Tranquility Read Free Page B

Istanbul, because lately the Pintérs from the first floor had begun making trips to Istanbul, instead of Warsaw, to buy leather coats.
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    Yes, it probably would have been better to stop the whole thing instead of ordering a lousy leather coat from the Pintérs just so I could ask them, casually, to mail a letter from Istanbul, but I couldn’t do it. Actually, I was grateful to my mother for insisting on receiving Judit’s letters. I caught myself anticipating the mail as much as she was; we got so used to dividing the little tasks: I’d open the envelope and then together we would read the few lines in the kitchen.
    Esteemed Mother, this week I am giving three concerts in Tel-Aviv, from there I’ll be going to Damascus, best to my kid brother, wrote Judit, because I had no idea that those idiots signed only a ceasefire, which in its own way is still war and that tourists still had to choose: either Israel or Syria. The Brenners found this out, but only at the Syrian embassy, from which the Consul kicked them out when he saw the Israeli visas tucked into their passports. But they already had the two letters with them, and thinking that at least I’d have two Jewish stamps, they mailed Judit’s letter from Haifa; luckily, my mother didn’t notice because she hadn’t a clue about the difference between Hebrew and Arabic letters. In short, she didn’t notice anything; she took out the world atlas that I had given her and I helped her find Damascus. Using a black felt-tip pen, she marked the city with an X; the map was so full of black Xs and dates, it could have been a boardgame where one advanced from luxury hotels to concert halls not by train but by Lufthansa or KLM, and not by rolling dice but by waiting for the mail. That is how my sister traveled the world on a map spread out on the kitchen table, like a plastic doll moved along her route by my mother, but I was the one who determined the route. And for years I planned that one day she would have to put an X on Budapest, which would be the logical end of the game, but as it turned out I miscalculated that too.
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    In Karcag, I went into the waiting room. I actually like artificial flowers clinging to radiators and flypaper dangling from fluorescent bulbs, oversized clocks showing the exact time, and the smell of liverwurst sandwiches, homemade brandy and sweat that the cleaning women can’t banish from these giant spaces even with their green-apple spray fresheners. For a while, I was watching a young countrywoman sitting at the far end of the waiting room. In a neon-yellow vinyl bag placed between her feet, baby chicks were squawking while she was trying in vain to calm her baby in her lap. Finally, the baby got what it wanted: the mother freed one of her breasts from her blouse and the infant’s lips stuck to it like a leech. There was nothing in the greedy sucking and gulping one could call childlike innocence, but the moment the baby began to swallow its mother’s milk, the chicks in the vinyl bag also piped down.
    Then a tarp-covered truck stopped in front of the entrance. The driver did not turn off the engine; he simply waited until all fifteen men jumped off the truck’s bed and then sped off without looking back. No waving, no bon voyage, nothing like that; as if the truck had been piloted by a robot. The men came into the waiting room and sat down next to one another. They all wore the same kind of pants and sweatshirts, the kind that soldiersin forced labor units would wear. And they certainly weren’t Hungarian soldiers; I could see it on their faces that they wouldn’t understand a simple Hungarian “good day.” As for me, I find nothing scandalous about racial characteristics sitting there on our mugs the way old ladies sit in front of their houses to gab, or about being able to tell, sometimes at a single glance, whether another person