BARCODE

KRISZTINA TÓTH [from BARCODE (London: Jantar Publishing, 2023)]

VACANT PEOPLE (Borderline)

I was meant to be going down on the Thursday, but in the end I couldn’t find the time. I didn’t make it to Kecskemét until the Sunday and I was far too late to bid him farewell.  There were four people surrounding the body when I arrived.  Though it was a sweltering summer, they hadn’t opened the windows, as if ashamed, even in each other’s presence, of the sickly smell that was only intensified by the tepid smells drifting in from the kitchen.

I looked at him in some confusion, reflecting on how the dead resembled one another, even at this stage, immediately after death, let alone later.  Strangely enough, I can no longer recall the pain I felt, just as I can’t remember the business that seemed so urgent at the time and which made me arrive so late.  I remember only my profound unease as I shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other as I stood behind the distraught but taciturn relatives.  I kept the same pose, hands clasped in front of me and gaze vacant, as if at some solemn speech, just as at that time in my childhood when they laid that dead, sallow-faced old lady out on the platform bench in the underground.  That had been an old lady, this was an old man.  Or rather, now, a no-body, an unhabited house, a hollow puppet, who had arrived back at the resting place of the soul.  

There were sixty years between us.  By the time I last saw him alive, three weeks before that late, and last, visit, he could barely speak.  Curiously, in parallel with his long-drawn-out and then suddenly worsening condition, it seemed that the house and garden, too, began to show signs of falling apart.  The lace tablecloths looked exactly the same, the door was propped open by the red kitchen stool just as before; yet something had nevertheless changed: the discreet choreography of arrivals and departures was different, the food tasted unfamiliar, dirt had lodged in the crevices of the handles of the knives and forks, and a strange smell pervaded the rooms.  Especially his.  He lay under a chequered blanket on an adjustable, metal-framed bed.  I was surprised at how small his body was and how jagged and sharp its contours; by contrast, his speech was soft and mellifluous, as if his words had been deprived of their clear shape. He seemed to be communicating solely by his looks and especially his damp, glistening, blue eyes, now bulging out enormously.

“How long are you staying?”

I eventually understood what he was saying.  I didn’t want to lean any closer, as I found the smell of the medications and the talcum powder distressing, to say nothing of how I was put off by the saliva that had gathered in the corner of his mouth. I had no wish for a close-up view of the skull faintly visible through his skin.

“I can’t stay,” I said, shaking my head.

He closed his eyes, as if reflecting on my reply.  I didn’t ever stay: I always came in the morning and took the evening train back, so I didn’t really understand why he was asking.  As if he didn’t know I had to return.

Then, unexpectedly, he looked up and gestured to me to come closer. I rose from the chair and held an ear to his lips. What I heard was improbable in the extreme.  At first I felt only the cadence of the sentence, something like “cover me”, but then as I glanced at his face and saw his look, I realised that he had indeed said what I thought I heard.

“Kiss me.”  

I was caught in an uncomfortable position, above him and bent almost double, as he clutched my arm, longingly and with supernatural strength.  I straightened up, removed his hand, and sat down again.

Without replying, as if I hadn’t heard anything.

Sixty years between us; he could have been my grandfather.  And in a sense that’s what he was: I had listened to his stories, I had admired his pictures, I had sought his praise.  And now here I was sitting beside him, horror-struck and ashamed, staring out of the window.  For heaven’s sake, what could he be wanting.  I was 20 years old, an ignorant, arrogant semi-adult.  I didn’t understand what he was expecting, whether it was a goodbye kiss, as if we were on a station platform with the train about to depart, or that it was not from me, a woman, that he wanted a kiss, but from someone in the land of the living that the one about to die desired some final gift, something wonderful but impossible – and that someone just happened to be me.

Meanwhile Aunt Edit had come in.  She plumped up the pillow under his head, straightened the blanket, and asked if she shouldn’t open the window.  My little baby, she called the old man, something that even before I’d found weird and now seemed downright mawkish, because if his wife was the mother of this sick and aged body, what did that make me? I was on edge, as if I’d been caught out doing something naughty.  I knew little about living with someone and even less about being taken away from them, or at least too little to suspect that she wanted the same thing as her husband, that they had forever been one person in two bodies and it was just that one body would now remain lying there while the other went to the dining room to lay the table and serve the steaming hot soup.

We ate it in silence. When I looked down into my soup, I saw at once that something was not right.  But I didn’t dare say anything; it was simply impossible.  Beads of sweat formed on my brow and I felt increasingly nauseated as I tried to take a spoonful of the liquid without letting any of the tiny little insects into the bowl of the spoon, but I couldn’t do it, the odd one or two always remained and it would have been agonisingly awkward to pick them out by hand.  Oh my God.

“Don’t you like it, my dear?”

All I can remember, thinking back, is reaching for the toilet chain and noticing the yellowish tide-mark of the limescale in the bowl as I tried to vomit it all up: death, the smell of the herbs, the soup, everything, and, as I rested my brow against the wall, I shouted: no problem, I’m fine, it must have been the very early start and the journey down.

Now I’m standing in another bathroom, looking into a round mirror in a white frame which reveals my face, now 15 years older, as I gradually lower my towel.  I am 35, I know something about birth, but still frighteningly little about death or, rather, that’s what I feel, that’s why I had to splash my face with cold water: to make sure I didn’t burst into tears.

A friend of mine has died.

It was a lingering, difficult death, a gradual shrinking away, even as the child by my side continued to grow.  

Don’t mention the lower half of the minute body, wrapped in a nappy.

Now he’s lying over there in the room, his loved one by his side, or rather his loved ones, sitting there, holding his hands, caressing his brow.  I go back to the double bed; the girl on the left is crying.  I sit down and look on, I say my goodbyes but only to myself.  The girl says to take his hand: it’s already gone cold, but it’s still warm under his armpits, that’s where his soul is still nestling, that’s its final refuge, it’s from there that it bids its final farewell.  That’s its home-pit.  And it’s true: I put my hand there, gently, as if the three of us were just sitting around someone who was asleep, even though the sleeping body is vacant, it has arrived back at the resting place of the soul.  There was no age difference between us, it could just as well have been me, yet I’m alive, alive. I have a son, I have a son, I have a son.

He’s four.  I squat down to hear what he’s saying.  For some reason he always calls the homeless people ‘vacant’.  Every morning in the Blaha Lujza underpass he sees the stinking bodies of the wretches snoring away on the cardboard sheets.  I can see it pains him, that he doesn’t think it’s right, though this sight is part of his life, so much so that we generally stop and exchange a few words with Robi, who is often to be found not far from our block, rifling through the giant wheelie bins in the mornings. 

“Why vacant?” I ask.

The underpass is busy, I’m crouched down by him, the crowd almost sweeps us away. He thinks for a moment.

“Because they haven’t got any locks,” he replies.  

I think I get it. I stand up and we go on.  They have no doors, hence no locks on their non-doors, so they are vacant.  I can’t be sure that’s what he means, but he will say no more, his lips are sealed.  My little baby.

We come across Robi every day around eight, hard at work among the wheelie bins.  Robi is in a wheelchair which he uses to roll right up to a container and when he is close enough, he swings forward to raise its lid and with his two muscular arms lifts himself out of the chair. For Robi has no legs.  His shoulders are preternaturally broad: he grips the side of the container with one arm and with the other he starts rummaging about.  If he finds anything, he throws it out, later using a stick to root about in the pile and see if there’s anything that can be made use of.  He would hang on like this for a minute or two, then flop back into his chair, exhausted, his arms trembling.  When he lifts himself up, there’s an occasional flash of his stumps.  The back of his trousers is stained; obviously he can’t always get out in time.  One summer when the caretaker had washed out the containers and they were drying with their lids flung open, I was about to throw out some cat litter.  The wheelchair was there but no sign of Robi.  When I leaned into the container I suddenly recoiled from the damp, rank smell.  Robi was standing inside the container, or rather, he would have been, if he’d had anything to stand on. He was inside it, leafing through an old copy of Playboy.  I almost dumped the cat litter over his head.  He gave me a fright. I asked him what he was doing there, to which he replied, cool as a cucumber, without even looking up, that he was reading.  

“Can you get yourself out of there?” I asked.  He gave me a look of contempt so profound that it made me blush, not least because, though he couldn’t have guessed, what flashed through my mind was that I ought quickly to take a picture: Legless man in a wheelie bin.  You could easily live in one of these, he added as he went back to his reading matter.  I could imagine it: a ‘habited’ wheelie bin.

That had all happened in the summer, but now it’s autumn and quite cool, leaves litter the pavement.  Looking at the wheels of the wheelchair, I notice something has happened since yesterday. Robi has threaded pink and lime-green shoelaces through the spokes, so there’s a colourful blur as the wheelchair spins along.  It must have taken him some time, but it was worth it.  My son is overjoyed and waves to Robi for a long time.  As I say goodbye I reflect on the colour of Robi’s face: it reminds me so much of someone.  Or rather of something.  Yes: it’s the old man’s dead body, his yellow skull.  Robi has a skull-like face. He won’t be with us much longer, certainly not by winter.

On Friday I have to go down to Kecskemét.  I haven’t been there for many years, not once since the Old Man died.  On the train, though, I still have the feeling that it’s him that I am going to visit.  The landscape is autumnal, crows circle above, a mist hovers above the bare fields.  As I watch the various shades of brown and grey, and the thick smoke swirling up from somewhere, I wonder where the boundary is, that borderline between life and non-life, between life and death, whether there is some kind of definite borderland at all. I wonder about the living and the dead, about how over the years I have learnt nothing, I’ve merely grown older, and I wonder what has happened to my self-esteem and what has taken its place, and about all the things that have not, in fact, changed and would still make it impossible for me to kiss goodbye to someone who was about to depart. 

I miss the afternoon train back and have several hours to wait for the next one.  I take a stroll in the park by the station, then sit down on a bench in the playground.  A – no doubt –  Sunday father is shivering as he keeps a wary eye on his track-suited little boy, who is intently piling gravel onto the slide.  From time to time the father snaps tersely at him to stop it, but the boy, who must be about the same age as mine, pays no attention.  The man turns aside, lights up and cups his raw hands around his cigarette.  I’m cold.

The boy grows bored of the slide game, climbs into a tunnel of many colours intended for children smaller than he is, and spends some time inside it before coming out.  From his hands there dangles a tampon that he takes over to his father.  The man throws it away angrily, and they set off home.

I go into the waiting room, because it is getting dark and cold, and there’s still a long wait before the train is due.  I sit down on a bench: at least it’s heated in here. I scan the adverts.  A vagrant, leaning on a crutch, stumbles in, goes over to the white flip-top rubbish bin in the corner, and contemplates it at length.

On the side of the bin a freshly painted sign in blue declares:  You are in Europe!  Do not litter!  The homeless man undoes his fly and urinates into the bin, even spilling a little.  Then he hobbles over to a bench in the corner, lies down, curls up, and falls asleep.

I’m still very cold, time drags by, I don’t feel like reading; I’m tired.  Slowly, I begin to envy the position the man’s in. I stretch out on the bench and nod off, my head on my bag, my cold hands resting in my armpits, where it’s warmest. We have both lain there for about ten minutes when a railwayman comes in, plastic carrier-bag in hand.  He looks round carefully, then switches off the fluorescent light.

Apparently, there’s no one here.