The Rapid Advance of Sorrow
I sit in one of the cafés in Szent Endre, writing this letter to you, István, not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow, not knowing if this café will be here, with its circular green chairs and cups of espresso. By the Danube, children are playing, their knees bare below school uniforms. Widows are knitting shapeless sweaters. A cat sleeps beside a geranium in the café window.
If you see her, will you tell me? I still remember how she appeared at the University, just off the train from Debrecen, a country girl with badly-cut hair and clothes sewn by her mother. That year, I was smoking French cigarettes and reading forbidden literature. “Have you read D.H. Lawrence?” I asked her. “He is the only modern writer who convincingly expresses the desires of the human body.” She blushed and turned away. She probably still had her Young Pioneers badge, hidden among her underwear.
“Ilona is a beautiful name,” I said. “It is the most beautiful name in our language.” I saw her smile, although she was trying to avoid me. Her face was plump from country sausage and egg bread, and dimples formed at the corners of her mouth, two on each side.
She had dimples on her buttocks, as I found out later. I remember them, like craters on two moons, above the tops of her stockings.
Sorrow: A feeling of grief or melancholy. A mythical city generally located in northern Siberia, said to have been visited by Marco Polo. From Sorrow, he took back to Italy the secret of making ice.
That autumn, intellectual apathy was in fashion. I berated her for reading her textbooks, preparing for her examinations. “Don’t you know the grades are predetermined?” I said. “The peasants receive ones, the bourgeoisie receive twos, the aristocrats, if they have been admitted under a special dispensation, always receive threes.”
She persisted, telling me that she had discovered art, that she wanted to become cultured.
“You are a peasant,” I said, slapping her rump. She looked at me with tears in her eyes.
The principal export of Sorrow is the fur of the arctic fox, which is manufactured into cloaks, hats, the cuffs on gloves and boots. These foxes, which live on the tundra in family groups, are hunted with falcons. The falcons of Sorrow, relatives of the kestrel, are trained to obey a series of commands blown on whistles carved of human bone.
She began going to museums. She spent hours at the Vármuzeum, in the galleries of art. Afterward, she would go to cafés, drink espressos, smoke cigarettes. Her weight dropped, and she became as lean as a wolfhound. She developed a look of perpetual hunger.
When winter came and ice floated on the Danube, I started to worry. Snow had been falling for days, and Budapest was trapped in a white silence. The air was cleaner than it had been for months, because the Trabants could not make it through the snow. It was very cold.
She entered the apartment carrying her textbooks. She was wearing a hat of white fur that I had never seen before. She threw it on the sofa.
“Communism is irrelevant,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “I made a paprikás. I stood in line for two hours to buy the chicken.”
“There is to be a new manifesto.” Ash dropped on the carpet. “It will not resemble the old manifesto. We are no longer interested in political and economic movements. All movements from now on will be purely aesthetic. Our actions will be beautiful and irrelevant.”
“The paprikás has congealed,” I said.
