Here I have to commemorate Jenô Bazsinka, whose chief claim to fame was that he did not become a writer. I did in his place. Rather like the cursed ferryman in the fairytale who thrusts an oar into the hands of an unsuspecting wanderer who happens to be passing by that way on the grounds that he, too, should row a little, Bazsinka stepped over to me and asked to do him a tiny little favour, one that could easily be met, of writing in his stead a story that he himself, for various reasons, was unable to write, though it was very important that the work be done and should be ready for the class’s wall-newspaper by tomorrow morning at the latest.
It was a matter of honour for Katie, Attila’s girlfriend!
“The story that I ought to write is actually very simple,” Bazsinka clarified. The reason he could not do it himself was precisely because he was at a loss with simple things. He was always seeking complexity, unsolved and insoluble problems. “So anyway,” he carried on with his explanation, “the story has to include that a gym class is in progress. Along comes Katie, bringing the class diary from the girls to the boys. She is wearing a light-blue school smock and dark-blue jeans. Not that it’s important, I could drop it from the story. The main thing is Katie comes along, she goes through the changing room and goes into the boys’ gym with the class diary then comes out of the gym without the diary and goes away. That’s it. Nothing really.”
“If it’s that simple,” I asked Bazsinka, “then why don’t you write it yourself? After all, you’re the one who dreamed it up!”
He expostulated that that was exactly the point! He hadn’t dreamed up a single bit of it!
I could tell from the look in his eyes that he was lying. I took pity on him.
“And no longer than three typewritten pages!” he exclaimed in relief. “For one thing, I don’t want you to fritter away your whole afternoon on it. For another, three pages is precisely the space it has to fit at the bottom of the wall newspaper. For a third, because no one reads anything longer anyway, and the main thing is that this story, in which nothing but the truth is written down, will get to be read by the whole class. That is what restoring Katie’s honour calls for.”
I wrote it for the next day and put it up on the wall. Ten years later my first book appeared.

[...]

László Márton
is a novelist, playwright, translator and essayist. Among his works are a trilogy of
historical novels set in 17th-century Hungary and a drama trilogy on 16th-century
Transylvania. Two of his novels have been translated into German (Die wahre Geschichte
des Jacob Wunschwitz and Die schattige Hauptstraße) and he has also written a novel
(Die fliehende Minerva oder Die Letzten Tage des Verbannten) and a novella
(Im österreichischen Orient) in German. Márton’s translations into Hungarian include
Goethe’s Faust, as well as works by Luther, Novalis, Kleist and Walter Benjamin.
The short story published here is the title story of his latest collection reviewed by
János Szegô on pp. 143–46 of this issue.