Balázs Györe

Happy-Book

(Excerpts from the novel)

I.

The pipes in the loo are perspiring, droplets of water hanging down from them, in a line, I can see them when I look up as I take a pee, half-naked. I too am perspiring. The thermometer outside the window in our sitting room shows 33 degrees Centigrade (I checked just before, at two o'clock).

"Let the story be a naked lunch."

This morning I took my wife to the hospital. To be more accurate, she had to go back (she had already been there for ten days in March).
I am writing with the fountain pen that she gave me in 1986, during a critical period of a similarly very difficult year, though the problems then were of a different nature than this year.
Now I need to write a boldog könyv- a happy book. I promised my wife as much. That was the intention with which I sat down at the writing desk.

"The method must be purest meat
and no symbolic dressing"

It is clouding over. The air is ever more stifling. Yesterday, the fifty-year record high for Hungary was broken. I washed the bed linen and hung it up to dry on the rack in the kitchen- the bed linen on which my wife had slept.
On account of what I shall call the happy-book, I have left off the book that was started in March. ("It seems the world is discontinuous like that.") I could carry on with that, but right now the happy-book is more important. I have begun a new pagination in my big, blue, spiral-bound, lined-paper notebook, which I am about halfway through, seeing as I number pages (provide them with numbers). I have got into the habit of doing it.
I owe my wife this book. I owe her a lot (along with much else), but this book above all. ("I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot.")
I would like to write it. I would like to be able to write it- for her. For her.
I promised. She needs to know that whilst she is lying on her sick-bed in hospital I shall be endeavouring to make her happy. I'll try. I am writing to you. It's me. I'm sitting here on the edge of the bed. Sleep soundly! I'll keep an eye on you. ("Please follow your heart, win or lose.")
The flat is empty without you. I wander aimlessly between the kitchen and the living room. I cannot find my place. I squeeze a lemon, making lemonade for our daughter. She will be back from school before long. I'll fry two chops for her lunch. There is still a bit of poppy-seed cake from yesterday.
Puffballs of white cloud are forming in the sky. I look at them from the room.
I blunder around the flat. Read the electricity meter. Wait for the meterreader. Sweep up in the kitchen. Clean out the coffee filter.
Before we went to the hospital, you vomited, felt dizzy and nauseous for days on end- a result of the side-effects, adverse effects, of all the medicines, we supposed. What is more, we stopped all the medication, at our own discretion. You went on a diet. You ate toast. The poppy-seed cake that you like so much (poppy seed is your favourite) I ate for you.
I have plenty of choice as to where I might begin our story. Where and how should I begin the happy-book? (That's the name, the genre, the purpose, the goal, indeed even the title of this on-going piece of writing. Work in progress.
I call it that simply because one cannot give a long and laborious label to something that it will be rather hard, complex and moot to bring off or define.)
I could start the way Gyula Krúdy opens his novel Ladies' Prize: "Daemon, who rules the entire world, came to Pest one day and spied a bolt-hole in the funeral director's house." Yes, indeed. Whilst I was moving into Aunt Margit's apartment on 27th December 1997, devils moved into our flat on Bartók Béla út. I did not know that at the time, did not suspect a thing. I did not suspect anything until the morning of Saturday, 14th March 1998, when my daughter's despairing phone call startled me out of bed: she asked me to come at once, because something was wrong. "Mummy's so weird," she sobbed into the phone. I went. I was not yet aware then that for weeks my wife had been imagining I was a spirit; for her, I am that daemon. "You are a ghost," she said. She spoke to me in English that Saturday morning. I have to try and drive the spirits, daemons, Furies, ghosts and God knows what out of the room. Win back the flat from them.
My wife was taken into hospital that same day, and I moved back home from Pannónia utca after two and a half months.
So much stuff that I needed to write piled up during those ten days in March that it would be enough to last me 200 years. At least three lifetimes would be needed to write everything that accumulated during that brief period. Three lifetimes!
On 14th March, my 16-and-a-half-year-old daughter had to grow up from one moment to the next. She had to put at least 25 years onto her actual age - in the blink of an eye. She had to behave soberly. Yes, indeed. We needed to preserve a sound mind. Our sobriety. Or another way of saying it would be that we had to sober up promptly. I don't know how successful it was. I cried. We cried. "I've only seen you cry once," my daughter later on alluded to that Saturday in a poem she wrote for my birthday. "I was scared."
I could start the happy-book with a roundabout curse (I confess that I have recently taken to swearing, every now and then, to myself, or under my breath), but that is not my style. I won't start that way.
I could start with what I found in the etymological dictionary: boldog- happy, of uncertain origin. May derive from the root bód-, of unknown origin, as in the verbs bódít 'stupefy', bódul 'become dazed'. (The change in meaning from 'ecstatic' or 'stupefied' to 'happy' may be linked to some pagan religious aspect.)
I could start the way Allen Ginsberg starts his great poem, 'Howl': "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..."
Or I could start with a contradiction- the one that Iván Sándor wrote in response to a letter in which I mentioned what I was preparing for: "- there's no such thing as a happy-book. Happiness is at best being able to complete a book."
I spoke to my wife about the prospective book. I reported that I had made a start on the happy-book. I had no particular ideas about it, or at most only that, come what may, the ending has to be good, happy. No kidding.
We strolled out of the hospital block, slowly, hand in hand, and after a winding little detour set off down the hill in the grounds. We looked for and found a free bench. We withdrew into the half-shade and sat down on it. That is where I said I had no particular ideas about this book, only that I had started it, made a start, because I had to start. My wife was sitting beside me in her night-dress.
It was hot. The world was pressing down on her like a lead weight, she said. The grass before our feet was a vivid green, the iron bench snow-white. People were coming and going on the narrow path behind us, in a hurry. "Being is intolerably difficult," she said. "Even bird song... I try to guess their names when I hear them striking up at dawn... That's a bluetit, that one a blackbird."
In those hours when the vital corona of the land and sleep serve only for me to dream, o my darling, in the stillness of my doubts I picked up this strange book, the door wings of which open into some kind of deserted house at the end of an alley of trees.
I gathered the spirit of the moment, flitting onward in every single song of each flower, each bird, in order to write, weaving eternal life and everlasting peace.
All of a sudden, my friend Rezső Keszthelyi came to mind, who once told me, "You don't conceive the past in advance. You cannot say that you are now writing down past time. You don't conceive it. The past is not reconstructed. It is the way it was. You have no construction for the past. It lives. It connects with the present. Your relation to the past is in the present tense." Well, maybe I should adopt some method along similar lines, I said to my wife on the bench, awkwardly yet self-assuredly. I stroked her hand, or she stroked mine, and meanwhile a small child rushed carefree over to a basin that had long not been in use, but a hedge that had been planted around it blocked it off, and the child was unable to get any closer. I saw the joy of discovery on the face as the child was running, then I also saw the bewildered tiptoeing behind the hedge.
I need to find the path that leads to healing. The path that leads to total recovery. That leads back to life. Bend the branches aside, gently, and glimpse the clearing. That is the task. The path leading to healing needs to be mapped out. The happy-book needs to be written. To be more exact, my wife has to find the path, and she also has to write the book, not me. She will dictate. She will guide my hand. She will write it for me.
Of course, I could start with Ottlik: "Tolstoy, perhaps by way of apology for his choice of subject, starts his famous novel: All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion. Well, they are not all alike. On the contrary, the species of unhappiness, by and large, are much of a muchness. It is happiness that is diverse, unnamed, unmapped. Unhappiness is easily seized by the forelock, portrayed, understood, and seemingly of wider interest, because what it has to say is of more universal validity. Happiness, the lurking, deep currents or unruffled, subdued heartbeat, unpredictable flare-ups or settled bitter calm of which Kosztolányi often lays bare in unusual situations- happiness is an all but unknown territory that still awaits exploration...
That is a big risk... to accept a romantic way of looking at the world, accept that in the end, taking one thing with another, life is good nonetheless, and say yes to it."
The word boldog appears for the first time in written form in Hungarian in 1193, compounded in a toponym, and as an adjective around 1200, in the form boudog, in the 'Funeral Oration and Lament'.
I must correct myself straight away. There is no basin at the spot toward which the child rushed. I took a look. Simply a flower bed with plants set out around it. The basin is further up the hill. I was muddled. My wife and I sat down by the edge of the long-unused basin in order to talk. Today, really and truly. For today the world has cleared up, she said. The verdure and the grounds are different. She hears birdsong differently. When was there last water in the basin? What's in it now? Nothing? Dry. But its bottom has not cracked as yet. How long since it was last used, I wonder? Harmless decoration. Round. Deprived of its water, it sits there, deserted, before our feet. We ought to use it. But how? By being concerned with it.
Over the past weeks, back at home, we had tried to promote healing by reading aloud. I read Robinson Crusoe to my wife, a chapter at a time ("I seldom gave any thing over without accomplishing it, when I once had it in my head enough to begin it."). Let there always be something that offers solace. I read out Emerson's essay ("trust thyself"), a Hemingway novel ("light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order"), a Ken Kesey short story ("A man must have balance, like a haiku."), but above all, or rather first of all, Salinger, the short story 'For Esmé- with Love and Squalor': "You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of becoming a man with all his fac- with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact." Indeed, indeed, that's what we too are looking for and want, which was precisely why we would often say together, or separately, or with one starting and the other finishing, that we needed a chance of becoming a man with all his faculties intact. That sentence became our watchword. That story (one of the nine) was my favourite. For me it is what poppy seed is for my wife. "I used a coat tree as delicately as possible, and then sat down at a table and ordered tea and cinnamon toast. It was the first time all day that I'd spoken to anyone." I love those sentences. It is from Salinger that I know about cinnamon toast. That such a delight exists at all. One of my favourite treats. My wife often makes it for me, out of bread rolls.
Without warning, an early-evening shower pitched down on us in the hospital grounds. I did not have a raincoat with me. Leaning on the balustrade in front of the main entrance, we looked at the grounds, the paths, the flight of stairs, the trees, the flowers. We saw everything freshening up. The rain washing the ground. The rain washing our souls. Too exquisite? I don't wish to deceive. When we strolled over towards the so-called Memory Clinic earlier on, the sun was still shining. We discovered some mouldering benches beside the path.
It was no longer possible to sit on them; it could be no-one at all had sat on them since time immemorial. My wife was worried I would catch a cold in my T-shirt. That worrying was already the old, the natural her. It was gratifying.
I then ran out into the rain, cut across the park, in my sandals. My wife's night-dress was rocking in the shopping bag. I would wash it out later at home. The rain was warm. At 7 o'clock in the evening the nurses dole out the medications to the patients. Whilst I was dashing about in the rain, my wife was again overcome by fear, I found out later.
I noticed that the right-hand headlight of my car is not working. In March the left-hand bulb burned out, likewise on the homeward journey from the hospital.
Yesterday was my aunt's name-day. Margit took us out to Csobánka, to the little house there, fifteen years ago. We didn't even know the village existed. With her help we found the sloping plot that we eventually bought. A tiny shack, patched together from sheets of iron and timber; inside, a bed, cupboard, table and a few chairs. Built into the loo was a toolroom, along with lots and lots of tools, nails, a sprayer, a manual lawn-mower, recliners, plant-protectant chemicals, dried-up cans of paints, a hose-pipe, and God knows what else. Our shanty was, perhaps, not unlike the cabins of Thoreau or Malcolm Lowry, seeing that we did not have even electricity for 12 years, for instance. Rising and dipping. Descending and rising. Sinking and elevation. Hill and dale. Soaring and tumbling. Folds. Scrolled-up leaves. Wires. Picket fence. Plopping damsons. Barrels. Roses.
What do I mean by all these risings and dippings? Why am I emphasising and reiterating them? Why would I like to supply ever newer synonyms? Why do I need to do that? To dress them up in ever-newer clothes. "Your writings are a sea full of wrong words and faulty sentences. Level." "This is the sadness of the sea- waves like words, all broken- a sameness of lifting and falling mood."
The body is at once rising and dipping. The chest rises and sinks as we breathe. Up, down.
My daughter, as a three-year-old, ran happily down the slope in the Csobánka garden. Thrilled to run around. There was room. Spaciousness. Lungs. The trees were still tiny, the girl still tiny, in 1984. She ran towards us in sandals, no socks, in her little shorts, her upper body bare. We were waiting for her at the bottom of the garden. Down below. She ran with arms spread wide open, hair cut like a boy's, with her big belly button, then started to brake. She was laughing. It was August. Heat wave. I was cramming a few students for resits in Russian (that month I earned 3,500 forints with home tutoring). The body was panting from running. The child could still be picked up. From ground into arms. And handed on.
We collected the rainwater in green barrels in those days.
I taught throughout 1984. Home tutoring, from Rákospalota to Budaörs.
I coached struggling students. We did their homework. My daughter wrote block letter Bs in my diary, in red, in June, against the months of September and November.
My father came out to Csobánka just once, or rather I took him out there by car so he might see what sort of 'property' we had bought. Later on, he no longer even moved outside the apartment and soon was confined to bed.
My grandmother was also curious about Csobánka, and I once took her too out there. She clambered up the path leading to the house by hanging on to the fence. At the top she missed her footing and tumbled to her knees. Knelt before our house. Fortunately, no harm was done. It was hard to help the heavy body up from the kneeling position. I pointed out the sights: the two Kevélys, the limestone crags of the Oszoly, the village of Pomáz straight ahead, and beyond that, in the distance, Dunakeszi, and still further beyond that, the church at Fót. Over to the left was the roof of the tourist hostel at Csikóváralja, with its chimney, Cradle Hill, and on the extreme left the red lamp of the beacon on Dobogókő ("the supreme symbol"). It shines constantly. I am proud of the vista.
Over the years, Csobánka became part of our life. The water main was connected, we expanded the house (a small kitchen, two small rooms and a minuscule bathroom), and the big terrace, its area (24 sq. metres) equalling that of the house, was completed. We furnished it. Bit by bit, it became completely our own; we grew attached to it and would not sell it for the whole world. Our pine trees (3 of them) grew. And, all of a sudden, the ivy planted in front of the terrace began to grow and creep. It clambered up on the side wall, then ran up the timber balustrade, and on reaching the top of that it had to be trained to slither back down. Evergreen.
My mentioning Lowry just before was no accident, as one of the things I read to my wife was his short novel 'The Forest Path to the Spring': "But could you rent Paradise at twelve dollars a month?" In this short novel, "... such words as spring, water, houses, trees, vines, laurels, mountains, wolves, bay, roses, beach, islands, forest, tides and deer and snow and fire, had realised their true being, or had their source..." The vocabulary of happiness is sparse, stuttering... Happiness, put into words, is more pallid than the reality...
On a back page of an American book, I discovered not long ago the following sentence: "No trees were cut down to make this book." I too would prefer that not a single tree were to be cut down on account of the happy-book. And that I destroy nothing whilst writing it: "in order that I may become a better man, capable of more tenderness, understanding, love..."
I shall not allow the Csobánka shack to be knocked down. Our life, too, is a similar shack that my wife and I have been building for 19 years (we started it in 1979, the two of us, together).

III.

I perhaps first saw Juli Gábor in the late Sixties or maybe the early Seventies, on Margaret Island, in the queue at the box-office for the open-air cinema. There was always much shoving there, an air of expectation, a long line even before the box-office opened; the tickets were soon snapped up. In her miniskirt and thigh-length black boots, she was a rather conspicuous figure. She smiled self-confidently, since everyone was just gawping at her. I learned later that she was the daughter of the actor Miklós Gábor and his actress wife, Éva Ruttkai.
Her mum would sometimes come to visit her, dropping in at the Surplus Stock Centre. This workplace was a gathering place for superfluous, discarded people, from Alice to Zsombor. On one occasion the actress wore a cape, and she squeezed into the cramped women's changing cubicle with her daughter, waiting until she had changed. They went off together to lunch or shop. Juli was wearing glasses by then, with big round frames. She had become more serious. Her mum was not ill yet (I am not sure about that). Her dad never came, but he phoned her up lots of times. My friends called me up lots of times too; my colleagues would constantly be calling me to take the phone. That slightly nettled Juli, but she would laugh. Then one day, to my utter amazement, she offered to loan her small house in the Huývösvölgy district. I must have been moaning about not being able to get peace anywhere. I was living with my parents at the time; I moved to Kavics utca on separating from my wife. I was in the midst of divorce proceedings. I would complain at my workplace that there was no nook to which I could retire (a touch of exaggeration, perhaps?); I would like to write, but I had nowhere to do so. ("The Happy Prince never dreamed of crying for something." I did not know that at the time.) I moaned so much that Juli finally tired of it, and one day she placed the keys to her small house in my hand: "There you are!"

The consultant has prescribed a new medicine for my wife, because what she has been taking up to now had no effect. It is so new that it is not yet obtainable at the pharmacy. "Free medical sample. Not for sale" is printed on the box. It has an odd name (odd to us, at any rate): Zyprexa. Not easy to pronounce. Its "alternative" or "non-proprietary" or "generic" name is olanzapine. It means nothing to us. Will this funnily named medicine (which has since been introduced commercially) bring about an improvement? Will taking one tablet twice a day mean healing? Why should I not put the question that way? Eli Lilly & Company Ltd, Basingstoke, England. Is happiness to come from English climes? Is the starting-point of recovery 70 km from London? In a factory? What a distance! What paths, immeasurable remotenesses, must the soul travel in order to be well again? Is happiness concealed in pills?

Let us try to track delight, step by step! Let us try to nab it, catch it in the act! Let us try to learn the technique of delighting- from Hemingway, for instance!

I have fourteen slips of paper at present, set largely in order. Is that too many or too few? I have filled up both sides of twelve of them with my writing; only two have an empty verso.

Again I have to correct myself: those mouldering benches about which I asserted earlier that one could not sit on them ("it could be no one at all had sat on them since time immemorial"), well, one can. During our stroll today we saw them being used. We even walked by the people who were resting on them. They were sunning themselves. We strolled up as far as the night-time sanatorium.
I like these strolls, but what about my wife? I wonder if she too likes these slow steps. And this is why she learned to walk? For these belated, bitter steps? We walk hand in hand. For me the breath of air is as though we were in our own garden. "These strolls are very good. Fallen leaves under my feet and the mellow calmness of the misty evening." I have had to switch to another book. "Trees, and our house... And our house has a magic spell, with wisps of grass, dried walnut leaves, pictures, books, Mariska, a chopped-down cherry tree. That has something to do with happiness too." I had to switch for a short while into "the garden of our own house", "the misty evening", but I am now back here again, in the bright afternoon. "A shiver of a sort of sense of happiness passed through him." We have nothing, only our shadows. Night-dress on my wife, white shorts on me.
We spot the man who at the same time, day after day, suddenly hoves into sight amongst the trees. He runs. Cropped hair, bared chest. Our observations suggest he makes several circuits of the park. His pace is swift; he must already be behind the main building. An athletic body. Who can he be, we ask each other every time we glimpse him. An athlete? A patient? Whoever he may be, I pay the man my respects, unknown as he is. I like runners.
The bulky trunks of two trees are girdled by iron railings- to protect them. From what or whom? Who would harm the trees here? On the ground are big-bodied ants, scattered; they do not swarm, only scramble around, seemingly at random.

"'Yet yesterday I surmised that life, for me, has four planes.
A mundane or real plane. Duty, coming and going, saving...
Then the romantic, or happiness, plane. Amatory obsessions, sentiments, novels, marvellous moods...
Then the fear or danger plane... Tax office, throat cancer, people's democracy, the death of near-and-dear...
The final plane, the incomprehensible, is the plane of my death...'"

"On recovering, even after a serious illness, we restart the world. At all events, we try to start again from the beginning. We try to sniff out what has remained intact and unscathed. What is incorruptible. Where is that plane of existence into which no trouble, illness, poverty or bullet of any kind penetrates? Where things and events preserve their pristine essence, their original meaning. A patient undergoing treatment would rather adjust, in seconds, to a primordial starting-point than to society, to some kind of impoverished timetable. What might be the name of that sensibility to which we dare entrust ourselves in such a case? What kind of immovable embryo do we seek at such times? And if we find it, recognise it, it is no longer an embryo, a 'generative germ', but a poem, birth, twilight, laughter or childhood snow-fall. (I am thinking of versions of a poem, birth, twilight, laughter or childhood snow-fall to which human language has no access.) Adrienne is reading, Barbara sleeping. In any case, a year of primal significance has come to an end. 'It was night...' Therest- pre-recollection."

I am rereading what I wrote around 16 years ago. I was quoting myself, from one of my old pieces ("The child just holds my hand to teach me"). Overnice? Unintelligible? Does it still stand its ground? What ought I to write differently?
I keep examing my sentences. Hmmm. What definitely has to be amended? If the soul could get well again 16 years ago, why should it not also get well today?

In 1997 there were 400 million worldwide who suffered from anxiety disorders and 340 million from depression, the World Health Organization reports.

It was not Mariska but Marika- the name of my keelboat, that is to say.
We bought her second-hand in 1966. It was not me who named it; it was already called that. Somebody had christened it a good while before, and that was there, in curly lettering, on the boat's prow, on both sides. I did not change that, nor did I rechristen her. The licence was issued by the Waterways Police Headquarters. Stamp-duty affixed to the application. Serial number 133. Keeler 'Marika' is cleared for taking to the water. Permanent moorage: Vöcsök Boathouse II. Hull material: timber (mahogany). Length: 800 cm. Beam: 75 cm. Draught: 31 cm. Capacity: four (4) persons. Double rowlocks. Displacement: 320 kg. Registration number: Bp-X-1821.
There are Marikas in my wife's family, her mum and grandma, for example.
That keelboat was most definitely a part of happiness- for 10 years at least. "And then went down to the ship, down to the beach, set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea..." One of the nippiest boats it was at the Rómaipart. It was in good condition. I liked it a lot. I had (still have) a map: Water Sports Map. The Danube from Esztergom to Budapest. I still carry round in my head one or two of the river lanes and several uninhabited islands. The Kvassay Lock. I camped on Mosquito Island (opposite Nógrádverőce). Nothing survives of that water life for me now. But I always look at the Danube. When it is in flood, I go across to Szentendre from Csobánka and observe the height of the water. I keep my fingers crossed that the river won't flood the city. Shall I ever be able to explain what it meant to me to put out in a boat? Explain? No, I don't want to explain anything ever again. The oar blade glided on the surface of the water as one drew it back, whilst the sliding seat slipped forward in preparation for a new stroke. Feet fastened with straps. Possibly a thin cushion, of foam rubber, under one's behind. The singlet water-soaked to cool one down. What is the cox doing? Is he paying attention? Indulging in reveries? That is not permissible. Rowing (like literature) is no time for reveries. Happiness, not slaving at the galleys. Where is my friend Zoli Szlabej, with whom I not only rowed but also fenced in Csepel? We were rivals, as well as fellow sportsmen, at the age of 15.

"'Then another reason why it is hard to put up with people is that, much as an awful lot goes right, the displacements in the planes are constant. When I am moving in the happiness plane the other person will happen to be having a realistic moment...'"

No, at 15 years of age I was not aware that we were mates and rivals at one and the same time. I was not aware that literature is not a reverie. I dreamed. "Literature is not dreaming, embroidery, a Bohemian craft, still less a refuge for the wounded, the handicapped, or simpletons."

What name would I have given my skiff, I wonder? What would I have called it? And what name would I give it today, if I had a keelboat?

What's all this, then? Are worries surfacing over the happy-book? Are you scared it will flip over? That the intention will turn turtle, the devil stick an oar in, and it will turn into an unhappy book? Nothing of the sort! I'm not afraid. I have patience. ("Happiness is nothing more than prolonged patience.") Let the heart pound! ("A pure heart is all it takes.") The task is to shift from the plane of fear to the plane of happiness; from sickness to health.

I have a feeling that up till now all I have been doing is scratching around. My wife says that she can't write either, all she does is chicken scratch the paper. She tried to copy a few sentences out of a book by Kosztolányi into her notebook but couldn't manage it. Writing tires her. Her hand doesn't tremble, but she writes dodderingly, as if she were elderly, an old biddy with shaky hands, though her hand does not shake- it is just tired, very tired.

It was Malcolm Lowry, by the way, who reconciled me to the word wife. He uses it so familiarly and naturally in 'The Forest Path to the Spring' that it gave me a taste for the word.

I read out the first 15 pages of the happy-book to my wife. "Your sentences purl along like the waters of a brook," she said. "As if it might even be a spring?" I asked. "It might," she replied. Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle. We left the room meanwhile. The washing machine programme was through. We hung out the clothes to dry on the rack, and my wife prepared a little evening snack for the two of us. After that, she read me a Rilke quotation from Lowry's short novel 'Through the Panama': "- for those unapparent fatalities, once one has recognised them, can be endured only so long as one is capable of expressing them with the same force with which God allows them."

We are there in books. May I look on ahead? May I look on ahead when reading? I don't believe so. Can I bring something forward from behind?
My wife always used to tell me (since she has been my wife, since I know my own mind, or in other words since time immemorial) not to be afraid as long as I could see her. I should put my trust in her. She would nurse me when I get old, feed me when I became helpless. She would look after me, support me; she would not allow me to starve to death. I know she meant it seriously, and I believed every word of it; it was comforting. At the moment I am nursing her, and we are not even old; I try to support her, comfort her not to fear as long as she sees me.
I shaved my beard off the night before the summer solstice. I did the same last year. Last year it helped. A sort of rite. Let there be a cleansing! May my wife be healed! "Open the gate, new moon!"

That alone is love, boredom, illness, growing ugly and dreaming of elsewhere, and the desire to flee, to escape, a thousand times over yet always staying put: sitting face to face and looking at one another's ageing features, watching the other's dying to the end- that is love.

During the Sixties, I would even drink the water of the Danube. If I didn't have a water-bottle with me, or I couldn't find a well on the shore where I had moored, and I was very thirsty, I would stand in the water up to my knees, bend over, and drink from the Danube. I slurped the water. It was very satisfying. It never gave me any trouble.

At Luppa I would swim over to Szentendre Island. As I swam further, ever further out, just when I had gone past little Luppa Island, the water became colder, cooling me nicely. I would allow myself to be carried by the current. If I swam when it was raining or cool, the water would warm me up.

Squeezing out of ourselves at least the daily quota of good cheer is hard work. Wringing out a bit of joy. The daily minimum dose of joy. The way one squeezes lemons in the kitchen, day by day, because one regularly drinks lemonade. One puts the squeezed-out lemon in the refrigerator to absorb the smell of food: it is supposedly the best odour extractor there is.

Should I attempt a trick? Sneak up on joy unnoticed? Steal up behind it on tiptoe, then cover its eyes with a sudden flourish? "So, who is it? Who am I?" should I ask, or just wait in silence until joy says something, tries to guess my name?

"In my dream I was acting opposite Éva Ruttkai in a two-hander. The actress was wearing a lovely gown. Her face was made up. I went over to her, as the role required, and caressed, comforted her. I kissed her tenderly. The actions were not accompanied by any words."

"Illness wisely shows where our soul is to be found. A blow of some kind is needed for us to be able to see it."
My friend from America helps me out. A letter has just arrived from him. He has sent a questionnaire: techniques for procuring joy in Budapest. "Do me a favour and fill it in," he writes. And he appends his own list: "1. Stand on Margaret Island, near the bridge. Southwards is the city, Pest and Buda, before our eyes. Up above migratory birds wing away. Or: an immense jeweller's shop window, by night. 2. Observe an old building being renovated. 3. Wish a lot of luck to a recently planted tree. 4. Stroll along a street where cars are not allowed to drive (e.g. the southern end of Váci Street). 5. Look into a pair of beautiful hazel eyes swimming in the Olympic pool. 6. Visit Gyula Krúdy's old stamping-grounds (Margaret Island, Óbuda, Király utca, Andrássy út, the Terézváros and Józsefváros districts, etc.)." In my reply I promised my friend that I would fill in his questionnaire on techniques for procuring joy- if I live long enough.
The Mozart has arrived on the Danube, mooring alongside the Dolphin Queen (at the end of July). Where might the Esmeralda be? River Symphony is still anchoring here.

If you go down Deer Park Street and cross Valley Street, where the No. 56 tram stop is, look around, and if you carry on, still going down the hill, you cross a little bridge, that's the Devil's Ditch, and there you have Fern Road, Cloud Road, Carpet Road, Kerouac Road, Lowry Road, Thoreau Road, Hemingway Road; bear to the left, then turn up Snipe Road, carry on up, up, then again take a left, then left again into Vulture Street then Happiness Close, to No. 6/a. There you will find the little house the keys to which Juli placed in my hand: "There you are!"

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Balázs Györe
studied Hungarian and Russian and is now a free-lance writer. In addition to a book of poems he has published eight volumes of fiction to date. This novel appeared in 2001.