Down with and Death to would bloom at night
on the timeworn stones of the Eternal City
If that paint had even lit up
Sheer wonder that that test-tube didn’t blow up in your hands
Daddylee
One time they caught him after all
While distributing subversive leaflets
But that’s another story
A British army jeep rolled up beside him they grabbed him
By the jacket he slipped out of it and jumped from the truck
And vanished breathlessly
Never did he finish anything decently
My dad
In Bucureşti many a Salon Litteraire
Saw the cane-swaggering young man
His tie pin adorned with diamonds
Young Onegin went to see a play
But left after the first curtain
And in the salon Jewesses with blue- and red-hair
Were talking of the Iron Guard and Michelangelo with some flair
Selbstverständlich or certainement in French
And the Romanians took him right off to a camp
Someplace else the world war broke out
The discipline there was really lax
It was more or less hostage-taking nothing serious
A so-called military pre-training camp
And the guards could be easily bribed
A bohemian drifter a rake a mini Don Juan
Whom the women at the cleaners on A. Street so adored
Who tickled them with his acrobatic tongue until
They laughed themselves so shamelessly red
And he played on my mother as on an instrument
On her body not on her soul
The devoted patron of brothels
A virtuoso of the instrument
He clambered over to her at night they made no sound
At most the floor creaked once or twice
The sagging mattress squeaked now and again
We lived in the same room with our parents
And slept on two foldaway beds
Back then my little sister and me
One time the Madame allowed him to
It was back in old Szatmárnémeti
Before he passed the examenul final
It wasn’t by chance that she
At the front gate of the Eminescu Secondary School
After an examen that went disgracefully
When in front of an army of parents
Dad poorly failed in mathematics
My temperamental grandma
Broke her umbrella on his head
Striking off his silver-embroidered
Eminescu uniform-cap in the meantime
She hit him so hard – while her son guffawed –
that it rolled into the mud
They still slept in one bed at the time
My grandmother immersed in The Magic Mountain
But mostly she was solving crossword puzzles
How many letters in Mademoiselle Marcell
Indeed in Szatmár the Madame
Who was so very much fond of him
Showed him a tiny hole in the wall
Tilting a lewd picture on the wall
Which on peering through afforded a view
Of what domnul Munteanu
Vice-President of Banca Comerciala
Was up to with Liza the lily of the meadows
Their classmate’s sister
He told me this not long before
He left me there on Finchley Road
Don’t sing Dad they’ll think you are a fool
His face twisted from rage
At such times he came completely unhinged
The world as such to him then ceased to be
Even in the port of Constanţa
No even earlier yet in Bucharest’s North Station
The Gara de Nord
Where his mother put him on a train
She stayed behind at the Gara de Nord
Waving her handkerchief for a long long time5
But just before she simply greased the guards
And had a fake paşaport prepared for her son too
A savvy woman my dear grandma was
She ensured my dad’s escape from the worst of the worst
And exactly this may have been the root of all the troubles
The amazing escape
The same thing took place also in reverse
The cunning Sisyphus absconded twice
Even from the place he’d fled to
Leaving behind his latest homeland too
Swapping it for a third
He started afresh until there was a fresh start to begin with
He got off the hook not once but never finished a thing
You have to be replaced and when you sink
Mrs Pápai replaces Pápai6
And Alcestis descended into Hades
The photo was taken in the port of Constanţa
Where he’d stood on the quay
In his brand new leather jacket ready for adventure
There a wandering photographer captured him
In a few nimble motions and
After the exposure
They won’t harm the women
So my grandma at the Gara de Nord
No not the women7
Don’t sing Dad they’ll think you are a fool
I told him on Finchley Road
At the port the photographer stuck
His hands into a wooden box
A portable darkroom and
In the sunlight a miracle happened
In the blink of an eye without even looking
After a few nimble motions
He presented a photograph
With a soft and somewhat vague smile
An expensive set of calipers and a camera
Anything that could be turned into money
Dad boarded a steamship in Constanţa
But my grandfather’s purple-nailed hand
His leaden hand on his son’s orphaned head
While dying as he blessed his little son
My grandfather jumped into the icy Szamos
With the aim of avoiding enlistment
And in one go smoked two hundred cigarettes
And ten years later he died of it
Dad could hardly wait to tell me how it was
Sometimes he was like Scheherazade
The spoiled young master
Who jumped over life’s hurdles with great ease
In the dark room men in mourning suits
On the wall an oil painting of the weaving mill
In Łódź supposedly his great-great grandfather’s
And by the colonnade that little grocery
Friedmann & Company
They were robbed by the ‘Company’
That heavy hand on Dad’s little head
That toy balloon weighing a ton
The ten fresh-baked crescent rolls Margit handed out
To the beggars loafing by the cemetery gate
So the mourning prayer would be valid
He may have taken it wherever he went
That blessing
It protected him not
It protected him from nothing at all8
Bruria
It happened to her halfway still in Athens
She had two days before boarding the ship
She thought she’d walk up until the Parthenon
And noticed as she neared the holy temple
Ambling over the marble debris
That someone was photographing her and only her
I could yet detail this at length
It was a slightly cool mid-morning
Not like in Budapest but a winter day in Athens
When Boreas unmercifully blows
And Kaikias and Notos are blowing in the face
And you’re exposed to the ceaselessly buffeting
Jostling whirling
Air currents on the magnetic hilltop
That slap and rip at your clothes as if at any moment
A surge of wind will snatch you up and slam you about
The birds steer well clear of it
And meanwhile the sun the impassive Helios is blazing
Your brain almost boils from rage and fury
The unknown man took not one
But a dozen pictures of my mother
One sees on them how Mum her expression rock-hard
Approaches the photographer
Tornado-like
Descending marble steps
Like Pallas Athena on the plains of Troy
Her jaw her stiff cheekbones bulging
Her glance a stinging pebble
Like someone caught red-handed
Oh why didn’t I ever see you this way
Unmerciful goddess
Or like Agave who was spied on and who in a frenzy
Unwittingly killed her son Pentheus
Or Medea who with triumphant laughter
Tore her sons to pieces
Mum was under strict orders
Not to allow any such occurrence9
Her behaviour was defined by command
She had to report anything suspicious
But back then she told her tale otherwise
How much sudden silence how many half truths
That’s not how you told this story dear Mum
For even if she wasn’t a Mata Hari
Though the comparison would be apt
But if one reflects on one’s mother
And Mata Hari never had a child
Turned out not to have been a spy after all
A blooper like that can slip in any time
She was a tiny cog in the wheel
And so my mother headed with terrible wrath
Toward that CIA (KGB, Shin Bet, MI6) agent
Like raging Hera Jupiter’s wife
Or like Artemis riding her wildly galloping horse
Handbag on her arm and drawing her furious expression
Like an Amazon drawing her bow
And we know what little remained of Actaeon
This time the matter had a better outcome
Later we all wondered at the pictures
At the stone face of the stern agent
This hurt her to the tune of twenty dollars
I think that much less remained
Of the money her comrades had given her
To espy the Zionist conspiracy
And build up socialism
She wasn’t a heroine she wasn’t far no
She tread mid-way between two homelands
Between two reasons between two treasons
Schmitz Schmitz little Schmitz
You won’t even get to Auschwitz
When the writing appeared on a wall
When a whole country went to the streets
That sound alone stirred in her ears
On the decaying mortar as she got off the tram
The inscription face to face
The imperturbable reality
They would have hung Dad from a lamppost
Because he’d spoken silly things on the street
At twilight those nasty men youngsters
Had not my little sister that wonder
With her red shock of hair and the retroussé nose
Had she not been sitting on his arm
To go to leave and tekel upharsin
To spring up and to skedaddle
To run away from here anywhere
Might have seemed a reasonable conclusion
But a special seventh sense
She had and he too
The nurse and the journalist
Pápai and Mrs Pápai
Forgács and Mrs Forgács
Marcell and Bruria
For unerringly bad decisions
Every decision is bad
Okay – needing to decide at all is bad
And there are in fact situations in which
good decisions can’t be made
Like when I am writing this
Like the way I am writing this
To marry or not to marry by all means
you’ll regret it
To go or not to go by all means
you’ll regret it
The point is of course that one shouldn’t succeed
To boldly resist all sound arguments
To spit at any word of warning
To do what our hearts dictate
Is indeed a romantic concept
A revolutionary doesn’t think he goes
And does what his heart dictates
Dashing ahead to save the world
And in place of the heart
Shards of glass rusty barbed wire
If there is no sin let us invent the sin
He is a highly talented individual who knows
how to keep quiet but at the same time
travels the world with open eyes – this is what she said
of me to them – She – she said this of me to them
When she thought
I could take the baton from her
That I could become
Pápai junior
Never ever did we bring it up
She lied to the recruiting officer
Or maybe we did bring it up
Oh, Gethsemane, Gethsemane
In the Buda apartment under the Castle
In the shelter with the old ladies
Who kissed my cheeks to smithereens
During the bloody storm of autumn 1956
Countering a country’s will my mother waited
For the Russians to invade us again
How often oh how often
She boarded a ship – a ship? rather a little
Dinghy from the pennies and blood money10
she cobbled together from the one-party state
With the generous support of Department III/I
She boarded a ship
So she could touch the ancient land
From which all power flowed
And the legend manufacturers come into operation11
The only landscape that she feels good in
The only land that would open up before her
The only one that is still organic
From which her organs had been built
The hills the mountain the orange-red sand of the coast
And where she arrives as a secret agent
No longer seeing simply recording like a machine
Orange trees mating in the fragrance of the sea
Eucalypti cyclamens anemones oleanders and orchids
The cascade of flowers before the bunkers
And jasmines parched by the smouldering heat
The hot and stormy quarrels and fights
The balm of hatred on the deep wound of the heart
And from the starting point again
From A to B and then from B to A
And so on ad infinitum
My mother is a countryless derelict
Well what kind of person is this
Beautiful beautiful perishing
Delightful even while dying
Majestic demonic and angelic
Tumbling into pain
Even morphine should not ease it
One by one she surrenders her limbs to death
She looks in your eyes she has nothing to hide
A whizzing of the winds from the universe
Defenceless blinded chaotic dogged
Tender hysterical calm elated
Persecuted among the persecutors
Who can heal with her hands
And washes the tub with Sterogenol
Again on the flimsy little raft
Amid muddy clay-grey waves
Drowning on a single slippery beam
Which Charybdis spat out of her maw
And there on the opposite shore for a moment – but no
No no no no no
Not even for a moment –
The harassed soul
If we consider not even for a moment
But maybe maybe after all
For a single moment after arrival
Near the blue-eyed Father-god
She calmed down for a single moment
Her soul subsided
She arrived
Kiryat Sefer shemoneh12
The address on the envelope
Benumbed by pain nose running from hay fever
Selling out its homeland sad soul
Chatting with women border guards in no-man’s land
And constantly on the alert lest she’ll be caught
She got the hang of an ugly wooden office jargon
That can’t be shared with anyone else
Because she yearned as an outcast
To return to the world from which she strayed
That’s how she arranged her travels
Sehr praktisch sehr geschickt sehr what else can I say
Thinking it over after the fact
No matter how inexplicable it is still somehow understandable
If only I knew how that somehow was
She wasn’t no she never was sly
She was not the sly Odysseus
She didn’t plug her ears with wax
She was beguiled right away
Perhaps
Near the floating golden cupola
Which never was hers
In any sense not even like a
Not even as much as a
Specks of dust dancing in the light
For but a single wee little moment
When in her snow-white dress
Standing on the hills
She looked toward the sun-beaten city
Where she’d been born13
Bruria
she spun she wove she knit
she knit she spun she wove
her fate she jabbed she stabbed
the Monster that is beyond the mountain
lost in the distance beyond the sea
I don’t look at the photo
I want to conjure it up from memory
behind the women
six-headed Scylla with a triple row of teeth
which she put in a glass of water at night
I’ve got to look at it all the same I’ve got to
go there and I’ve got to look at it
the golden cupola swimming under the clouds
the shouting women
who are running toward the Monster
to divert its attention
from that which is unattainable
strands colours
die in shoes
she collected colours every drop of hers
good little girl
who on the sea of Galilee
in the spring of ’25 or ’26
was lured by a man
into a cabin on a boat and
he lured her into the cabin and
struggled to explain
all at once memory starts to heave
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