‘Where is he, the cool Comrade Coach, I want to give him my thanks in person, mo-de-rn thanks, and full of psycho-lo-gy!’ Béla would enjoy his triumph to the full were it not for all this mess: Nadia has been doing hardly any training for eight months, it’s a disaster. The man from the ministry opposite him, one of those who took Nadia away, blinks rhythmically, no doubt out of embarrassment at being forced to appoint Béla as ‘Head of the World Championship Team’ in place of his young rival.
‘However, there is one condition: Our Most Esteemed Comrade wants to see the same girls as at Montreal. He wants Nadia, Dorina: the golden team! Nobody knows your new girls. Do whatever’s necessary, Professor, the country is counting on you…’
See the same girls again? But they’re dead, those same girls! What little girls? Big fat women with spunk on their cunts who’ve been lounging around for months! Fucking ce-le-bri-ties! And he’s stuck with them for all eternity, ‘no doubt until they get their menopause!’ he shouts at Márta when he joins her again in Deva. He has six weeks before the World Championships.
Do you want to come back, Nadia? With me?
She cries softly, muffled sounds that give the silence a rhythm. He has carefully moved aside the skirt and tights so that he can sit next to her on the bed. He takes her by the hand, goes over their life together, almost nine years, does not insist on the 10 that for months has gripped her body and throat. ‘Baby! Do you know that right at the very beginning, you disappeared? Do you realize you left me the moment I noticed you in that schoolyard… But I always find you again!’
He thought he was lightening the mood, but she weeps inconsolably. Do you want to come back, Nadia? he asks her again; she stays silent, everything is covered with ashes, with endings, with fat, this Illness is like a burial. He is on his feet now, it’s as if he is praying.
It will be torture. A massacre. An invasion planned centimetre by centimetre, we’ll scrape all that off, discover what’s left underneath, if anything. Do you want to come back, Nadia?
When he leaves late that afternoon, he greets the four guards smoking in the corridor outside, and to one of them who asks, ‘So, how did you find her?’ Béla replies, ‘I’ll tell you, my lad: last week, during the exhibition, I was told she was in the audience and I didn’t see her. Today when she opened the door to me I realized that yes, I had seen her!… But I hadn’t recognized her, because… she’s a monster, my lad, a fucking huge monster!’ and he waves goodbye as he marches off, rewarded for his outburst with loud guffaws.
In her private diary for the year 1978, from which she sends me this photocopied sheet, some words are written bigger than the rest, and are underlined in blue: ‘From tomorrow I MUST believe in Béla again. I’m ASHAMED, terribly ashamed of becoming a monster.’ And these sentences, copied out several times in neat lines:
‘I’m not going to turn my back on what frightens me. I’ll face it, because the only way I can escape my fear is by trampling it beneath my feet.
‘I’m not going to turn my back on what frightens me. I’ll face it, because the only way I can escape my fear is by trampling it beneath my feet.
‘I’m not going to turn my back on what frightens me. I’ll face it, because the only way I can escape my fear is by trampling it beneath my feet.’