said.
Margit thought about running her hand along Erzsébet’s long skinny arm to see if its texture was really so parchment thin. She wanted to cup Erzsi’s wrist to see if her fist would unclench. She touched Erzsébet’s collarbone, canted like it had been broken and carelessly set. The wet Sandor spilled in her clavicle’s hollow was cool over Sandor’s blue thumb bruises there.
“We carried rocks and bodies,” Erzsi said. “Stiff or soft, puffed with juices and gas.”
“The bodies or rocks?” Margit asked.
Erzsi laughed, more a cough. Sandor stood. He looked toward Erzsi, Margit, then his coat on the peg.
“He means to save me, raise the dead,” Erzsi said.
Margit lit a damp cigarette and passed it. “Kindness hurts, doesn’t it?”
Erzsébet blew out smoke. “Especially from you.” She raised her legs, kneaded cigarette ash into her knees’ dented caps, rubbed it in like a powdery salve. Margit could not help but see where her underpants’ cloth came apart from its elastic band.
“I bet you think pity is stronger than love,” Margit said.
Erzsébet turned to the wall. Where her shirt came undone, her backbone seemed too loosely fused. It reminded Margit of pig’s knuckles in aspic turned pale as it jelled. If she were to lick Erzsi’s spine, she thought it would taste just like that, sour and vinegarish.
“Love’s just hugging bones,” Erzsi said.
Sandor stalled at the foot of the bed. Margit smelled Erzsi’s Emke perfume, her own nerves and his sweat. “You can’t prove that to me,” Margit said.
Erzsébet made a noise in her throat. She climbed from the bed. Her stride was an incautious lunge like her hips were attached to yanked strings. Jerky as if she would fall, but she didn’t fall as she stepped away from them both. “He carried me five hundred kilometers on his back.” Erzsébet hugged herself. “Crows waited to pick out my eyes from Katowice to right here.”
“She’s exaggerating,” Sandor said, but Margit thought she was not.
Erzsébet stood before the bit of mirror, skew-hipped. She touched her hair and her mouth. Even after what happened to her she’s still vain, Margit thought.
“You look like some soft creamy thing, your figure’s a pitcher of cream,” Erzsi said. She pressed her concave belly, watching Margit in the glass. Margit leaned on her elbows to better see Erzsébet’s loose white smile. Erzsébet pressed her stomach hard, though her flesh there seemed pliant and slack.
“Please,” Sandor said.
“All you women who live. So plush, so selfish.” Erzsébet chewed the ends of her hair hanging into her face. “I watch you eating and drinking, holding your lover’s hands.”
“That’s enough,” Sandor said.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t pain me, everything’s already happened to me,” Erzsi said.
“I don’t have a lover yet,” Margit said. She felt giddy, unmoored on the bed.
“Pity,” Erzebet said. She dug her new nails in her wrists until Margit could tell she broke skin. “You should have left us alone, but love’s not wise, either,” she said.
Here, a stopped clock, factory smoke, windblown leaves. Six hundred kilometers ahead, the borders are open, or they shoot everybody on sight, or we’ll hang by our necks. Last I heard they’d be starving the prisoners soon, you’d be dead. I like to think rumors are leaves, insignificant on the wind.
But Sandor, you always liked facts: the Museum of Coal Mining’s here. In this place they’ve been rooting the earth since before the Bronze Age. A plaque on the station platform says fire burned Kisveresfold in 1836, flood drowned it the following year.
I can’t tell this town from the last, the same suitcases tied with twine line the tracks like the town before this. Coats, faces, soil, all run to gradations of iron and pitch. Couples share cigarettes, I watch them through scratches from coins lovers etched in the train’s rattly glass and it hurts, although you never smoked. Ink from the papers you forged has never come clean from my dress. Your fingerprint bruises are still pressed against my eyelids.
I knuckle them shut so I won’t remember we always did like daytime best, its high white sad grace like today.
Inside your room, our clock was the single note tick of spent rain. A radio faint through the wall jumbled lies masquerading as news, that the peasants would keep all their land. Though I only just stepped inside, I said, “I better go, you’ve got work.” I waited for you to say don’t, took a step toward the bed as if without purpose, intent. You stood cavalier at my back, fingers under the straps of my dress. You turned my shoulders, pressed your thumb in the cleft of my chin.
“Before you were born, that’s where an angel touched you so you’d forget heaven,” you said.
I laughed, it was nerves. “Leave it to God to make us forget the good parts,” I said.
You touched my temple, my jaw, the flushed side of my face. “A little bit scared and a little bit sad,” you said. I wasn’t cold but I shook. “What we know about each other could fit in my pockets,” I said.
“You’re not wearing pockets,” you said.
Light from the window pooled on the barren mattress. We were mostly naked by then, you in your ink-stained blue shirt, me with my underwear trapped around my ankles, my dress to my waist. There was not enough space in my throat for my heart and for swallowing at once, so I stalled, put my mouth to the sour sooty pulse at your neck.
“You’re going to hurt me,” I said. One sock on, I didn’t know what to do with the other one balled in my fist.
“I won’t mean to,” you said. The kicked-aside blanket bunched like a mute chaperone at the foot of the bed.
“Intentions don’t count, only acts,” I replied, then I let you push and I fell. Thin light fell across my eyelids. I helped you turn me around, crumbs and coins in my knees, elbows, wrists. I thought about gathering my wits but I couldn’t even gather my breath, and then mercifully I couldn’t think.
I still see us plain, like this town, its sorrow of commerce passed by. Coal, severed stumps of horseradish in carts, the broken-nosed statue of Stalin that every town has. A flurry of pigeons flutters like loose afterthoughts around its bare head. A man in a shabby brown coat sails a newspaper boat on an isthmus of mud. Where the road meets the track, a woman like me swings her purse, she tucks her ambivalent smile in her scarf as she waits. I recall how that was.
Now I can’t forget the good parts, even under this afternoon light that absolves what remains. The name of this place moving past which means small bloody earth. The man with one arm by the blinking switch box feeds small nervous birds, and I think how before the war, he might have tried cupping their tight beating hearts in both fists.
I have to not look at him, press my brow to the glass like we touched our heads to your low windowpane in 1945. We both saw the same limp-shoed men passing by as right now but it looked different then.
How can I simply explain? It’s not fair you once leaned into my back, reached around with your arms around mine, tipped the window to rain. I plucked a weed through the bars for the vase on your one yellow chair. My breasts became streaked with wet rust, but I liked it, I didn’t care.
“You’re my torture in bed,” I had said.
“Talk like that you’ll get us started again,” you replied. You spoke into my hair and I can’t help but bless you and curse you for this: Sandor, I think plenty now, but I’m still trying to gather my wits.
A day, three, the year passed.
Long, damp sticky hours in bed, his eyelashes teasing her brow. Sleepsweat on his shirt.