Endre Kukorelly

Fairy Vale, or Riddles of the Human Heart

(Excerpt)
Chapter IV. Money

 

4

I was frightened of the remedial patients. The path to the river took one that way, through the ploughed lands belonging to the occupational therapy place, far away from the buildings, but still one went in between those barracks to the bank. Yes, but for some reason I'm frightened. Everyone is scared of them, it's not advisable to go near them, you never can tell, can you. They would hang about among the bushes, in the shade of the apple trees, well wrapped up even in the heat, their padded jackets buttoned up to the neck, their ear-flapped caps pulled down low on the brow, lolling about, scratching, staring blankly. Whisking the flies away.
Remedial patients, which is to say loonies. Old-timers and retarded on top, their mouths constantly gaping and, so it was said, continually screwing. They screw all the time, each and every one with everyone else, it's common knowledge, all the women get shagged several times a day, even the oldest, in between which they check one another out, and if strangers should pass that way, apparently, I don't know because I don't look that way, they flash their willies. All that could be seen was that they were flaked out in the shade, that's how the nutters took a rest.
They rested from who knows what. I, in any event, didn't look anywhere, I looked straight ahead, at the path, lest the wheel bump against the kerb. I made out that I wasn't shit scared, yet I was shit scared as I finally pedalled at full speed among them, down to the bank, though they didn't so much as look at me. They weren't to be seen close to the bank. They're afraid of water, no doubt.
A good job too, the idiots, thank God, are afraid of water, that was comforting. Not completely, though I no longer rightly know, it's possible that I'm only afraid now. I reassured myself with the thought that if they were to come at me, to start running after me, I would cycle into the river.
One time I went to the Sárosis' to hoe weeds. Before the footie Tibi mentioned that his father would pay ten forints, did I feel like it, money for jam. They gave me a shout at dawn, I was already wide awake through excitement. Manual labour, hard physical, I was going to make some money.
Like anyone else, the other kids in the settlement, paid in work units. The Sárosis had a separate piece of land, their own, not the co-op's, a few long strips of land out on the far side of the elevation behind the railway tracks, over towards the Csajerszke. I haven't been this way before, now I'm plodding along here, hoe on shoulder and a touch of pride to boot. The air is cool, almost cold, the sun has just slipped up over the crowns of the trees, the sandy soil is still damp, the bushes dew-laden. When I reached the end of a row, I could drink half a lid of water.
They had brought a tin can of water with them, and we drank from the lid. I'm doing what they do, I'm working for pay, I drink their water, they brought it, us together, communal drinking water, I was mingling with them. The water gradually warmed up. The main thing is on no account to hoe out any of the crop itself. Occasionally I hoe one out then quickly stuff it back, smooth down the earth around it, and hope no-one will notice. How good life is.
What?
Life is good.
I sat under a bramble thicket and endeavoured to straighten out my palms.
A good life, admittedly the others are way ahead; they pay me no attention, I'm lagging a long way behind in the line. Why? Was I supposed to keep up? They didn't say I should, there wasn't a word about tempo. The water's warm as a puddle, tastes of iron, and a bunch of sand has got into it, it's crunching between my teeth.
My teeth were crunchy from it. At the sweet shop in Budakalász one could get lemon ice-cream, delicious, semi-molten, slightly bitter, watery-tasting scoops, sometimes strawberry ice and raspberry too. I didn't spend the money. I didn't buy the bicycle that I would have liked to have.
Headlamp, calliper brake, gears, adjustable saddle with a small leather tool-kit bag. You tip the dynamo pulley onto the wheel with the toe-cap of your shoe. I didn't buy any ice-cream either. Once or twice, or not at all. I didn't buy any Travellers' Relief Drink at the lido but drank from the tap; I munched my bread-and-butter with yellow pepper and drank water with it. I purchased a Travellers' Relief and drank it super-slowly.
I drink slowly and it's finished in one go, make a start and that's it, a sip. It's ten forints for the hoeing, but Sárosi didn't inform me beforehand whether that's for one hour or how much, or how many rows have to be hoed. We went home at noon, and I got seventeen forints. Money makes me bashful, because it signifies the sort of thing that I'm actually loath to show. Sadly, money signifies me, the more diffident me, a whole lot of stuff about me, whilst to others, almost everyone-me almost entirely. I take into account what I signify to others.
To others, through money, I signify anything, because what I do is endeavour to switch to what they're doing, and they have to agree to that beforehand.
If they agree, that's the money, you go along with it, that's what you produce.
If I have no money, they don't like me.
It's not even possible for them to like me, because I do nothing, don't take so much as a step, which is why I have no money, that's it, by and large. You want to be liked, then take a few steps, go through at least one or two motions that also suit others. If you have no money, you get-take this literally now-stuck, you've been stuck with this one thing, you end up definitively separate from others, unable even to move away from there. I endeavour to avoid anyone who has no money. Anyone who has no money stinks.
He has a strange smell, not the same as that of others. He dozes on the metro carriage seat, lurching like a sack of potatoes between Újpest and Kőbánya stations, only waking up at the end of the line to relieve himself between the rails, other people pulling away from him due to the stench. You don't spot him straight off, however, you sometimes sit down next to one of them, then when you see what he is, when you've noticed, you promptly stand up and move away from there. Some people even get off immediately, pulling discreet grimaces as they step over to the next carriage. You see what sort of person he is, because he has no money.
When I have no money I don't concern myself with other people, I don't give a damn about them, I have to have money. I'm not indifferent, I need to have a place, and that place is among the others. I may not like them perhaps. For sure I don't, I'm sick of the sight of them, I speak to them in a forced way in some foreign and trite idiom, meanwhile eyeing their salami sandwiches, but I join in and marvel at them. Do they appeal to me? I don't tell them they bore me.
I'm bored with you, there's no chance of my saying that kind of thing. Someone always turns up who appeals as well, and there are some whom I truly like. I like them, miss them, it's hard for me to part from there, or them, I go back just for a short while, just in case some grub or beer was left, and I often discover that I'm the last one left.
I stay to the last so as not to be alone. I'm saying this to those who are able to follow. They follow, though I make no move of any kind. I speak to those who are capable of loafing about like this, as stupidly as me, so bereft, amidst all kinds of seemingly happy things. It's summer, nothing is moving, I'm sitting outside on a deck-chair under our apple-tree, scribbling on the unused pages of my squared-paper maths exercise book; if someone comes by, I break off.
People come over, I cover-up, shut the exercise book, shove my book over it. A woodpecker is hammering on the walnut-tree, rattling like a piece of wood caught in a fan. If no-one comes, I work, when I'm alone, that is my work. In the summer of 1962, on the platform of the suburban train station, I saw the headless body of an elderly man-approximately ever since then. I saw a man's head separately, but I didn't really pay attention, I was hurrying home, my foot hurt.
I didn't stop, didn't give a look over there, partly because I was scared, partly because the sole of my foot hurt like blazes. I also had a temperature. I hardly gave it a look, but I still saw the whole thing. Rigid.
Not the details. No details.
That's why I scooted off from there so, er yes, lightning-fast, as if it did not interest me, I'd had enough of it, even that much were sufficient for me never to be free of it. A chap got off the suburban train, strolled to the end of the train, placed his briefcase beside him, bent down as if he were about to tie up his shoelaces, then, when both conductors had stepped back from the boarding steps, lay prone on the platform and stuck his head between the wheel and the rail.
I went back after it had grown dark. I was better by then and, it seems, it interested me after all. But there was nothing there by then. Roughly that. A shrill croaking of frogs. That's how quickly it's spirited away, something absorbs it.

5

When I was a child I was often alone. I didn't know about this distinctly like that, or to put it better, I no doubt knew that I was alone, but that belonged to it, at all events that's how the alone and you are belong together. I didn't suspect how this was all so, I don't know what further description to add, what richer predicate to use, boring. I wasn't bored because I had no clue about how I should be alone, I was just alone. The others were working.
My parents were in Pest, at their workplaces, Grandma was soaking my socks in the wash tub, making a fire in the stove, pressing seed onions into the turned soil, cooking lunch, sending me to the shop for bread. She somehow managed to get me to do that. She washes the plates with a brisk clinking in a basin. My mates at the settlement grafted every day in order to have money. Not me.
I go to the shop, tops, bike over for mineral water-not what you could call work. I have no money, nor is it important that there should be, without it whatever works out is worked out; the ones who need money work, I therefore have no need. If I work, that is probably on account of money. Just for money, it's crude put that way, sounds vile, I might write this sort of thing down, write it down maks, but not say it out loud. X. Ks, fiksed, I've written it down, because this is the situation, yet even so I don't think so at all.
Out of prudence, though it could be this is how I get my pay-back. We are used to thinking up all kinds of things and then not blurting them out but neatly shooing them away from ourselves, the word shooing having been hit on expressly for that thinking-up. I'm ashamed to speak ill of others, that too is on account of money, money is what rules it, because if the person in question is floundering before your eyes, are you going to look at them and tell them?
Like: don't take it amiss, but you're too small for me. When I decide for some reason, on account of a bloody-awful upbringing one's in the habit of deciding things like I'll speak my mind frankly-that makes disproportionate demands. Too close to tell, sweltering, my back becomes sweaty and it drags on hopelessly long. For I don't give up, since I already gave up when I started. I blush. You flushed.
The reason for the blushing is money. Infinitesimally short, brutally to-the-point sentences. To tell others one's frankly poor opinion, nothing comes of that, on top of which it does everyone in indiscriminately. I find it bad, that way it doesn't meet my needs, so one doesn't speak, I don't stop to talk with them, don't stomach it, because I don't take it from them, won't buy that sort of thing purely out of politeness.
Or I buy it purely out of politeness, out of tact, and promptly dump it in the first doorway. You're acquainted with those moves when, after some hesitation, you stick something on the dustbin lid rather than tossing it in, just in case it comes in handy for someone else. I don't know by the way what's with this sparing, who it is I'm sparing by doing this, and why not myself, but all the same, why should I tell them that what they have is vile, lousy. Is it certain it's vile?
Could be that it's not so vile. But then again it's vile for sure, since it's me who gets to decide what's vile.
My money decides, money says so, because what the money goes on is good for certain, at least during that brief moment. For example, I'll give you this stupid example, Travellers' Relief really was good, the money would really have liked it a lot to be laid out on that.
It would have liked to rush out, be laid out without thinking, that would have been worth it. It's laid out because it's worth it, and if it's not worth it, then not. Or Ischler biscuits. On the way to school, where I turn out of Izabella Street onto Andrássy Avenue, a coffee aroma billows out from Lukács's, the confectioner's. Mingled with cake. That always worked, it billowed continually, the aroma was produced continuously, and I always went by there, I wouldn't have been able to anywhere else, because should I go out of my way, a street nearer the Vörösmarty Street Girls' School, on that account? I didn't go in and I didn't go out of my way, and that's when the Ischlers surged through the vents.
Linzers, Dobosch torte, Tátra meltaways, rum-punch petit fours. Once a year, after the year-end speech-day ceremony, when school reports were handed out, we would go into the Lukács café with our parents to have an ice-cream. We make our way down to the basement, walnut-hued wainscoting, clouds of cigarette smoke, the thimbleful of soda water that came with the ice-cream. The very fact of its being Lukács's, the confectioner's.
The Lukács isn't abolished for good, it's just that right now, as it happens, they have brought in people's democracy for eternity, which is why Specialities is inscribed in the oval frame over the entrance, in the same Art Nouveau lettering. The revolving door metes out the aromas as two platinum-grey old dames totter in, rouged up to the eyeballs, expelling several door-compartmentsful of intense coffee aroma onto the street. The cakes are delivered in aluminium trays to other not-so-special places, the barely cooled French creams shuddering in a corpse-carrier pan on a Soviet GAZ slab. Lots of French Creams trembling. There would have been a lot to seriously lament about in front of the Specialities confectioner's.
Which no one called that, we called it the Lukács; my mum would never let any other name pass her lips in place of the old ones, reactionary to the core, she never wavers on that, though admittedly it's impossible to say out loud nonsense like Specialities, or People's Republic Avenue and November the Seventh Square, in any decent way.
The Oktogon, and that's all. Opposite the confectioner's is the district police station, a constable posted on the pavement in the chocolatey fumes, keeping his eye on a tray of however many Johnny Rigós. A few steps past the police station, beyond Aradi Street, is a tobacconist's and, at the corner of our road, a branch of the Laundry Co., where we took our bed linen to be washed. Blackened edifices, stucco pealing from the walls: the houses are decaying all along Izabella Street.
All the houses in the back streets. From time to time they put up scaffolding on one or another, there's no knowing why, the courtyard corridors and balconies are underpinned and left that way for years. After lessons, I mess around with Gézus Kajtár, Georgie Onodi, and Barta in front of the tobacconist's, then, when we start to get tired of that, it's off home, that's the route every day. I hurry home, I'm hungry, and it's ribbon noodles with poppy seed for lunch. Maybe I'm not so hungry after all.
I'm hungry, but it's going to be ribbon noodles with poppy seed, with the castor sugar strictly rationed, already divulged in advance it comes to mind, and I'm no longer quite so hungry, it deserts me, that's how it goes. Awfully flat, no surprise-true, no one said anything about surprises, there's nothing shot-in-the-dark. It's possible they're going to bring a newer model of Soviet-manufactured trolley-buses into service; that too showers sparks when it jumps points, the electric motor in it whirrs just as menacingly.
As in any of the earlier models. It howls its motor if one of the current collectors jumps off the cable on the points at the Szondi Street turn-off, where the No. 76 line goes its separate way from the No. 73, no big surprise. Our school is next door to Lukács's, the confectioner's, but by and large we never went in. Still, we might have gone in sometimes nonetheless.
In a text even merrier than this, I would have gone in to pack in some Rigó slices.

6

The Investment Bank means I was able to visit the bank. My dad's workplace, a smell of paper, ladies' perfume, men leisurely smoking cigarettes in the corridors; they invest and all that stuff, heavy-duty financial affairs. He kept coloured pencils in his drawer, on my account I reckon, one Elephant India rubber and stamps as well, Invbank seals, I'd get purple all over my fingers. Wooden panelling on the walls of the corridor, solemn tobacco-brown hues, it was sometimes permitted to type, when one of the secretaries was out of the room. You take the paternoster lift up to the fifth floor, but you don't step out, scary: it's written in red lettering on a back-lit glass plate that the last floor follows, please alight, and we don't.
Before it reaches the head of the lift shaft they give a warning, you have no business going further, higher, it's out of order, this is the limit, strictly forbidden to pass, in red letters with an exclamation mark, alight or you have only yourself to blame, they have told you, somewhat menacingly, it's not just a fairy story. But my little sister and I clung together in the compartment, grasping the legs of our dad's trousers and waiting for what would happen, but nothing did.
What happened was nothing happened, the contraption turned round with a squeaking, and it was incomprehensible why we weren't standing on our heads. That's when I understood, not before, and even afterwards I didn't entirely understand. I grasped what was happening, yet in all truth we still ought to have been standing on our heads at the turn-round, because isn't that what a turn-round is? Or stay there and step out of the compartment at the last floor.
You span the limit and instantly come back. The boss leaves the room, whereupon Auntie Erzsi or whoever opens a drawer, produces her comb, squeezes out a little lipstick and, setting her round mirror in front of her, daubs her mouth dark red with unbelievably meticulous care. The tip of the lipstick slips out like the prick of a dog in a rutting mood.
She tightens her lips, purses them by pressing between her teeth, but only slowly pursing, slowly and now very much, because she is already made up, just touching up. She leaves off the touching-up, presses her lips together. Some red sticks to her teeth.
She adjusts her bra, adjusts her stockings. She doesn't concern herself with me, fortunately, she only concerns herself with me if the boss is in the room, though then too she is obviously concerning herself with the boss, who is my dad. No matter, I don't concern myself with her either, I'm able to put on a show of not looking when she is titivating. When she is titillating. I watch her in such a way as not to, because I'm drawing a besieged castle, Turks unsuccessfully besieging the Hungarians, I make out that Erzsi is not exciting. I don't even see her.
The way she pokes in a thumb under her bra, reaches in lightning-fast, lifts away the whale-bone frame, releases the stale air. She lifts it away, lets it drop back, away, back, the bits quiver, the knockers knock. The surrounds too, whalebone and rib bone. My willy gets a hard-on. Do you believe that the person who reclines his head on a Fairy Mound cannot lie still? I don't believe so, but I do know that when my head bends to your bosom I am roused too strongly for sleep to fall on my eyes. I went out to the washroom.
You step out into the corridor, look for the men's room, because you need a leak but you can't-get round that somehow, old pal. At half-time during a match once, in the toilets at the Népstadion, that's where it happened for the first time, I was unable to pee for excitement, though I desperately needed to.
It would be good if I could because, for one thing, I came here to take a leak, then for another, the second half has started ages ago and-nothing.
There I was, standing in the stench in a urinal, and it wouldn't go, though not due to the stench.
Due to the excitement. Full ground, the concrete terraces groaning, whilst I would be well advised to slash on that tarred wall as soon as possible. I all too readily get a stand, very easily and haphazardly, it's all sheer chance, which is good and also bad. Then later, no matter, the whole thing grows on you. There are two different endings, so indeterminably comely and homely, depending solely on memory. And on what does memory depend?

7

At home we had much the same sort of porcelain as in Lukács's, the confectioner's. In the corner of the cabinet stood my mother's Zsolnai porcelain lace doll, among Herend bonboničres, animal figures and Mattie the Gooseboy. A piglet plays the accordion very amusingly on a round lace doily, because on top of everything there were also these crocheted doilies. Now, one was not allowed to touch this doll, because the situation with the doll was that, sadly, it was crumbling.
Rampantly at that. You touched it and a chunk of porcelain dust promptly detached from it at the most unexpected places. Even if you didn't touch it, it fell apart of its own accord, the lace dress occasionally shed itself, crumbled, though admittedly that did not do much to alter the doll's so-called prettiness. The doll was pretty, you see.
From a certain point of view. Elegant lace flaws, exquisite, ruined and acquiescent, it resembled that brassičre-hitcher in the bank, Auntie-I no longer remember who. Erzsi. A ripped-dress prettiness, so pretty it is ugly, in any event annoying. The cabinet annoyed me in principle, because why do we have a cabinet with lace.
Why the cabinet. And the lace.
On one successful dusting a more substantial chunk dropped off the evening gown and the decision was made to sell the doll. I didn't like the doll, the dusting annoyed me and I was glad to see it sold, yet there was still an air of solemnity about the decision. Grandma cooked semolina pudding every week.
Semolina pudding was a fixed item on the Wednesday menu, you were already preset for it when you got back home, that's how you woke up in the morning-disenchanting. So was there something to become disenchanted with? I would eat mustard with the semolina so it would be a bit more of a surprise, have any taste at all. I was prepared for it to taste vile, but not vile for being vile, more for having no taste, that's what was vile about it.
It was still atrocious with mustard, so it was beyond hope, there was no solution. Semolina is dry, pappy sand, it soaks up the saliva, one can take a dreadfully long time eating semolina pud, a lot of chewing and champing, I dislodge it, shift it around, use the mouth until it finally gums up, then gulp the gob down in one.
Or in two, if I'm able to bite it in two. From time to time we sold one or other of the better pieces from the inheritance to the State Pawnship, and on such occasions lunch would be a joint of roast meat, a bottle of wine, with love-letters for afters. It was-how would one put it?
Hopeless. Seven or eight freshly minted, brick-red hundred-forint notes, and then it would be a matter of bouillon that Sunday, obviously, followed by breaded cutlets and chipped potatoes or maybe cutlets with cheese. We have no money, it seems.
Appropriate family happiness, but not the money to go with it, not enough for happiness. My dad works in the bank, Mum for the Post Office Savings Bank. On one occasion, for some reason, the regime sharply pushed up the price of silver, and Dad stood in the queue at the State Pawnship, because one had to queue up into the bargain, and sold two of the lighter, un-monogrammed silver goblets out of the service, as well as a cigarette case. Somehow I recollect that transaction, and it's not a good feeling.
It's a lousy feeling.
We sold the doll for seven hundred forints, whilst another porcelain ornament, the Easter Aspersion, was squeezed into the doll's place, in the corner of the cabinet. The Easter Aspersion portrayed a peasant lad in wide breeches and waistcoat pouring a jug of water steadily-at least it was steady until the base dropped off and smashed to pieces during a spring-clean-down a girl's neck. Little red apron, bodice, a flaxen plait, pert little bosoms. If we had no money, then we didn't, we took note of the fact, there was no special lamentation, no melodrama.
Did we cheer up?
Probably not. A man's a machine. This machine gets up and goes to bed. It sits down at the table, speaks and holds its peace, gets pay-back, justifies, carries out its business, trots out what it knows, what is fed in, takes note, never forgets completely. It is inordinately fond of talking to itself. It yawns, strives, falls asleep nicely because it could cry. And cries bitterly.
It cries bitterly. He turns completely away from the inward direction, the path he should have followed in order truly to become a self. I trot out what I know at the press of a button. Function, eat, defecate, screw, work, joyous, bitter-sweet, then give up the ghost. The customary, hardly varying, resigned recognition, not particularly overdone but not overlooked either, of how little money we have. Porcelain services-yes, I found nothing surprising about that.
A Rosenthal service, painted Czech fruit dishes, commode and divan, truckle bed, silver coffee spoons, family this and that. The truckle bed simply means a bed insert, the bed settee and truckle bed, that's how we say it, that's the sort of thing we say, don't ask me why. Trolley table with tea service, gilded cigarette case, monogrammed cigarette box, sets of the works of Sándor Márai and Ferenc Herczeg-why, other people have stuff like that.
Trolley table with four casters, no? The properties had all been kissed goodbye as it was, hadn't they, nothing to be said about that, Uncle Pepus put the patrimony into war bonds at the outbreak of the First World War, but after the Treaty of Trianon the bonds were worth a gold signet ring and a Swiss wristwatch-that was the inheritance. Four thousand acres, three zeros, the matter of properties was not often trotted out, in truth never, part of the game was not to speak about that sort of thing.
I don't know why: out of modesty or pride or because of the sheer futility, but that was the rule, the regulation so to say, I could reel off a whole list of things. Out of a general hopelessness that extended to just about everything. It all melted into thin air, zero, full stop, end of discussion, kissed goodbye, who now knows how.
They probably did know, only I didn't ask them. What the situation was. 'I'm going to D. now' (our other estate): 'I'll see how things are and do what I can there'. Not deliberately forgetting, merely not talking about it, not discussing it, a prim yet nonetheless suitable working family strategy, though not explicit of course. Written all over us is a profound conviction that it isn't necessarily proper to go on about such things, they vanish of their own accord anyway.
They do vanish too. Forgetting is the royal road: you don't think it through, don't write it down, you talk only about the most trivial, mundane matters, everything else just crumbles away like that porcelain lace-that's forgetting for you. We don't talk about it, then either it will become clear, or not. What is it about Jews in general, for instance, that gets our back up, because it's seemingly nothing specific-I would have been interested to know that.
What's the deal: separately decent, collectively not decent, or each one separately helpful but en masse out to do the dirty on you? Or is it the fact that, sad to say, when it comes down to it they're true-blue monarchists; that is to say, we, it gradually dawned on me, are true-blues, and I wasn't comfortable with that. Not true-blues for convenience, not even out of principle, not out of defiance or bloody-mindedness, not because it's due, simply because that's what we are, true-blues, out of habit; that's the way one was born, so one accepts it.
Why are we, I'm serious, such true-blues. Stiff bearing, long, aristocratic white cloak reaching right down to the horse's rump, plumed helmet, always being thrashed but always coming through in the end, though never at the very end-that's true-blue, that's how I saw them on the tellie. My dad rode horses from childhood on, his uncle had a racing stable, was a passionate horse. On the other hand, potato noodles again for lunch, semolina pudding at best, so judging by that it's now the very end. We are skint, reduced to scraping the very bottom of the semolina pud. They are working to no avail.
He works the whole day and till God knows what hour of the night, because he believes, that's what he must have been told, that's how he was brought up, that through work, unremitting, demeaning work that used up all his time and patience, any sort of work, he would earn enough money.
To support his family decently, to support us. An easy-going, worn-out, elegant true-blue officer, he would come back home, no helmet or silk cloak, change clothes, switch on the radio, start up the bobbin-winder, meanwhile putting the coffee percolator on, and set to it. Like that, every blessed day. Every goddamned day. But where did he get that from?
For one thing, let's start there, the money wasn't enough anyway, he should have known, not for anything, he ought to have tumbled to that; where did he get it from that it might be enough? That impassive exertion, then meanwhile the display-cabinet thing-was that not futile? Yes, futile, pointless his doing what it wasn't enough for, what it is best to yearn for, anything polished off this easily, put behind one this quickly, is anyway totally superfluous.
A Travellers' Relief is superfluous or, depending on the context, super-flewous. Money is ice-cold. Cold, a ferroconcrete fence, tightly woven wire netting around our garden. Territory belonging to us, a tiny piece of land, thus far mine, that part over there, from the row of lilacs, does not belong here, you don't step over.
Don't even step. I don't take a step. I don't understand why, but those are the boundaries, and it's as if the most appropriate boundaries were marked, suits us fine, I accept them, don't even want to change them. Money is an infuriating thing, maybe it preoccupies me so much because it is so infuriating. My parents worked for their money.
We work and something will come of it-that was the basis on which they did it, only nothing came of it, that's the problem. That's the basis. What did come of it was that they brought back from the market two kilos of blood oranges, really tasty, and they didn't tot up afterwards how long they had squatted in the cotton dust showering out from that bobbin-winding machine for those eight oranges.
In the fine fluff that uniformly coated the flat. Bananas were not to be had, and a good job too. We didn't talk about it, we didn't talk about money, and it was totally out of order in front of strangers, so when it came down to it I didn't really know what money signified, yet still it seemed, though maybe I am not seeing it right, as if that was what it was always about.
That is to say, precisely the fact that nothing was said about it, nothing explicit, the family's vocabulary cut off along a specific line, with us not employing certain words. So what words would we use? Gobble my goo-we wouldn't use words like that, those kinds of words would be used by Gypsies, Gypsy women would yell at one another whilst quarrelling on Rose Street. No way of discovering for what reason, and it's not as if I would want to discover, but according to the dictionary there aren't any words like that. Nor matters touching on money. Nor much blander stuff, either.
Money-that exists, and there exists this awkwardness about words touching on money, that somehow is what I sense. Money pays off my time, it signifies present tense, buys it separately, even if it doesn't bring it back, but it represents, makes it visible. Then too, in a strange way, it does bring back something that I didn't sell for money. My time, which I once considered I had to sell, I sell all over again; that's the mechanism, if I recollect. Fairly smooth functioning, if
I don't recollect it, then I've truly written it off, and I'm not going to write off so easily something that I once had. When I write it down, I take it back. Family drama with a fixed cast, terrible hamming, a stream of empty chatter, the text unwritten, barely thought-through.
I don't feel like it, but play along all the same, then I quickly forget what.
I lock myself in the bathroom, come out, I don't feel like it, nor like staying inside either, I'm peeved; as far as possible, for the sake of balance, there should always be one or two family members who are peeved at other members of the family, those are the best scenes. A few flawless scenes. Take the one where my dad, on my fourteenth birthday, opened the lid of the silver cigarette box with an appropriately theatrical flourish to signal that I might light up.
Feel free to light up, if you fancy one, but I didn't fancy one, didn't feel free to light up.
I fancied one but still didn't light up. That felt good, still, there were a few things I played out properly with him. One time I slammed the hall door in his face. We had been standing in the outside corridor, an argument ensued, I turned round, stepped into the hall and slammed the door in your face. At least 1x. Banged it to with full force.
Then I opened it, that too resolved itself, not that it was me who resolved it, nor he, but in any event the heartstrings are wrung-that dissolves it, the wringing.
In the early Sixties, one early afternoon or whatever in spring, I decided I was going to write. It took less than a minute, and of course not a word as to what I might write, nor indeed did I do any writing, and-OK-maybe I didn't even decide, still, I felt that I definitely had no hankering for anything else. Hankering -that both is and isn't the right word here. You decide from one minute to the next, then for years, ten whole years, nothing at all happens. A hundred years-of nothing. On the way home, I stop in front of one of the run-down blocks of flats on Izabella Street, dig out my ballpoint from my satchel, jot down a few words, and I look idiotic. That's where Kajtár's family lived. What's more, Géza's Ma promptly comes out through the front door and asks what I am doing. What do you think you're doing here? I must have looked idiotic, for sure, and in 1977 I jacked it in for good so as not to look idiotic, yet all the same it looks as if one thing and another happened anyway.
What happened is that I jacked in writing before I had even started, and I now want to understand why. Why in fact people jack what things in. 1995, a stately home not far outside Berlin, a very quiet small village, a slight whiff of dung, castors on my chair so if I stand up it trundles away from under me as though the floor of the room were on a slight slope. The floor of the room does slope slightly. If I write anything down, right then I'm not remembering, and it's not that I'm not-remembering, more that I hit upon it-that form-in precisely the form it had.
As if I were taking it back. I grasp it and buy it back, hand back the money-pure business, pure joy. My melancholic mood had left me.

...

Translated byTim Wilkinson

Endre Kukorelly
first appeared on the literary scene in 1984. Since then he has established himself as a leading member of his generation, having published 15 volumes, all poetry and short pieces of fiction. His latest, published in 2003, of which the above has been excerpted, is a fictionalised autobiography of 370 pages, an account of growing up in Kádár's Hungary.