ISTVÁN
ÖRKÉNY | FROM:HUNGARIAN
Autumn
Translated
by Mark Baczoni
Sylvester Gács, a forester with
the North Hungarian Forestry Service, patrolled the woods (every tree of which
he knew by heart), doing the rounds of the pathways he himself had trodden out
with growing restlessness. At forty-four, halfway between excitable young man
just starting out and the vouchsafed reward of retirement, his energy was
beginning to fade; he’d even had enough of his forest, and was more and more
bored of the profession he loved. His melancholy took no particular form, but
filled the long, lonely wanderings of his rounds with the most peculiar
assortment of memories, ruminations, and speculation about the future. At
first, he had chewed over these in silence, but with time had gotten into the
habit of saying out loud whatever came into his head. Better to hear the sound
of his own voice than the mute silence of the forest.
When someone so intensely alone
starts talking to themselves, it’s not necessarily a sign of insanity, or
eccentricity, even; all the more so if, like Sylvester, they’re merely
expressing things floating up from the half-remembered past.
Once, for example, he stopped by
an Austrian oak and stared at a pale yellow butterfly, the spitting image of
the yellowing leaves everywhere around.
“When did I first see one of
those?” he asked.
Not only the colour, but the
shape and patterns of the butterfly’s wings matched perfectly the leaves of the
oak. He would have been six or seven when he’d first seen such a creature.
“Look there,” said his father
(also Sylvester and also a forester) “how perfect an example of mimicry that
is. It’s called Katydid. It’s actually a cricket, but to protect itself, it’s
dressed up as an oak leaf.”
“What about you, then, father?”
the six or seven year-old Sylvester had asked.
“I’m a man dressed up as a
forester,” his father smiled. “You too, my son, will be a forester, God
willing, when you grow up.”
“And he was absolutely right, my
wise old man,” Sylvester told the trees, continuing now on the well-trodden
path. “Suffered so much before he died, in hospital in Miskolc, poor man…I
suppose that means,” he added, “that he’s neither man nor forester any more.”
Stopping, he was lost in thought;
something new had occurred to him.
“Who knows how all this works,
really?” he asked. “If a yellowing leaf is really a cricket, and a forester is
really a man, then maybe other things too are not what they seem – after all,
every living thing tries to protect itself somehow…What about this stone?” he
said, picking up a stone and flinging it away, “What about this trunk, or this
bluebell, or the North Hungarian Forestry Service? What, really, is the whole
world, anyway?”
He stopped once more, because
that was a question he could not answer. He tore off a yellowing leaf and,
casting his eye over it, examined the network of little capillaries running in
their incomparably delicate, regular way off the main artery, asking loudly,
almost angrily:
“What is real, then?”
He turned on his heels and headed
back along the path all the way to the oak where he’d found the cricket dressed
as a leaf. There it sat still. The forester watched it, and as he watched it,
suddenly took fright. The thing his father had called Katydid all those years
ago gave a wobble and then fell off the branch; slowly, just like a leaf, it
meandered down into an ankle-deep pile of fallen leaves.
The Old
Man and the Great Big Automobile
Translated
by Judith Sollosy
The Following story may not be
true, but stories that are not true deserve our attention, too, because it’s
the way stories are told that’s enlightening. Anyone telling this particular
story five years ago would have told it in the following way:
An old man is walking, ragged and
barefooted, along the road from Balaton. After a while he starts waving his
arm, because he sees a great big automobile come along. The great big
automobile stops, and the driver opens the door.
“Why are you waving, Comrade?” he
asks.
“Where are you headed?” the old
man inquires.
“We’re heading up to Budapest,
Comrade.”
“Would you kindly take me with
you?” the old man asks.
“There’s no room in the car,
Comrade,” the driver says, slams the door, and steps on the gas.
Now as the sun is shining, the
blue lake is sparkling and we are exchanging many good stories with each other,
this story, too, comes up again, but in a new guise:
An old man is walking, ragged and
barefooted, along the road from Balaton, when a great big automobile comes
along. The great big automobile stops and the driver opens the door.
“Are you headed for Budapest, old
man?” he asks.
“Yes,” the old man says.
“Get in, old man, we’ll take you
along,” the driver says with a friendly smile.
The old man goes over, sticks his
head in the window, and asks:
“Have you got a radio?”
Both stories are good, but
neither story is true. The truth is that the old man, ragged and barefooted, is
walking along the road when there comes a great big automobile, but it never
occurs to him to wave, nor does it ever occur to the driver to stop.
This is the true story. On the
other hand, it is not as good as the other two.
The Star
Translated
by Mark Baczoni
We’d had a very good catch. They
said I’d brought them luck; they’d been hauling in catches of five, or four, or
seven hundred kilos to Szemes for weeks now, whereas today – by old Muskát’s
reckoning, they’d raked over thirty-five hundred kilos off the lake’s bed with
the nets. Most of the men were still working away on the barge in the blinding
glare of our floodlight, packing the fish in ice, sorting them according to
type, quality and size.
We’d dropped anchor somewhere
near Dörgicse, just beside the reeds. Thanks to them, the pools of light
connecting the two boats had become almost a physical body; all the mosquitoes,
moths, and other nocturnal insects on lake Balaton were in a frenzy, swirling
in the band of light. I could barely move them away from me in the cabin on the
bridge, though it had only a pale ship’s light in a brass and glass-domed
housing.
Old Muskát had lain down beside
me, spread a newspaper over his eyes, and was sleeping. He’d balled himself up
so small that even on this impossibly narrow and short bunk, where two
stick-thin men would barely have found room to sit, he was able to make room
for me beside him. I lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke where the cloud of
insects was thickest. I stared out into the sightless night; now and then a
lighthouse in one or other of the harbours in Somogy winked back at me. It was
all quiet now, only the waves lapping on the hull.
All at once, someone piped up
behind me somewhere in the stern.
“Hey! Has anybody seen the star?”
“What star?” I asked after a
small pause, there having been no answer.
“The paper, you know.”
I looked around. In front of the
wheel was the compass in a battered wooden case; to the right and left of it, a
shortish shelf. Old Muskát kept his pipe tobacco there, and besides that there
were a few finger-smeared glasses, in case we got hold of some beer or wine. Then
there were the papers: one of the big dailies, a technical journal, and Women’s
Own, all of them creased to death and dog-eared. I did wonder at first why the
fishermen subscribed to Women’s Own, there being strictly no women allowed on
the boat; but then, perhaps that’s the reason.
I went through the pile of papers
and called back:
“The Star’s not in here.”
“The devil take that Balog,” said
the voice.
‘If he means the latest issue of
The Star,’ I thought to myself, ‘there’s a story of mine in there, too.’ I
ruminated on how such a hard-bit fisherman would react to my story…I was filled
with happy daydreams. Who’d have thought that something one writes would find
an audience here, in the light of a pale ship’s lamp beside the reeds somewhere
below Dörgicse? This isn’t the most God-forsaken profession in the world after
all, I told myself, and could hardly sit still with pleasure. I went out on
deck. The night was cool, the reeds sighing softly but powerfully behind me. I
was struck by the scent of fish soup. Two men huddled over a spirit stove had
been making fish soup since midnight in the biggest enamel pot in Hungary.
This soup is the ancient right of
every fisherman on the Balaton, and has been for centuries. I was there when
they brought the fish for it over from the barge; I’m no expert, but it looked
like they weren’t the worst of the catch. I watched them make it in the old
Balaton way – without any fat, but with so many onions that not even two of
them had managed to slice them up before the tiny flame had brought the
enormous pan of water to the boil. And now, at the same time as the heavy
footfall of the fishermen returning from the barge set the boat swaying gently,
the smell of the fish soup suddenly spread all through the night, warming the
heart like a woman’s laughter.
Either because of the smell, or
because of something else, old Muskát woke up. He took a report on the catch,
casting a grateful glance at me, the guest who’d brought them good fortune.
There were comings and goings, plenty of clinking and the banging of mess tins
meanwhile. Then a bold, jovial voice called:
“Ahoy there, colleagues! Which of
you’s got The Star?”
‘Well, well,’ I thought, ‘another
reader’.
“I do,” said someone in the bow.
“Who’re you then?”
“Ferenc Szabó.”
“Well get a move on, Szabó.”
‘How badly he wants it’, I
thought delightedly to myself as they brought old Muskát his soup on the
bridge. He got his brought to him on a tray in a white porcelain bowl. He was
the head fisherman there, the Captain, the lord and master. He was the old god
of the Balaton, who knew where, when, and in what direction the fish would
swarm, and could guide the fleet to the very spot.
A giant heaved himself down on
the threshold of the cabin. Even sitting down, he blocked the door completely.
You could only see out onto the boat through his rumpled hair, a stranger to
the comb. He put his red mess tin full of soup down on the ground beside his
wellies and cried,
“Where’s that Star, then, blast the lot of
you!”
My skin started tingling, I
confess. I’m passionate for literature, and I’ve met others who love it too.
But never had I met such ardent fans of it as these storm-tossed sailors…Now, I
could hear the cry all round: “The Star, The Star, where’s The Star?”
“Here it is,” said Szabó from the
bow.
“Get on with it, then, before I
knock your block off.”
So it was among the sailors
outside when the tousled giant pulled himself aside from the doorway, letting
pass a young, graceful lad. He entered the bridge with a mess tin brim-full of
soup and handed it to me.
“Perhaps you’d like to join us,
Comrade?”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’ll get you The Star as well,”
he said.
“Don’t bother,” I replied. “I’ve
read it.”
“We usually put it on our knees,”
he said, bemused.
“Your knees?” I said, bemused in turn.
“So our trousers don’t get oily,”
he told me.
“I see,” I said, taking the hot
mess-tin by the handle and holding it suspended in mid-air, waiting for The
Star.