Translated from Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess
They’ve been working on the metro site for more than three years; carrying construction material and slowly erecting ticket booths, that looked like mushrooms, over a reenforced concrete station. At break time they kept puffing on their cigarettes and kicking bits of gravel around with their boots. It was Marin who bought the smokes from the Chinese market; he’s been peddling them for a long time. Sometimes he’d also sell cases of Harghita beer. He also kept offering them cheap Priluki[1] cigarettes. This will make your spit turn bitter, he told Johnny, with a snort of laughter. You could see that he had hardly any teeth in the front. He was twenty years older than the others and talked with a lisp. Johnny guessed that he was at least forty. Marin waited until he pulled one from the pack that was being offered. You’ve got to croak of something anyway, right brother, he said with a sardonic wink. They say it contains mouse shit.
Johnny lit up, as he tried to think of something pleasant, like the smell of a Marlborough, just so that he wouldn’t have to taste this filth on his tongue. Ever since Ica left and he had to pay on his own the rent on that goddamned room; he had no money left for good quality cigarettes. His bad mood filled his insides like the cheap smoke of the Priluki. The liter of milk that he drank with it only dissolved the thick film that stuck to his pallet.
They worked behind a tall fence which at least kept out strangers. If one of them managed to get inside, from time to time, he would start clicking away taking selfies in front of the lemon-yellow excavators right in the middle of the work area. Johnny remembered clearly when, in his words, last year an army of slant-eyed tourists made their way inside somehow, chattering away non-stop; one of them carried a tiny flag on top of a red umbrella, the rest followed her everywhere; it was hard to get rid of them; they were attracted like flies to shit by the street full of tourists and the smell of goulash.
Right now, it was quiet and there was no commotion; it was lunch time. Johnny and his fellows retreated to the wooden shed at the edge of the square to have a miserable half hour of peace. They gobbled down whatever food they brought with them. In the summer they would gulp down a couple of bottles of beer; when it was below freezing, a shot of hard stuff, always provided by Marin.
After his belly was full, Johnny liked to watch the others, especially Tomek. Every single day, using the same old story that one of the buses from Kistarcsa was dropped from the schedule – clearly BS – Tomek was late for work. And he kept boasting that he had been humping some manicurist chick. He would get it off every morning. They were often pissed at him. Of course, the creep would line up with the rest of them for the pay at the start of the month.
When alone, Johnny sometimes took out a mirror from his pocket and examined his moustache. For the life of him, he never managed to trim it so that it was the same length on each side. He kept trying to fix it so often that the straw-boss told him not to keep kissing his goddamned mirror — get on with cleaning up the rubble instead. From time to time, he would surreptitiously look at the mirror. But the moustache always obeyed its own rules, it was only a few sparse whiskers: on the right it turned up, on the left it hung down. When he lifted the liter carton of milk to his mouth, it dribbled from it, streaming down his pointed chin, onto his caved-in chest and then disappeared into the dusty soil. What are you wasting it for, you dumb dick, Tomek snorted. You should give it to the mice instead, he said leaning against the fence. He had thick eyebrows, was pudgy, far from good looking; yet he was a chick magnet. He would chat them up, night or day.
Johnny tried not to think of Ica, with whom he had lived for only one year. But he wouldn’t have thought that she would find someone only two weeks after they broke up. And he would never have thought that he would miss her so badly. One of Johnny’s acquaintances, saw Ica flirting with a complete stranger. The news made him form a fist with his hand, without wanting to. But even this was at least three months ago. It hurt him for a while; he would have preferred not to leave his room at all; at work he kept avoiding the others. It was Marin who had had enough of it. Buddy, no one is worth this much, and pushed a half empty package of cigarettes under his nose. Have a smoke, he insisted. Johnny obediently took out one, but his stomach started knotting up right away.
These days, he picked a blond woman who worked in the nearby store as a possibility. She was the best looking one around. She was a peroxide blond; her hair was almost as white as snow. To top it off, she had two light blue eyes the size of saucers. Thick lips, made to be kissed. Johnny couldn’t remember when he had last seen a mouth as pretty as this.
He had no idea how he should approach her. You have beautiful eyes, he could say; he suspected that this would not get him anywhere, especially not with this chick. Yet he felt that he needed to succeed with her, no matter what. He pictured himself loitering in front of the store in his dirty overalls with a faded bouquet of flowers in his hand. He dismissed this idea as well. Perhaps he could invite her somewhere, but he couldn’t, for the life of him, think of any place. Nothing that he considered would appeal to this woman. While he lived with Ica, the two of them hardly left the four walls. She was OK with Johnny’s beer at home, and only asked him once in a while for some liqueur from Tesco. In the dog days of the summer, they would drink in the cool corridor overlooking the courtyard of their building. They would beat each other in Kill Zone. From their dilapidated window they could see the city park. However, for Erika from the store, that was her name, Erika, this would no way be enough.
If there were no costumers in the store, she would watch some pirate movie; allegedly she must have seen it a hundred times. She was enchanted by the star, a skinny nervous guy with long hair, once Jack appeared on the screen, from then on, he was the only one who counted. Even when she was at the cash, she kept glancing at the TV; you could tell she was somewhere else, she saw Jack everywhere, instead of one liter milk cartons and cans of liver spread, he was hiding behind rum barrels, and he had a sizeable moustache under his nose; it was thick and dense as if made of cotton. At lightning speed, he would slide his sword against his enemy’s throat and heads kept falling one after the other. Johnny stared mutely at the screen.
From then on, he only dared to thin his moustache whisker by whisker, using a ruler, a millimeter at a time, and not even that much from the length; he let it grow. He even spread some wax on it. By the summer, it looked quite rakish. The passers-by stared at it. This made Tomek laugh throughout the day; what’s up, would you like to rub it against a pussy, he snorted. Johnny would have liked to hit him, but he didn’t want any trouble; he knew that the straw-boss would fire both of them.
The first time he had a chat with Erika, was on the same day when the new construction machines arrived. Johnny walked into the store in the morning, the woman was leaning against the counter by the baked goods. He stepped up to her: I’d like some ham to go with the bun and milk, he said nonchalantly. With pleasure, my dear pirate, Erika giggled, a hungry man shouldn’t be kept waiting. Her teasing tone drove him nuts. Her tight slacks were taut on her behind, the white strap of her lacy bra showed from under her flimsy T-shirt. Johnny shuddered. Soon I’ll be in business, he thought, and was filled with lust. From then on, he loitered in front of the store, even before opening time. He kept looking for Erika to show up around the corner. Weeks passed this way.
Then she suddenly disappeared. Instead of her, a stern woman in her forties was behind the counter. She didn’t give a damn about Johnny. The man was worried that Erika might have quit, but quickly got the idea out of his head; it’s impossible that she would disappear without a word, when things were going so well between them. Perhaps, in a few days, everything will go back to where they left off. No doubt something is going to happen between them, he felt it in his bones, it was a kind of tingling that kept him constantly excited; this was replaced by the usual emptiness when the woman disappeared. But his enquiries led nowhere; no one told him anything in the store.
As if something had been gnawing at him from inside, he became insufferable, he kept kicking the dusty bits of gravel all day long. Even the straw-boss was considering having him transferred. But he wasn’t the only one with issues. Tomek was also a problem. It didn’t matter to him that his pay was being docked for being late; he kept grinning like an idiot, and when they asked him about the manicurist chick, he just shrugged his shoulders. He would indicate on his fingers how many times they did it in the evening and in the morning. He didn’t say much to the others except: lift it, push it, clean up the rubble – the usual.
They ran into each other in the store a few weeks later. Johnny was about to leave when he heard Tomek’s voice. He turned around, that’s when Erika stepped out from behind the milk counter. She didn’t notice him. Johnny had a chance to see how she smiled at Tomek, but what a smile, damn it, Ica never smiled at him like that, even though she was really hung up on him. After a while Ica’s clinging got to be too much. He couldn’t even drink a beer in peace with his buddies, she would make a fuss, and they wouldn’t talk to each other for days. Ica wanted him all to herself. Even on the street she would be jealous of any woman passing by.
Sometimes Johnny dreamt that Ica would hang onto him like a vine, embrace him with both arms, squeezing him, not letting him go for even a second. He would wake up in the middle of the night frightened and soaked in sweat.
He put up with it for a while, then he told her that he couldn’t take it anymore. By now, even if he regretted it, it was too late to go back. He’d been free for months, but his life was empty.
He watched Tomek’s hand as it confidently moved toward Erika’s ass under her cotton slacks. He sidled up to it, kept patting it, and when he thought no one was watching, squeezed it hard. The woman put up with it with a smile and didn’t slap his hand.
Johnny felt all his blood rushing to his head, yet he didn’t do anything. He just stood there in the doorway like a sack of potatoes, holding a shopping bag that had a liter of milk and some buns in it. When Tomek spotted him, he let go of the woman and approached him. You could tell that he wanted to needle him; he sized up Johnny with a malicious grin. Suddenly he reached into his pocket, this is your favorite isn’t it, he said snorting as he held out a Priluki. He was grinning widely. Johnny would have stabbed him on the spot with a big-ass sword, the way pirates would do it, and, of course, Jack, that is, he, was the master swordsman of them all. But all Johnny had was a bag of buns.
Just one slash of the sword and everything would be settled. The wide blade would cleanly penetrate Tomek’s heart, the blood would turn everything red. The dirty rat would drop dead on the spot. Then he, Johnny, would embrace Erika, the woman would cuddle up to him and kiss him. They would step over the corpse and walk hand in hand toward the brand-new metro station.
He got the milk carton out of the bag. He drank the milk in huge gulps, hardly taking a breath. Then, he wiped his chin.
[1] Priluki cigarettes are cheap and poor quality. Harghita beer is also an inferior brand.
ANNA GÁSPÁR-SINGER was born in Budapest in 1976. She is a fiction author and a journalist. She studied Hungarian and Italian literature and communications after completing journalism studies. She has been publishing short stories, reviews and newspaper articles since 2012. Her first volume of short stories “Valami kék” was published in 2019 by Kaligram; it was shortlisted for the Margó Prize awarded to first time authors. “White as Snow” is from this book. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies since 2016.
MARIETTA MORRY and WALTER BURGESS are Canadian; they translate contemporary works from Hungarian. In addition to stories by Anna Gáspár-Singer (three have been published), they translate fiction by Gábor T. Szántó, Péter Moesko, Zsófia Czakó, Anita Harag and András Pungor; many of these translations have appeared in literary reviews, including The Stinging Fly, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Gábor Szántó’s book “1945 and Other Stories”, six of its eight stories translated by them, was published in August, 2024.
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