Читать книгу No Stopping Train - Les Plesko - Страница 23

To Sandor from me, Kiskunfélegyháza, November 6, 1956.

They’re burning leaves in the apple orchard outside, the smoke bitter yet sweet. The newspaper says the Russians reclaimed Budapest. We won’t be going through there, the trains shuttled past that new death. I half expected this. Escape is the wind through the panes of this roadside cafe, stirring red and white checked tablecloths, my hair, soiled napkins. What remains: Winter scars on the buildings’ facades, this light at the height of the day. Warmth from the sun through the glass on my dress. I’ve ordered a beer though I don’t drink beer, I’ve smoked two cigarettes. My yellow valise by my ankles, my hand in my pocket, the forints you gave me, a hairpin.

When I married you, Sandor, I wore a simple white blouse and a faded blue skirt. I wore pearls, they weren’t real but they had a casual, cheap elegance. Your suit was the color of mud and your pants weren’t pressed. We were three stories up. Steam from the radiator smelled like burning leather, fake fur. I plucked my wet blouse from my chest. The new official red flag on the magistrate’s desk didn’t wave. My hands damp, I dried them on my hips. Above us a fan churned a fine bureaucratic incense. I held our unmatched pawnshop rings. The magistrate said kiss the bride, my lipstick gone grainy and soft in the cracks of my lips. “Now I’ll start calling you Mrs.,” you said, although you never did.

That night we were shiny, awake. You bent over me skinny-assed with your odors of metal and ink. Lamplight smeared its sheen on your limbs, the same as before, not the same.

After, you folded a paper airplane from a counterfeit document you had made, wafted it. Some kind of residence permit with fake embossed stamps. It circled and dipped, blundered against my bare shins. “A love letter,” you said.

I laughed. “Fake,” I said.

You held my cool feet in your cooler hands, blew on them. Your hands were the same size as mine, your ring in my mouth tasted sour, I opened my paper-pale legs.

But this is an old story now, isn’t it? How a thousand birds flew past our window while vendors pushed carts down the street past my moany relief, your trembly naked arrogance.

In the orchard nearby, they’re burning what’s left of the harvest, wood crates, rotten fruit. This note’s porous as thought, blurred in light on this bright windy day. Imminent refugees move past the glass, hide threadbare Hungarian flags, toss placards with wishes on them to the flames.

Did you know mail’s returned from the prison stamped DIED? But then maybe it’s also a fake.

This small town, I’m already nostalgic for it. I could nurse myself here with a man playing bocci ball in the square. Show him my calves. Make him stop playing whist on a slick tablecloth filmed with soot. Bat my eyes in a tired, city way.

A box for my needles, my thimble, a drawer for unpacking my threadbare underwear. Wednesdays, kohlrabi and beets, on alternate Thursdays, the usual queue for bad meat. I’d open a sewing shop, sure, sit with a horsehair blanket on my knees as the weather got even colder than this.

But don’t worry, Sandor, I have sturdy shoes, I won’t linger too long in this place. I still feel your chin in the cleft of my set shoulderblades. See me retying my scarf in the street among curled blowing leaves. The sun in my face, burnt apples and smoke in my hair. Hefting my yellow valise as if gauging my will by its weight.