Читать книгу No Stopping Train - Les Plesko - Страница 20

After her mother died, Margit remembered this: The year before war, when the war was still mostly vague fear. Down by the boats, she pressed the heel of her hand to the small of her back, squinted against the white glare. She tugged at her hem, brushed cinders and leaves from her hair.

Alma stood beside her among ankle-high weeds. Paddleboats drifted by on the pond, knocking green-yellow ribs. Saw grass poked through lily pads. Buoys seemed to anchor the water, dotted with black and white birds. Margit wanted to touch Alma’s arm, her pale exposed wrists made her ache. It had been cold and no heat, wind covered their coughs into soiled handkerchiefs. Margit twisted a tube of gold lipstick, leaned over a puddle, refreshened her lips. She knew how to do this, already almost thirteen.

“There, pretty and happy,” she said.

Her mother had seen them, these practiced, perfunctory strokes.

“You could teach me,” she said.

“The pretty or happy part?” Margit asked.

She watched her mother bend to her small black purse, smelled her hair as she picked out a jar, smeared red on the undersides of her eyes, pastry-thin.

“That’s rouge, for your cheeks,” Margit said. Impatient, she rubbed quick smooth strokes across her mother’s startled white face. The light was beginning to fade. They collected leaves, there were plenty of them. Margit pressed leaves down the front of her mother’s familiar sweater with holes in the sleeves. Alma blushed, she said stop, but Margit wouldn’t quit, she wouldn’t have minded if they could have stayed there forever, just kept doing this.

• • •

The day Alma’s body was found, the light behind Sandor was spare. In the Angel Street house Margit wiped rain from her shoes with her hem. There were birds on the sill though it was too icy for pigeons to land. Outside, a lorry went by from the tungsten refinery plant.

Oh, she already knew, she could tell by the way Sandor stood, as if shamed, ashen-faced. If he’d worn a hat, it would have been clutched in his fists. Margit thought about Alma’s fingertips splayed on the pane and their dewey rosettes. About how when the war was still young, there was lace on the arms of the chairs, decorative plates on the wall just like in any decent Magyar house. Then, Alma had a small job, earning tips from the lift. When rent became due, she stacked coins on the scarred tabletop by the light from the window that never properly shut.

Always, it seemed, it was winter outside, or just passed, almost winter again.

“What happened?” she asked.

Sandor’s hair fell over his brow, his shoes, too, had gotten wet. “Alma went out in the snow, they found her frozen,” he said.

He enfolded her arms. Though she didn’t want to be touched, she desperately needed it. She smelled ink from the press, she wasn’t crying yet. Margit looked over his shoulder, bewildered that people could simply walk by on the street while her mother was dead. “But it’s not even snowing,” she said.