Here you thrashed about in damp, sour sweat. There, in another bed, you drooled at the cloying scent of the climbing roses, the juicy dumpling, or the naked body born of a fantasy. Here, your chest rose from the sheet—another attack—and then fell back heavily, as if bricks had been pushed into the place of the lung lobes. There, you tossed and turned in the dark every night, for the old crone was toothless and cruel, the bed musty and foreign, and with every movement it was as if the restless skeletons of the late tenants were poking at your back, not the weary springs. Here you could smell the salty tang of the sea, for now the sea was sick too and smelled weird; and you could hear the unfamiliar birds singing in Greek, you could hear someone cursing somewhere under the azaleas, and you rejoiced: perhaps this was the first sign, perhaps at last some modernist spirit was sprouting within you; at last you could spread out the paper before you and take up the pen.
Only when the fever had subsided a little did you realize that there was no sea, no bird, not even a language to venture near this closed, airless, infectious room. And here, in this bed, you also imagined reaching for someone’s warm hand, wrapping his fingers around you, slowly leading his fingers to your softer places, but that someone, with his watery blue eyes and his big, hooked nose, abandoned you in your hour of need, leaving you with no companion but the crumpled pages of Contre Sainte-Beuve on the bedside table.
In one bed, you were merely sleeping off the deadly slow hours of work; in another, your first love penetrated you, leaving a pool of blood on the sheets; in a third, you clenched your teeth in response to the icy December wind that crept under your blanket through the cracks of the old window frame; and you could go on and on about the many experiences in those many beds… But did you ever think of counting them all? To count how many beds there are in a life? Or the beds in which you sometimes awoke from a dream so deep that the room seemed to be the dream itself and the dream seemed to be reality. Where the walls were temporary, but the dream of you standing at the window of your childhood room, watching a fat, furious tornado coming at you was permanent—a recurring one. You would freeze, terrified, but before it could reach you, the dream was always over.
You cannot remember your very first bed, yet its quality defines the rest, because the slats of milk-tasting slumber, though they may bend, buckle, and widen with time, never disappear. But your childhood began some time later, with a few scattered, hazy memories, authenticated, if you were lucky, by your parents, and a few others you’d never told them about, so you could only guess at their date. For example, when your older sister asked you to do strange things under the blanket, you didn’t understand exactly what you had to do, why the two of you had to touch where you did. Or perhaps an aunt’s story has transformed inside you over the years, like a bulbous plant in the earth: the bulb, the root of the memory, remains the same, but the flower changes, producing richly colored petals one year and only a single stunted shoot the next—just as the mind changes with age, abusing the tricks of time, deceiving: adding or taking away.
Your fevered limbs hit and hit against the white wall, like branches gone wild in a storm—like the silver birch beating itself against the window, its bark cracking, peeling off—your thin fingers tapping on the bedpost, your heart oscillating, then suddenly the fingers calmed as they found a memory: the warm edge of the tiled stove, a piece of which, who knows when, had snapped off. And there came another attack, the fever was stubborn, but you held on to that glazed tile, to the coziness and liveliness of the family home, where now, at this very moment, your mother was lying by the stove reading Thomas Mann, unaware that her child, between being and not being, was clinging to this broken, unstable lifebuoy, this thirty-year-old memory of the stove, to somehow wriggle out of the illness.
You remembered how, as a child, your father would sit on the edge of the bed every night and read from Az eltáncolt papucsok, but after the székely, the princess, the black rooster, the devil’s son, the lame duck, and the tree that reached the sky, it was the shepherd boy you wanted to hear about the most, over and over again, because every night you made your father tell the tale of the boy who cried wolf. The boy who was tending the flock called for help twice: “Wolf! The wolf is coming!” And your father cried out, as the boy himself would have cried out, and then he went on, “At this shrill cry all the peasants ran out there with their pitchforks, sticks, spades, and hoes, but the wicked, insolent boy, who was lying under the tree with a blade of grass in his mouth, just laughed at them. When he cried wolf for the third time, for it was really coming, no one came, and the wolf tore the whole flock to pieces.”
You liked the way your father painted the peasants, because you could almost see them in the shimmering summer sun, emerging from the spreading horizon: forks, clubs, rusty hoes in their hands. You could see the shouting, barefoot men in their baggy trousers, the women behind them with floury palms and swirling skirts.
Your father taught you well to make sure you greeted everyone in the village: “You may not know them, but they know whose daughter you are.” It was a surprise that the big-city crone you moved in with when you were eighteen, at the beginning of your university studies, turned out to be quite different from the villagers, from your kind neighbors Aunt Vilma and Aunt Teri, who sat on the bench in front of their house and watched the village go by. They knew who went where, when and why, and they also knew exactly when you had to be home from school, how your godmother made an onion brew for your persistent cough that no modern medicine could cure, or which classmate at kindergarten liked to touch your butt.
You lasted only two weeks in the rented bed where the old hag ruled and strove to dominate you like an evil, overbearing master. For two weeks you endured tossing and turning every night and weeping for your mother, and then you, like the peasants with pitchforks of three generations before you, wrapped up your valuables in a sheet and crossed the city and half the country with your bundle to return to your own bed. Perhaps it was a sign of true adulthood that this panel block bed, reeking of communism and guarded by knick-knacks, paintings of Jesus and artificial flowers, was the first and last to throw you out so rudely, for in the others that followed you found sleep, though not in all of them peace. Some of them inevitably ended up insignificant, as props for a school trip or a vacation, or because the people who filled the rooms left no tactile trace. Some were completely erased from memory.
Madness suddenly, with daggers and a thousand needles, charged at your limbs, your gullet burned with thirst, but you could not rise, for if you tried, the dim room would turn white before your eyes, your legs would collapse. How long could your sanity hold out? This virus that people had been talking about for years had infected you in this very bed, between the folds of the sheets of love and pleasure, and now you could only vaguely recall the night you had stuck your finger down your throat here and poked at your uvula in vain: the hashish you had swallowed would not come back up.
The painful melodies of Ederlezi were blaring from the television, and you already knew that your body could not tolerate the edible, it was making a comedy out of you: it was turning you into a snake. Your bones were gone, and you were no longer constrained by physics; you bent and twisted wherever you wanted. You slithered on the flat disk of a new dimension. Your cool, scaly skin was smooth and flawless. You glided silently, with no limbs or organs in your way to dictate how the slats bent, to pigeonhole you into the nature of an absolute entity. In fact, even the snake was a weak analogy, a poor metaphor, forced upon you by the thrill of words. For all your life, you had been, as Virginia Woolf says in The Waves, a clinger to the outsides of words. But then you were truly just a long, ancient spine, climbing the wall and the ceiling, watching your internal ripples in the noiseless slide, as all that had passed and all that was to come piled up inside, but the expanding disk, like a trampoline, absorbed all the painful bumps, edges, and bulges.
As the hashish dissipated from your stomach, a different kind of ecstasy approached. The boy whose watery blue eyes and big, hooked nose you had fallen in love with, who had welcomed you into his own crumpled bed, now took the black lace thong, decorated with a silk bow and held together by a string of pearls in the middle, between his teeth, pulled it and snapped it against your flesh. You laughed. He began to suck on the pearls, pressing them against you with his tongue. All the blood rushed to your nerve endings, you swelled up, everything inside you concentrated into a knot. You wanted to push that greedy mouth away and push your whole body into it at the same time. Compared to the boy’s expertise, the pleasure in that double bed on the ninth floor where a bat had flown into your room one summer was nothing. You had watched with a shrill scream as the tiny black body grabbed the dusty curtain and fell with a soft thud behind the sofa.
You called your father, hoping his deep voice would comfort you like it did when you were a child and he said, “All the peasants ran out there with their pitchforks and sticks,” but he just laughed on the phone now and said, “Well, what am I supposed to do from this distance?” Because you were in the big city and he was watching the evening news by the cold tiled stove. “Go and call the neighbor!” And the neighbor came and started beating the tiny black body with a shovel, but you took pity on it and cried, “Don’t kill it, please!” Then, with a straight face, the man scooped the few grams of body onto the shovel and threw it out of the window, and you shuddered, wondering if it would survive. How silly you were again, all that fuss and drama… But fear was an insidious thing, because even if it seemed to pass, it could still circulate in the nerve pathways for a long time, and the only way you knew how to ease this unexpected shock was to touch your soft parts. You continued stimulating your body up until six in the morning, until the last of the fear had been shaken out of it. Until it was light outside. For then you could be sure that the bats had returned home and nestled into the crevices of the block.
Another attack—you hoped it would be the last—in this bed where you had felt like a snake not so long ago, in the boy’s room where the walls had been permanent for years and the recurring dream was a thing of the past. But the rest you longed for, in vain, eluded you, as if the room itself, with its thick, high walls, had driven it far away. The boy’s guests swarmed within its walls on weekends, repeating their jokes with foaming mouths, one shouting over the other, bobbing their heads in damp, sour sweat to the monotonous beat of the throbbing music, snorting and gulping everything down until the stupor blurred their vision. Then, like a tree felled with an axe, they all collapsed onto the sofa, the armchair, the carpet, or the bed, wherever the exhaustion of the body caught up with them, driving you out of your bed to sleep in the kitchen on a single mattress with the boy next to the fridge.
You awoke to a soft noise. You had a splitting headache. The coconut mattress—another bed—creaked, your arm slipped off it. The kitchen floor was cold and sticky. On the table were empty vodka bottles, lipstick-stained glasses, rolled up banknotes and empty cigarette packs, the sterile smell of vodka wafting through the air. You propped yourself up on your elbows: the boy was lying next to you, the blanket moving up and down over him, making that soft noise as he was stroking himself. “Come!”—he said when he saw you were awake, and he grabbed your thigh, his mouth smelled of booze and plaque, but you couldn’t do it like that, you were afraid that someone might come out of the room at any moment. What were you doing here anyway? On the kitchen floor, like an intruder, who knew no one—no one from the rooms, and maybe not even this boy—because, as you watched the rhythmic movement of the blanket, it was as if you were no longer there, lying stiff next to him like an unusable piece of meat, your stomach clenching because you had refused his advances and he had accepted it without a word. Another night wasted, another morning ruined.
You lay back on the mattress, closed your eyes, and to escape from it all, you imagined that the noise was coming from the beech martens in the attic; that the heat was not from the summer but from the tiled stove; that your father had just said a few minutes ago: “The wolf tore the whole flock to pieces;” you imagined that you were back in your own bed. You could count yourself among the lucky ones who had their own. The wood frame had absorbed your own smell, your own sweat—no one else’s. The pine had aged and ripened and darkened with you. Home was the bed; home was the foot of the warped old bed where you hung the thread to weave a bracelet; the bed whose slats were no longer held by the nails; the bed where you knew every knot of the pine, because you had stroked them all with your little fingers in your sleepless nights; the bed whose only companion in your absence was the worn-out teddy bear that had guarded your sleep with open eyes since before you knew the word dream, and before your thoughts had been strung together into a logical chain by your brain, because they were still fragments: a smile caught on a parent’s face, or a voice that sounded familiar.
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Mari Klein is a writer and literary translator based in Budapest, Hungary. Her work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, Új Forrás, 1749, and Hungarian Literature Online. She holds degrees in literary translation and liberal arts, and participated in the Irish Poetry Translators Masterclass organized by the Embassy of Ireland. She’s currently working on her first novel.
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Nadia Arioli’s visual art can be found as the cover of Permafrost, in Wrongdoing Magazine, Feral, Strawberry Moon, Anti-Heroin Chic, Northwest Review (forthcoming) and Kissing Dynamite (forthcoming). They illustrated James Rodehaver’s chapbooks, published by Cringe Worthy Poetry Collective.
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Another Chicago Magazine 