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.
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