Excerpt
…something, as though movement itself were enough. Even there
I loved the center — the place where stories met, where I could
deliver the punchline. I was not brave, only brave enough not to
appear cowardly within the group. Since I never showed my fear,
even those I feared kept a certain distance from me. It created an
outward and inward equilibrium.
At home I was quiet. I read a great deal. I loved washing dishes,
watching plates and cups turn snow-white. There I desired no audience.
I loved solitude; then I daydreamed, sometimes wrote, sometimes
drew. I knew I was good at what I did. And already desire
was growing steadily inside me. I watched not only girls’ faces but
their legs, breasts, buttocks. The maps of erotic dreams sometimes
appeared upon the sheets.
Then one day I simply disappeared. Not dramatically. I just
stopped going on with the old companions. Life brings several
such changes. That was the year the Hungarian division of the Iernut
secondary school was abolished, and the corridors echoed the
Hungarian language more strangely afterward. As though not a decision
but a gradual silencing had put an end to it. The Hungarian
population of the once predominantly Hungarian town diminished
year by year like a stream during drought: it did not dry out all at
once but quietly, irresistibly. In the courtyards the words of grandparents
could still be heard, yet in everyday life Hungarian speech
became increasingly rare.
The number of Hungarian elementary school pupils also declined.
An empty desk in the classroom no longer provoked sadness,
because absence itself had become familiar. The morning bell
still rang, but fewer voices answered it. Uncertainty worked within
the decisions of parents: the promise of the future shimmered elsewhere,
in another language, in other cities. What had once seemed
natural — the self-evident presence of one’s mother tongue —
slowly became the exception. Memories cling stubbornly, yet they
cannot halt time; they merely testify in silence that once, here, the
world spoke differently, about different things, to different people.
