Tranquility Read Free

foot out of the apartment for years – not even to go out on the gallery overlooking the courtyard.
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    One-way only, I said to the cashier at the Keleti station because she wanted to sell me a return ticket; I have never bought a return ticket. On top of it all, I misread the schedule and discovered that I’d have to change trains somewhere in the middle of the Alföld and for a moment I considered calling or sending a telegram to say that because of an unexpected illness I had to cancel the reading; for me, a forty-minute layover in the Great Hungarian Plain would be tantamount to waiting for forty days. I would prefer the most barren desert to this breadbasket of Europe. In fact, I loathe the undulating wheat fields, though I have no special reason for it; that’s just the way it is. Some people hate the mountains, some the sea; I hate the plains, that’s all. As I was saying, I discovered I had to change trains and, if I could, I would have turned back, but then I thought of the shameful yelling of the previous night. I told the cashier I wanted the ticket after all, and consoled myself that I could probably use those forty minutes to look over my text for the reading. Then I remembered that Judit, at the time, left for Belgrade from the very same track, and that happened fifteen years ago, almost to the day. That for fifteen years I’ve been getting the vitamins, the Valerian drops, lipsticks, nail polish and hair dyes for my mother and for fifteen years she’s been sitting in the flickering gray light of the TV or standing in front of the blind spots of her mirror. Considered in this way, she’s been dead for years. An ordinary corpse, its stench concealed by the smell of mint tea and its skin rubbed human-colored with vanishing cream; a cadaver that plays solitaire with long-expired death notices; a dead body that has collected fifteen years’ worth of Radio TV News, Apothecary Courier and Life And Science . She collected those crappy papers in the maid’s room, along with the we could still use this for something phials andthe pity to throw it out candy boxes. That’s how she lived: collecting junk and corresponding with my older sister, without realizing that she was in fact corresponding with me or that even experts couldn’t have distinguished my left-handed writing from my sister’s right-handed sharp and merciless letters or that my acquaintances mailed those letters from Antwerp, Bombay, or New York, because I lied to them that I collected envelopes with stamps canceled abroad.
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    Judit’s last postcard arrived fifteen years ago: Esteemed Mother, if you wish to see me, please don’t let them close your eyes, she wrote from Caracas. Since then, only the checks kept coming from a bank in Zurich, on the seventh day of each month, with the punctuality of a Swiss clock and the discretion of Swiss bank secrets, because even the most contemptible mothers deserve five hundred francs a month. Since Caracas, I have been writing Judit’s letters, with my left hand, taking care to avoid both forgiveness and calling to account, I want them to be only signs of life from a daughter buried alive to a living mother who was as good as dead. Esteemed Mother, this month I’ll have three appearances in Stockholm, I will write again around Christmas, greetings to my kid brother and of course to you too, wrote my left hand – because the next day somebody I knew was leaving for Stockholm – while my right hand squashed to smithereens the cigarette butt in the ashtray.
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    A few weeks after my sister’s disgraceful burial, it became evident not only that my mother’s migraines kept her in the apartment, but also that she would probably never leave it again. That she would spend the rest of her life inside this eighty-two-square-meter crypt with a northerly exposure,furnished