by Simon Avery
“Meet me,” she said.
She thought she heard him drop the phone. When he recovered it he said, “Be careful, Krisztina,” then he hung up.
Krisztina held the phone to her chest for a moment. Before she returned to her bed she checked the lock on the door.
***
The following day the song revealed itself to her, and suddenly it all made sense. She heard it hummed by the hotel porter in the lobby, heard it playing underneath a pop song on a radio on the metro, saw the words that she would sing on a sign in a shop window on Váci utca:
I loved you once, I love you now
The coldest hands will leave no trace
I saw you then. I see you now
I see beyond your broken face
Instead of taking the metro to Kecskemét to continue in the studio, Krisztina walked the city in pursuit of the fugitive song. She’d thought she was done with them; they’d receded sufficiently for her to walk the streets and not hear pain calling out of the concrete, but this melody was so plaintive, so utterly heartbroken, she couldn’t leave it alone. It made her think of that first song that had been Alice.
Is it the teardrop method?
It was the same ache.
If Rebeka Stróbl shared the ‘gift’ (and Krisztina hesitated to think of it as such) or something similar, then she supposed it was inevitable that their paths had crossed as mortality called out to them. But Stróbl had murdered the torch singer, put a knife into her chest and taken her life. And in doing so she’d stolen that essence that Krisztina had spun like gold into songs. Perhaps the ‘gift’ offered itself in different ways to different practitioners of art.
As Krisztina crossed the Chain Bridge, the cold coming off the river felt ancient, hostile; at odds with the soft pink and gold shades of the water’s surface. She took the funicular to the Castle District as a winter snow swung out of Russia into Budapest. She followed the Mary Magdalena church as it rose above the yellow buildings in the soft haze of snow and streetlamps. Cars hemmed into the kerbs, turned into soft shapeless mounds by the snow. Past the Trinity square as tourists drifted from the Matthias church with cameras in their hands, rucksacks on their backs and hats with fur earflaps. North of the castle she made her way to Vizivávos. Taxis were swerving around corners, moving slower than usual as the snow eddied around the city. Somehow events had led Krisztina to Batthyány Square, the place where Alice’s accident had occurred. She saw the electricity flares from the tram wires overhead in blue green sparks, turned through a tiled archway and down a cobbled alleyway and realised that she no longer had to listen for Felipe Lejeune’s song; it was all around her now.
We carried the good days with a song in our hearts
Now we’ll carry the bad ones like a burden on our backs
I know you’re trying to hide but don’t
Nothing has changed. It’s still a beautiful day
Felipe Lejeune’s apartment was waiting for her away from the sounds of life in Batthyány Square. It was a sad little place, she thought. Clearly he could have afforded to live in better circumstances, but this place with its broken windows choked with newspaper and its walls darkened with soot and damp seemed to be his sentence, his attempt at penitence. The door was painted black. It was open. Krisztina paused to look back at the city and the snow and then pushed the warped wood of the door with her shoulder, climbed the narrow staircase to three other doors. Krisztina could hear music through the narrow walls; its insistent bass line seemed to be urging her pulse to catch up. She could feel the floor vibrating with the sound. She didn’t have to wonder which door belonged to Lejeune: someone had chalked a crude mask into the wood – half of the face was a blank expression, the other sloped downwards and into the grain of the wood. Did he have cruel neighbours? Perhaps he’d drawn the picture himself. Krisztina pushed the door and was surprised to find it unlocked. She glanced down the stairs a final time then went inside.
The three rooms that Felipe Lejeune called home were as featureless as the mask Krisztina had seen him wearing. She moved around touching the second hand furniture that smelled of old people and sickness. She picked up the cluster of framed photographs on a table beside the window. She looked at the photograph of Lejeune and Stróbl on a beach in the South of France somewhere. The day of their wedding. The tide coming in over their bare feet and Stróbl’s long white train. There were other wedding photos alongside some Polaroids and family portraits. Krisztina studied each of them in turn, and then looked out of the window at Batthyány Square where the traffic seemed to be floating through the snow in silence.
She found two featureless masks in the narrow bedroom, and one in the sink in the bathroom that had been shattered into pieces. There were bottles of medication in the cabinet. A towel had been thrown over the mirror.
Krisztina returned to the living area and stood, feeling the music from below vibrating through her feet. After a moment, she sat down in one of the faded chairs and waited.
***
Felipe Lejeune came back several hours later. Krisztina had turned off her mobile phone after she’d received too many calls from the studio requesting her presence. Lejeune seemed unsurprised to see Krisztina waiting there. The dark had settled in around her, covered her up. The snow outside was luminous. It fell past the window, casting soft shadows on the wall opposite. It had made her drowsy. The music had stopped an hour ago. As soon as she’d heard the door downstairs, she’d roused immediately.
“I see you’ve made yourself at home,” he said.
It took some time for her to understand his words. They sounded blunt and wet. The mask muffled the words further. Its blankness disturbed Krisztina. Your broken face. She watched him move around the room, lighting lamps and drawing curtains. He kept glancing at her surreptitiously. The pale, blank face was disturbing. She had no idea what the man was thinking or feeling. Without facial cues, she was at a loss. She wanted to know what the mask was concealing; she wanted to know the extent of the damage done.
But finally he sat down opposite her and sighed. He produced some cigarettes from his shabby jacket and shook them to ascertain how many he had left. Then he leaned forward to offer one to Krisztina. She took one and he leaned across to light it. She could smell the aftershave on his throat and on the collar of his silk shirt. His clothes were expensive but they needed washing.
Krisztina realised she was holding her breath as he held the cigarette to his face. But then he lifted the mask away and left it perched on his head. He smiled at her curiosity then, and the effect was grotesque. He lit the cigarette and smoke coiled in the air between them. There was something stiff about his skin and something askew too; as if someone had glanced at a picture of how Felipe Lejeune once looked and had then been given five minutes to arrange his features again from memory. The left side of his mouth was pulled down and the skin was puckered and pale. Krisztina could see what had once been beautiful about him, but it was gone now. The memory of it was a warped mirror. He held the cigarette carefully to his damaged mouth, pulled on it, exhaled.
“Why are you here?” he asked finally.
“I want to know why your wife wants to kill me,” Krisztina said. “I want to know why we share this ‘gift’.”
“Why do you have to know?” Lejeune said. “Things just are.”
Krisztina nodded. She hadn’t expected him to know, but she’d felt compelled to ask. But she wanted to know about Stróbl; what it was that they shared that had left them with this gift. She asked Lejeune to tell her something, anything that might help her understand.
***
The way Lejeune described his life as a model before meeting Stróbl made it sound both thrilling and depressing. A sea of brilliant faces, all of them strangers all of the time; all of them coming to bask in the reflected glory of beautiful things. The same face on a second day was just so much unnecessary baggage. Discard them. Send them home, back to the malaise of their banal little lives. He referred to them as ‘limpet
s’. He’d moved from one unfamiliar hotel to the next. Always tripping over the furniture. Always sleeping until noon.
But then it creeps in: the stale, sober air of 5 a.m. as the Cristal runs dry and the last stragglers depart or crawl off to sleep in the bath. It dawns on Lejeune the way it dawns on everyone who lives the life of the debauched and the idle rich: no one here has dreams or desires deeper than the flesh, or none they’d admit to. Every sentence has the practiced air of boredom and sarcasm.
In the midst of this arrives Rebeka Stróbl. Lejeune likes her conviction, her caustic tongue, the easy swell of her breasts in a tight grey sweater, the little skirt with the pleats that makes her look like a schoolgirl. She has perfect green eyes. She is unimpressed with his friends. It has taken him some years to come to a conclusion she makes in an afternoon.
“They’re fucking limpets,” he agrees.
“We should go to the beach,” she says. “You should bring the champagne.” When he glances around at the PR men and the hangers-on in the room, she says, “Trust me, they won’t even know you’re gone.”
She wades into the sea fully clothed at midnight. She peels off her sweater in the perfect moonlight and he feels his heart roaring in his chest. Hung-over and unable to stop themselves from touching each other, they drive up the coast from Nice to Monte Carlo the following day. He finds her sole book, All the Pretty Children, in a bag in the car. It seems like a little concession to vanity that she carries her book in her bag for him to find. He reads it in the still afternoon while she sleeps naked in the shadows of the hotel bedroom; he doesn’t understand it all, but he thinks he might be falling in love with her.
He is certain when, one week later, they are married on a private stretch of beach in St Tropez. It is a beautiful day. There are others there but he cannot see them. He only has eyes for his new wife. They honeymoon for several days and then travel to Paris. Two days later, their car hits a truck, head-on. He watches as if outside of his body as it flies through the windscreen and impacts with the other vehicle. He is a crash test dummy. His head is a soft-boiled egg.
This is where his life ends. It goes on, of course, but to all intents and purposes, it end there, he tells Krisztina.
“But you still had each other,” Krisztina said. “You were in love.”
“Faces change with age,” he said, the cigarette forgotten and smouldering in the ashtray. “You both grow old together, and by the time you realise that you’ve both changed – that the lines are deeper and the hair thinner and the belly larger – it doesn’t matter because what you love is under the skin: it’s intangible; it’s the years and the experiences – the good ones and the bad.
“But that wasn’t going to be our lives. I realised that after the second plastic surgery. Rebeka stood at the back of the room as the surgeon peeled away the dressing on my face to see how the skin had healed. She looked away then. I saw it. And when she spoke to me after I saw that something had gone from her face. It had left in the blink of an eye. Whatever it was she had felt for me had lasted no more than a few months.”
“When did she start to see the stories?” Krisztina asked.
“When we returned to Budapest,” Lejeune said. “She hadn’t written for years. Not since the publication of All the Pretty Children. She told me that she had run out of things to say on the day she sold the book. She would sit at her desk and stare at the screen, watching the cursor blink. She would smoke, and pace the room, and stare out of the window, and nothing would come. So she gave up.
“But then, a few days after our return to the city, she had what she called an epiphany. She’d been out walking. She told me it was to think, but I could tell that it was simply an excuse to get away from the house, from the sick room.
“I could see how she looked at me. I was like spoiled food. I wasn’t what she had ordered from the menu, but now we were married and she felt guilty about the disgust she felt when she looked at me. She wouldn’t as much as touch me. So she went out and walked.
“She saw the words. Rebeka was curious at first and she simply followed them like clues across the city. It was a game, a little diversion, that she was happy to give herself up to. She discovered an old man in the Jewish Quarter that day and as she did, she saw the story of the man’s life. She saw it all: his escape from the ghetto of Király utca after the Nazis arrived in Budapest in 1944 to carry out the deportation and execution of Hungarian Jews. Finding refuge in the famed Glass House that provided protection for almost three thousand Jews from the Nazis, and then helping form the Zionist Youth Movement, who used the building to coordinate relief and rescue activities. Rebeka saw all of the moments that make up a life: hardship and toil, love and loss. She saw how the story began, how it progressed and evolved, she saw the poetry of it; the way the words would stream across the page in the way they had used to for her.
“She came home and tried to get it down, but it defied her. She returned to it over the next couple of days but the words simply wouldn’t come. Finally she left the house again and returned to the Jewish Quarter and found the old man. She followed him the entire day as he played chess in the park and went to the synagogue. She watched him buying his dinner in the supermarket near his house; she watched him walk up the hill and close his door. She saw it all again: every word that was his life.”
“When did she realise she had to kill him to have his story?” Krisztina asked.
Lejeune shrugged. He rose and went to the window, opened the drapes a little and peered out into the dark. “I don’t know. She became more secretive, furtive. She began to leave the house at all hours. We stopped speaking entirely. I assumed she had started an affair.” He paused, closed the drapes and stared at his surroundings. “I found her washing blood from her hands one night. And there was a knife in the sink, also covered in blood. I asked her what she had done and she simply closed the door in my face. She refused to answer my questions.
“So I began to follow her. And at first, I thought my assumption that she was having an affair was correct. She met both men and women. Sometimes she went home with them, other times she simply followed them. And then one night, I watched her drag a woman into an alleyway and cut her throat. As the woman fell to the ground, I saw something in Rebeka’s face that I hadn’t seen since that first week of our relationship: it was love, it was satisfaction, it was happiness.
“I realised after a few weeks that she was indeed writing again. She would spend the night in the city and the day in her study, and the pages of the manuscript began to mount up. But she stopped sleeping. There were voices in her head, words everywhere she looked. She didn’t tell me this, but I could see it. Something essential had gone from her face. She was seeing every life that the city had to offer. It was sending her mad with the sheer quantity of information. It was taking its toll sifting through it all to find the diamonds among the coal.”
“And then she saw my story,” Krisztina said, understanding finally. “And realised it was almost the same as her own.”
Lejeune nodded. “She started following you. She made notes. I think she’s waiting to understand your story.” He stood and disappeared into the bedroom and reappeared with a thick manila envelope. “Take this,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s what she has written so far. I stole it while she was out one night.”
Krisztina rose from the chair. She said: “I hear your song.”
Lejeune nodded. “Of course. I understand.”
Perhaps it was also Rebeka Stróbl’s. But it wasn’t finished yet. It was incomplete. What else was there to know? The world had turned so black and white.
“Read that,” Lejeune said, shaking the envelope at her until she took it from his hand. “And then I think you should go,” he continued. “Far away before it’s too late for you. She will come for you.”
Krisztina nodded, but she was still trying to accept the notion of being exposed to every life in the city, offering millions of pote
ntial stories. She had heard the sound of mortality, but had learned how to hear it without listening. But Rebeka Stróbl didn’t seem to have that filter. Never really sleeping, never really knowing peace for the sound of every soul in every corner of the city. It’s sent her quite mad… “I’m sorry,” she said to Lejeune finally. It was all she could think to offer.
“So am I,” Lejeune said.
She left him then and went out into the night.
10
She was unsurprised to see that the manuscript was called The Teardrop Method. It was a series of interconnected stories involving a cast of characters that moved in and out of each others’ lives, some of them taking centre stage for a time, and then drifting away into the background again. Krisztina read through the prose, and found a passage about the torch singer they’d both orbited. She recognised phrases she’d seen written on billboards and in newspaper articles that had called to her. The words that constituted a lifetime. Where Krisztina would use music and pare the words away to tell the story of a life, Rebeka had the rhythm of language, the ebb and flow of sentences and paragraphs and pages. It was exquisite. It was the same way out of the darkness of loss and pain and creative famine. Krisztina couldn’t begrudge her that, but if people were being murdered for their stories, then she must. She had only taken the stories that the natural end of life suggested. She’d never taken the life.
It was the final story that made Krisztina put the manuscript down and step away from it. She opened the doors to the balcony and felt the cold air streaming up off the Danube. She breathed it in, gripping the railings with white knuckles. The river surged below her. She stayed like that for a while, and then returned to the manuscript’s final story. She turned on the lights and drew the drapes, poured herself a brandy. She couldn’t stop her hands shaking.
