Vacation in Naples

I.-5

I don’t know how I would have gotten home if Mari hadn’t walked me. She bumped along with me in the joint of the accordion bus, enduring the pitying and curious stares of the other passengers, while I bawled the whole way home.

I never knew Váradi was such a bastard.

And that reporter! How dare he ask me, of all people, what I thought?!

‘What’s your opinion about the news concerning Csaba Váradi’s upcoming wedding?’

I think I just stared blankly at him for the first couple of seconds, so he elaborated.

‘You know, Csaba Váradi, the club’s number one striker, twenty–four years old, three–time all–star soccer player and…’

As if I didn’t know! I’d been out to see all three of his all–star games at the stadium.

‘…he’s marrying Marianna Tarcza.’

Good God, those were the words that twisted the knife into my heart. I struggled to hold my tears back. This situation is especially horrible because, in my opinion, Marianna Tarcza is the best left back player in the world, and my supreme role model. She’s twenty–three, so there’s slightly more than five years between us. She’s fast, tall, accurate. She’s got such amazing, powerful bow–legs. I wanted my legs to look just like hers so badly that two years ago, I used to stand for hours with a basketball between my knees, hoping that my straight legs would become bent like hers, but it didn’t work, so I gave up. I’m just mentioning this on a side note. Marianna Tarcza is just magnificent. And Csaba Váradi is also magnificent. The only terrible thing about this is that Csaba Váradi is the love of my life.

So this is the end of the world. And the news came right when I was shooting goals like a machine gun and didn’t even try to get out of the V–sit exercise at the end of practice. By the time I got my body into top shape, my life fell apart.

‘Listen up, Bagger,’ said Mari at the Miklós Street bus stop. People have called me Bagger ever since I joined the team. Braun is my last name, and I bring my lunch in a brown bag so Braun Bagger was the nickname I got. ‘Don’t lose your marbles on account of him. There was nothing between the two of you. He doesn’t even know you’re in love with him.’

‘He knew,’ I answered. ‘He had to.’

‘How could he have had, had he not have heard it from you?’

Those are the exact words she used.

‘He could have known. People just know things like that. Some things are written in the stars and you can read from them,’ I answered. I’m sure that sounded slightly dumb, but in situations of stress, I’m liable to talk a load of nonsense. (Like I did to the reporter and later on the phone. I don’t even want to try and remember the things I said to Csaba over the phone, and to his father, oh, and maybe even the fire department.)

At home in bed, I listened to Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, and S.O.S. by ABBA. ‘I wish I understood what happened to our love.’ I couldn’t sing along with them, and I didn’t want to. My heart was bleeding from the knife twisted into it.

And this was only the beginning.

The article appeared the next day. In a sports paper. A NATIONAL sports paper!

I’m not going to quote the article, after all we already know who’s getting married. They were both praised for being outstanding athletes, bla bla bla, and at the end, there was a short column about how ‘not everyone shared the young couple’s joy.’ More precisely it read: ‘We asked the junior team’s handballers what they had to say about the engagement between their role model and a club–mate. One member of the team, a slender girl, herself a left back player like Tarcza, said this was probably a misunderstanding, then burst into tears. Another girl said that the team is pleased that Tarcza has found the right man.’ Bla bla. The rest is not important. But was is important, is that they included a photo of us. Actually, the five of us. I’m sitting in the middle on the windowsill. If Mari and I hadn’t made plans to meet after school and before practice, I wouldn’t have appeared at practice today. I was so ashamed. Naturally, I was out of my mind with rage.

‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ she said with a shrug. ‘The reporter was nice enough not to include the things you said.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, that Csaba had been waiting his whole life for you, for you to turn eighteen, and that this whole thing was just some crafty scheming and that it was a total lie. He also didn’t mention that you repeated about twenty times that you’ve already been practicing signing your married name. Stuff like that.’

‘Who me? I said that? You must be dreaming,’ I answered, but then thought: could I really have been so stupid to tell the reporter that I’d tried signing my name as Mrs. Csaba Váradi?

‘So how many times did you call him again that night? Did you creep out to the phone booth to…?’

‘Not once,’ I sighed, but I was filled with new hope.

What a good idea!

I called him on the way home, but nobody answered. It just rang and rang. Then I called Marianna Tarcza too (I’d gotten hold of her number from our coach a while ago, but I’d only called her once so far, after the European Cup Finals. I had screamed through the whole game, rooting for the team with all my might, but as soon as I heard her voice, I slammed down the receiver.) but no one answered there either.

That night, I fell asleep daydreaming that Csaba would cancel the wedding because of me. I imagined it in exact detail. I didn’t want to hurt Marianna, I liked her a lot, but she’s so awesome, she’d be sure to find someone new in a jiffy. Maybe a high–jumper or a pentathlon athlete. It would be a win–win: she’d be happy and so would we.

The next day, I called Csaba twenty–three times, but he only answered three times, and because I’d said nothing each time (my throat tight with restrained sobs), he didn’t say hello anymore. It was incredibly annoying to have my beloved just a voice away from me, while I was mute. I didn’t even end up calling Marianna.

‘This is crank calling,’ Mari informed me when I told her, on the way to the gym before practice, what had happened. ‘You’re harassing him, even though you never had any relationship whatsoever.’

‘And what about all the times I spent dreaming about him? And the time he invited us to join him for cake in the supplies room on his birthday?’

‘That’s your problem. It’s fantasizing. It has nothing to do with him.’

After practice, Györgyi, our coach, sat down with us on the floor. We were stretching.

‘I’m announcing the members of the new team. If you hear your name, be happy.’

I was the third name she called, but I wasn’t happy at all. What the hell for?

‘The people whose names I read out are on the new team. We’ll be starting a three–week training camp at the end of June, and the week–long international championships will start right after. And we’re not just going any old place!’ she exclaimed, her eyes sparkling. ‘We’re going to Italy! To Naples! The club will arrange for passports. We’re traveling with sports passports, upon invitation by the Italian team.’

The end of June? My eyes welled up with tears again. Now everything really was over. They’d be destroying my life. It’s the end of May, the wedding will be sometime in August (the supplies manager told me). So I’d only have a few weeks left of this month and part of June to win him back, or rather, to call attention to myself. But after that, I’d be in Italy, and he’ll just go and marry Tarcza. I felt like bawling. I’d only been abroad once before, at a tournament in Czechoslovakia (where I sprained my ankle on the second day, was fitted with a marvelous brace, and was stuck in my room for the rest of the trip), but even the thought of an opportunity to travel didn’t excite me. Otherwise, under different circumstances, a trip like this would have been the height of my career in sports thus far, but right now, it was the tragedy of my life.

I had to do something to captivate him before I left.

On the way home, I tried to call him six times from the phone booth on Vera Square, but it was busy each time. I was crazed by the thought that he was lying in bed, talking to Marianna, who was also in bed, except in her own. I ended up calling her too, but she didn’t answer. I was left in the dark.

When I stepped through the gate at home, I thought that maybe if I ran headlong into the wall of our house with my arm outstretched (my left arm, so it wouldn’t be my shooting arm), maybe one of my bones would fracture, I could get a cast, and be able to stay home. That way, I could gain a whole month, during which Csaba would understand that it was me he wanted to marry.

Yeah, but then when would I ever get a chance to go to Italy again?

Never again in my life, for sure.

* * *

Days passed before he had enough faith to realize he could do it. Directly after the operation, he felt like he would never ever be able to get out of bed again. He still had tubes hanging from him and could barely move. At times, he regained consciousness for a few moments, but then plummeted back into a hazy dream that slightly eased his pain. He vaguely remembered seeing the policeman at the door, and the doctor and nurse, always together, talking about how he’d had surgery for ileus, an intestinal obstruction. He smiled to himself. His plan had worked. The medicine he requested from his old, trusted friend – who was always compliant, no matter what he asked – had done the trick. The woman sent him the medication in the exact packaging he specified. The lawyer who’d delivered it to him had no idea what was in the parcel. He had once been told that he must never take this type of medication for his heart condition because it could cause ileus. He’d always thought that the doctor who’d treated him back then had only warned him out of routine precaution, but luckily it really had worked.

A few days after the operation he started feeling a little better. For security reasons, he had been put in a double room alone. There were bars on the windows and a guard posted outside his door, but even so, he was one step closer to freedom. After he stopped plunging into that deep sleep all the time, he began taking note of how often people came to see him, when his medication was administered, if any unexpected visitors, like detectives, popped in, at what intervals the guard checked in on him, and so on. Finally, he chose two time periods when it seemed safe for him to do his strengthening exercises. One was between midnight and one a.m. when everything was silent, and the other was between three and four a.m. During the day it was too risky, because he could never know when someone would appear, and Verbovszky didn’t want to take the chance of anyone discovering that he was getting better. He set the clock in his mind to wake him at three–fifteen. He quietly got up, cautiously, so his stitches would not tear. He sat up, then climbed out of bed. He strengthened his upper body by doing a few vertical “push–ups” against the wall. Then he continued with squats and walking in place. The first night, he couldn’t do more than ten minutes, but the second night he did fifteen, sweating profusely, and the nurses noted when they came around to bathe him at dawn, that he was running a fever. He didn’t mind. The later they wanted to send him back to his cell, the better.

After about the fifth night of exercise, he was starting to feel that the time would come soon. He even managed to swipe a pair of small scissors from the counter while the nurse was changing his bandages and the doctor was occupied with writing something on his fever chart; they weren’t particularly pointy or very sharp, but he hid them under his pillow anyway. The nurse mumbled something about always misplacing things, and he pretended to be in pain. Inside he felt triumphant. Things were going his way, but he couldn’t show his joy outwardly.