Gyula Zeke:
Anderson-taktusok
(Anderson Beats)
Budapest, Seneca, 1998, 171 pp.

Gábor Németh:
A huron tó
(Lake Huron)
Budapest, Filum, 1998, 125 pp.

Attila Bartis’s basic experience was in a region of particularly evil memory in the recent past (his short fiction can easily be located in time and space), therefore I am filled with some satisfaction that the innocence of his senses, the sincere longing of childhood were not destroyed by despotism; the intrinsic purity breaks through the filth and beams on the horizon of remembrance in the form of spell-binding short stories.” This comment on the cover of Attila Bartis’s new volume of short stories, Bluish Mist, comes from Ádám Bodor. The latter, a publisher’s editor and an older fellow short-story writer, has produced weird and enchanting short stories—rare gems of recent Hungarian literature—that were also conceived in “a region of particularly evil memory in the recent past”, that is Transylvania in Romania. The thirty-one-year-old Attila Bartis was born and brought up in Transylvania, and despite the several years he has been living in Hungary, his work so far has been inspired by childhood memories.
The association with Bodor is difficult to avoid, for the view of this world and its representation in Bartis’s stories are close to those of Bodor’s. His stories, expressed in accurate, measured and elegant sentences, balance on the edge of reality and grotesque mystery. The volume contains fifteen short stories, arranged in three cycles, with a quotation from Wittgenstein as the epigraph of each. The title also comes from one of these, “But one might also say: no one can be great who misjudges himself, who draws a bluish mist over his eyes.” In his work, Bartis tries to shatter this bluish mist that envelops in his memory the sense of that lost world, and his simple stories shed the bluish mist of distance and personal involvement, while they are unconsciously wrapped in a fog of a mysterious parable-making.
The first cycle, Lies for Bohumil, adds another model to that of Bodor. “Bohumil or the Story of Breadcrumbs” is about the grandfather of the narrator, an inn-keeper of the mould of Hrabal’s characters. From the ‘20s to the ‘50s he used shrewd cunning to protect the huge chestnut tree in the yard of his inn from the local Romanian authorities. His last trick was to allow half the leafy crown of the tree to be lopped off in return for the “appointment” of his grandchild as headwaiter. The tree shaded the dining-room of the council chairman’s brother-in-law. Luckily, the old man was no longer alive when another council chairman had the tree felled so that his mistress could “have an overview of things” from her apartment. At his death, the old man metamorphosed into the later Hrabal (or Hrabal was the soul incarnate of the Transylvanian inn-keeper): while feeding his pet pigeon, throwing out the breadcrumbs, he fell off the church tower.
In another one of these “lies”, an official arrives from the county authorities with an order to the cemetery keeper for the skulls of the Bolyais, father and son, two great Transylvanian-Hungarian mathematicians, to be exhumed for an exhibition. The name in the document has been misspelt as Bokai, and since the cemetery happens to have a father and son by this name, the law-abiding and intransigent keeper is willing to provide their skulls for the noble purpose—the more so as he too is a Bokai. Maybe up there, in the mathematical infinite, everything is different as the Bolyais declared, “but that’s far away, Mister Sáfrány, very far. And here you are anxious about your job, and the two Bokais will also be stared at here.”
The “genesis stories”, autobiographical in inspiration, of the second cycle include the best pieces in the collection. They excel with openings such as: “In the spring of nineteen-seventy three a shepherd called Ágoston Szöcske sheared a total of a hundred kilos of black wool off the famous sheep of the parish priest of Sáromberke. The noble wool was washed, combed and taken to the loft of the presbitery in five sacks.” Or: “There used to live in Marosvásárhely a young man called Károly Piros, who exterminated cockroaches. He had come from beyond the forest, one of his legs was 4 cm shorter than the other, and until March 6th nineteen-seventy three, no one loved him.” Both the five sacks of coalblack wool and the lame cockroach exterminator appear sooner or later on the horizon of the writer and his family, all mentioned by their real names. They provide the title or dominant motives of other short stories, they become more than just anecdotic elements, story themes in themselves, and provide a cool and reserved irony, a dry and acrid manner of presentation casting the nightmarish light of a chaotic and grotesque world upon the stories. “Oszkár or the History of Physics” is about a dwarfish genius of a physicist, Oszkár Dóczy, who discovers a sensational constant after sixty years of brain-racking and calculation, and mails it to the relevant authority together with its demonstration. After some weeks of waiting, a student of his asks him one day: “What is the opinion of Comrade Professor about Voinic’s constant described right after the editorial in today’s Red Flag, to which Dóczy replies that unfortunately he does not read newspapers, but Comrade Voinic, the academician, is highly competent in his field both as a physicist and as the nephew of the Comrade Chief Party Secretary, and if he has calculated a constant, then it will be valid at any point of the earth.” All there remains for Oszkár Dóczy now is to forget even Newton’s laws after appropriate psychiatric treatment, and to tell the pensioning-off commission: “to hurry because at three he has a meeting with UFOs under the metal owl guarding the entrance to the Teleki Library.” Oszkár Dóczy does go to the library for a few days and ostentatiously scrutinizes the sky as if waiting for UFOs. All this may, or may not, sound a grotesque exaggeration. This is precisely the secret to the world of Bartis’s (and Bodor’s) fiction that you never know whether the things that appear grotesque are not simple, everyday facts “from a region of particularly evil memory in the recent past”.
Gyula Zeke is in his forties and his new book, Anderson Beats, is his second. His former volume, another collection of short writings, Idõs hölgy három ujja vállamon (Three Fingers of an Elderly Lady on My Shoulder), appeared three years ago. Zeke is a one-off, not to be placed with any of the currently fashionable trends or groups. He is actually the latter-day (belated) heir to a Hungarian or, rather, Pest tradition: wandering scholar of Pest, the knower of its secrets, a flaneur, a bohemian tramp, a Budapest Villon. A word on his predecessors is in order; they include Gyula Krúdy, Dezsoý Kosztolányi, Zoltán Jékely, Iván Mándy. Mándy is relevant here; some years ago, when he died, he seemed to be the last inhabitant and writer of Budapest who knew and protected the spirit of the place, knew everything of its everyday life and miracles. In Zeke’s stories this knowledge seems to live on, but the town he inhabits is the Budapest of those who travel on trams and buses, the boozers, the homeless, a city that has collapsed in rubble. What connects Zeke with his predecessors is his love and understanding of the city, his being at home in its crumbling state as it bleeds from thousands of wounds, his urge to walk its streets, and his calling at its watering holes day after day, as if he cannot have enough.
There is also another aspect that links Zeke’s writings to a Pest tradition. Most follow in the line of the feuilletons that used to be a feature of pre-war Budapest papers. These humorous-anecdotal pieces, often polemic in intention, reported petty events, personal impressions which tried to grasp the local essence that underlay the everyday life of the city. Zeke moulds this genre to his own image: he extends its intimacy to the confessional subjectivity of poetry or of entries in a diary, intensifying the language to this purpose. At places, his texts are expressionist interior monologues, stumbling over bizarre associations. Very likely matured for a long time and executed with great care, his stories are in a meaningful tension with their main theme: the fragmentary and improvized nature of the city and the life of an inhabitant, the first-person narrator. The occasionally forced and arbitrary linguistic stunts are tempered by an acrid resigned humour that instils an invigorating sap in most of his stories.
Anderson Beats, just as Bartis’s book, is also a three-cycle work. The first consists of short disconnected lyrical sketches. A similarly stylizing perspective asserts itself in the third cycle, String of Death (the last cycle of Bartis’s volume also contains three legend-like “death stories”): these pieces of two or three pages, introduced by quotations from Gilgamesh are variations on the theme of death and self-destruction that lurk throughout the book. Just as with Bartis, the size and character of the central cycle is decisive, and in quality, the best. It is in these pieces of the “Buda Fugue” that Zeke apparently feels at home. They take place mainly “in the street” or on the metro or on the tram, in pubs and cafés. They are simply the narrator playing in his typical and self-contained manner a prosaic melody elicited by a certain subject. “Coffee Prose, Beer Prose” is about a day of his when some inner restlessless gets him up and into the streets well before daybreak. He roams his regular places, drinks coffee, beer, wine and soda, bitters, sweet Tokaj wine, smokes, eats meatballs, scrambled eggs, meets friends and strangers and, in the meantime, keeps watch, observes.
Unlike his contemporaries and colleagues, Zeke is in no hurry, he looks around with a sort of peacetime leisureliness, and so he perceives the tastes, smells, sounds, lights. He chats with chronic alcoholics—one of them, an old woman of aristocratic origin, quotes Baudelaire to him in French after he stands her a small glass of wine and soda (“Farewell to the Aristocracy”). He is accosted by beggars and the homeless all the time, who ask him for money. Once a stranger, an “urban Hungarian”, asks him for 700 forints in the street, promising to return it at the same place, in three months’ time. After some wrangling, the narrator hands over the money to get rid of him (“Heading for the Wine Tavern). Zeke’s narrator feels compassion for the downcasts and victims of the new world of thievery, feels that he partly belongs with them, yet he is an educated man who “has written a special study putting a segment of the world at rights”, he has a family, home, car and enough money on him to provide hand-outs and order the odd beer or glass of wine.
While he walks the deepest recesses of the city, he ponders, reflecting ironically upon himself and his situation: “This is a basin,” he says of the geographical feature of Hungary, “no sea, no perspective, things settle down, hatred accumulates, strength and passion rotate in their circles. Melancholy blackens not only the souls but also the soil, there is always something tragic and final in joy, there is a premium on death.” Yet this is where Zeke is at home. “Where else could I go? My feet know the way, they take me to the Tabdi wine-bar at the beginning of Király utca. The soda does not lessen the horrid taste of the hog-wash, yet I am at home. Yes, this draughty, coarse smell of tobacco, the urn-like aluminium ashtrays, these toothless corpses, that’s what I have specialized in with my lungs, my guts.” (“Flower of Flowers”).

Gábor Németh (1956) belongs to the same generation as Gyula Zeke, whose name is even mentioned in Lake Huron. The book, containing short prose pieces, displays several similarities with Anderson Beats. Lake Huron also offers personal notes, sometimes like feuilletons, sometimes like diary entries. In his writings published so far, Németh combines loosely connected fragments into prose pieces, which only temporarily—if at all—create a larger narrative context and, in the final analysis, demonstrate the impossibility of story-telling. (In this he bears affinity with the fiction of several of his contemporaries, Parti Nagy, Darvasi, Garaczi, Hazai, Podmaniczky, Kukorelly and others.) That Németh can create lifelike situations and authentic dialogue—when need be—is shown by the outstanding 1998 film, Presszó, which he co-scripted.
One of the epigraphs of Lake Huron is taken from Thomas Bernhard: “No one has ever discovered anything, or will discover anything either”. By the same token, Németh writes things that have not been made out by him but happened to him, are about him, and does not even make an attempt to pretend that it is not he who speaks. The same applies in broad outlines to Zeke and Bartis as well, but while Bartis’s recollections, emerging vaguely on the border of reality and fiction, are often almost anecdotal, and Zeke accurately outlines his narrating self, Németh speaks about himself in such a way that neither autobiography nor stories unfold; what happens is the articulation of a person’s manner of speaking laden with digressions, insertions, omission, interruptions.
The title piece, (lake huron)—the pieces have lower-case titles in brackets—evokes the figure of a “haughty, noble and sweet-faced” childhood classmate who wore an Indian string of beads for a belt. Today, she is a thin, worn-out, sad wreck of a woman. The piece (black rings) also lists girls who were classmates together with the first experiences of women associated with them (“Every pussy is different.”) Similarly to Zeke, several pieces confront the reader with images of Budapest misery, the homeless begging: (let it be light), (sentences for money), (how nice it would be, if). (silver Kossuth) evokes the cigarette brand of this name and Radio Free Europe wittily so named after the Budapest Kossuth Radio, and what it meant at that time to get to the West. “There was the radio, you could listen out from in here, into the colourful and fragrant. You could know, or guess that things could be different. You could pity here, ‘under the Soviet tanks’ my tiny homeland ‘bleeding from a thousand wounds’. Here is captivity and there, beyond the noisy fog, made explicit in the words, was Free Europe. And I knew then that it would always be like that. I would live like that. I would beget imprisoned children. We would listen together into the colourful and fragrant. Odd as it may sound, being a captive is a sort of dignity. It certainly is not you who does the evil to yourself. Certainly everyone was good, if you didn’t need to be bad...” (are you jewish?) starts from a traumatic school camp and from a war documentary seen at that time, to evoke the child’s question: “are you a Jew?”, and if yes, “why didn’t they tell me?” “Some years passed. I learnt new words. I understood that they were not lying. That I am not a Jew. Nor Roman Catholic, or communist that I see the sky empty, while hell is here <he’d think that’s exaggerating> and works quite well. / Yet, were there someone to ask if I was a Jew, I could only answer with this story.”
Every text abounds in remarks, comments between the < and > signs. These are a posteriori comments by the author to some of his statements, utterances—at least they pretend to be. Probably they are not later added but signs of multiple reflection and hence organic elements in the pieces. Beyond a certain point, all these many corrections, relativizations, retractions, additions turn against themselves—and the reader. If the writer is so uncertain and cannot decide how it really was, how is one to understand things and what he should write about, is it worth writing at all and, more important still, is it worth leaving all this for the reader to decide? These doubts are reinforced by those texts in which the writer refers to utterances by his friends and other writers, to events connected with the literary or theatrical scene or which are simply private events. Cases in point are not really writings like (living paragraph), in memory of Iván Mándy on the occasion of his death and burial, though it is also closer to feuilleton, but those that need a certain amount of initation (see the frequent mention of Zeke and other writers) and those that deem events worth to be read just about because the protagonist of the events reflected upon them in writing. Lake Huron shows Gábor Németh as an able and sensitive feuilleton writer—not utterly free of some Esterházy epigonism, who cannot decide at present what to write about as a writer of fiction.