Ádám Nádasdy
Flora in Favour and Disfavour
I probably like her because she turns her back on me. She does not care for me, she just carries on with her job. As long as I can remember, this picture has been hanging in one of the houses, one of the rooms, above the bed, next to the upright piano, or between the tile stove and the double door. It comes from Stabiae, near Pompeii, dug out from the ashes of Vesuvius. The art historians call her "Flora", goddess of flowers, plants, all vegetation. My father, from whom I inherited the picture, said her name was "Ver", the Latin for "spring", and I, as a child, connected this word with the identically sounding Hungarian "vér" ("blood"), which lent unusual gravity to this light and fluffy picture. I was born in 1947, and soon became accustomed to the fact that many things possessed an invisible gravity, especially those that came "from peacetime", that is, from before the Siege. ("The Siege", in the usage of our family and that of many others, meant the Russian siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944/45, later referred to in official Communist parlance as "the Liberation".) It seemed to me that there were few such things around—but obviously, at the beginning of the fifties practically everything (and everybody) had to be survivors from before the Siege: the furniture, the clothes, the plates, the lift, the paving stones, the rubbish-collecting horse-and-cart. Where else would all these things have come from? Obviously, we ate with the same knives and used the same lift ("No smoking in the elevating chair"). And yet everything was different. The beautiful objects produced by modern designers right before the siege had also become old, like the Bakelite table telephone set with the elegant tall neck ("Standard" brand), or the brilliant art déco metal-and-glass doors of the "Newsreel" Cinema, built in concentric circles around the box-office. Such things—though just a few years old then—were not referred to in the family as "new"; occasionally people would touch them or rest their eyes on them with a moment of quiet. The collapse of 1945, and
the ensuing Communist takeover of 1948, carved such a deep trench in people’s thinking, completely overturning the relationship of the possible and the impossible, that in this light even physical objects seemed different. Like someone putting on a black arm-band on his ordinary daytime suit: he will appear to be wearing mourning attire, even though his clothes are the same, from his tie down to his socks. One decisive new sign will push into the background many other, familiar signs bearing no new information. In this sense, then, we were indeed eating with different forks and knives, and using a different lift to go up to a different floor. (In the lift, I was fascinated by the incredibly archaic Hungarian of the notice, wondering what an "elevating chair" was, until my brother explained that it was nothing but the old official term for the lift itself. I was surprised: I had assumed that this "elevating chair" had disappeared, like the cable-car on the slope of Castle Hill, or like Elizabeth Bridge, or like the word "Royal" from the façade of the post office.) But the woman with the green flowers and the blood-like name was the same.
My father, who directed at the State Opera, bought the picture in Pompeii
sometime in the twenties, when he travelled in Italy as a young man. It is a good print, plastered on thin plywood. I remember when Grandfather (a retired First World War naval officer from the Austrian imperial navy and a real jack-of-all-trades) pieced together a frame for it. At first, the ugly green paint and the harsh new material were in painful disharmony with the picture, but as time went on, they mysteriously ripened to suit it, until the frame came to bear the same greenish-pale mellowness and timeless peace as the fresco itself. My father liked the picture, he would tell us about Pompeii, about sunken worlds, the continents of Gondwana and Mu, all on a strictly scientific basis.
Then, for some reason, the picture fell into disfavour. Perhaps it was the rudimentary frame, or that it began to fade and lose colour, or that it looked very ˝n-de-sičcle, which was definitely out in the 1950s. It was relegated to the family bungalow in the countryside, near Lake Velence, another place where everything was new and old at the same time, like an embalmed corpse. This holiday resort had begun to be developed right before the war in 1940, and my grandparents were among the first to buy a plot and build a summer house. Nothing worked. There was a Bauhaus-style beach with an unused restaurant where goats were kept, and a roof terrace where you couldn’t go up because it was damaged by a bomb. A gentleman with no legs and a straw hat was selling lollipops from his wheelchair, and grass-snakes lived in the marshy water. Behind our house my parents had a second, smaller house built in 1955 to accommodate the whole extended family (my mother had two older sons). This building was finished in a rustic simple style, to avoid damaging comment on the part of envious neighbours and the local police. It was crammed with old jumble no longer needed in Budapest. Thieves would occasionally break in during the winter months, let them have it. The picture was in the attic bedroom now, under the thatched roof, where the two camp beds met head to head. The frame gradually became more and more warped in the humid evenings. If the woman did not turn her back to the room, she would have seen
my first embrace, unexpected, agile, desperate, on a pouring summer night; as it is, she must only have sensed with her nape that she was crossing a field of force that night, and felt with her naked soles the gentle shuddering of the earth.
How small her hands and feet are. This may explain the painting’s gracefulness—mind you, the whole thing is only about 15 by 10 inches—though if you look at the woman more carefully, you’ll see she is of an imposing physique: tall, straight, big-bottomed, long-legged. A Nordic, stately type. She could be a dancer, except that dancers cannot communicate motion and stillness simultaneously with such skill. Flora displays a different behaviour above and below her waist. Her feet are stepping, she is in a position from which she has to move on immediately. But her hand only seemingly stretches for the flower. On the contrary: she holds it in position, with eternal calm, fastening it rather than picking it. Perhaps she is a dancer—but then of the Isadora Duncan kind, who didn’t do anything, but did it with enormous strength and intensity. To be body yet air. To be recherché, yet to be plain natural. Does this woman have anything to do with nature? Or are we faced with a sophisticated fashion photograph from one of Pompeii’s haute
couture firms?
Ádám Nádasdy
has published several volumes of poetry
and teaches linguistics at the School of English & American Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
