Tranquility by Attila Bartis Page B

existence would go into the coffin, the wheat into my lap. I looked at the print of the Virgin Mary on the wall I was facing and listened to the sound of the photos – taken at Mother’s Day concerts, birthday parties and class outings – as they hit the wood of the coffin. I knew that I appeared in most of them, too. And didn’t feel a thing. Not even fatigue. Simply nothing.
    Then she looked around the apartment once more to make sure shehadn’t missed anything. In the bathroom she found a slip, in the maid’s room an old schoolbag.
    The schoolbag was mine, I said.
    All right, she said, and threw it back among the suitcases and other odds and ends.
    It was really mine.
    Then she brought in the toolbox from the pantry and began nailing the lid. She bent all the nails because she didn’t hold them right. After the fifth or sixth try, she shoved the hammer into my hand and I nailed down the lid all around. It would have made no sense to tell her to ask one of the stagehands to do the job. Or maybe it would have, only I didn’t think of it at the time. Except for thinking of how to drive in the nails, my mind was blank. Then I said, Goodnight, Mother.
    .   .   .
    In the morning, she went to the Catholic bookstore where, besides books, one could buy everything necessary for religious rituals. From phosphorescent rosary beads to holy-water basins for home use, from veiled Virgin Marys with the infant Jesus made of plaster of paris to three-dimensional Golgothas; in short, everything the domestic light industry could produce or was possible to purchase from wholesalers of the Vatican to facilitate religious observance. She purchased ten blank death notices and filled them all out before I got up.
    Good morning, Mother, I said.
    A-ha, she said, and with her pearly letters she continued to copy from the telephone book the mailing address of the Ministry, because she was sending death notices not only to my sister, but to the theater’s party secretary, the Minister of Culture and Education, and to János Kádár himself.
    She showed no signs of madness. I stopped behind her and watched how she licked the stamps and stuck them to the black-bordered envelopes.
    Why don’t you stop that, Mother, I said.
    Don’t you stick your nose into this, Son, she said and removed my hand from her shoulder.
    .   .   .
    Then she left and paid for twenty-five years’ use of a plot in the rear corner of the Kerepesi cemetery, among the children’s graves grown over with creepers against the brick wall separating the cemetery from the rubber works where, when they test tires, the sighs escaping from the valves sound as if the dead were breathing in the ground. The gravediggers made faces because section eleven was their nightmare, that’s where the roots of linden, chestnut, and plane trees get all tangled together and there is no shittier job than trying to cut through them with axes; even carving a grave out of rocks is easier than that. In the end, they chased away the pheasants, cut all the weeds and dug the hole without realizing they had become honorary stagehands and without appreciating how well they fit their temporary roles. For example, stonecutter József Smukk was so terribly fond of Finlandia vodka that it took him but a few minutes to carve my sister’s name, date of birth and death into a prefabricated imitation stone obelisk; he also gilded the letters and saw to the transportation of the monument. The funeral director overlooked the lack of a death certificate; to be more exact, a carton of American cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch bourbon that Mother purchased in the Kigyó Street foreign currency shop with the money Judit had sent her became my sister’s death certificate. In short, all the obstacles, including the objection that nobody’s been buried here for the last thirty years, were overcome, the four gravediggers