I Saw Our Leaders

A stranger was checking me out,
from his confused movements I can deduce
what I’d find in the collapsed hall
of the old rope factory. In the voice of
the lonely tools, lifted by chance and at once dropped back,
something utters what I myself
am unable even to think.
Sometimes I can’t imagine you, my homeland,
except as a damp shower curtain clinging
to my skin. Or as if I were resting one hand
in an empty nest, while in the other
I have already crushed the eggs. There are times
you don’t even cross my mind.

From a window in my grandma’s house I watched
how the cement factory in Vác
stood motionless in the night.
I couldn’t yet have known that in other towns
it’s bridges and churches that are illuminated
in the way that here, up north, is the threatening
tower of concrete and frost.
That’s when my grandpa came in.
In his hands a see-through rosary, a token
of the eternal longing to depart or return.
I thought he was talking about my father,
but it turned out it was about God and the
misshapen animals with gouged-out eyes
living in the depths of the ocean.
He spoke, while I watched
the lights that concealed themselves behind him.
Meanwhile I subconsciously assumed
the rhythm of the breathing of
the 22-kilo man lying in the other room.
Finally my grandpa went out and locked
the door of the room filled with palm branches.
Silence fell. You could hear
that in the guts of the man lying in the house
death was stamping all eight of its feet
and realised: that too was just cement
and water; what of dust was made
will once again return to dust.
I pounded the concrete wall and had to admit
that my fist is of china made. 

(1)
The love of railwaymen and pedagogues
for generation after generation,
on a short stretch of the western border strip.
As a piece of industrious labour always exemplary,
as an inheritance a disappointment that veers us to the right,
a paraplegic backbone.
They are all good Catholics:
Not a would-be suicide, fallen woman, or alcoholic among them.
Just the teach-them-a-lesson defiance of the little guy,
for which there is no reason or excuse.
Because the family lived as if there were a God.
And as for me, I learnt by myself how to believe in Him,
to be the first to question
the stories that were thought to be uninterruptable,
the first to be curious about the tiniest details,
the intakes of breath, the snores, the coughs.
Because it’s impossible to live saying: it’s OK as it is,
that crying together will solve everything.
And I grew up to speak with sentences
that must be said at proposals of marriage.
As if we were all to die the next day,
and it would at last be unecessary to keep on loving.
For this kind of thing they have no sense of moderation.
That they have blackmailed into me. That’s what they lost.
And at weekends in vain do they sob into the soup that
family comes first. By way of an answer
I swear by God that they’ll never see me again. 

(2)
In the estuary of the allée of chestnut trees
the main building: a supertanker at anchor.
As one’s searching gaze lowers slowly,
it lands on a Roman numeral on the façade,
it would look into a cavernous room on the first floor.
What can be seen by someone inside, elbows on the ledge?
If he glances askance, a bay, else some foothills.
Back then boys here were trained to issue orders,
only through the thick jackets one couldn’t make out 9
how inside the ribcages, like fountain spray in frost,
valour had cracked.
Later the army-like column took
the stammering steps that became the city’s heartbeat.
There the fountain stands in the middle, but
of the parade ground there is no trace,
the wailing of those lined up in the fog
has died out of the park over the years.
Routine of cure replaced rigour of training:
limbs of ducks carve their way through
the tightly stretched surface of the water in the pool,
intakes of breath come wheezy and incurable,
thus does a hissing sound leak from the mouth cavity,
like wind through the allée.
And here crouches the ingatherer of the crop from the undergrowth,
silent, like a sign for tourists.
And even if in the end he couldn’t fit them all in his pocket,
he can recall every chestnut he picked up,
he can recognise, too, from its shape, its colour, its sheen, its damaged part
the one who looks after him,
it is from him tht he gets his face when he comes close,
he holds his hand when the class goes on a trip,
up and down on this border strip. 

That sense of how much better it would be
to be somewhere else, that was the most you could give me,
and did. The possibility of longing to get out of here.
The kind the child of an ex-empire doesn’t experience.
The kind only we can. It was worth it, even so, for the language. 

Or, maybe, the other one, that here it’s the best. To each their own.
For some reasons, only the extremes. The places that
can be easily loved, those that will not be the death of you: those have gone.
This is what is meted out to us. To envision a fate whatever pothole we’re in.
To debate, howling, as we drown, whether in a reservoir or the ocean. Clouds homeward. 

More than that who can give? Uncomfortable chairs,
a spritzer on a wonky table on the gravel.
Failures in slotting together tragic horizons. Eggs on our faces.
A self-image too grotesque to be even a caricature. World-patented silence.
Even so: rape fields over the centuries. 

In the town where I was born, beside the bus stop
stands a statue on the scorched turf. A misshapen railing,
six storeys high, on it a few round mirrors. You held my hand,
I looked at the statue, I didn’t understand, I thought it was glorious,
I just didn’t yet know if it was you or me. 

Of course, we can make a sad image of anything.
A landscape drawn in the vapour of a window of train arriving a thousand years too late.
The least you deserve is that I address you properly.
You, where the rule states only that it should have written on it
OPEN HERE, not that it should really open there, my homeland.