by Unknown
The face that looks back at her from the cheap mirror now is still a feminine face, all attention: she can still take delight in life, is still curious, still wants to see everything. There is no trace in her of the expression you catch on other déclassé immigrants, the cynical hanger-on’s don’t-blame-me look. She has not walled herself in, become a solitary, she has not been distorted by the enormity and the harsh bustle of the alien world that now surrounds her. She is just the same as she had been in prison when sharing a cell with eight others. Having made subtle enquiries and going by what is around her, I know she is alone, though I had hoped she might have a man in her life. There is no way of asking her this directly, as it is something we never speak about. Grandmother brought up her three girls, she being the youngest of them, to avoid even the most harmless romantic literature, even that in which the attractive, and in every respect impeccable, young suitor makes so bold as merely to touch the innocent maiden’s hand in the long awaited last chapter, at the point of engagement. She would glue the last pages together or simply cut them out with scissors, believing such episodes to be unseemly. My mother addressed the issue in less radical fashion, in the way that best suited her: it simply didn’t exist. My sexual education at home consisted of a single short sentence that I first heard at the age of about four or five when the words first issued from her lips at a time when I lay in bed with some infection, possibly influenza: You are not to play with your pee-pee. That was it. My father said even less. He said nothing. So I became an autodidact in the subject.
Her circle consisted of a few relatives and female friends, all Hungarian, two of them quite close to her. I suspect, I sense, I see, since she practically radiates it, that she lives entirely, exclusively, for me, and that this, for the time being, is as certain as can be. She wants to show me, to buy me, all she can of America, all that is possible to show or buy, whatever is obtainable in intellectual or material terms.
That is because I have chosen to remain there, because I chose not to come with her. That is why she scrimped and saved, that is what she was preparing herself for all her life here. Almost as soon as I arrived the first thing she did was to take me to a medium-range department store and, bearing my tastes in mind, equip me with several suits of clothes, from top to bottom, the way she might a child, that is to say her son, whom she has now had on loan for three months. There were certain items of my own clothing that I had to throw out: she absolutely insisted on that.
There is another photograph of her, some thirty years back in Színházi Élet, a magazine for theater lovers, showing her playing patience with Gizi Bajor, the actress. Gizi is dealing out the cards while she looks on attentively, smoking, turning the signet ring with her thumb the way she used to. And there it still is, miraculously, the golden signet ring, next to her engagement ring: she doesn’t take it off, not even while washing up. When I was a little boy I desperately wanted to have one of those. Engraved into the deep-red ruby, under a five-point crown, a tiny knight-on-horseback galloping to the right holds high his sword, a moustached head, bald save a single wisp, obviously a Turk’s, impaled on it. Patiently and wisely she would explain to me time and again that I couldn’t have one because it was not mine to possess, because even my father didn’t have one.
It hurt me, infuriated me, it brought me out in a fever: I simply couldn’t accept that I was unworthy of it. I, I alone, unworthy! When I could get anything else I wanted! It was the first time I felt the limits of my world and I couldn’t understand it, couldn’t get used to it. Yet how fine it would be turning it round on my finger while talking, as she did! To answer questions in so careless a fashion!
Several years, some eras later, I upbraid her on account of the ring. Before the gimnázium is nationalised in 1948 and I am still at the Cistercian school—but have become an avid consumer of the works of Hungarian novelists, poets, sociologists, and historians, most of whom are outside the Church-approved curriculum, and am fervently committed to the cause of equality—I get embarrassed by my mother, not just to myself but before others too, precisely on account of the signet ring she is wearing, which I see as an emblem of feudalism.
She spends her evening removing, at my stubborn insistence, the embroidered five-point crown above the monogram from the remaining items in her trousseau such as tablecloths, napkins, bed linen, towels, kitchen cloths, and dusting rags, and she does it silently, willingly, with a glum expression. Then, something I really haven’t anticipated happens: I have to identify with the onetime envied, later despised, signet ring. The dictatorship itself so to speak pushes it on my finger, as I too am a “class-alien.” Now I fear for her and try to persuade her to remove it because she could get into trouble wearing it. She won’t listen to me. She has worn it all her adult life, she will not disown her family, she is not ashamed of her ancestors, she tells me rather sharply. Pretty soon, in November 1949, they arrest her on a trumped-up, patently absurd charge of panic-mongering.
“Who are you fucking, you stuck-up whore?” asks her first interrogator at the notorious security headquarters building, 60 Andrássy Avenue.
There are things to take pride in and wonder at in the little kitchen. For example there is a never-before-seen gadget, the electric can-opener, and next to it, hanging on the wall, there’s a square-metersized piece of thick, perforated pasteboard, painted white and framed with red insulating tape, from whose holes hang, at a convenient distance from each other, a set of useful hooks accommodating a variety of kitchen utensils. It is a brilliant example of American practicality in offering solutions so blatantly simple that it takes your breath away.
She had seen it somewhere, put the scarlet border round it, fixed it to the wall all by herself, and it is so handy and saves so much space. I don’t recall in our previous life, or lives, rather, ever seeing her with a screwdriver or hammer in her hand. Now she is the owner of pliers, chisels, files, a range of screws and keys, measuring tapes and insulating tapes, keeping them all in a professional-looking toolbox, proudly setting them out and recounting what she fixed with what.
We move into the living room, though she uses the English term with a little apologetic smile, since she could hardly call it a salon, the word we used to refer to the spacious sitting room in the Buda villa of my childhood. This small space is dark even in daytime, darker than the whole inner-tenement apartment. With a peculiar— and to me entirely unfamiliar—giggle and twinkle in her eyes, she lowers her voice and tells me that, through the window overlooking the tiny yard, she can see into a neighboring apartment where the occupier, in fact the janitor, a corpulent black man—just imagine,
Nicky!—right by the open window, even with the lights full on, there on the sofa, regularly, ahem, caressing himself! You can even hear his heavy breathing! That’s why I have to keep the curtains drawn, even in the daytime. There are a couple of engravings on the wall in slightly clumsily fixed ready-made frames. In terms of furniture I see two ancient, much worn, and in every respect dissimilar fauteuils that might charitably be referred to as antiques, and two, just as dissimilar, also mock-antique little tables, as well as a spindly baby-sized chest of drawers on barley-sugar legs, matching the rest only by virtue of imitation. These she has purchased, piece by piece, as and when opportunity afforded, from a thrift shop, that is to say a store where are sold all kinds of cheap things abandoned or passed on by gentlefolk for charitable purposes. Some ornaments on the table, a few minor antique items of bric-à-brac, of silver, copper, and porcelain, a photograph in a silver frame, a lovely old ashtray; most of them Csernovics and Damjanich family relics that I had brought from home on request. They obligingly made themselves at home here, as if, indeed, coming home. There are vases on the tables and, as has always been the case, there are flowers in them. The style is familiar: these are obvious signs of her refined taste, obvious only to me of course. I myself lived with her beautiful antique furniture, on Sas Hill, right to the end of the war. She used to collect the tiny bits of polished dar
k-brown veneer that had flaked or fallen off them and keep them in a tin cigarette box: from time to time a skilled joiner would come and glue them back on with surgical precision as if they were missing pieces of a jigsaw, and there the furniture would be: repaired, impeccable, brilliantly glossy and majestic once more. Let such things be about her even now, however cheap, however fake, if only to serve for atmosphere, as compensation for the world that was once hers, so she may feel at home. This desire has crossed the ocean with her, it and she are inseparable companions, they are what she is, like her past, like her ring, like those capers balanced on the back of her fork, like the aahkaahdémia. And all this moves me, though I don’t, of course, show it.
TRANSLATED FROM HUNGARIAN BY GEORGE SZIRTES
[TURKEY: GERMAN]
ZEHRA ÇIRAK
Memory Cultivation Salon
Laura Zwist arrives punctually and in an especially good mood for her appointment at the Memory Cultivation Salon. As always, she comes on Friday at two o’clock for her appointment. And as always, she carries a small packet with fancy little cakes. Exactly six months ago, on her seventieth birthday, she received a year’s membership from her girlfriends for this unique Salon. She takes care not to miss any of the twelve appointments, one per month, and looks forward greatly to each one. Today is the halfway mark. That’s why she wants to celebrate with her Memory Cultivator, Frau Merk—because Laura’s convinced that one should take every opportunity to make hay while the sun shines. Besides, she managed to remember something very special today; and she also brought Frau Merk three red poppies. These rest in her tote with the little cakes. And an especially sweet little cake is what she popped into one astonished young mouth on her way over.
It is a sunny early summer afternoon and quite warm, but a cool breeze is blowing. Inside the small shop in the middle of a quiet street downtown it’s as quiet as ever. There isn’t a single neon light to cast an ugly glare on one’s skin, but rather a pleasant radiating glow, a slightly golden warmth and cosiness. The salon and its lamp are in a room at the back, separated by a white curtain from the front entrance and reception area, and even more comfy still. Laura’s gaze falls first on the round bistro table in the middle of the well-appointed room. Coffee stands ready to be served. She glances out the two adjacent windows onto the tidied green of the back courtyard with its chestnut trees. Then her eyes move to the honey-colored floor of the corridor and the whitewashed walls. She finds particularly lovely the pictures by Jan Vermeer hanging there, framed behind glass on one wall, with a few by Hieronymus Bosch opposite them. The bookcase that takes up the entire fourth wall is filled with carefully chosen literature such as the novels of José Saramago and Ernst Weiß, which Laura has borrowed in the course of the past year and come to appreciate. And several volumes of poetry stand there as well, out of which she and her Memory Cultivator read aloud from time to time.
Other than a high, narrow glass case where old-fashioned yet tasteful dishes are arrayed, there is the bistro table with three comfy leather armchairs around it and a stereo on the little table near the deep red velvet couch.
As usual, indeed more or less automatically, the two women sit down at the table immediately upon exchanging their opening pleasantries. They pour themselves coffee and, while Laura opens the packet of pastries and arranges the goodies on a plate, Frau Merk settles the three rather wrinkled poppies into a vase and says in a low whisper that outdoes the powdered sugar on the littles cakes in sweetness: “Today’s the halfway mark, I’ve chilled a small bottle of sparkling wine, dear Frau Laura—after coffee we’ll toast to us and to your memories. Many thanks for the flowers. I love poppies, especially these deep red ones with the black. The blossoms look like lingerie, don’t you think? And when I sniff them I think of something made for feeling, not for telling, you understand?”
Frau Merk smooths her dark hair off her brow toward the back of her head, though its shortness doesn’t really allow for smoothing, and certainly not for shaking. Nevertheless, she moves her head the way girls with long manes like to, the way Laura herself used to love to do when she was young. Lovely girl, long hair, the apple of the men’s eyes.
Rattling the coffee spoon in the cup, Laura attempts to banish this image from her mind.
Frau Merk—who for certain reasons prefers not to be too informal with her customers, only allowing herself to be addressed by her surname, yet making fairly free with the first names of others—is considerably younger than Laura. Barely forty.
After numerous and varied jobs, which she pursued listlessly for some time, she’d settled determinedly on self-employment. On an impulse, not knowing what awaited her, she opened this store some three years ago, with this ad:
DO YOU RECALL? COME TO ME TO CULTIVATE EVEN THE MOST RECALCITRANT MEMORIES!
That’s how it had read in the classifieds of a variety of serious magazines, on the local pages of the newspapers she deemed most promising, and on the fliers she distributed. On the reverse, nothing more than the telephone number of her shop, which she called the “Memory Cultivation Salon.”
Frau Merk has accumulated many clients, mainly elderly women. For her, elderly means that these people are rich in experience and brimful of memories. She pays herself a by-no-means low but nonetheless affordable hourly wage; after the salon’s overhead there is enough left to live comfortably. Most of the customers come once a month for two or three hours. Fifty to a hundred euros is what Frau Merk charges an hour, though the price is determined by her level of affinity for the client. She gives special rates to a few of the customers, the ones who can’t pay much. But the best and most affordable option is, of course, the purchase of a membership.
Today Laura is wearing an elegant velvet suit that she knows Frau Merk finds particularly pleasing. It is of a simple cut, and black, and with it she wears a dark red blouse, just the thing to go with the poppies. Frau Merk notices right away, of course, and pays Laura not a few compliments. As usual, they tell one another about the events of the past month that they deem worth mentioning, assure one another of their friendship, praise the weather, and do not neglect the little cakes. And, at last, they come to the point: with the well-chilled sparkling wine Frau Merk has poured into simple but lovely glasses, they toast the half of the year that’s over, as well as the half that still awaits them.
Finally, they settle in on the velvet couch. One leans on the left, the other against the right armrest. Laura tucks her legs beneath herself and makes herself comfortable. Frau Merk sets an ashtray between herself and her customer, who, in turn, immediately lights up a cigarette which she draws at quite pleasurably while bobbing her head up and down, and begins: “You see, Frau Merk, blowing this sort of smoke ring was something I could do even as a young girl. Rarely, though, do I manage to blow a small one through a large one. It’s not at all easy, not everyone can do it. I happened to meet a man a long time ago who taught me how, after I was bold enough to ask him outright.”
Then Laura demonstrates how well she can still manage it. A little group of smoke rings escape her lips, which twitch open and shut like the mouth of a fish, and float directly toward Frau Merk’s face. Frau Merk blows them back toward her with quiet puffs, and the rings dissolve.
“Laura, today is the first time you’ve done that for me here. I didn’t even know you knew how to make smoke rings like that.”
“Yes, on the way over here I vividly recalled who’d taught me. The man was named Alfredo. I only met him once, but it was wonderful for a young girl like me, simply wonderful. It was on some Friday or another, I think it was Father’s Day, when I’d just turned fifteen. My parents, some relatives, and I had stopped for a bite to eat at a popular local café during a day’s outing. Everyone was still eating and talking animatedly. So I was able to go to the restroom and smoke a cigarette without anyone noticing.”
Laura paused for a moment and explained with a giggle: “My parents were very sweet but a little strict, you know. If they’d even suspected me
of smoking they would have been flabbergasted.”
Then she returned to her story.
“For that reason I didn’t want to stay away too long, and so I smoked rather quickly. After peeing, I stood in front of the mirror with the nearly finished cigarette in my mouth and watched myself puffing away. Then amid the sound of flushing, I heard whistling and giggling from the men’s restroom beyond the thin wall. I examined the wall and quickly discovered a little hole next to the mirror. It was so small that a finger could have just barely fit into it, but it was still large enough to look through. I blew the last puff of my cigarette into it and heard someone on the other side curse. I waited with bated breath, curious. After a short silence, suddenly a whole series of little rings of smoke came floating through the tiny little hole. The last itsy-bitsy one flew—as if directed by the hand of a magician—through the next-to-last, bigger ring. I was very impressed and absolutely had to be able to do that myself. So I positioned myself right in front of the hole and said, ‘Hello, could you please teach me to do that?’ Well, I wasn’t exactly shy, and more than that: I was curious. I said through the hole that I’d go into the restaurant’s garden, and asked whether perhaps we could meet at the rear of the house. I’d have a cigarette behind my ear so he could tell who I was, and he should do the same. The man answered, audibly amused, that he would be glad to. And his laughter gave me the guts to go to this small, secret meeting.
“I told my parents that I wanted to walk around outside until they were through. So I stepped outside and around to the rear of the house. Leaning against a small shed, I only waited a little while before the man showed up with a cigarette behind his ear. I was startled because he was much older than I’d expected. He smiled and rubbed the eye that must’ve been the target of my smoke. He gave me his hand and said his name was Alfredo, I told him my name, and because I was rather impatient, I didn’t even ask why he had been looking through that hole in the wall. I wanted to keep him in a good mood so he would hurry up and teach me how to blow smoke rings. I quickly lit up my cigarette, even lit his, and urged: ‘Okay, let’s go, hurry and teach me how I can make those rings. I haven’t got a lot of time and I absolutely have to learn how.’ The man looked very nice and he could easily have had a daughter my age. When he looked at me brazenly and said, ‘Well, big girl, is it fun to sneak a smoke in the john?’ I just answered him very cheekily, ‘Well, Uncle Freddy, it must be fun to sneak a peek at girls through a hole in the wall!’ We laughed.
