Free Tranquility by Attila Bartis

end of the center island. And the vendor yelled out from his stall, if you don’t get the hell out of here, I’ll kick you under the streetcar, but the woman did not let up, so the man ran out of his stall and grabbed her by the hair.
    â€œLet go of her, right now,” I said, even though I had never interfered in street altercations before.
    â€œShut up or you’ll get yours, too,” he said.
    â€œI said let her go,” I said again, but a lot more quietly.
    â€œThen you clear her out of here, and her fucking bird, too,” he said angrily and went back to his stall, still cursing, and slammed the door behind him.
    The woman hugged my legs like some tree trunk, and I didn’t know what to say. All that came to mind were phrases like cut it out already, or calm down already, and after a while, I felt as if I would have to spend the rest of my life standing at the corner of József Boulevard and Bérkocsis Street with this whore kneeling next to me in a puddle. I would have liked to flee; I should have left the whole thing to the news vendor, and then I got hold of the woman’s arm at least to free myself from her embrace.
    â€œPick me up,” she said and I helped her get up on her feet; she waited, leaning on the lamppost, while I wrapped the dead crow in the Film Theater Music . She shoved the little bundle under her armpit, locked her arm into mine and we crossed over to the square. I picked out a bench whose seat hadn’t been kicked to hell, but she didn’t want to sit down.
    â€œHere it’s no good,” she said.
    â€œWhere do you live?” I asked, and she nodded toward one of the side streets, and then dumped the crow into a garbage bin. Her room opened from the rear staircase, opposite the filthy toilets, but she had to climb on top of one of the toilet tanks to get to the door handle she used as key, and finally we were inside the home that used to be a laundry room. Since the Hajdú washing machines had become popular, the District Council with great fanfare declared as temporary dwellings all public laundry rooms that saltpeter and decay had left more or less intact and were just big enough to accommodate an unmade bed, a small table, two easy chairs with broken armrests, a closet, and a small gas cooker.
    Around the cooker and the sink, color magazines covered the flaking plaster. Some of the thumbtacks had fallen out and stars of the musical theater and models demonstrating the spring cardigans were drooping, the wet bricks penetrated the plunging necklines of the cover girls of Rocket-Romances ; still, it wasn’t mustiness I smelled but something I remembered from the birdhouse in the zoo. Then she opened the closet and suddenly chirping filled the room. Twenty-five small cages lined the shelves; the light awakened the canaries and the parakeets, the little seagulls and finches and turtledoves, but there were plain pigeons, too, Balkan doves, blackbirds, and a whole bunch of sparrows, and every one of them was fluttering at the bottom of its cage because its wings were broken.
    â€œGot any cigarettes?” asked the woman, and I told her I had run out; shegot down on her knees and reached under the bed, coming up with a fruit jar full of change; she grabbed a handful of twenty- and fifty-fillér coins and shoved them in my hand. “Get a pack of Fecske,” she said.
    .   .   .
    The salesgirl was sweeping up. You have to come earlier, she said, the register is locked up already, and I said, you could ring it up tomorrow morning, but she said she couldn’t, because what if I was an inspector, then they’d kick her out of her job, and I said I wasn’t an inspector, only my mother couldn’t come down to do her shopping because she broke her wing, and that made the girl laugh and she let me in under the half-lowered shutters, even though I said wing instead of foot only by mistake. I also bought four rolls