The Dispossessed

by Szilard Borbely

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction: The Culture of Brutality

  Chapter 1

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Also by Szilárd Borbély

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  The Culture of Brutality

  We Eastern Europeans are all Kafka’s sons.

  —SZILÁRD BORBÉLY

  The tiny village of Túrricse, where Szilárd Borbély lived for the first ten years of his life, stands on Hungary’s great plain, the Alföld, the flat expanse stretching from the eastern bank of the Danube out to the distant Carpathians. On current maps, Túrricse lies at the very edge of the nation’s political borders, with Ukraine and Romania literally within walking range. Not only is the village’s distance from Budapest striking, but even as far as regional towns are concerned, Túrricse is closer to Romania’s Satu Mare and Ukraine’s Mukachevo than any larger settlement on the Hungarian side.

  At one time the village was less geographically marginal. During the centuries of Habsburg rule, up until the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary reached much farther: Satu Mare was still officially Szatmár, Mukachevo was still Munkács, and the population’s ethnic, or, to be more accurate, ethno-religious, mixture was far more fluid. One influence emanating from both Ukraine and Romania was the presence of the Greek Catholic Church in the region, a religious orientation somewhat rare among Hungarian-speaking populations both inside and outside the current borders. Even more notably, the immediate vicinity had once contained several strong Jewish communities, including the Hungarian-speaking Orthodox lineage of the Satmar (Szatmár) Hasidim. Yet this has always been an impoverished land. Its soil is meager, the regular floods from the Tisza River and its many tributaries are always a threat, and there are few links to the world outside.

  In an unpublished essay from 2012, “The World of Kafka and the Culture of Brutality,” Szilárd Borbély describes his personal background, blending poetic sensitivity with harsh fragments of Stalinist jargon:

  I was born on November 1, 1963, in a village in eastern Hungary of some four hundred souls, and I grew up in Túrricse. In this tiny village close to the Ukrainian and Romanian borders, the onetime peasant world of Eastern Europe lived on. There existed in that milieu a unique mixture of collectivist ideology and the traditional peasant worldview; at the same time, the socialist dictatorship was slowly yet gradually abating. My family was considered to be “class enemies,” and due to suspicions of Jewish origin, as well, we were shunned. For me, the functioning of the collectivity of the village made the culture of brutality palpable.

  The 1960s were a peculiar decade in Hungary, even more so in its rural peripheries. In Budapest, the heroic resistance and tragic defeat of the 1956 uprising became the predominant focus of collective memory, as did the efforts of the reimposed Communist administration toward their obliteration. But in Túrricse, all of these world-historical events seemed far removed from everyday experience. Instead, it was the traumas of World War II that remained most vividly evident. Miklós Horthy, the former Habsburg admiral who had ruled Hungary single-handedly as regent starting in 1920, had brought the country into alliance with Nazi Germany—partly in hopes of regaining territory lost after the Trianon treaty, yet also partly due to genuine ideological agreement. Through this alliance, Horthy not only involved the woefully ill-equipped Hungarian army in Hitler’s assault on the USSR, with casualties measuring (in the most conservative estimates) around two hundred thousand, but also willingly arranged the deportation of even larger numbers of Hungarian Jews from the countryside to Nazi concentration camps.

  In 1944 Horthy was deposed, and power was seized by the even more extreme Ferenc Szálasi, leader of Hungary’s Arrow Cross, a paramilitary Fascist movement. Szálasi was responsible for the most widely cited atrocity of Hungarian fascism: the murder of Budapest’s Jews in random shootings in the Budapest ghetto and in organized massacres along the Danube embankment. Yet the events that wreaked the greatest damage within the world of The Dispossessed were those from an earlier date: the seemingly calmer days of Horthy’s rule, regarded by all too many on the contemporary Hungarian right with disturbing nostalgia.

  Borbély describes the peculiar status of the part-real, part-fictional village of his writing as “existing outside of time.” It preserved in microcosm the lived forms of an ancient culture while destroying all traces of the recent past. This ancient culture, for him, was one of brutality transmitted through language:

  In a milieu such as this, the process of growing up and the acquisition of language do not occur within the framework of education but instead within a harsh discipline, like animal training. This brutal discipline of language use kept the traditional ancient peasant culture of brutality alive.

  At the time when he wrote the novel, Borbély seemed to stand at the top of his career: a highly acclaimed poet, dramatist, essayist, and literary historian with a teaching position at the University of Debrecen. From his first mature works in the early 1990s, he was universally regarded by Hungarian critics as one of the most vital figures in the impressive generation of poets to emerge in the post-Communist era. The Hungarian literary world, as well as the reading public, greeted The Dispossessed with great fervor on its publication in 2013; since then, it has gone through at least five reprintings. When one of the most important literary figures of recent times, one known for his strong personal reticence, chooses to write in detail about his agonizing childhood, it is certainly a major literary event. But the overwhelming response to The Dispossessed had to do with more than that. No Hungarian author—whether novelist or social scientist—had ever really written about the persistence, even through Communist social levelling and late-twentieth-century social advances, of Hungary’s deep and intractable poverty the way that Borbély did, with his laser-sharp observations and uncompromising ethical stance. For certain voices in Hungarian society—manifesting a near-incessant nostalgia for past aristocracies and purported lost golden ages—the bitter inequalities prevailing across time, from the serfs sleeping in the barn to the broad levels of the socially excluded today, remain a taboo subject. Rooted in centuries of division, the material and social deprivation of Hungary’s marginal classes has remained untouched as much by the post-1989 democratic order as any of the regimes before.

  The figure of Messiyah in The Dispossessed—the despised Gypsy, or Roma, of the village, whose main occupation, apart from attracting the scorn of the village men who hang out in front of the tavern, is to clean out the outhouses in the village—is something like an untouchable in this closed universe. His “nickname” is a variation of the word Messiah: he is the only one in the village who has a beard. When someone wants him to clean out their outhouse, they show up at the tavern, asking: “Has Messiyah left yet?” The village is indifferent to the implications of this question: the Messiah has abandoned this place, although it is impossible not to keep hoping for Him. Or: he is present, and he is despised.

  BORBÉLY ONCE STATED IN AN INTERVIEW THAT HE HAD promised his father that he would never write about what he’d seen in the village as a young boy. He kept the promise until his father’s death in 2006. In an interview in 2013, he stated:

  My origins obligate me [to write about the marginalized]. I come from the depths. There are masses now who will never get a chance. I lived in an atmosphere, and I grew up in a family, where everyone felt
and knew that we counted for nothing . . . I write about poverty because there is nothing more tedious than poverty . . . and because I see a continual disintegration in how poor people are treated, whether they are Roma or Hungarians. And because I would, today, hardly be able to get out of that milieu that I came from. This gnaws away at my heart; it is deeply upsetting to me.

  —OTTILIE MULZET

  We walk and we are silent. Between us there are twenty-three years. Twenty-three cannot be divided. Twenty-three can be divided only by itself. And by one. There is so much solitude between us. It cannot be dismantled into parts. It must be borne as one. We are carrying lunch. We walk across the turned-up earth. We call it sodground. Ogmand’s sodground. When we go into the forest to gather wood, we pass this way. Sometimes we go in the direction of the Szomoga family fields so we can walk along Kaboló Road. Because it isn’t so muddy. We call that puddle slick. Other times we go across the Count’s Forest, up to Palló Street. My mother has a kerchief tied around her head. We call that kurchie. Women must have a kerchief tied over their hair. The old ladies tie them in a knot below their chins. Their kerchiefs must be black. My mother’s kerchief is colored. She knots it in back, beneath her hair, which is done up in a bun. In the summers, she wears light triangular kerchiefs. A white kerchief with blue polka dots. My father got it for her last year from the market in Kölcse. My mother has chestnut-brown hair. Auburn-chestnut hair. Not every chestnut has this tint of auburn. In the autumn, we collect chestnuts with my older sister. There is one single chestnut tree in the village. It is where the Barkóczy manor used to be. All the rest of the chestnut trees were cut down after the war. The earth, always so moist, tolerates only poplars. And willow trees. We call them willo’wood trees. In the spring it’s easy to make a whistle, a willo’wood–tree whistle. We whistle in order to annoy our mother. And the dogs and the neighbors, too.

  In the autumn, we escape to the only chestnut tree on the other side of Kepec Meadow. We sneak away behind the gardens. The enormous tree’s five-pointed leaves dry out toward the end of summer and begin to fall. It’s as if there are huge cut-off hands lying around amid the dead leaves. In the spring, the blossoms of the chestnut tree are white candles. Its green burr is like a hedgehog. We make legs for the chestnuts out of matchsticks. We ask my mother for the burned-out matchsticks. Only our mother can touch matches; they’re not for kids.

  “Scissors, knives, forks—not for little brats,” chants my mother.

  “BECAUSE WE ARE THE MASTERS NOW. TODAY, THE PEOPLE are the lords. Before, the kulaks exploited us. Now it’s we who exploit the kulaks . . . If they don’t like it, too bad! And that’s that.” This is what the people who used to be landless farmers say.

  “It’s easy for them, because they never brought even so much as an iron nail into the collective,” says my grandfather, who misses his horses most of all. “They only take things from it.

  “Because they like handouts,” he murmurs in disgust.

  “They only know how to squander,” he says. “They just dissipate everything. They don’t know how to improve anything. It all just goes to waste.”

  The former landowners miss their horses the most. The land, not so much.

  It was the horses, not them, who were tortured on the collective farms. The soul was driven out of them.

  “They broke those horses. They died before their time. What’s the point of that?” my grandfather says.

  The new masters were impatient and violent. They addressed everyone as “Comrade.” They made up new greetings.

  “Even their fathers were nobodies. All they want are handouts,” he grumbles.

  “Forward!” say the comrades, instead of “God bless.” And they’re always talking about progress.

  “We must progress with the age, Comrades, progress! We will produce whatever we want. If it’s rubber dandelions we want, then we’ll make rubber dandelions. If it’s rice porridge we want, then we’ll make rice porridge. Whatever the Party wants is what will be. What Comrade Stalin and Comrade Rákosi say is holy writ. We must, Comrades, be victorious over nature!” The brigade leaders repeated the slogans to the shivering people during early-morning training sessions. In the meantime, they gulped down a shot or two of brandy.

  “Devil take you, Comrade,” my grandfather muttered under his mustache so they wouldn’t hear. But so that they would still hear. Or so they would at least know.

  “Well, you watch your mouth there,” the new masters grumble. But they don’t want any trouble, either. There had been enough of that already. By then, the kulaks had been let out of the camps. Then most of them had left. They couldn’t handle staying in the village. No one minded not having to look into their eyes anymore.

  The ornamental trees had been cut down, the buildings on the estate demolished. The Party building was built where the lane of chestnut trees used to stand on the estate. Everyone is quiet about the old manor house. There is a deep silence.

  “Peasants know how to keep their mouths shut,” my mother says.

  No one is allowed to talk about the past. The old people refer to it as the ancient world. What we are silent about doesn’t exist. To erase the past, once and for all . . . they sing with the cantor, as if at a funeral.

  DURING THE DAY, MY MOTHER’S HAIR IS IN A BUN. WHEN she lets it down, it’s evening time. I often comb it. I like to comb her hair. Between the wide cracks of the horn comb glide the brilliant strands of hair. Lustrous, like the evening. The sky is full of stars, and it has a good smell. The smell of grass. Of bread. The smell of milk. I get tired of the horn comb. It makes me think of slaughtered animals. There is always some black dirt stuck in the cracks. Greasy dandruff and dust build up and stick together. The women twist their hair into a bun underneath their kerchiefs. They hold it together with a horn hair clip. During the day, my mother’s hair is hidden. Not my older sister’s. On Saturdays, we wash our hair. In the evening, we put the washbasin on the kitchen floor. We boil water on the stovetop, then bathe in it, one after the other. First my older sister, then me, and finally our mother. We all wash our hair with oil soap. We rinse it out in the large pot. We all have the same smell.

  I always sense it as soon as I step through the door. Other people’s houses have a different smell. Now we are going to the forest for kindling. My mother is wearing a dark kerchief. A thick woolen kerchief. Now she, too, knots it under her chin, like the old women. So her ears will be warm. Because it’s cold. I’m always freezing, I hold my mother’s hand. Her hand is warm, mine is ice-cold. If she is carrying something, then I stuff my hands into my pockets. She’s always carrying something. So then I warm my hands in my pockets. My fingernails are freezing. I don’t understand how fingernails can freeze. I think about that as I try to keep pace with my mother. After the summer harvest, we’ll collect corn husks. I’m thinking of how good it would be if it could be summer already. Mostly you can find the husks at the edge of the harvested field. At least then it’s warm. But I don’t like that, either.

  “Nothing’s good enough for you all. If I pricked your asses with a needle, you wouldn’t even like that,” says my mother. And then she laughs. As if she has made a joke. But it wasn’t a joke.

  We walk along the sidewalk, and I’m shivering. I’m always shivering. My hands are freezing, and my toes are freezing in my shoes. Frost traces the spiderwebs in the holes of the wire fence. The tangled outlines are clearly visible. I play at poking them with my index finger and, like at the touch of a magic wand, they disappear. It’s enough to break even just one thread for the whole thing to collapse. The strands break, and the particles of frost fall to the ground like crystal sugar. Sometimes dogs run ahead of us because of the rattling sound. If my mother lets me, I drag a cane or a stick along the length of the fence. Most of the dogs have no great desire to jump around then. Some dogs follow us on the other side of the fence until we have left their owner’s yard behind. These are the excitable dogs. We call dogs like this jittery. They grimace. Th
ey show their snow-white teeth. They stamp their paws. They tremble from rage.

  “Don’t irritate them,” my mother says.

  “I’m not irritating them,” I say and pull in my neck. I watch my mother’s hand from the corner of my eye. I’m standing on her left side. She doesn’t usually hit with her left hand. I breathe a sigh of relief.

  “Don’t tell lies,” she says.

  “I was just touching the spiderweb a little,” I say. My mother doesn’t answer, she looks ahead roughly. And quickens her steps.

  “You scoundrel,” she says. When she says scoundrel, it means she isn’t angry.

  MY OLDER SISTER IS ONE. I AM TWO. THAT’S MY NUMBER, two. My older sister is Big. She is the girl. I am the Boy. My little brother is Three. He is the Little One. That’s what they call us.

  “Rock the Little One to sleep,” says my mother. We rock him and put him to sleep. I count how many times we rock him. One, two, three. These are the first words I ever learned. I’ve known how to count to ten for a long time now. I practiced on the eggs. We’ve never had more than ten egg-laying hens.

  My mother always makes me count the eggs so we know how many eggs were laid that day. In the morning, she checks the hens for eggs. She tosses the hens out of the hen coop one by one. She grabs their wings with her left hand and, holding the hen against her body, reaches into the hen’s ass with her right index finger. The egg is already waiting there, you can feel it with your finger. She counts how many eggs will be laid that day, and I always have to get all of them by evening. In winter I have to hurry a lot, because it grows dark very early.

  If there aren’t as many eggs as she counted in the morning, then she argues with me. My older sister has other tasks to do, so my mother argues with her about other things. The hens lay their eggs at noon. After lunch, I start to collect them. I know already where they hide them away, because they want to conceal the eggs. They aren’t brood hens, they don’t sit on the eggs, they just hide them away. In the haystacks, the piles of wood, behind the shed. Only a few hens sit in the nesting box, although it has been prepared for them.