Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

The Secondary Threads of a Crime

 

1

The more he thinks about it, the less he knows about Ilona and Mihály. Looking back, it is as if he had merely joined up with them sometime in midjourney. Or maybe they had thrown in their lot with him, and continued for a while together. All of it seems so incidental. The only sure thing is that they weren’t with him from the outset, and at one point they just vanished from alongside him. The suddenness with which this happened confused and terrified him. And the meaning of love became uncertain.

2

On the first day of the last Christmas of the millennium, a mechanical voice from the telephone exchange told him to call a number outside his district, immediately. Unsuspecting, he punched the number into the telephone keypad. Perhaps it didn’t even ring; the call was answered so quickly, as if someone had been waiting for it. The moment he identified himself the lights of Christmas morning were extinguished. When he put down the receiver, he still did not grasp what he had heard. He understood it, but he had not yet begun to live it. Then he began to plummet, downwards into his body. He sensed the palpable darkness, the quickening tempo of the fall. Unknown depths gaped beneath his feet, dragging him down, down into the depths. Down into the body. He does not recall how long this vertigo lasted. The pressure of the unseen hand that had broken through the wall of the abdomen reached into his entrails and clutched him between his stomach and heart, holding him above the void, now relented slightly. Slowly the unseen hand crept upwards towards his heart. And when this pitiless force slackened, he tried to stand up. He clenched his jaw. A few words came gnashed out through his gritted teeth: just don’t let it reach your heart. Stooped over, he trudged into the kitchen and asked for a full tumbler of cognac. The strongest we have, he said. Then another one. He knew he had to knock it down in one gulp. And he also knew that it would be his last drink for months, so that his mind would be able to function properly with neither illusions nor blunting. He would have to be attentive, for he could trust no one, he thought. He sensed that what he would have to avoid, most of all, was sympathy. A sharp presentiment alerted him, like an impersonal whispering, an obscure message, a voice coming from afar, that he would have to remain distant from his own self. He would have to spurn, the wordless whispering told him, his very self. He would have to mercilessly renounce and reject compassion and love, for both are sources of weakness.

3

The autopsy of Ilona’s body was held on December 27, 2000, four days after the day of the crime. Rigor mortis had already begun to dissipate. After giving a preliminary assessment of the external injuries, the report stated: “Cause of death of the aforementioned: open depressed fracture of the skull, resultant crushing of brain tissue, followed by cerebral paralysis.” The text is impassive; the indifferent striving for precise registration of the facts of the case leaves no room for love. When, years later, he read through the report, he paid particular attention to his own body; the veins in his skin, the throbbing of his pulse as he felt it on the inside of his wrist under the table. It did not quicken: this reassured him. His face remained numb. He knew that a deadening of emotional life is common in post-traumatic states. The objective description of the autopsy report brought him closer to the body which, in accordance with the basic principles of crime scene investigation, had been stripped naked at the scene. Following inspection of the victim’s clothes the dead body is stripped and the external injuries are examined and documented. He found the photographs later, at the bottom of the box containing the documents. Months after the court verdict he sees Ilona’s naked body in the photographs, laid on a bloodstained sheet on the parquet floor. That is the last he sees of Ilona’s body—the body of a woman about sixty years of age—which had also been his own body for nine months. And for the first time, he sees her naked.

 

[...]

 

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

 

Szilárd Borbély
a poet and essayist, teaches 18th-19th century Hungarian literature at Kossuth Lajos University in his native Debrecen, a city on the edge of the Great Plain, where he still lives. He has published eight volumes of poetry. Berlin-Hamlet was published in English by Agite!/Fra, Prague. “The Secondary Threads of a Crime” is a personal testimony as a response to, and in the aftermath of, a horrific crime which occurred shortly before the Christmas holidays in 2000.