The Dispossessed

by Szilard Borbely

  “I’d hoped this day would never come,” says my mother after the long silence that Máli has left behind.

  “Go after her, accompany her to the train station.”

  I quickly jump on my bike. I find Máli halfway there already. I awkwardly pedal up to her. I get off the bike.

  “Let me accompany you,” I say. She stops. She puts down her bag. A dark-brown bag with two handles. Every old woman has one like that. It’s made of fake leather. The bag is already broken and cracked, like Máli’s face. Her eyes are red, tears are flowing out of them. Her eyeballs are tiny and red. Her drooping eyelids hang down and dangle beneath the wrinkly bags under her eyes. As if her eyeballs were contracting. The tears flow out of them. She turns to me.

  “Let me say farewell to you, if I cannot say farewell to your sister. We shall not see each other again in this lifetime. Let me kiss you,” she says.

  I let her. I always used to be repelled by these kisses. She kisses me three times. From right to left, from left to right, and finally on my forehead. Before, she also used to kiss me on my mouth, because that was the custom with us. I didn’t allow it. I loved Máli, and yet I was also repelled by her. You could never take her seriously; she always remained a child. I accompany her. I see that she no longer hopes for anything. Like someone who regrets something too late but whose conscience has become lighter for it, that is what she is like now. Her gaze is clearer. She no longer asks for anything. She no longer hopes for anything. She is freer now than when she came to us.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “Don’t accompany me, I want to go by myself.”

  “You must understand,” I say to her.

  “I understand. I understand now. But don’t accompany me anymore. Because now and forever, I will be alone. May God bless you. Keep me well in your memories.”

  She’s crying again. She bends her head down, she picks up her basket. She doesn’t speak, she doesn’t look back. She leaves. I look at her hunched back, her wizened body, until she turns into Vasút Street. I go home. My mother is sitting in the summer kitchen, and she’s crying.

  “Poor Máli,” she says. “May God forgive us.”

  “We couldn’t have done anything else,” I say to cheer her up.

  “We couldn’t have done anything else,” she says. There’s a question in her voice. “It didn’t have to be like this,” she says. She wipes her tears with the back of her hand. She goes outside. She takes down the hoe. She starts raking in the flower garden. She scrapes away at the dried earth in rage.

  WHEN WE WERE ALREADY LIVING IN THE OTHER HOUSE, I came across the architectural plans for our old house. It was a copy, prepared on transparent waxy paper. It had been made with carbon paper, a simple mesh of blue-purplish lines. It contained the ground plan, the facade, and the side elevation. It was a very simple plan, with a window in front, two windows on the side, and one door. One kitchen room plus larder, as they called it. A chimney on the low-falling roof. An open veranda. Then the four cardinal directions, the crosslines indicating orientation. Everything straight lines and parallels. You can’t see the mold in the drawing. You can’t hear the fighting. Thirteen years of bitterness aren’t in it. Thirteen cannot be divided. You don’t see the poverty in it. Suddenly I saw it as being so beautiful that without my mother knowing, I took it into the city, to the frame-maker’s workshop.

  “You want to frame this?” the man asked. I sensed doubt in his voice. I felt hurt that he didn’t take me seriously. I was not yet eighteen years old. I often felt at that time that people didn’t take me seriously.

  “Yes, I want to get this framed,” I answered.

  “Fine, then. What kind of frame do you want for it?” he asked, but I felt from this point on that he wasn’t taking me seriously. I was just an adolescent who didn’t have to be taken seriously.

  “The simplest one, I just want a frame for it,” I said, beginning to feel uncertain.

  “Good,” he said, and he quickly folded up the drawing. He turned his back to me and put it in a drawer. Then he paid no attention to me. He was doing something, I only saw his back. When I saw the drawing disappear before my eyes, I wanted to ask for it back. I waited for a long time. When he finally turned around, he seemed surprised that I was still there. He asked me a meaningless question so as to get rid of me.

  “Do you want to pay for it now, or when it’s ready?” he asked, and he didn’t look at me. I didn’t trust him. He didn’t look at me anymore.

  “I’ll pay for it when it’s ready,” I said. I stood there for a little while longer, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. But the man didn’t notice me anymore. He looked to the side, arranged something on the table. On the wall there were framed certificates of honor for outstanding brigades of socialist labor. On the table there were frames, listels, glass plates everywhere. The counter was made from a simple piece of planed wood. It didn’t seem like a business, more like a workshop. In the back, there was a big table where another man was working. Or at least he made it look like he was working. I slowly backed out of the shop. I was offended, suspecting that these men had not taken my request seriously.

  I thought that everything could have a frame. A frame holds things together. I went out to the bus stop, because the frame shop was halfway between the gymnasium and the bus stop. I waited for the bus going home. I looked out the window.

  At home I told my mother that I had taken the architectural plan to be framed.

  “You shouldn’t have,” she answered.

  “I found it a while ago in the box. I liked it. It’s a clear and simple drawing,” I said.

  “What’s the point? We’re not in it, just the empty room. Nothing that happened to us is in it . . .”

  Maybe that’s what I liked about it. That it was just numbers and lines. But I didn’t say this to my mother. Her comment made me realize something. Because afterward, I really didn’t understand why I had liked this technical drawing prepared with carbon paper.

  “And where do you want to put it?” my mother asked.

  “Well, we can put it somewhere on the wall,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. I saw her gaze darken. She didn’t cry. It was just that her eyes became like the air above the river at twilight. Like the afternoon sky in the summer above the Túr, when the tips of the swallows’ wings cleaved the surface of the water. The air was always steamy. You could already feel the approaching thunderstorm. Or the approach of twilight, when the huge red disk of the sun prepares to tumble over the horizon. Then the beetles set to flight, the swallows circle. Now my mother’s eyes turned cornflower blue like that. Like the horizon above the fields when the sun goes down, when the dew descends.

  Her mood darkened.

  “You know best.” That’s all she said. We never spoke about it again. Just as we never spoke about the Little One.

  I NEVER WENT BACK TO THE FRAME-MAKER. I NEVER WENT back for the blueprint. If he ever even framed it. But maybe he knew better than me, maybe he knew people better, and he never even started. He put it away, deep inside one of the many drawers in the workshop. Then, later on, when they were clearing things out, it was thrown out. Thinking things over, I don’t even know why I wanted to frame that blueprint. Maybe what I liked about it is that we weren’t in the picture. That it represented a kind of ideal scheme, in which everything is perfect. The straight lines are really straight, and the parallel lines are really parallel. Our house wasn’t like that. If I think about it more carefully, our house didn’t even resemble the blueprint. The house in the picture was another house, a perfect house, one in which people don’t live.

  And subsequently, from that recognition, I felt ashamed.

  My mother was right: there was no place to put it. There was no wall in our house where it could have been hung. There had been no point in getting it framed.

  In the beginning, I just kept putting off going back for it. Then, for a long time, I forgot all about the drawing in the cave-like workshop. I only
remembered the man’s back in his brown working cloak. The seam along the middle of the cloak, between the shoulder blades, was torn. The pockets extended and dangled outward on both sides. The pocket of the left side was ripped halfway open. It hung and swayed in the air. We call it swyed.

  The torn-off pocket of the work cloak swyed. And this, too, meant a little bit of freedom in that time when sloppiness counted as the slight wobbling of an incomprehensible order. The privations that were familiar, and the transience that could never be familiar—the transience in which we still live today.

  And we think that it is freedom, but its limits are unknown to us.

  ENDNOTES

  2 kulaks: Kulaks were the wealthier peasants of Czarist-era Russia, who owned their own land, as opposed to being hired laborers. They were heavily persecuted during the collectivization of agricultural land in the Soviet Union and subsequently in Soviet satellite nations after World War II.

  3 Rákosi: Mátyás Rákosi (1892–1971), leader of Hungary from 1949 to 1956, and fervent Stalinist.

  15 He leaves early in the morning; he has to be at the collective by six a.m.: As with all the Eastern Bloc states, agriculture in Hungary was collectivized after World War II. In Hungary, the collective farms were known as termelőszövetkezet (farmers’ agricultural cooperatives), commonly shortened to TSzK. The work brigades, or work units, were officially voluntary but actually compulsory institutions: all people of working age living in the area had to help with specific tasks at the collective farms, usually during harvesting or planting.

  27 Horthy mansion: Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), regent of Hungary from 1920 to 1944. Horthy’s rule was marked by the persecution of political opponents and increasing anti-Semitism. He led Hungary into its alliance with the Axis powers in World War II. The mansion mentioned here is Horthy’s birthplace, in the village of Kenderes.

  29 March 15 holiday: The main Hungarian national holiday, commemorating the Revolution of 1848.

  30 Petőfi: Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), revolutionary Romantic poet who led the Revolution of 1848 and died in the struggle against Habsburg rule.

  34 battered pengős: The pengő was the currency of Hungary from 1927 to 1946. After disastrous hyperinflation following World War II, it was replaced by the current forint.

  34 Jutas: A village in Hungary, the site of a military training center for the Hungarian gendarmerie under the regency of Miklós Horthy (1920–1944).

  35 It is forbidden to till this unplowed balk: A balk is an unplowed strip of land.

  37 Dörmögő Dömötör: A children’s monthly founded in 1957, still published today.

  47 Matador powder: DDT powder, commercially marketed in Hungary in the 1960s.

  61 cholent: A traditional Jewish stew eaten on the Sabbath.

  74 In the Caucasus: The uncle was taken prisoner of war by the Soviet Army during Hungary’s involvement in the invasion of the USSR alongside the Axis forces in World War II. The Axis forces were defeated near the town of Svoboda on the Don River in 1943.

  117 “Which story should I tell, the one about the ell or the one about music?”: An ell is an archaic measure of length, roughly the length of an arm from hand to elbow.

  119 Then the Russians took him away . . . : The grandfather was also taken prisoner of war by the Soviet army in World War II. See endnote for page 74.

  122 “My grandparents were Ruthenian,” she says. “They lived in Szlatina. They came from there. From somewhere near Munkács”: “Ruthenian” refers to members of East Slavic minorities, i.e., Ukrainians and Rusyns, who lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and still inhabit the Trans Carpathian Region of Ukraine, northeastern Slovakia, Serbia, southeastern Poland, Hungary, and Romania today. Ruthenian (or Ruthene) is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Eastern Europe. (Not to be confused with Old Church Slavonic, which is the liturgical language of the Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches in the Slavic countries.) Munkács is the Hungarian name of the town of Mukachevo in today’s Ukraine. It was part of the Principality of Transylvania in the sixteenth century, and was later absorbed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Szlatina probably refers to the town of Alsószlatina (Lower Slatina; Ukrainian: Nizhne Solotvino) in Ukraine.

  140 Until one day, the county envoy appeared. He came from Károly, accompanied by the county hajduks. The hajdúks were irregular or mercenary soldiers of the Kingdom of Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  144 “—but from now on, they were going to be the pious flock of the Uniate Church . . .”: The Uniate Church, also known as the Eastern-Rite Catholic Church, traditionally grew out the early schisms of the Church in Asia Minor as early as the fifth century. In Eastern Europe, however, it was employed by the Habsburg Empire as an institutional means of assimilating formerly Eastern Orthodox populations who either joined the Uniate Church or were forcibly converted, as is depicted here.

  150 when Gömbös’s men came up with the land reforms: Gyula Gömbös (1886–1936) was the prime minister of Hungary from 1932 until his death.

  150 Levente corps: Mandatory military youth corps in Hungary under the Horthy regime for young men ages thirteen to twenty-one.

  162 they were members of the Arrow Cross . . . : The Arrow Cross Party was a fascist party that came to power after Horthy’s removal by Nazi Germany in October 1944. Led by Ferenc Szálasi (1897–1946), the party initiated even more destructive terror against Hungary’s remaining Jewish population, who were by then largely in Budapest. Earlier, Horthy had ordered deportations of a large percentage of the Jewish population from provincial towns and rural areas to Nazi death camps.

  166 They were behind Trianon, too: The Treaty of Trianon was the 1920 peace agreement that formally ended World War I between most of the Allies and the Kingdom of Hungary. The treaty deprived Hungary of two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population.

  169 As if Béla Kun could have been responsible for everything: Béla Kun (1886–1938) was a Hungarian Communist revolutionary and head of the short-lived socialist Hungarian Republic of Councils in 1919. After his government fell, he fled to Austria and then the USSR, where he died in Stalin’s purges. The fact that he was Jewish has often been used by anti-Semites to denounce all Jews for the advent of Communism in Hungary.

  178 He was a D-officer: The term D-officer refers to Section D of the Communist-era secret police in Hungary (ÁVH). D-officers supervised individual agents within the general population.

  183 It’s been seventeen years since I came home from the Caucasus: See endnotes for pp. 74 and 119.

  184 He told me about the Don: This refers to one of the decisive battles on the Eastern Front during World War II (the Ostrogozhsk–Rossosh Offensive), in which the Soviet Army began to turn back the forces of Nazi Germany and its allies Italy and Hungary following Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. The Hungarian Army, ill equipped and ill prepared, suffered massive losses as it was commanded to hold its position at a bend of the Don River against the Soviets even while the Germans were in full retreat.

  184 About the atrocities of the Hungarian military police in the army camps: This refers to the reprisals of the Hungarian military police against Ukrainian villagers who helped anti-Nazi partisans, as opposed to the actions of the Germans in the same territory.

  190 shochet: Kosher ritual butcher.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SZILÁRD BORBÉLY (1963–2014) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important poets to emerge in post-1989 Hungary. He worked in a wide variety of genres, including essay, drama, and short fiction, usually dealing with issues of trauma, memory, and loss. His poems have appeared in English translation in The American Reader, Asymptote, and Poetry Magazine. His verse collection Berlin–Hamlet is forthcoming from NYRB Classics. Borbély received many awards for his work, including the Attila József Prize.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY SZILÁRD BORBÉLY

  Berlin–Ham
let

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Cover illustration © Philippe Sainte-Laudy Photography / Getty Images

  COPYRIGHT

  The translator would like to thank the Translators’ House in Balatonfüred, Hungary, where part of this translation was completed.

  THE DISPOSSESSED. Copyright © 2013 by Szilárd Borbély. English-language translation copyright © 2016 by Ottilie Mulzet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published as Nincstelenek: Már elment a Mesijás? in Hungary in 2013 by Kalligram.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-236408-1

  EPub Edition November 2016 ISBN 9780062364098

  16 17 18 19 20 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

  Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

  Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

  www.harpercollins.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

  www.harpercollins.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

  Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

  Rosedale 0632

  Auckland, New Zealand