indifferent to everything, the three sacks of flour which will run out right in the middle of winter, three of her seven daughters, who wait to see what she will say.
The sin has already been committed, she has hesitated.
She considered, if only for a minute, abandoning him. Her voice is dry. If you want, you can go back. Said to Dana, the eldest, thirteen. The decision is shoved off onto another. She doesn’t say “we’ll go back,” she doesn’t say “go back,” she doesn’t move. And yet, my three-year-old grandfather still has a chance. Dana leaps from the cart and dashes back down the dirt road.
We, the as-of-yet unborn, craning our necks through the fence of that minute, draw our heads back and breathe a sigh of relief.
Dusk is falling, the mill is miles away. A girl of thirteen is running down a dirt road, barefoot, the evening breeze flutters her dress. Everything around is empty, she runs to tire her own fear, to take its breath away. She doesn’t glance aside, every bush resembles a lurking man, all the frightening stories she has listened to in the evenings about brigands, bogeymen, dragons, ghosts, and wolves run in a pack at her heels. If she dares turn around, they will hurl themselves on her. I run, run, run in the still-warm September evening, alone amid the fields, on the baked mud of the road, which I sense more intensely with every step, my heart is pounding in my chest, someone is there crouching along the road, but why is his arm twisted up like that so strangely, oh it’s just a bush . . . There in the distance the first lights of the mill . . . There I should find my three-year-old brother . . . my grandfather . . . myself.
The mother, my great-grandmother, lived to be ninety-three, passing from one end of the century to the other, she was part of my childhood, too. Her children grew up and scattered, they left her, grew old. Only one of them never left her and took care of her until her death. The forgotten boy. The story of the mill had entered the secret family chronicle, everyone whispered it, some with sympathy for Granny Calla and as proof of how hard the times had been, others as a joke, yet others, such as my grandmother, with undisguised reproach. But no one ever told it in front of my grandfather. And he never once told it. And he never parted from his mother.
A tragic irony of the kind we usually discover in myths. When the story reached me on that afternoon, the main heroine was no longer with us. I remember how at first I felt anger and bewilderment, as if I myself had been abandoned. I experienced yet another pang of doubt in the justness of the universe. That woman lived to a ripe old age under the care of that once-abandoned three-year-old boy. And perhaps that was precisely her punishment. To live so long and to see that child before her every day. The abandoned one.
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
