For this week’s Translation Tuesday, psychological horror meets scathing social commentary in Eszter T. Molnár’s “Invisibles.” From the first paragraph we’re primed by imagery that’s both mundane and otherworldly—cupcake perfume and short skirts appear alongside a “vibrating blue” sky and decorative figures of preternatural monsters. Our protagonist, an exchange student seeking solace in drinking and hookups, reluctantly attends a Halloween party. But when a horrific discovery is made, the party is split between deniers and . . . deniers? Our protagonist’s indifference (itself demonstrating the benumbing effects of violence), plus the partygoers’ inebriated hostility and homophobia, and the ever-present face of youthful vacuity and diffusion of responsibility, set the stage for a tragedy that reads more like a nightmare. An important voice in contemporary Hungarian literature, Molnár addresses gender violence and domestic abuse in vivid, psychologically nuanced detail. “Invisibles” is one such study on how we interpret and (mis)handle horrific acts of violence.
The sky was still vibrating blue, but the shadows were preparing themselves along the base of the houses. As he wound his way through leaping skeletons, witches, and vampires, Tamás caught scent of the girls’ cupcake perfume. He stopped in front of a shabby tenement house. Bikes were parked along the sidewalk, in the street, even in the flowerbeds. He pushed open the door, stepped into the inner courtyard, and beside the trash cans, he leaned his bike against the wall, next to Varja’s. Her bike was decorated with plastic flowers. Please don’t leave trash next to the containers, put it in the bins! was written across the crimson sign in white letters.
He rang the bell three times, but the tune of “Für Elise” was lost in the music swelling up from inside. He started shivering. His damp sweater was sticking to his back, underneath his coat. It was a stupid idea to come, he thought, and he turned to leave, when the door burst open, and a sheet swept down over his head. They pulled him into the vestibule, circled around him, pushed him back and forth to each other. They were the spiders, he was the prey. Even though he’d expected something like this, his pulse went into a frenzy. He struggled helplessly, the blood throbbing in his ears stifled out the shrieking and choked laughter. He crashed into the wall, and fell to the ground.
“You can knock it off,” he said, with strained calmness, and they tore the musty cloth off his head. He picked himself up, and looked at his face in the mirror. His eyes were wide, like someone completely stoned.
“Tamás, I thought you wouldn’t show your face around here anymore,” Dino, the host, said, slapping him on the back. “Where have you been?”
Tamás threw up his hands, but didn’t explain. Dino wouldn’t have listened anyways.
The party had hardly been going on for an hour, but everyone was already wasted. Tamás went straight to the kitchen, where Alessandro was pushing Tati, a half Chilean girl, up against the snack counter between the dirty plates. Tamás greeted them. He fished a beer out of the cooler, then thought twice about it, and picked up a half-full vodka glass instead. He went out into the living room. He didn’t want to look for Varja right away, he knew sooner or later they’d run into each other.
The flat must have been an upper-middle-class home once, with a servant’s quarter and two parlors, but since eight of them had been living there, its grandeur had worn off. Now that it was full of attractive girls, it didn’t seem so run down, it just had a stale smell. Dino loved being the host at Halloween. He decorated the living room with spiderwebs and snake heads, scared the newly arrived Asian girls with his plastic vampire teeth. He had a weakness for Asian girls. He’d dumped Tati for a manga character a few weeks ago. Tamás lazily made his rounds, looking for people he knew, but nobody responded to his hello, and he came so quickly out of their focus, as if body were made of some transparent material. His phone vibrated. Unknown number flashed across the screen, but he suspected it was Kata. It was pointless putting his phone back in the pocket of his jeans—he felt the vibration in his thigh even longer. Nowadays they spoke even less, especially since the night in October when Tamás had walked Varja home.
Dino knew how to throw a party. There must have been a hundred people there, mostly girls in short skirts. The majority of them probably hadn’t been in town more than two weeks, and they still accepted every invitation.
Tamás tried to chat up a blonde girl, but his words kept bouncing off of her, she just hummed softly to herself, then let out a quiet laugh, because maybe she’d seen something funny on the other side of the room. Tamás was invisible, as if the sheet they’d thrown over him when he arrived was still on his head.
The “scary” decorations were already starting to peel off the walls, the shreds of snakes and bats trembling to the rhythm of the music. In the middle of the room, Varja swayed side to side, her long, bright hair illuminating the lusting boys and the plain girls around her. She looked up, and her gaze passed over Tamás, but her expression remained unmoved. Tamás grew dizzy. He stepped closer to her, tried a few uncertain moves. He stretched out his sweaty palm towards Varja’s waist, but only grasped hold of air. The girl’s look was cold, like moonstone. Tamás resolved to really dance, but he couldn’t handle the swaying of his arms, and a few minutes later he was leaning against the doorframe, watching Varja.
In the end he just stuck to Dino’s room. For an hour or two nothing happened. He could hardly hear what everyone was talking about, just stared forward absently, counting the stains in the rug, and if it came around to him, he took a drag from the hookah pipe’s wet mouthpiece. Maybe once or twice he went to the bathroom or out for air, but he didn’t go looking in the living room, where he knew Varja would be. His phone rang four times, but he didn’t reach for his pocket, he let the vibrations travel all the way up to his head and then sail off above him. He saw Kata in front of him, how she used to sit on the bed and wrap the ends of her hair around her finger, how it always tormented him when they fought. The lock of hair was frayed at the end, where it became lighter, hazel-colored.
He’d come out of the bathroom when the doorbell rang. His hands were still wet when he pushed the handle, dark droplets dripping onto his shoes. A forty-something-year-old man was standing in the doorway, his stern expression not at all fitting his rosebud-patterned nightgown. Dino came running, maybe twenty people on his tail, but when they saw it wasn’t a guest, they dropped the sheet. Tamás stepped back. The man in the nightgown started to explain in broken English that the baby couldn’t sleep because of the loud music.
“We have permission,” Dino said with a shrug, because they really did have a permit with a policeman’s stamp on it. They’d even hung it up next to the gate.
“I know,” the man said, his gaze jumping from one face to another. “But you don’t need to be screaming in the courtyard.”
“What do two faggots need children for?” Oleg blurted. “I couldn’t sleep either, if I were them.”
“I hope they aren’t still breast-feeding!” a girl threw in, a platinum blonde.
The man’s face flushed.
“Alright, old man, we’ll turn it down,” Dino said to him, and he patted his shoulder, before slamming the door in his face.
The hallway quickly emptied, Tamás was the only one to remain, unwittingly, in front of the wallpaper’s twisting patterns. His deep, throbbing pulse was turning over his insides. He opened the door, stepped out again into the courtyard, lit a cigarette, and sat down on the edge of the concrete flowerbox. The bikes were leaning over to one side, their silver handlebars gleaming. At the foot of the trash cans lay a large heap of clothes, worn out and discarded costumes, a little farther back, as if it had rolled out of the bike’s flower-laced basket and into the mud, a head was lying on the ground, its dirty, blonde wig sticking together from puddle water. It was already past midnight, and most of the flats were now dark, the only faint, glimmering light coming from the neighbor’s on the ground floor. Maybe they put a towel over the reading lamp, Tamás thought, because that’s what his mom did when his brother kept waking up every night in a panic. Ever since, Tamás couldn’t sleep with the lights out.
He shivered and grabbed his vodka glass. He should call Kata back. He had to say something to her, that he was staying here, that he was never coming back, and he never wanted to see her again. He opened the door. Two shadows stepped out into the night, silently collapsing into one another beneath the bathroom window. Tamás tossed away his cigarette; it sizzled against the damp stone.
He went back into the apartment, drifting through the smoke-filled rooms like a ghost. There was no point looking for familiar faces. They were impossible to make out, their features crumpling from all the alcohol. He felt dirty, as if mold was rushing into his pores, the vodka glass growing slippery in his hand from sweat. Then suddenly the door burst open, and the couple from outside rushed in. The girl locked herself in the bathroom and started retching. The boy was deathly pale. His name was Raffaele, maybe.
“There’s a head in the courtyard,” he shouted, his voice breathless, sharp.
“It’s just a mask,” Tamás said, but Raffaele didn’t listen to him.
“There’s a head in the courtyard! There’s a head in the courtyard!” he repeated. “I think it’s Varja’s.”
Tamás clutched his stomach. He went into the kitchen. The girls wearing glasses were still sitting there, same as they had been two hours before, but Alessandro was now pressing the platinum-blonde girl up against the counter. Tamás slowly washed the vodka glass, the moaning growing louder, then he placed it on the drying rack, and stepped out into the hallway. More and more people had gathered around Dino and Raffaele.
“Shouldn’t somebody call a doctor?” one of the guys asked.
“Her head is two meters away from her body,” said someone else.
One girl started giggling nervously—another buried her face in her hands.
“Hey, what’s with the hysterics, people?” Dino demanded. “You’re such an asshole, Raffaele. How could it be Varja? She didn’t even go outside. Someone’s fucking with you. I’m telling you, someone’s tried to fuck with you, but if you don’t think so, then go out, and take a closer look.”
Dino looked around triumphantly. His forehead was shining, and his eyes were slightly crossed, but the girls still sighed in relief, and the boys shrugged their shoulders. Only Raffaele didn’t seem convinced, but by looking at him, it was clear that he wasn’t going to go out to determine if it was a mask or a head.
When the hallway cleared, Tamás stepped out from underneath the coat hooks. He opened the door with his coat sleeve, and as he pulled it closed behind him, he wiped off the outer handle as well. He read the crimson sign. Please don’t leave trash next to the containers, put it in the bins! He lifted the bike off the ground. The blonde hair was sticking together from the head’s clotting blood. Now, soaked in filth, he couldn’t remember its soft beauty from just a moment ago, in its moon-colored eyes there was no more allure, no more arrogance. Tamás sat on his bike, and wound his way into the empty street. At first he pedaled slowly, the sharp, icy wind cutting through his thin coat, but as he warmed up, he made his way through the unlit streets faster and faster, the length of the sleeping town. He decided he would call Kata in the morning. He would tell her that he’d been working late, and that when he got home, he fell asleep.
Translated from the Hungarian by Kristen Herbert
Eszter T. Molnár was born in 1976 in Budapest, Hungary. After receiving her doctorate in immunology, she worked as a researcher in Freiburg, Germany. She received the Margó Award in literature for her Young Adult novel Stand up! This Book is Forbidden. Since 2016 she has published a number of works, including her short story collection The Numbered (A számozottak), from which this work originates. Her latest novel, Teréz, The Body’s Memory (Teréz, a test emléke), is a trilingual account of a woman’s life abroad as she struggles to overcome childhood abuse.
Kristen Herbert moved from Chicago to rural Hungary in 2016 as an English teacher, and she has been studying the Hungarian language ever since. She has previously published translations of Eszter T. Molnár’s work in Hungarian Literature Online. Her other translated or original writings have appeared in Waxwing Magazine, Columbia Online Journal, Cleaver Magazine, and soon in Panel Magazine. Today she lives in Budapest.
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