The men behind the speaker all nodded.
“We’ve all wrestled you, and you won’t gurulni any of us.”
“Yeah!”
Lili reached into her tent and brought out her breakfast, a flank of beef from last night’s roast which she’d won by wrestling a one-legged deaf man. (And this was really the last straw, the men all thought, being that the man was deaf and one-legged and all.)
“So what?” she said.
“So we want a rematch.”
Lili listened to the men, and began gnawing at her bone, thoughtfully. It was rather odd, she was thinking, that they all wanted a rematch. It was all very cute. “What do I get if I win?” she said.
“You get to gurulni any man in camp,” one said.
Lili snorted.
The men looked at each other. “And you can eat with us every day.”
“Every day? For how long?”
“As long as you like! Eat as much as you want.”
Lili thought about it. She didn’t really feel like gurulni-ing with any of them. Your average medieval Hungarian male was no hot ticket, and the last thing she could afford to do for her health in all this rain was open up and let somebody jostle around everything that she would just have to set right again—but in the end, the promise of all that food was too much to pass up. She wiped her hands across her chest and grinned. “All right,” she said. “Who among you wants to fight me?”
The men smiled, and then, like a curtain parting, stepped aside as Szeretlek the Giant made his way through the crowd.
“If I can be of use,” he said.
Lili took one look at Szeretlek and wavered in front of the flap of her tent. She held the lip of meat in her mouth. This was not what she had agreed to.
“This is not what I agreed to,” she said.
Szeretlek grinned at Lili and sat down on the rounded earth in front of her tent. He landed with a thud. His legs unfolded beneath him, stretching out like fallen trunks—
The men practically danced around him.
Lili retreated into the solitude of her tent. How could she beat the Giant? She lingered for a moment and evaluated her resources. Although on the short side, with a trunked neck and an unimaginative bosom, Lili was not a completely unattractive she-pagan. She had blond hair, smooth shoulders. A playful soupçon of feminine beard. She could flirt with him, she decided. The idea wasn’t completely outrageous. She hocked a burr of phlegm into her hand and smoothed her hair. She pinched her cheeks for color, wrapped her braids around her head, and unbuttoned the top of her cloak like it was accidental. She practiced standing at various angles that called attention to her fattest, most flattering body parts, and when she emerged from the tent a few moments later, she looked softer, in a way, than she had before, and the look on her face was clear and desirable.
She smiled a thin, disingenuous smile, and then Lili László lay down on her back.
The Hungarians erupted in cheers. What a match! Szeretlek the Giant versus the unflagging leg-wrestling champion of tenth-century Hungary! The people liked Lili; she teased the men and roughhoused with the children, and there was nothing particularly great about Szeretlek apart from his physical greatness. He was big, yes—but Lili’s strength seemed to come from somewhere else. You could feel it if you stood too close to her. You could smell it on her breath. It was in her voice. Her screams were spectacular, louder than any soldier entering battle. Huns were known for yelling the loudest as they fought, Germans shouted “Kyrie Eleison,” and the Hungarians cried out in wolf-like howls, “Hooy Hooy!” Lili screamed louder than all of them.
She locked legs with the Giant.
“Go!” shouted one of the slighted men.
Szeretlek, meanwhile, had not been expecting much of a struggle. He casually looked up from the position where they now lay, legs interlocked, and wondered what all of the fuss was about. Although feeble-minded, he was aware of the basic biological differences between them, and felt certain there were better uses for him at the moment. Kinga had trained Szeretlek to feel uneasy when he was not being useful in some way to the greater Hungarian society, and as he lay on the grass that afternoon, he had some difficulty keeping his mind away from the other, more important tasks at hand that day. The Gyepü always needed some kind of maintenance. There was the Vacuous Hole that needed filling again. He had been spending the morning watching the Moving Rock Pile when the Hungarians approached him about the match.
He looked back at Lili, between their nest of legs. Most women were afraid of Szeretlek. After all, his arms were like logs, his head was potato-shaped. His hair grew out in scattered, queasy sprouts. If the Giant looked at any woman and smiled, if he offered any sweet expression, she always gathered her things in her basket and hurried off in the other direction. Szeretlek noticed that Lili was not frightened of him; on the contrary, it was like she didn’t even see his swinging limbs, his lumpy head. She coiled her hair around one finger and lowered her eyes. She puckered her lips and blinked at him coquettishly. Szeretlek stared back at her, and then it was like something stepped forward on a platform in his chest and plummeted deep into his gut—
I Love You was in love.
As the Giant tried to understand this fresh emotion, he absentmindedly released his grip. His knees loosened, and he felt Lili’s legs go tight. Solid. All of a sudden it felt like he was trying leg wrestle a block of wood. He tried to focus, to find another strategy; he tried altering his torso right and left, lumbering his weight little, trying to take advantage of his considerable gravitas, but still the smiling girl did not move, and after only a few minutes, his forehead blushed, and the blush moved southerly. His face grew hot, his lips quivered. A thin trickle of spit slid from his mouth onto his chin. He couldn’t be losing, but he was.
Szeretlek was losing.
It wasn’t entirely his fault. Two things were at work against the Giant that day: first, although it may not look like a contest of the mind, there is a definite strategy involved in leg wrestling, and by locking in early, Lili had suggested to her thick-witted competitor that all she knew how to do was hold tight in one position, and eventually she would falter.
This was simply not true.
Szeretlek’s other handicap was simply the place he had chosen to sit. On his side, the grass was long and plush and beckoning. As a giant boy, the giant man had enjoyed lying leisurely in grassy fields just like this one, feeling the soft tickle of long blades over his large palms, but in the end, Szeretlek’s clean green grass that he adored, that all Hungarians adored, gave him absolutely no leverage.
Lili, meanwhile, was lying in a patch of unruly tenth-century crabgrass.
Clouds hung low above them, and the birds shut up. Rain was approaching from the east. Tents flapped open and the dogs whimpered and ran for cover, but nothing else moved. The whole camp grew quiet and watched as Lili and Szeretlek held together, tight. Lili’s thighs quivered. She held on tight to the handles of crabgrass, and then a sound moved from her belly to her throat, up and out, orbiting around the crowd and nearly blowing the Giant’s hair back:
Not since Aranka’s scream while giving birth to Szeretlek had there been such a noise in camp, and that had been nearly thirty years ago. Chilled by the familiarity of the sound, the Giant lifted his head to try and see what she was doing, and then:
Lili had been taking a breath.
Szeretlek grabbed desperately at the grass that fell into withering clumps. He tossed the handfuls to his side and grabbed again until there was no grass left. He began grabbing at dirt. The dirt flew. It looked like he was digging a hole.
“He’s digging his way to the Black Sea,” an old woman sniggered.
Lili László’s legs flashed left and jerked right, making the Giant’s torso look like an enormous fish caught in a line. She reared his massive rump skyward and then just as quickly sent it crashing to the earth. She did this twice, and then the third time, she flipped her feet under his body and the thighs went to work.
>
In The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures, the Captain examines every muscle in the body: “The gluteus maximus,” he writes, “is the strongest muscle in the body and covers a wide part of the buttock. It allows the thigh to extend, causing the leg to straighten at the hip when a person walks, runs, or climbs. It is used to raise the body from a sitting position.”
It is also used to toss enormous Hungarians over your head.
The sky opened and it began to rain, but the crowd remained, cheering as Lili thrust her ass forward and—for a split second—flipped Szeretlek over onto his stomach. She held him up with her feet, the way that children pretend to fly. Szeretlek’s eyes held, staring into hers, and he thought he saw something inside of them that he already knew of the world, something long and low and pulling, but triggered only for the quickest second, like a slippery memory of a smell. Then Lili found the position she’d been looking for.
She winked.
Szeretlek saw the wink, and believed that the woman he loved loved him back. His body went limp as her knees sprang up. The Giant elevated only a few inches, landing directly behind her in a patch of spider-shaped crabgrass.
The crowd thundered appreciatively, then quickly scattered in the rain. Lili wiped her face and stood up. She picked a thorn from the side of her back and then grinned at the men.
They were forced to acknowledge the victory.
“Fine,” they mumbled. “Go ahead and pick someone.”
Lili finished brushing herself off, and then asked for the impossible: “I choose Árpád.”
The men looked at each other. “Shit,” they said, and one of them ran off to tell him.
Lili turned to Szeretlek and stuck out one hand, helping him up from the wet grass. “You okay?” she asked.
Standing up, Szeretlek was almost a full human taller than she was. He rubbed his lower back, fighting the hot hold of tears in his throat. He nodded.
Then Lili turned with the men and went to find Árpád.
The Giant watched them go. He wondered how or when he had misjudged the situation. He felt deeply wronged, but could not articulate the wrongness, and as he walked back to work, his sadness swelled to anger. His feet left heavy imprints in the mud, footprints deep as bowls, until he reached the Moving Rock Pile.
All of the rocks in the Moving Rock Pile were identical, and it was terribly difficult to pull them apart. Occasionally one rock would become separated from the others, and then the entire pile would go in search of its lost member. Without warning, the rocks would move, and if the Magyars weren’t careful, if the Moving Rocks were not closely watched, a person could easily be trampled in the middle of the night. The Moving Rocks needed constant supervision, and since Szeretlek was the only one strong enough to carry the rock that fell away, he was usually the one to watch it.
This time, however, he did not take his place; instead, he reached down and grabbed one of the rocks. He yanked and tugged it, forcing it away from its brothers. Once separated, the rock turned in his hands, squirming in the unhappy manner in which only the Moving Rocks could squirm.
Szeretlek walked over to the embankment. He held the rock above his head and then he threw it into the river. He watched it sink beneath the surface. Then he sat down on the grass and waited for the ripples to begin. He knew that the rock would eventually move up out of the water because just as the pile would search for any lost rock, the rock would also search for its pile. The Moving Rocks moved slower than freshwater snails, but they could always be counted on to move, and in that hard moment, Szeretlek the Giant needed something he could count on.
XIV
A PROBLEM WITH INVENTORY
The following morning, I awake on the bus to a tickle aggravating the lower part of my thigh, reach down to scratch it, and am fairly surprised when a patch of skin the size of my palm peels off. I hold it up to window, examining the crisscross pattern that reflects back to me, and then reach for Madame Chafouin.
“Déloyauté,” she says. “Disloyalty. Treachery.”
Outside, frigid April wind woos over the stiff grass, blowing the milkweed. A crow barks. The crickets have all dozed off. Marjorie taps the window with her splintered blade languidly, making the whole field look emptier somehow. Vacant.
I pick up The Complete Book of Water Polo, With Pictures and study the Captain’s face. It could easily not have been him, I think. There are occasionally swimmers who go swimming in the Queeconococheecook. But the swimmers usually come in the summer months, and this has probably been the coldest spring on record. I open the book and read the first sentence: “The body is a tight and efficient unit,” the Captain writes, “and it works together, not each part separately.”
I do not feel like a tight and efficient unit. I am a messy conglomerate. Flotsam and jetsam. Bad art.
I close the book and look out to the gray, inimitable sky, to the trees that line the field like patient grownups, and feel an acute pang of loneliness. Which is fine. Anonymus writes, “The peculiar intensity of the Hungarians’ existence can perhaps be explained by their exceptional loneliness,” and as the last remaining member of a species, I would imagine that it is Normal, now and again, to feel a sense of longing for one’s lost brethren. I pick up Dr. Monica’s business card from the windowsill, the one she gave me when we first met, and finger the sharp corners. I breathe it in, deeply. It used to smell faintly of Dr. Monica.
Now it just smells like everything else.
Mrs. Kipner peeps from inside the tin can. He hates the rain, and it was pouring all night. Whenever it rains, his antennae droop, and he is overcome with malaise. Sometimes he won’t even lower his pucker for breakfast. I get up to slice off a piece of tomato, but when I pass the tin can I realize that he’s not moving; both wings are hanging weirdly off the sides of his back, and the little white spots have spread to the middle. He’s not even trying to fidget around to itch them anymore.
I reach in to touch him as if to say, “You all right, Bub?”
He snaps his good wing against his thorax. His antennae twirl.
I pick up the can to make sure he’s just in a bad mood and not something else, but it slips from my hand, hitting the floor with a shiny pop and sending the beetle tumbling out onto the corrugated rubber flooring of the meat bus.
Confused, rolling on his back, his numerous legs pedaling the air, Mrs. Kipner rocks his shell until he manages to flip himself over. The legs spread out evenly beneath him and he immediately practices moving them one at a time, and then all at once. When he’s determined that all of the legs are functioning in the manner which they should be functioning, he jumps up, alert, and darts to the far end of the bus, following one straight ridge of the corrugated rubber flooring, dodging crumpled Big M labels as he goes. He scuttles all the way down to the empty driver’s seat, and for a second I worry that he might flee underneath the door of the bus and disappear into the weeds—but he doesn’t. When he reaches the driver’s seat, he turns around and races back, stopping at my feet, breathless and a bit bewildered. He looks east. He looks west.
Then he begins to hop.
I never imagined how Mrs. Kipner might move if given the opportunity, but I never expected this. He hops all around my feet, the bad wing hanging off him like a broken backpack. Dr. Monica once said that in order to fully recover, to recover in body and spirit, one must believe in something.
I looked at the gold cross, dangling out from her turtleneck sweater. Like God? I wrote.
She paused. “Something like God.”
I watch Mrs. Kipner go hurtling down the corrugated rubber flooring and wonder if an insect can believe in God.
Mrs. Himmel is in a good mood today because she was given a warm loaf of zucchini-nut bread from a grateful mother and is slicing off thick pieces for everyone in the office. Everyone but me. Which is fine. I couldn’t stomach it anyway. But there are other pleasant things going on: the rain has given way to a warm breeze, the Sick or Diseased children are tumbling in a
corner, Adrian’s manning the phones with her big, I-Climb-Mountains way, and Mrs. Himmel is working her gob on the bread. Things, you could say, are as good as they get.
And then they get better.
Dr. Monica unexpectedly walks into the Waiting Area. She walks over to Mrs. Himmel’s desk and leans over. Far over. She’s looking for a goddamn paperclip and in the meantime pointing her refined and shapely ass in my undeniable direction.
Sitting here, in these cheap and uncomfortable chairs, helplessly staring as though I can see right through the flimsy white polyester material of her pediatrician’s jacket, as though I can see the run of her sturdy thighs wrapped snugly in their tan slacks from the curved anchor of her lower back all the way down to her thick, alluring kneecaps, there are moments I fear that I really am more Animal than Man; moments when I don’t trust myself not to stand up and walk over and lift the tidy hem of her jacket to expose those devastating thighs. Creamy. Limber. Delectable Darling. Ma Plus Grand Amour! Do you not feel the pulse of my probing gaze? Do you not yet see me blowing you imaginary kisses? Do you not feel my hot breath traveling toward your milk-colored neck? Do you really want to know how to heal me? I can tell you that right now. There’s only one thing I need to recover, and that is for you to dim the lights, walk over to the crusty little bearded man who at this very moment is sitting so patiently next to a wheezing Sick or Diseased child, lean down, place your tender, pudgy hands on the arms of his wooden chair, and kiss him wetly on the mouth. It would be just like in the movies. Kiss him, and his lungs would clear, his bad leg would fill with muscle. His eyes would blink and brighten. He would tear his stylish woolen cap from his head, toss his thick spectacles onto the Berber carpeting, throw one arm around your waist and bend you over and—
Dr. Monica finds her paperclip and stands up, professionally cinching the child’s report.
“Make sure he gets plenty of water,” she says to the mother. “You also might want to watch the way he walks. If he seems to be crossing his legs a lot, or tripping over his own feet, then schedule another appointment to bring him back in— Otherwise, he should be fine by morning.”