• ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Literature, PoetryApril 13, 2016

In Memory of M./M. emlékére

 Memories Afloat, multimedia by Alia Bilgrami.

Memories Afloat by Alia Bilgrami. Image courtesy of the artist.

Translated from Hungarian by Erika Mihálycsa

“Why does God demand sacrifice of man and not angels?”
~ Martin Buber/Olga Marx, ‘Tales of the Hasidim’

I was left alone at fortythree in forty-
five. Alone with the painkillers,
the sedatives, the morphine. With the make-
up mirror. With my nurse’s degree and the fiftyish,
bespectacled internist in the office. Alone without my
husband, little daughter, parents, close and collateral
relations. With the Körös riverbanks and the laughter of children swaying from
willow branches till they drop in the water, with my dead class-
mates’ faces on the yearbook picture full of gaps.
With our friends burnt to ashes. With the funny rs
of the Wehrmacht officer: “kann ich Ihnen irrrgendwas helfen?“

“Ja, bitte. I beg you bring them back from
Auschwitz.” I rush home on high heels, shiver
craving the needle in my arm laced with blue
veins. My tresses all afloat, my blue eyes
misting over. Blue, blue, Mary-blue.
I drink green English tea from green Meissen
cups. Green like the trees in spring. Buchenwald:
Beechwood. Tanzen und singen, singen und springen.
Yellow light dawns through the window shades.
I rest, blissfully, in the yellow sun. I hear their wooden
clogs grating on the yellow sand.
“It’s not so bad to be dead,” they flounder.

“We can be where we want to, where we are called back.
We came in two: you called two of us in the same breath.
Here airways are free, we all hover
together. Nothing hurts. We only miss
you. We don’t feel the kicks. The pangs
of hunger. Dampness trickling down the bones.
It’s like watching our story in a film. If you didn’t
bring it up we wouldn’t know it’s ours.
Call me yet. Ask for me on the office telephone.
Let them hear my name and remember I have lived.
Buy some kaiser rolls at the baker’s, tell him it’s for your
daughter. Remind him to put in a few slices of ham.”

“My husband and daughter visited me yesterday,”
I tell the next day. “It’s not so bad to be dead
they say.” The internist takes my arm in his hands.
The mystery of the morphine’s disappearance is solved. “I’m afraid
they will run out of arguments in the end and get fed up
with being dead,” I add, “or that I realize they are
right. I’m afraid of them. I long for them.”
“M. M., I will cure you,” he tells me twice
but I don’t want to hear my name uttered twice any-
more. Let one time be enough.
I am at his service all day long but he should not
want me to feel that he craves or perhaps loves me.

God has taken out my soul, cleansed it, and like
washerwomen at the creek, He soaped it over, beat it,
scrubbed and rinsed and dried and mangled it,
then placed it back, clean. I was seized by hope, I re-
married, moved out of my rented flat. A girl
was born to me. I became a grandmother. The mayor
visited me on my hundredth birthday.
I showed him a few pictures. But I remember
having another life of which no picture
is found in any drawer. A former
husband and a former child? I dare not
ask. What if they answer, yes?

After he had made fire in the oven, the servant
started praying. But the log flared up with a
spark. “Fire!” the others cried out, “why didn’t you watch
over it?” “It is written in the Scripture: and the fire
was quenched,” he answered. And lo, it subsided.
Where have I read this? God has left me here for good.
I am confined to bed but everybody loves me.
They cut up my bread, pour coffee in my cup.
I suggested we visit my native town. They said
the trains were halted because of the heavy snowfall.
So much the better, I’m terrified of trains. My granddaughter
laughs at me: flying is more dangerous but she will fly all the same.

Am I a coward? I commune with death every day.
I’m more afraid of people. I will not cover
my brow when the Reader of Faces looks upon me.
But they pull their hats down to their noses. I open
a book every day but never turn the page.
One word is enough for me to muse over for hours.
At such moments one of my daughters sits on my
bed and reads out from the paper. If I live to be a hundred
and eight I will be the oldest Hungarian alive,
they say and laugh. I caress their happy child-faces.
I had wanted to throw the world away from me, but
is the world mine, that I can throw it away?

~ Zsuzsa Takács

Continue Reading

1 2 View All →

Tags

Erika MihálycsaHungarianHungarian literaturePoem of the WeekpoetrytranslationsZsuzsa Takács

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleSix Ethiopian poets of the diaspora
Next articleStorm Sonnets: Desmond

You may also like

Billy Luck

To the Depths

Dearly Departed

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Oxford University Press Pakistan: Museum & Archives

The Oxford University Press Pakistan Museum & Archives in pictures. Photographed by The Missing Slate’s Nabiha Zeeshan with accompanying text by Ghausia Rashid Salam.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at [email protected].

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
On Monsters

"This made me reassess everything that I thought I had known about him, and to an extent what I thought...

Close