Farewell, Russian Style
To travel backward, not leaving out even a
single station. To gather up all the small details,
and to erase them one by one from the train window,
like so much steam, empty pictures. To remove
the addressee from the envelope, to empty the folders,
eradicate the computer’s hard drive,
smash the telephone. Burn every note,
sketch, scrap of paper, manuscript. Then, if everything is ready,
sit down for awhile, like the Russians, before setting off.
Outside the basket is tied up, the light carriage, the heavy blanket on top,
the old horse harnessed. Grovel, proud man!
Then to look out one more time onto the rooftops across the street.
In that prospect, tranquillity resided. To bid farewell to them,
rise from the chair, wash off the table and shelves
with much water. To leave here so that no readable trace
shall remain. In this way the true story of the road travelled may
possibly be preserved. Because nothing is ever taken back
by death, only changed. Once I underlined
this sentence in a book. Now I know already:
this too is different. Death takes back that
which has no life, and it does not change that which lives:
faces stronger than my own life were written within me by love.
I give thanks that I could live with them, turning grey unto death.
Like smoke, like a summer cloud, so then it can disperse.
Notes on the Back of a Map
The house search lasted until dawn. Osip was arrested. Yagoda signed
the warrant. Later on, in less than four years, he too will be a prisoner of the NKVD,
and he will be murdered first. At that time Osip resided in the Butyrka prison. By night-time,
when they transferred him to a labour camp to the north of Vladivostok, he was freezing,
he died there in December in unknown circumstances. He will write from there:
“In vain is poetry esteemed only in Russia. There is no other country in the world
where a person is murdered because if it.” In 1934, proceedings were halted against him,
thanks to the intervention of friends, and because he was still not declared innocent,
he was sent into exile to Chernishev. There, on the first night, he threw himself
out of the hospital window, but the window was too low; he only broke his collarbone,
and his face was bruised. He was obsessed by the idea that they would come
for him at the designated time, and carry out the judgement passed in secret. You were
born the next day, this too was a judgement. What a shame that we cannot remember tomorrow!
“Here I lie with my face buried in death, and I don’t know why the death of tomorrow
would be any different than the death of today”— you wrote, and you were not wrong, because when
Osip lay there beneath the hospital window with his bleeding face, his broken collarbone
at the bottom of a freezing pit, like someone who can count to three or four
before the explosion, he unfolded time itself to her. So what street is this?
he asked later, pointing at the map. It’s your street, answered a woman’s voice.
You see, there’s nothing straight within it, the whole thing is crooked. And Osip
laughed as loudly as he could. We should exchange heads, he said, and you laughed too,
you laughed until the Bucharest earthquake that in 1977 killed Kobak.
But still, until then, the rains of eastern Europe soaked many a poor soul through and through.
The filth fell from their mouths, the rusty nails from their hair, the brass buttons
of interchangeable faiths snapped off, and the lipstick stains of evenings past their
warranty can nevermore be erased. History has made its bed for the sake
of underground love-making. Thus on that day when you finally stood in the draught of death,
I became a man according to the laws. Osip lives here with me now,
you whispered, in a heavenly sublet. You sit on the steps of the ladder, dangling your legs,
you look and see what you can see, you listen to the silence as it grazes below,
you steal the cow-bells, and like schoolchildren, you giggle at everything. I saw
how the ladder nearly broke under Osip. The brew of the sky rumbled. Since then
I walk the unknown streets like a thief. My brain is grinding out a line of poetry, and you and Osip
hang before me from below the last rooftops, like bats on the tips of eyelashes.
Above the Gravel Path
I drink in troubled air like churning
dark water. Time is ploughed with numbers,
but there is neither good seed, nor aggregate, nor product,
and no hand to cast the seed. If the earth
would be barren, anxiety would be gold, to drive away
the cows, and live the shortened hours, which I
would measure by the weight of observation and desire.
But chicory sprouts again from the mogul,
who sweeps away the colourful days, melts
milk-coloured lead into the furious sunshine.
Still, he lacks confidence. His algebra
is mistaken, after the division the remainder
increases. If more slate-years are to follow,
and we will still have to study their graven writings,
then the moment will also arrive dressed in green.
Sweet waters fall before us, and above the
gravel path we sniff the fragrance of old songs.
Then we shall erase the blackboard. Our story
has not reached its zenith, there still is time for germinations.
We look again at springtime with puppy faces,
during the stolen evenings there will be time yet to wilt.
Dawn Light
The crying of an infant heard through the window.
The dawn light sails across the yellow wall
of the house. The gaunt song, the late
arrival, lays the table again with the thick homespun
of the generations, begins to enumerate
the forgotten names of birds. The street
does not observe. The houses know the predictions
of the great rains, and of the lightning as well.
In this winged cemetery even the newborn
does not tire. The crying from his sparrow-sized lungs,
between the window frames, beyond the rooftops,
ascends higher. We have no faith
in the unknown. We would flee
from it, but we can only grow accustomed
if we tie the rope ever tighter within
ourselves. Who could now open
those aching bluish eyelids, as if awakened
from a dream of seeing the dead? Who will give those
eyes the dawn light now? If we were to know
the true co-existence of wings and darkness,
we would not have to take our hopes
from the crying of the newly born. But at this algebraic
feast, often falling into despair,
can we imagine another time?
Atropos’s Scissors
A few rainy days in the middle of the yellow-veiled,
Buddhist heat. The slide towards the equator
stops for a while. The demonic fever abates,
poison, released, is washed away from the bodies.
The days will still have the names of cats.
Only they, the cats, remember the patter
of the cobblestones, they know how long the fig trees
below the castle have blossomed, and that here
they batted at the Turkish tassels in the shade, finding
a Jewish farthing, and why time always passes
without memories, backwards. It is amazing
that some still believe in its ability to convey information.
The streets always lead to the same place,
for the hundredth time the curly-haired black girl
steps out of the newly built house, so that before Atropos
cuts the thread, for the hundred-and-first time, she can fasten
her hair into an apple-shaped bun: enough of a change for now.
Wars were never taken too seriously around here. Their first days
were always as if the age of eternal peace were
drawing near. The long tranquillity can be
reversed with one huge bloodletting, and the exiled
king will be able to return. A two-horse landau or a black Audi
keeps on going, and the water system has improved in vain,
the sewage system, even today the poor have the same
sour stink. So that no one here ever had to learn
how to swim. Decades often fell away from
the calendars, and the tomorrows demanded the
return of the dreamed-of past. So we exchange the right today
to float, like bits of cork on the wine’s surface,
slowly becoming drunk. On such rainy days such
as these, we are grateful for the relief.
The hatred within us subsides, and although on the trams
the steam of humans has not lessened, and the walls don’t even really
cool down, perhaps we will succeed in politely removing the scissors
from Atropos’s hand, and we will not begin to believe in providence.
Beyond the Cordons
There were corners, enclosed spaces, where for days after the dispersal
of the demonstration the biting smell of teargas could be sensed. If the burnt-out
ruins of the cars had been removed, the ripped-up sidewalks, the absence
of pavement hardly let one forget that the city centre had become a zone
of uncertainty. Evening belonged to the sirens, the chants of the arsonists;
the squares were traps, the streets borders, trajectories of escape that could be closed down
in a commander’s head, after so many years of peace at last able to conduct warfare.
*
No matter where one turned, there were bars, cordons. The stoic
grey of the houses arrived from a distance farther than moonlight. The city still
spoke of the new wrath in the dead language of ornamental statuary: Poseidon
is the chief god here, in the continent’s centre, where in narrow rented rooms people bargain for stolen love. The naked stone bodies turned towards each other
like the screens forgetfully left on: the thick poppy seed of the visual static
sprinkled onto them as down below wrath gathered up the child-legions, far from every sea.
*
Two hands which do not know of each other write the story of your body, two voices summon within you the unknown itself. Gather up the distinctions. Place the
blossoming bouquet of lies, explanations and objections now onto
your grave, tend your grave, clear away the beliefs falling down onto it
like autumn foliage. But do not look at all at the everyday with everyday eyes.
The simplest questions are always those that you do not ask, and if
they scream into your ear, don’t even listen to them until you have run away outside of time.
*
With decorative flagstone, flower-boxes and ordered transportation, the city centre covers its self-hatred in times of peace, and the decommissioned streetcars,
carrying the scent of humans from the most frightening outer districts,
are taken to its terminal caverns. Life here was never anything else
than the art of the too-slow massacre. Going along the cordons, now at last
the alert mind can play with its dreams of public hangings, schizophrenic love
and the like, and believe, intoxicated, that it is engaged in politics.
*
Sometimes it is necessary to go to war. After all, in the innermost, relations were never
peaceful. A single person is too narrow a space for so many wants and desires. He who
has no eyes and ears, who always brightens in the presence of others, and he
with the owl’s eyes, going around with a millstone round his neck, and who for simplicity’s
sake calls himself ‘I’. None of them inhabit this world at all. All of them
betray themselves. Their state is emergency, but they are just the same all
capable of delighting in their defeat. In vain does the one who speaks here decree
against them.
*
But what, as a matter of fact, is my problem? Someone born on the same day as me, who knew me for at least twenty years, asked me: Closing time? Hopelessness?
Boredom?
And looked at me, as if explanations would mean something. In exchange, I told a story
about a grey heron. I saw it in a city by the sea; it stood every morning
on the roof of a red Peugeot in the parking lot, and waited for the fish to be thrown
from the upper floor of the house opposite. Every morning the selfsame improbable out into the sun. Take this heron as a comparison, I said. Of that which you
want.
*
If one day you leave here, don’t throw a single fillér over your shoulder! As if with closed
eyes you would sit on the other side of the moon, grow the ice within yourself, and practice
the art of slow murder. For surely you were never anything else but the astronaut
of your feelings. Your spaceship is a piece of blank paper. Do not pity those below who
after the battle display their scars, and because they cannot conquer the hardships, dream
of Sundays fragrant with food. Take nothing from here, and do not believe the rivers,
the oceans! From here you can escape only upwards. It is not worthwhile to recollect upon
the Earth.
Until the Lions is forthcoming in late 2015 from HarperCollins India and Arc Publications, UK.
Highly acclaimed as a poet, a dramatist, a children’s author, and a novelist, Gábor Schein lives in Budapest, where he is a professor at the Hungarian Literary History Institute of Eötvös Loránd University. He has written nine collections of poetry and three novels. English translations of his writing have appeared on www.hlo.hu and B O D Y.
Ottilie Mulzet translates from Hungarian and Mongolian. In 2014, she won the Best Translated Book Award for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. Upcoming translations include Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens by László Krasznahorkai (Seagull, 2016) and The Dispossessed by Szilárd Borbely (HarperCollins, 2016).