Aleksandar Tisma - The Book of Blam

In the back house, where tenants, the widow Erzsébet Csokonay and her crippled daughter, lived, no such changes took place, except that every summer Erzsébet Csokonay would fasten a brush to a long pole and whitewash the walls around the tiny green windows and the glass door that gave access to her kitchen and from there to the apartment’s only real room. This door had once faced the back wall of her landlords’ house, which had nothing but the pantry’s ventilation window high under the eaves, but now it looked out on a large, modern, wider-than-high bathroom window. And from that window, every evening, the newly pubescent Miroslav Blam watched the widow at her bath.

It might be said that this festival of nudity came about quite by chance, when one night Blam went into the bathroom without turning on the light and, noticing a hazy glow coming from the courtyard, placed the bathroom stool on the toilet, climbed up on the stool, and beheld the widow bathing. But had he not been led by a vague inkling? Erzsébet Csokonay was a pale brunette who kept a kerchief tied tightly around her hair and always walked quickly and slightly bent, as if burdened by her widowed state, her poverty, and the responsibility of caring for the child she had brought into the world with a dislocated hip. Her mute resignation was visible to the growing Blam not only as she went daily through the courtyard to work (that is, to the houses of the well-to-do when extra help was needed) and back (to feed her daughter, whom she had to leave by herself) but also in the Blams’ house itself, where she sometimes did the washing, helped with spring cleanings, and so on. She worked quickly and silently, almost angrily, constantly flexing her ample body, her old skirt billowing around her like a ship’s sail in a tropical wind. But Blam did not focus on her female qualities until Lajos Kocsis began paying her regular visits.

Kocsis was married, and although he lived with his wife and children at the house and at the expense of his butcher father-in-law (he was unemployed), he enjoyed the luxury of having a mistress. As he made no sacrifice for his pleasure — no material sacrifice, at least, for he lacked the resources — Erzsébet Csokonay not only had to keep working, she had to work harder, because he expected her to receive him in a clean, well-heated, well-stocked home. In her landlords’ house, the front house, the new situation met with unconditional condemnation. The Blams, peering out from the glassed-in veranda, where they enjoyed sitting after noonday meals or in the evenings, and seeing the short but solid, straight-backed figure of the middle-aged man in his threadbare but neatly brushed suit making his way through the courtyard to the back house, would exchange angry, ironic looks and mumble, “There he goes again!” then launch into a long discussion about the injustice of the relationship between the vain, hollow man and the helpless, lonely widow. They would never have admitted to anyone, not even to themselves, that part of their indignation stemmed from the disloyalty of their occasional servant, whom love and the sacrifices it entailed had delivered from the bonds of slavery, for Erzsébet would leave a task at the Blams’ undone whenever her idle lover showed up unexpectedly at her door.

The sixteen-year-old Miroslav, however, was instinctively aware of the self-interest involved in his parents’ condemnation, and in his adolescent rebellion he took the side of the lovers. He was just coming to grips with his sexuality, as yet vague and undefined, and his parents’ rejection of Kocsis as a moral degenerate only served to weaken his own moral reserves. Whenever he saw Kocsis stride through the courtyard — freshly shaven, his gray-flecked hair combed back smoothly, a frayed tie forced into a knot around his ruddy bull neck — and disappear into Erzsébet Csokonay’s house, Blam’s mind and thoughts would fly from the textbook he so detested into the tiny, sealed-off room where everything he longed for was actually taking place. He would spend hours imagining their kissing, hugging, panting, their naked bodies arching and convulsing in shameless lust, after which the flesh-and-blood Kocsis would emerge into the courtyard — back straight, every hair in place, face and neck even ruddier than before — to be followed a few minutes later by the widow, off to pick up her crippled daughter from school or do some housework for a neighbor, a kerchief thrown over her bent head. Blam would follow her longingly with his eyes, picturing the vibrant body under the coarse fabric of her dress, and if he happened to catch her narrow-eyed glance, he felt singed.

The night he discovered the observation point at the bathroom window, his eye went straight to the window-panes in Erzsébet Csokonay’s door, which, though hung with a gathered muslin curtain, left enough room uncovered at the top to afford him an unobstructed view of the kitchen from his post on the toilet. The widow was moving about the kitchen under a light he could not see, and Blam could tell from the intense concentration behind her otherwise fitful movements that she had something specific in mind. She piled the dishes from the table on the stove, folded the tablecloth, opened and closed the sideboard, and moved the table and chairs to one side. Then she placed a large white basin in the space she had created, went over to the stove, took the lid off a pot, picked up the pot, and poured water into the basin through billowing steam. The steam rose, spread, and for a few moments the woman was invisible, but it soon dispersed, and there she was without the kerchief, her long chestnut hair pinned behind her neck. She unbuttoned her blouse, took it off, almost sloughed it off, pulled down her skirt, stepped out of it, lifted her shift over her head, and shook off her slippers. She now stood in the middle of the kitchen totally naked. Blam nearly moaned: for all his prurient conjectures he had never dreamed that the body under the coarse dress would be so tender, so beautifully put together. The widow’s skin was smooth across the long milky thighs and almost transparent on the disproportionately small, quivery breasts, where it seemed to have been gathered prudishly by the two blood-red seals of the flat, finely wrinkled nipples.

Then the scene lost its titillation: the widow began to wash. She bent over, so low that her shoulders concealed her breasts, dipped a bar of soap in the basin, rubbed it in her hands, and spread the suds over her arms and shoulders, under the arms, across the chest, and all the way back to the spinal column. Then she carefully rinsed off the soap, straddled the basin, squatted, and lathered her private parts, belly, behind, and thighs. Still squatting — her breasts resting on her knees like flattened cones and her belly and private parts hidden in the shadow between her thighs, except for a tuft of short dark hair — she poured more water over herself. Then she stood up, stepped back into the basin, and lathered and rinsed her legs. She was completely visible now, glittering from the drops of water, rosy from the rubbing. She reached for a towel and wrapped it around her body, holding it at the breasts. Then she stepped into her slippers, walked through the door, and disappeared into the dark of the back room.

Frightened, Blam jerked his head away from the window and stood trembling for a few moments, wondering whether she had seen him, listening for the door to the back house to open, for the patter of slippers, for a complaint about the intruder. Nothing happened. Cautiously, still enthralled, he took another peek. It was nearly as dark outside as it was in the bathroom, and he sensed more than saw that the narrow gullet of the kitchen was now empty, the white blotch of the basin the only trace of the recent scene. Erzsébet Csokonay had most likely gone to bed.