No Stopping Train. Les Plesko

my arms or my neck or my forehead or cheeks or my waist or the small of my back. A week since we lost the revolt and the borders came down, I could climb on this train, I could run while I left you behind. I can’t sleep for bad dreams. I hardly dare look at myself in the blackness the train glass reflects, though it smoothes my classic moonface, soothes my eyes that in daytime just ache.

      You used to call me beautiful. My almond-shaped eyes, the cupidity of my mouth was a puffy kiss-bitten surprise. I was vain of my thighs and my belly and legs, the pleasing contour of my ass and my hips.

      After the war, the big one, I thought my flesh was like Hungary’s meadows and hills, even with shrapnel and metal and broken plough teeth underneath. Now I don’t trust metaphor, I hardly believe what I see when I look at myself. My mouth tastes like my mother’s unwash, her starved breath.

      I lay beside her in our bed, jolted awake fully dressed, dawn swarmy as newspaper print.

      “Stay with me, don’t go out,” Alma said.

      “I’ll go anyway, then you’ll be sorry you asked,” I replied.

      I hadn’t slept with you yet. What I owned was my own, I carried my needles and spools and the war in my head.

      “Everyone’s come home again and you’re going away,” Alma said. She turned on her side, a weak smear of light on her tattered nightgown.

      “Make me feel bad, it’s what you do best,” I replied, chewed the sleeves of my dead father’s coat, its tail trailing crumbs by the bed.

      “I recall pushing you in the pram,” Alma said.

      “Pull out all the stops,” I replied.

      “We paused on a bench by the lily pad pond, fed the ducks,” Alma said.

      “It rained, you hate ducks, you never bothered to cover my head.”

      “I threw myself over you when bombs fell.”

      “It was me who did that for you,” I replied.

      Alma rubbed her hand where her swapped wedding band left its naked indent. “I never wanted a child.”

      I didn’t bother to sigh. “Tell me again how you stopped eating on purpose back then.”

      “I lay on my belly, my fists to my gut, wished you dead,” Alma said.

      My fingers drew tight figure eights on the sheetless mattress. “In school we played a game, ‘put your mother on the ceiling,’” I said. “We had to imagine our mothers up there. One of us said his mother baked pies, another’s saved porcelain figurines.”

      “Smart move during a war,” Alma said.

      I had a habit of narrowing my eyes against sarcasm then. “I said you collected bad thoughts.”

      Alma tapped her nails on her teeth. “When I was pregnant, I tried to slip on the ice, but your father kept grabbing my arm. I told him, instead of delivering a baby, I’ll give birth to a bone through my leg.” My mother hurt to look at. The light through her gown illuminated her belly and breasts. “Once I was sure about you, I went to the park, I clung to the Tilt-A-Whirl’s bars, let it drag me around.” Alma smiled.

      “So you’ve told me,” I said, but it choked me all over again.

      “They had to tie me to the hospital bed so I wouldn’t jump out the window,” she said.

      I smiled back nonetheless. “If you’d eaten better, maybe you’d have had the strength.”

      We both laughed. I could afford to, I thought. Because, Sandor, you waited for me in the street with fish or with soap or a silver barrette. I believed you would always be there. My belief made me think I could be cavalier yet remain generous. I touched my mother, though I was never supposed to do that, all brittle bones through her gown and her hair tangled up. She wrenched free of my hands, hugged her chest. “That’s a cheap shot. Don’t leave me with something I’ll miss,” Alma said. But I did.

At the Galamb Cafe they were serving stale water in porcelain cups, air on fine china plates. “I enjoy Budapest best in the rain after war,” Margit said.

      “It must suit your temperament,” Sandor said.

      “What do you know about it?” Margit asked.

      “Sad and a little bit mean, like this city,” he said. Russian soldiers stumbled across the sidewalk, watches up to their elbows, grain alcohol stunned. “They flush toilets for washing their food,” Sandor said.

      Margit hated sitting around when she could have been mending or washing or looking for bread. Small talk gave her nerves.

      “When the food drains away, the bayonets come out,” Sandor said.

      Damp muggy air pasted Margit’s dress to her back and her chest. A cold draft raised the hairs on her neck. “The lesson is don’t eat with Russians,” she said.

      Sandor laughed. Shadows from his glasses etched indents on his cheeks. She patted her coat for a cigarette. Two left so she offered him one.

      “I don’t smoke,” Sandor said.

      “Ciggies cut hunger cramps,” she replied. Behind him she saw the Parliament dome wrecked against the skyline, the church-tower clock frozen at noon or midnight. “It seems ridiculous not to smoke,” Margit said.

      Sandor cupped his hands for her match. Pale light beat over his wrists. Around them, whoever had something was bartering it, chocolate bars, liquid vials. Out in the street, drunkards were singing the national anthem and pushing a powerless tram.

      “The vanquished aren’t meek,” Margit said.

      “They’re going to get that song wiped from their lips, you just watch,” Sandor said.

      Margit blew a ring, watched faces pass busted-out windowpanes, cheekbones gaunt yet oddly lovely, like Sandor’s, she thought.

      “Not you, though, with those papers you forge,” Margit said.

      Sandor put his hand on her mouth. “You’re not supposed know about that.”

      Margit knocked the tip from her spent cigarette, saved the butt. His hand smelled like ink and she wondered if she’d get accustomed to it. “Your girlfriend told me. Erzsébet.”

      A long silence fell between them. Across the street, a lorry bumped to a halt. In the gap of its tarpaulin ribs, a man and woman were chained to a bench. The woman’s hair blew in her eyes. The man tried to wipe it away from her brow but he couldn’t, manacled like he was.

      “I’m not going to sleep with you right away,” Margit said.

      Sandor took off his glasses, rubbed them on his shirt. “Who said anything about that?”

      Margit tapped her nails on her cup. “Because the war’s over, all the men think they can have any woman,” she said. “But I’m waiting for love.”

      Sandor stood. Gypsies and children who roamed past the tables extended their palms. Waiters flapped napkins at them. Sandor scooped up a tip not his, tossed it at the nearest hand. They all knew the coins were worthless. A pengö before the war was worth half a quadrillion pengös now. Still, they grabbed.

      “I guess we’re not coming back here for a while,” Margit said.

      Hard to keep up, she had to hold on to his sleeve he was walking so fast. “You’re already in love. Maybe not with me but the idea of it. It’s caused by the end of the war,” Sandor said.

      Margit made him slow down. “So you’re just the one who showed up.”

      Sandor shrugged. He glanced at their reflection in an unbroken storefront. “We look all right together, well matched.”

      Margit stopped, tried lighting a cigarette into the wind. “You’re trying to make me believe this was all my idea,”