Bartók Express

‘It is the first time that I have both of my parents around’, exclaimed Tamás, as they sat
around the table at a rented apartment in Pula.
His fifty-some years old father, Anton lived in a nearby village. He had given a ride to
Mária twenty years ago, then hitch-hiking along the Yugoslav coast. Afterwards, he had come
three or four times to Hungary to meet her.
‘Me or the child’, he said, when Mária became pregnant, and Mária chose her son. As it
turned out, Anton was already married.
The meeting did not turn out well. Anton behaved rudely towards Mária. He took up her
camera from the table to examine it.
‘It’s cheap and old-fashioned’, he said.
‘The quality of a photo doesn’t depend on the price of the machine’ – she said affronted.
She used to take lots of pictures in her youth, and was proud of them.
Anton’s long hair was already gray. He couldn’t come because of the war, he said
apologetically. His movements were still quick, but his eyes lost their sparkle.
Tamás had seen his father only twice. This time he called him because he had big news.
Anton didn’t seem to take any interest in the phone call. Yet Tamás had even learned
Croatian for his sake. When they switched into German, since Tamás spoke it almost fluently,
he related about his imminent journey to Munich. He would be a volunteer at a hospital for a
year, he said. At last he dictated his new address, and Anton obediently put it down, although
both knew that he would not use it.
After the call Tamás sat in his room with burning cheeks.
The following day Mária went shopping. She had to buy lots of things, because the hour
of departure was already at hand. So she hadn’t time to go into the photo shop for her current
photos.
She gave the afternoon to Tamás, although she had urgent translations. After lunch, she
popped into his room. This time she didn’t reprimand him about the mess. Does he want to
spend the last afternoon with her, or stay behind the computer as usual?
They decided to pass the time together.
‘What shall we do? Shall we play cards?’, Mária asked.
But it was a Christmas pastime only. They played with her old father who was an expert
at card games. However old he was – ninety one now–, he always won.
‘I’d rather talk’, Tamás said.
He immediately brought out from his room his favorite book, written by Jaroslav Hašek.
Then he enlisted those short stories from which she could choose.
‘Just not the one with the judge, I don’t like it’, Mária said.
The agreed upon a shorter one. The shorter, the better, Mária thought.
Then they just chatted.
They went to bed early. They needed their nerves for the following day. Mária even
ordered the taxi that would carry them to the railway station.
In the morning she got up with a heavy heart, heavier than she expected. She knew that
there was no way out, her son had to learn German perfectly. ‘Do you want to play cards or
chat’, she asked again. They preferred chatting for the remaining few hours. Mária chose the
sofa, and Tamás sat before her on the ground, back to her. She ruffled his hair lazily. It
embarrassed her a bit, since he was a big, twenty-some years old young man. However, she
wouldn’t have this opportunity for a whole year.
Time flew by. Minutes became hours. It was time to make the sandwiches for Tamás.
When she finished, they ate lunch. Long before the time of departure, since Tamás was very
slow. Then Mária put on her watch, and checked that her son had done so as well, as he was
so forgetful.
 The enormous suitcase was very heavy, they could hardly drag it through the narrow
hall. Mária took great care not to cause any damage to a poster which she had brought from
Colmar ten years ago, it showed Martin Schongauer’s Madonna. It was the apple of her eye,
reminding her of youth and her travels.
Tamás put on his backpack and brought with him a smaller green bag. It was a good
purchase, they had bought it together with the suitcase. Tamás liked the little flask that
belonged to it, that’s why he was willing to accept it, not like other bags which he refused. He
carried all his schoolbooks in plastic bags.
Down, before the blockhouse, there was a taxi waiting. They hurried toward it almost
running. A young man climbed out of the cab. He wore baseball cap. Mária asked him about
the booking, but he didn’t remember their name. However, they climbed in.
Tamás wanted to sit in front as usual. He had got used to it at the time of his accident.
Mária remembered even the date; the 27th of April. It had happened in the year of her son’s
graduation. He had gone to his Latin teacher, but as he had run across the road in front of a
bus, he had been hit by a car.
It was the Latin teacher who brought the news to Mária.
‘Can you sit down, please?’, said the woman. ‘Your son had an accident.’
Mária was so shocked that she could hardly ask:
‘Is he alive?’
Tamás’s healing coincided with his graduation. He took his exams in cast, hopping on
one leg.
Mária put onto the backseat the green bag beside the backpack. It was safer there. She
had counted the fare of the taxi before and put it aside. She took care to bring with herself
their monthly mortgage as well. Later she would go to the bank on her way home.
The cab driver was a talkative type. Based on his intelligent face and the newspapers
smashed into the front of the car she took him to be a one-time intellectual.
‘Where are you going?’, he asked.
Mária and her son explained that it was only Tamás who was leaving.
‘Munich is a beautiful town’, the driver said. ‘I’ve been there once. Is it an excursion or
a longer stay?’
Mária bent down to see the driver’s face in the rearview mirror. Thus she explained that
her son would be a nurse in a hospital. An EU program. She met the driver’ gaze in the
mirror. This time the brown, little eyes seemed too sly to her.
‘I have a friend there as well. She is a hairdresser’, the driver said. ‘First she had a hard
time there, but later it became easier.’
‘Did she speak German?’
‘Yes. She said that at first they didn’t accept her. So it goes. But if you behave yourself,
you get your reward.’
The taxi almost flew toward the railway station. They already saw its outlines. Mária
could hardly see because of the blinding sunshine, it was a clear day.
‘How warm it is this spring’, she said, but the driver already took no notice of them. He
seemed to be interested only to get them out of his cab.
Mária looked at her watch. They had exactly an hour before the departure. No problem.
She would get on the train with her son and have a good talk.
The driver asked for 1900 Forints, and she gave him 2400. She had thought about the tip
and put it at the front of her purse to be at hand at the right moment. She hardly zipped up her
purse when she reached at the knob to open the door of the cab. The two young men had
already sprung out to the pavement. As she had sat on the left side of the taxi, now she had to
take care of the passing cars. When stepping up from the road onto the pavement, she
unbuttoned her coat as it was very hot outside.
 By this time Tamás was beside her with all their luggage. He had magically produced
them from the boot with the help of the driver. Mária grabbed the green bag. Tamás put the
big backpack on his back, and dragged along the suitcase. It rolled on quite easily.
The train was already in. Mária knew the number of the compartment and that of the
seat by heart – 257 and 26. She thought that they weren’t allowed to get on, but Tamás
opened the door with a click.
At his seat, he flung the big backpack, the green bag and his cap onto the luggage rack
above, and slid the suitcase between the two opposing double seats. At home, Mária had been
worried that there wouldn’t be enough space for them, or he had to pay an extra fee from his
little money. Now she sat down face to face with him, and opened her own shoulder bag. It
somehow felt too flat and lightweight. She rummaged in it for her subway tickets. She found
them, but the purse and the 60 000 Forints of the monthly mortgage was not in it.
She told Tamás the bad news. They at once removed everything from the rack, and
fingered about all their pockets. The purse was nowhere to be found. They opened the little
green bag. There was a purse in it, but it was for Tamás.
“There’s no use to dig deeper”, he said.
They opened all the pockets of the nice little green bag for safety’s sake. Even the
backpack’s pockets had their turn. Mária was surprised to see that Tamás was about to take
with him lots of age-old exercise books to a foreign country.
‘I’ll run to make a phone call’, she said gasping. ‘I’ll be back within ten minutes’.
‘Come back soon’, Tamás said in alarm.
She ran to the phone booths of the station. She dialed the number of the taxi company
which she knew by heart. She heard a pleasant man’s voice, and gave an account of what had
happened.
‘Hold the line’, the voice said.
The line broke after two minutes. She dialed again. This time a woman answered the
phone. Mária began to explain herself again, but somehow the woman knew the facts. No, the
young colleague hadn’t found any purse, she said.
Mária staggered out of the open booth in a haze. She ran along their previous path, but
without any result. Back to the train. In the meantime, Tamás once again had searched
through everything – in vain. They were running out of time. They had only half an hour left.
Passengers were drifting in one by one. Mária took off her coat.
‘I go off and look around myself’, Tamás said.
Mária was sitting alone now on his seat. What will happen if the train starts without him
and me sitting here?, she thought in horror. Minutes were ticking by, and she got more and
more nervous. That’s what became from our nice little chat, she thought bitterly.
Tamás came back soon, without success. They had a quarter of an hour left until the
departure. They spent it speaking about retelling every minute detail of their loss.
An elegant older woman took her seat beside them. The half Hungarian, half foreigner
kind on these international trains. One could tell that she was listening to their conversation.
A young, tall man with a hawk nose arrived, and sat down beside Tamás. There wasn’t
enough space for three persons. Mária stood up, and put on her coat.
‘Now it’s time to leave.’
As it turned out, the young man didn’t buy a seat reservation. Tamás at once came into
action, and began to explain it in his bad English. He loved to meddle in anything.
Mária started for the door. Tamás got off with her. The last five minutes went by beside
the train. The boy flung his arms around her neck. Mária tweaked his nose. She felt as if she
was twisting some lifeless rubber. As if it didn’t belong to her son any more. She felt numb
but she knew that within minutes she wouldn’t see him for a long time. There would be
nothing to replace his presence.
Then she sent him up onto the train. He was looking down at her from the door.
 ‘Go in, you’ll leave at once’, she said. ‘We’ve had enough accidents.’
The door closed behind him, and she set off for home. She struggled her way through
the rush hour crowd. She hated these faceless bodies packed into their padded jackets. She
clutched her bag with the remaining money to her shoulder.
At home she had nothing to do. It was dark by now, and the light was not enough for
reading. She was too distraught for it anyway.
She lay down on the sofa where yesterday she had been chatting with her son. She
wrapped herself up warmly in blankets, and just lay there listening to her own loudly beating
heart. Finally it was time to go to bed. She wasn’t in the mood to think about anything. Sleep
was not easy anyway, so she made an herb infusion.
A sudden thought came as she lay in bed. Did she leave the receipt of her photos in the
lost purse? If so, how could she get them back?
She thought of the eleven or more very good photographs that she had lost years ago.
They were perfect rendering of perfect moments on her travels. She could catch the moment
as a closed shutter was mirrored in an open window, in a narrow street at Dubrovnik. There
were fabulous lights there, and the photo became fabulous too. Somehow nevertheless she
might have thrown them out unknowingly during a spring-cleaning. She couldn’t go back and
find the same window. If so, even Dubrovnik would never be the same again. The town was
in ruins. Anton fought there, she remembered.
There was a minuscule hope, however, that she somehow left the photos in the upper
compartment of the dresser. Loads of old junk had been gathering here through the years.
Now she decided to try her luck.
She sprang from her bed. It was half past eleven. Not the best time for cleaning. She
might awake the neurotic tenant, an old woman who lived below them and knocked at their
door complaining about the slightest noise.
If so, then so be it. Mária dragged the ladder before the dresser. She lifted up one thing
after the other: children’s clothes, little anoraks and padded jackets. She even found a red
raincoat among them. Tamás might have been seven years old or so when he had worn it. She
remembered well this raincape. By God, how little he had been, and what a giant he was now.
Textbooks were also hidden among the piles of clothes – she put them aside, onto the table of
her son’s room. It was the product of a decade and a half: grammar and history books,
coloring books, nursery rhymes, even a booklet for sexual enlightenment. They were covered
in dust. No matter, she would wash her hands later.
The dresser became empty, but the photos were nowhere to be seen. She decided to look
for them in the kitchen, in a similar upper compartment. It was dustier than the previous one.
My hand couldn’t be dustier anyway, she thought, and lifted one old exercise-book after the
other. They contained her own teenage poems and journals. The photos weren’t here. The dust
stung her throat but she worked on stubbornly.
There remained one last possibility, a narrow slot for an old backpack, which had been
out of use for more than a decade. She had used it for her travels. It was a formidable white
mass of dust that she didn’t dare to touch until now. When she carefully flipped its flap, the
dust exploded and flew in every direction in the little flat. When she took off the whole
skeleton-like structure. The motes of dust covered it like snowflakes, one layer above the
other. She stood the backpack beside the dresser in the narrow hall very cautiously, so that she
did not touch it while passing. Tomorrow she would throw it out. Quietly she put back the
ladder into its place, and took a bath to cleanse herself of the dust.
She fell asleep unusually soon, perhaps because of fatigue.
In her sleep she roamed about an unknown foreign country, this time on some seaside.
Her son escorted her. The coastal mountain ridge consisted of two distinct parts. One was
covered with lush, green forests, the other was an arid, bare, rocky landscape. She decided in
her sleep to explore both of them.
 At this moment, a scuffle broke out among the hordes of tourists around her. They all
stared into the distance, toward some blue mountains. They spoke of a boat that could take
them there.
And they were on this boat already – she and Tamás, in all the throng. It might have
been a ferry, because the hazy horizon and the azure water disappeared altogether, and they
were down in the belly of the boat.
They became hungry and wanted to eat. Two kinds of food were measured out for the
passengers on distinct floors. One for those with good money, the other for them, who could
pay only with change. Mária chose two sandwiches and was about to pay for them when she
woke up.
It was dawn already. She slept a lot.
When she staggered out onto the hall, she saw that the dust covered the floor like thick
white mould.