Tranquility by Attila Bartis Page A

brief contemplation he said, no, she shouldn’t write that, too ambiguous, those imperialists out there might misunderstand and think that the family here would come to harm. Rather, she should write that even existentially we honor and appreciate talents like her. To which my sister responded, Esteemed Mother, here they appreciate me and not just existentially, though for now I can send you only five hundred dollars a month. Incidentally, I’d rather be a chambermaid here in some motel than the first violinist at a concert given in honor of the Party Congress. I beg you, please don’t write to me about this any more.
    Mother, in response, instead of seeking Comrade Fenyő’s advice, made a list of all the leading roles and state decorations she’d be deprived of by her snotty little daughter’s defection and demanded that Judit return home immediately. She would not put up with walk-on parts for the rest of her life because of her daughter, that little bitch of a slut. Either she takes the first available flight home, or her mother would consider her dead fromthis moment on. Mother also guaranteed that, as one does a dead person, she’d bury her daughter. She’d take all her left-behind junk to the public cemetery.
    .   .   .
    One morning, while looking for a pill to soothe a headache, I was astonished to find ripped-open envelopes at the bottom of the Wertheim safe, because I thought that I was the one who read all Judit’s letters to my mother.
    When you think about it, the Metropolitan is not such a bad place. But it’s terrible that you still can’t read well, Son. I’m not at all surprised you couldn’t graduate from high school.
    It wasn’t reading that I flunked, Mother, I said.
    Wasn’t it? Well, never mind, go on, she said, and dripped the soft-boiled egg slowly onto the toast, and I continued to read. But those letters were talking about things very different from those in the three letters addressed to Miss Rebeka Weér, care of the theater, and which my mother hid behind the medicine box in the Wertheim safe. In the third one, Judit was already using the informal address, not impertinently or disobediently, only addressing her as one woman would another. Shame spread over seven pages, ripped out of a music notebook, and I just stood in the middle of the room, realizing that beginning with my sister’s first period I had been left out of certain things. I was about to replace the envelopes when I noticed my mother’s pitying look in the mirror.
    Poor thing, she said while taking the music sheets out of my hand. She held them like a dead rat, with two fingers, her eyes colorless, like those of animals beaten to death, and I knew that from that moment on we’d beliving our lives differently. The rules we had followed until then had just lost their validity.
    My poor little nobody, she said and left me there alone.
    .   .   .
    She came back late in the evening, together with a stagehand who wore a sleeveless shirt and carried a prop casket on his shoulder.
    Over here, my mother showed him the place, kicking aside the clothes strewn on the floor, shoved five hundred forints into the boy’s hand and closed the door after him.
    I was still sitting on the bed.
    Come, lie down, Mother, I said.
    Get out of my room, she said, but I didn’t move.
    She opened the coffin with her foot and threw in Judit’s letters. Then all the sheet music from Paganini to Stravinsky, then the music stand, the strings and the resin. From the birth certificate and the left-behind clothes to Judit’s coffee mug, she threw everything into the coffin. Then she fished out the yellow shoebox with the photographs, sat down next to me and without moving a single muscle of her face, she lobbed them in, one by one. As if she were separating the chaff from the wheat: anything with the slightest hint at Judit Weér’s