Flesh: A Novel

10

“SO YOU WORKED IN ENGLAND for some years?” the manager asks, looking at István’s CV.

“That’s right.”

“Why did you come back?”

“Family reasons,” István says.

The man seems satisfied with that, or at least he doesn’t ask anything else about it.

He asks what sort of work István did in England.

István says that he was a security driver, and that he also worked on the doors of nightclubs and other places.

When the man asks why he’s not looking for that sort of thing now—door work at a nightclub or whatever—István says it’s mainly about the hours.

“Anyway,” he says, “that’s more of a young man’s game.”

The store manager, who’s about his own age, nods with something like sympathy.

He’s looking at the CV again. He says, “And then for the last twelve years… what’s this?”

It’s true that the CV isn’t very explicit about the last twelve years. It just says “Self-employed.”

“I had my own business,” István explains.

The man wants to know more.

István tells him that it was a hospitality business, and that it failed during Covid.

“Yeah?”

István nods.

He’s already been through all this with the store’s head of security.

Neither the head of security nor the store manager seem entirely persuaded by him.

It’s not his age.

There are a lot of older men doing this sort of work.

It’s something else.

There’s something odd about him, they seem to feel, something that doesn’t quite fit.

As they both point out however, there’s a serious shortage of qualified staff these days and in the end they offer him the job anyway.

The store is the Media Markt in the town’s main shopping mall. He either works nine a.m. to six p.m. or noon to nine in the evening. Sometimes, when someone’s off sick, or leaves suddenly for another job, they ask him to do the full nine-to-nine shift, with double pay for the extra three hours. When they ask him to do that he usually agrees.

He wears a white T-shirt with a sort of black gilet over it, an earpiece in his ear, and a walkie-talkie attached to his waist.

There are five of them on the security team. István is the oldest, though not by much. Only Béla, the head of the team, is significantly younger than him. He’s about thirty and has an immaculately executed skin fade. It always looks like he had it done yesterday. He takes the work very seriously and organizes team meetings where he talks about “strategy” and “performance.”

The older men pretend to listen.

In fact, most of the time, there’s not a lot to do.

Either you’re out front or you’re looking at the screens. They take turns, the two of them who are on duty at any particular time. Even though you’re on your feet, it’s easier to be out front in a way. If you’re on the screens it’s harder to stay focused for long stretches.

Every two hours or so there’s a ten-minute break. Usually István takes the escalator up to the roof of the shopping mall to have a cigarette. The roof is also the car park. The escalator arrives in a glass box that houses the machines you use to pay for the parking. He tries to find a quiet spot to smoke his cigarette. In the middle of the shift he also eats his sandwiches.

After work he most often walks home.

When it’s raining he takes the bus.

Most often though, he walks.

There’s the footbridge over the train tracks and then the long walk through nondescript streets up the hardly perceptible slope of the hill to the housing estate.

His mother usually has supper ready for him.

As he takes his shoes off in the hall he hears her putting things on the table.

“How was your day?” she asks him.

He sits down, smoothing his hair with his hand and looking at what there is—breaded chicken, maybe, with sticky rice and some leaves of green salad.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

When they’ve eaten he washes the dishes. It doesn’t take long and by the time he’s finished it she already has the TV on.

He joins her on the sofa, and they watch the Hungarian version of The Apprentice or The Voice or something like that.

At about ten, usually when the news is just starting, he tells her that he’s going to bed.

“Okay,” she says. “Sleep well.”

He stands in the dubious-smelling cubicle of the toilet and then brushes his teeth at the sink in the separate small bathroom.

About a year ago he became addicted to sleeping pills. He was having trouble sleeping and the doctor prescribed them. He’s more or less over that now. There’s just a vague feeling that something’s missing at this point of the day.

He undresses down to his pants and smokes a last cigarette leaning out his bedroom window, looking at the quiet housing estate.

His mother is still watching TV and the sound of it finds its way through the wall as he lies down on his bed and looks at the pattern of light that the lampshade puts on the ceiling.

After about a year he thinks it might be nice to have a dog. Maybe a brown Labrador called Kurt. Obviously that was Jacob’s idea. And in fact the whole dog idea is about Jacob. He’s perfectly aware of that.

They sell puppies at the Sunday market, which isn’t far from his mother’s apartment. Even though it’s only eight in the morning when he arrives, there are already hundreds of people there. There’s the smell of frying and the sound of announcements over the public address system. Political parties have set up stands in one place and on makeshift terraces men are already drinking beer.

In one part of the market there’s a double line of trees along a sort of track, on each side of which the puppies and other animals are displayed. The people who are selling them park their cars end-on to the track with the animals in the open trunks of the cars.

It’s always one of the most crowded parts of the market, with a lot of people moving along the track, looking at the animals in their cages.

István moves slowly with the crowd, looking for brown Labradors. He finds some in one of the last cars, at the end of the track where the trees are smaller and the shade starts to give out. The puppies, four of them, are in a cardboard box full of shredded paper. There are some other people already looking at them and István stands there, waiting his turn. The man selling the puppies seems slightly impatient with the children who are looking at them now—probably because he thinks that they are just looking. The children are asking him questions and he’s giving them surly monosyllabic answers between pulls on his cigarette. István can’t hear, above the noise of the market, what the children are asking.

After a while, as he waits there, he becomes aware that people are looking at him in a strange way.

Then the person standing next to him asks him something.

He asks him if he’s okay.

István just nods.

The PA system plays its jingle and makes some echoing announcement.

Even the man selling the puppies is looking at him now, and after a few more seconds István turns and walks away.

He walks for quite a long time, until there aren’t people around him anymore and the sounds of the market seem to arrive from a slight distance.

He’s among secondhand cars.

He has walked as far as the secondhand car market, which consists of dealers’ huts with the vehicles they’re selling gathered around them in the glare of the sun. From the nearest hut two men watch him suspiciously as, standing next to a twenty-year-old BMW SUV, he clears his throat and wipes his eyes with his hand. He inhales deeply through his nose and feels in his pocket for his cigarettes. It has been a long time, more than a year, since anything like this has happened. And it’s not quite over yet. Standing there next to the old BMW, he starts to sob again. He knows that he won’t be able to stop until it’s over and he doesn’t even try to.

The men watch him from the hut.

Seeing them he waves apologetically, and after a few seconds they look away.

Sometimes he misses Helen. It’s only now that he fully understands what a significant part she played in his life. A more significant part than anyone else probably. In a way, that’s obvious. In another way though, it surprises him. Or it seems strange somehow, to put it like that. He’s not sure why. Something to do with how things started with her maybe. It just never occurred to him then, during those first months when they started having sex, that she might end up playing such a significant part in his life. He’s not the same person he would have been if he had never known her. The way he thinks about a lot of things is her way of thinking about them, and his memories of a lot of other things are inseparable from memories of her.

One day he finds the naked pictures that she sent him from that hotel in Munich, nearly twenty years ago. He had forgotten about them, but they’re still there in Facebook Messenger if he scrolls back far enough. He looks at them with, initially, a kind of archaeological interest. Then, experiencing an unanticipated stirring of arousal, he undoes his trousers and masturbates just sitting in front of the laptop, sometimes pausing his action to move to one of the other pictures.

After he has come he feels sort of silly and ashamed.

He’s aware of how absurd he must look, sitting there in front of the laptop with his trousers at his knees.

He’s also suddenly very aware of the fact that Helen is dead, or his perception of the fact that she’s dead changes. There’s a deep immovable sadness that wasn’t there before.

With a tissue he wipes the small amount of grayish semen from his thigh where it fell.

His dick has shrunk to almost nothing now, has almost disappeared into the tangle of his pubic hair, which has definitely started to turn white, or at least there are a significant number of white hairs now among the darker ones.

He does up his trousers again.

The picture of Helen, as she was then, naked in that hotel in Munich, is still there on the screen.

She would be happy, he thinks, if she knew that he was still doing this, that he was still, at least very occasionally, thinking of her in this way.

Sometimes, after supper, he goes out for a drink.

There’s this place not far from the apartment. It’s down some steps from the sidewalk, underground. The floor tiles crudely depict bunches of grapes and a sign above the entrance says IN VINO VERITAS. He’s not sure if that’s the name of the place or what. It might be.

Inside there are plastic plants and neon tubes and backlit pictures of well-known local landmarks. An illuminated Coca-Cola sign over the bar.

He nods hello to half-drunk old men, and then sits at a table on his own with his white wine spritzer.

He almost always sits on his own.

Normally he drinks two spritzers and then leaves.

When he’s finished the first one he takes the empty glass to the bar for the second. Seeing him approach, Bori starts to prepare it, ladling the wine into the glass and then adding soda from the hose.

He likes Bori.

They talk sometimes.

When there’s not much going on she sometimes stands near his table and they talk about things.

Sometimes they find themselves smoking together on the steps up to the street.

She’s a tall woman of about his own age, or slightly older. There’s something attractive about her personality. She’s tough and straightforward. There’s also something physically attractive about her, he finds, even though objectively she’s sort of ugly. It’s interesting how that happens. Sometimes he fantasizes about having some sort of affair with her.

And in fact they do have a sort of affair.

One night, when she’s locking up and he’s still hanging around smoking a last cigarette, she asks him if he wants to come back to her place.

He’s not sure what she means by that. She asked the question in such a matter-of-fact way that he assumes she just means for a drink.

“Where do you live?” he asks her.

It’s in another part of the town.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

She drives them there.

They drink a bottle of white wine that she has open in her fridge, and then another one.

When the second bottle’s empty she asks him if he’s going to stay the night.

It’s quite late now.

“Is that okay?” he asks.

“If you want,” she says.

“Sure,” he says.

She says she’s going to get ready for bed.

“Should I sleep here?” he asks, meaning the sofa.

“You can sleep where you want,” she says.

She leaves and he hears the bathroom door shut.

It’s a small panel apartment, not unlike his mother’s except that it’s in a much taller building.

There’s the same sort of little balcony though, and he stands out there with her straggly tomato plants, far from sober, smoking a cigarette and looking at the twinkling lights of the town.

She’s in the bathroom for quite a long time, and when she’s finished he takes his turn.

Making his way back through the hall he notices that she’s left the bedroom door partly open.

He taps on it.

“Yes,” she says, and he puts his head in.

She’s under the duvet. The sight of her naked shoulders interests him, and she seems to be looking at him in an inviting way.

He’s still worried that he’ll misinterpret something though. “Shall I sleep on the sofa, then?” he says.

“If that’s what you want,” she says.

“It’s not what I want,” he says.

In the morning it’s awkward.

There’s that thing of not knowing how to act.

They edge past each other in the small spaces of the apartment.

It’s strange to see her in a dressing gown—almost stranger than seeing her naked.

She makes coffee.

“Where’s your husband?” he asks her.

“He’s traveling,” she says.

“Yeah?”

Her husband’s a truck driver. István knows that.

She says that he drives to Italy usually.

He’s normally away for a few days a week.

“Okay,” István says.

“Are you working today?” she asks.

He nods.

“What time you start?”

“Nine,” he tells her.

He thanks her for the coffee.

“That’s all right,” she says.

Half an hour later he leaves and waits for the elevator. He needs a shit. He didn’t want to take one in her apartment, of course.

The elevator has bright orange doors. Everything else in the stairwell is gray.

The next time he stays the night at her place it’s a Tuesday and he’s not working the next day.

She asks him, as she makes the coffee, if he feels like going for a walk.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

“It’s a nice day,” she points out.

“It is,” he agrees.

She has a small car, a white Fiat Panda, and they drive a little way out of the town, into the hills. There’s a Communist-era TV tower at the top of one of them, and trails through the forest around it. On the north sides of the hills the forest is mostly mature beech and pine. On the south side it’s mainly younger oaks, and the path is drier and stonier.

“I like walking here,” she says.

“Sure,” he says.

He spends the night at her place a few more times.

Waking up in her bed is something he gets sort of used to.

The room is very messy.

It’s summer and during the night the air conditioner that her husband installed last year blows cold air onto them.

There are these dark red curtains. When he wakes up he sees them glowing as the sun hits them from the other side.

The air conditioner is off now and the room feels slightly stuffy.

She brings him coffee in bed and then takes off her dressing gown and joins him under the duvet again.

“Thanks,” he says.

She has a nice body for a woman of her age, he thinks—thin and long-limbed, though with large breasts that are starting to hang down. He finds himself secretly wishing that he’d seen them twenty years ago, and then one day she says that she wishes he’d seen them then too, only she says thirty years ago not twenty. “They used to be really nice,” she says.

“They still are,” he says.

And she says, “I know you’re just being polite.”

For a while they spend quite a lot of time together. They go for walks in the forest and have supper in town at the Tex-Mex place, which is still there, though somewhat different from how it used to be.

He tells her about his life.

For instance, she asks him if he was ever married.

“Yeah,” he says. “I was.”

“Divorced?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“No?”

“She died,” he tells her.

Another time he tells her that he had a son who’s dead too. That in fact they died in the same accident. Talking about it feels strange, like he’s talking about someone else’s life or something. He doesn’t usually tell people about it.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“You don’t mind talking about it?”

“No, I don’t mind.”

“This was in England?” she asks.

He’s already told her that he lived there for nearly twenty years.

“Yeah,” he says.

After a few drinks, he talks to her about his life in England.

He tells her that he was extremely wealthy there for a while.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Like?” she wants to know.

“Helicopters,” he says. “Private jets.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

She makes a face at him across the table in the Tex-Mex place.

“It’s true,” he says. “I promise.”

He shows her some pictures on his phone.

When she asks him what happened, how he lost it all, he says that his wife had a son from her first marriage and that he got everything when he was twenty-five.

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have anything of your own?” she asks him.

“No,” he says.

Which isn’t quite true of course.

He did have things of his own.

The various development projects that he did with loans from the Nyman trust fund, they were all in his name, as well as valuable possesions like the Bentley and the watches, the Audemars Piguet and the 1953 Rolex Submariner.

In the interests of keeping the story simple though, he doesn’t tell her about those things. He doesn’t tell her that as soon as Thomas took possession of his inheritance, he started a legal action against István claiming that all the loans that the trust fund had made to István’s projects over the years were in fact against the terms of the trust and should therefore be annulled and paid back immediately, which was in itself enough to bankrupt what was left of the projects. And because the assets were now worth less than the value of the loans, István was unable to pay back the money in full, at which point Thomas’s lawyers went after him personally. In the end declaring himself bankrupt was the only way out, and that was what he did. Unfortunately it involved handing over everything of value that he still owned, and it was at that point that he and his mother decided to leave England and move back to the town in Hungary where they had once lived, and where his mother still had her apartment.

Bori tells him about her life. “It’s not as interesting as yours,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“As a story.”

“No?”

They’re in bed. The window’s open and there’s the sound of individual voices, indistinct, from outside. He’s smoking a cigarette.

“No,” she says.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Yes, it is,” she says.

He asks her how long she’s worked at the wine cellar.

She tells him for about twenty years.

“I like it there,” she says, as if she feels she needs to explain it somehow, that she’s been there so long.

“Sure,” he says.

“They’re nice people.”

“They are.”

She says that the only interesting thing about her life is that she has a daughter who’s in her thirties now.

“Yeah?” he says, surprised.

She says that she was fifteen when her daughter was born. She put her up for adoption. She lives in Holland now. She’s spent most of her life there. Bori knows that because she contacted her about five years ago.

“She contacted you?” István says.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“On Facebook.”

“What did she say?”

“Just that she was my daughter, and that she wanted to meet me. The message was in English,” she says. “She doesn’t speak Hungarian.”

“Okay.”

“So she wrote in English. I had to use Google Translate.”

“How did you feel?” István asks.

“When I got the message?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Happy. And sad. I don’t know.”

“Why sad?”

“I don’t know.”

He stubs out his cigarette. He takes his time over it. “Did you meet her?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“Where?”

“In Budapest.”

“And?”

“It was nice. It was nice to know that she’s okay.”

“Of course. Are you still in touch?” he asks.

“Sometimes.”

When he takes her hand one day as they walk in the town she says, “Don’t do that.”

“Okay,” he says.

In fact he only did it because he thought she might want him to. He’s actually pleased that she doesn’t. He likes that about her, that she’s not the sort of person who wants to hold hands.

They sit down at a terrace and order drinks.

The terrace is on the edge of a paved open space surrounded by concrete buildings. Kids mess about on skateboards in the middle of the space, where there’s the sort of municipal sculpture that nobody ever particularly notices or thinks about.

The kids’ voices are still echoing around the space when they leave and walk to a kebab shop that they like nearby.

After that they go back to her place.

It feels quite ordinary and domestic now, to take the elevator up and let themselves into the apartment.

The affair, or whatever it is, lasts for about a year.

Then Bori ends it. She says that she doesn’t want her husband to find out, and she’s worried that if they don’t stop he eventually will.

“Okay,” István says.

She’s looking at him with a slightly worried expression.

“I understand,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It’s eight in the morning. She told him they needed to end it while they had coffee in the kitchen after spending the night together.

Now they’re in her narrow entrance hall. He’s putting on the ugly square-toed black shoes that he wears to work.

“Are you going to be okay?” she asks him.

“Sure,” he says.

And in fact she’s the one with tears in her eyes.

He’s surprised to see them.

One of them slides down her face.

“Hey,” he says, wiping it away. “It’s okay.”

She nods.

“It’s okay,” he says again.

He works at Media Markt for many years.

At one point he turns down a promotion to deputy head of security.

“May I ask why?” the store manager says. It’s not the same store manager who originally offered him the job. He left years ago. The head of security from that era has moved on as well.

“I don’t know. It’s just not for me,” István says.

“I would tend to disagree,” the store manager says.

“Thank you.”

“So?”

István shakes his head.

“You’re definitely turning it down?” the manager asks. He looks slightly irritated, as if he just doesn’t understand. He’s at least twenty years younger than István.

“Yes,” István says.

“All right.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

He leaves the manager’s office and takes the escalator up to the roof to have a cigarette.

And then, about ten years after they move back to the town, his mother dies.

She just dies in her sleep.

That happens sometimes apparently.

When she isn’t up and about in the apartment when he emerges from his room in the morning, he has a feeling that something’s wrong and knocks on her door.

When there’s no answer, he looks in and sees her still lying on her bed and when he steps nearer it’s obvious that she isn’t alive.

He phones for an ambulance and while he waits for it he smokes the first cigarette that he’s smoked inside the apartment for years.

The funeral is in the town cemetery, not far from where they live.

It’s May. The chestnut trees are in flower.

A few of his mother’s old friends are there.

When it’s over he sits on a bench. The dry petals of chestnut flowers fall onto the path. They move on the asphalt with a papery sound, and when the wind stops they lie still. He watches them for a while. Then he stands up and walks back to the apartment. After that he lives alone.