Quarantine
by Béla Markó
Translated from the Hungarian by Anna Bentley
It’s been this way from the beginning.
You can’t swap places with the person
you see in the mirror.
You can’t step out of your body.
Nor out of the sweep of time.
Maybe on occasion, out of looking,
Out of sounds. Out of fragrances.
Out of touching. Out of dreams too.
But out of the whole shebang, no way.
Of course, that’s not what this is about,
This is a story. And some careful arrangements.
We go to Kolozsvár at night in two cars.
Anna drives one, I drive the other.
We get to the airport at three in the morning.
We park. Anna comes over to sit with me.
We leave the other car unlocked, the keys
still in it. Balázs emerges from the terminal.
He’s come from London with an old classmate.
Whether or not you’re ill, it’s still fourteen days
quarantine. We’ve talked the whole thing through
on the phone. They’ll be in Marosszentkirály.
We’ll be in Marosvásárhely. Close contact is
forbidden. They stand just a little way off from us.
Grown-up children. No barrier between us,
No fence, no railing, no police. Nothing at all,
Beyond a sort of invisible awareness.
A realisation. Self-limitation.
We wave to them. No handshakes. No hugs.
No blokey clap on the back or rub of the shoulders.
Like once. Merely an entirely different
closeness. Which is also already a distance.
Unbridgeable. Unfathomable. As we
learn to keep our distance. When we step out of
ourselves, we cease to be. That’s what we’re thinking.
Or not even that, just about the discipline forced
Onto us. We point out where the car is.
They move off towards it. A practice exercise, perhaps,
for something we don’t yet recognise. The barrier hardest
to break down is the one that doesn’t exist.
Béla Markó, poet, writer, editor and politician, was born in Kézdivásárhely (Târgu Secuiesc, Romania) in 1951. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, collections of essays, children's books and Hungarian school textbooks. He has also translated Romanian poetry and drama. His poetry has been translated into French and Romanian. Poems by Markó have also appeared in English translation in anthologies and literary journals as well as in his own volume, Notes on a Happy Pear Tree (Pont Press, 1999, transl. Sylvia Csiffary).
Anna Bentley is a British translator of Hungarian literature. In 2019, her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic, Arnica the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press and her translation of Anna Menyhért's study of five forgotten Hungarian women writers, Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers was published by Brill. Several stories by Gabi Csutak have recently appeared in Anna's translation in Trafika Europe's online journal. Her translations of contemporary poets such as Mónika Mesterházi and Zsófia Balla have appeared on Hungarian Literature Online.
13 January, 2021
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