The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

Frozen raspberries

The black and white sky stayed empty, the forbidden song spread throughout the country in trains, in buses, on horse-drawn carts. In tattered coat pockets and shoes worn down to the point of listing. Also in the car, between Adina and Paul as they drive back to the city.

The sky in the roadside village is blue, the forbidden song has howled it empty. The village policeman put his pants back on but left his cap on the tree. He didn’t clear out his desk, just grabbed the pictures of his wife and two children and stashed them in his jacket. Then he cut across the field at the end of the village, looking to get as far away as possible.

The old lady next door carries her pillows and down covers into the house, because evening is lurking behind the village as it does every day, only louder.

* * *

At the border, at the other end of the country, where the plain juts into Hungary like the tip of a nose, there is a little crossing. The barrier is dark. A car is waiting by the barrier, the driver is wearing a thick sweater. He hands his passport through the window. The border officer reads:

KARÁCSONYI ALBERT

Mother MAGDA née FURÁK

Father KARÁCSONYI ALBERT

As the man returns his passport to the glove compartment a birthmark the size of a fingertip pops out of his shirt collar. The barrier swings up.

* * *

Adina and Paul look up at the window, the curtains have been drawn. The apartment is unlocked, the key has been left in the door from the inside. Abi is not at home and there is no note. The wardrobe is open, a matchbox is lying on the carpet. A chair has been knocked over on the kitchen floor. On the kitchen table is a half-empty bottle of brandy and a full glass. The soup in the pot on the stove has a layer of mold.

No one leaves home like that, says Paul, unless they’re forced to.

* * *

At the café behind the quiet streets of power the glass panes have been shattered by bullets. The red curtains have been torn down. Soldiers sit at the tables. The poplars rise pointed and tall and peer into the water. Where fishermen stood during the striped summer, soldiers now stand day and night. They don’t care what time it is, the bell tolls in the cathedral tower and doesn’t even hear itself.

The dark green yews between the opera and the cathedral have been torn apart, the display windows splintered and empty. The bullet holes on the walls are as dense as skipping black rocks.

The cathedral steps are crammed with thin yellow candles. They flicker at a slant, like the wind. The long red carnations and short white cyclamens have been trampled but are not yet wilted. The steps are guarded by tanks and soldiers. The dwarf is wearing a black armband and sitting on the curb next to a wooden cross. He stretches out his legs so that his brick shoes face the sidewalk. He is selling yellow candles. Attached to the cross is a photograph of a dead man, a young face with a pimple. The mouth smiles and smiles. Adina closes her eyes and an angel with a bullet wound smiles from out of the picture. Paul moves his face close to the photograph. At his feet a woman is sitting behind a cloth spread with candles. She is all muffled up and eating a soft-boiled egg. She bores her fingertip into the yolk and licks it. Her finger and the corner of her mouth and the yolk are yellow just like the candles. The woman wipes her finger on her coat and holds two candles out to Adina and Paul.

Praying is something I just can’t do, says Adina, Paul lights one of the candles.

At the opera, a whole gallery of photographs has been posted on the heavy wooden doors. Paul reaches over an old man in a fur cap and points at one of them. His finger touches the picture, it’s a photograph of Pavel, mouth smiling, his birthmark just above his shirt collar. Farther down, Adina’s finger touches a different face, it’s the man who pissed in the river and right afterward was able to walk along the bank like a quiet man. Underneath the pictures are the words: THESE ARE THE ONES WHO FIRED.

They all fired into the air, no doubt about it, said the old man with the fur cap, but it was the air that happened to be in people’s lungs.

* * *

The curtains have been drawn. They were here all right, says Paul. The door to his apartment is closed. But the doors to the wardrobe are open, the clothes strewn on the floor, the books, the bedspread, the pillow, the blanket. His records are lying on the kitchen tiles, trampled to pieces.

* * *

They come to Adina’s apartment, she unlocks the front door. The bathroom door is ajar, the sink is empty, no sunflower seed is floating in the toilet. The wardrobe is closed.

The fox tail slides away under the tip of Adina’s shoe. Then the first, second and third paw.

And then the fourth.

Adina slides the tail back to the fur with her fingers. Then the right hind paw, then the left, the right forepaw, and the left. That’s the right order, she says. Paul inspects the floor. No hair.

Can I stay here, asks Paul.

* * *

Adina stands in front of the bathtub, hot water runs out of the pipe, steam coats the mirror. She takes off her blouse, checks the temperature with her hand. Then she turns off the faucet and puts her blouse back on. The TV is talking in the other room.

I looked in the mirror and saw my white shoulders, I saw the bathtub, the white steam, I can’t bring myself to get undressed, she says, I can’t manage to take a bath. She rummages through her travel bag. The nail clipper is on the bottom.

* * *

Before the sheets are warm, sleep has filled their heads. Because both Adina and Paul have gone to bed with the same bullet-pierced image that swells until it bursts through the skull because the image is bigger than their heads.

I loved you like my own children, the dictator’s wife had spoken right into the room. The dictator nodded, his eyes saw the nail clipper on the table next to Adina’s hand and he pulled his black fur cap down onto his forehead. He’d been wearing the same cap for several days. After that bullets shot through the screen and hit the wall of a barrack, in the filthiest bare corner of the courtyard.

The wall stayed there, empty and riddled with bullet holes.

And then two old peasants were lying on the ground, and the soles of their shoes peered into the room, while heavy soldiers’ boots stood in a circle around their heads. Her silk scarf had slid off her head onto her neck. His black fur cap had not. Which one was it, the same, the last.

How about them, would you cut their corpses open, asked Adina. Paul squeezed and released the nail clipper. That would be worse than having to look inside my mother and father, he said. My father often beat me, I was afraid of him. When I saw the way he held his bread while he ate my fear went away. In those moments he and I were the same, we were equal. But when he beat me, I couldn’t believe he used the same hand to eat his bread.

Paul was breathing deeply after all the exhaustion of the past days. Where other people have a heart, those two have a cemetery, said Adina, and between their temples there’s nothing but dead people, small and bloody like frozen raspberries. Paul rubbed some tears out of his eyes, I am repulsed by them and still I have to cry for them. Where does it come from, he asked, this sympathy.

Two heads on the same pillow, separated by sleep, ears under hair. And above their sleep, behind the city, a lighter but sad day is waiting. Winter and warm air, and the dead are cold. In Abi’s kitchen the full glass remains untouched.

* * *

A few streets farther on, Clara falls asleep with the same bullet-riddled image. The telephone rings through her sleep. The red-swollen carnations are standing in the dark, the water in the vase casts a gleam. I’m in Vienna, says Pavel, someone is going to drop by soon and give you my address and a passport, you have to come right away, otherwise I won’t be here anymore.