Endre Lábass
City in a Suitcase
Getting up in the morning and crossing over to the other quarter, there
was nothing else. It was good crossing to the other side of the city in the
mist over the river. Each roll of film a record of the route taken on a given day,
morning or afternoon, undeveloped to begin with. Unbidden. Then, as conscience
kicked in, I decided to develop the negatives at least, and put them away in a
drawer. One roll of film in each pouch-like negative strip holder, a hundred rolls
in every drawer, twelve drawers in the cabinet. Little by little the cabinet filled,
but there was no semblance of order in any of the pouches, in any of the drawers.
After a while I began to make rough notes of the contents on every pouch; the
trouble was that I never knew where any given pouch was in the serried ranks of
pouches. And yet they were all numbered. In time I stopped taking the whole
thing seriously. And time passed.
There was no more room in the drawers for new negatives. I started putting
them in boxes and filling new, bigger drawers with them. And yet, if all the
pouches contained the chaos of the days, and there was no logic in the
sequence of pouches, how, then, was that incredible orderliness achieved
within the suitcase? It was the neat arrangement of things that created the
semblance or order; the pouches were replaced by folders, the contents of
a hundred pouches were now slotted into soft plastic pockets, but lo and
behold, the streets were still tangled up, like the strands of a ball of yarn.
A hundred plastic sheets with pockets went into each black folder, fifteen
brand-new folders holding one thousand five hundred sheets, neatly
arranged, one on top of the other, inside the suitcase: the city.
It would be worth getting the suitcase weighed, to know its weight exactly,
to the kilo, to know whether one could take it onto a plane. What is that
you're carrying? That's what they'd ask when they stopped me at the security
gate. What do you think? Boom! My God. All that work, and nothing useful
to show for it. Houses are not aligned according to street numbers. Tens of
negatives, and a total disregard for city districts. Over the years the images have
acquired new meanings. An afternoon was placed in a box, and nothing in the
whole wide world held the images contained in that box together except the
bygone mood of an afternoon in the past. Then some of the photographs of
those afternoons fell out from among the rest to end up in other boxes
that were put aside, like a discarded toy rabbit with an ear missing;
others lived the charmed lives of old favourites, remaining in the light,
these I took out and looked at every day, and put them beside other
favourites. And in five years, say, the folder containing the chosen
images of those bygone afternoons was complete, containing the bestloved
moments. And that was when the phone calls started coming, do
I have a photograph of such and such a house? Who can give you an
answer to a question like that, nobody in the world. No one ever asked
me about such and such an afternoon, no one ever begged for a rainy
Sunday. The shadow of an old man on a stone wall. The shadow raises its
hat and softly, politely bids one good day. Good day to you, sir, and how
are we today?
Yes. Exactly so, in the plural. How are we today? I am glad that we are, that
we exist. Taken separately, not so good, but together, in the plural, quite well,
and this feeling of well-being lasts a couple of minutes, as long as it takes to
pass each other by. And the memory remains, and the raising of the hat on the
negatives, which does not fit in anywhere among the house numbers or the
arrangement of the districts, because how is one to define it, classify it: this
raising of the hat, if you please, originates from in front of the Aladdin Tavern, it's
an old and treasured piece from my collection.
If we have nothing left and we are standing in a square, no matter which road we
decide to take we can return before sunset with the happy awareness that that
same night, or early next morning, we can take a different one.
I brought no clothes with me except for what I was wearing and what fitted into
the suitcase, beside the city that is. Luckily, it was not a large city, there was
plenty of room left for my favourite jackets.
Translated by Eszter Molnár
Endre Lábass
is a painter, author and photographer who has been photographing Budapest
for decades. The above is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Moonfaced Traveller,
in which the author runs away to see the world taking with him only the city.
