beneath the coffee table, the lines of a play stalled at page five. Krisztina knew all about that kind of creative famine. The frustration of the empty page; sitting at the piano forcing notes to become music and failing. But no longer. For almost a year now she had heard songs, indeed, had been given songs. She wanted suddenly to know József’s; wanted to hear what it was of his life that suggested music, a lyric, verses and chorus. She wondered what it was that constituted his middle eight. Finally, when too much time had elapsed and it felt as if she was stalling, Krisztina felt compelled to let him push her skirt up around her thighs and then tug down her woollen tights. She sighed when they tore, but she didn’t say anything; she simply smiled at him and allowed him to bury his tongue deep inside her. Beyond the window the snow was still falling. Everything was white, everything was silent. It was growing dark, and at the same time, more luminous. Krisztina ran her fingers through József’s hair and sighed as he lapped at her, tried to imagine it was Alice there between her legs. She wondered how much longer she would have to wait. Although the song was loud and clear now, there was no sign of József’s impending mortality. Finally after several minutes of clumsy cunnilingus, he rose and wiped his mouth. He swayed above her and then unbuttoned his trousers. Krisztina watched him, glanced away when he fumbled with his underwear as it tangled at his ankles. She shifted as he knelt back down and pressed his weight onto her, nuzzled at her neck, covered her face in kisses. She tried to sigh, to fill her mind with the memory of Alice’s attentions but it was no good. She could feel his stubble rough on her skin, his breath sour in her mouth…
“No,” she said, pushing József away finally. “I’m sorry, no, I can’t.”
He tried not to look wounded by her rejection, but she suspected it had happened before, for he withdrew immediately, nodding his head dutifully. He rose and tugged his underwear and trousers back on, buttoned them up.
Krisztina pressed her face into her hands, pulled her knees up beneath her chin. She could hear fragments of the song but they refused to be knitted together. “I’m sorry, József. It’s not you…”
He nodded. He glanced around the room emptily. A befuddled old man who’d been rejected. When Krisztina rose finally and pulled up her torn tights, gathered her coat and bag, József finally galvanised himself and said: “Stay.” He rubbed at his face. “Stay. Please. Just stay here tonight. Sleep beside me. That’s all I ask. One night.”
“József…”
“I won’t touch you, I promise,” he said, his voice clearer now, more resolved. “Just this night. You’ll never have to see me again.”
She stared at him, at his shabby home with its dirty clothes and grimy plates and stalled dreams in the typewriter. Finally she acquiesced. There was, after all, still the song to think about. “OK. Just for tonight.”
He smiled at her then and it broke her heart a little.
***
When Krisztina woke she was cold. Her body had shaken her awake. When she turned over in the bed that József had unfolded out of the couch, she was alone. The sheets were twisted around her body. She’d refused to remove her clothes when she climbed into bed with József. He was sufficiently chastened to leave his clothes on too, and, after he had switched off the light, had turned away on his side, as far away from her as he could get. Krisztina had lain awake for a time, hearing the same bar of music she’d heard all day, all these weeks; they refused to coalesce into more than words, more than notes on the cusp of a melody. She’d willed it to fuse but then she was waking in the dark with the cold raising the small hairs on her skin.
It was snowing in the room. The linoleum and the foot of the bed were already covered. Any longer and it would begin to drift. The balcony door was open. The drapes were flapping in the breeze and, beyond the broken plant pots and the skeleton of a bicycle, was József. He’d stepped up onto the wall of the balcony and the snow was fluttering around his body. Krisztina rose from the bed, her mind a sudden horrifying blank. She saw herself stumbling forwards, slipping on the fallen snow, her arms outstretched. “József!” she cried out.
He glanced behind him for a brief moment and smiled. Then he turned and silently fell from the balcony. He’d hardly made a noise, but suddenly there was a cacophony in Krisztina’s head.
It was his song.
She heard those first pensive and tremulous notes again, the ones she’d heard all across the city for weeks, like fingerprints left behind in a house; but then she heard the bass notes begin, the mournful trumpet refrain, the plucked strings, the sinewy violin, and the muffled pulsing beat. She heard the words:
Salvation comes at too high a price
For better or worse, this was my life…
She stumbled forwards, past the drapes and onto the balcony. She leaned out over the pigeon-shit covered wall and looked down. József’s head had split open and his blood and skull had bloomed out across the snow covered street. Krisztina turned away and hurried around the flat, picking up her coat and her bag. She was trembling. Had she caused this? Or had her rejection simply been the final nail in the coffin of József’s shattered life? She shook it away.
Krisztina could hear it all finally. His soul, his essence, the vessel that contained the sum of a human life. It was the song of his days in this world; it was beautiful and atonal and ragged and sad. She stood for a moment, gathering herself, and then she slipped out and away. She took József’s song home and recorded it. This had been the way of things for the past year.
2
Krisztina lived on the entire top floor of a faded old hotel that towered over the Danube. She took József’s song back there, hurrying through the wintry evening light and the crowds of soft eyed men and heavy bodied women in fur-lined hats and coats. Here in the hotel she lived a self-imposed hermetic life. The rooms were always stifling with heat and the wallpaper was rotting away from the walls, but the French windows opened onto an elegant balcony with wrought-iron railings and offered a perfect view of the river and the city. Sometimes Krisztina would stand here, drinking expensive Brandy and smoking French cigarettes, watching the Danube beneath her freeze.
One of the rooms had been converted into a soundproofed studio. She brought her new song here to an an
cient upright piano, and recorded the skeleton of its melody. She moved from her guitars to a 16-channel analog mixer and then to her battered old Apple Mac. She downloaded a selection of electronica sounds that she’d heard as she’d gathered her things in József’s flat. She wrote the words on the wall as she remembered them. They were all there, waiting to be turned into a song. As she wrote and recorded into the night she saw József’s life like the tapestry it was: another naked tale of failed relationships, the wounds of childhood embarrassment that followed him into adulthood, the hospitalisation as a child due to a bout of yellow fever that had caused liver damage. The song was callous and mournful when his life was all about battlefields and the loss of young life. It was beautiful and jagged when the girl he said had looked like her passed in and out of his life. Krisztina called it ‘Yellow Jack’ and by the time the first light was shivering across the Danube, and the coroner was examining the remains of József’s body on the mortuary slab, she had it down. Then she crawled into bed and slept the daylight hours away.
3
Review for Wire magazine by Dave Cook
Krisztina Ligeti
This is Krisztina (2008)
Hungarian chanteuse Krisztina Ligeti’s debut album surprises with an eclectic mix of musical styles and influences. This album is a mystery: underneath each, seemingly very simple, hardly-written song is a bona-fide gem, standing solidly on its own for its noticeably stripped-down instrumentation. These seemingly straightforward compositions about broken relationships and disconnected people, sung in her trademark glacial voice are at once voluptuous and constrained, its trumpets, woodwinds, violins, and guitars undercut with edgy electronics, processed drums, and disorienting pauses. Superior song writing and a pleasure from beginning to end.
