The jagged sobs of a child in pain, sharpened by a note of fear, accompany a woman's shrieks, splintering the torpid summer noon. Far below the windows of the fifth-floor apartment, ragged poplars shed wisps of fibre resembling discoloured shreds of cotton dressing.
Inside, bloody footprints lead towards the bathroom. As the woman's high-pitched cries subside, the child's sobs become subdued. Madame Szusza emerges from the bathroom, dragging her ten-year-old daughter roughly by the arm. The girl's right foot is wadded in a bandage, and there is a strong smell of disinfectant.
"You see what she does?" Madame expostulates shrilly. "She does this on purpose. To spite me."
"What happened?" I murmur lamely.
"Glass! She stepped on broken glass!"
A few days earlier, Madame Szusza, whose spare room I am renting for a two-week stay in Budapest, had narrated excerpts of her life over a cup of expertly-prepared espresso in her tiny living-room, made colourful and cosy with hand-woven rugs and folk-art.
While she was working at the Italian embassy, she had fallen in love with a junior diplomat. Before she could tell him she was carrying his child, he had been abruptly transferred. Leaving her (she described an arc with her hand and forearm, suggesting the contour of a pregnant woman's abdomen, waxing like the moon) - "like this. With the baby in my belly," she reiterated.
The diplomat had phoned her now and then for several years, and even sent a little money. She had been unable to contact him by phone, or obtain a visa to travel abroad. She had smuggled messages and letters to him, until embassy staff who helped her do so were in due course replaced.
As time went by, hopes of a reunion with her daughter's father faded. Apart from photographs she sent, he had never seen his child.
Madame Szusza's daughter is very beautiful - olive-skinned, long-limbed, with lustrous hair and hazel eyes. She is also rebellious to the point where it appears that she actively detests her mother. The tension between them is apparent in even the smallest daily transactions, such as the offering of food and drinks, which Maria makes a point of rejecting, forcing her mother to rant and then plead before she will accept any refreshment. This is all the more pointed in a growing child, who must surely have a hearty appetite.
It is a bitter irony that Madame Szusza should have given birth to a love-child who seems to hate her.
Madame is quite unlike her daughter in appearance. She is short and plump, with black-dyed hair piled in a beehive style. Her skirts are just a shade too short for modesty, her heels more than a shade too high for ease of gait or comfort.
She wears a set of costume jewellery - necklace, earrings, bracelet - set with sparkling stones. "A present from my friend Omar, who comes here for his holidays."
Madame now gives Maria's arm an emphatic little jolt, berating her in torrents of Hungarian. The girl looks sullen. Then her mother snatches up a little overnight bag and leads Maria out of the apartment.
Madame returns accompanied by a young man, whom she introduces to me as Omar. Intent on departure, she bustles in and out of her room, dangly earrings flashing in the motes of slanting sunlight.
"I return in three days," she tells me, valise in hand, moving towards the front door in a miasma of perfume, musky, a trifle stale. As she turns to exit, Omar closes the gap between them, an anticipatory palm placed firmly on her hip.