Читать книгу No Stopping Train - Les Plesko - Страница 19

If you saw us together you’d think we were friends, Margit thought. The tall woman’s hand on the smaller one’s elbow, they walked past storefronts reflecting spent rain. The day white, you could make out the clouds by only their movement against the white sky.

Margit studied herself in the glass, she wished she’d worn a scarf or a hat. She’d dressed carefully just for this. Last night she’d tried on all her clothes, picked a plain lime-green skirt, Sandor’s fish-patterned shirt. She’d fooled with peroxide and bleach for a semblance of blond. Now she could see in a compact she wiped with her spit by what shade she had missed.

“Where do you sleep with him?” Margit asked.

Erzsébet pulled her coat tight, Sandor’s coat. In the war it had been Margit’s coat. “On wooden planks like the camp. I’ve strung barbed wire on my walls for nostalgia’s sake,” Erzsi said. Margit wasn’t sure if Erzsi was joking or not. The cold was so present it burned, it leached the tang on the breeze from the meatpacking plant. A lorry rounded the corner too fast, marbled ribs swayed on hooks behind torn canvas flaps.

Margit said, “My bed smells like your Emke perfume.”

“I don’t care for beds. You can fuck anywhere if you want to enough,” Erzsi said. A smile played at the edge of her mouth.

Margit felt herself blush. Lately, she’d been eyeing her blanket for what might have happened across it while she had been out. Checking for signs of sexual prowess on the sheets, though she didn’t know what these might be, a mangled garter’s sprung clips, elaborate stains. She’d got down on her knees to look underneath for fancy underpants.

“It’s me he loves,” Margit said.

Erzsébet shook her head. “He’ll always be carrying me on his back from the camp.”

Margit pushed up Sandor’s jacket’s sleeve. “Look, his toothmarks,” she said.

Erzsébet ran her hands through her hair to purposely let Margit see her arm with the numbers on it. Her face appeared remorseless with small nervous ticks. Margit felt pity for her, she couldn’t stand how it filled her up with an undesired tenderness.

“He wants me to marry him,” Margit said.

Erzsébet’s breath was a sudden pale cloud when she laughed. “You don’t need my permission for it.”

Margit looked down at her shoes, they’d gotten wet. “I need to know why he wants to,” Margit said.

Erzsébet studied her face with a weary contempt. “He thinks you’re a tinsely bright carnival, a cheap little fair after what came before,” Erzsi said.

Margit’s ankles felt brittle and weak as she tottered on them. “Things have happened to me, that’s my dead father’s coat you’ve got on.”

Erzsébet leaned on scraped brick with a careless precariousness. “If we’re toting up corpses, you lose.”

They lit cigarettes. Wind stirred greasy puddles and trash. Leftover snow seemed illuminated from within, glazed pink from the bloody runoff gouged by trucks from the meatpacking plant. At the tail end of winter, Budapest was the same everywhere, Margit thought. The nickel-plate sky over clattering boughs of bare trees. Men on the street, hats pulled low, nearly slipping on tracks before trams. Soldiers cradling the stocks of their guns, cobalt-blue barrels recklessly aimed anywhere.

“If we’re counting the living, I win,” Margit said.