Translation Tuesday: From “MetaXa” by László Garaczi

a spacious lonely month awaits me, pinned to it the remainder of my life at home, light trembling under the skin—I have to meet the middleman from Hamburg, we have to clarify the details of the mission; I don’t talk to anyone for days, I stagger around in the July heat, I slowly begin to understand that I cannot do anything with this city, sharp menacing hot unevenness, it does not let me come closer to itself no matter how sly or flattering I am, I cannot smuggle myself into its good graces and my patience is running out—it is hard to imagine that I will have to sun dry in the heat for another two weeks—a blind fire flares up from under the earth—even your shadow scorches—you jerk back from the flame that flashes at you from the dying waves on the shore or the white stones, the cars are colourful leeches on the steaming asphalt—you hover weightlessly without an outline and choke, and then, when you are ready to give up there is the miracle, a new era—you throw the red plastic camera into an armchair, fall asleep—wake—sleep, forget even the forgetting—you carry on with the mantra even when awake—the air conditioning monster crunches its iron teeth, a picture on the wall, the air vibrates with the colours as if humming—you wriggle around on the bed, the picture on the wall doesn’t let you sleep, it’s a salmon with a glory,

you go down to reception—name tag Saulius—he rants on an exhale: how-are-you-thanks- fine, he holds a lit cigarette between his ring and little finger—you ask for the key to the net room, the air conditioning is not working, the window opens to a filthy alleyway and a neon sign in the gap between the fire walls: Moon Palace—you visit a few hacker sites, they are selling stone samples brought from the moon in apollo 13, stolen from NASA with photos and prices; with your usual name: Asztrik, you enter a Hungarian language US-room, there are about ten of them around not excited to see you, a closed group and they have no time for you—they are busy bankrupting Cat Canada at the moment; Maximillia is the demon of the chat room—she dominates the territory, knows no mercy, brutal, real—are you rebelling slaves—she leaves and knows that they will talk about her—a few of them follow her straight away—and then there is only Little Strawberry left—silence—you’re waiting for her to say something; Detko enters and starts chatting: she is holidaying in New York, she gives you her number privately, call her and have a drink together—Little Strawberry remains silent all along; before you leave, you take a look at the Gellert Mountain on the web camera and the light chain of the Elizabeth Bridge, you twitch under the feelings flooding you—go up to your room, it is cooler now, but the air conditioner is screeching—you imagine Maximillia, the demon in Budapest and Detko, the giggling teenager in New York—you are lying alone in a ran-down room in Brooklyn, the dread pumps adrenaline into your brain, even though tomorrow will be summer, too, and a bank holiday—the skyscrapers are sparkling, two spinning numbers show how many people are living on the planet and how much they owe to the banks—the sun is beating down in the park, rock musicians wearing white on a podium, spinning dancers on skates, a guitar-shaped boxplant, toilet basin, skull, another bush shaped like a finger-biscuit, forget, forget, oblivion—the Chinese girl who taught you the word oblivion after a concert—you cannot remember her name—forgetting the problem is the solution; you wake up at noon, sweltering heat—you are sitting on a bench on the promenade near the bridge in the shade, on the other side of the water the houses are trembling in the rising steam, the smell of chips iodine dead fish rubber acetone—cities smell more in summer—little balls of different smells bang your nose, the last miserable smoker stubs out his last miserable cigarette in Manhattan; at night I’m again in the net room—the mouse lies exactly in the same angle on the mousepad showing the airplanes approaching the WTC towers; in one of the common areas at least forty of them are fighting, Maximillia amongst them—you don’t even check the name list when your private window appears—you are alone with the demon—what’s up, hi, Maximillia—you did not call Detko, upsy-daisy—she disappears, you search around: nothing, she left—you call Detko on an impulse—it is ringing, you have to concentrate to breathe—in and out;

the running engine of a camion—pneumatic hammer—steal thorns slicing the concrete, clanking, the rhythmical buffing sound of music—you cannot discriminate between the noises, you are waiting for Marina and salt blisters grow on your skin—a woman feeds a squirrel from a paper bag, a man in a suit is sitting on the floor cross-legged and types on his palmtop; punks with Iroquois crests thrown on rucksacks, a barefoot girl is practicing dance steps; blokes with earrings gazing at each other over the chess board, their sighted hands push the pieces;—this was the place where Warhol invited people to come to his studio, and asked them to piss on the metal dust covered plates, and the girls pissed puddles in their embarrassment; a week ago, at the same time at noon, you were sitting in the café in the Trump Tower, the coolness inside made a climatic trick out of the heatwave outside, Lalos Garcia was late, a black man wearing overall pushed the dust with his blue-haired brush; the guests, rebelling against the uniformed, globalised spirit of the place, all ate the hamburgers in a different way, with one hand, two hands, with napkin, without napkin, close to face, far from face, fast, slowly, while talking, reading, gazing, peeping into the hamburger before eating, some people only ate the inside, someone put down his triple sandwich like a Tower of Babel and chewed it down to the level of the table layer by layer, some of them left crumbs, or a bite as a ritual, or if something fell out they sneaked it back, others left it, and the ones who had put it back wiped their hands afterwards in different ways into their clothes/napkins/table, and there were some, of course, who did not wipe their hands, and there were some, who did not eat at all, just sitting there, like you; gastro-fascism and eating-democracy, they all ate the same thing, but they all did it in a different way, if they had eaten different things, perhaps they could have been united, but they were uniform eating machines at the conveyor belt of plastic counters; while they were fighting with the same hamburger their otherness became striking, eating the same food pointed out their differentness, the what-eating emphasised the who-eating, they were widening the cosmos with their teeth and chewing, the humans of the future will go on to differ not only from the specimens of today, but from their contemporaries also; Lalos Garcia’s handshake feels like putting your hand into a dough, male perfume, coffee, condensation sweat, leather shoes, cells with faulty metabolism; the history of a body wafted onto me in the form of vapours; does he want a cola, I ask—he does not drink cola, because the cola firm made an exclusive agreement with Hitler in thirty-eight, that was the coca-cola firm—but what about a pepsi or a fanta, you say—fanta, he shouted, am I joking with him, fanta was developed by Hitler himself to replace the cola in forty, he personally coined the word fanta out of fantastische, fanta is a chemically pure fascist cancerous growth, Nazi cordial, no thanks, he does not want anything, let’s come to the point—his eyes, in contrary to the rant, are dead and deserted, he pulls out a pile of files from the bag: photos proof of origin expert report detailed description of the production process of the Viola Damore—the buyer is a Syrian, Adel el Fadel, what a name—you bag the papers—as you step out into the street burning walls fall on you;

Marina is approaching from the direction of Barnes and Noble, hair gathered in two small buns, on her forehead sunglasses—how little she is—again I’m surprised—a Barbie doll, everything tiny yet shapedly and sharp yet contoured, on her face unevenness and chaos, the frisk, only her nose is straight as if carved from chalk, in the green of her eye a yellow blaze and naïve trust around her lips—playfulness—she weaves the freesia I give her into the strap of her top, a moment ago it was in your hand now it caresses her skin—she knew about the concert, Zsolt had given her your nickname, Asztrik, this is how she found you—by the way, she is here to visit her mother; dirty desire squats behind your displeasure; a black man wearing a top hat casts cards onto a small fold-up table, on the wall graffiti saying: todos somos illegales—everybody is illegal—a firm’s sign: Manroth and Sons, walruses bathing behind the bars of the Zoo—the walrus is the only mammal that has a bone in its penis—you have not said a word to each other for over a minute; you have to prove that you are a pleasant conversationalist, an alfa male who can sublimate his desire intelligently, you are polite, well-versed attentive yet decisive, masculine; you are walking towards Park Avenue, instead of finding some witty and entertaining subject, the water splashing up from the seals’ and walruses’ pool reminds you of hippos, the unique life of hippos; you submit to a torturing and senseless desire to communicate; the memory of a film seen ages ago rushes at you with a whirl you cannot resist; anything is better than silence,—the male of a hippopotamus or river horse isn’t called stallion, but bull and the children are not foals but calves, and the hippo, would Marina know, is not a stupid grey pig as it seems, but the hippo is the nearest relative of a dolphin, it can communicate and it’s capable of feelings such as love pride jealousy fidelity grief hate revenge, and it’s good to know that the males are unpredictable and troubled, because due to the dominant bull’s autocracy they are hindered from mating their whole life;—let’s say that a peaceful group of tourists, floating in a canoe on the River Zambezi is enjoying the view of Victoria Falls—no sounds, the water is gently tapping the side of the boat and then all of a sudden a terrible monster attacks them from under the surface; it capsizes the boat and tramples the guide; they wanted to get in touch with nature, and a rampaging hippo touches them, the shocked guide gazes at the light playing on the hair- weed, his blood colours the water, he wonders whether he would drown first or bleed to death—if he manages to pull himself onto shore his chest wound will be filled with cling film taken from the sandwiches of the passengers—here you put on the breaks as you did at the party with the further developed Maddox technique, you don’t go into detail about the guide’s mortal agony; you are sitting on the terrace of Sidewalk—this is a different silence now—she pushes up her sunglasses, she analyses the drinks menu, ice cubes clank—the cola foams down your throat—her look deepens, you look at each other—the city disappears: the cars the passers-by the houses—you disappear from the eyes of the world—the waiter stops, he does not dare to come closer, now it is happening,

I pin up Pinchas Zukerman on the wall of the flat on Staten Island, we are softly levitating in the huge sun-filled rooms, in the evening we go over to Manhattan with Frankie the ferry, the steamy air is chased away by an anticyclone; there was no seduction or mating dance, there were no misunderstandings, we did not hope brood or dream, we did not sparkle our intelligence, neither did we sway or show our best and most attractive side—we omitted the choreography of approach and the obligatory rituals of courtship; her breath stops, her spine becomes tense and she whispers nearly soberly—if you stop now I’ll kill you—now she is spoiling you and you melt in her hands during the reprise of the second major motif of the Symphonia Concertante, you clutch the duvet and squeeze the pillow under your head, your body is a barrel of honey and your thoughts tear away and become independent, one more minute and you’ll fall asleep yet somehow this minute does not want to pass, you mustn’t force it or panic, but this mustn’t is enough to drift you back—a dog is barking somewhere – Marina is nestled in a warmly pulsing membrane—what might she be dreaming about—she always leaves a gulp-size at the bottom of her glass, she does not take it out to the kitchen, the room is full of relics left over from the morning orange juices afternoon teas evening wines—she takes off her jewellery when she enters the flat—she starts peeling off her decorations while walking through the door—on her thin hips thighs and knees she wears scars from operations, between the white and harder creases there are softer dimples, she has platina inserts in her body;—I should touch her in the knowledge that she is an expensive woman—the usual account of events that would be told in this situation stays away, we playact an old married couple: fresh passion behind routines, intimacy and half-uttered words;—the tennis yard yawns emptily under the terrace, bald headed gardener cuts the grass, the lawnmower hums in C sharp minor; darker and lighter spots begin to swing in the canopy of the maple tree, the bloodred mass of the gingko tree boils unmoving in the middle, blue sky like the eyes of the Buddha crossed by the minus sign of the jet stream, the moon’s zero plus five clouds;—you are reading on the terrace, she comes out wearing a white towel- tiara on her head, she says,- well—this well means something like: anytime I see you I am overcome by bliss that you are here with me,—how did you deserve this trinket—you are walking on whipped cream—homely and dangerous—she takes off the tiara, she stands in the light with hands held up, breast pushed out and concave hips; yesterday she said she can’t tolerate the sun, she burns straightaway, now she is standing here in a sun-worshipper’s pose, her bikini bottoms are from Benetton, the top is Victoria’s Secret, this year’s fashion; is she stretching or sunbathing—this is not clear—she takes a palm-snugging streamlined gadget from the chair, she puts her sole onto your thigh—she pulls up the lower seam of her bikini bottom and smoothens the skin—she looks at you—her look says threatening-jokingly: you have no choice; epilator in A minor birdsong gurgle of Brook in G major or D minor;—you put the book back onto the balustrade—how blindingly green are the trees—how can the earth produce such a green—you say—I can’t see it—she says—my sunglasses are a different colour—you are epilating on my leg, I cannot read,—well—this well means now: be careful I will be very cross with you, —take your watch off—she says—why—because it will leave an ugly white mark on your wrist—she stands up, switches off the machine and goes in, a crow lands on the tree and repeatedly slaps it with its beak, then as if it had fulfilled a mission it cries and flies away; before any excursion with Father and Mother you had to listen to the birds from a record and you had to identify them; there was a bird that copied the others, it was the imitator bird;—shiny spiderweb between the branches the leaves are motionless, only one of them pirouettes—a little engine spins it; popping sounds dryness in the ears—people are playing tennis—she comes out and says—it is time to deal with the nose-hair business—she’s invented this nagging wife-type for today: she pinches little fluffs from your clothes and folds locks behind your ears, she adjusts your collar; in the morning she warns you that a hair is peeping out of your nose—you check it in the mirror—you cannot see the hair, she can; this is the nose-hair business—she takes up the sun-worshipper pose again—am I brown—she asks—you are brown—you reply—if I get brown will you marry me—she asks—together you imagine the wedding day the dresses the party the wedding night—you try to recall the former teenager, who was then the big girl from your perspective, the one who knew the adults’ sins and secrets—what’s her opinion of your foot, you ask—it’s not too gnarly, don’t worry- she says and leaves,

you take the subway over to the west side, the sun has set already and the dusk is over, at the Meat Market you descend to the Shots—crumbling concrete—in front of the cashier a mutely sweating crowd is squeezed together, a swaying guy begs a fag from you, the red of his gum licks at you like a flame from his yellow face—you don’t accept his money—then he takes another and puts it, too into his grinning mouth; the DJ’s stand is an un-planed log, blokes wearing sunglasses and floor-length coats stand by the wall, the music is slow dark metal—we buy some cocktails: vaginal mary and penis colada—in the concert hall fast dissonant death metal booms; I lose Marina—suddenly the body of darkness intensifies: it has volume touch and density—many hundred throats roar, the chasm opens and you have an erection—as if an invisible presence had started to scare you; the first accord digs deep into the bone and it hits you in the chest, then sucks you back up—it grinds your flesh and churns your blood; the masked demon on the stage picks up a bottle, takes a swig and spits into the audience, then throws it—spinning and splashing over the heads—the object’s energy is stronger than you thought—it’s flying towards you—you reach for it and the hit of the catch waves through your spine; the people around jump at you, hands reach towards you, but before they could grab it and glimpse at the Holy Grail, using the swing of the throw—you stash the bottle under your arm—your hands are empty, you gaze at the stage with a gape— people crawl about at your feet, searching for the dish that wears the hot kiss of their idol, his fingerprint glows on it—one of them stares into your face from close, he looks at your hands again, then he turns to the stage and forming horns with his fingers starts jumping up and down; from under your left armpit coolness streams onto your heart, you drift away, you look at it, there is no label on this bottle—pale blue plastic—you take a swig; outside in the bar you make new friends, Terence has an aquiline nose, he is sensual and sly, Avalon, his girlfriend is physically stronger, a dominatrix squeezed into black leather; dance with Avalon dance in a quartet dance alone dance with everybody; I am smoking a thin joint in front of the toilet—Avalon is talking about the little fish that clung to the dots on her swimming suit in the sea, she thought they were piranhas and ran screaming to the strand—then she tells the story of her first kiss with twin girls—she can still feel the softness of their lips like two does—Terence used to be a vampire, in his Lower East Side flat funeral urns and stolen blood plasma bags were lying about, he whizzed up the blood with bone ash and vitamins— the music is throbbing, Marina turns to me, falls on me—clinging to each other you sashay onto the dance floor—entangled plants in the windblasts of the music, you munch on her lips—salty taste—your legs jam you fall she laughs hysterically, you help her onto her feet, she goes to the bathroom,

half an hour passes half a day half a year—in the toilet one of the cubicles is locked, you pull yourself up and look inside, she is sitting on the floor with her head hanging, on her side her things scattered, you shout at her,—hey, what’s the matter—she is not moving, you reach down to open the lock you nearly fall in head down, her eyes are open the makeup is smeared black ditches of tears expressionless clown mask—you sat her on the toilet lid and pick up her things—you hug her—she starts shaking then stops: the after wave of the attack; as if scraping up the words from the muddy bottom of a lake she says—all of this is so terrifying, the thing we are doing and that she will not survive it,

Gigi, my girlfriend, has not replied to my e-mails for more than a month, her phone is switched off, she has disappeared, she’s gone off the radar, I couldn’t—even if I wanted to – inform her of the fact of our break up—her silence seemed to be a clear sign—I released myself from the responsibilities I felt for her, I did not cheat on her, I did not betray her, but literally forgot her—I deleted her, as if she had never existed—simply she did not cross my mind; Marina was like an epidemic that changes the demography of a country within a few days or a flood that reshapes the geography of a country within a few hours—Marina opens her emerald eyes in bed in the morning, goes to the terrace in her white fluffy bathrobe—she stretches sleepily and I stop breathing—big-bellied clouds swim into the picture, mute children dig around in the sandpit—I try to read, a fly lands on the paper, it blocks the sentence’s path, a tailless squirrel is hanging from the branch, the maple tree bobs and tussles like a dreaming boxer, raindrops play the piano on the leaves of the gingko tree; the question is how will you introduce Marina to the relatives in Vancouver—their window opens onto the largest flag of the world—it pierces the sky with such elan as if wanting to make a hole in it —it’s a nesting place for thousands of birds—it has to be x-rayed regularly to check whether it has been picked apart—barefoot in the garden: sharp and hot stones, my sole is tingling—by the time I get back Marina has disappeared, perhaps she’s gone to the 7Eleven—in the tv bees are being trained to find mines—the fuss around the closure of a Texan toy factory that made one-legged dolls for one-legged children—on another channel a scientific experiment trying to prove that the bread will always fall with its buttered side on the carpet, a machine developed for this purpose throws buttered bread slices onto the floor from different heights, two independent examiners confirm the experiment—you go to the kitchen and eat a peach— by the time you are back the tv channel has already been changed to MTV and Marina is reading a girly magazine on the bed in all innocence, on her side a horizontally cut apple with a star-shaped core rests on a plate,

we are gliding in a car under the green canopy and the American sun is shining in the American sky, we roll around the lake—the concrete softly crackles under the tyres—a grass snake wriggles on the road like a question mark—the black letter S is growing in the front and shrinking at the back—people squat around a golf bag, trying to push their fingers into the dense lawn—special effects—high-tech super-production—extras under the blue painted sky, extras between nature’s scenery and the set-designed cities; we exit the motorway, barbed wire and windowless houses, black people are sitting on the pavement and in battered graffitied cars, two policemen poke at a clump of rugs—a severed hand squeezing a stone— control tower in the distance,

you get to the bottom of the nose-hair business—it not only peeps out, but it’s white, it’s greyed, and when you are talking or eating this white pointed hair spikes in and out of your nose, someone has pinned a fishbone into your nose, it’s not only visible, but it is alive, it moves, and this—excuse her, is unbearable for her—she has to look at it all the time, she has to think about it all the time—she leans over me with the scissors, just like Gigi, cut it down pull out the invisible hairs squeeze out the invisible blackheads—female obsessions, it is better to give in to them, better not to be too stubborn: blackheads crumbles hairs furrows wrinkles spots smears blobs dots blotches,

you are sitting strapped down in the semi-darkness, somebody behind you is hitting a keyboard, you can feel it on your shoulder blade—the flap on the wing opens up and the airplane reveals its bone and vascular system—then, creaking in D-major, the flap closes; Marina had to take off all her clothes at security, the desperately cheeping metal detector signalled the platina screws planted into her body; the words of the man sitting in front of you seep into your defenceless consciousness:—everything is true, the Bible, Jesus is proven, only he did not rise, the resurrection is not correct, for he put himself to sleep with yogic breathing and emigrated to India, where he lived a simple life as a fig merchant, later he returned to Judea and joined the persecution of Christians; the woman whom he is talking to, fixes her bun with her red varnished fingernails, round bronze arms; you have been waiting for the take off for an hour now—a hollow cloud sprawls in the sky—the man says to the red fingernailed girl that in Istanbul there is a magnetic hotel porter called Ali—within close range of this magnetic hotel porter called Ali you can sense a strong smell of roses and a hot breeze, and in his pockets the objects get swapped, what was in the left pocket will be found in the right and vice versa—standing on a ladder, a technician in work uniform raps at the wing top with a screwdriver—shaking his head he walks back to the dolly—America doesn’t work, America is finished—some of the passengers laugh in agony, others remain morose and threateningly silent,

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Translated from the Hungarian by Csilla Toldy

László Garaczi (b. 1956) is a prolific Hungarian playwright, novelist and translator with many prizes to his name, including a George Soros Fellowship, the Sándor Márai Prize, Tibor Déry Prize, the József Attila Prize, Baumgarten Prize and the Palládium Prize and Writer of the City of Graz. His short novel, Metaxa, was first published in 2006 by the leading Hungarian publisher of contemporary fiction, Magvető.

Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator. She published three books of poetry with Lapwing Belfast (2013, 2015, 2018), Angel Fur and Other Stories (2019) with Stupor Mundi,
and Bed Table Door (2023, Wrecking Ball), a novel. With the latter, she was awarded the Desmond Elliot Residency of the National Centre for Writing, Norwich, Unesco City of Literature. Her translations have appeared in Hungarian Literature Online, Pamenar Magazine, Modern Poetry in Translation and Cyphers. Visit her website here.

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