THE POET AND THE WOMAN:

STORIES, SKETCHES,

AND

MINIATURES

MIKLÓS RADNÓTI

Translated and with an Introduction by John K. Cox

.

Translation and Introduction ©2017 John K. Cox

c22017 Szeged, AMERICANA eBooks

Radnóti Miklós öszegyűjtött prózai írásai / Radnóti, Miklós, 1909-1944. Osiris, Budapest, 2007

ISBN 978-615-5423-41-3 (print); 978-615-5423-40-6 (mobi); 978-615-5423-39-0 (epub)

AMERICANA eBooks is a division of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, published by the Department of American Studies,

University of Szeged, Hungary.

http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu

Cover design by Kathleen T. Cox

C

This book is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 – Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs 3.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence.

For more information, visit:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.hu

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

[CURRICULUM VITAE]

THE MERE TRAGEDY OF THE LITTLE MAN

THE POET AND THE WOMAN

THE MODEL

MINIATURE 1

MINIATURE 2

LITERATURE AND THE STREET

THE CANARY

BANDI

SAILORS ON MANEUVERS

AVIATORS

DEATH

THE TALE OF THE WEEPING WILLOW

THE BIRTH OF THE LAND OF ETERNAL SUNSHINE

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

BLACK TYL’S EYES

HATRED

BUTTERFLY

THREE PICTURE POSTCARDS

THE FAREWELL

INTRODUCTION

Miklós Radnóti

and

the Emotions of History in Central Europe

by

John K. Cox

The lovely southern Hungarian city of Szeged seems to have footprints, so to speak, from a great number of great Hungarian writers. Attila József, whose intriguing, enigmatic statue still stands on the main square in the town and whose name the large and prestigious university bore for many decades, is perhaps the figure who comes to mind first. But it’s quickly followed by Mihály Babits, Béla Balázs, Éva Janikovszky, Ferenc Móra, Gyula Juhász, Leopold Löw, Fr. András Dugonics, István Tömörkény, and Kálmán Mikszáth—and these are just the classic writers of various types; writers closer to our day, such as Róbert Hász and Temesi Ferenc, as well as other cultural figures ranging from scientists to composers, abound in Szeged as well. But our list of writers would be nowhere close to complete if we failed to include Miklós Radnóti.

Radnóti was primarily a poet whose work has enjoyed a stellar reputation for three-quarters of a century. He was indeed a poet of the Shoah, and is known primarily for that work outside of Hungary; but he developed many themes in his numerous books, combining elements of neo-classicism, expressionism, and late modernism. His likeness, along with plaques marking his time in the city and his tragic death in Abda near the end of World War II, can be found in several places in Szeged. At the main building of the Faculty of Arts of the university for instance, where he studied in the 1920s, the café is named for him and his photographic portrait graces a wall there; on the other side of downtown, outside a highly regarded and academically rigorous high school that also bears his name, stands a moving statue of the poet and his devoted wife, the teacher and memoirist Fanni Gyarmati (1912-2014).

I was teaching at the University of Szeged, as a Fulbright lecturer in the fall of 2014, when I rediscovered Radnóti’s powerful poetry in translation. Less than a year earlier, the very moving Radnóti statue near Győr, at the place where the poet was murdered and interred in a mass grave in 1944, had been destroyed, apparently by vandalism. This called to mind the precariousness (a material fragility too often tested by war, theft, and intolerance) of Holocaust memorials I knew about at Jasenovac in Croatia, Riga in Latvia, and Dachau, for instance, and I decided to look into Radnóti’s life and work and see if I, as a historian, might make some contribution to the permanence of his legacy. I was delighted to learn, in stages over those months in Szeged, that Radnóti had indeed written some fiction (which I prefer to translate); that his stories were interesting and instructive, always enjoyable and sometimes exquisite; and that my Hungarian was, with a little help from my friends, up to the task of attempting translations of the stories.

***

Miklós Radnóti was born Miklós Glatter on May 5, 1909, in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire. His family was part of the assimilated Jewish community in Budapest. With both of his parents deceased by the time he was twelve, he was raised by relatives, and he prepared for a career in business. By 1928, though, he had discovered his love of writing and begun publishing poetry. His first book appeared two years later.

In the early 1930s he studied at the university in Szeged (then officially called the Ferenc József Tudományegyetem), spent several productive months in Paris, trained as a teacher of literature, moved considerably to the left in his politics, and adopted his nom de plume. In 1935 he married Fanni Gyarmati and moved to Budapest, where he wrote and translated intensively. Like many other Hungarian Jews, he was conscripted into labor battalions during World War II and was eventually forced to work in both Ukraine and Serbia. Near the end of the war, he was executed in western Hungary by elements of the Hungarian military. Today, his body lies buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest; there are numerous statues and memorials to him around the country.

Readers will find Radnóti’s own bare-bones version of his autobiography in the short sketch “[Curriculum vitae]” which opens this collection. What Radnóti’s notes cannot delineate for us, of course, is the great impact of Radnóti’s life and work that rests, arguably, on three pillars. First, when his body was exhumed from the mass grave in Abda shortly after the war, a significant number of poems were found on his person, and these have provided moving artistic testimony to the conditions of slave laborers in camps and on death marches. Second, the care and consistency with which his widow, Gyarmati, worked to preserve his memory and the privacy and dignity of their relationship comprise a significant chapter in Hungarian cultural history. Third, building on his career path in the shadow of increasing anti-Semitism and creeping radical-right authoritarianism in the Hungary of Admiral Miklós Horthy, especially under prime ministers such as Pál Teleki and Gyula Gömbös, Radnóti’s life stands as uniquely eloquent witness to the lethal political entanglements of the 20th century.

***

One of the luxuries of writing an introduction to a translated volume is the space to offer a few notes to readers. Experts in Hungarian literature, and, with the increasing amount of Radnóti in translation, more international scholars of comparative literature, are the ones to address the important issues of the connections between the author’s biography and poetic oeuvre, on one hand, and these stories, which range over so many years and topics, on the other. Often, the most useful glosses or annotations that a translator can make are historical, but they are arguably less in demand in this collection because Radnóti’s stories tend to turn on emotional connections―delusions, compromises, insistent commitments, and the like. One is tempted to say they are also straightforward, but that is not always the case, as with the three sequential fables in this volume that culminate in “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

If readers of Radnóti’s poetry notice that they contain both a great and frightening (prophetic?) sense of doom and direct invocations of self-evident and sensual love, then they will likely find echoes of these preoccupations in his short prose as well. Other topics and themes include: the role of the artist (broadly conceived to include craftspeople and writers); journeys and the knowledge they bring; the marginalized or down-and-out in society, especially in terms of their disarmingly droll survival instincts or fatalistic resignation; the generation gap; and modernity, appearing in the stories as advertisements, airplanes, battleships, immigration, and industry. There are possible political allegories, especially in “The Tale of the Weeping Willow,” “The Birth of the Land of Eternal Sunshine,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

But the landscape of this volume is overwhelmingly and indelibly formed by love, by intimate relationships of various types. In fact, eleven of the eighteen stories here are built primarily on the examination of love or lust. There is sexual tension, infidelity, flirtation, prostitution, sexual blackmail, and even gender fluidity. On the quieter side of love, there are resignation and commitment, understanding that follows aging and even divorce, bad luck, and a deep, desperate love between a son and his dying father. Love can be broken, racy, dog-eared, well-thumbed, and unfulfilling, but it is always dogged, irrepressible, or dramatic, in Radnóti’s deft formulations—and somehow it always wins. Or at least it has its way. Indeed there is an optimism, or at least contentment, in most of these stories. It might be indirect or we might figure it to be fleeting, but to call it naive would be cruel.

One of the translator’s favorite pieces in the collection is the odd, mute mini-drama “The Farewell.” Its expressionistic or avant-garde credentials are strong, but above all one is struck by its consonance with or potential as opera or ballet. The text is seedy and violent and explosive and, ultimately, redemptive. Sharing pride of place as an experimental story of sorts is “Black Tyl’s Eyes,” a tale steeped in ambiguity, melancholy, and decadence and set in and around a nightclub in Venice.

Other very strong contributions to this anthology, in the judgment of this observer, include the title story and “Miniature 1,” both of which treat the beating of young hearts and melding of young bodies in a clear-eyed and self-aware way—shorn of illusions, ultimately. Finally, it should be noted that “The Aviators,” although traditional in form, is in some ways the least traditional in content or imagery; although minimalist, it is carefully plotted and harbors a small dose of modern socio-economic criticism.

***

Fiction written by poets is fun to read, I’ve always thought, but difficult to translate. The issue is more than concision or the spareness, often, of the prose, in terms of description, dialogues, or digressions. It also has to do with the use of individual words, and even with the choice of those words themselves.

Here are some of the challenges facing the translator of Radnóti’s prose. We need English versions of his autobiographical writings, so perhaps these brief thoughts will begin a discussion that other translators can complete. Working through these issues was exhilarating; whether the results delivered accuracy and enjoyable reading, only you, Radnóti’s readers, can decide.

- Radnóti employs an abundance of participles, both present and past, especially to qualify the action of the main verbs in the sentence.

- Hungarian grammar allows for a certain indeterminacy of gender (since pronouns are not definitively male or female, for instance), and this leaves the translator dependent upon context, divination, or inspiration to work out narrative directions and turning points.

- Radnóti prefers minimalist, poetic descriptions to naturalistic ones, and they are often focused on key details. If sometimes cryptic, these descriptions are often very fresh and visually engaging.

- Every story contains one or two highly unusual adverbs, made from run-of-the-mill adjectives operating outside of their usual function or semantic range. A literal example would be “brownly.” We also find archaic words or archaic-sounding variants of contemporary words, requiring that the reader stay open to a different sensibility.

- Radnóti, like all authors, has some favorite words or sets of words. For some reason, experience shows this translator that these are often verbs. In Radnóti’s case, one needs many synonyms for, first, the complex consisting of “to mumble, grunt, groan, murmur” and, second, for “to look, catch sight of, study, see, behold, regard.”

- The frequency of short sentences and short paragraphs tempts the translator to combine elements for the sake of flow and readability—but this is usually not a good idea.

***

Perhaps a good way to end this brief essay would be an attempt to put Radnóti in an international perspective. With whom, perhaps, could his life and work, his art and his suffering, his genius and his enduring importance be meaningfully compared? Danilo Kiš, the great Yugoslav novelist who translated much of Radnóti’s poetry into Serbo-Croatian, compared him in a 1967 essay to Attila József and the Polish poet and Holocaust survivor Julian Tuwim (1894-1953); they were all prophets like Jeremiah, poets of “a menaced humanism in the shadow of fascism” whose poetry raised clouds of hidden but eternal “fear and the intimation of catastrophe,” especially among Jews. Aleksandar Tišma, another acclaimed novelist from the Vojvodina who knew Hungarian and South Slavic literature well, compared his work to that of the Croatian poet Ivan Goran Kovačić (1913-1943), a celebrated anti-fascist writer who was killed in battle during the Second World War; Tišma characterized Radnóti’s work as precise, complex, meditative, and remarkably individualistic and universal at the same time. Above all, Tišma held him up as one of those rarest of writers who represents a visionary “revolt of the cultured human being” against hatred and who demonstrates that even infinite suffering can engender great literature. These stories play only a supporting role in these achievements of Radnóti, but it is indeed possible to claim that they contribute to our appreciation of him as more than just a historical voice or a beautiful writer. Radnóti, like Edvard Kocbek (1984-1981) of Slovenia, lives on today as a kind of conscience of his nation.

***

My work on this collection would not have been feasible without a great deal of help from Hungarian friends. I’d like to express my sincere thanks for inspiration and linguistic help over the years to Irén Annus and Thomas Williams; I also owe debts of words and ideas to Linda Kunos, Réka Cristian, Andrea Kökény, Dávid Szollát, and Ági Bató, who also read and commented extensively on several of these stories. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also share my gratitude to Katy, Lilly, and Ethan, for being willing to put their lives on hold for five months and go with me to Szeged in 2014, where I began these translations over my happy early-morning coffees that autumn.

This translation is dedicated to my old friend, Jeff Pennington, whom I have known for over three decades and who has accompanied me on more adventures through Hungary and the neighboring lands (anywhere there’s a Lutheran church, right, Jeff?) than I can count; who has probably toted more books across borders and the thresholds of post offices than he would care to count; who is like a wise and energetic and generous uncle to my children; and who never stopped believing that I should learn Hungarian well enough to translate literature that I love and hope to share.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The source texts for the items in this anthology were found in the following work: Radnóti Miklós összegyűjtött prózai írásai (Budapest: Osiris, 2007).

The following list is not exhaustive, but it does contain many of the most readily available publications by and about Radnóti. There also exists a Hungarian-American film (Forced March, directed by Rick King in 1989) about the author, and the Postcard poems (Razglednice in the original) were set to music as a bilingual “dramatic oratorio” by the Serbian composer Milica Paranosić in 2009.

Braham, Randolph L. “The Assault on Historical Memory: Hungarian Nationalists and the Holocaust.” East European Quarterly 33:4 (Winter 1999), pp. 411-426.

Burnett, Leon. “Languages (Un)twinned: The Dynamic of Differentiation in Mandestam and Radnóti.” Translation and Literature. 12:2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 205-230.

Emery, Edward George. The Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: A Comparative Study. New York: Karz-Cohl, 1986.

Ferencz, Győző. Radnóti Miklós élete es költészete. Budapest: Osiris, 2009.

Gömöri, George, and Wilmer, Clive. The Life and Poetry of Miklós Radnóti: Essays. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1999.

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Radnoti, Blanchot, and the (Un)writing of Disaster.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17:2 (June 2015). Gale Literature Resource Center, Web: www.cengage.com. Accessed 4 February 2017.

Kiš, Danilo. “Novija mađarska lirika,” in Mirjana Miočinović, ed., Varia (Beograd; BIGZ, 1995), 298-313.

Ozsváth, Zsuzsanna. In the Footsteps of Orpheus: The Life and Times of Miklós Radnóti. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Radnóti, Miklós. 33 Poems. Translated by Thomas Ország-Land. Budapest: Maecenas, 1992.

---. All That Still Matters at All: Selected Poems. Translated by John M. Ridland and Peter V. Czipott. Milwaukee: New American Press, 2013.

---. Camp Notebook. Translated by Francis R. Jones. Todmorden, United Kingdom: Arc Publications, 2000.

---. Clouded Sky. Translated by Steven Polgar, S.J. Marks, and Stephen Berg. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

---. The Complete Poetry. Translated by Edward George Emery. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980.

---. The Complete Poetry in Hungarian and English. Translated by Gabor Barabas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.

---. Eclogues and Other Poems. Translated by Jack Roberts. Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2015. Web: http://ebooks.americanaejournal.hu/hu/konyvek/eclogues-and-other-poems/

---. Foamy Sky: The Major Poems. Translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick W. Turner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

---. Forced March: Selected Poems. Translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer. Rev. ed. London: Enitharmon Press, 2003.

---. Ikrek hava. Napló. Budapest: Osiris, 2003.

---. Under Gemini: A Prose Memoir and Selected Poetry. Translated by Kenneth McRobbie, Zita McRobbie, and Jascha Frederick Kessler. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985.

---. The Witness: Selected Poems. Translated by Thomas Ország-Land and Nicholas Parry. Market Drayton: Tern Press, 1977.

Tišma, Aleksandar. “Miklós Radnóti, 1909-1944,” in Miklós Radnóti, Strmom stazom, translated into Serbo-Croatian by Danilo Kiš (Novi Sad: Forum, 1961), 7-10.

[CURRICULUM VITAE]

I was born on May 5, 1909, in Budapest. My birth cost my mother her life, and I was twelve years old when my father also died. My mother’s younger brother raised me and put me through school.

I completed elementary school and junior high in Budapest.

In July of 1927 I graduated from a commercial academy and then in December 1929 from the lyceum. In the fall of 1930 I enrolled at the Ferenc József University in Szeged. I was in the faculty of liberal arts there, with majors in Hungarian and French. In July of 1934, immediately after graduating, I took my doctoral degree summa cum laude (with distinction), specializing in Hungarian and French literature and educational psychology. My dissertation, entitled The Artistic Evolution of Margit Kaffka, was published; it was a monograph on her works from the perspective of the history of style and form. In the fall of 1936, I sat for the pedagogical licensure exam and earned the certificate to teach Hungarian and French language and literature at middle-school level.

Back before the start of my university studies, in the spring of 1930, Kortárs [Contemporary] publishers brought out my first book of poetry. It was called Pogány köszöntő [Pagan Greeting]. The next year another volume, Újmódi pásztorok éneke [The Song of the Newfangled Shepherds], came out with Fiatal Magyarország [Young Hungary] publishers in Budapest. This was followed two years later by Lábadozó szél [Healing Wind], published by the Szegedi Fiatalok Művészeti Kollégiuma [The Szeged Youth Arts Group]. Then there were Ének a négerról, aki a városba ment [Song of the Black Man Who Went to Town], Járkálj csak halálraitélt [Walk On, Dead Man], and Meredek út [Steep Road], published in Budapest by the Gyarmati Könyvnyomtató Műhely [Gyarmati Publishing House], by Nyugat magazine and by the Cserépfalvi publishing house in 1934, 1936, and 1938, respectively.

In recognition of my published work, I was awarded the Baumgarten Prize in 1937. I served, and still serve, as a literary correspondent for nearly every domestic daily newspaper (Magyar Hírlap, Pesti Napló, Budapesti Hírlap, Pester Lloyd, etc.) and almost every journal (Széphalom, Nyugat, Válasz, Tükör, Szép Szó, Gondolat, Színpad, Új Idők, etc.). I have translated a number of French poets. In March of this year, a volume of my translations from the French will be published as Guillaume Apollinaire válogatott versei [Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire] in the Flora Mundi series of the János Vajda Society. My literary reviews and essays have been appearing in print for five years, mainly in Nyugat. I’ve also given quite a few lectures on literature for Radio Hungary.

After acquiring my teaching certificate, I never received a posting, so I live in straitened circumstances on the proceeds of my writing and of my work as a private tutor.

(1940)

THE MERE TRAGEDY OF THE LITTLE MAN

Péter Bacsó was an industrial worker of sorts. Early in the morning he, like masses of others, spilled out of the hall of the Nyugati train station. In his hand was a small box with its coat of black paint.  He was such an average man that he didn’t stand out at all from the other people. From his village every morning he rode into this infernally large city of Pest, but that didn’t bring him any closer to city life. He hoofed it from one end of the Körút, the Grand Boulevard, to the other and entered his workplace at precisely the right time. Nothing in the world could have prompted him to stop and gaze at a shop window.

So now, this Péter, who his whole life long had been an honest and god-fearing person, returned home one evening to find his wife in the arms of another man. It was not for naught that the whole village had been whispering about such a thing.

Péter was a dispassionate man, whom the harsh discipline of the factories had long since broken of any hot-headedness. Consequently, he didn’t reach for a hatchet or a kitchen knife, but rather sat down to have a smoke on his pipe...It was the only diversion left to him in this bitch of a life. He puffed away for ten minutes, like the locomotive that pulled his train to work every day... And after that he made his decision.

He snarled at his wife, who stood there blubbering by the table with her arms wrapped across her chest. The seductress was nowhere to be seen now.

“Julis... You’re not the one for me. I’m going to follow in my older brother’s footsteps and immigrate to America... Fend for yourself, as best you can!”

The woman threw herself at Péter. In doing so, she had no desire to hold him back but rather to thank him for leaving. The man shoved her away. He shrugged his shoulders sluggishly, and out he went. One could hear, as soon as he reached the edge of the porch, the string of oaths that he was muttering between his teeth. In the parish hall he signed over all of his property to his wife, and then he bid farewell to his close relatives.

“I’m taking off for America,” he said over and over.

The young people of the village would have preferred for him to plunge a knife into the seducer’s belly, but the old folks approved of the way he was making himself scarce. „No one will ever make a decent woman out of that one!” thought the old folks.

Thus Péter Bacsó, with his pipe and his little box, set off for the main road leading to the train tracks.

The route led past the graveyard.

Crippled old János Balog, the one-legged sexton, emerging in the morning from his hovel, saw a body dangling in the crisp morning wind in the tree at the edge of the road. He hobbled over to have a look, and, rubbing his eyes with his gnarled fists, exclaimed:

“Well, if it isn’t Péter Bacsó!”

And then, shaking his head, he added:

“But he said he was goin’ to America. Damnation! It’s a rotten, suicidal world, by Jove...”

And with his bad leg bouncing back and forth, he ran towards the village...

(1926)

THE POET AND THE WOMAN

Mia and the poet both went to the party. It was boring, as parties always are, but it did fulfill the holy calling of parties since time immemorial, intended to fix people up as couples. The poet had been invited only because of his name―he was the clou, the main attraction, and of course he was utterly bored. Out of everything and everyone there, only Mia, the belle of the ball, so to speak, interested him, because Mia was the kind of woman in whom poets were interested. Hers was not an everyday beauty: her body was ravishing, and her wondrous green eyes predestined her for many notable conquests in the future. In addition to being an intelligent girl, she was a witty one. And for that reason a rarity. These characteristics formed the basis for her scorn of, and boredom with, the present company.

The poet found his way to a secluded table. It was round and small and dimly lit.  He was a great poser, and he was skilled in the selection of places that made him seem interesting. From his seat he very much wanted the girl to come his way. Mia glanced in the poet’s direction many a time―she yearned to be with the party’s one intellectual being, while she teased the shallow-minded, vacuous lounge-lizards and entertained them with cheap witticisms and empty gestures of refinement that they didn’t know how to appreciate. Yet she did not want to be indiscreet. For his part, the poet, though, seeing the way Mia looked over at him, yawned conspicuously, fidgeted in his seat―in other words, he exhibited his utter boredom and showed that he was alone and would not mind it at all if somebody were to approach him. In an uproar of approval following the delivery of one of her jokes, Mia left her gallants standing there and walked to his table.

“May I?” she asked in a sweet, unassuming voice.

“But of course,” the man replied. “I’ve been waiting. I knew you’d come.”

The girl was ready for battle. She raised her exquisite eyebrows in irritation at this unusual reception, but the subsequent moments found the two of them engaged in amiable repartee.

Mia bestowed her genial grace upon the poet, until on that very same evening he fell in love with the gorgeous girl possessed of such sparkling wit.

From that point on, they went everywhere together: to the theater, to matinees at the cinema, to sessions of parliament and on walks in the park. The woman became the poet’s shadow. They often debated major issues: life, death, love… But Mia so forthrightly expounded her own principles that the poet did not dare come out with his own notions.

One steamy summer evening, seated on their usual bench beneath the dust-clad trees in the park, they were in the midst of discussing a particular poem when the poet suddenly, without any warning or transition, blurted out: “I love you! I desire you! With every fiber of my being,” he panted into the girl’s ear. “Don’t think I don’t want your body, too. It’s not just your soul... Through that exquisite mouth of yours I want to kiss your soul, and I will keep it warm through your magnificent body. Understand me: I love your soul... I love it!”

At first Mia was taken aback by this swift and intoxicating flow of ecstatic words. She did not know what to do. It left her presence of mind in shambles. But only for a moment. Then she got a naughty gleam in her eye. All the coquettish ingenuity of her being was contained in the look that she now threw the poet. Warily she scooted over to the other side of the bench. Out of her small lacquered purse she fished an ordinary little paper bag. How in the world such a thing came to reside with the other mess in this mysterious woman’s purse―no one knows. Just as we’ll never be able to imagine how other bizarre objects make their way into the compartments of women’s purses. She brought it up to her mouth and exhaled into it, with pathos and an enormous, theatrical sigh; it filled and expanded, and, pressing together the opening of the bag, she held it out to the man.

“You see, I sighed into this bag. I wedged my soul into it. Now give it a kiss” ―she commanded.

The poet, with practically childlike astonishment, took it from her with such reverential care that not a particle of its contents could’ve escaped from it. But then, rapidly perceiving the comical character of the situation, he angrily slammed it against the bench. With a loud bang the bag burst into pieces.

Mia leapt to her feet, with all her suspicions on display on her face―but underneath it all it was all she could do to hold back from emitting a peal of laughter.

“Cruel man! You shattered my soul. My beautiful soul has been set free like a bird.”

And with short, rapid, provocative steps her willowy figure disappeared underneath the trees of the promenade, in the direction of Aréna Street.

The poet, regaining his presence of mind, stared awkwardly after her. He was aware in the corner of his mouth of the sourish taste of a kiss that remained undelivered.

First of all he stipulated to himself that, after that fiasco, he couldn’t show up for their rendezvous the next day.

Then the paper sack crossed his mind and, curiously, with caustic self-mockery, he reflected:

“We are an interesting lot, we men who love the souls of women. By chance we always love the souls of beautiful women... Intriguing.”

And like a child whose eyes had been suddenly and ruthlessly opened, he was conscious of how very disillusioned and bitter his heart was.

(1925)

THE MODEL

The first thing she did was remove her red shawl. Then she draped her coat on a hanger next to the podium where she would be posing. She slid off her dress; its fabric was colorful.  And there she stood, with all her limbs exposed, wearing only a slip.  Without even stooping she flung the tiny shoes from her feet and all at once even her lower legs were bare. In one more sure and rapid movement the last little piece of clothing was up and gone, and nothing was left covering her lustrous nakedness.

The sculptor followed every movement of his mannequin, but he did so with indifferent eyes. He gave her some instructions on how to pose—pose in such a way as to give expression to all the sensuality of a young woman.

Then he started mixing the clay with his fingers, started making shapes. And the model in front of him began to turn white. First her entire body took on a spectral shade of pale. After that he noticed every movement of her limbs, and even of her muscles, taper off. He was amazed, but only at how a dead body could remain on its feet in such an impossible position, with its arms thrown back behind its head and its chest thrust upward. He saw that she had stopped blinking and was staring vaguely out into space with the eyes of a corpse. Before those eyes he lowered his gaze; his trembling hands created forms in the wet clay and made casts of plaster.  At that point she stopped breathing. The gleam went out of her eyes all at once, her pupils disappeared somewhere up and under her lids, and her lashes dried out like pine needles. The sculptor paused and just stood there; he looked panic-stricken. Then he picked up a mirror and took it over to her half-open lips, barren and cold. The mirror did not fog over. Then he touched her, with his palm, beneath her upraised left breast. She was as cool and firm as chiselled white marble, and his hand failed to detect any hint of life. Her heart was not beating.

Now perspiration ran down over his face. He thought he’d try to find a pulse on her left arm and so he quickly grabbed her by the wrist. He noticed at once that the arm simply fell; it was dead, snapped off above the elbow. But no blood came gushing out of the rupture. He let her arm drop and it struck the ground with a thud. There it lay, unmoving. Cautiously he felt for a pulse on her right arm. His touch must have been barely perceptible. But the arm came loose immediately and fell as if from a skeleton.  He wanted to close her eyelids, because the whites of her eyes were bulging horribly. But her head began to rock to and fro and then it tumbled to the floor as though it were a mere skull.

What he had before him was a torso. The plaster on the bulges of her raised breasts had grown white and now it shone with heightened sensualness.

It was only when he beheld her adjusting her garters, when he saw the delicate little bumps on the skin of her breasts, when clothing covered her thighs and waist—it was only then that he realized that what he had before him was a woman. It was a woman with a body, a woman of flesh and blood.  And when he paid her the honorarium for posing, she took the money from his hands and left behind the warm touch of her fingers.

He heard her high heels resounding in the hallway. He could see, through her sheer stockings, the graceful curve of her legs. Then all at once, as soon as she was lost from view, he felt his arm burning where she had touched him; he knew his head was spinning now from the warmth of her breath. It was her eyes that had set his heart to racing.

Exhaling, he felt intoxicated: it was the scent of a woman’s body that hovered now in the air of his studio like a misty veil of white.

(1927)

MINIATURE 1

In a blow to the very body of silence, the ringing tore into the dark room, and its delicate, fading oscillations slid along the walls for a long time.

As someone stretches, the bed creaks. Faint fits of coughing and the light now burning in the doorway seep in through the curtained glass door.

The porter has gotten out of bed, stepped into his slippers, put on his heavy coat, and gone out to open the gate.

He remained outside a long time.

Then he came back and tossed the 20-fillér coin he’d just received onto the table with the other gate-money.

“One-thirty in the morning and that swine only gives me 20 fillér?” he grumbled. When he dropped back into bed with a groan, he still had his big coat on.

“Who came in?” said the woman, sitting up in bed. From the opposite corner of the room one could hear their daughter propping herself up on her elbows to listen, too.

“One of the boarders coming down from the second floor. The cop.”

“Why the hell were you gone for so long?”

The woman rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Switch off that light outside, would you?”

“Ugh. Leave me in peace, you two.”

“Well? What is it?” the girl and the woman both asked all of a sudden. “What happened?”

The man groaned and then began to speak slowly and emphatically.

“They nabbed Lojás in the alley with all the hot merchandise... They’ve had him inside for questioning... He says... a long time... Don’t expect him to come home.”

The two women shrieked in the middle of his sentence.

The woman was thinking of her son, while the girl was thinking of the previous evening, when she’d been the one to open up the gate and find the detective there. She was in her housecoat. The man pulled her to him and kissed her everywhere he could. Then he asked her: “Come up to my room, Giza.” And she went.

She turned to her father.

“He didn’t help?”

“No. Says he’s a son-of-a-bitch. You two go to sleep now.”

The porter whipped off his coat and turned out the light at the front door, slipping into bed next to his wife.

All was quiet.

Only the girl remained sitting up in bed.

Later she got out of her bed and pulled open a drawer.

The man woke up with a start: “What’s that?”

“Nothing. Lojás said that if he ever failed to come home, I would find something in his drawer.”

“Do it in the morning. Stop moving around, or I’ll give you one hell of a kick―!”

The girl crouched, stiffly, on the ground in front of the drawer.

Afterwards, when she heard snoring, she resumed her search.

She found the revolver. Dressed just as she was, she opened the door softly and stepped out. Ran up to the third floor and rattled the window to the back room.

A light came on. The girl’s dash had left her breathless. Two arms reached out. He lifted her up while he kissed her through the sheer slip, between her breasts, with his warm mouth. The revolver remained on the window-sill, dropped there by the girl’s retreating hand.

It was early the next morning before Giza, disheveled by his embraces, quietly opened the door, picked up the revolver from the ledge, and ran downstairs, barefooted and shivering on the cold steps.

(1928-1929)

MINIATURE 2

Nervously, with his hands thrust into his pockets, the writer paced back and forth in the disorderly, darkening room.

The reflected light from the trams running along the street danced about on the ceiling.

Now and again the wind stirred in the curtains and whipped them against the wall, as when the wing of a restless sparrow in flight flaps against the eaves before a storm.

The gloom weighed heavily on the woman, and she kept taking deep breaths. She was seated on the low sofa, hunched up and almost vanishing amongst the pillows. She was on the verge of tears, and she sniffled as she followed the man with her eyes.

This had been going on for weeks.

Instead of the sweet rapturous words of old, evil words came now, words that slashed and drew blood. They were quarreling yet again.

The man stopped pacing, halted in front of the woman, and from his mouth with deliberate nastiness poured these words:

“I’m fed up with you, do you understand? Go to hell! I’m bored and sick and tired of you. You know, darling, so many times I have filled up great white sheets of paper with my scribbled characters... and do you know what I do with them? I tear them to bits! Hah! But I wrote them in my blood. That’s my art at work! And what are you? An insignificant little floozy. Eh? Your whimpering is pointless. Nothing but a tart. One that’s got scribbling all over her. Yes. Written on by my kisses, and those of others.

“Or just with mine? Could be true, because, as you well know, I licked the other men’s kisses off you. The rows of kisses run all the way up and down your body, and indeed I seek in vain but cannot locate a clean spot―not one that my lips can reach. Kisses everywhere! And you reek. Even your perfume is loathsome. You are full of them. Everywhere you’re covered with them, and I’m tearing you to bits!

“I’m bored and sick and...”

At this point he looked over at the woman, who was sitting in the same place on the corner of the settee, with her head hung sideways, stared in astonishment with an odd, birdlike expression at the artist as he overflowed with pathos.

He abruptly fell silent and his eyes opened wide, round as saucers:

“Well, look here. The bitch has something in the corner of her eye. It twinkles. And I’m just now seeing it!”

He was surprised. Sincerely and devoutly, as only artists and children can be surprised.

And the light there in the corner of the little woman’s eye―which also could have been a teardrop―drove him to distraction.

He walked over and threw himself at her feet.

And once more there were words of love and the music of playful kisses. Playful, mad music.

And the young woman left, satisfied and giggling.

The next day the man once more was walking back and forth in the room without a word, and once again the woman was seated in the corner of the settee, but she wasn’t slouched over. Instead she was sitting there, fresh and confident, amidst the scattered pillows. She was waiting. She knew another attack was coming. She had long ago learned that love was a battle. A titanic, bloody struggle. Such was the price of a kiss and, therefore, it took a lot of tussling. With one’s wits and fingernails. And it wasn’t acceptable to leave it to chance. Yesterday she had gotten to know a new man, a man who was an artist. And she learned a lot.

She kept her eye on the man, and sure enough he started in on it again:

“You bore me to death...”

But now the woman derisively, but calmly, crossed her legs, and her voice lashed out: “Shut up! The hell you’re bored! I know your type. Go write a story about how bored you are. But not here and not now. Hush! I’m not an admiring audience. I want you, and you... you’d rather perfect your literary style!”

At this point she felt sorry for the writer, whose poignant appeal had dropped precipitously during his cruel talk, and who now stood there, depleted and alarmed.

She beckoned:

“Well, come here then, my bookish little nut-job. I’m not that cross. Kiss me!” ― And down she pulled the man down towards her―who with his head swimming and filled with spite slumped onto her lips―and wrestled herself on top of him.

The woman, huffing and puffing with effort, pushed her shoes off her silk-stockinged feet and kicked them away, while she pointed her finger at his head and contemptuously rolled it in the air, showing the walls and paintings that this fellow had at least one screw loose.

Or more than one, actually...

And the paintings and the walls, blushing, took cover in the darkness, with the woman and the settee, both moaning with pleasure, remaining behind.

(1928-1929)

LITERATURE AND THE STREET

“Second-hand Shop”

I was going through the crates in front of a second-hand shop on the Körút, the Grand Boulevard. The seller was standing next to me, keeping watch, and then he walked back into the doorway of his shop. A short while later he returned, and placed before me a copy of one of my own older books.

“I’ll bet this will be of interest to you!”

I eyed him distrustfully―and he was smiling.

“Why do you think I would find this interesting?”

“I just thought so. The other day, Lajos Kassák came by. There was a copy of Bonfires Sing in stock, and he bought it.”

“How do you know that this is my book?”

“I know. The other day you were browsing in front of the gate here with someone, and you happened to say, when he asked about this book, that it was out of print.

“You have a good memory.”

“I do. I live by it, and―” he laughs― “from the way authors still occasionally buy their own books.”

“Csokonai in the Streetcar”

Dániel Berzsenyi, Mihály Csokonai Vitéz, and János Arany are my regular reading. For days at a time I keep them in my pockets, lugging them around with me and thumbing through them wherever I go. One evening I’m reading Csokonai’s adaptation of Batrachomyomachia or The Battle of Frogs and Mice in the #4 streetcar, and I rather fliply open the book at random. The seat next to me is changing owners. Now a middle-aged gentleman sits down beside me, and, as is the custom in Pest, he sticks his nose into a book.

We read like this for about four stops. I discreetly hold out the book closer to him, and wait, while he also finishes the page, and when I notice out of the corner of my eye that he is done, then I turn the page. After the third time he becomes conscious of my assistance, and he pipes up: “If you don’t mind my asking―what is that?”

“It’s The Battle of Frogs and Mice, by Csokonai.”

“Smashing! I shall read it. I don’t remember that from my schooldays. They didn’t teach that, right?”

“No.”

“Jaj. Kálmán Széll Square.[1] I’m getting off here. Conductor, this is my stop!”

He mumbles his name and shakes my hand. From the steps he calls back: “Thank you.”

He gets off and then yells up to me:

“Is it in the old Classic Authors series?”

“No.”

“What a shame.” His regret is audible over the clamor.

(1934)

THE CANARY

Last summer I spent five days in Paris as the guest of a large international writers’ organization. A modern, tastefully appointed flat, with a bathroom, was put at my disposal. In the evenings I relaxed in the library for an hour, browsing in the books, before turning in, and if a visitor for me arrived, the butler bade him or her have a seat in the parlor and informed me that someone was waiting. The Central European poet would recoil and feel ill at ease for five minutes, and then with a gratifying little groan would resign himself to making the best of it. Just when he’d gotten used to all this, the period of hospitality was over and the poet moved from the corner of the Champs-Élysées to the old hotel in the Latin Quarter, where the bathroom gurgled constantly and compelled one to inhale its oily smell; and in the evening he prepared cheese rinds for the mouse so that it didn’t need to trot back and forth across the floor in the night.

In the house of writers, on the first morning, I awoke to the sound of birds twittering; the entire building resounded with them, quite like a forest in the spring. As it turned out, Monsieur Gérard, the valet, kept a vast number of canaries; he was quite mad about birds. After breakfast I visited him in his two-bedroom apartment. He showed me his little eggs, enfolded in cotton wool, and his snow-white canary, along with his light yellow one, and a regular yellow one, canary-yellow. I kept up the visits, and he kept offering ardent explanations; slowly I turned into an expert. I owe it to this mutual interest that, at our farewell, he discreetly commented that he considered me Europe’s most sympathetic writer.

And, nowadays, I think more than ever about the canaries. Does he take them down into the air raid shelter? I am more and more interested in their fate. The fate of the captive birds, born into captivity.

(1939)

BANDI

A large, dark cockroach poked its head out of the hole that served as the drain for dirty water in the middle of the bathroom floor. The hole gurgled constantly and gave off a foul smell, and it provided Bandi with background noise for his dreams; he rented the bathroom overnight to the tune of a few pengős each month.

The cockroach crept out, its nose up in the air, and snuffled around the hole. Bandi, just awakened, sat on the mattress on the floor, watching the bug with perplexed and blurry eyes, as half-wittedly as only a person on the divide between dream and wakefulness can view the objects of this world. He even forgot to feel revulsion.

Pensively he raised one of his shoes off the floor at his side and let it rip. Although he didn’t hit the bug, which crawled back into the hole in alarm, the shoe somersaulted and bounced along until it reached the side of the cast-iron bathtub. Bandi was now fully awake. In his alarm he gave a little hiccup and opened his eyes wide. He sat there. And then he yawned. And with the tip of the nail on his little finger he scratched away the residue of sleep from the corner of his eye.

At that point he looked around.

He caught hold of the edge of his trousers, which were hanging from the toilet handle, and yanked them towards him.

With that his coat fell over his head, and through it he could hear the water begin to bubble and flow.

Terrified, and completely tangled up, he endeavored to extract himself from the coat. This took quite a while.

He huffed and puffed.

He took hold of the pants again, and ran his hand down into one of the pockets almost up to his elbow. Nothing. He did the same thing to his other pocket.

His face broke into a smile.

Cautiously, held between his two fingers like something that had a mind to fly away―he extracted a 10-fillér coin.

He scrutinized first one side of the coin and then the other.

“Kingdom of Hungary, 1927... Budapest... Ten fillér…,” he mumbled.  “Hm. With this I can buy enough brown bread to tame the old belly.” And he roared with laughter.

He tossed the coin up so that it spun in the air, and caught it. Then he flipped it again even higher. Once more he caught it feeling quite satisfied.

So now he tossed the ten-fillér piece higher, once more intending to catch it, but the coin changed direction after striking the ceiling. It fell to the floor and ever so slowly, in smaller and smaller circles, rolled down into the hole.

Bandi just watched.

He watched, and he grew more and more dejected.

He didn’t want to believe his eyes.

He dragged himself over to the hole. It was black. There was gurgling.

He crawled around it.

He kept crawling as his panic mounted.

He had seen the coin roll in, so he was doubtful, but still expectant, when he lifted one corner of the pads making up the mattress. His eyes searched under them. All in vain.

He nosed around on all fours for a bit longer, and then sat back down.

He kept sitting.

“So much for that,” he said, after a long pause.

And you could’ve knocked him over with a feather.

(1928-1929)

SAILORS ON MANEUVERS

From the direction of the flagship, small detonations popped sporadically across the blue.

Mihály leaned over towards Péter. They were sitting on their heels waiting for their orders, under the Number 3 cannon on the right.

“The planes are taking off from the Bundás.”

“Aha.”

The ship tacked, and as soon as it tilted to the side, both of them toppled to the deck.

With its steam whistle going, the ship released a burst of fog around itself.

The two men resumed sitting on their haunches. Orders are orders.

Mihály leaned all the way over to Péter and yelled:

“You know Márta, right? Pretty girl, ain’t she? When we’re finished with this joy-ride, I’m gonna marry her.”

The air smelled of oil. There was no response. So Mihály swallowed his happiness and kept a lookout, too.

Three planes took off from the lead ship, an aircraft carrier, and began to frolic above them. Peter extended his arm.

“Look at that!”

“Holy Mother of God!” Mihály said with great enthusiasm. “H-8 and B-9 want to catch up to Big K. Man, they’re awesome at that.”

The wind came up and brought with it the din of the ships.

“And she’s not unfaithful?” Péter yelled out.

“Who?”

“Márta!”

“Fuck no!”

The ship banked again, and once more they sat down on the deck.

“They say there will be a war.”

“No, there won’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m getting ready for my wedding.”

The racket grew louder, and Péter could only tell by Mihály’s gleaming teeth that the other man was laughing.

(1928-1929)

AVIATORS

The airport canteen was smoky and genially warm amidst the autumnal cold. Whenever the door was opened, powerful serpents slithered right in from the gruff outside racket and the wet, cold air. The walls and windows vibrated constantly from the din of the engines, and out there on the field, among the mechanics, airmen, and soldiers, the planes bustled all day and all night.

The meadow-men followed the outbound planes with their eyes, even as they worked at full tilt but with great precision. The same with the pilots. These were moments that brought a kind of superstitious saluting along the booming runway.

A plane tormented the grass and lifted off sluggishly. Three times, four times, it licked the earth and bounded back up like a skipping stone and finally flew away. They watched it go.

At the long table in the canteen, three men and two women were carousing. They were drinking wine. Their acquaintance was fueled by a sense of travel adventure. In terse voices they got on with their revelry; their words were commands, so to speak, the way soldiers typically talk when they’re on a bender.

Next to the bar stood a round table. It had five men and five women seated around it. The men were commercial pilots, bitter and oily. Their hard, skilled fists rested lightly on the surface of the table. Next to them were their wives. Five women with their hands folded together in their laps, next to the five men; they had grown accustomed to this solicitous posture, which was a kind of unvoiced prayer for their menfolk working in the air.

Piping hot tea in large beer mugs steamed in front of them.

The five men spoke in subdued but passionate tones. The topic was the same one they’d been discussing for two years now at the close of every day.

“Not on your life!” said the one sooty man, and rapping his fist slightly on the table for emphasis. The lady on the right immediately laid her palm over the knotted and needy fist.

“Not on your life!” he repeated, yanking his hand out from under his wife’s palm. He pounded on the table again, this time mightily.

“Why the hell not?” all four of the other men said at once.

“Why the hell not? What? Why not? Let’s resolve that we will no longer fly in this rust-bucket. Not with this death-trap! The company has to switch out the plane. They have money enough. We’re going to fall out of the sky. They aren’t paying us enough to do that.”

“There’s no way we’re going to crash.”

“There’s no way we’re going to crash? We are most certainly going to crash. Shall we roll the dice with God every time somebody takes off? Huh? Whadda you say?”

“He’s right.”

“The hell he’s right! He has no money, so he’s not right. We need to make a living.”

“They aren’t paying us enough to do that.”

“If they want to use a plane for advertising, they should purchase a new one. This one’s rickety and falling apart. It ought to be burned or sold for scrap. Not kept in service.”

“But if they don’t buy one...”

“They should though.”

“Come, come now! It’s also advertising for them if the plane goes down. The boneheaded people out there will stare in astonishment as it spins around—now green, now yellow...And then all of a sudden it slams into the ground. Everyone will be talking and writing about the company for days.”

“By gosh, if someone crashes and it’s not me, then I’m going public with this. I will tell all in an article or something.”

“And then? You still need a livelihood, and that’s that.”

“You’ve got to have a livelihood,” one of the lady’s voices said in support.

“What do you know?” lashed out her husband. “Go have some babies. They’re in short supply. What do you know? You should work up there with this piece of crap and you’d hear the way the motor cuts out and then fires back up.”

The canteen-keeper glanced up at the clock on the wall, picked up the leather cup and two dice from the bar, and brought them over. He put them down and waited.

Someone asked: “Who’s rolling today?”

Suddenly everything was quiet. Five men with puffy red eyes and five tremulous women just sat there at the round table.

“Whose turn is it?” the voice inquired again, this time rather impatiently.

“Marie,” one of the ladies responded.

The woman named Marie seized the leather cup, placed her open palm over its mouth, shook, and dumped the two dice into the middle of the table. The five men leaned forward on their elbows. The ladies sat there superstitiously, worrying their interlaced fingers and not looking up. The canteen-keeper was helping count. Twice they totted up the results.

“Franz flies today,” one man said at last, bitterly.

“Drink up your tea first!”

“No need.”

And the man named Franz got to his feet. He ran his hand fondly over his wife’s back and went out.

He left by the door, which he left open behind him. The din made its way inside. They could see him, his shoulders drooping, as he made his way slowly across the airfield and adjusted the belt of his trousers. Off in the distance, they were towing the plane out of the hangar. Meanwhile, one of the mechanics tried out the contacts on the illuminated advertisement. The letters on the wing blazed up, made the wet grass gleam, and then went out.

The whole plane winked off and on.

“The door!” bellowed one of the men at the long table.

Someone shut the door.

The quivering walls and windows once more screened out the racket from outside.

Inside, where they were also making quite a row, they concentrated and could hear the roar of the engine outside increasing. The plane droned away above them and the din subsided.

And the voices of the three carousing travelers, along with the blonde woman’s inebriated laughter, held dominion once more over the canteen.

(1936)

DEATH

1.

In the earthy-smelling, low-ceilinged peasant room, only the droning of the flies could be heard. From the corner, from the direction of the bed, spread the apothecary smell of various medicines.

Lying on the bed, amidst disordered and rumpled pillows, was a pallid man. He’d come here to the village with his family in order to rest, and here the swift-footed scourge of the worn-out work-a-holic, the Bitter End, caught up with him.

Over his drawn and exhausted forehead, white locks of hair fell, damp from the fever but golden blond and defiantly thick for his age. He was having difficulty breathing, but his chest pushed the ancient striped quilt up and down noticeably. A will to live this mighty was occasionally ripped open by a great groaning sigh that made your skin crawl. One of the man’s hands—diaphanous, long-fingered—rested on top of the bed. This hand was so cold and death-like that the wedding ring on it—now quite loose—seemed alive.

A small ten year-old boy was in the room, fervently attending to the man’s needs from his spot next to the bed. The sick man’s son. He’d been ordered to the bedside to chase away the flies from the dying man. With an enormous green-leafed tree branch, the small, withered lad fanned the sleeper; it took a great effort of will, his puny little arms with their last ounce of tautness rhythmically working the branch. He was so worn out that he would let it fall onto the patient’s head after just a short time.  But alarm at possibly waking him elicited new strength from the boy.

The sleeper awoke gently and opened his eyes. He stared at his child’s face for a while, and then wearily lost consciousness again.

But in a few minutes, a fly started tormenting him, and he couldn’t feel the boy’s fanning. He looked up. From outside the sounds of children at play were audible. His son was watching them. His hands had stopped, he was no longer mindful of the branch, and playful curiosity was frozen on his small pale face. His mouth was half-open, and he gasped perceptibly as he followed the sounds of the game outside. The boy concluded from their voices that they were probably playing cops-and-robbers.

“Get’im!”—he said under his breath, as if he were about to run and chase the kid gangsters himself.

The man lying there in the rumpled bed frowned irritably and, in a quiet voice, spoke these words to the boy:

“Go outside, my boy, and play. You don’t have to chase these flies away.”

The little boy came to his senses with a terrific start.

“Absolutely not,” he replied, and immediately he resumed fanning. His father tried to dissuade him again, but the boy read the hidden reproach on his father’s face, and he stamped the floor vehemently with his scrawny leg: “I’m staying!”

This resistance unnerved the sick man. He was weak. He blinked a couple of times, and then fell back to sleep like a ton of bricks.

Now the boy closed his ears, so receptive to all the noisy games and merriment from outside, and zealously lashed out at the flies above his ailing father.

2.

That very evening the boy was dispatched to Pest to get the doctor. The condition of the pallid man there on the bed had grown very bad indeed.

The train station was an hour’s walk from the village. The child set out on the road, his teeth chattering with fear. He was afraid of everything, of the black of night, of highwaymen, and of wild animals.  But for all that he strode along heroically, and his mind was on his father while he was on the dark highway. He reached the station. All by himself he bought his ticket and clambered up onto the train.

The third-class carriage was filled with the outlines of people floating in pipe-smoke. The boy coughed and ensconced himself in an empty seat between two hefty market-women. He well-nigh disappeared between them. They tried asking him all sorts of questions, but when they saw that the boy was barely responding, and was very much lost in his own thoughts, they went back to their gossiping. Their words enveloped him, and, curled up into a little ball, he fell asleep. When the train stopped for the first time, he woke up in alarm. Crying, he appealed to the peasant man sitting across from him.

“Are we already in Pest?”

“The hell we are!” replied the man with a coarse grunt.

In a fright, the child flattened himself against the wall behind the two heavyset ladies. The conductor, who was walking the length of the coach holding a lantern, noticed him only him now. He collected the boy’s ticket, and from under his massive mustache he growled genially in the boy’s direction:

“The train doesn’t go a meter beyond Pest. Everybody will get out there!”

And he moved on, shutting the door behind him. In the carriage people resumed their interrupted conversations. The boy calmed down a bit, but nonetheless he was constantly waking up with a start, thinking:  “Oh dear! Everyone’s getting out now, no?” Eventually the fright and exhaustion overcame him. He only bolted from his sleep when the two market-women sitting next to him, and the others, began preparing to exit with great rustling and bustling.  The scowling peasant barked his way:

“We’re there now.”

The child nodded drowsily, got to his feet, and let himself be pushed along to the entrance of the train station. There Budapest spread out before his eyes with all its great radiance. It was raining, and the streaks of light hopped to and fro on the asphalt that water had turned into a mirror.

“Wanna earn some money? Take my suitcase.”

He turned his tear-filled eyes to the man who just stood there without saying another word. He wandered past darkened doorways in a quest for the doctor. He scrutinized sign after sign. The letters blurred before his eyes, and only by accident did this sign leap out at him, a white spot under the dark archway:

Dr. Dezső Bálint

3rd floor

With his last reserve of strength, he dragged himself to the door. He rang the doorbell.

The doctor opened the door, and the boy fell into his arms.

“My father is very sick,” he whimpered.

And he fell asleep.

3.

Meanwhile, back in the peasants’ room that smelled of earth, the pale, fair-haired man passed away. In his final sigh, and in his last words, hovered the face of the boy looking outside, absorbed in the game. His image vibrated in front of his face. In a scarcely perceptible whisper, he uttered:

“Go, my son, and play. Never mind about the flies.”

(1928)

THE TALE OF THE WEEPING WILLOW

For Viola Tomori, with love

Out towards Tápé, on the banks of the Tisza, there lives a weeping willow. When the night sky is filled with stars busily sharing their light, the moon can relax and take its time; seated atop the willow, its tongue protrudes from its mouth as it rests, rocking gently back and forth.  On one such occasion the moon, laughing, asks the willow tree a question:

“Tell me, old buddy, what makes you angry, and what makes you sad?”

Now the willow has already many times explained to the harvest moon[2] that he’s sad because it often happens that the sky is full of stars, meaning that the moon often rests on him and rocks. But at the end of the little tale the moon always laughs derisively at him, ruffling and snapping some of his branches, and then just leaves him there. And the willow would grow very annoyed with the moon.

In the last few years he hasn’t even said anything but rather looks irately off at the water and responds crabbily:

“I’m not going to tell you anything. If you don’t go on your way, I’ll toss you in the water.”

The golden moon laughs, and settles even more firmly onto the tree. The willow musters all of its strength, creaking and cracking, but the moon is always stronger. He doesn’t topple into the water.

But from year to year he has to hold on ever more firmly to the willow, because it is getting steadily angrier and more powerful.

One evening a year ago, when the stars were shining very brightly, the moon had to grab on with his hands for dear life, so he wouldn’t tumble down.

But someday the tree was bound to throw him off, and the golden moon was going to end up in the water.

On one occasion, then, the willow of Tápé told me about what things made him sad, and the other weeping willows there, too, and I didn’t laugh in his face the way the moon did.

Now I’m going to tell you, ok?

Once upon a time, long ago, there was just one weeping willow tree in all of Hungary. And this tree was not like the ones nowadays. The branches did not tumble downwards in the same way, it had a lovely straight trunk, and its gaze was on the sky rather than the ground. It lived on the banks of the Danube, but as I said, it never once glanced at the water. And this willow fell in love with a cherry tree, a girl whose trunk was lime-washed a beautiful white to prevent bugs from climbing up it and getting at the fruit, and she lived in the garden of a farmer who had a great fondness for the harvest moon. The cherry tree was very proud of her waist and of the fact that she lived inside a fence, where the farmer plucked her dried leaves for her. And of the fact that she was provided every year with a new white skirt for her lower half. She took no notice of the willow tree who was sending her gallant kisses on the wind. But because the willow was quite smitten, he found no peace or rest, day or night. He was forever agitating his branches and he was unable to stand still.  One night he gathered his roots from out of the ground and set off towards the cherry-tree girl. He got somewhat dusty while hoofing it along the highway, but nonetheless he was holding his head up, high and proud, as he reached the farmer’s garden.

The cherry tree was asleep. He woke her up.

“How’d you manage to get in here?” the cherry tree whispered in low, resentful tones.

“Through the garden gate. It works just like a door,” the willow replied, amorously edging his roots into the earth.

“It works just like a door, but it’s meant for the farmer. Not you. Now hit the road!” And with that the proud cherry tree stood up straight and showed off her whitewashed waist.

The willow just shook his head.

“I’m taking you away from here. That’s the reason I came. Don’t you want to marry me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are poor. You don’t have a lovely white midriff as I do, and you don’t bear any fruit, and you also have a foul smell—” said the cherry tree girl haughtily. “You’re never going to have any. There will never be any edible fruit on you! Just why are you so wretched?”

“That’s how we are, and there are many others who are like that: born poor. We can’t help it—” the willow responded calmly—“but you love us anyway, right?” And he opened his arms wide in her direction.

“I do not love you!” she said, pushing him away. „Tell me, will you always be this poor? You know, the Infant Jesus can help you.”

“I don’t think so,” the willow lowered his head. “Maybe. It’s possible that he’ll help. But one of our siblings already tried that. He called us all together and we set off with him. He was a lovely strong willow. The only problem was the way he used to sing when the wind blew through him!”

“And what became of him?” the cherry girl asked excitedly.

The willow tree let his head hang even lower.

“They burned him alive. The trees in the garden did. They burned him at the stake. His healthy moist flesh sputtered and crackled in the flames, and he turned black.”

“The trees in the garden did that to him?” the cherry tree asked in a shaky voice.

“Yes. The trees in the garden,” the willow tree said, but there was no exasperation in his eyes—only Love.

“Well, then more power to them! Get out of here. Or I’ll wake up the farmer and he’ll burn you at the stake, too,” roared the cherry tree girl.

“Wait,” the willow beseeched her. „Wait just a little!”

He mustered all his strength, stretched his hands up towards the heavens, and plucked out the harvest moon.

“See? I’m giving this to you.” He held it out to her with a smile. And the moon turned into a clod of dirt between his fingers.

The cherry girl laughed, and so the willow tree wearily tossed the clump onto the ground.

As soon as it reached the earth, though, it became a moon once more. It flew up to the sky, to an unreachable height there, and stuck out its tongue.

The melancholy willow pulled his roots back out of the soil, and with a hang-dog face, he headed back to the Danube.

On the way the dew beset the grass, and he was bedraggled and mud-splattered when he got back to his old spot. Wearily he bent his head over the water, and his hair slid down in front of his eyes. His locks even went down into the water a little bit, but he couldn’t have cared less. He was busy weeping bitterly.

And that’s the story the willow once related to me.

And since them, a great many years have passed. But this is why all willows weep, and it’s why they are sad.

It’s on account of the cherry tree girl and the scorched sibling. But rather more so on account of the cherry girl. But nowadays, when they believe no one can see them, they still dry their tears, straighten up from the waist, and hold their heads up high.

I’ve spied on them.

And should the moon plop down on top of them, they don’t stir and they don’t talk.

They screw up their strength.

And one day they will toss off that golden moon.

Then they will flock together, and they will not be weeping.

And someday they’ll say:

“Our lives have also been blessed with fruit.”

And then, when they lean out, over the water, they will see that their lives have also been blessed with fruit.

(1932)

THE BIRTH OF THE LAND OF ETERNAL SUNSHINE

András and János were twins. When they tumbled out of that large, bead-laden skirt, from which people generally plop onto the ground, they already resembled each other to such an extent that only the wearer of the big skirt could tell them apart.

Afterwards they were caught out many times in the heavy-grained rain; the riotous sun baked them; and the snarling winds came. They grew up.

And as they grew, they changed shape, and the day came when they no longer resembled each other. No one would say anymore that they were siblings.

The wearer of the big skirt also died. For a time it was rumored that she was sitting around in the clouds, and when the heavens thundered, it was just her clapping her ankles together. But later they learned that something else produces peals of thunder, and in airplanes they flew up towards the clouds; they saw that there was not so much as a dog sitting up there. But the people who were spreading those rumors, and who depended on them for their bread, told the story that the wearer of the big skirt turned to smoke, and now swirled around church towers or was simply invisible. They were satisfied with this.

Nobody remembered anymore that András and János were once brothers, not even the rumor mongers, even though they made a show of knowing all about it.

Therefore, for a long while, András and János were able to live peaceably next to each other, just as long as they didn’t live together.

András had a number of rooms to himself; for each one of them he possessed a separate key, and on the chairs in the rooms sat his shaggy treasures, with their arms crossed on their breasts.

They were disheveled, because when they were left alone they immediately took to playing tag or tussling with each other.

But András was patient, and every day he combed out their hair. The secret of the keys was known to András alone.

János inhabited only one room, but he was not on his own there. He was together with the other jánoses. There was no key for that room, and none was needed. Here there were no treasures seated on the chairs. Indeed there weren’t even any chairs, just rags lying on the floor. On the rags and the walls crouched red begs, with their legs crossed, and they stank up the place. They didn’t stir except when János returned home with the other jánoses.

János and the other jánoses would’ve been delighted to have someone steal the red beetles, for they were of no use to anyone.

Once János carried one by accident, on his coat, into András’s house. He went over there to wish András a happy birthday, but András threw him out, along with the bug, hollering after him:

“Today I had wanted to give you an itsy-bitsy shaggy treasure, but now you aren’t getting anything, because you brought a red bug with you!”

János flung the bug to the floor, where it shivered on the cold stone before scampering rapidly back up to where it’d been sitting earlier.

That same day, János asked for directions from a severe-looking man who emanating smoke and heat—because he was tying one on in the corner tavern. The red bug took a liking to him and scarpered over onto the stern fellow, whom he replaced in two hours with another somber chap. And by the next morning there were a lot of red bugs seated, corpulently and with their arms crossed, on the screen of the window of his room in the grim house.

András’s skin was white, and his hands had shiny fingernails; János was black, and every now and again at night foul-smelling flowers would sprout on him. Because András bathed every day, in the mornings, cold and hot water flowed into his large porcelain basin. A tin basin in the summer awaited János emptily, because it had holes, and the water leaked out of it; in the winter the water stayed in, but then it was frozen. And János and the other jánoses no doubt just rubbed their eyes in the morning and started their day. András also had friends, and other andráses, but there weren’t as many of these as there were of the jánoses.

All the same, they got along well and lived peacefully. János worked a lot, and all the time; András worked little, and seldom.

András worked little, and seldom, and he had loads of free time, and for precisely that reason he was always a little bit delighted when he got together with János. Because János admired András.

He didn’t love János’s odor so much, or his eyes, but András loved being admired, and for that reason he was willing to put up with all sorts of things from János.

Their usual little game: when they saw János coming, András would clap, and his shaggy little treasurers would swarm around János and surround him; with another clap they would then hoist András up and carry him off.

During the procession he would don festive, reversible clothing, and the rumor mongers and the stern but beaming men strolled along with them. Sometimes there were angels, too. For his pains, András was paid back with tiny shaggy treasures.

It went on like this for an untold number of years.

But the shaggy treasures multiplied. More than rabbits do. And they grew ever more fractious.

As for the jánoses, they took to eating less and less, and they worked more and more. And new jánoses were born, who no longer admired András.

They learned things. To see with their eyes. And to hear with their ears. They read books, and they gathered together to listen to cascades of speeches. And they learned about the secret life of the shaggy treasures. They no longer marveled at anything. And one day János encountered András’s procession. And that was the birthday of the Land of Eternal Sunshine.

András came with the procession, and it was very quiet. He halted his bearers in front of János.

“Do you want a furry little treasure and a day for loafing?” he asked graciously.

János shook his head.

András grew pale and the shaggy treasures began moving about restlessly. The austere men accompanying the procession began a ghastly clacking of their teeth, while the rumor mongers, guilelessly and with their heads cocked sideways, stared at Janos from the edge of the road.

“Do you want two little furry treasures, and two days for loafing?” András asked in alarm.

János shook his head.

Then he slowly stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. With a red cap on its head, the whistle ran off, and, in two twinklings of an eye, it completed its circuit through the series of little streets.

And the jánoses began making their way from all directions towards János and András.

Millions of them.

The shaggy treasures leapt into the air with fright and scattered in a mad rush; they let András fall from a considerable height, and he splattered onto the paving stones of the street. The severe men and the rumor mongers defended the corpse briefly, but then the jánoses stomped on them and ground them underfoot, and then they ran after the fleeing treasures. One by one they caught up with them, apprehended them, and squashed them in a bathtub.

Out of the many small ones, a giant shaggy treasure emerged.

At that point the jánoses held a meeting to consult about the situation, and in a short while, on command, the giant set to work.

And they constructed houses with large windows and lots of sunshine, and built locomotives, bridges and airplanes, a big building for brand-new babies, spotless houses for the ill, and cheerful cemeteries rich in flowers. They sold no one, and they bought no one; the girls got their guys and the guys got their girls; the fields got sunshine and the barley seed got its showers, and loaves of bread lay heaped upon the tables.

The Land of Eternal Sunshine had been born.

(1933)

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

Happy József wobbled down the hill on his stiff legs, and out of his mouth a long string of colorful expletives issued.

Miserable Mihály fell in beside him and added his voice to the din. So now the two of them were completely losing their religion over the good homes from which they came. For Happy József it had been four weeks, and for Miserable Mihály seven, that they had worn the same collars on their unwashed necks.

Now Screwy Feri was tagging along with them, too, whistling as he went.

They had taken their comprehensive examinations at the university, and now they didn’t know what to do with themselves.

Their eyes and their hair still ached.

Happy, Miserable, and Screwy, three shiny medals on the good Lord’s chest, could find no place on earth to call their own.

Paul the Plutocrat was coming up the hill with Kata the Mooch on his arm, and he touched his hat. Two doors farther on, he went into a pharmacy. Kata eyed the three naïve boys with sweet cunning, and she just stood there, shifting her weight and crossing her legs. They watched her.

Happy József mumbled a little song:

My whip’s handle is red, not yellow,

and a rich boy’s like no other fellow—

Out of both sides of his mouth trickles spit.

His teeth are green; his mouth stinks like a pit.

Miserable and Screwy sang backup. A little bit like dancing, they walked along in step, like the horses of good burghers at a funeral or of the police in the middle of a protest.

Standing on the corner in front of the Royal was Needy Gábris, who was flattening out the wrinkles on his ratty coat sleeve with a mother-of-pearl jack knife. When he saw them, he offered up his trembling hand and his voice:

“May I trouble you for something for a poor blind man... ?”

The three of them encircled him. Happy József snapped at him:

“Have you lost your mind? You’re a panhandler now?”

“May I trouble you... „

“I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“Kick your grandma’s ass!” And then once more, in heart-rending tones:

“The Lord will requite you for it with strength and health. God bless the—aw, c’mon, pay for a woman for me, my good man.”

They shrieked with laughter.

And Needy Gábris threw in his lot with them, and then there were four.

The foursome followed the road downhill.

Screwy Feri kept falling behind. When he came across a mailbox, he walked over to it, snorted, and spit through the opening. He had had a lot of practice, so he always hit the bulls-eye. Only once did his spittle land off to the side and roll slowly down the mailbox. At every turn he grumbled that he was an honorable man but had grown quite bitter. An old man was waddling along in front of them. He stretched out on the ground and started writhing convulsively.  He foamed at the mouth.

Water does that, froths up like that, after it plunges over something.

They hoisted him up and carried him into an entranceway. Needy Gábris put under his head as a pillow the Sunday issue of Kiralyhűség; Screwy Feri pinched the old man’s face.

“Don’t be scared, old sport. Before you know it, we’ll be carving you up for an autopsy, too!”

And down they went, towards Happy’s house. It was Happy, Miserable, Screwy, and Needy.

In the bustling, dark corridor, Happy dug around for the key as he hummed softly:

The souls of squished cockroaches

are whistling on the threshold,

on the threshold...

They laughed. Screwy shrieked and shook his head:

“Don’t mess with me, you lousy bastard!”

Something crunched beneath Miserable’s foot, and he slipped slightly.

“Ugh, what the fuck! I stepped on it. Hey, what’s going on with that door?”

Needy Gábris’s smile lit up the darkness.

“How afraid they are of God’s wee little creatures!”

The door recoiled and shut on them a couple of times, but eventually swung sedately and prudently open.

Sacrificial Coco, from France, was sitting in an easy chair in the stinky room, next to a bed, at the bottom of which sickly-colored straw showed its face.

“Bonjour, Coco,” the four of them greeted her. The dead face, sunk onto her chest, quickened for a moment, and she attempted to smile.

One after the other they shook hands with her.

Two interlocked bodies burst furiously through the doorway from the neighboring room.

János Windmill was beating Dezső the Sage’s head against the floor.

They pulled János off, whereupon he stood up, plucked the button from the front opening of his pants, which was only hanging on only by a thread, and growled:

“Such a sonofabitch! He writes all over my anatomy book?”

Coco grew quite frightened and was complaining in French. Sniveling, she retrieved a whisky bottle from under her chair and took a large gulp. That’s what she was using these days to relieve her sense of futility. She drank and coughed. She offered the booze around. They all looked at each other.

Dezső the Sage winced in disgust and hiccupped.

But Screwy took it, clamped his bared teeth around the neck of the bottle, and drank.

He passed it along and they each took a turn. Everyone was standing at attention. They all saluted the beverage.

Coco whined gleefully; she very much loved to give, and she was glad when people accepted.

A pack of cards was lying on the table, and Happy began dealing them in a wide sweeping motion. They played slowly, apathetically, just for the hell of it; not a one of them had any money. A pair of one-crown coins was hiding in Dezső’s pocket, but he kept us in the dark about that. Whenever the coins accidentally clinked against each other and made noise, he turned pale and bit his lip.

In silence they slapped down card after card.

Sick Péter walked into the room, along with Awkward Andris and István Contagious.

They were returning from their evening round of treatment together. Then again, these days they’re always together, the three STD-carriers. They sat down on the couch, and with their arms around each other’s shoulders they lurched from side to side, howling:

The waters of the Maros

flow silently by...

“Either cut that out or get lost!” Happy howled. Total silence descended once more over the room. Needy Gábris just sat there, scratching the table with the edge of a card, and Coco cracked her knuckles loudly. György the Proclaimer sailed into their dump of an apartment in a panic. He spat once on the floor, pulled up a chair, and blurted out breathlessly:

“Charles the Intrepid has died. This afternoon in the maternity ward. He shot himself in the belly. In a bathtub. And Mangy Hilda threw vitriol at Laci the Righteous. He’s now blind in one eye.”

Everyone groaned. Coco guffawed unpleasantly.

“Hush!” someone hissed at her, and the light blinked, bringing down brief brown. Half-smoked cigarettes rained down, unstifled and with disgust, onto a large plate in the middle of the table. Smoke danced playfully in spirals. An unused match on the place burst brightly into flame. Somebody poured water over the whole mess. It sizzled and started to stink.

Feri lit up again. Sage snatched the cancer stick out of his mouth and angrily ground it out in the water.

“Huh?”

“Don’t smoke now!”

“We’re all gonna croak anyhow.”

“We’re already wasting away.”

“We’re waning. Like the moon.”

Feri stood up, gave Sage a raspberry, and walked out. He slammed the door behind him.

It jarred the room.

They sat around the table, and the lamp sputtered. For a long time all was quiet.

Then Miserable Mihály piped up disingenuously:

“One time I was on a trip to Bulgaria. I was going through the Balkan mountains with our compartment door locked, trapped in there with a Greek Orthodox priest, a Turk in a fez, and a German girl. She was a teacher, and I made it with her that night in the bathroom...”

“That’s nothing!” János Windmill said, cutting him off. “I fell in love with a nurse in the isolation ward at the hospital. I was down with scarlet fever, ten years old…”

“Shut your traps, all of you!” Happy banged his fist on the table. Water and cards flew all over the place. He kicked over his chair and went to stand by the window.

The air felt even stickier there.

And Needy Gábris, Awkward Andris, Sick Péter, and George the Proclaimer took up positions next to him.

They looked out the window.

Behind them were lined up István Contagious, Dezső the Sage, Windmill János, and Miserable Mihály.

And they too were staring out the window.

Coco got up on the chair to look.

And Screwy Feri edged his way in, smirking:

“Now children, the paper bag outside is adorned with the saying that a pharmacy is there to alleviate pain and provide relief!”

No one said anything.

“Hee, hee,” Happy started laughing, mechanically, after a considerable pause.

“Hee, hee,” said Sage, picking up on the merriment.

“Hee, hee,” laughed Needy and Crazy and Sick and Proclaimer, too.

“Hee, hee,” chuckled Contagious and Windmill and Miserable, and even Coco. And the room echoed, and the window frame reverberated.

“Hee, hee, heeeee, hee hee hee!”

Above Alchemists’ Street, day was breaking.

Happy József, in a mutinous mood, was trudging uphill, raising dust.

It had been a long time, but now it was dawning once more in the middle of the witches’ month. Remote, bitter peasants were frantically harvesting the fruits of the rose-trees, because it was cloudy and the sky was baleful.

The wind was mussing up the clouds from above.

He strained forward in a hurry, toting on his shoulder a large paving stone. A week ago he had spied it outside the city, and today he’d gone to get it.

It was a large rock, of the type that allows streets to turn corners. And it was heavy.

By the time he reached the city, day was breaking.

Above an entranceway, a Gothic saint held his head in his hands, and it disappeared slowly from sight on the ledge. The paving stone was bleeding.

Dirty-eared errand-boys drew slimy sketches with watering cans on the dusty floors.

In the doorways, in front of the partly raised shutters, businessmen fat and lean stroked agitated fabric with yellow, tobacco-stained fingers. They were talking loudly about money.

“You’ve become a quarryman?”

Horny István stood blocking the road in front of him, legs planted wide. His trousers were unbuttoned. He used to slink off to his woman from the clinic, where he worked as an orderly on the night shift. At present, he was on his way back.

“Can you give me a hand here?” groaned Happy from underneath the stone.

“Bite me.”

“Fuck off, then.”

Happy detoured around him and went on his way. Horny Steve stood there in the street by a storm drain.

By the time the clouds burst into tears, he was almost home. Big raindrops were falling.

From the other side of the street, Mátyás Andor the Sloth, who was a poet, accosted him with a yell:

“Happy!”

“Yeah?”

“Carthage’s columns came tumbling down last night beneath the weight of the moon. Didn’t you hear?”

Happy József lowered the stone to the ground. He cupped his hands over his mouth and bellowed over a crude offer relating to a body part.

Groaning, he clambered up the steps, and he dragged the stone upstairs into the corner of the room.

He took out some India ink, poured a bit onto the stone, and tilted it so that some of the ink ran down the side. It looked now as if someone had taken a piss on it.

After that he set about drawing. The roots of the hair on his head looked as if they had flashing pearls of liquid on them, so great was his industriousness. He drew a sign: WC. And he nailed it onto the wall above the stone.

Then he scrunched up his eyes and studied it.

József was now happy for a minute or two, and he felt the universe scraping coldly past the back of his collar.

He washed his face and brushed his teeth, things he had gotten out of the habit of doing regularly.

It was noon already.

He lay down on a bed, stared at the ceiling, and ran his tongue over his teeth in anticipation of lunch.

A pair of copulating flies fell buzzing onto his forehead. He brushed them off and then smacked them with his hand.

They lay there unconscious on the bedspread.

He produced a microscope and, taking them by the wings, carefully placed them under it.

The flies were still stuck together.

He couldn’t see much of anything.

“Ah, screw you,” he grumbled. With an air of ennui he took the microscope over to the window and dropped it out. He wanted to be rid of those flies.

He peered out at the large bang that followed.

His head was swimming, so he sat down on the edge of the bed, and clapped his hands on his knees.

And there he sat.

Then he let out a loud shriek.

“So much for the microscope,” he said later when he calmed down again.

He made his way back to the window.

People were standing around down there in a circle, directing their bovine gazes upwards.

He snorted and spat a wad of phlegm down on their heads. After that he slammed the window shut.

Lost in his thoughts, he scratched his head and regarded the dandruff that had just collected under his fingernails.

Someone knocked gingerly at the door.

And Silent Máté came demurely into his room.

He said hello.

“What can I do for you?” Happy József said, sitting up.

“I’m moving. Do you want to come live with me?”

“No. I have a woman now. Why? What’s up with your pal Stinky Marci?”

“He’s insufferable, you know. I mean, I’m a good egg, right? But when he peels off his socks in the evening, for crying out loud, they land with a thud and stand there at attention. Giving off fumes.”

Happy grinned from ear to ear, and laughed thunderously: “Ha ha!”

“Good grief. This is pointless. I’ll see you later.”

With that he marched dreamily out of the room.

Happy reclined again.

He lay there for a good while.

And into the room came Mangy Hilda; when she noticed the stone and the sign, she laughed.

Actually they both laughed.

Mangy Hilda laughed, and Happy was happy to see her laughing.

Mangy Hilda laughed, and she let down the blinds and started taking off her clothes.

And she lay down on the bed, exposed herself, and beckoned.

So Happy also began to undress. The bed sang until dark.

Then there was a rap at the door. Our man pulled on his pants and went out.

Győző the Death Trap was there.

“What’s wrong?”

“Is Hilda here?”

“Nooo…she isn’t.”

They took turns blinking at each other. Happy was smiling like an idiot.

“So. Let me in.”

“What do you want with her?

“Look here, I need money.”

“And?”

“You’re taking a break, are you? Yesterday Hilda slept at Paul the Plutocrat’s place, so surely she’s got money today. I want to ask her for some. You just gonna stand there and rain on my parade?”

And Death Trap shoved him out of the way, as a doctor would, and slipped into the room.

Happy’s eyes grew wide. As he was trundling in that stone in the morning, he had seen Hilda laughing. And he had seen her with Paul the Plutocrat.

“May his tool wither and drop off,” he gasped painfully, leaning against the wall.

Later Death Trap came out. He greeted us in a whisper and veered out the door.

Then Happy József went back in and put on his shoes and socks. He stood there in front of the mirror and adjusted his collar.

“Come heeeeere!” She almost sang the words. They rang out at short intervals, many times over.

He heard someone rummaging about and looked over his shoulder.

Hilda lay on the bed, naked, puffing away on a cigarette. With every breath she blew out smoke and another “come-hither” command. Boredom showed on her face.

This made Happy furious, and he hurled a book at her.

At that Hilda sat up. She retrieved her purse from the chair and pulled out a revolver.

“Do I shoot you down like a dog, or will you come here?” She smiled at him around the cigarette. „I won’t go to Paul the Plutocrat’s place anymore.”

Happy just stood there.

“Are you coming?”

“No.”

She shot him in the stomach.

Happy József’s soul stood next to the table, above his own body, and looked on.

Hilda was naked. The young man was leaking blood. She shook him, and then, horror-stricken, she got dressed. Apoplexy fluttered about, crackling querelously along the walls, and then it hovered above Hilda’s head. But it didn’t strike.

She left off dressing and sat back down on the bed. She pulled up her knees.

Happy decided to play a joke.

He poked at the dead body until it rolled over. Overjoyed, Hilda sprang over to him and gave him another shake. He didn’t budge. She looked around the room and felt like screaming, but she just swallowed hard. She sat back down, covered in goose-bumps.

Happy watched her.

As she sat there, her leg thigh looked soft and sweet, like the back of a dove’s neck you see when they’re walking or sitting beneath a statue.

He bent over and kissed her.

Horrified, Hilda rubbed the spot till it was red.

He tried to sit on her and press her down, but it didn’t work. He was weightless.

“I’m a spirit!” he smirked venomously.

He strolled a bit among the pieces of furniture, swept the ashtray off the table, knocked down a painting, and, plucking the pillow from the bed, smacked the floor with it.

Hilda was squealing like mad.

And that got on his nerves. He took the key out of the door, let it fall, and then sprang into the keyhole and squeezed through.

He roamed the streets.

It was the peaceful hour after suppertime.

Indoor dogs on leashes fussed about on three legs along the bottom of walls, leaving behind sketches of hydrographic charts. Girls on two legs, unstockinged, stood patiently next to them.

József took long strides. He felt light on his feet. Every step was a block long.

He liked this game quite a bit. He collided with the random pedestrians who turned into doorways in alarm, and he gave a pinch to one girl’s breasts.

He thought back to the nursery rhymes of his youth, and he hopped about on one leg.

As soon as he was outside the city, he cackled.

He saw a low fence and, getting a running start, he made ready to jump over it. He pushed off forcefully from the ground.

With a whoosh he flew up into the air and then was unable to plant his feet back down on terra firma.

How he fumed about this! It occurred to him that he had work to do. A hideous still life from the magazine The Good Family still hung on the wall, and he wanted to send it flying, to smash it to pieces.

But to no avail.

He was sailing through the azure.

Happy József flew upwards, and he was cussing up a storm on account of that still life.

Then Miserable Mihály whooshed up beside him and struck up a conversation.

“It’s you, eh?” Happy exclaimed gleefully.

Off they went into the wild blue yonder. The winds sliced backwards through their wings with a whistle.

“Working in a factory was new for me,” Miserable started to say. „I couldn’t get work anywhere else. And in the morning outside we went outside to the latrines to smoke with old Lajos the Scab, at whom I was angry, because he wasn’t joining the Party.

And Lajos the Scab was leaning against the wall and just said, “It is what it is.” And I told him it served him right and he deserved it.

And then he turned red, and he hit me on the temple with a heavy broom handle.

“Jesus,” Happy uttered, thunderstruck.

“After I died, I still went to Party headquarters. They issued me a membership card and I thrust it into my pocket. After that I recruited Lajos, and then I saw that you were flying in the air and so I thought I’d find out where.”

And on they flew.

And Screwy Feri cropped up in the air next to them. He was whistling.

“Is that you?”

“What’re you up to?”

“What made you kick the bucket?”

“A hare.”

“Say what?”

“I’d been at wits’ end for weeks. And then I was coming down off the mountain, across a meadow. A track led down. And off in the distance a ways, a rabbit darted across my path, from left to right. Well, then I started to run, too. If it wins, I decided, I’ll shoot myself in the head. That was the right way to do it. Like a gunfight in America. And he hopped down to the road ahead of me. He won! It’s a good thing you all are here.”

“You dope,” grumbled Happy and Miserable simultaneously. “You’re a dumbass.”

And on they flew.

Farther down the line stood Poor Gábris, holding out an open hand.

“You’re panhandling?” Happy József seethed as they gathered around him.

They were shivering, because it had grown cold.

“Yessirree bob, I’m a-beggin’.” And he snapped to attention, Needy Gábris did: “I panhandle because I died hungry. There are no cops here, and no such things as pandhandling permits!”

“Oh, knock it off. Come on, now.”

They dragged him along with them.

And on they flew, the four of them buzzing through the air.

There was Coco sitting on a cloud, waving merrily. She had a beard.

“You must’ve been here quite a while, for you to get this hairy,” they smirked.

“Harrumph!” Coco said. “It took a lot out of me, getting up here. And it’s been so boring up to now!”

They clacked their fingernails together in amusement.

Screwy Feri turned a somersault out of joy at seeing them again, hocked into his palm, and hurled his goober at a star. The star vomited, lit up in a fury of sparks, and disappeared.

In the tropics, outside a village horror-stricken by the presence of golden lions, a girl was singing songs on the shore of the warm sea, and the star plopped down at her feet. She dried it off, because it was wet, and carried it home and put it in a dark corner in front of the fetish.

But they didn’t see that.

They were roaring with laughter.

They sat down on the cloud next to Coco to sing.

*

And so, once more, the air whistled and crackled. From out of the swirling winds Mátyás Andor the Sloth’s dishevelled head popped up.

They interrupted their song.

“Well, get a load of you!” a voice exulted. “Screw your poetic self!”

The Sloth slunk out of the wind, covered the soles of his feet in chalk, and took up a wide-legged stance atop a pair of stars.

With their tongues protruding, the stars supported him, even as they wheezed warmly under his weight.

He scanned the quiet people seated there, who were waiting expectantly and staring off into the distance.

He stabbed the air with his finger and a shout:

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one!” Happy József bellowed back at him, taking his years out from under his heart, holding them up and waving them around.

“How about you?”

“Twenty-three. You hadn’t even seen the light of day yet!” warbled Sacrificial Coco in a half-witted chant, as she kicked her dangling feet back and forth.

“Produce those years then!” squawked the poet.

“This isn’t a card game. I’m not producing anything,” said Sacrificial Coco in a suddenly serious tone. “And anyway I couldn’t show them. They no longer exist.”

“Where are they?”

“I threw them away when I made the ascent. They were very heavy. And flat. I skipped them across the water like stones.”

And she laughed again.

“No joke! My tenth year skipped six times. It was really something!”

“Shut up already,” the Sloth screeched at him and stuck his arm out towards Screwy Feri:

“Well, and you?”

And Screwy Feri reached in below his heart with his hand, and showed it them what it held.

There were twenty-one of them.

“I rest my case,” Coco smiled, but then they seized her by the throat.

“Well, and you?”

“Twenty-two,” Needy Gábris howled. He removed the years from his heart and brandished them in people’s faces.

And the Sloth de-hearted his years and paraded them around, too.

“Do you all know why you’re here?”

No one responded. They were brandishing and jangling their years in time, and somewhere a hidden choral ensemble hoarsely struck up a slow version of the Serbian song “You just wait, dog, you just wait.”

Then the Sloth motioned with his hand.

They put back their years and looked down.

The earth spread its wings and flew close to them.

They watched. Atop the houses, factories, and churches, between the chimneys and towers, potbellied tycoons were doing calisthenics in time with the song.

Happy grew dizzy and threw up. Needy Gábris sunk his head into his hands.

Once again they saw the window.

And standing there in the window were Little Happy József and Little Miserable Mihály and Little Mátyás Andor the Sloth, and they were looking out through the panes.

Their eyes turned upward, and they laughed.

“The next package tour,” said Mátyás Andor the Sloth, pointing in their direction. Tiny points of light twinkled beneath his fingernail.

Day was starting to break above Alchemists’ Street.

Above the Alchemists’ Street, even after all that!

Day was breaking!

In the apartments of upstanding citizens, though, the darkness lurked densely behind the blinds.

Below them the dawn wind was blowing.

Now Miserable Mihály was standing on the two sweating stars and dilating upon something. A stone skulked scabrously in the palm of his right hand.

The stone will home in presently on the shuttered windows, and a shattering will follow.

The window is going to break.

Waking up with their bleary eyes, the good men and women of the town will slide their feet nervously into their slippers, but because they can’t go out into the street, they’ll whisper to each other through the wall:

“It’s a revolution!”

And then

beneath them

the dawn wind

finally

will blow.

(1931(?))

BLACK TYL’S EYES

He dropped in at Venice once again.

Drenched, with thick bands of sleeplessness under his eyes.

Trembling and restless, he caressed with his beautiful white palm the walls of the damp palaces, and with bulging eyes he watched the radiant, rocking water beneath the bridges.

He would stop and stand on the embankment if a gondola, with its hammered copper bow, lurched shakily into view, and lost in wonder he’d behold the meandering route as it was outlined on the shore, by the light of the streetlamps.

Under his half-closed eyelids was an enigmatic game of shadows.

He would’ve loved to break into song at such times, and he believed all light and darkness were now his.

He stood for a considerable time in one spot.

The gondola had long since bobbed away, and its lantern swayed somewhere out in the distance. His eyes followed it, and he was astonished that it was so far off, but he still had not said goodbye.

By day he sat for hours, sitting exhaustedly on the couch in front of the Ecce Homo by the Anonymous Master, and at certain times in the evening the image would come over and keep him company.

In his alarm, he whistled to himself; only on the Piazza di San Marco did he break off his tune.

Because at San Marco, he walked without making a sound.

There the moon splashed its light all around, noiselessly, with light, while pigeons slept in its great whiteness beneath the ornamentations. He had no desire to alarm them. Only his teeth chattered loudly above the sound of his footsteps. But there was nothing he could do about that.

In front of the church he always bent his knee, and every night he stared anew at the painted archways of the portal, and he came to envy those ancient painters for their colors. He also paid a visit to the columns of the Doge’s palace, looted from afar. Onto one of them, perhaps the thirteenth one in from the water, the artist at some time in his younger days, had chiseled his own life. Life―towards which he’d been tearfully stretching out his arms for years already.

Everything was on that column, from birth to death.

Including a wedding.

A couple, clinging to each other and wrapped up in some kind of cloak.

He loved this carving a great deal.

He stared, and gulped happily—from fright and enjoyment.

He wasn’t capable of remaining there for long, however. He didn’t care for the light and the frightful, sprawling shade of the pillars. Here it was all sharp contrasts and garish unpleasantness.

He grew restless.

He scrutinized the moon as it rested on the tip of the campanile. He fled in the direction of dark little squares where the moon bathed the Holy Innocents of the fountains in light and where large, sinister black cats and disheveled girls, fleeing home for a kiss, pressed themselves against the base of the walls.

He was afraid of the cats.

He walked next to the water, superstitiously, so that no cat could cross in front of him from right to left.

But when the girls called out to him, he felt as if he were going to die.

Still, one girl pursued him. She walked behind him, enticing him. The boy fled from that black girl in ghastly and boundless dread. He didn’t like girls—and he was downright afraid of the black ones.

Once, a long time ago, a blonde girl kissed him in the sunshine in the cubical courtyard of a tenement. He had loved her ever since.

He heard jazz playing faintly in the distance, and he ran towards the sound. He stopped in the doorway, panting.

The girl, avoiding the light streaming forth from the door, walked dejectedly back into the darkness, a cat at her heels.

He looked around under the multi-colored lights. From over the shoulders of dancing men, the moist, starry eyes of women watched him.

That’s when he knew that he was handsome. His hair fell into his face, and his sad eyes were aflame. He didn’t push his hair back.

He could already feel, in his fear-swollen throat, the wine and the pieces of ice floating in it. He loved to drink. And he loved the softly colored veils that flitted in front of his eyes as he drank his wine.

He took a deep breath.

An arm rose up in greeting, above the heads.

He looked hard in that direction. A black man was waving at him.

He stayed where he was. The arm dropped, in embarrassment, and two imploring black eyes burned. He looked over, again. The large unfamiliar eyes beckoned.

He began moving in their direction, through the tables.

“He’s going over to Tyl,” the ladies of the evening said under their breath, amazed, their bosoms overexcited from dancing.

The people talked in low tones and stroked his clothing as he walked past. And afterwards, as if they had touched a saint, they pressed their pursed lips onto the tips of their fingers in a kiss.

He didn’t notice.

He sat down. They brought him wine and he filled two glasses. The ice cubes clinked loudly against the sides.

They drank.

The black man placed his hand, with its purple nails, atop his.

He did not object.

They said nothing. Every now and then they nodded their heads to the cadence of the music.

He studied Tyl’s eyes, and in them he traveled beneath interlaced trees, on the banks of warm bodies of water, where sweet-natured alligators sunned themselves in the tropical light and heat. And where the black girls with their odd-looking breasts dance around an altar in rustling skirts.

Where the sea grumbles kindly in its thick, white surf, and it is perhaps now day on the other side of the earth, where black men and women walk about upside down. Where it’s always gushing summer, and rain only falls in winter. Dense curtains of rain.

Here there are no trees; only palaces rise above the water; he looked out the window but saw only himself, because at night windows are mirrors.

Then he turned back.

They can’t do any more harm now, hurt you now, gentle white boy—he read this in the black man’s motionless eyes, but when he scrolled back through his memories, those great American horrors made his heart ache. He saw a weeping child standing there, with whitewashed legs, greasy skin gleaming, and tears flowing. Then further on, with great alarm in his eyes, he saw men in straw hats, a lynch mob, standing in a circle, where they punched and swung their fists in the air as if they were conducting an orchestra.

They sat there for quite some time, and the boy wandered for ages in those fabled eyes.

They sat there in the now vacated hall, where there was no longer even the sound of music and their wine disappeared but slowly, and they cherished each other.

No ice made its way into the last two glasses. They clinked before taking a final, solemn drink.

They started on their way at dawn, walking side by side, and in step.

They proceeded slowly.

He felt chilly in the early morning cold, and the wind from the fish market brought strange messages.

But he was in no position to quicken the pace.

From the black man’s slow step he wondered at the meaninglessness of haste.

Only the mad are in a rush.

One should simply sit for millennia, or lie under a palm tree, legs crossed under you like a sage, and watch the world turning slowly on its axis.

A blood-smeared cat ran in front of them, licking its chops and straggling home late.

Tyl lifted a leg into the air, his arm swept backwards, and the cat shot screeching into the water.

He looked gratefully at the black man, who had drawn his lips into a smile.

In a narrow street he halted in front of a house, laid his hand with the purple nails upon the boy’s, and went inside.

He continued to stand there.

He looked up at the sky and mused about whether the pigeons of San Marco might already be waking up.

On the second floor a window opened, and an orphaned canary chattered enthusiastically in its morning voice.

(1930)

HATRED

One of the young girls was still peering through the eye-hole in the door, and then she too took a seat at the large table of smoothly planed planks.

“We will proceed in the order in which we are seated. She started. So now we go to the right,” said the oldest boy, as he busied himself with the material in front of him.

The seven of them were seated around the table in the evenly lit room. Three young girls, two of them blonde and one dark-haired. Two of them upper-class domestics and one a factory girl. But they looked the same here, attractively flustered by their work, with lipstick smeared a bit about their mouths and their hair unkempt. Two boys were there, too. One flaxen-haired and the other with dark brown hair. They were also cut from the same cloth. Two boys, two potters. In splattered and stained smocks, on which whitish color was still to be found only where they’d been unable to wipe their paint-stained fingers. These were apprentices.

And the two master craftspeople: one man and one woman. A noted ceramicist and his former wife. The woman had been her husband’s assistant, learning from him and then eventually equaling him in success. But they badgered each other at work, got in each other’s way, and grew envious and old. And they got a divorce. But only in bed. The large sunny room, the workbench---and above all a stake in the glowing-hot kiln in the corner, a thing jointly held and precious, kept them together. And they worked together. Together they trained the five young people, who were becoming ever more like peas in a pod. And with dull, jealous gazes they minded each other’s adroit modeling fingers. They nursed their malicious grudges in peace and quiet, and once a year at full volume, too, before the big exhibition. They tended to the expensive modern kiln, which would keep them on a common path until such time as one of them should draw a lucky lottery ticket or come into a good inheritance. But there were no wealthy relatives, and they didn’t invest in lottery tickets. Everyone gathered resignedly around the one kiln. And sometimes of an evening, the apprentices, as they jostled and pushed their way out into the street, would snicker and talk about how they were going to get married before too long anyway, despite these warnings.

Tranquilly they plied their trade with their peculiar tools and briskly moving fingers. The only sound came from the kiln, the potter’s wheels, and, soft as a whisper, the clay. Every once in a while from out of the low three-legged stools would come creaks when they shifted their bodies.

And so the girl sitting to the right of the first one got to her feet a short time later, and went over to the kiln, and scrutinized the glowing cones through the view-pipe. She nodded and sat back down. And then at equal intervals they proceeded down the row. When they had gone all the way around their circle, they started over.

“I can’t believe it’s working so well,” the man said, as if he were trying to prolong the conversation. He beckoned towards the women.

She looked up and stuck out her tongue at the man.

“Bah!” she fired back at him.

The five young ones chuckled dutifully and then went back to work.

Now they began getting up more frequently, and looking over at the kiln more often, too, and not in the proper sequence.

In there, alongside the apprentices’ work, the woman and the man were firing two large compositions. Exhibition pieces. Little cards would eventually be leaned against them, saying they were not for sale. That way they could ask more for them, and get all sentimental about it, too.

The man and woman looked at each other quite often. Mockingly, and expectantly. More than anything they would’ve loved to bare their teeth and snarl, but they were too indolent for that, and also too weary. They were also far too excited about the two pieces in progress.

And then it went bang! The kiln exploded! And with a clatter, the window broke. Dark blue fog swirled through the room and then gradually snaked its way out through the smashed window. It turned light blue, and then there was nothing left of it. The light quivered.

They stood there around the table, so shell-shocked from the blast that their deaf ears buzzed. They coughed and looked, red-eyed, in the direction of the burst kiln.

“There must have been a grain of sand in one of your pieces of crap,” the man hissed hatefully.

The woman didn’t respond. She lurched towards the kiln, stretched out her arms and fell to her knees. She folded her hands in prayer.

“Make his turn to dust. Let mine remain whole. Mine. Not his!”

The man walked over to the kiln.

He stopped next to the woman, wrinkled his brow, and slowly laid his palm on her head.

“If yours has ended up in pieces, then mine will be yours. I surrender it to you,” he said, and one could sense how ashamed it made her.

The woman looked up at him and clasped his hand. They stayed like that.

She nestled up to the man’s forearm. He kept his palm on her head.

The kiln was leaking smoke all along its new fissure.

The five apprentices, with their backs turned to the room, suddenly took to studying scrupulously the cracked window.

(1935-1936)

BUTTERFLY

In the large room all was silence. The only noises were the scraping of rulers and the turning of pages in sketch pads. Then someone sharpened a pencil. I looked over at the clock on the wall and felt that I couldn’t stand it any longer, even though Tini wasn’t going to show up at my door until 7; that was still fifteen minutes away. I put the instruments away in the desk drawer. As I was locking it, the keyring fell out of my hand. Everyone looked up. It was the beginning of the semester, and we still hardly knew each other. The looks people gave me weren’t exactly punitive, but more like tired; some of them pointed at their eyes to indicate they were still working. I walked out of the room with my head down, followed by the gazes of my colleagues.

Then I was standing at the front door, looking out at the city below me, where lights glowed as dusk lay red upon the clouds. Farther out were gardens. Light wind played in the golden leaves.

“My name is Paul.”

A stocky man, with a carefully knotted, modern tie and loose pants was standing right in front of me.  The sharp creases on his trousers stood out noticeably.

“You don’t say,” I felt like answering. Instead I just arched my eyebrows and looked at him without saying a word. I was not surprised in the least. If he had gone up in smoke at that very moment, or turned into a leaf on the tree, I also would not have been surprised. I was waiting for Tini: for the evening before we’d been admiring one another in front of the main post office. We walked along next to each other for about twenty steps, and then laughed and shook hands in greeting. I was expecting Tini, whom I had walked home yesterday evening over the mountain: because she lived up there.

The stubby man wanted some kind of response, but I just looked at him mutely. He found this unpleasant.

“I’m Paul,” he repeated, somewhat louder this time.

“I know that already,” I answered insolently. I was irritated by his tie and his pressed and creased pants.

“You saw Tini home last night. Or am I mistaken?” he inquired, moving closer to me.

“You’re not mistaken. Why are you asking if you already know?”

He appeared to notice that I had shifted my body into more of a defensive position, with my legs apart; he changed the tone of his voice.

“I only wanted to warn you,” he stated, sounding gentlemanly. “She’s sick. Quite sick, actually.”

“Ah. So what’s wrong with her?”

He gave me a long, direct, heartfelt look. He said nothing, but nodded. When I also said nothing, he whispered:

“T...b...c...h...y...x...”

“C16NH3P4S3,’’ I mumbled stiffly. My face felt numb. Then I let fly another sympathetic sigh.

“I suppose you are from the health service of the Salvation Army, right?” I asked with a laugh, and then I walked away.

Tini was coming down the mountain towards me. She moved with silent steps through the supple foliage. Her coat was unbuttoned and she was smiling faintly.

“Where are we going?” she asked, pulling her hand away as I tried to kiss it—although she did touch my cheek with the tips of her fingers. I glanced around. The little man had disappeared. Admittedly there was no puff of smoke to be seen, but the leaves along the trail were stirring.

Tini and I ran, out of breath, down to the city; pushing our way through all the people just leaving work, we made merry noises, and spoke to each other by whistling and purring, instead of using words...

She stopped suddenly in front of a pastry shop and pulled me over to the display in the window.

“Look at this. How pretty!” she said enthusiastically, as she stood before the cake with its fancy decoration. Her forehead was pressed against the glass, and she was breathing hard from running. I led her inside and we ate standing up between the tables.

“Where are we going?” she asked with a laugh. We were back in front of the shop and she was licking her lips.

The lights of a cinema beckoned from the corner, rocking like a steamship. When we got there, the doors had just been opened, allowing thick, heavy air to flow towards us.

“Well, hello there,” she sniffed. “This smells like movies.”

I blazed a trail over to the ticket counter. It was like a little cage, with an elderly, white-haired woman seated inside. She looked attentively at me as I scanned the labeled sections.

“What is a ‘small loge’?”

“It has only two seats. For love-birds,” she laughed, showing her black teeth.

“Can I get one of those?”

With her fingers, stained yellowish by tobacco, she shuffled through the tickets, looking like her feelings were hurt.

“They’re all occupied. For the 8 o’clock show there are spots, though.”

“Give me one of the small loges then.” I put the ticket in my pocket. Tini waved at me from some distance away. She had taken a position leaning against a column so the crowd wouldn’t sweep her off her feet. Around us the lobby swelled and retreated. An unspecified sense of panic, the premonition of a disaster, clung to the ugly chandelier and hung over the entire hall.

Then we were seated, alone, in the little compartment. From out of the distance, above the smoke and the murmur of voices, the white screen blazed. It got dark and I was overcome by a feeling of warmth; I felt like I was being enveloped by blackness. Up above our heads, the projector whirred.

“This is how a person must feel just before being born,” I said with a sigh.

From very close by, I heard a quiet laugh: “That guy’s crazy...” And we squeezed closer together.

Later we walked away, slowly, across the street, as the wind blew into our faces. A delightful, bright evening ambled with us; the stars were shining so brightly that they hurt our eyes.

She did not ask where we were going.

I couldn’t help but think of Frau Hammerschlag, the shriveled-up woman with the indignant expression, from whom I had rented a room two days earlier. Three family photographs and a vase, all of which had been adorning the table, I handed back to her—and that was the declaration of war. She spun around in the doorway and told me in no uncertain terms not to forget that I had moved into an upstanding house. Then she left me. Later Herr Hammerschlag turned up, rotund and affable. He admired my soap dish and then whispered to me:

“You rented the room and you can do what you like. But you have to avoid any scandals. Keep the noise down! Don’t forget that we are people of refinement.”

“Keep the noise down?” I thought again. Nonetheless, I didn’t have the courage to say it out loud. I closed the outside door and we groped our way up the stairs. I felt her hot hand on my neck.

Next to the door was a window through which the night came beaming in.

Cautiously I slid my key into the lock.

Tini tugged off her shoes.

“Not everyone needs to know that you have company,” she whispered.

With her delicate shoes in her hand, she rose to her tiptoes in the threshold, as the light from the stars played in her hair.

“Butterfly,” I said softly.

(1938)

THREE PICTURE POSTCARDS

1

MEN

The man stumbled up beside him.

“Who are you waiting for?”

“The secretary from heaven. She just went up a bit ago, and she’s practically on her way back down. And then she’s going to let you know that I have no interest in making small talk with you.”

The bawd broke into a smile, showing her sparse, scraggly teeth. Now they were silent for a long time.

“You’re waiting for Anna,” said the new arrival.

“You got it.”

The newcomer’s fingers were itching to give the other man a box on the ears, but he didn’t stir.

“Anna has a girlfriend. Manyi’s her name. Pretty girl.”

“Yeah, pretty. A bit on the plump side. She can do a bit of cooking for you on the side.”

“Buy her then.”

“I was thinking of her for you.”

“Don’t think anything for me.”

Silence set in. The air between them turned thick and heavy. The second man pulled out the best weapon from the armory of his thoughts:

“Anna gives people diseases.”

“Then I’ll jolly well get sick,” responded the first man, who’d been waiting. He closed one nostril and blew his nose out in front of him.

Now the second man was overcome by furious frankness, so he asked, “And what are your intentions with Anna?”

“To get a disease,” the first man said brightly as he pushed past a third man.

“Me, too,” announced the second one, and he darted towards the laughing madam. The two of them waited.

And the trees up and down the block nodded their approval.

2

THE EXCURSION

A star blinked three times and disappeared.

The cloud entered the valley and sat down.

The leftover potato paprikash gave off slight noises as it froze in the large skillet in the middle of the table. It’d been forgotten there.

“Leave me alone now. I want to sleep,” the girl declared in a matter-of-fact voice. She was on the outermost straw pallet. The boy lay down with a crunch next to her, and he remarked:

“Right. I want to sleep! And then it’s ‘I want to wash up.’ And then it will be ‘I want to work on my suntan’ and ‘I don’t feel like it right now.’ And ‘Let’s look at the mountains.” And then ‘Now let’s play a game of something or work out!’ And once in a while: ‘Okay, now you can come over here. I’m in the mood to ease your sexual misery.’ What the hell are you thinking? Do I look like an idiot to you?”

The girl spooned him and giggled. It was the kind of sound that comes from scratching glass.

The others fumbled almost inaudibly with each other’s bodies in their sleeping bags.

Here inside, only János was still in his seat at the main table. He was using his flashlight to look through his kit. Under his breath he muttered profanities because he was faced with so much soiled laundry. He was looking for a flannel shirt and warm socks for the evening, because it was cold.

When he overheard that girl’s voice, he said, loudly and clearly:

“Yet again they don’t know how to keep their traps shut and go to sleep.”

He cut off his flashlight and edged in next to his partner, who was whimpering from all the day’s hiking but shifted a little away from him.

The cloud got to its feet and went off to another valley, just as the star was coming back from there.

3

THE OLD WOMAN

“Dashing off again? You never spend any time here!” grouched the old woman over her plate. “Why do you wander around all the time in the cold? You’ll get frostbite on your feet. Bring the girl up here. You can do your talking here, too.”

The boy wolfed down his noontime pasta, followed it with some water, and said half-heartedly: “All right.”

He went out and brought the girl back up with him.

The old woman fell all over herself fussing over them, and then she sat down near them on the sofa, where she talked incessantly.

About how expensive the apartment was. And the electricity, and the gas. And meat. Milk. Eggs.

Eggs!

She nearly blew her top on account of the eggs. Now there are none here in the house! And later her other son is coming home. He has a job, and boy, there’s gonna be a dust-up then! He and that damned stomach of his—always wants to eat what we don’t have. They’ll be closing in a few minutes. Someone should go down for eggs. We have to! Meanwhile, these two will just go on kissing, right through the whole thing.

She was very angry.

She muttered something as she picked up her shawl and went out. She was in such a rush that she nearly broke her neck.

Soon she returned, the bearer of three eggs. But she found the door to the small room closed. She pressed down on the door handle, but it was locked.

She felt like kicking in the door, but she didn’t dare; she was afraid of the boy.

She eavesdropped through the door. From inside came affectionate voices, unequivocal in their meaning.

Her near apoplexy left her hair thoroughly mussed.

“Stinking commies!” tumbled out of her mouth.

She moved away from the door and sat down in the large room. She cut off the corner of a loap of bread for herself.

Mournfully she licked it.

The way a dog licks its paw when it steps on broken glass.

(1935)

THE FAREWELL

A Mummery in One Act

Dramatis personae

Peasant Lad

Peasant Lass

First Magician

Second Magician

Gendarmes

Boys, Girls

Noon in the marketplace. The gaudy sideshow booths stand empty, abandoned. Colorful, showy signs. The Peasant Lad is waiting for the Peasant Lass.

The Peasant Lad dances back and forth. Every now and again he stops. He stretches his limbs, making his body creak, and he makes wistful hugging motions. He’s growing tired of waiting. He looks at his watch. It is still early. He starts to look around, and, with movements indicating curiosity, he circles through the booths. Stored on the ground next to one of them he sees the musical instruments of the brass band, which left them there earlier that morning. His face perks up as he thinks back to it. He starts dancing a csárdás by himself, his mouth pursed to whistle and his arms held stiffly in front of him, as if he were holding a girl by the waist. He dances for a long time in this way, moving his mouth as if he were speaking. He comes to a stop, scared, next to one of the booths, and begins to eavesdrop. On his face the fright is visible. He moves forward along the side of the booth. With an unexpected movement he kicks open the door and springs inside. A cat scurries out in alarm. The Peasant Lass also comes back, holding a drooping cat high in the air. She holds it out in front of her face and looks into its eyes for a considerable length of time. Then she tosses it after the other cat. She is standing in the shadows of the plank wall. She waits. After a brief interval, the square starts to fill with people. Lasses and lads come. The members of the orchestra[3] arrive, too. They sit down, take up their instruments, and commence playing. The whole square erupts in wild dancing. Sorrowfully, with capering motions, the Peasant Lass wends her way between the dancers. The girls beam at her, and the boys occasionally clap her on the back. A new girl comes over and invites the Peasant Boy to dance, but he refuses. The girl mingles with the other dancers and pairs off with a new boy who is just arriving. Finally the Peasant Lass comes over. She throws her arms around his neck. They kiss for a long time, and then they start to dance. The others, girls and boys, make room for them and, holding hands, slowly rotate around them in a circle. All of a sudden the music ceases. They leave off dancing. The First Magician arrives. They all gather around him. He requests a handkerchief, uses a lot of hocus-pocus to make it disappear, and then conjures it up again. Then he marches off into one of the booths. A portion of the spectators follows him. The Second Magician comes out. They circle around. He offers to make any one of the lads’ sweethearts disappear for him. The Peasant Lad solicitously wraps the Peasant Lass in his arms, but she darts forward and, showing off, begins to dance. The Magician makes her vanish. The Peasant Lad whips out a knife and rushes at the magician, trying to kill him. The people restrain him, while the frightened Magician conjures the girl back. The Peasant Lad, catching sign of the Peasant Lass again, leaps to her side and initiates a sensual dance with her. While dancing he bends her over backwards, farther and farther, and finally lays her out flat on the ground---and then tries to embrace the girl. They struggle. She is embarrassed and tries to defend herself. Two gendarmes dash forward and yank him to his feet. The Lad grows furious, pulls out his knife again, and as fast as lightning plunges it into the body, first of the one gendarme and then the other. He leaves the knife protruding from the second man’s chest and wraps himself once more around the Lass. A number of gendarmes pour onto the stage, drag the Lad away. Night is falling, and the marketplace begins to empty out. Word spreads. Only the Peasant Lass remains on stage, along with the two dead gendarmes. The Lass sits on the ground and weeps. For a long while everything is still. Then one of the deceased gendarmes stirs. He pulls the knife out of his chest, tosses it aside. He gets to his feet. He shakes the other man by the shoulder, and the second man also stands up. They comfort the girl with pats of their hands, and then exit. The Peasant Lass regains her composure. She bolts off the stage and then comes back with the Peasant Lad. They kiss and caress each other repeatedly, and, locked in each other’s arms, they disappear into one of the unoccupied booths. Two cats run across the stage.

Curtain.

(1930-1931(?))

Megjegyzések

[←1]

From 1929-1951, this large plaza and important transportation hub in Buda was named after Kálmán Széll (1843-1915), a famous politician. Between 1951 and 2011, however, it bore the name “Moszkva tér.” Today it is again named for Széll. (Translator’s note)

[←2]

Radnóti uses here an unusual Hungarian word, aranyhold, which literally means "golden moon." This may refer to some dramatic version of a full moon, perhaps one colored yellow or orange by the sandy soil or light-colored bodies of water in the Tisza Valley of southern Hungary. (Translator’s note).

[←3]

The orchestra in question here is a folk ensemble, probably with Roma (Gypsy) members. (Translator’s note).

Contents

INTRODUCTION

[CURRICULUM VITAE]

THE MERE TRAGEDY OF THE LITTLE MAN

THE POET AND THE WOMAN

The Model

MINIATURE 1

MINIATURE 2

LITERATURE AND THE STREET

THE CANARY

BANDI

SAILORS ON MANEUVERS

AVIATORS

DEATH

THE TALE OF THE WEEPING WILLOW

THE BIRTH OF THE LAND OF ETERNAL SUNSHINE

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

BLACK TYL’S EYES

HATRED

BUTTERFLY

THREE PICTURE POSTCARDS

THE FAREWELL