1956, his mother fled across the border with a new husband, Gyorgy Pleszko, making her way to America and leaving two-year-old Laszlo behind with her elderly parents who struggled with the realities of the revolution. She sent for him at the age of seven. He arrived in Boston, speaking only Hungarian, to meet his mother, a glamorous near-stranger, and his new family, which now included a baby half-brother. A new name. And a new language.
His encounter with English began a love affair that continued for the rest of his life. “Immediately, he was in school, and nobody spoke Hungarian, so he listened in from the back until sounds took shape and made a kind of music,” said Cohen. “He listened to the radio, watched TV and listened to his mother and stepfather, who never spoke Hungarian, fiddled with a reel-to-reel tape recorder until the music became word. At some point he lost his fluency in Hungarian, gave it up for new and interesting things, all that America had to offer a boy in the ’60s. Les was in love with language and in love with love and fell in love with the music all around him.”
But the ’60s in America had their pitfalls: “He made friends with people who were going places. San Francisco, Santa Cruz,” she recalled. “He tried college but he fell in love with heroin and dropped out. When you read The Last Bongo Sunset you’ll come to know how he broke his own heart. But the tenacious [side of himself] quit using and thought maybe he could be an artist, a musician. He recognized he possessed a feel for word and deed and an eye for beauty. So he hit the road, taking jobs along the way, searching. Fell in love with an older married woman as a hand on her ranch in the desert. It ended badly, broken hearts and incipient violence. Made his way back to Los Angeles: flag man for crop dusters, country-western DJ. He took a sales job. He had a compelling voice; it roped you in and kept you there. Laced with smoke, sorrow, and an unbeliever’s faith in resurrection, he told the truth and you could trust that.”
I’ve seen those pictures of Les as a young man, a businessman with a phone to his ear, in ’70s wide lapels. They astonished me, for I knew him only after these formational years, the years that gave the raw edge to his first novel, in new sobriety in the Braverman workshop, writing the book in which he found his unique voice, his tone as an artist, and a moment of accolades. About The Last Bongo Sunset (reviewed just ahead of A Void by Georges Perec) The New Yorker said, “For the narrator of such extravagant, ravaging prose, it would be impossible to commit a cliché.”
But now that book is long out of print, and Les’s last two novels reached only the circles already aware of his work. What would ever become of the Hungarian novel, all these years in the making?
Shortly after Les’s death, as friends and students wandered in dazed disbelief, the Australian novelist David Francis—a former Plesko student and protégé—seated me next to an editor from Counterpoint at a PEN USA dinner. David knew that the story of our colleague’s death and the tragedy of No Stopping Train soon would arise in conversation, and so it did. The editor, Dan Smetanka, was eager to see the manuscript. Who had the book? When could he read it?
Word went out. Les, a great letter-writer, had sent various incarnations of the book to his correspondents over the years, notably to Julianne Cohen, to his former fiancée Eireene Nealand, and to his devoted student Jamie Schaffner. All of them were able to produce incarnations of the manuscript. Soon Les’s younger brother, George, received an offer to publish.
So comes the end of a very long journey for one small jewel of a book. It is with a profound and bittersweet pleasure that I now hold this volume in my hands. How proud Les would have been if he had lived to see this day, how happy he would be for you to turn the first page.
I wish you good reading.
JANET FITCH
Los Angeles, California
April 21, 2014
You are the man who sang “God Bless the Magyar” after we lost the war. I watched you sway by a bullet-pocked door, heard you testing the national anthem’s loose notes, a lost war’s afterthoughts. I hadn’t heard it since school, and then school was called off. All up and down Saint Matyas Street, wind chased your song among tattered banners and placards and flags. Elms cast their shadows on smashed cobblestones, windowsills lined with wash. A corpse swayed against a streetlight in accompaniment, its belt buckle clinking the pole, red-checked shirt cheery against the dull sky. Its urgent clogged smell permeated the air, the sad clothes on clotheslines.
I was twenty and blond, black hair showing through at the roots. I thought I could love you, perhaps, but I wanted to know: would it last? You wiped your nose on your sleeve as you sang. You didn’t see me but, Sandor, you would have been proud: I wiped tears from my eyes as I whistled along. When you looked up I stopped, I was shy. You scanned the sills for my face but I hid in the curtain’s torn lace, my feet crushing glass and mousedust. There was nobody left to accompany you but the dead; you did not seem to mind.
These haystacks bundled with twine remind me of our bed. These men playing cards on this train, they remind me of you with your hair in your face, but then everything does. Torn clouds are your tattered pant cuffs. Scarecrows by the tracks guarding dirt wear your fish-patterned shirt. My palms on the train window’s glass scratched with lovers’ initials like ours are the same size as yours in my hair, in my mouth.
You used to say if wishes were horses beggars would ride. I’ve begged, now I ride, yet I still haven’t figured that out. My pale hands in this dicey Hungarian light, my finger’s indent where my wedding band used to rest, I hope you understand about that. If I had tears left, if you had hands that could help, I’d let you wipe them away from my eyes. Sandor, if I found my voice, I’d sing along with you now.
She had needle and thread, they had fish. They had torn clothes, Margit knew how to mend. Erzsébet poked a raw chunk of fish in a fire of mattress guts, newspaper scraps. Remnants of older fires littered the steps down the Danube’s steep bank. Sandor stoked char that smoked more than burned, there was ash on his lips. One drifty eye swam behind black-framed lenses, his other eye studied her, then they switched. Margit turned away, blushed.
Erzsébet laughed out loud. “You never know if he’s looking at you or some glorified future,” she said.
Margit kept her gaze on the shore where thin ice abutted the bank. Opaque as the sky, it gave the illusion of firm. “Maybe he sees the past,” Margit said.
“So you’re a philosopher,” Erzsi said.
The river encrusted two pigeons, a stump. Waves lapped a corpse, licked its face of split teeth and raw bone. Margit swallowed against its sweetness, like ice cream left out in which the vanilla has spoiled. It seemed almost to breathe, Margit thought. She wondered how it would be if hers was the body half sunk, what if she grew gills? Her hair casually turning aquamarine, the water’s chlorine in her lungs. Under the panel of ice, there’d be no thinking of food, only the hiss of her own body’s fumes, its bubbles escaped into green. If she stayed underneath long enough, she’d forget there had been a war, even land.
“Where’d you find fish?” Margit asked. She made herself turn from the corpse, its burst checkered shirt, its red-white-green boutonniere.
“Swapped a kiss,” Erzsi said.
Margit looked at her mouth, then Sandor’s.
“Not with him, he has nothing worth trading for it,” Erzsi said.
Sandor did not take offense. He offered Margit the stick with the fish. Margit burned her lips and her tongue
