Julia Phillips

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Citadella

Every afternoon of that dark summer in Budapest, Sophie found herself breathless and distracted in anticipation of Soma’s homecoming. In the mornings, she was able to take walks or practice her flashcards in the hazy light of the park, but as the end of his workday neared she began swinging in long orbits around their block, gravitating back to the small blue apartment. Once finally there, she’d lean over their kitchen counter, wiping down the tile with one hand and pressing the other to her stomach where her skin tingled as if it were conducting electricity. She hovered around their bedroom, biting the tender skin of her lips, folding their clothes or making the bed two or three times in a row.

Inevitably, twenty minutes before he was due home, her pretense of housework became useless. She pulled his desk chair to their bedroom window instead and watched for him on the street. Their apartment house, made of rough cement, rested on the edge of the Danube, and from this window she could see a small market square, flat-topped boats rocking in the current, and Gellert Hill on the other side of the water. She had seen the hill illuminated by the sun only once, briefly, the fourth week she was there; the occasion was momentous, she’d taken a picture to show her mother. The rest of her time it was covered in shadow. At its peak stood the lone statue of a woman, her posture perfect, her head back, her arms raised to the sky, and above that there were only the thick and constant clouds.

She had thought that in coming to Budapest with Soma she would discover a nation of people who looked like him, babies and girls and men who were smooth-faced, sweet-lipped, and solemn. She’d expected a nation of brothers. Instead she found milling around this city hundreds of skin tones and body types, wide noses and thin mouths, high foreheads and heavy eyelids, hair that ranged from straw to yarn. She had to ask Soma for clarification after their first week there: “What do Hungarian people look like?”

He’d laughed for a long time. “To you? Maybe a little starving,” he’d said, and from the shelter of their sheets pointed out this same window to the clusters of girls below with flat stomachs and shadowed cheeks. Above the street, the clouds sat, strangely fat, settled together like stacks of bread.

When she finally caught sight of him on those evenings after his work, all her muscles tightened and released in a shudder of joy radiating from her abdomen. His dark close-cropped hair, the delicate bones of his skull, the smooth planes of his cheeks, his thick brows tilting up in constant consternation. It was a delight to watch him strut, lips pursed, head lowered, shoulders forward, through the crowds.

Sophie salivated hearing his key in the door. She led him by the hand into their neatened bedroom and began slowly to uncover him, a ritual she adored and pretended not to know he dreaded. Soma dressed in loose denim and slack collared shirts, baseball caps and a leather jacket. Article by article she removed his heavy clothing to reveal the slim, golden, female body underneath. His clavicles protruded, his breasts were soft and high, a shallow valley extended from his sternum to his navel each time he exhaled, a swell cushioned his lower stomach. His legs were lean and taut. She ran her pale hands over his exposed skin, sucked on his fingers, kissed his knees, pushed their salty bodies together. Loving him felt like breaking the rules. She was in a foreign land, wrapped around someone who existed impossibly between genders, mapping the contours and crevices of his unexplored form.

Sophie cupped her slender hands around his breasts one night late in August and kissed his neck. “I have looked online,” he said, his voice crackling in the stillness of the blue-gray night, “and I think I am to get a mastectomy.”

She flexed her fingers against his softness. “But,” she said, “you don’t really have to do that, do you?” He muttered something, too quick for her to catch. While she waited for him to shift his arguments into English, she pressed the length of her body to his, trying to keep them both intact.

“You do not want me to change this.”

She didn’t say anything back. Soma spoke her language slowly, carefully, spinning out each fragile thought like a silkworm. She had learned patience there, between those long days learning vocabulary and those clouded nights waiting for him to explain.

“I am like a…” he began again, and lifted his hand from her cheek to sketch his meaning in the air above them. “I am trying always to trick people to believe that I am a man. But I cannot trick me. Not while I come home and…”

“And?” she said, her throat tight.

“Come home and love you like I am a woman.”

“That’s not true,” she said, and pressed her head into his shoulder to shake it emphatically. He shrugged, dismissing her falsehood. Sophie cupped her hands to more closely fit the swell of his breasts. Her face was buried in the sweet-smelling curve at the base of his neck, and suddenly she was overwhelmed and frantic, she needed his body to stay a woman’s, she needed him to shed his disguises only for her, she needed for him to remain unexpected and unblemished. She opened her mouth against his skin.

Around their apartment building the clouds moved murmuring in heavy layers. Sophie had needed to cite these Hungarian clouds to finally convince her family back in Clayton that she hadn’t crossed the ocean on just a whim. “You don’t understand,” she’d said, tucked into the luminous plastic of a payphone. “It’s dirty here. It’s gloomy. I’m not here on vacation. I’m here because I’m in love.” Her mother had clicked her tongue in exasperation at this but said nothing for once, and so Sophie was able to listen furtively to the noises of home: the regular hiss of her mother’s breath, the distant chopping of a blade on a cutting board, the hum of the refrigerator barely detectable in the background.

Summertimes in Clayton, for each of Sophie’s twenty-three years, had been half-obliterated by the sun. She and her younger brothers drank lemonade and wore ironed t-shirts, her mother had set out stacks of immaculate china for Sunday dinners, they drove as a family to the drugstore one day in every August to buy reams of lined paper and new fluorescent three-ring binders. She had kissed her first girlfriend, a tall brunette with an overbite and broad shoulders, in a back yard surrounded by white picket fence. She had played with Frisbees there, had glimmering braces cemented on and off there, slammed doors and jumped rope and saluted the flag there.

Clayton smelled like baby carrots and Jell-O pudding. Clayton tasted like Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers. Soma smelled of hot cologne, like the last bits left over in a cup of apple cider. She had chosen him, Soma to love in the face of Clayton’s smooth sidewalks and floodlit garages, Soma to follow when his visa expired and he was forced back to Hungary without the degree he’d hoped for, Soma to wait for as he struggled to explain to the officials at his embassy how his passport declared one sex and his driver’s license another. Soma to escape the Midwest with. Soma to lie in bed with. To uncover under the cover of Budapest’s dark sky.

The clouds were what had convinced her mother, who’d chosen Clayton’s yellow school buses and hopscotch grids, that Sophie was serious; Sophie knew this was so and never bothered to explain that they were what made Budapest worthwhile. In direct light, the buildings were plain, their pockmarks revealed, and the people had scars and stubble, and the streets grew steamy and foul with trash. But under the clouds, the city was revealed.

Sophie sat out those mornings of June, July, August in the park by their apartment, studying flashcards without needing to squint, and watching the world show details she’d only ever seen in still lifes before. Copper rooftops could be divided into panels and mossy patches, jeweled embellishments could be distinguished between ornate tiles, the wrinkles painted onto a stone saint’s sleeve were discovered, she could find every crack on the yellow walls of the steam room in the bathhouse.

In such a dark, exact world, she could not bear to come home to Soma’s body if it no longer blurred the lines between man and woman, or if it bore the marks of a surgeon or a stranger. Out the window the clouds shivered and churned. She ran her fingers down his golden stomach and felt goose bumps follow in her wake.

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Julia Phillips lives in New York and attends Barnard College. Read more at yulichka.wordpress.com