Tranquility by Attila Bartis Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t scribble or paint all kinds of tripe all over the place. It would be very difficult to undermine the working classes with string quartets. In a word, he, as comrade minister, would be extremely grateful to Comrade Fenyő if he could find the Achilles heel of the maternal heart.
    Thus, Comrade Fenyő – at whom everyone had dared to laugh, at least for the duration of the last five-year plan but only discreetly, of course – well, Comrade Fenyő spent a whole sleepless night racking his brain, trying to figure out where the Achilles heel of a mother’s heart would be. He was even peeved a little that gone were the days when one’s hands weren’t tied, and then he thought what the hell, this was still a people’s democracy, and the next day he asked Cleopatra to exchange her play script with one of the slave girls. “You’re kidding me, right?” Cleopatra asked, but Comrade Fenyő said no, comrade Weér, this wasn’t a joke and your new role is an excellent one; and if we really think about it, the people’s theaters along the shore of the Tisza may also need outstanding performers of your caliber. Cleopatra responded by telling the director to get this asshole off the stage; the director, however, asked her, as his esteemed coworker, not to interrupt the flow of the rehearsal and, if she pleased, to learn by tomorrow thosefew lines of her new role because he, the director, was still determined to take part in the Prague theater festival.
    Then Cleopatra ran home, just as she was. Black tears were streaming from her eyes because she hadn’t even bothered to remove her makeup. With a black wig topped by a glass-diamond diadem on her head, she ran through the downtown streets, in a bra decorated with glass rubies, Egyptian sandals on her feet and a synthetic silk cape on her shoulders, looking exactly as – based on the poster of a French revue – Comrade Fenyő’s niece had imagined Cleopatra to look. People didn’t believe their eyes. Mothers coming out of the Pioneer department store grasped and turned away the heads of their offspring, the way one rings the neck of a chicken, some wives slapped their ogling husbands around, shamelessly, right there in public, the number seven bus crawled slowly from Liberation Square to the Astoria Hotel because the passengers wouldn’t allow the driver to pass Cleopatra. Only nobody realized who this half-naked woman was with her fluttering cape. They didn’t recognize their actress because they had never seen her shedding real tears, only the kind that, prompted by the Vietnamese ointment smeared on the skin under the eyes, well up at the appropriate moment. The way Antony has never seen Cleopatra cry either, not even when the mailman delivered the letter from the Eastern shores. In fact, he realized only now that Cleopatra’s tears were not mentholated but salty, like everyone else’s, and he didn’t even care that the reason he saw her cry with real feelings – for the first time ever – was that she had lost a damn leading role. He was grateful to the draconic laws of the people’s democracy for these salty tears. He wouldn’t have cared if they had transferred Cleopatra from the privileged camp of state-supported artists not into the tolerated but into the banned category; if her status, based onthe confidential file of her character references, had been lowered even more. Then Antony went into the bathroom for the Valerian drops and a wet towel, undid the straps of her Egyptian sandals, and wiped the dust of Lajos Kossuth Street, The Little Boulevard and the Museum Garden off her ankles and toes. And then he removed the synthetic cape too, so he could wipe off, with another towel, the beads of perspiration collected in the valleys of her vertebrae. To calm the shoulders trembling with her sobbing and the writhing of the hips adorned with a gilded sash. Then he