Only now did Dragica look me straight in the eye. She said, “Listen, lad, that blood money turned out to be the easiest bit. It was paid a year later, and was burnt by Lajos the very same day.”
And then she said nothing more. She no doubt thought that the whole matter, and the rules that went with it, must be clear enough. And you too may well say: Of course, where’s the problem? A man has been warned and he knows he must watch his manners. But look, that’s easily said, because the following day I met Parasja again and she looked at me, straight at me, and let me pass along a path leading to a stream that was sparkling in the first sunlight. Birdsong. Smell of young tobacco. Parasja was a girl with deep black eyes that, ah . . . what more must I say about them? A beautiful song, perhaps, might make them glow again.
In the campsite both parties became immediately aware of the infatuation. No one saw them together, no one even heard them say a thing to each other, but everyone was losing his or her head over it. Quick-tempered and terribly jealous of their own honor. One of the girls had only to be careless and throw washing water in the wrong place in the stream for things to go awry. And the horses would be stamping their hooves, restless.
On the third day things turned bad between Nenat Gian and Dragica. When they met each other, by chance under the trees, Nenat Gian suddenly remembered that one of her great-grandchildren had been sick all night and crying. She walked straight past. Of course, she walked on and so did the other woman, but they’d looked at each other. When they were back on their home ground, Nenat Gian in her sheet-metal caravan, Dragica in her tent, those looks came to life. “May the rotting flesh fall off your bones!” cries a loud woman’s voice suddenly through the camp, and soon Dragica is accused of sorcery. “Nenat Gian is descended from the dogs and everyone on this black earth knows it” is her immediate response.
“Pustistu!” Drop dead! It can’t get any worse and what happens then? Exactly. Two ancient furies, each with a full head of steam, come tottering out of their holes. Both of them mad as hell and all the families in the campsite flocking to watch.
Do they enjoy the fists, the clenched lips? When Nenat Gian and Dragica, cursing without restraint, turn carefully and without the slightest haste head straight for each other, the audience makes room between the tents and the caravans. “Comb seller!” “Half-breed!” Isn’t there anyone to stop these two? Now they are thirty paces from each other. Does the public really want to calmly watch the gory spectacle of our two grandmothers scratching each other’s eyes out?
Well, that’s a shame, because other things happen. At ten arm’s lengths from each other they stand stock-still. They don’t budge another inch. Oh, those two still know how to curse, with singsong voices they go on heaping imprecations on each other’s heads. “May the Goat’s Foot roast the souls of your ancestors to the end of time!” “May the scurvy Satan ...”
Summer afternoon. A site where bone-dry washing is left hanging in the sun. Silence after a great quarrel. You can imagine it, I assume. You can imagine the caravans on the stinging nettles flattened by wheels, the children, the horses, the wretched horseflies. You may think that the rage has burnt itself out, but that isn’t the case. It’s simply located in other spheres. In sadness, for instance. After her retreat Nenat Gian sits down in her caravan. Her lips are muttering, first silently, then moaning. Suddenly she howls like a she-wolf on the plain for her dead husband Simon and blames his death on her enemy. Dragica. I assume you can imagine how she pounds the ground with her fist. “Your fault, Nenat, that my son was sentenced!” That night Parasja and the Dutch Gypsy elope together.
They take a pair of Lajos’s horses and quickly cross the cornfield. They follow a path upward. The ground becomes stony, they see a valley with dark yellow farms, the moon is half full. He calls to the girl, who still hasn’t said a word, to ask if she’s tired yet. “There’s a haystack farther on,” she shouts back. “There’s a river too!”
They keep going in the direction of Busnovi, plum trees, on their left a wooden mosque.
“Just a bit farther!” she cries.
It’s approaching Santa Maria, the time when the summer’s warmth stays hanging in the air for twenty-four hours a day. It’s he who sees the excellent spot first.
“Enough. Stop!” He reins in, jumps to the ground. “So here we are!”
When she slides from the saddle, he takes her by the waist. There isn’t a moment, on that hasty journey, when he has not felt the movement and the shape of that waist. And the glow. And you surely know what it’s like when everything around you is simply bursting with those things? The haystack, a tobacco field, within hearing distance a stream where for three nights the toads sit singing. Can you imagine that all this flows at the same rhythm as your blood? He and Parasja, and that’s the world. Or should I now say, now that everything has been accomplished, simply: Parasja, for three nights so terribly beautiful under those blue-tinted skies. They fish in the river. They catch hedgehogs. He doesn’t know what’s happened, but he knows that this girl is his soul. By the fourth day they are so sure of each other that they saddle the horses again. What they want are cheerful faces and the blessing. They imagine that everyone in the camp will regard them as a couple from this moment on. They have no doubt about it. Unhurriedly, but eager to return, they retrace their route. They think that over there, they’re already lighting fires, and they’ve bought wine. The feud has taken its toll on everyone, but now there’s an overwhelming need for a few good songs.
The caravans are there. But all is silence. And empty. Dragica’s kumpania has already upped stakes and left. Later Parasja explains that she saw the curse of Nenat Gian sitting like a crow in the trees.
Six years go by. Parasja and he travel through the countries of Europe and they do so in the company of his family. Nikolaus Andrias, also a Dutchman by birth, has received Parasja as pleasantly as possible. His first wife and two sons were driven into the gas chambers during the war. Now Kata, a Hungarian Gypsy woman from a family of coppersmiths, who gave him his new eldest son and two daughters, immediately embraces Parasja. She keeps a hopeful eye on her monthly wash.
But the seasons go by and nothing happens that points to the greatest family reward. Nevertheless Parasja and he are happy. I maintain that. He buys, sells, and trains horses, she provides food and thinks of the children that they are simply bound to have one day. He argues with his cousins Branco and Sanyi about the profitability of the motor trade. She attracts the attention of gentile ladies in villages and towns and seizes their reluctant hands. I maintain that in that first stage of their lives together, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. At night, against his cheek, her heart beat like a young bird’s. I’m telling you as well as I am able what it was like. Before she crawled under the quilt with him, she appealed to the ancient Virgin of Kiev in the glow of a prayer lamp. Mumbling and crossing herself again and again, she made a whole series of curtsies before the icon.
Then as time passes she loses heart. He doesn’t realize immediately, even today he can’t exactly remember when that happened, but she stops her fertility measures. What were they again? Things like making him suck a raw egg and getting him to spit it into her mouth. One fine day she stops believing in all that. But she goes on cooking fantastically well. And she maintains a friendly expression on her face. She’s too close. He doesn’t see that she has had enough of her body that stays as firm and smooth as a girl’s. The curse of Nenat Gian? It weighs heavier and heavier.
One day they’re standing in a meadow near the Ammersee in southern Germany. It’s still early in the morning. Parasja has gotten up at about six o’clock. She wants to be at a neighboring farmhouse for milking time. She takes a milk can with her. When she comes back she gives the full can to her sister-in-law, walks on without a word, and climbs the steps to her kitchen. Her husband is standing in front of a mirror clipping his mustache.
“Oh, damn!” she says. “They’re there!”
He knows immediately who s
he means.
“They’re camped behind the reeds a little farther on. I saw the caravan tracks when I went to fetch milk.”
He says, with the scissors still close to his lips, “Do you mind telling me what you mean?”
He looks at her seriously in the cracked mirror. She wants to leave him. He realizes it instantly and with retroactive force. The need to leave him has been nagging in her ears for a long time, she hasn’t been able to listen to anything else.
“Lajos has no horses anymore. There’s a big Mercedes next to his caravan.”
“Well, well,” he says, and turns to face her. He knows what she’s been working at all those weeks, with her senses primed. She has been piloting her family toward the reeds near the Ammersee.
“Have you said hello yet?”
She lowers her eyes. “Not yet.”
In the evening he and Parasja are strolling along the banks of the lake. In the skimming light of a low-lying sun that turns the water a copper color, kaugi ducks are swimming about. When they return there is the irresistible smell of a roast in the camp. Parasja is given a golden-brown leg. He sees her gnawing at it with joy. The bottle of raki goes around. Cigarettes, pipes. The Andrias family smokes and is rather silent. At night he hears her snoring against his shoulder. That’s how it was. Do you know what makes you lower your head? What you can’t understand. In the early morning she again took the milk can and went down the steps of the caravan.
A sigh. That was Lucie. Who realized that it was over and done with, completely. She saw her father sitting at the table reading the newspaper. On the other side of the corridor Hanzi, Katharina, and Jojo were asleep. She’d put them to bed an hour ago.
Joseph had got up from his chair. He’d like to take a quick look at the horses. It was getting on toward nine.
“But did he never see her again?” she asked.
He took something off the sideboard and put it back again. He gave no sign of having understood her.
“Didn’t he look for her everywhere then?”
One of the dogs stood stretching next to the stove with its back arched, with much wagging of the tail. Full of happiness the animal looked at Joseph. Who now went to the hall and put on his coat and boots. She watched them through the dark window in which the furniture was reflected. She saw the other dog running toward him across the yard. There was a hard-edged moon in the sky. Still full of the mood of the story, Lucie looked from the shreds of cloud to the privet hedge that she had pruned that afternoon. The branches were still lying on the ground. When Joseph came back after about half an hour, he brought in with him a draft of air from outside. His face had a contented expression. He went over to the television. At the moment that he pushed the button, she asked again, “Did he never see her again, then?”
3
Not her.”
The television was on a table in the corner next to the window. Joseph pulled up a chair so that he could reach the buttons without much trouble. Images of a western appeared — horses, cattle, a woman with nice breasts. Gerard also turned his chair around. He watched along with them with one elbow still on the table. His large shadow fell on the wall between the windows.
“Who did he see, then?” she asked.
“Lajos!” Joseph leaned back. The sound of the television was loud. “Lajos and Bajka,” he yelled.
Lucie turned and went over to the cupboard to get ham, mustard, and bread. As she presented the plate, she said, “Those two!”
Gerard and Joseph watched television. Gerard had poured a glass of gin for himself and his son-in-law. “I might as well have one too,” said Lucie. She pushed her glass toward him. While Gerard carefully managed the bottle, he thought: I wish they’d be quiet for a while.
“Those two!” his daughter repeated at that moment.
Joseph replied without taking his eyes off the film. “Yes, goddammit. It was three — no, four summers back in Vienna!”
Lucie served another helping and then, with her face turned toward Gerard and Joseph, sat down by the side of the television, blocking the sun-drenched pictures of horses in full gallop a little, unintentionally, by paying absolutely no attention to them. This Gypsy, her thoughts went on nagging, and those two who’ve actually brought him bad luck. They saw each other in Vienna.
“Look,” said Joseph to Gerard. “Look at that wild calf!” And to Lucie, “Do you want to know the details?”
She nodded. “Oh yes. I’d really like to.”
“He had bumped into Bajka, his uncle, Dragica’s eldest son, in Lechfeld, when he was going to Vienna. Bajka maintained that Lajos had spoken to him that night in his sleep. That he had said, ‘All right, I’m going to die. Let’s grant each other forgiveness before I’m forever lying low in my grave.’ Because of the great distance his voice had been very faint!”
Now Joseph also muted his shouting. Gerard had turned the sound of the television down. Struck by he knew not what, he was now listening too.
“He went along with him. He drove behind Bajka and his wife to Vienna where Lajos, having grown rich — God only knows how — was living in a house. ‘Comb your hair,’ said Bajka’s wife when they arrived in the middle of the night. He too was impressed by the house on the edge of the city. So much light came from the windows that the cars and caravans of the families on the hill sparkled in the rain. The weather was awful. In the courtyard he saw people around fires under lean-tos made of canvas. The wind played with the flames. ‘Come, friend.’ Past rooms full of people and children playing on the stairs, he followed Bajka, the cousin of his dead father, to the deathbed where he came to settle the issue of forgiveness while it was still possible.”
Gerard glanced to the side, very briefly. Then he brought his eyes back into line with those of Joseph, who, with a sunny landscape at eye level, said, “There he lay. In bed, with his hands folded under his head as if he were simply listening to the rain against the windows. His eyes were trained on the door. He grinned cheerfully when Bajka walked toward the bed, and seemed not to have noticed at all that somebody else had come in, a younger man who sat down shyly in the corner next to a cupboard. Lajos didn’t look at all as if he was to be mourned within the next twenty-four hours. His hair lay over the pillow and his hand with the golden rings squeezed Bajka’s hand powerfully. Nothing indicated that the women would soon start screaming and tearing their hair in this yard, and that an Orthodox priest would be required to sing his texts at the edge of an open grave, above a passionate wailing, while nearby there would be a tussle to prevent an inconsolable old woman from plunging into the grave.
“‘It’s me, Bajka.’
“‘I knew, brother, that it was you.’
“And his voice sounded deeper, and with more sense in it than it had all his life.
“‘How do you feel?’
‘“I’m done for.’
“‘You look pretty well, though.’
“‘Well, then, have another look, I’d say.’
“‘You’ve become a rich man, Lajos. You’ve got a house.’“
Yes, a house. You can hear the stairs creaking. You can feel the strength of the walls. When the wind blows you can hear the trees in the street. Still, a house wears you out in the long run.’
“They started talking as people everywhere talk when night comes. At night you’ve all the time in the world. He, in the corner next to the cupboard, had given his thoughts free rein. They could do what they wanted. Meanwhile, he sat and looked at the shadows moving over the ceiling and listened to the night. A gust of wind made the closed windows shake. A tile slipped down with a sharp swish. He looked at Lajos, among the pillows on his bed, and remembered the screws that he had once had in his head through Bajka’s doing. It seemed to him that those screws, of which there was no sign, had maybe not done any harm to the brains in that head.
“I was an idiot.’
“He could hear that the two men were magnanimously forgiving each other.
“‘No, damn it! It was
because there was a devilish fire in me. Do you remember how hot it was that summer? The marrow in your bones melted.’”
Gerard had got up, for no good reason really. He walked into the middle of the kitchen in his socks. Hands in his pockets, head bent, he stood there for a while and didn’t know what thoughts were guiding him. Did he want to go to bed? Then he saw the half-smoked cigar lying in the ashtray. He took a long time relighting it. Without surprise he noticed that Joseph had meanwhile stopped talking about the house in Vienna with the dying man.
“Sit down, Dad,” said Joseph.
He sat down again as he’d been sitting, with his face toward the television screen, and then was told what he’d missed in the film.
“They escaped,” Joseph explained earnestly. “Those cowboys jumped into the saddle, in one swift movement, one leap. It was unbelievable, and they escaped, shooting like maniacs.”
For a moment they both sat intently watching the soundless images. Out of the corner of his eye Joseph must have seen Lucie put her arm out to him, because he hunted through his pockets and handed her his lighter without looking away. “As I was saying,” he went on, “there was nothing to indicate that within a few hours Lajos would be dragged into the courtyard on his death mattress. It was a rotten night to die, a rotten night. The wind sometimes seemed to be coming out of the clouds, and then in huge gusts out of the ground. Eight men were leaping around with oilskin sheets, and had the greatest difficulty in making sure that Lajos, lying in front of the stable door, didn’t get wet in the rain. From one moment to the next he started to look really terrible, with hollow cheeks and hair that was already falling out. Suddenly it seemed to be a miracle that his soul hadn’t started on its journey days before.
Duke of Egypt Page 13
