Thursday, June 24, 2010

rampage

...mass slaughter in Lake District and an extradition news bite from a couple of weeks back brought to life memories of a very hot summer in a very small village terrorized by, in our Eastern parts, unusually typical serial killer.




...of course I knew the face but I couldn't quite remember it when the word spread that he was the prolific axe killer that haunted the longest summer of my life. He was on of those characters that you do notice and acknowledge the act of noticing them  but then somehow always get lost on the edges of your peripheral vision while you are looking at them, because, in an attempt of the brain to blur the image of something underneath that is upsettlingly wrong with that person you are looking at, the mind plays a self-defense trick and edits the stressor completely out of the picture.


...I think I cataloged him as 'one of those' people, the misfortunate ones that the village life  and its dark side of underachievement, driven by fear of the world out of its safe boundaries, had poisoned beyond repair, both physically and mentally. He had a disabled arm, the souvenir of taking on amateur brawl and professional boxing opponents more ample than himself in an attempt to claim a fairer share of the pie of life and smalltown social territory than he was born to have. He always did seem rather odd, everywhere out of place, I think I remember forming a chain of thought once upon seeing him that he was someone too cowardly to ever attack openly but definitely the kind of man that bears grudges, stacks them up layer upon layer of self-pity and envy and hatered, until the piled up disappointments of his life hit the roof, fry his brain and he probably ends up, as the locals like to colourfully say, 'tween the hams', swinging from the attic beams. 

...he ended up killing a lot of people and the fear of him had made my late  father slap me the only time ever, when at the peak of the hysteria and  killing spree I  was stupid enough to go out after dark alone, on the same evening when the village neighborhood watch dad was taking part in found the shop manager and his wife brutally slaughtered.


...the bottom of the ocean that gave way to the fertile land is still  just a misplaced depression of nature that spills its manic sorrow into the lives of  its inhabitants.


...in the small village, you not only know everyone  by name and three generations that preceeded them and are well versed into everyone's extramarital and sexual escapades, you know all the complex family relations that no sociogram could ever accurately portray , and all of the accumulated sins and mishaps of everyone you bid good day are available for discussion at any moment as soon as you mention seeing them. Small places have excellent collective memory when it comes to everyone else.

...a micro mythology of a place had formed and  things that everyone knows by merely living there were hammered into me stuck doing the brainless substitute job for my aunt as the lottery seller, right in the bullseye village centre office, next to the church, school, marketplace and  two meters across from the always open door of  'the' village café.




...so I knew the story of how he lost the function to his arm, how the wife was slightly slower and how he beat her once bad and ended up in jail, how he had a nasty temper and would nowadays pick fights with local super-men who would then turn it into a typically brutal laughing stock display. I also knew who his father was and what he had done. I knew where they used to have land that bordered ours, and the house where his grandmother had lived.


...they just speak, the villagers, their communication pattern is based on the assumption, or a communicative dogma to word it more precisely, that the intention of the designated listener whether he wants to hear the information or not is never inquired upon, because it is the standard rule that he does, and shares the common background information. If at any point  they notice that you've lost your way in the maze of names and events that prefix any information you actually want to hear, you will be made to go through it step by step and affirm understanding of every segment.


...the four of us were probably the oddest girls in the village, attractive enough to be tolerated instead of receiving the usual ridicule that is  given to anyone who dares to be too different, except for the village cartoons as  I called them. Every village has an aged rocker, a predatory sexually charged divorcé that everyone bangs, a useless poet, a politican, a  retired policeman, archetypes that are alive and walking around unaware of the fact that their need to differ is what makes them so sterotypical... but not every village had four girls 'from good houses' who study art or  whatwasitthatthingthatyoustudycalledialwaysforget come together in such a way that it impacted the rest of their lives, the girls who moved away and are already over the fence, out of its grip but by the force of a string of coincidences all four  stuck for a summer in it, and instead of getting all bigcitily depressed, were having the time of their lives, throwing cooking parties when none of them knew a thing about cooking beyond scrambled eggs , meeting for a five o' clock tea all dressed up, dating and exploring sexually men they would be ashamed to parade in the city and conspicuously borrowing books from the village library on almost daily basis, among other things.

...that summer was too radical, too carefree, too powerful to come to an easy-way-out end anyway... my very own, first-hand experienced summer of Sam.

 ...



Wednesday, June 2, 2010

debris of a letter


Danilo Kis, Danilo Kis, Danilo Kis
Little* Dany,
to your death I might add
my own little dying: my opus magnum
( a bunch of small bullshits,

to be honest),
for you have, you old scribbler,
already added to the pile 

just in time
with a shovel full
on top of mine
future death:

“DEATH IN PARIS” -
great title for a novel,
almost as good as  “...in Venice”!
But in Budapest?!
In this country that resembles a toilet someone forgot to  flush?!
You tell me...
You say nothing. Neither shall I.
But if you knew that it really did happen down south:
I am sure: you would have died laughing.
But you, with eyes that were to see death
you saw right through us

and ran away
ran from here, ran from there, ran from everywhere.

For me it's already too late.

P.S.

I hear bad things about you by the way.
Playing cards with Trotsky?
Well, you used to know best, just how much of a jinx he was.

Let him cheat sometimes.

(György Petri: Debris of a Letter) 

* Kis in Hungarian means little, small, tiny 


(reconstructed from a Serbian translation by Árpád Vickó)