I HATE YOU, ARIADNE
I never forgave Ariadne for betraying her brother. How could you give a ball of string to the one who would kill your unfortunate, abandoned brother, driven beastly by the darkness? Some heartthrob from Athens shows up, turns her head—how hard could that be, some provincial, big-city girl, that’s exactly what she is, a hayseed and a city girl at the same time, she’s never left the rooms of her father’s palace, which is simply a more luxurious labyrinth.
Dana returns to the mill all alone in the darkness and rescues her brother, while Ariadne makes sure that her own brother’s murderer doesn’t lose his way. I hate you, Ariadne.
In the children’s edition of Ancient Greek Myths, I drew two bull’s horns on Ariadne’s head in pen.
CONSOLATION
Grandma, am I going to die?
I’m three, I’m standing next to the bed in the middle of the small room, with one hand I’m clutching my ear, it hurts, with the other I’m tugging on my grandmother’s hand and crying as only a scared-to-death three-year-old child can cry. Inconsolably. My great-grandmother, that very same Granny Calla, now over ninety, having seen plenty of death, having buried more than one loved one, an austere woman, is sitting up in bed with tousled hair, no less frightened than I am. It’s midnight, the witching hour, as she called it. Grandmaaaa, I’m dying, Grandmaaa, I howl, holding on to my ear.
You’re not going to die, my child. Good God, the poor little thing, so he knows about dying, too . . .
My mother runs in and catches sight of us like that, embracing and crying in the dark. I can imagine that composition clearly—a boy of three, barefoot, in short pajamas and a desiccated ninety-year-old woman in her nightgown, who, incidentally, will pass away in only a few days. Crying and talking about death. Perhaps death was hovering nearby, perhaps children can sense it? Hush now, child, you’re not going to die, my great-grandmother repeated then, to console me. There’s an order to things, my child, first I’ll die, then your grandma and your grandpa, then . . . And this made me bawl all the harder. A consolation built on a chain of deaths.
My great-grandmother died exactly one week later. Just like that, out of nowhere, she lay in bed for a day or two and passed away on New Year’s Eve. That was the first death I remember, even though they didn’t let me watch. She was lying on the bed in the room, small and waxen, like an old woman-doll, I thought to myself then, even though dolls never get old. In the middle of the room, reaching almost to the ceiling, stood the Christmas tree, decorated with cotton, silver tin-foil garlands, and those fragile ornaments from the ’70s, which lay all year carefully wrapped in a box in the wardrobe. Each of those shiny colored orbs during that unforgettable New Year’s Eve reflected my dead great-grandmother.
I was more worried about my grandfather, who was sitting at her feet, crying quietly. This time abandoned for good.
Much later my grandfather would lie in that same bed one January night and take his leave of us, since he had a long road ahead of him. Mom is calling me to help her with the sacks . . .
TROPHY WORDS
Szervusz, kenyér, bor, víz, köszönöm, szép, isten veled . . .
I will never forget that strange rosary of words. My grandfather strung them out on the long winter evenings we spent together during my childhood vacations. Hello, bread, wine, water, thank you, beautiful, farewell . . . Immediately following my grandmother’s quick and semi-conspiratorially whispered prayer would come his szervusz, kenyér, bor . . .
He always said that he used to be able to speak Hungarian for hours, but now in his old age all he had left was this handful of words. His trophy from the front. My grandfather’s seven Hungarian words, which he guarded like silver spoons. My grandmother was certainly jealous of them. Because why would a soldier need to know the word for “beautiful”? And she simply could not accept calling “bread” by such a strange and distorted name. God Almighty, Blessed Virgin, what an ugly word! Those folks have committed a terrible sin. How can you call bread “kenyér,” she fumed, in dead seriousness.
Bread is bread.
Water is water.
Without having read Plato, she shared his idea of the innate correctness of names. Names were correct by nature, never mind that this nature always turned out to be precisely the Bulgarian one.
My grandma never failed to mention that the other soldiers from the village had brought real trophies home from the front, this one a watch, that one a pot, yet another a full set of silver spoons and forks. Stolen, added my grandfather, and they had never even taken them out to eat with, I know their type.
But my grandmother and Hungary were not at all on friendly terms, between them that spirit of understanding and cooperation, as it was called in the newspapers back then, just didn’t work out. Quite a while later I came to understand the reason for this tension.
I found it strange that my grandfather didn’t like to talk about the war. Or at least he didn’t talk about the things I expected to hear and had seen in movies, the constant battles, artillery fire, kurrr-kur-kurrr (all our toys were machine guns and pistols). I clearly remember asking him how many fascists he had killed and bloodthirstily awaited the tally. Even though I already knew that he couldn’t chalk up a single kill to his name. Not one. And to tell you the truth, I was a bit ashamed of him. Dimo’s grandfather from the other neighborhood had shot thirty-eight, most point-blank, and had stabbed another twenty in the gut with his bayonet. Dimo took a step forward, thrust the invisible bayonet a foot into my stomach and twisted it. I think I gave him a good scare when I dropped to the ground pale and started throwing up. It’s awful getting stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. I barely survived.
LIVE MEDICINE
The slugs slowly drag themselves across the newspaper, without letting go of it. Several are timidly clinging together, body to body. My grandfather grabs one with two fingers, closes his eyes, opens his mouth and slowly places the slug inside, close to his throat. He swallows. My stomach turns. I’m afraid for Grandpa. And I want to be able to do as he does. My grandfather has an ulcer. The slugs are his living medicine. They go in, make their way through the esophagus and stop in the soft cave of the stomach, leaving their slimy trail there, which forms something like a protective film on top, a thin medicinal layer that seals off the wound. He learned this recipe on the front. Whether the slugs come out the other end alive and well afterward, or die as volunteers, plugging up the embrasure of the stomach lining . . .
A huge hand lifts me up and sets me at the opening of a red, warm and moist cave. It is not unpleasant, even if a bit frightening. The red thing I have been placed on constantly twitches, slightly bucking and rising, which forces me to crawl farther in toward the only available corridor. At the entrance there is a soft barrier, it isn’t difficult to overcome. It’s as if it opens on its own, in any case it reacts when I touch it. Now there’s the tunnel, dark and soft, which I sink into, horns forward, like a slow bull. I leave a trail behind me to mark the way back. I feel safer with it. The path down is easy, short in any case. The tunnel soon broadens and ends in a wider space, a rather soft cave different from the first one I passed through. At one end I notice a brighter spot, sore and radiating warmth. I pass over it slowly, leaving a little slime. I don’t like this place at all, though. It’s cramped, dark, and musty, claustrophobic, as if the walls of the cave are shrinking and pressing in on me. But the scariest part is some strange liquid that the walls themselves are pouring over me and which is starting to sting. I don’t have the strength to budge, as in a nightmare where you keep moving more slowly and slowly and slow . . .
To feel for everything, to be simultaneously the swallowed snail and the snail swallower, the eaten and the eater . . . How could you forget those few short years when you could do so?
Sometimes, while writing, he feels like a slug, which is crawling in an unknown direction (in fact, the direction is known—there where everything goes), leaving behind itself a trail of words. It’s doubtful whether he’ll ever follow