Free Tranquility by Attila Bartis Page B

behind the gas cooker, yanked the jersey dress off her body, undid the clasp of her bra, letting her enormous breasts spill out of the cups and unfold like crumpled sponges or wilted guelder roses in the rain.
    The mailman must come here because of these breasts, I thought. He must have some mental problems, I thought. Cripples love to hide between giant breasts like these, I thought. And that guy in the wheelchair, whom I’ve been seeing around here every Sunday, he must be a client too, Ithought. He works the crank-arm with one hand, guides the wheels with one foot, and calmly goes through the red light, because he has nothing to lose anymore, I thought. On purpose he rides over the traffic cop’s foot and yells at him, fuck your mother, lousy copper, but the policeman only jumps aside; doesn’t even ask for the man’s ID card; he’s no fool, he knows there’s no point trifling with someone who no longer has anything to lose, I thought. We’ll try this out tomorrow, I thought. Cross in the red, and if they won’t ask for our ID card we’ll have nothing more to lose, either, I thought, and watched the woman kick off her shoes. Her feet were all muddy, so she took a kerchief from under the pillow, spat on it, wiped her feet and then threw the kerchief under the bed.
    â€œWell, are you coming?” she asked.
    â€œI’d rather sleep here in the easy chair,” I said, and took another slug from the vodka bottle, to fall asleep faster.
    â€œYou can take off your clothes, I’m no thief.”
    â€œI know,” I said.
    â€œWhen you’re ready, turn off the light,” she said and pulled the cover over herself.
    I pushed the two easy chairs together and took off my clothes; using my hands, I drank some water from the faucet because the vodka was burning my throat.
    â€œWhy do you want your mother to see everything?” I asked in the darkness.
    â€œIf you don’t wanna fuck, go to sleep,” she said.
    .   .   .
    I was waiting for the train to clatter through the housing projects and the third-class green belt, because I loathe the outskirts of big cities. Andmaybe there is nothing wrong with the outskirts. Maybe many people consider Kispest-Garden City a great improvement over the Grand Boulevard of downtown Budapest, but for the have-nots, the awful Havana settlement is an even greater improvement – over nothing. Not for me, though. A long time ago, whenever I awoke in one of these prefab apartments I would panic. I never thought I’d find my way home, and throughout the years I filled a whole drawer with bits of papers on which I drew a million little maps; some I did with burnt matchsticks because in bed there was nothing else to write with. “But it’s pretty clear, isn’t it my lovely, you keep going on this street here, at the ABC you turn right, and then smartly throw this slip of paper with the address and telephone number into the garbage can, because I don’t like it when in the middle of fucking they mix me up with some hotline for psychological support.” And of course, some were written on napkins with heart patterns, or on a notebook page, and some were penned with lipstick on a piece of fabric torn from a dress. “But you’ll keep it, won’t you, my treasure, here is the address and telephone number. So, you walk straight ahead on this street, turn right at the ABC, and that’s where the stop is. And now get a move on, because my father could be here any minute from his night shift, or my husband might be back from Leningrad.” And on that occasion I ran to catch the last streetcar exactly the same way I had when, on another occasion, I mixed up a teacher-cum-model with the psychological hotline, and in the middle of screwing I broke down, weeping right into her face. In short, if we consider that after coitus, one way or another, one feels like fleeing, we can see that