No Stopping Train - Les Plesko

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Bare toes tucked under his too-short pant cuffs, giddy-kneed with herself and his scent.

      Margit arched her neck toward the low basement’s barred window light, her body slippery under her dress. She lit a smoke, smoothed her hair, her newest approximation of blond, rinsed in the porcelain bowl where they washed, where he shaved when he shaved.

      “Is it always a little sad after?” she asked.

      Sandor had the grace not to tell what he knew about that. His hand nested in the small of her back and she touched where his shirttail rode up, that flagrant exposure of skin. Damp, a man’s smell, she had no defense against it. Sometimes it took counting till ten to breathe normal again. She leaned over the bowl to see how she looked, but there was no water in it, and none in the tap because of the unceasing drought.

      “If we had money,” she said, “I could wear pretty clothes and go out.”

      Sandor gathered change from the sheet, copper coins he could only subtract. He put his hand on her neck, his palm cold, Margit shivered from it. “Go where? Do what?” Sandor asked.

      Margit closed the window to shut out the smell of horse droppings, wet dog, the tungsten refinery plant’s yellow dust. If they had a decent-sized mirror, she thought. She craved a new dress for herself, and heat in the room so she could undress without getting into the bed. What she desired was what she could use, rouge, soap that foamed, a woman had to have these.

      She raised her head, spilled cigarette ash on his chest, placed her cheek to his neck with its leftover odor of sex. “We just live in this bed, is that it?”

      Sandor covered her face with the smell of sour coins that were hardly enough for the tram. His hand in her hair, his white breath. “Are you tired of this?”

      Margit knelt, picked lint from her red poppy dress. She could tell it was late afternoon by how much the air from the plant burned her throat, stung her eyes. Outside, the stoplight blinked, stuck on red. Across the street, a broken bench leaned, you could not sit on it. The scabbard-shanked statue was gone from the mean little park, Russians had kidnapped it. She looked down at herself, stripes from the window grill in her lap, his knees pressed against her sore legs.

      “Love only keeps you warm for so long, you can’t eat it,” she said. What was real was cold hands, money she didn’t have for nylons. Her underwear itched, she was down to her last cigarette.

      “You could pick up more sewing, you haven’t been home in a week,” Sandor said.

      She did not look at him, kept her gaze on the street where sooty Trabants gasped through yesterday’s snow turned to slush. All week long she’d been trying to forget about that. Just thinking of Alma gave her a pain in her brow, a weakness that spread to her shoulders and neck. “I thought this was home,” Margit said.

      Sandor climbed from the bed. “We both have things we’ve been ignoring,” he said.

      She tried not to comprehend what he meant but could not help herself: She saw Sandor kneeling by Erzsébet’s cot. Candleflame guttered in shadows that begged and repulsed and capitulated. Scorched moths crisped, pliant fingernails scraped until he just had to quell her lucky suffering, slake her fever with his hips.

      And how could she begrudge a smoke-rescued woman her ease? Because Margit had clambered on Sandor’s taut bony flesh, buried her hot face on him, to her shame, envious, Margit did.

      “You’re going to see her,” she said.

      Sandor coughed, looked about to say more but did not. Sometimes silence was so eloquent, Margit thought. Down in the street, men and women in thin winter coats stumbled into and out of the grocery store under a broken streetlamp. Pigeons flopped on concrete, performed courtships in mud caked the color of blood. Sandor bent down, squeezed her wrist. He meant reassurance but pressed her so hard she went numb in his grip.

      “You don’t really want to go there, it’s just an idea about how you should act,” Margit said.

      How many other foolish things had she spoken out loud in this room on her belly, her back? She wanted to tether them both to the window’s iron bars, beat herself into him until all her perspective blurred from her face once again.

      Instead she scraped Sandor’s lovemaking crust from her thighs, watched bubbles rise on the side of the water glass on the chair by the bed. She drank it to rinse Sandor’s taste, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. It tasted bitter, like marzipan stuck to a plate overnight.

      “At least lie to me, Sandor,” she said, but she knew he would not. She pulled herself up by his sleeve, tugged her dress into orderliness. In this light it was frail, like their gestures that crowded this room, the same dress she’d put on, removed how many times she’d lost count. Sandor buttoned his coat. They stood close as they could and then slightly apart.

      “I could wait for you here,” Sandor said. He shouldn’t have bothered to lie, a feeble attempt with its answer already in it.

      Someone had to take the first step toward the door and he did. In a way, Margit thought, it was kind.

      “Will it always be this way with us?” Margit asked. She shivered to think she could bear that he didn’t reply. That she’d stay with him, anyway, if it was.

      Last time I saw Alma alive was a day like today. So many days in this place are exactly the same.

      Outside the Saint Matyas Street house, rain turned the corner and fell. The rain through the window frame gap on parquet was a clock in a dream you wake into again and again. My mother, myself, just like it had been in that place since 1938. We stood by the glass, our same-sized palms pressed to the pane.

      “It’s just like old times,” I said.

      In the winter-burned tree, weather-beaten birds hid their wings.

      “Old times was only last week,” Alma said. She wore the nightgown I’d left her in. Afternoon light struck the cloth.

      “I’ve fallen in love since last week,” I replied. Almost a whole year had passed, but I hadn’t dared mention it, just in case it was my fantasy.

      “Love is a bad accident,” Alma said.

      Accidents made me think of you, Sandor, the bruises you left on my wrist, the kisses you pressed on my cheeks. Those reflections of blooms I had touched in our mirror’s cracked wedge had made me misbutton my red poppy dress. Even now my shoes fill with silence just thinking of it.

      “He’ll leave you with nothing to show but his smell on your breasts,” Alma said.

      Thank God for cigarettes. I lit one and hugged your velveteen jacket to hide our bed scent. In my mother’s house, my smoke drifted up, stung my eyes like the cheap sentiment of some future regret. “That man doesn’t hurt me,” I said like I almost believed it myself, though I sat up nights waiting for you, peeling the soles of my shoes while next door a husband and wife slapped each other around and I touched my face from their blows, listening for footsteps.

      “If he didn’t hurt you, you wouldn’t have come around,” Alma said. She fingered her nightgown’s scooped neck.

      “Hurt’s all right when before there was nothing,” I said.

      Alma’s mouth tugged in a smile only I recognized. “On our wedding night, I wouldn’t allow your father in our bed. I reached down to the floor where he slept, but he never once took my hand.”

      “That’s not how it was. He reached up, you refused, he told me,” I said.

      She leaned on the sill, looking out at the gray scuddy muck of the sky. “We walked to the church where we wed. Your father kept saying my name as if I would forget it,” she said. “We ate Dobos torte on a bench by the opera house steps. He brought lilies,

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