The neighborhood was quiet, like a wake.
I fell in love with it right away.
“For rent” signs hung in the windows of the street’s small businesses, shop owners getting ready for retirement were selling the last of their diet cokes. The street was full of dying trades: a grocer, a color TV service, a leather craftsman, a bookbinder. The craftsmen worked at higher rates and with less precision than the guys on a gap year at the hardware stores in the nearby mall, but everyone still came here.
It’s not good to leave Víziváros. It’s like stepping out of a thick forest directly into a congested boulevard.
Inside, a courtyard overgrown with weeds, with typical old yellow tiles, crumbling balconied walkways, and a servant’s stairwell. Even then I’d already heard the sensual, rhythmic moans streaming down from the third floor. The loadbearing walls were a meter thick, but the separating walls were paper thin. I fell in love with the building right away, even though I’d yet to see the apartment. It was a musty studio that smelled of furniture and mothballs, undoubtedly the living space of an old woman who hadn’t left the apartment in decades. A rosary, jewelry in ashtrays, a very old gas stove that looked like it weighed a ton, the kind that stands on iron legs. In the kitchen, a heavy metal sink mounted on the wall stood in for all the conveniences of a modern kitchen. You could have even bathed a larger child in it. In the room, classic works sat in a glass cabinet, early 20th century editions with matte covers, adorned with gold detailing.
The sense of passing crept between the walls. The old owner must’ve died here. She must’ve been contented at the moment she’d died though, left behind money for the funeral, and had put her affairs in order. The air in the room was light, there was nothing oppressive about it.
I sat in the little living room for a few minutes. The real estate agent waited outside in the courtyard, smoking heavily.
Through the thin walls, the sound of lovemaking continued to stream down from somewhere on the third floor. Now, in the quiet, I could hear it crystal clear. Rhythmic, painful female moaning with fingernails dug into the other’s back. Minutes passed, it didn’t want to let up. I started to envy the guy.
I sat a while longer on the colonial sofa, tried to picture myself in the apartment, and it worked. I went out to the kitchen and nodded that I would buy the apartment.
I felt like this aged, beat-up building and studio suited me, with its crumbling courtyard walls and the weeds and tufts of grass protruding amidst the yellow paving stones.
We discussed the details, a lawyer and that sort of thing. We signed a few papers there in the kitchen, the undersigned Kornél Janega, referred to hereafter as the Buyer, and the like. We set up the first meeting with the heirs.
Meanwhile, the rhythmic moaning streamed in from the courtyard.
Now, a good ten years later, I decided to go away for a while anyway. I said goodbye to my friends at the coffee shop, gave a key to my apartment to one of them, so that someone would have one if needed. I didn’t even really know him, just knew that he too lived in Víziváros, and that was enough. That was usually good enough for all of us. We knew when to tell the other when he’d drank too much, knew who to turn to when we didn’t have anyone to hang out with on a Friday night, and knew who to ask to take care of our dog for the weekend. We knew who we’d find in which coffee shop or bar on a given day, and, based on the time of night, which open establishment we had to go to to find the others. We were on a first name basis with everyone on the street, the shop owners and bartenders knew what each of us did for a living and when we’d show up. We had running tabs at our local watering holes. We told each other our deepest secrets.
And everyone knew that the other wouldn’t use what they’d heard against us.
Gergő lived on the neighboring street; he’d gotten a place for me in the middle of nowhere. I rented out the hundred-year-old wine press house, far away from everything. It was January and ice cold. It was stupid to move to a poorly insulated wine press on a vineyard, but I couldn’t stand to be in Víziváros anymore.
Dita had left two months before, and I hadn’t found myself since then. I barely slept. Víziváros weighed on me with those two years we’d spent together, like the rain-soaked set of a noir comic. It was there in every shadow of every apartment building, in the weed-scented courtyards, in the ochre glow of the lamps, it choked me, loomed over me like the long-clawed shadows stretching across the firewalls of Gotham City.
The wine press house had water and electricity, but that was it for creature comforts. At the top of the vineyard, beside the house, a terrifying scarecrow bowed to the newcomers. It wore black trousers, with a Cluj-Napoca Gypsy hat, and a neon-green party blazer stretched tightly over the burlap that made up his chest.
Mice and cockroaches scattered when I opened the door. My dog chased after the slower ones. I spent a day just cleaning up the mouse shit in the house. It was made up of two rooms and a cellar. The inner room had an old farmer’s wardrobe, a bed, and a table with candle holders. It would’ve been too much trouble to heat the whole house, so I decided to use that room as a fridge. Winter raged outside, it was nothing but subzero temperatures, so I kept the food there that I’d bought for the month.
At the bottom of the hill, a singular lamp signaled the end of civilization. There was barely any life beyond a five-kilometer radius.
It was getting dark as I cut wood.
It was damp wood that barely wanted to catch fire in the stove.
It took two days to heat up the stocky press house’s cracked, carelessly whitewashed walls. Once I was by myself, I was overwhelmed with a city-dweller’s fear, terrified for a few hours in the corner that someone might break in during the cold, dark January night up on the hill. Then, slowly, my childhood spent in the Slovakian mountains crept in. On that first night, I checked everything a hundred times, double-locked the wooden door, barricaded it with a chair, called my dog to my side every ten minutes, and always carried a hatchet on my belt, as if I would’ve dared use it if someone would’ve attacked me.
On the third day, I awoke to having left the door unlocked.
I laid with a supreme calm in the light of the crackling stove fire, stared at the wood beams on the ceiling and the light of the stars shining through, and thought that if someone did not happen to have anything better to do but kill me, then let ‘em.
This is how I defragmented for a month, like a crummy old computer’s operating system, in the raging January cold.
There was a shitter at the base of the house, a classic little wooden shack, with a wooden hole in the middle, its rim wet from piss and crap, into which a person would shit, so that the result would plop down with a loud splat a second and a half later onto the filth left behind by all the previous culprits.
On the wooden door, a huge, typical heart shape had been carved out. It stuck out like an eyesore.
Every morning, I had to stare at the heart-shaped hole while shitting, perched in the smell of disintegrating excrement. Through the hole, I could see the far-off hills, the clear blue sky, the crystal-clear air, the light and orderliness.
Life itself burst through it in all its glory.
Inside, on the other side of the heart-shaped hole, there was a vile stench of shit.
That wooden shed that smelled of shit was the hole where my heart was.
I had two neighbors on the hill. Jani, at the foot of the basalt organs. He had those low-quality, harmful nova grapevines. He was the first to start the harvest every fall, because by then he typically ran out of wine. And Zsibi, the man who squatted a wooden cabin a little further down. He never heated the house, not even in the greatest cold. His face was blue from the cold and alcohol. On the first day, after Gergő left me there, Zsibi knocked on my door. I offered him Unicum, and after that he showed up every day with some excuse.
The first few days passed rather peacefully. I enjoyed that I had nothing to do. That no one waited for me, no one asked stupid questions at work, and that no one wanted anything from me. That was perhaps what put me most at ease. I even wrote.
I hate therapeutic writing. Once, I spoke to a woman in her forties who showed me her writing. Every one of her lines screamed that she was over forty and had done nothing meaningful with her life other than have kids, so she’d decided to write. Probably because learning to play an instrument was a tad harder.
“I love writing. It makes me feel better,” she said, smiling, and became extremely unlikeable right away.
“If it makes you feel better, then you’re doing something terribly wrong.” I couldn’t come up with anything smarter to say. She hadn’t spoken to me since.
The trouble started the second week.
The days and nights melted together, the silence and the chaos around me were so great that after a while I couldn’t follow how long I’d been there or what time it was.
I had nightmares.
My father haunted me every night.
I dreamt of him fucking Dita. I have no idea how my brain had put these things together; the memory of this completely nonsensical dream gnawed at me for a long time.
How he held her down on the press house’s kitchen table while I lay frozen on the mat; by the stove, unable to move, trying to use all my strength to control my body but couldn’t. I could see everything crystal clear, everything was completely real, I lay there and couldn’t move. My body responded to my panic with a gloating stillness. I couldn’t even lift a finger.
I had to watch as my imaginary father, who I hadn’t seen for thirty years, who had been declared dead for over fifteen, and who had stepped out of my life when I was five, made the love of my life his, rough and laughing, on the kitchen table, while the hundred-year-old press house’s metal stove hummed in the background.
In my dream, Dita’s face was full of lust and gloating.
She watched me the whole time, not taking her eyes off me for even a moment. Her gaze was piercing and provocative, as if she were saying: well, what do you think of this? Her young, perky breasts shook rhythmically. The small, extra weight around her hips jiggled feverishly.
My pulse was so high that I could hear it as nearly one continuous drone.
I was certain I was going to die. I often thought that, but it always felt real every time.
There was a character in my first novel. This is how I had killed him, is what I thought. I took him out to a house on a mountain and made him drink alcohol until he died, and they only found his frozen, withered body in the spring. Now it’s come back to get me, is what I thought.
Of course, it immediately occurred to me that it was time to bury my father.
I took out pieces of paper and began taking notes. I filled a few pages with a draft of a novel with messy handwriting in very little time. Drawings, phrases rearranged by circles and arrows, multiple pages of messy notes, as if it were a blueprint for a nuclear reactor; in a word, I jotted everything down, with arrows and underlines, that I could think of.
On the bottom of the last page, the words: funeral.
I awoke at dawn.
The room had completely cooled down, the stove clanged in the half-dark. For several minutes I had no idea where I was, started calling my dog out of reflex, who jumped up on the bed and curled up on my chest in seconds. My teeth chattered. My fingers had gone numb in the cold. My dog licked my face. I got up. I looked for a lighter. Some bark and a few pieces of small wood had been left in the house, but I couldn’t find paper anywhere. The newspapers I’d prepared, I’d used some time the night before. I shivered, and all I could think of was for the fire to finally light in that stove. I searched around the room but couldn’t find anything.
The table was full of my notes, at least fifty to sixty pages of messily scrawled, hastily jotted-down notes and drafts. I quickly started taking pictures on my phone, then crumpled them up and threw them into the stove right away.
A few minutes later, the fire started and bit into the small pieces of wood.
Warmth slowly filled the house that had cooled to zero degrees.
Every part of me was frozen through. I poured a shot for myself. There was no other glass nearby, so I poured the Stolichnaya with my hands trembling from the cold into a tea mug. I raised it to my mouth with two hands as if I were drinking hot tea. When I drank more than one deciliter of liquor, I laid back to sleep under the double sheepskin blanket placed on the sleeping mat after filling the stove. My dog shivered as he came to lay beside me under the blankets. The wood-burning stove crackled, lighting up the room, shadows danced with indiscernible order on the walls. My dog, like me, poked his head out from under the blanket, put it on my shoulder, and breathed softly. The exhaled air hit my forehead.
Zsibi woke me up. He pounded the press house’s iron-studded wooden door until I woke up. He wore rubber boots and faded green army trousers, as always, with a knitted worker’s cap on his head. We drank Unicum and had breakfast. His face and both his hands were blue from the cold. I had no idea how he could get by without heating.
“Tell me something about yourself, Zsibi,” I tried to make conversation, because Zsibi was big on silence.
He shrugged his shoulders and moved his eyebrows up and down, chewing on the sausage a long time that he’d just a moment before had picked up from his plate.
“Do you have kids, for instance?”
“Well,” he started slowly, as if just incidentally.
He paused, swallowed.
“I have three families.”
I thought for a minute as to what that could mean, until I realized that he must mean he has three kids.
“One of my families is in the neighboring village, and my other two families are two villages over.”
We ate in silence.
“And do you visit them?”
He raised the Unicum so we could cheers. I didn’t want to drink, but I did so out of courtesy.
“Do you see your kids?” I pressed on.
“They’re not interested in me,” Zsibi closed the conversation.
After breakfast I sat down behind the heart-shaped hole.
I looked through the arched opening at the hillside opposite, at the snow-covered rooftops along the quiet winter streets of the neighboring village. Life had come to a total standstill in the neighboring villages in the raging January cold. The chimneys peacefully puffed out smoke. The people went to their neighbors for firewood, maybe pálinka. The schools were on winter break, and the buses stopped running, they didn’t even try to clear away the constant snowfall. The vineyard trellises creaked and cracked under the weight. The heads of the scarecrows bowed lower and lower at the ends of the rows. Fox and boar tracks covered the white landscape.
I couldn’t recall anything of the third week. I hadn’t showered for at least two weeks. I wasn’t using any of my city clothes. I wore rough, thick worker’s clothes I’d found in the house. A Dreher coat, blue overalls, lined rubber boots. Sometimes I even forgot to heat the house. All day long, in fact, often even at night, I sat outside the press house. I watched the foxes roaming without a sense of fear and smoked one cigarette after another. Brown Sopianae, which I’d bought several cartons of in the village when I’d arrived, even though I hadn’t smoked in years. Now I smoked two packs a day.
My mind cleared completely. My pulse barely reached sixty.
Gergő came for me.
“You alive?”
“I’m alive.”
We’d covered the important part.
I had no energy for anything. I got beside him in his car in worker’s clothes, rubber boots, and unshowered. The things I’d brought from home, once neatly folded and packed into bags with military precision, I now gathered up crumpled, bulging, and in disarray. I smoked one more cigarette in front of the press house. The snow creaked under my feet, and the bags tugged at my shoulders that we had to walk down with from the hill to the car.
The wind blew mildly, it slammed open the door of the shitter.
The heart-shaped hole waved to me in the wind.
We were about to leave when one of the scarecrows gave up, cracked, and fell. We tried as much as we could to pick up its pieces, removing its neon green jacket and trousers and throwing them into the press house. We left the straw bag and the rest of its belongings at the end of the vine row, like a dried-out corpse.
We didn’t say a word to each other on the way home. In the light of the highway at night, my disheveled, stubbled, unkempt face sometimes reflected mockingly in the windows, along with the Dreher logo on the gray work uniform I still wore.
We arrived in Víziváros late at night.
I could barely drag in the dog and my things to the stairwell, all my energy had been zapped by the time I made it to the apartment door. I threw myself down beside the door and sat on one of the bags. I found my last Sopianae that I had with me and lit up.
The apartments were full of life. Those who lived there were having a pleasant weekday. Joy wafted out from behind the half-closed curtains behind the balconied walkways into the courtyard. They paid bills and loans by the dim light of their laptops. Children ran from one room to the next, with TVs flashing in the background. The heaters opening onto the balconied walkways released warm carbon monoxide into the courtyard, their heat making the light quiver faintly in front of the windows while the muffled hum of the television sifted through the dark like dust. The residents put things away before going to bed, dressed in their pajamas, brushed their teeth, checked their alarm clocks, and had logged off Facebook quite some time ago.
The week I had moved in came to mind there and then, as I sat in front of my door half-dead and uncivilized in used worker’s clothes.
The memory came to me of how, when I’d lived there maybe two weeks, I started cursing to myself, envious of the guy on the third floor who had nothing better to do than fuck that girl twice a day. Those rhythmic moans broke out every godforsaken day, as if I were living in some kind of comedy. At night, I drowned out the sounds with loud music so I wouldn’t have to hear other people’s joy. I cursed the turn-of-the-century architects, that they’d only given thought to the load-bearing walls. Perhaps that was their priority, that the foundations endure for centuries so that the rest of the walls could be rebuilt. Perhaps a hundred and ten years ago there weren’t as many sources of sounds for it to be relevant. It had taken another twenty years for this part of the city to implement electricity, they’d even used gas lamps for street lighting. At dusk, they’d go around the neighborhood with long-armed lamplighters, lighting the lamps one by one with wicks soaked in rubbing alcohol. And, inside the apartments, life would come to an end, there’d be no noise, so what would’ve been the point of building thick, soundproof walls?
I’d lived there for two weeks when, on the way home, a blinking ambulance welcomed me.
The door to the stairwell was left wide open. Paramedics stood on the street. Soon, two of them appeared with a gurney. They carried a human shape covered with a sheet. A withered, liver-spotted arm hung out from the sheet.
When they passed, I hurried past them nervously. How is one meant to act in that kind of situation? At a loss for anything better to do, I walked toward the stairwell, then into the courtyard. My neighbor was smoking on the balconied walkway. He was a relaxed, forty-something guy, the kind who tells it like it is, who worries about nothing and will probably outlive his contemporaries.
“What happened here?” I asked hesitantly, like someone who really had no right to. With the uncertainty of an outsider.
“The old lady croaked. It’ll finally be quiet,” said the neighbor while ashing his cigarette. The ember flew a long way toward the courtyard and turned to ash by the time it landed on the yellow tiles, not far from the water drain that had been placed at its center.
“Who died?” I asked incredulously.
“The old lady who was always moaning.”
“Old lady?” I didn’t even try to hide my confusion.
“The one from the third floor,” he added. He took another drag of his cigarette, ashed it again, and again the ash flew toward the middle of the courtyard.
“She’d been circling the drain for months, had kept the whole building awake as she whined in pain,” he added.
I didn’t respond.
Ten years had passed.
I could only think about the heart-shaped hole. I don’t even know why it came to mind then. I smoked the cigarette in front of the door. Nearly everyone turned out the lights in the building. They had bought the old lady’s apartment since then, changed out the doors and windows to brand new ones. A flat-screen TV streamed blue light out onto the courtyard.
I threw the worker’s clothes into the washing machine.
I had work the next day. I showered and shaved so I’d be ready for the day ahead.
