Vacation in Naples

I.-1

I.

Nikolett Ladányi stood in the living room of her parents’ house. From here, she had a view of her old room, which was mostly used for storage ever since she’d moved to Békásmegyer. Niki used it as her “seasonal” closet, while her parents shoved it full of all their own unused stuff. The drying rack for laundry was also set up in here. She stood in the middle of the room and couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“So it’s true? He really moved out?”

“Why don’t you ask him if you don’t believe me?”

“I believe you.”

“I’d be happier if you asked him. Personally. Will he be able to face you? I wonder how he’d break it to his daughter… if he even has the guts to tell you.”

“Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. He doesn’t owe me anything.”

“No? I’d be curious all the same, to see if he could look you in the eye. After all these years… how could he… do this to me?”

Niki’s mother burst into tears again. She had already cried her eyes red and the puffiness around them made it clear that she had been crying for days. Niki had no idea what to do as she stood there. She wasn’t even capable of sitting down. Thinking was out of the question. She’d barely returned from her trip to the Caribbean. She had scores of her own problems, and to top it off, she now had to face the crisis between her parents.

“Maybe he just wants to be alone to think things over.”

“Fat chance. You know him.”

The two women were silent. If Niki was silent, and if her mother was silent especially, it meant that something was definitely wrong. Her mother was usually a motor–mouth who feared silence and used speech to defend herself against it. Niki stared out the window.

“He left me because of another woman.”

“Men never leave because of another woman,” Niki corrected. “The problem is rooted in the original relationship…”

“f**k that self–help junk,” her mother declared furiously. “Your father left and pretty soon he’ll have the rest of his stuff hauled out of here too. To another woman’s place. Period. There’s no point in analyzing or picking apart the nature of the original relationship. Your father walked out. He left me. He’s a piece of shit.”

Niki was silent.

“I just wish I didn’t love him… Anyway, he can drop dead.”

Niki stood despondently by the window. She could see her grandmother’s yard from here. Oh, God, she prayed to herself silently, please don’t let Gran come over now to muddle the situation even more. Her griping was the last thing they needed right now.

“I lost thirty–three years of my life… or more,” her mother said, sniffling. “Whoosh! Gone. Whisked off. Everything I thought was good… it was just an illusion.”

Niki forced herself not to interrupt. Her mother only wanted to vent her anger and pain. Niki wasn’t going to argue with her, especially because she had no idea how to help. What should an adult daughter do if her parents split up? She loved them both. Who’s fault was it? She couldn’t take sides, and if she thought about it, she wouldn’t have been able to, even if she wanted.

She’d dropped straight into the middle of a marriage crisis: her parents’ marriage crisis. Why now, when she had no idea what to do about her own life?

“How can I help you?” she asked softly.

“Help me clean this mess up. To sort through… my life… And you might talk to him. Answer the phone when he calls. He says you don’t answer when he tries to phone you. I don’t want him passing messages through me.”

“I was barely awake when you told me the news. He called me right after. I didn’t answer because… I wanted to see for myself what was going on first.”

“I’m not in the habit of lying. You could have believed me without seeing it with your own eyes. But now you can really believe it.”

Niki switched her phone off instead. And she kept it off for the rest of the weekend.

Her mother was fueled by anger and impulse. She began her mission on Friday, and by Sunday, the house was nearly unrecognizable. Gone were the family photos and the old trinkets that Niki’s father had bought her mother. Her father’s favorite pillow, which he always put under his head while watching TV, and his favorite mug were stuffed into a bag. Niki rescued a pot of blooming orchids from the garbage can. Her father had given them to her mother at the end of last year. The clothes her father had left behind were also removed from the closet. Niki’s mother dragged the TV into a different corner of the living room, rolled up the rug in the bedroom, moved the dog into the winter garden, smashed a vase she and her husband had brought home from Istanbul, meticulously swept up the shards from the floor, proceeded to snip a lace bra to pieces – Niki didn’t want to know the story behind the lingerie – grabbed a can of anchovies, her father’s favorite, from the fridge and flung it in the garbage. The purging fit began on Friday afternoon and by Sunday they were up in the attic. Niki helped unobtrusively, and though she did not wholly agree with this cleansing, she nevertheless understood the purpose it served. She was just like her mother. The cleansing type. Anything you didn’t need or was not attached to you, anything that was unreliable: you get rid of it! It was a trait she’d clearly inherited from her mother.

“I haven’t been up in the attic since I was a teenager,” she smiled.

“Then it was about time.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Nothing. We’re tossing out your father’s stuff. Haven’t you noticed yet?”

“Here’s my doll. Little Hanna,” she said, picking up the toy.

She tipped it forward and the baby doll cried. Niki replaced it in the toy crib.

“I’m happy for you, but concentrate on looking for your father’s old boxes instead. He always said he’d unpack them someday. Well, he’s not unpacking them anymore… not in this house, anyway.”

Her mother had used up mountains of tissues already. Her nose was red from all the wiping, but she didn’t look like she was starting to feel better. Niki crouched above the dusty boxes. Chilled, she pulled her coat closed. The old goose–down coat she’d left here years ago when she moved out had come in handy today. Now, she recalled how she’d always enjoyed sitting up here in the attic on hot summer mornings, when the sun blazed through the small skylights, casting a mysterious light on all the attic’s treasures, and how, in the afternoon sunset, everything in the attic seemed luminous with an unusual color. Treasures, shelves, chests, boxes, odds and ends: everything was coated in a fine layer of dust and illuminated by the setting sun. She liked the sweetish smell of the attic. Now that her old room functioned as storage, her childhood all came back to her here, in the attic. In her mind’s eye, she saw the girl of long ago who’d once promised to go out on a date with a boy, and as she and her friend played treasure hunt in the yard, she panicked when she suddenly saw the boy appear on their street… How they’d laughed after they dashed into the house and watched the boy from the window as he hung around outside... They breathed a sigh of relief when he finally left.

“What’s this?” Niki said, opening a box and pulling out a snapshot.

Her mother… what a beautiful woman she’d once been. Like an Italian film star. Black hair, snow white skin, an attractive figure, and a sweet but still somehow erotic smile. A young man stood beside her. He was masculine, but still more a boy than a mature man. He was handsome and tall, a casual smile on his face, gazing at Niki’s mother lovingly.

It took a second glance to realize that the man was not her father.

“Leave it. Just leave it,” Niki’s mother said, trying to pull the whole box away from her. But she suddenly changed her mind and plucked only the black and white photo from between her fingers.

Her gaze softened. Niki noticed a date on the back of the photo: 1976. She hadn’t been born yet. A quick calculation told her that her mother had been eighteen then.

“Who’s that guy? He’s a hunk,” she said in recognition.

“Alessandro Grotti.”

“Hmm… an Italian? Where was this taken? And who is he? Why didn’t you ever tell me about him?”

“I’m not required to tell you every detail of my life. You weren’t even been born yet when this was taken.”

“But who is he? Some mysterious, distant relative?”

“No. He’s a…” her mother paused, searching for the right words, smiling faintly. “…a boy from Naples… and the past.”

“Where could he be now? Do you keep contact?” Niki inquired, while attempting to maintain a nonchalant expression.

She and her mother were sitting around in the kitchen having coffee. Niki’s jeans were dirty and her muscles ached from three days of lifting and packing, but suddenly she was very curious about that Italian boy from her mother’s past.

“No.”

“No? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re not very talkative. I’ll leave you here with Gran then. She’s on her way over right now. Here she comes, across the yard.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“The two of you can rag on Dad together.”

“If you don’t leave me with her now, I promise to tell you… about Alessandro.”

“Deal,” Niki nodded.

Maybe a pleasant story from the past would take her mind off her own problems and her father’s unexpected desertion. Now she had to worry about keeping her mother’s spirits up. Hopefully, her mother wouldn’t do anything stupid in her state of despair. Niki didn’t want to see Mom crushed and lonely. She had a whole bunch of problems she needed to solve and her parents’ sudden breakup had caught her off guard.

* * *

A bolt of pain shot through him at even the slightest movement, but nobody suspected that he was doing squats and strengthening his arms in between the two beds so soon after the operation. He was lucky (though he wouldn’t have quite called it luck) that he was alone in the double room. When they came around to take his temperature, it was still high. This was due to the series of exercises he’d completed a little while earlier, as well as his ability to raise his body temperature at will when they came around to stick the thermometer into his ear. He appeared feeble and kept his eyes closed. He heard the nurses talk to the guard outside his door: “He’s asleep now, but it might be from the fever.” He hoped this information would make the guard’s attention slacken. He had a lot at stake in keeping the nurses and doctors thinking that he was weak. He needed the time to get his strength back, while pretending he could barely get out of bed. He had to avoid getting sent back to his jail cell, because there was no way out from there. The next few days were crucial. But he might already have to act tonight.

Verbovszky thought about the girl who had taken his freedom. He hadn’t thought much of her. But he had underestimated her, and the price he’d paid was great.

He had to prolong his stay at the hospital, because here, freedom was within arm’s reach. He must prevent them from taking him back to prison. Right now, his job was getting his strength back while convincing the doctors that he was recovering at a much slower rate than expected.

* * *

András Zsoldos could have entered with his own key. After all, he was the one who’d had the locks changed when they caught Verbovszky in Niki’s apartment. Afterwards, the place needed a little fixing–up. The bed, for one, had to be replaced. This was explicitly requested by Niki. It wasn’t hard finding a place to put the old furniture: they went straight to the institution where Aranka lived. The crafts room at the Home for the Mentally Handicapped needed the new furnishings anyway, and they did not remind Aranka of the time she had spent as Verbovszky’s prisoner in Niki’s apartment, on her couch.

András stood for a little while longer in front of the barred door on the ninth floor. He rang the buzzer again, then walked back to the elevator. Niki should have already returned from that cruise. She’d promised to call him when she got back so they could meet, but her phone had been switched off for days. He could have gone in with his own key, because Niki had told him to keep a copy till she came home and to give the other copies to the fitness instructor girl who was her neighbor. But he couldn’t just go barging in. Niki was probably fine, but even if she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be the least bit pleased if he’d enter her apartment uninvited. She might be spending a long weekend with someone… maybe at home. Probably not, but he had to take every possibility into account, especially in his line of work.