Full of dark humor and vibrant details, today’s Translation Tuesday, by Réka Mán-Várhegyi and translated by Owen Good, shows the inner workings of a Hungarian family. Dealing with obesity, sibling relationships, and emerging sexuality, this gripping story captures that uncomfortably liminal time known as adolescence.
‘It’ll be beach weather at the weekend,’ our mum squeaked. ‘Get your swimming costumes ready, we’re going to the lake. Dad, have you checked the batteries in the cooler bag? Does it still work? We’ll not miss it if we don’t buy a new one. No point in wasting money.’
Panni was staring at her hand. I was counting the strips in the rotting wainscot on the dining room wall. We didn’t put up any protest but we didn’t want to go to the lake and they knew it. We didn’t want to lie in the sun in swimsuits, we didn’t want to soak in the water, and, most of all, we didn’t want to gawp at jet-skis. Every summer, jet-skis tore up and down the puddle-sized lake with pornstar-esque girls and boys on them, our classmates, but at least in school they didn’t shriek all day long.
I was born into a fat, hemorrhoidal family as the younger member of fraternal twins. By our teenage years, Panni and I had turned into sluggish potato sacks, we’d become our own parents one size smaller. Later on it became clear that our features weren’t overly similar, but the differences between us were hidden by the fat, just like our parents. When I was seventeen the spare pounds didn’t hurt so much as the fact that I didn’t have any distinguishing features. After class Panni and I often went to the wood, we sat on our coats at the foot of a tree, smoked a cigarette each and scratched our faces with thorns. We both wanted a proper scar. But these were just pathetic thin scratches. They healed in half a day. Especially on my skin—which was positively brown compared to Panni’s milky white—when I wiped the blood off you couldn’t even see them.
The true test of bravery, we said to each other, will be when we put out a burning cigarette on our own bodies. That’ll be a battle scar, I said. A stamp, she said. I wanted to try it on my upper arm, she on her face.
At the time I knew perfectly well that we lived in a dump. I loathed the me of a few months ago who thought this place was normal, that we were surrounded by normal people and that everything was fine. Now I had some clue about the world. Panni had notions about the world as well. Among others, that our parents had never wanted children, they just didn’t realise in time. If they could have actually chosen, she asked me, if someone had asked them which they’d prefer but they were to properly think about it, a child or a pot plant, what do you think they’d have chosen?
‘The blue razor’s in the bottom drawer,’ our mum went on, while sucking on a chicken bone. ‘Girls, whip it around your pits and your shins, and shave yourselves a bikini line while you’re at it. Let’s have some standards.’
‘I’ll do my bikini line too, if you like, Mumsie,’ winked our dad, and they both burst out laughing like someone had pressed a button. For a while now, their laugh had been intrusive and overbearing. They tried to woo us into laughing with them, isn’t that funny, their faces asked. But we never gave in. Panni sat over her plate unflinching, and I sprung up theatrically, limited somewhat by the tight space and my own acting abilities.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ I said. Recently I’ve grown to like acting tough. I imagined I was a character in a film, although instead of striding off a film set, I squeezed my way out of our hideous panelled dining room. My mum and sister had to stand up to let me out. They had to push the table out a bit towards our dad, who just cowered like a moron, the uneasiness showing on his face. He was a weak-willed, martyr type who immediately heard voices in his head, repeating over and over that he never acted with his parents like this, that he gave us everything, that he doesn’t understand how he could deserve all this.
It was a narrow space around the table, no wonder we could hear each other’s thoughts. These flats were designed with spatial economy in mind. The smaller rooms were put beside one another, so the toilet was directly next door to the dining room. Although our discreet parents had filled the toilet wall with foam, all that accomplished was that we could no longer hear the gushing and frothing in the far corners of the flat. We’d learned that during mealtimes we could only go for a number one.
A minute later our mum completely violated this rule, shouting after me:
‘I don’t hear any puking!’
But through the foam I could clearly hear the wicked affectation in her voice. I could have punched someone. I stuck my fingers down my throat, and taking care that the retching would be loud enough, I threw up my dinner, as promised. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it. I returned to the room pleased with myself. Our mother gave me a horrified look and I felt like a triumphant general. I knew it hurt her to see money-bought food ending up in the sewer.
‘You’re not right in the head, I’m telling you,’ she said under her breath.
My big sister answered for me.
‘If she’s not right in the head, neither am I.’
‘Then you aren’t either.’
Our mother usually regarded us with suspicion. Maybe she’d got it into her head that we were already conspiring against her in the womb.
We sat on the lakeside, us under a tree, our mum and dad on the sand close to the water. It must have been a billion degrees. We didn’t watch but we could hear them perfectly, spreading sun cream onto one another, wading into the water, coming out again, drying under the sun, grabbing a beer from the cooler bag, mum pouring a bit for herself into a plastic glass, dad drinking the rest from the bottle.
‘Do you think they really do love each other?’ asked Panni, who had given up to the summer heat, taking off her clothes and throwing herself down in the black one-piece swimsuit on the huge SpongeBob beach towel. Underneath her was the waving, always happy SpongeBob SquarePants, and beside her, my spot, was the stupid, grinning Patrick Star.
‘No idea,’ I answered. With all the throwing up I’d lost a few kilos, and now I could comfortably sit cross-legged.
‘Even if they don’t love us, I hope they at least love each other,’ said my sister, and it shocked me. Despite the arguments I’d never considered that they didn’t love us. But once again Panni was one step ahead. Why hadn’t it occurred to me? I felt myself growing weak, maybe it was the weight of the thought, maybe it was the heatwave, I had to lie down on Patrick Star.
‘We’re their children. We look like them, they have to love us,’ I said.
‘That’s the thing,’ said my sister. ‘We look the same, and so do they, and two of the same is already plenty. They can handle each other’s obesity, but they can’t handle ours. We’re too much like them, that’s their problem. That’s our problem too.’
Panni had been reading books on psychology recently.
‘Well I’m grateful to them for bringing me into the world,’ I said, because inside me I was hanging on to the faintest conviction that it makes sense to respect your parents for that act at least.
Panni shook her head.
‘We have to accept it, we’ve got a lousy inheritance. Unlucky, obese, uncultured and all the rest. It can take decades to counter that. You’ve nothing to be grateful for.’
‘You two aren’t too hot? Are you enjoying yourselves?’ Mum called over. ‘Don’t you want to eat something? Or drink something?’
‘I’d murder a burger,’ my sister answered.
‘Then get yourselves burgers at the stand and bring two beers for your dad, let him enjoy his weekend!’
We got to our feet. Panni wrapped a towel around her waist, we slipped into our flip-flops and I stuffed mum’s money into my pocket.
‘We’ll be back,’ I said. Our mum had already turned away.
‘Hurry up, I’m drying out,’ added our dad.
We had to climb a sandy bank to get to the path running around the lake. With all these pounds and in these flip-flops it was never easy, but back then it didn’t bother us so much. The lakeshore was partitioned into spaces of a few square metres by bushes, and from up here we could see how the beachgoers had kitted themselves out. They’d set up inflatable armchairs and shaded beach shelters; towels and swimming suits hung to dry on the branches of trees; some had brought barbecues, coolers, even radios. When we came to the lake, we always left at dawn so we’d be sure to get the same patch of shore, with the rising sun opposite. The beachgoers—hyperactive children, shrieking women and roaring men—set up camp further down the shore on the sandy beach. Our neighbours were quiet, ageing, well-bronzed nudists. I found it comforting to be among so many disgusting bodies. Although usually we couldn’t so much see the others, as guess, thanks to the bushes and trees, on the way to the burger stand or the toilet, within minutes we might spy half a dozen near-melted male sexual organs. Or as our mum repulsively put it: dingly-danglies.
All the life was on the sandy beach and that’s where the line of food stands was. There were only two sellers working on our stretch. Guests could expect burgers, deep-fried dough, beer, scalding plastic seats and relative silence. I didn’t want to eat, even though mum never spared money when it came to food, but I was afraid to stuff myself with this junk. I slowly slurped my diet-cola through the straw and gawked in the direction of the lake. Panni was eating greasy deep-fried dough coated in sour cream and cheese. As usual, she skimmed the cheese and cream off first with her tongue, and then tore off the dough in strips.
We had been coming here for years, we spent our childhood here, and we still didn’t know the food seller’s name. We didn’t even know if she had kids, a family. She was an ageless woman; if she wasn’t frying dough, chopping pickles or loading beer from one fridge into another, then she was leaning on her elbows in the window and watching the lake, like we were now.
Not many young people came here, and those who did were all complete idiots. As we were sitting there, two younger girls appeared, they must have been eleven or twelve years old, one of them had a bicycle between her legs and was shouting at the other to sit on the handlebars.
‘Don’t throw a hissy fit,’ she said to her. It looked as though they’d been arguing for a while. The other girl gave in and tried to climb onto the front of the bike. From a distance, we could see she was right to be scared, she was going to go flying at the first bump. The first girl, paying no heed to the danger whatsoever, got onto the saddle and carried on directing her utterly identical—I’d only realised—twin sister. They started moving.
‘I can’t watch,’ I said, and looked away.
But Panni called over to stop because they were going to keel over. The girl sitting on the handlebars leapt down like a grasshopper.
‘I don’t want to die because of you!’ she said to her sister.
‘Are you really such a wimp?’ replied the other.
We stood up and walked over.
‘What do you want?’ shouted the angry one. It was obvious we weren’t the reason she was worked up, most probably she’d suffered considerable injustices throughout the day, and now we were just making her life harder.
‘Relax girls, it’s summer, have fun,’ my sister replied.
They were pretty girls; blonde, well-proportioned. Their nails were painted and their faces were made up. It was clear they’d nothing good coming in life.
‘You got a cigarette?’ one of them asked, and took a step closer. I shook my head.
‘Anyway you shouldn’t smoke.’
‘It’s none of your business what we do,’ said the other. ‘Do you know the time at least?’
‘After eleven,’ said my sister.
‘Can’t you check your phone?’
‘No, I can’t,’ she replied. ‘We’ve not even any phone on us.’
And they jumped us. They shoved us around and called us fat pigs, we didn’t dare punch them back, we just tried to get them off. Luckily it only lasted a couple of seconds because a boy appeared from nowhere and yelled at them to stop. He must have been the same age as us, and he looked like them except he had big ears. He yanked the little rats off us.
‘What’s going on here?’ he yelled at everyone.
‘We were trying to save their lives, and they returned the favour with a spot of rough housing,’ I said.
‘Rough housing,’ grinned one of the girls.
‘You ever heard the term smart alec?’ I asked. The girl shook her head.
‘I loathe the day you two were born, I haven’t had a second of peace since,’ said the boy, and the girls shook with laughter.
‘My name is Cable,’ said the boy, at which his sisters whooped even louder.
‘His name is Ábel,’ they shouted.
It turned out his name was Török Ábel, and when he introduced himself Ábel sounded like Cable.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Cable, ‘I think Cable is a way better name than Ábel.’
‘It’s not in the register to my knowledge,’ I said.
‘Doesn’t matter. And what’re your names?’
‘Tünde,’ my sister lied.
It seemed logical not to tell them our real names.
‘Xénia,’ I lied.
‘Xénia!’ said one of the girls.
‘Cool,’ nodded Cable.
‘I’m depressive, she’s bulimic,’ said my big sister.
‘Nice,’ replied the boy. ‘I know a secret beach by the river, do you want to see? It’s not far.’
Nobody had spoken to us in a long time. We weren’t the most popular students at school. We wouldn’t have kowtowed just because someone had invited us to a secret beach, but Cable seemed interesting with his stupid name and his big ears.
‘Why not?’ we replied. ‘To the secret beach.’
‘Hurrah,’ said the girls, who apparently didn’t want to beat us up anymore.
We set off towards the Danube. Cable told jokes and we laughed. We crossed the embankment, the railway lines, and that Stand by me film came to mind, which my sister and I had seen at least five times. We sighed with teary eyes for those American boys from the sixties. Such sound lads, good lads, we said, and not like the dumb, stinking little shit-munchers hanging around here.
‘Lollipop, lollipop, oh lolli, lolli, lolli,’ I started singing.
‘Nyári pop, nyári pop, oltári nyári nyári,’ my sister joined in with the Hungarian version.
The girls didn’t know the song, neither did Cable, but soon he was humming the humming bit at the end. In my head we were already like the Stand by me boys wandering along the train tracks. We only briefly thought of our parents, who were probably already expecting those two beers, but we weren’t at all worried.
‘Good tune that,’ said Cable.
‘It’s from a film,’ we answered. ‘Four American boys in the sixties go on a trip to find a dead body.
‘Whew,’ said the girls.
‘And then what happens?’ asked Cable.
‘It’s a test of their friendship,’ I answered.
‘They grow up and leave the small town,’ said my sister.
‘Just one of them,’ I said.
‘Two actually, the main character and his best friend who becomes a lawyer. But then he gets shot. And the main character becomes a writer.’
‘Do you two like reading?’ asked Cable.
‘Of course,’ we replied, because we read more than the average.
‘I don’t,’ laughed Cable, ‘but I like girls who do. And why does the lawyer get shot?’
‘He gets mixed up in a street gang war,’ my sister replied. ‘He dies a martyr. And that’s better than rotting away in a place like this. There’s no happy ending, but he manages to get out of the dusty town.’
‘Everyone is a prisoner of the conditions they were born in,’ I said.
‘Wow,’ said Cable. ‘Your chat’s pretty deep.’
‘Don’t you want to get out of this dump?’ my big sister asked him.
‘Of course I do,’ said Cable, and started talking about what kind of cool car he wanted and what kind of cool seaside villa. It was clear from the look of him he didn’t have a chance. My sister looked at me and I knew she was thinking the same thing. We’re not going to stay here. We’ll leave our mum and dad behind, we’ll leave their poverty and their slothfulness, their gestures and their misery all behind.
We cut through the bushes, climbed a fence and arrived at the secret beach. You really couldn’t see in from the road. At the edge of the river someone had built a dam from stones and formed a little pool.
‘It’s like a Jacuzzi, isn’t it?’ said one of the girls.
‘We always come here,’ said the other.
‘Nobody else knows about this place,’ said Cable. ‘Just a few of our pals and their pals. Nobody can see in. We can do what we want.’
‘And what do you do usually?’ I asked.
‘We act out our most secret desires,’ whispered Cable, and laughed.
The girls threw off their clothes, and threw themselves naked into the little inlet. Cable started getting undressed as well, and when his hand reached his trouser button, he looked at us. Panni shook her head.
‘I’m not taking my clothes off,’ she said.
‘Girls, nobody can see us, it’s just us,’ grinned Cable.
‘We don’t know you,’ I said.
‘I’m not ashamed in front of you two, even though my thingy’s not so big,’ answered Cable.
He threw off his trousers, and was standing naked in front of us. His dick seemed tauter, suppler than the leathery nudists.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’ll see, how good it is.’
He lowered himself into the water beside his sisters. The girls beckoned us in and tried to splash us. We were standing about three metres away from them. My heart was pounding. I vaguely thought that in this situation the most normal thing to do would be what they were doing. It was about one hundred degrees. I’d never bathed naked in the river. I took off my clothes, took off my panties, and slipped out of my bra. Cable and his sisters cheered. I stepped into the water, it was cool and fresh, nicer than the lake. From the corner of my eye I saw Panni tear off her black one-piece. I could feel the current of the river. The builder of the dam had made sure that there was somewhere to sit along the wall.
All five of us were in the water. I didn’t dare look at Panni.
‘It’s nice here, right?’ asked Cable, and we nodded. Then he said:
‘You two are beautiful, girls. You’re my type.’
‘Thanks,’ answered Panni.
Cable closed his eyes, and sighed.
‘I just imagined myself kissing you,’ he said. Seeing as we were sitting here naked, his comment didn’t surprise me, even so, I started laughing and coughing.
‘You don’t believe me?’ he asked.
‘No, I do,’ I answered.
‘Do you two ever make out?’ he asked.
‘With who?’ asked Panni.
‘With boys,’ asked Cable. ‘Or girls.’
I shook my head. We didn’t.
‘Maybe with each other. Don’t you ever practise on each other?’
‘As if,’ said Panni.
‘Well it’s important,’ says Cable. ‘You two are lucky to have each other.’
‘Practise is important,’ said one of the girls.
‘We practise,’ added the other. ‘You want to see?’
They didn’t wait, they were already pressing their lips up against one another. Cable watched his sisters contentedly.
‘Watch and learn,’ he whispered.
A moment later their skinny hands were touching one another. It all seemed expertly done.
Suddenly I remembered the most shameful memory. I’d managed to forget it for a few years, but now I could see perfectly the time Panni and I had played doctor. One of us would take off her trousers, and while she lay on her belly on the sofa, the other examined her naked bottom with the toy stethoscope.
‘Whew, someone’s gone red,’ sniggered the girls, who’d stopped the kissing.
I don’t know which one had spoken.
That’s when Panni lost the plot. She jumped up like she’d caught a leech. She headed towards the water’s edge, moving the water so much with every step it came up to our necks.
‘Where are you going?’ shouted Cable.
My legs were shaking but I stood up. I would have liked it to be an hour earlier, and not to have met this idiot family in front of the burger stand. I approached the shore with wavering steps. Panni was picking her swimsuit up off the ground.
‘What’s up girls, cold feet?’ Cable hollered after us, and his sisters repeated the question. Panni didn’t answer, she shook out her swimming costume and stuck one foot through. The foot didn’t go through the hole, her outside toes got stuck. As she tottered there on her short, stocky legs it occurred to me that she looked like a dodo bird. We had a picture of one with loads of other pictures hanging at the top of our wall.
It was as if she lost her balance the second I stepped ashore. My sister toppled like a sack of potatoes. She fell on her right side and lay there motionless for a few seconds. The others fell silent. It looked like Panni had dealt herself a fatal blow on her own head. I felt nothing. I stared at my sister and I felt like the breeze was blowing through me.
Gradually she stood up, clutching at her face with one hand.
‘I hate this swimsuit,’ she said.
She stretched out the swimming costume with her other hand and stuck her leg in the hole. Then with both hands she pulled the black monstrosity onto her body, and was pulling the straps over her shoulders when I noticed her face was bleeding.
‘I cut myself on the rocks,’ she said.
She looked at me, and repeated herself. Her expression looked like my mum’s. Then my dad’s.
‘You alright?’ I asked her weakly.
Everything happened in a flash. She picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at me. I found myself wrestling with my sister.
‘Cat fight!’ shouted Cable.
Panni was stronger than I thought. With one hand she pressed me down against the ground, and with the other she sliced the sharp edge of the stone into my arm. I whimpered, cried out, and saw the birds on the far bank take to the air.
Translated from the Hungarian by Owen Good
Réka Mán-Várhegyi (1979) spent her childhood in Târgu Mureș, Romania, and now lives in Budapest, working as an editor at a children’s book publisher. Her first collection of short stories, Boldogtalanság az Auróra-telepen (Unhappiness on Aurora Council Estate, 2014) was hailed as a surprisingly mature first volume. In 2018 she released her long-awaited first novel Mágneshegy (Magnet Mountain).
Owen Good, born in the north of Ireland, is a translator of Hungarian literature. Good studied Hungarian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in London before moving to Budapest in 2011. Besides translating, Good teaches at Péter Pázmány Catholic University, and is an editor of Hungarian Literature Online. Good has published in Asymptote (winner of the Close Approximations contest 2014), Hungarian Review, Hungarian Quarterly, Hungarian Literature Online, and Dalkey Archive Press’s Best of European Fiction 2016. He has worked with several writers, including Krisztina Tóth, Ferenc Barnás, György Petri, and Réka Mán-Várhegyi. For Seagull Books he is currently translating a collection of short stories by Transylvanian author Zsolt Láng (expected 2019), and the novel Pixel by Krisztina Tóth (expected autumn 2018).
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