Untitled by S. Fawad. Image courtesy of ArtChowk Gallery
Click here to read the original in Hungarian.
A nightmare that will end well. László Luka was hoping for this. Perhaps the previous night he had drunk a bit more than usual, or the pálinka was not of the purest sort, it even crossed his mind that he should employ a taster. After all, the child rejected by its mother had risen to enough power, and he had dreams so wild last night that he could hardly pull himself together to stagger out of bed, even though he was preparing to go hunting and the orphan child knew as much that the one who wants to go hunting had better be up early. If only getting up were not so damn hard.
László Luka was a handsome man and he was well aware of this fact. He wore tight-fitting short sports jackets with breast pockets. Not for him the reach-me-downs: the best Paris and London sartors worked on his clothes. For hunting he used to wear a Swiss-made short mink coat, never put on a shawl, wore even his skewed-neck Russian shirts unbuttoned: he loved to share the sight of his body with others. He had a winsome smile and intelligent foxy eyes. He had been through six-form primary school – so what? At the Hermannstadt Catholics, whenever he could escape the beating, he devoured all the adventure stories he could lay his hands on and made up his mind at a tender age that he would live to get everything he wanted. Is there no order in the world? is there no justice? do cause and effect only correlate by chance? So much the worse: he would be the master of chance.
The gate was open, the dark green GAZ-67 pulled up right to the entrance, ploughing the lawn where a strapping young man, Beczásy, the owner of the hunting ground was already waiting for them.
’Good morning, gentlemen, the beaters have been waiting since dawn. The only question is, what are you after: hares, roebuck, fox, boars, deer? We have everything here, all one needs to know is where to find them.’
’At this hour the most we can get is hares,’ Szenkovics answered quickly. He wanted to prevent Luka from opening his mouth: the fact that he was the finance minister parading in a Swiss huntsman’s jacket didn’t alleviate in the least his painful and utter ignorance in matters of hunting.
’We’ll shoot a couple of fine hares,’ Luka concurred with the minister of light industries; he spurted out whatever crossed his mind, no time for prestige raffles now, all that had to be postponed until later when his headache subsides.
‘At least one glass of prime plum brandy, gentlemen, Beczásy offered and chuckled to himself at how these two scoundrels purred at being called gentlemen. ‘You should have seen it,’ he later told his wife at coffee, ’how at every ‟gentlemen†a guilty pleasure showed on their mugs.’ ‘Ce monde n’est, je vous l’assure, que’un immense entreprise à se foutre du monde!’, Zina, like a clown Cassandra, quoted the Journey, curtsied and blew a kiss on her husband’s forehead.
A shade embarrassed, Luka and Szenkovics shook hands with Beczásy, then jumped back into the jeep.
’Let’s keep that prime plum brandy for the return,’ Luka shouted back in a steelyringing voice, at once covering up his hangoverish nausea from liquour, and showing to the wide world that no matter for how many centuries Beczásy had been the lord of this place, he, Luka, was the lord of chance. A war won, he reasoned, painstakingly fighting back his nausea, is more than enough to disqualify the centuries.
The Soviet jeep was climbing the slope slower than expected, the trees surrounding the house drifted into Luka’s field of vision. In this state he was even more incommoded by the fact that the needles of the one fir-tree species were short, those of the other of palm’s length. And then there was that weeping willow, what the fuck is a weeping willow doing here in Háromszék County, he grumbled to himself, he was sleepy, but still had an appetite for the hunt, and lo and behold, there appear these two funny creatures, I haven’t seen anything like them in Sochi even, they must have come from somewhere in the Far East with those queer fan-like leaves.
In front of the gate they suddenly bumped into the beaters on horseback and on foot with their beagles. Why are they standing outside, why are the dogs silent, the bellicose thought prodded Luka’s headache. How come we haven’t seen them when we were going inside. In the end Szenkovics threw two words at them, that they would be going for hares, at that Luka came to and growled at the broadaxe-faced man in Romanian: speed up, we’ve come here for hunting not for banqueting.
In the field the beaters with their dogs spread out into an invisible circle, the horn blew, they started narrowing the circle, the dogs were barking furiously and from a ditch, or from pure void, the first hare sprang up. It felt it could no longer lie low, the only chance for its young not to be mauled by so many dogs was if it sprang into visibility, ran, coursed, careered, zigzagged as far as it resisted. It had terribly short ears, even its running looked canine, Luka didn’t want to but ended up taking aim and shooting, in the same second as Szenkovics. The animal or whatever it was tumbled over, one of the beaters sent Vitéz for it and the dog brought it back in its jaws. To the rattle of guns the hares started leaping up like mad one after the other, the two ministers could hardly catch up with the aiming and shooting, and the dogs retrieving the prey. Luka was getting dizzy, he wiped his forehead, looked around him, saw the kill laid out neatly side by side, the wide open eyes seemed to understand everything, all the orphanage of the world, Luka had to close his eyes because he suddenly glimpsed those daft Moldavians laid out neatly side by side at Fântâna Albă, who doltishly thought that if they waved a white flag and a few wooden crosses they could safely walk over from the Soviet Union into Moldavia like hares. Not all of them were lucky enough to get a bullet: the rest had to be battered with shovels until they somehow fainted into the holes dug and no longer attempted to climb out.
’I say we can call it a day, the mistress is waiting for youse with the lunch,’ an elderly beater spoke up to Luka who nearly tripped over. Luka shuddered, for a second didn’t know where he was and who this grey-haired man with a moustache might be who addressed him in Hungarian, in that singsong he remembered from his childhood, from the times before his mother, in order to be able to marry at ease, dumped him into the Sibiu orphanage.
Szenkovics lowered his rifle to his feet and patted Luka on the back:
’As far as I’m concerned, Laci, we can go, we’ve got a handsome quarry and a ravenous gang.’
’Your lordships need not worry,’ the grey-haired beater went on, ’we’ll take care of them hares. We have enough men to skin the whole lot, and then…’
’Do what you like with the hares,’ Luka interrupted him. He didn’t feel in the mood to listen to the particulars of processing corpses. He flung his gun, hot from the shooting, into the jeep and signalled to the others to start at once.
Szenkovics was sitting speechless on the back seat, musing to himself if there was any point in trying to talk to Luka, now or ever, if he had made any progress on the rocky road of self-consciousness, or if he was simply a beastly lucky thug shooting left right and centre at whatever came into his field of vision, hare, dog, sheep or decent prole. When he got so engrossed in his thoughts that he was afraid his treason to come was taking visible shape in this wobble, he leaned over to Luka:
’The landworking folks in these parts can somehow never let go of mylording. Dependance comes as naturally to them as eating or shitting. It must be something to do with nature, for no matter how many rational arguments they are mouthfed, they keep nodding and then do everything exactly like they used to.’
Luka felt no inclination at all for ideological arguments now, he wanted brandy, food, he wanted to see live human beings around him. So he snapped at the broadaxe-faced one: Doru, you motherfucker, what are you waiting for, step on the gas. Szenkovics leaned back pondering why equality and fraternity were forever failing here, if the Soviets indeed managed to put it across over there. As if in answer to his thoughts, he noticed a rather peculiar construction in the village centre, in the continuation of the village shop: something of about one meter’s height, half a meter’s width and about ten-fifteen meters’ length, whitewashed as usual and with a tiny rooftop. No windows, no door.
In the parlour the table was laid for six, but the driver and the guide were left outside. Sitting at one of the tableheads was Zina, on the other Luka, the finance minister. Beczásy raised a tiny glass:
’Let us then drink the promised glass of plum brandy.’
The brandy connected Luka’s limbs, on the way to slowly and loosely detach from one another, with a sweet sense of hovering; he soon took the caraffe from Beczásy’s hand and started pouring drinks himself. He barely noticed that they had finished eating dinner by that time and he was sitting next to Zina, they were talking about Tolstoy in Russian, whether War and Peace was the greater work, as Zina argued, or Anna Karenina.
’Anna is the incarnation of the longing for freedom,’ Luka expounded in ever more porridgy voice, ’she is the premature victim of the marriage of sense and sensibility in a society built on injustice and exploitation. Oh for god’s sake! Anna is a real woman!’
’I can accept your argument, sir,’ Zina answered and winked at Beczásy who had in the meantime moved into the chair facing her, ’Anna Karenina is adorably complex, but allow me to find more worth in the work that represents individual relationships not merely through psychological dispositions but within the ensemble of the social ambient’s expectations and dynamics.’
’Tolstoy was a great man, a great realist and a great master of dialectics,’ Szenkovics joined the conversation. ’There is no better evidence for this than the fact that he was able to reassess his own views under the impact of reality, and even though he initially intended to pillory an immoral, irresponsible woman in his novel, in the course of writing he realized that Anna is a complex figure whose downfall is not provoked by her own faults but by the hypocritical social norms.’
Beczásy didn’t understand Russian but at this moment hardly regretted this fact: he was watching his wife, an irregular beauty, he was listening to her poised alto voice and felt proud at the evident effort with which these two pipsqueaks tried to impress her. He was woken from his reverie by his little daughter who climbed in his lap in her frilled light blue dress and with her chubby baby’s paws tried to reach the plate full of cakes in the middle of the table.
’Tania, my bearcub, tell me better which cake you’d like?’ Zina asked, reaching toward the child a plate for the desert with a napkin.
’All of them, Mama’, the answer came and she ran straight across into her mother’s lap.
Luka could not take his eyes from this little Tania, she has the same name as Anna’s daughter, who knows what befell that one. Anna is a revolutionary, she has to tend to all the world’s children, she can’t be pampering one forever. So she sent the little blue-eyed Tania to the orphanage, she must have grown up since. Perhaps this green-eyed Tania, too, will grow up, in the worst case she’ll have less cakes to gorge on so that others may have a slice too, in the worst case she’ll grow up without a father and a mother as so many of us do, Luka thought and reached out to the little girl, pulled her over into his lap and asked her what she’d like him to get her the next time he comes, for there will be a next one and then he’ll bring Betty with him, how happy she is going to be to have the occasion to make conversation with such an intelligent woman in Russian, for if nothing else, these overspoilt bourgeois definitely know how to make conversation.
From the threshold Liliann, the elder daughter was watching the scene mortified. She saw the ruins of the dinner, the animal bones under the table, the human bones in the ditch, her father as he sat proudly watching her mother who was smoking with a long cigarette-holder in her mouth, she saw her unsuspecting baby sister in the lap of a stranger, saw the other stranger who would navigate through a dictatorship betraying everyone, but first of all himself, she saw today’s hare hunt, every single hare on its own, she saw the orphaned young ones starving to death, she saw other hunts going for roebuck, fox, boars and deers, she saw the dictator shooting bears at the feeding-place, she saw her mother up to her thigh in water cutting rice, she saw her father beaten to death at the Securitate, she saw how her father aged 81 walks out on the street in December 1989, erect, right into the revolution, she saw, she sees the dictator fleeing like game and shot like a dog, and she saw that everything is full of joy and full of sorrow.
She was standing on the threshold in her white frilled nightshirt, barefoot, with her curly blond tresses afloat, nine years old. She saw everything, but only said in a small voice,
’Tolstoy était végétarien.’
Zsuzsa Selyem is a novelist, poet, translator, and Associate Professor at the Department of Hungarian Literature, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania. She was the recipient of a 2005 Academie Schloss Solitude writer-in-residence bursary, and of a 2015 Landys and Gyr writer-in-residence bursary (Zug, Switzerland). Her 2006 novel ‘9 Kiló’ (Történet a 119. zsoltárra) [9 Kilos (Story on Psalm 119)], representing Hungary at the 2007 European First Novel Festival, also appeared in German and French translations.
Erika Mihálycsa is a lecturer in the Department of English at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. Articles by her have appeared in Joyce Studies Annual, Joyce Studies in Italy, The AnaChronist, and Estudios Irlandeses, among others. I am the editor, together with Rainer J. Hanshe, of the online journal Hyperion – For the Future of Aesthetics, issued by Contra Mundum Press. Her translations (from English/German into Hungarian) include fiction by Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, poetry by William Carlos Williams, Medbh McGuckian, Anne Carson, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Günter Grass. She is a regular contributor to several Hungarian-language literary magazines. Her translations of contemporary Hungarian prose and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in World Literature Today, Trafika Europe, Numéro Cinq, The Missing Slate, and B O D Y magazine.
(This story is taken from ‘Moszkvában esik’ [It is Raining in Moscow], forthcoming from Jelenkor Publishing.)
