LITMIR.BIZ

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      It would be a long time before she said anything else, but by then I knew I’d be going there too, stumbling along the streets of the Nyócker, following the direction of Judit’s wavering finger, up the stairs to Janka in the hall.

      There was a man, Judit said, a Swede, who liked to watch her cry while she danced. He always brought a towel to soak up the tears. It was a relief, she said, to know he was coming back to Budapest, to the club, that he’d be asking for her, and she wouldn’t have to pretend. He would sit there, his smile brightening, as she danced until her breasts were wet, until the makeup ran down her cheeks, until she lifted the towel to her eyes and kept it there, dancing on, her body remembering that three feet of stage with a memory all its own, until it was over and he paid her and gently wrapped up his towel in a plastic bag and left.

      She laughed after she finished telling me the story. “There was a landlocked sailor who tried to cry himself to sea.” Once Judit was asleep, I sat there imagining this sailor, sitting on a sidewalk in some city dreaming up the saddest stories, hoping his tears would turn into a waterway and carry him off. Were those eyes, I wondered, plucked out by the communist authority, by some guard in some horrific camp, on display in the Museum of Failed Escapes?

      There were so many sailors. Judit had an endless supply. I’d lie beside her watching as she wiped the drink or me off her mouth with the back of a hand. The Nyócker was in the southeast part of Budapest, narrow neighbourhoods where the ornaments on the secessionist architecture were inches thick with grime; bullet holes still in the walls from the siege or the revolution; crammed corner stores where you dug through rotten peaches and plums, brown lettuce, yellow peppers covered in black spots; Romani children in the street staring at you with crazed smiles, bags filled with glue held in their hands like the necks of chickens; their parents wandering by, back and forth from the eastern train station, where they sent younger children to beg; men with blue tattoos, strange lettering across their backs and chests, less decoration than a series of messages only a select few, those who knew the code, could decipher; and their wives just like Judit’s mother, with handkerchiefs or shawls on their heads, holding bags filled with poppy, pumpkin, hemp seeds they sold for next to nothing outside sports stadiums, metro stations, public parks; and of course the whores, not only in Rákóczi Tér, but deeper in the district, like nothing I’d ever seen, lined along the tiny streets as if someone had measured out and marked exactly the spots where they should stand, less like the girls strolling and chatting at the intersections in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, than some regimental line called to attention, at most lifting a cigarette to their lips, sometimes extending a leg.

      Janka would come and go from the apartment where her mother and I lay in bed, never telling anyone where she was going, never asking permission, somehow always back in time for dinner, or for the bedtime story she brought up to me one time, a battered book that looked as if it had been paged through every night for years, holes punched in the spine with a knife, held together by bits of string. It was about the wind—on each page either a boat blown along a lake, a kite through the sky, pigeons up to belfries, autumn leaves—and when I read it her eyes widened, as if she’d always imagined a different story, different words, to go with the pictures.

      I described it all to Anna over the phone, telling her I was in Bucharest, superimposing one set of streets over another, lying about Janka’s origins. When Anna said, “Well, I don’t know,” when she became vague, I told her about reading to the girl, about what her mother had done for a living, how quiet Janka was when not talking in perfect Hungarian about what her village in Erdély had been like before her father’s death (for a minute I thought of telling her he was killed by Romanians, but decided not to push it), which forced her mother to move to the city and sell herself. Her mother was arrested, put in jail, and Janka ended up in an orphanage. I hoped the pauses and slight reversals in my story made me sound breathless, excited, and I guess in a way I was, and not just because I was worried that Anna would catch me in the lie, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the story, or even with Janka, reasons that had come to me only after I’d picked up the phone and dialed our number hoping to catch Anna in a moment when she was surprised, receptive, wide open to the sound of my voice.

      “Hm,” Anna said. “I don’t know . . . it’s because she’s five I guess. I don’t like the idea of her mother still being alive.” She paused. “I’m sorry I said that. It’s not very nice . . .”

      “Anna, I’ve come all the way out here to Romania. We’ve already talked about it.”

      “I know, I know. I said it might be a good idea. It felt like it at the time. What’s her name? Janka? She could go back once in a while to visit. We could pay for her mother to come see her sometimes . . .” She paused. “No, it’s nothing,” she sighed.

      “We’re going to need more money,” I said. “There are some additional costs . . .” I had been expecting enthusiasm, and now I was looking for something to jolt her.

      “Oh sure,” she said, after a quiet laugh.

      “So I’ll go ahead?” I said.

      “Yes, you go ahead,” she answered, faster now than before, as if she’d caught up to my excitement. “It’s what you’re there for!”

      “There was a sailor. I think this was in 1967 . . .”

      “Listen, Judit, I’m trying to talk to you about something.”

      “Just a minute,” she smiled, taking the bottle out of my hands after I’d grabbed it, and unscrewing the cap. “The sailor wanted to build a boat so fast its hull would not touch the water. One night he got very drunk and built these wheels, they were like balloons, except with fins, and attached them to his car and drove it into the Tisza . . .”

      “We need to talk about Janka.”

      “You can have her,” she said, still smiling.

      “Have her?”

      “I can’t take care of her,” she said. “I don’t take care of her, Mother does, but she’s so old. Janka would be better off without me.”

      “Where you live, it’s no place to raise a child. It . . .”

      “Your place would be so much better. Filled to the roof with money.”

      “Look, if it’s a question of money . . .”

      “Always.” She laughed. “It’s always a question of money.”

      “You’re her mother,” I said.

      She put down the bottle, and came over and looked me in the face, and opened her lips in a way that brought out her teeth. But then something slackened in her, and she grew soft, and patted the place where she’d grabbed my shirt. “Yes,” she said, “I’m her mother,” and then she put the cap back on the bottle and sat on the bed and hugged her knees to her chest.

      “You could come out, too . . .” I was safe in saying that. I knew it.

      She shook her head. “And do what?” She laughed. “It’s the same out there for me as it is here.” She opened the bottle again. “There was one sailor who made it, only to find that the place he’d arrived was the place from which he’d departed.”

      “Could you stop it with the sailor thing? This is important. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”

      “Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”

      “No,” I said. “No, I don’t.”

      She shrugged, tracing the sailor’s route with a finger along her bare thigh. “It’s why you invited me back to your place, wasn’t it?” I said. “For Janka? It’s why . . .” I looked around the decaying apartment, the missing parquets from the floor, the balloons of yellow water stains on the ceiling. “It’s why we’re always here. Why I read to her.” I shook my head. “You didn’t expect me to believe it was for me, you bringing me here? You could do much better than me. And I’m sure you do.” I knew it was all true, what I was saying,

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