Читать книгу Darling, impossible! - Eva Novy - Страница 7

It’s the following evening and I’m on my way to my grandmother’s house for dinner. I didn’t turn up to my appointment at Dr Horvath’s surgery this afternoon. After the excitement of yesterday, I wasn’t in the mood for news.

The smell hits me head-on as I enter her apartment building through the side door. Margo, her downstairs neighbour, must be cooking lamb again. I know what that means for my grandmother: another bad mood. Hungarians hate lamb.

It’s hot and dusty in the concrete stairwell. This two-storey red-brick eyesore from the fifties was built to make the winters colder and the summers hotter. Par for the course in this neighbourhood of run-down apartment buildings, old weatherboard semi-detached cottages and peeling pastel store fronts only three blocks from a beautiful sprawling ocean beach with powder-like white sand and blue-green surf. Side by side, the ugly, the uninteresting and the magnificent have made this place their home over the last hundred years. Impressive thirty-metre-high cliff faces define a coastline coated in graffiti and chewing gum. Bushy and vibrant banksias, bottlebrush trees and jacarandas overlook vast concrete schoolyards with wirenet fencing and rotten football poles. Newly renovated homes of glass and chrome sit above cracked footpaths with the fluorescent painted markings of half-finished utility work. This is North Bondi. This is home. I know my grandmother and I fit comfortably somewhere in the middle of this ragtag community, somewhere in there with the stoners and the supermodels, the Orthodox Jews in black coats and the young professionals in SUVs. The streets are full of stay-at-home mums with colourful prams, out-of work naturopaths with dirty bras, English tourists, Israeli backpackers, grumpy old men and hyperactive children.

For Sam, this place is a suburban hell, a bottomless pit of baggy tracksuit pants and unkempt hairdos that invariably smell of lavender oil and sweaty armpits. For Mama, this place is an urban nightmare, a concrete jungle with too much noise and too many accents, and she’d never set foot here again if it weren’t for the fact that all her friends and family still live here.

My grandmother always greets me at her apartment with a goulash and a Monologue. Both have a similar effect on me: they fill me immediately with that warm, familiar taste of family, then leave me feeling irritated and uncomfortable for the rest of the day. I never learn. I always enjoy them greedily, completely in denial of the heaviness that inevitably follows.

“Hi my Lily,” kiss kiss. She answers the door in a semi-transparent leopard print shirt, navy blue tracksuit pants and rollers in her hair. I can feel her crimson lipstick smear all over my cheeks. “Come in, daahrlink. You look terrible.”

This is what’s called a Jewish compliment.

“Thanks, Anyu,” I reply.

My grandmother’s name is Agi, but I’ve always called her Anyu, even though it means mother in Hungarian, not grandmother. Both my parents used that word when I was little. At first I thought it was her name, and later that it meant grandmother, and when I eventually learned the truth, it was too late. Anyu had stuck. It’s the only part of my father’s life that remains part of my every day. My mother, too, still calls her Anyu, though always through gritted teeth.

I head straight for the faux-wood table in the small dining area adjacent to the kitchen. The medium-brown shag-pile carpet makes the space seem even smaller than it is, its hairy fingers showing every wayward crumb and every granule of dust since the last half-hearted attempt at a vacuum by the “simple Filipino girl who hasn’t stolen anything yet”. That’s Anyu being compassionate and understanding.

By the wall opposite the kitchen, a dark, wooden sideboard holds a messy patchwork of everyday things and obscure bits and pieces placed slowly one by one over the years, never to be thought about again: piles of half-opened bills and notices, car keys, colourful glass ashtrays, three fake Lalique statuettes of cats on an off-white crocheted doily, a set of blackened silver candlesticks, and a crystal decanter full of whisky next to three unmatched glasses. The table is set for one: a basket of rye bread with caraway seeds, a plate of roughly sliced pickled cucumbers, a large, steaming bowl of hearty beef and potato goulash soup and a plastic cup of soda water.

Anyu shuffles into the lime-green Formica kitchen to continue her pottering as I sit down. The sliding door separating the kitchen and the dining room is half open, and I can see her intermittently as she bustles to and fro.

But I have no problem hearing her.

I’m ready for it: today it’s Monologue Number 43.

“It makes me awfully mad …,” she begins.

My grandmother’s monologues come in all shapes and sizes. There’s the gentle but patronising lament on the plight of the peasant; the fiery rant about right-wing politics; the romantic and nostalgic account of Budapest in the 1920s; and the passionately paranoid tirades on world anti-Semitism. Then there’s the lecture about living in a country whose kind but simple butchers give the best part of the meat to the dogs and the sermon on the absence of God during the war. And there are my favourites about how the Chinese and old men wearing hats are genetically pre-wired to be dangerous drivers, and how nothing is more barbaric than piercings, tattoos and chipped nail polish. The monologues are so well rehearsed and vary so little from recital to recital, that I sometimes find myself mouthing along to the words like I do with an old song. I’m not always in the mood for a monologue. Sometimes I can feel one about to break as it hangs heavy in the atmosphere and sometimes it comes out of a clear blue sky. Sometimes I find myself listening to one as if for the very first time, and sometimes I feel so lonely that I simply long for the comfort of her words.

Her monologues remind me of that famous joke about the old Jew who moves to a retirement home in Miami to start a new life. He is taken by a new acquaintance down to lunch where the gang meets daily. They are all sitting around chatting, when one of the group yells out “43!” which is met with roaring laughter. Another screams out “27!” Again, the place explodes. “What’s going on?” asks the newcomer. “Well,” the other explains, “we’ve all been together so long that we know every joke and every anecdote. So why bother repeating them? We just number them.” The newcomer, eager to fit in, takes a deep breath, clears his throat, and goes for it. “32!” he says. Silence. When the chatter finally resumes, he turns to his friend. “What did I do wrong?” he asks. “Well,” says the friend, “it’s the way you tell it.” And no one can tell a monologue quite like Anyu.

“… but whatever we do,” she continues, “we must never let them think they are the powerful ones. For years we had them fooled and then came those bloody feminists who tried to be more and more like the men and you know what? Well, they become as stupid as the men in the end. Tell me, daahrlink, who said that women never had any power? We have always controlled men … until these idiots came and tried to be like them … it’s your generation, Lily …”

My mother is allergic to Anyu’s monologues, in particular this one that ends with the bit about me being single and alone at twenty-two. By the second sentence, Mama is always up and out the door. My grandmother has been worried about my prospects since I graduated from high school. It’s okay, she once explained to me, not to be a virgin when you get married, but it’s not right for everyone to know it. My mother says she’d never let me get married so young, no matter what Anyu thinks. Neither has ever asked me what I think.

“… and we can’t blame them either, poor daahrlinks. They are only simple creatures. They are made like that. You see, they are wired in such a way that there is only enough blood to go up or down, but not both ways at the same time. And then come all these women who couldn’t find themselves a man, claiming that we need to have power over ourselves first. Vot rubbish! I’ll show them power. All they need is an hour at my hairdresser’s and a splash of red lipstick. Now that’s power! Imagine, daahrlink, when I was a young girl, I had legs … oh, all the way up to my armpits, and they queued around the block for just one dance …”

Mama’s told me all about my grandmother’s legs, those same legs, she said, that just couldn’t stay closed and got everyone into trouble.

“… when I was your age, daahrlink, things were different …”

All of a sudden, I hear a scuffle at the door and smell a familiar, pungent concoction of perfume and cigarette smoke. Saved by the bell: rummy night.

“Ah, so they haven’t forgotten me, the kurvák!” Anyu mutters, scrambling to undo the last of her hair rollers.

Dotsi, Zsuzsi and Punci are my grandmother’s best friends and worst enemies. They come over faithfully every Thursday night at eight-fifteen on the dot for cards, whisky, chit-chat and the occasional scandal or two. Anyu calls them kurvák, or whores, but that’s just her way of being affectionate. I call them néni, or auntie, even though we are not related at all. In Hungary, children always call older people in their lives uncle or auntie as a sign of respect, but they may as well be my real aunties. Apart from Mama and Anyu, I have no other family in Sydney. Both my mother and father were only children and Mama’s parents passed away before I was born. There’s a second cousin of Anyu’s in America and Mama’s great-uncle who never made it out of Hungary. I think Mama has a reasonably close relative who married a Russian soldier and moved to rural Poland, but no one talks about her anymore. The rest of my grandparents’ family members never made it back from the war.

Anyu and the aunties are like real family. They are always arguing, but I can never entirely figure out what they are fighting about since they all talk at the same time. Regardless of the topic, they never agree. From the trivial, like money and men, to the more important, like money and men, I don’t think they have ever suffered a harmonious conversation. They are so quick to disagree with each other that they’d rather contradict themselves than accidentally be caught with the same opinion.

But when it comes to an outsider, any outsider, they stick together like glue.

They are colourful creatures, with big hair, big diamonds and big boobs. Dotsi, the naïve and gullible one, has tattooed eyebrows and lives with the constant embarrassment of Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It can come at any time, but when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. She has a beautiful penthouse apartment with harbour views, but is, I’m told, too stupid to appreciate it. Zsuzsi, my favourite of the three, has flaming red hair and a temper to match. She always wears oversized sunglasses, day or night, and lives with the nuisance of an over-educated, over-liberal, WASP-y daughter-in-law and the shame of a homosexual grandson, although at least he is a doctor and has a good-looking boyfriend, which is more than Anyu can say about me. Punci, the envy of her generation, is the only one to live with a man. Always referred to by Punci and the gang as The Special Friend, he has managed to make it to the fabulous age of ninety-four with all his own teeth. He still plays tennis every Wednesday morning at the club and walks the two and a half kilometres down to the beach and back every morning come rain, hail or shine. He speaks seven languages fluently and still drives himself to the opera.

I turn to see them jostling and elbowing their way through the front door with arms flailing and air kisses all over the place. Dotsi’s necklace gets caught on the balustrade. Punci drops her purse, knocking heads with Zsuzsi as they lose their footing on their way to the floor. It’s like The Three Stooges in sequins.

I don’t have time to laugh. Instead, the dance of disentanglement that follows has me and Anyu retreating to the sanctuary of her kitchen doorway.

“Idiot,” says Zsuzsi. “A simple staircase she can’t even climb without breaking all of our necks!”

“Come on Zsuzsi now, move that big arse of yours before you really hurt someone. And get rid of those glasses, would you? Really, I can’t imagine how you made it up these bloody stairs …” It isn’t always Punci’s fancy to protect Dotsi, but she often takes advantage of Zsuzsi’s outbursts to slip into the role of defender, whoever the victim may happen to be.

“Well quite frankly, Punci daahrlink, thanks to our baby buffoon over there, I almost didn’t …”

“Baby buffoon? My dear, will you look in the mirror for just a minute? Dotsi, daahrlink, here, let me see, let me help … what in God’s name have you done to yourself?”

“Never mind what she’s done to us …”

“It wasn’t my fault. My beads …”

“My beads, you mean, which by now are probably tangled to oblivion. Let me remind you, Dotsi daahrlink, who gave you those beads in the first place …”

“Jaj! You’re pulling my hair!” Dotsi is now on all fours, and Anyu can’t bear it any longer. She struts out of the kitchen and I fantasise for a moment that she’s going to shut the front door and leave us in peace, but instead she grabs a pair of scissors from the counter top, mumbling to herself something about peasants, and I brace myself for the carnage.

“Precisely what I’m saying,” Punci says, snatching the scissors from my grandmother. “If you weren’t so smart about lending her, out of all people, your favourite beads, or should I say ex-beads, then we wouldn’t be in this mess …” Snip.

Everyone is safely inside the apartment, and I start to help Anyu clear away my plates and fit the green felt cloth over the table. My idea is to discreetly slink out the door without being noticed, but I know deep down that there is no getting out of here alive. I can see the wheels turning behind those hideous hairdos.

“You look too skinny, Lily daahrlink.”

Too late. Punci starts the onslaught. “Doesn’t she look too skinny, Zsuzsi? Agi, why aren’t you feeding her?”

“What on earth do you mean?” Zsuzsi says. “Don’t you know there’s no such thing as too rich or too skinny? Or is it too pretty? Never mind … You’re okay, aren’t you, Lily? Come on, leave her alone, girls.” But the relief is only momentary. She suddenly turns my way, licking her lips, her eyes inflamed. “So tell me, come on, how did it go with the Muchovsky boy?” She sings Much-ov-sky, rocking her shoulders to the beat of each syllable.

“Muchovsky? You promised you’d tell her about Daniel Leventhal. You know, Helen’s grandson.” Punci always has better ideas.

“Leventhal? Don’t you worry about him, Punci daahrlink, he found someone last week.” Zsuzsi turns my way. “So tell me, was he nice? I told you he was nice!” She emphasises the last word with an affectionate tap on my shoulder, almost knocking me to the ground.

“Daniel Leventhal found someone? What a shame …” Punci mumbles.

“I didn’t call him,” I say, without looking up. Of course he found someone. They always find someone sooner or later.

“I wonder who?” Punci scratches her head.

“You see, Lily, that’s why you’re in this situation. I can’t do everything!” Followed by something in Hungarian.

“Who what?” Dotsi joins in. She’s confused.

“Who did he find?”

“How should I know!” Zsuzsi now turns to Anyu. “She bloody asks me who. What am I, God? Can’t you do something, Agi? Tell her to call the Muchovsky kid.”

Anyu looks at me with longing eyes. She knows there is no way I will call him. I have never met him, but I already know the type: a good, solid job, maybe even a Master’s degree. Plays some instrument like a dream and lost quite a lot of weight recently, or was it hair? Just out of a long relationship and bitter break-up with a non-Jewish girl from the office who was pretty but, as predicted, simple. And of course, we have so much in common because we are both single.

I pretend to rearrange the contents of my handbag as the four of them sit down to deal the first hand. I have to get out of here. I can stomach a little monologue, but a real live ensemble is too much for tonight.

“You’re not leaving yet, are you, Lily?” says Punci. “Dotsi may need some help!” She laughs heartily and the barrage continues from all directions, this time in Hungarian, as Dotsi scurries urgently down the hallway to the toilet.

Anyu accompanies me to the doorway with a take-home pack of a week’s supply of goulash and rye bread. I wave a broad goodbye in their general direction, dreaming of the day I’ll be able to join in the banter in their own tongue, beat them at their own game. Eva will teach me a little something worthwhile: scathing but elegant, razor-sharp but cool. Knock their socks off. Imagine, if only they knew what I have up my sleeve. If only they knew my source. I can’t wait till Saturday and my first Hungarian lesson.

“Forget the Muchovsky kid, daahrlink,” my grandmother whispers at the door, just out of earshot. “His grandmother cheats at rummy. Romanian peasant stock. Trust me on this one. This Zsuzsi always thinks she knows everything.”

I kiss her goodbye and leave her to her band of cronies. She won’t be lonely tonight, but I feel sad for this once beautiful woman who reluctantly traded Old World elegance for sensible underwear and comfortable pants. Sometimes I catch glimpses of her former, lively self, but mostly I see this once prominent member of society relegated to the position of the irritating grandmother who nags and cooks too much. She spends her days attending the funerals of people she hated and her evenings at the rummy table with other bitter, fading souls. She’s forever waiting for that miserable, monthly government cheque and for her daahrlink Lily to get on with it and live a happy life for her.

I step outside into the humid night, throw her leftovers into the rubbish bin on the corner, light a cigarette and start climbing the familiar hill towards the cliffs and home.

I guess when my grandmother sees me, she feels sad too. They say getting old is depressing, but it’s better than the alternative. She must know that, just like my Papa, I might not make it that far.