Haïm Nahman Bialik / In the City of Slaughter

 

Joseph Budko (Plonsk, 1888 – Jérusalem, 1940), Dans la ville du massacre, Berlin, 1923. Illustration pour le poème éponyme de Haïm Nahman Bialik (c) mahJ

 

In the City of Slaughter

• 
  
• Haïm Nahman Bialik 
• 16 October 2023

In 1903, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, Haïm Nahman Bialik left Odessa and went to the scene of the massacre to gather evidence from the survivors. He wrote a poem which, powerfully expressing his horror and anguish at the situation of the Jews of Eastern Europe at that moment in European history, immediately found a considerable echo in the Jewish world.

Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;
Into its courtyard wind thy way;
There with thine own hand touch, and with the eyes of thine head,
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
Proceed thence to the ruins, the split walls reach,
Where wider grows the hollow, and greater grows the breach;
Pass over the shattered hearth, attain the broken wall
Those burnt and barren brick, whose charred stones reveal
The open mouths of such wounds, that no mending
Shall ever mend, nor healing ever heal.
There will thy feet in feathers sink, and stumble
On wreckage doubly wrecked, scroll heaped on manuscript.
Fragments again fragmented

Pause not upon this havoc; go thy way
Unto the attic mount, upon thy feet and hands;
Behold the shadow of death among the shadows stands.
Crushed in their shame, they saw it all;
They did not pluck their eyes out; they
Beat not their brains against the wall!
Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher bad it in his heart to pray:
A miracle, O Lord, and spare my skin this day!

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs
The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering -the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame
So sanctified My name!
It was the flight of mice they fled,
The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead!
And on the next morn, after the terrible night
The son who was not murdered found
The spurned cadaver of his father on the ground.
Now wherefore dost thou weep, O son of Man?

Brief-weary and forespent, a dark Shekinah
Runs to each nook and cannot find its rest;
Wishes to weep, but weeping does not come;
Would roar; is dumb.
Its head beneath its wing, its wing outspread
Over the shadows of the martyr’d dead,
Its tears in dimness and in silence shed.

And thou, too, son of man, close now the gate behind thee;
Be closed in darkness now, now thine that charnel space;
So tarrying there thou wilt be one with pain and anguish
And wilt fill up with sorrow thine heart for all its days.
Then on the day of thine own desolation
A refuge will it seem,
Lying in thee like a curse, a demon’s ambush,
The haunting of an evil dream,
O, carrying it in thy heart, across the world’s expanse
Thou wouldst proclaim it, speak it out,
But thy lips shall not find its utterance.

Beyond the suburbs go, and reach the burial ground.
Let no man see thy going; attain that place alone,
A place of sainted graves and martyr-stone.
Stand on the fresh-turned soil.
There in the dismal corner, there in the shadowy nook,
Multitudinous eyes will look
Upon thee from the sombre silence
The spirits of the martyrs are these souls,
Gathered together, at long last,
Beneath these rafters and in these ignoble holes.
The hatchet found them here, and hither do they come
To seal with a last look, as with their final breath,
The agony of their lives, the terror of their death.
Question the spider in his lair!
His eyes beheld these things; and with his web he can
A tale unfold horrific to the ear of man:
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.

Then wilt thou bid thy spirit – Hold, enough!
Stifle the wrath that mounts within thy throat,
Bury these things accursed,
Within the depth of thy heart, before thy heart will burst!
Then wilt thou leave that place, and go thy way
And lo-
The earth is as it was, the sun still shines:
It is a day like any other day.

Descend then, to the cellars of the town,
There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,
Where seven heathen flung a woman down,
The daughter in the presence of her mother,
The mother in the presence of her daughter,
Before slaughter, during slaughter and after slaughter!

Note also, do not fail to note,
In that dark corner, and behind that cask
Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,
Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath
The bestial breath,
Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!
Such silence will take hold of thee, thy heart will fail
With pain and shame, yet I
Will let no tear fall from thine eye.
Though thou wilt long to bellow like the driven ox
That bellows, and before the Altar balks,
I will make hard thy heart, yea, I
Will not permit a sigh.

Joseph Budko (Plonsk, 1888 – Jerusalem, 1940), In the City of Slaughter, Berlin, 1923. Illustration for the poem of the same name by Haïm Nahman Bialik (c) mahJ

 

See, see, the slaughtered calves, so smitten and so laid;
Is there a price for their death? How shall that price be paid?
Forgive, ye shamed of the earth, yours is a pauper-Lord!
Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late.
When to my door you come to ask for your reward,
I’ll open wide: See, I am fallen from My high estate.
I grieve for you, my children. My heart is sad for you.
Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.

Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers,
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed,
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting,
To hear the cry of their agony,
Their weeping everlasting.
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up,
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed;
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look in their hearts – behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth,
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath.
Speak to them, bid them rage!
Let them against me raise the outraged hand,
Let them demand!
Demand the retribution for the shamed
Of all the centuries and every age!
Let fists be flung like stone
Against the heavens and the heavenly Throne!

And thou, too, pity them not, nor touch their wound;
Within their cup no further measure pour.
Wherever thou wilt touch, a bruise is found,
Their flesh is wholly sore.
For since they have met pain with resignation
And have made peace with shame,
What shall avail thy consolation?
They are too wretched to evoke thy scorn.
They are too lost thy pity to evoke.
So let them go, then, men to sorrow born,
Mournful and slinking, crushed beneath their yoke.
So to their homes, and to their hearth depart
Rot in the bones, corruption in the heart.
And go upon the highway,
Thou shalt then meet these men destroyed by sorrow,
Sighing and groaning, at the doors of the wealthy
Proclaiming their sores, like so much peddler’s wares,
The one his battered head, t’other limbs unhealthy,
One shows a wounded arm, and one a fracture bares.
And all have eyes that are the eyes of slaves,
Slaves flogged before their masters;
And each one begs, and each one craves:
Reward me, Master, for that my skull is broken.
Reward me for my father who was martyred!

And so their sympathy implore.
For you are now as you have been of yore
As you stretched your hand
So will you stretch it,
And as you have been wretched

So are you wretched!
What is thy business here, o son of man?
Rise, to the desert flee!
The cup of affliction thither bear with thee!
Take thou they soul, rend it in many a shred!
With impotent rage, thy heart deform!
Thy tear upon the barren boulders shed
And send they bitter cry into the storm.

K.

Delmore Schwartz

 

Holy Delmore

The originary 20th-century American Jewish writer and poet is famous for his descent into drug-addled madness. A new collection shows quantities of self-obsessed dreck shot through with redeeming literary and critical genius.

BY

DAVID MIKICS

JULY 11, 2024

The New York intellectuals, Irving Howe once said, were obsessed “by the idea of the Jew (not always distinguished from the idea of Delmore Schwartz).” Delmore, as everyone called him, was a boy wonder, opening the revamped Partisan Review’s first issue in 1937 at the age of 23, with his perfect short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” (The issue included work by Picasso, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Wallace Stevens, and James Agee, but Delmore’s story headed the table of contents.) Then his first book of poetry arrived, hailed by Allen Tate as “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot.” But he came to a dismal end, an alcoholic and pill addict burdened by paranoid fantasies. Since Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and James Atlas’ classic biography, Delmore has been more celebrated for the legend of his wasted talent than for his actual literary production. Schwartz the writer has gotten short shrift.

Pablo Neruda / Being born in the woods

Being born in the woods

by Pablo Neruda

Translated by W.S.Merwin

Pablo Neruda / Naciendo en los bosques

When the rice withdraws from the earth

the grains of its flour,
when the wheat hardens its little hip-joints
and lifts its face of a thousand hands,
I make my way to the grove where the woman and the man embrace,
to touch the innumerable sea
of what continues.

I am not a brother of the implement carried on the tide
as in a cradle of embattled mother-of-pearl:
I do not tremble in the territory of the dying garbage,
I do not wake at the shock of the dark
that is frightened by the hoarse leaf-stalks of the sudden bell,
I cannot be, I am not the traveller
under whose shoes the last remnants of the wind throb
and the waves come back rigid out of time to die.

I carry in my hand the dove that sleeps recumbent in the seed
and in its dense ferment of lime and blood
August lives,
raised out of its deep goblet the month lives:
with my hand I encircle the new shadow of the wing that is growing:
the root and the feather that will form the thicket of tomorrow.

The immense growth of the drop, and the eyelid yearning to be open
never diminish, neither beside the balcony of iron hands

nor in the maritime winter of the abandoned, nor in my late footstep:
for I was born in order to be born, to contain the steps
of all that approaches, of all that beats on my breast like a new trembling heart.

Lives resting beside my clothes like parallel doves
or contained in my own existence and in my lawless sound
in order to return to being, to lay hold on the air denuded of its leaf
and on the moist birth of the soil in the wreath: how long
can I return and be, how long can the odour
of the most deeply buried flowers, of the waves most finely
pulverized on the high rocks, preserve in me their homeland
where they can return to be fury and perfume?

 

Mona Aicha Masri: I Want to Pray

For our first excerpt from A Bay of Megaphones, the new anthology of young Hungarian poets, we offer a poem by Mona Aicha Masri, whose "fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus," writes András Visky. I Want to Pray is translated by Anna Bentley

 17th March, 2023

Mona Aicha Masri’s fearless love poetry writes itself into the rich Western and Eastern tradition of amor sanctus. It does this, however, not as religious ecstasy, but instead as the burning loneliness of unconsummated love, in which the solitariness of the body is heightened and its lonely opening-up becomes an occasion for welcoming the world in. In Masri’s poems, erotica is the way to “emptying inwards,” and the setting free of the tongue a practice which, in this dynamic, “elevates” colloquial language and even slang as well, and makes these the chief material with which we can sense both ourselves and the world.

Physical sensations turn into linguistic surprises and vice versa: the multilingual texts that are born in this stream of consciousness (at this time mainly characteristic of her prose) lay bare deep levels of identity. Slang and hidden Biblical references, textual fragments of Ancient Hebrew and Greek koine: all of these make tangible to the reader a sort of permanent transience, the cracks and fissures that come about on the surface of time. Mona Aicha Masri’s textual inundations are sudden, beautiful, cataclysmic bursts of meaning; they sweep us along relentlessly but gently.

András Visky

 

 

I Want to Pray

 

If you were here, I’d say lie down beside me on the green blanket, the winking of the fairy lights wouldn’t bother us, the scent of cinnamon, we’d look good in the cold glow. You’d ask what’s new, and I’d say this year I learned

 

to be empathetic, forehead-wrinkling, eyebrow-raising, just the inner part of it near the nose, we mustn’t tip over into astonishment.

 

Give it a try, no not like that, look at me. Imagine you want to press your eyeballs
into an oval, two eggs. Relax your lips, no not that much, don’t laugh

 

The Christmas sweets are kitschy, you say. The blue ones are always coconut? Or the coconut ones always blue? The wrapper rustles on my thighs, the jelly melts onto my clit.

 

This year I didn’t fall in love, that’s your fault too. In my twenties I can’t write
about death, it won’t do. I’m tired of BKV poetry, IKEA prose and. I always forget the third one,

 

the opposing principles, that not every black is white, not every white is black. That in the new creation there’ll be no time, the tree of life will fruit
twelve times a year.

 

Love should be what I, guys are so boring, in my desperation of women’s bums, who cares what. I think of. I think of death. While I’m carting a cabbage in my rucksack, picking up dog shit, or now, here. I worry,

 

when we talk, lord, I get this far in the prayer. I told Kata, you know,
the psychologist. She asked me to try. If you’re here,

 

lie down next to me. The fairy lights won’t bother us, the pine needles
stick to the soles of your feet, you ask, what’s new, and I say
nothing much, weekday-stuff, but you know that.

 

Translated by Anna Bentley

HLO HU

Sign by Gábor Gellén-Miklós

Photo by Aayush Srivastava from Pexels 

Sign 

by Gábor Gellén-Miklós

Translated by Anna Bentley

 

there was none

 

as usual we were

crawling along in a traffic jam,

leaning on our horns and swearing,

in a hurry just then to get somewhere,

running late, scrambling to

cook dinner on Saturday

while thinking about Sunday lunch

we were drinking Cokes,

beer, wine and Cuban rum,

and sending a text message

we were ’chatting’ and

posting photos on Facebook

’liking’ other people’s photos

planning our summer holidays

planning our great futures

humming and hawing, hoodwinking

ourselves and others

our shoes were tight, our bunions hurt

we sent back the pizza for not being round

for not having enough oregano

there was too much ketchup on the top

we were cold

we were hot

not finding a place to park, we parked illegally

and the police fined us

the police didn’t do anything,

pure energy, we pedalled the spinning bike

desperately maintaining the pace

lest the world pass us by

 

there was no sign

 

or we were always looking the wrong way

and didn’t see it

 

March 23 2020

 

Dankó Pista Street - Pécsi Street corner, Kaposvár, 1969 (Photo: Fortepan / Bojár Sándor)

 

Márta Patak: Cocoa and Kalács at Lilla's House

Next in our texts for foodies, a chance to reminisce on the sweet snack times of childhood playdates, in this excerpt, translated by Anna Bentley, from Hungarian writer Márta Patak's novel Mindig péntek (Always on a Friday).

8th December, 2022

Lilla’s house was long and low. It had only two windows on the street-facing side, and extended inwards away from the road. It had a continuous metal fence one and half times the height of a man, and you couldn’t see in, even through the slit of the letterbox. If I peeked in, the only thing to greet me were its dark depths. Through the keyhole, I might just about be able to make out the bottom of the box hedge that lined the path or the bit of the flowerbed where touch-me-nots grew.

There were four of them in the house; the women of four generations living there together. What was strange to me was that there were three rooms which opened one into the other, each further back from the road, and only afterwards came the hall, meaning that you entered the house from the middle of the yard. At least six windows opened along the side of the house onto the narrow little walled-in garden. Apart from annuals and dahlias, pretty much the only thing languishing in this garden were the boxwood bushes. The hall opened into the kitchen, and the kitchen into the pantry at the end of the house. They had no bathroom. The toilet was outside, down the garden, as it was for most of the houses in our street, including the one opposite us, where my friend Kismari lived.

Lilla’s great-grandmother, her grandmother, her mother, and Lilla, who sat next to me at school. Lilla was almost a whole year younger than I was, not being a summer baby like me. She had huge brown eyes that brimmed with tremulous alarm, and when she looked at me, I would feel strong immediately. They lived in that house, those three women and the little girl, without a man, for pretty much their whole lives. When I turned up at their house, they would all appear at the door at once, a group of dark-clothed figures. They would stick their heads round the door, my Friday afternoon visit being always an event at their house. I liked being there. I loved the silky feel of the cover on the chair they sat me down on in the hall. I would gaze through the open doorway at the cushions lined up on the little sofa, and behind them at the tapestry on the wall. This depicted a hunting scene: there were deer and wild boar running in the foreground, while a group of hunters came down from a hill on horseback and on foot with their vizsla dogs.

I always got the feeling that, beyond the hall, the house went on forever in a long line of rooms opening one into another, full of secrets, spaces full of strange air, another world I had no place in. I dared go no further beyond the hall, which they used as a living room, than the threshold of the first room off it. It was as if the furniture cried ‘Halt!’. The little sofa, with its dark green velvet cover and embroidered cushions, its curly, walnut-stained woodwork finishing in four spiralling flourishes, planted its legs sternly before me. Off to the side there were two capacious, sinky armchairs. One, with its back to the window, was where the great-grandmother sat to read. This had a footstool set before it covered in the same dark-green velvet material as the sofa and the two armchairs. Next to it stood a little, slim-legged table. There was a table lamp with a huge shade, and beside the lamp some yellowing women’s magazines from before the war. On the wall there was an embroidered country scene in which a man leant over a high brick wall. In the foreground was a girl in a pink dress, her eyes cast down, her right hand thrown back to the man carelessly. In her left, she held a water jug. All around her were blossoming trees and, off to the side a path led to the spring. This dark-hued scene was so lifelike, you could almost hear the birdsong. On the sofa, was a cushion of a really dark claret colour, which looked like it was made from embroidered velvet. It was edged with twisted silk cord of the same shade and the green in its embroidered design harmonised with that of the sofa cover. In the centre of the cushion was a flower, winding up to the sky it seemed. It wasn’t a rose, that was for sure, but it resembled no other kind of flower, at least that I knew of. The rose’s petals clung to each other in groups of four, then there were two more to the sides and two above. The four petals clung to each other like tongues of flame and repeated in an endless pattern, more and more flowers growing one from another and surrounding the central form. The composition was a riot of colour, and yet it was the claret and the green that dominated, in every conceivable shade. Every time the door opened my eyes would slide directly from the tapestry to the sofa. From my seat, the particular corner of the sofa where this cushion lay fell just comfortably in my line of sight.

When I was at their house, I could gaze about me for hours. It was easiest to do this in the long pauses in our games of Nine Men’s Morris, when Lilla was racking her brains as to how to move her piece. After we had done our Catechism Class homework, we generally played Nine Men’s Morris with white and coloured beans on a hand-drawn board, and when we had had enough, we would wait in silence for her grandmother to bring us in our tea.

She would always begin by laying the table. We had to clear everything off it. Nothing could be left there, because she would spread a white tablecloth across it, a snow-white linen cloth with a bird embroidered on it in white thread. I was always afraid that I would spill my cocoa, though it wouldn’t have been a problem if I had, because there was a saucer under it and it wouldn’t have dribbled straight from the cup onto the tablecloth. For we drank our cocoa from cups, not mugs, and the cups had birds on them too, two painted birds of paradise on coloured Chinese porcelain. Our cups were identical and there was the same motif on the saucers. I always arranged the saucer and the cup so that the bird would turn towards me, and while I slurped up my cocoa I would lean over it so I could see the rim of the saucer. When I straightened up to eat the sweet, soft kalács, or a savoury pogácsa, I would gaze at the design on the cup, and a kind of inexplicable warmth would flood over me each time I looked at that gorgeous, brightly-coloured, long-tailed bird.

Lilla’s grandmother would bring us our tea on a shiny silver tray: cocoa in a pure white porcelain jug and six slices of kalács in a basket swaddled in a white napkin. If she brought us pogácsa, she would always pile them high so there would be enough, and she always told us just to tell her if they ran out, there were plenty more. I would think, if my mother could see how much I’m eating she’d be sure to make a comment, so I was glad she couldn’t see. I always glanced around when I took a third slice, though, because I could almost hear her voice behind me.

Sometimes we would also get rice pudding, sprinkled with cinnamon and icing sugar. This too tasted better at Lilla’s house, though it was the case that at our house my mother made semolina rather than rice pudding and she would serve it with cocoa powder and icing sugar. This meant the flavour of cinnamon was strange to me at first, but I soon got to like it. My mother, if she’d known about it, would have remarked that I thought everything at other people’s houses was better than at home.

Behind and on either side of me were bookshelves. While we sat opposite each other, waiting for our tea, I would cast my eye along them. We would sit in silence, for if I didn’t ask anything, Lilla wouldn’t utter a word herself. So, taking advantage of this quiet waiting, I would browse through the titles of the books. I got the same feeling at these times as I would later, standing in front of the stocking mender’s house, or as I did every time I was faced with a new word I had managed to spell out. On the spine of the enormous, claret-coloured cloth-bound book stood the words, A Monograph on the Issue of Hungarian Transportation, but even though I read them over a number of times, I still couldn’t make sense of them. My lips moved soundlessly until the words became a meaningless nonsense in my head, the same way sensible words did if I said them over and over for long enough. I sat and read through the titles of the books, repeating them to myself. A History of the Hung. Royal State Railway Corp., Annales Societatis Regiae Hungaricae Viarum Ferrearum, Les Chemines de Ferre du Monde.

I would be busily sipping at my cocoa and still bending forward over my cup and saucer, when Lilla’s grandmother came and stood by us. She would stand by the table, watching us as we dipped the fluffy kalács into our cocoa, as we leant over our cups and lifted the sopping pieces to our mouths and chewed them in silence. My gaze would sometimes slide from the painted bird of paradise over to the little basket on the table as if I wanted to reassure myself that there really was enough there. It didn’t matter that I knew they would bring more if the kalács ran out, but I wanted the pleasure to last as long as possible. It pleased Lilla’s grandmother to finally see her granddaughter eating well, which she did when I was with her. When I wasn’t there, said her grandmother, Lilla wasn’t really interested in eating. She always ate better with me, possibly finding then that she liked things she generally didn’t like at all.

Unaware of her approach and my face expressionless, I would slurp up the last drops of the cocoa from the depths of the cup, even though the dregs were bitter, the cocoa powder having sunk to the bottom. I hadn’t stirred it, I’d been so caught up with dipping the kalács and the six words beating in my head: Les Chemines de Ferre du Monde.

I didn’t wait for Lilla’s grandmother to ask whether she should show us her old photographs or take down the huge book with the red cover from the shelf instead. This book even had a photograph of her father complete with his name. Károly Göncz, retd. station master, born in Skrad, 1873. Completed higher elementary school in Zagreb and Fiume. Joined the Railway Corporation in 1889. In 1899 appointed station master. Served in Novoselec-Krizén, Kaposvár and Bábonymegyer before returning to Kaposvár. Retired in 1926, and awarded Citizen’s Cross of Merit, IV class. I didn’t wait for her to take down the dark red book and proudly show me this picture of her father, one gentleman among many with twisted moustaches and whiskers. It was from behind this book that our catechisms would always appear before class. I fidgeted in my seat, getting ready to leave, because I knew that if she saw me at a loss after tea she would go straight to the bookshelf and pull out the two slim, yellow booklets, and then there would be no escape for either of us.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1956. Below the fleur-de-lis, Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt Graz in large, sombre letters. Nothing more. That’s all there was on the plain, bare cover of the book. Inside there were only simple line drawings of scenes connected to the text. If I didn’t reply on the instant to her question, saying that I’d like to look at picture books, or didn’t quickly think up something else, then as soon as she saw me fidgeting, Lilla’s grandmother would take down the catechism and tell me to read aloud what we had studied in that day’s class. She would tell us we ought to go over the material for the next class, that we ought to read the section the vicar had set for us, and on that pretext the family would try to get me to stay. I should recite it aloud to Lilla, in case that helped her to remember it, then I should test Lilla on it, because it was no use her reading it by herself; by the time she had to repeat it, it would have gone out of her head. And while I read On account of their sin, our first parents lost sanctifying grace and drew God’s punishment down upon themselves, Lilla just looked at me wordlessly, hopefully, almost imploring me with her big brown eyes not to stop reading the incomprehensible passage I was struggling to read aloud properly. Because of the sin of Adam, we, his descendants, come into the world deprived of sanctifying grace. This sin in us is called the original sin. We inherit Adam's punishment as we would have inherited his gifts had he been obedient to God. Our purpose in this world is to know, love, and serve God, and through so doing we may be saved, that is, we may enter heaven.

I was still just twisting about in my chair, but at the end of the sentence my eyes slid over to Les Chemins de Ferre du Monde. I spelt it out letter by letter and that was what was drumming in my head, not the injunctions of the catechism. Should you be assailed by a sinful desire, repeat this little prayer: Jesus, do not allow me to sin. Lilla’s beseeching eyes were still fixed on me, but in vain. She couldn’t catch my eye.

‘Don’t go home! Keep playing with me!’ was what was in her eyes, or, to be precise not even that, more the pain that comes after rejection, because, when I started to squirm in my seat and when I shook my head at her grandmother’s offer to look at picture books after I’d read from the catechism, she knew already that I would go. I could still feel her eyes on my back when I had closed the gate behind me. Those six words were still clattering through my head: Les Chemins de Ferre du Monde, as if, by repeating them, I could keep my guilty feelings at bay. As I stood by the gate, I saw the spine of that thick book again for a moment. I saw the golden letters I had read with my head twisted round as I sat waiting for the cocoa. Then, the next moment, I was setting off up the hill.

 

 

Márta Patak, born in Kaposvár in 1960, is a writer and translator. The author of several novels and short story collections, her most recent publications include the novel Mindig péntek (Always on a Friday, Lector, 2019), and a collection of short stories Fronthatáron, (On the Front Line, Scolar, 2022).

Anna Bentley was born and educated in Britain. Pushkin Children’s Press (UK) published Anna’s translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic Arnica, the Duck Princess in 2019. In the same year, her translation of Anna Menyhért’s Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Women Writers, was published by Brill. Her translation of the inclusive 
children's book A Fairytale for Everyone was published by Farshore in 2022.

HLO HU