Read Online Siege 13 by Tamas Dobozy - Free Book Online

overcharged, and if they didn’t mind spending that much money the girls were told to offer them other things at similar rates. I knew enough about it not to ask why she did it, why she didn’t quit, why we were standing on the bridge at five in the morning.
    Earlier that night I’d told Judit everything—Trianon, Erdély, Anna and Miklós, the orphaned girl. It was a lame attempt to prove to her that I sympathized, that things were not good for me either, though remembering the clichés about women like Judit—those without options, unable to make the switch when communism fell, forced to cash in on their beauty, five years of work, ten at the most, before the steady slide down the rungs of the sex trade left them wasted, addicted, dead—I realized how ridiculous it was, how narcissistic.
    â€œIt’s good that you’re married,” Judit said. One of the last casino boats of the night—those golden barges that sail up and down the Danube—pulled into dock, blaring music, lit up, filled with men and women at the roulette wheel, playing blackjack, dancing. “A child should have a father and a mother,” she continued, slurring her words in that way she’d perfected, pulling up her slumping head, letting it slump again. A fleet of Mercedes passed on the bridge behind us, smaller sedans grouped around a limousine, racing along the körút into Pest.
    â€œWhere do you live?” I asked, hinting that it was time for her to go home.
    â€œWith my mother and daughter,” she said, then went quiet.
    It would be a long time before she said anything else, but by then I knew I’d be going there too, stumbling along the streets of the Nyócker, following the direction of Judit’s wavering finger, up the stairs to Janka in the hall.
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    There was a man, Judit said, a Swede, who liked to watch her cry while she danced. He always brought a towel to soak up the tears. It was a relief, she said, to know he was coming back to Budapest, to the club, that he’d be asking for her, and she wouldn’t have to pretend. He would sit there, his smile brightening, as she danced until her breasts were wet, until the makeup ran down her cheeks, until she lifted the towel to her eyes and kept it there, dancing on, her body remembering that three feet of stage with a memory all its own, until it was over and he paid her and gently wrapped up his towel in a plastic bag and left.
    She laughed after she finished telling me the story. “There was a landlocked sailor who tried to cry himself to sea.” Once Judit was asleep, I sat there imagining this sailor, sitting on a sidewalk in some city dreaming up the saddest stories, hoping his tears would turn into a waterway and carry him off. Were those eyes, I wondered, plucked out by the communist authority, by some guard in some horrific camp, on display in the Museum of Failed Escapes?
    There were so many sailors. Judit had an endless supply. I’d lie beside her watching as she wiped the drink or meoff her mouth with the back of a hand. The Nyócker was in the southeast part of Budapest, narrow neighbourhoods where the ornaments on the secessionist architecture were inches thick with grime; bullet holes still in the walls from the siege or the revolution; crammed corner stores where you dug through rotten peaches and plums, brown lettuce, yellow peppers covered in black spots; Romani children in the street staring at you with crazed smiles, bags filled with glue held in their hands like the necks of chickens; their parents wandering by, back and forth from the eastern train station, where they sent younger children to beg; men with blue tattoos, strange lettering across their backs and chests, less decoration than a series of messages only a select few, those who knew the code, could decipher; and their wives just like Judit’s mother, with handkerchiefs or shawls on their heads, holding bags filled with