The Drafting of Our Dear Dead: A Passage
The issue here isn’t about right or wrong choices. It’s not the language itself that excludes you, but the people who believe they own it—a culture they uphold like a crumbling fortress. There is no wrong choice in writing in another language. ‘Oh, shit’, I thought to myself. ‘Call me a stranger, call me a traitor, or maybe, like they do on the island, call me the trespasser. Call me anything you want, but just don't call me that ever again’.
And then she began explaining what strudel was: the different stuffings, savoury and sweet, the cottage cheese. I saw my grandmother, locked in her back room, bathed in light, silently stretching and rolling the pastry. The sweat dripped from the end of her nose into the dough as she worked with disciplined focus for long hours.
‘Oh, shit’, I thought. ‘That’s the end of me’. The problem—their problem—becomes your problem when your own tribe calls you 'the English' as if you're a 'guest' on an island you’ve accidentally landed on, ‘the intruder,’ the pest. I am the woman in love and would do anything… I mean, I fancy the pants off you, I thought, but this is what one might call total annihilation. You might as well burn all the books and lie down on the rails. The only thing that holds you back is the train driver whose life you really don’t want to ruin.
There were signs, of course there were, but of course, no one could read them. I thought it was the bedbugs, mainly because of Kafka and the morbid symbolism around it, but it all started with Peter’s stomach puncture that landed him in the hospital for two weeks in Buda, far from the Translators' House we were trying to reach.
In retrospect, the whole summer was ominous. The lake’s colour was an unseen, dirty brown instead of its usual eau de nil, tea, pistachio green, or fern, depending on the time of day and season. Temperatures reached a boiling point, making the Carpathian basin feel like a giant, extremely hot public sauna without water for six consecutive weeks. Meanwhile, the war raged next door. Each week, a new, superhuman machine was introduced, enabling both sides to breach the other inch by inch, rewriting the geopolitical map weekly.
The rising number of fatal deaths on the Balaton (Attila József) line was certainly a strange and sinister sign. I found the constant presence of large stink bugs, stuck insistently on the outside of the mosquito nets, foreboding. And then there were the strange new mosquitos, smaller, with diabolic striped abdomens and quick, zigzagging flights. They entered rooms invisibly and circled heads and bodies inaudibly, unlike their counterparts, the male invasion of the Chironomus Balatonicus.
Other news: the country’s star priest was caught in an orgy and sacked. Three people were stabbed to death in Cologne's central square. There was talk of opening up the south-eastern borders, and images of empty coaches with ‘Röszke-Brussels’ on the front were shown. No one talked about the extreme heat and the drought it brought, or it was only partially discussed, along with the lack of water reservoirs that farmers resisted investing in. I think not talking about it allowed us to focus on literally surviving.
My auntie, 89, decided she could not take it any longer and made a U-turn on the way to Budapest. At the second roundabout just outside Kiskunhalas, she decided she’d had enough and slowly breathed her last breath. The car’s air conditioning broke that day, and the outside air flooding in was above 45 degrees. She was born there, so now everyone says she wanted to migrate back home before she went. My uncle, at the wake, welcomed me with a strong embrace, and perhaps to make a point, told me—rather loudly, because he was already semi-deaf—that she would have really wanted to see me one more time. Naturally, I felt the earth crack open beneath my feet.
The funeral was held ten days later. Now I think of auntie, whose death that week really hurt, as someone who is long gone. I think this is what we call compartmentalizing. I have compartmentalized her memory into a box, a pun I sort of intended.
At the edge of the rather deep grave—a family vault, my mother later explained—it took the six grave diggers a good forty-five minutes to cover the pit in the excessive heat. One of them, who looked more like the instructor, used his shovel a bit less intensely. I was holding onto my mother's arm, her fingers digging slightly unusually hard into my sleeve. The cantor sang a whole litany of mournful hymns. One was called 'Our Dear Dead,' a hymn that had touched me long ago at another auntie’s funeral. That time, the setting was less urban, and a traditional group of paid mourning ladies wearing dark scarves sang these very same hymns. They were so genuinely mournful, even though my aunt was not their own dead. They seemed to be genuinely weeping, too. As if she was their dead too. As if we shared the grief that was not theirs.
Then came the news about the bedbugs: Adam and I would have to share a bedroom for three nights while deep cleansing took place in the rooms downstairs. The weather forecast got worse and worse as the day approached. And then came the birds.
One by one, large and small, with open or tightly closed eyes, they dropped stiffly from the sky. Some had open beaks, as if asking for food or wanting to complain before they blew their final breath. Then it was many birds. Some still alive, some barely coping, sweeping across the entire region we call Central Europe. They came with the flood and the storm, caught in it as they leisurely prepared for the big trip back. Some were temporary residents, so they called them ours. Some were just passing through, not ours.
My father used to call me his 'wee wandering sprite,' which often turned into 'travelling goblin' or 'migrant dwarf,' but he always filled these terms with affection. I could hear the affection in his voice as he called me his 'mini migrant dwarf' just before I would need to travel back again. Just before he also decided it was time for him to go. I recall September was again extremely hot, and he, too, like auntie, suffered from the heat. He took me to the airport in mum’s Beetle and waved until the plane took off. Well, I knew he was waving anyway. Mum quietly sobbed inside the car. Later, she called me 'the traveling poet.' I called her 'the museologist.'
The absurdities of ceremonial traditions. I would be mad or foolish to denounce them. Once a Catholic, always a cynic, though.
The news came that they had closed the M71, the main road to Lake Balaton, and asked drivers to slow down because the birds, exhausted from hunger and the sudden drop in temperature from 40 to 5 degrees, were flying low. Some slowed down. Some accelerated. There were many good Samaritans, picking them up and taking them home in cardboard boxes. Some filmed them with a running commentary of their final hours. I could not help but join the collective rage. A poet in a post called it 'The day of Swallow Armageddon.' Meanwhile, Central Europe continued to drown by the minute in river debris. Many drowned.
The Danube is rising by the minute. They say it will have risen 5-8 meters by this morning. I watched videos of the swallow rescue mission all night as I couldn't sleep. I sobbed inconsolably, even hysterically, when the rescue team or the volunteer was too late, too clumsy, too stupid, too tired, or too unskilled to save one. Even though they saved a lot. But I was mourning the ones laid out on the sides of roads and motorways and rail lines, frozen or dead from hunger because the rain had dampened the bugs they lived on. I watched many people hitting bushes and hedges with rakes and brooms and found some temporary relief when it worked; the birds did appear and swallowed the flying insects, all woken up and leaving the shelter of the greens in a panic. In the back of my mind, I thought of all those drowning, and those who had lost their homes, or those who were caught in their homes or cars or in the mountains, very close to dying. It also said the tension this week would grow. This year the harvest moon is a lunar eclipse in Pisces, and that you will experience and feel everything twice as intensely.
Adam cancelled his trip in the end and said he was a bit relieved, to be honest. Nonetheless, we continued to translate Attila's poems, making each other depressed in turns, I guess. Or even more depressed. His apocalypse matched... We continued with the work. We got to a part where we decided to imagine alternative deaths for Attila. Adam said he needed time to think about this task.
In many ways, I wanted them to save them all. I wondered what I would do, having suffered from wing phobia for my entire life, if one or two or a small colony of them turned up on my balcony or my windowsill, tapping with their open beaks and wide-open eyes. They do have really large eyes compared to their minuscule faces and a sort of smiley beak; they are very pretty. What if they asked for flour worms, warmth, and shelter? Only for a night or two.
I knew it would challenge me, but I was almost preparing myself for it. For being tested and perhaps not failing. For crossing that threshold where nothing else matters but the living thing in front of you and the goal of keeping them alive. I wanted to become that volunteer I saw on the 'Let’s Save Our Swallows' website, the one who put them into cardboard boxes, turned on the heating, fed them from his palm, and delighted in seeing them regain strength and fly again.
Overnight, close to half a million birds were transported to animal shelters in cardboard boxes. Soon the country ran out of flour worm supplies. One eager volunteer reminisced in an online post about Germany transporting a million swallows in 1975 in heated train wagons from Germany to warmer southern France.
Sometimes I just wanted it all to be over. I didn't want to think of them, either dead or alive. I wanted them to leave. I actually wanted them to leave the country and find happiness somewhere else, a friendlier climate they could call home. I didn't feel this piece of land, this age, and this time was particularly carved out for building new homes for newcomers. I felt it was too small, too tight, too turbulent and unpredictable. Too messy and too hostile and just too very emotional all the time, too cathartic until the next catharsis, so many of them one never feels settled down.
And the Danube rose another two meters, and they closed down Margaret Island. In the eyes of my soul (as we say here), I saw the Lipták House at Balatonfüred, its drains and gutters inhabited by soaked-through swifts and swallows, its pompous and majestic library covered with colonies trying to survive Boris passing through too. Hiding in kitchen mugs and lampshades, flying out nervously when you take off and open a book. I saw heaps of their small, stiff bodies lined up on the bank of the lake. I saw them everywhere, even in my dreams. Their large eyes, looking at me—yes, me, definitely me—trying to tell me something. In fact, there were moments I stopped eating too. I wrapped myself in my own arms and curled up for days on my sofa, unable to move. I wanted to wait with them for it all to pass. I wanted, at times, to die with them, too.
Then I thought it must be the peri-menopause. This hysterical reaction to the mass death of birds who aren't even indigenous or strictly speaking from here. This land is only their second so-called holiday home. They consider Africa their real home, really. So why the week-long pity? It's hormones, I knew. Way out of order or the normal. So I decided to go for a swim at Komjadi pool right next to the rising Danube.
The next morning was somewhat warmer. I woke up entangled in blankets and duvets and quilts. The first few blinks were almost trouble-free. Then the whole thing hit me with a punch in the gut. But the new videos were a lot more optimistic. One showed the telephone wires lined up with hundreds of them, stronger, healthier, perked up, ready to leave us. They were not going to stay, you know. Just passing through. They seemed grateful but in a rush. They had no time to waste here. I wanted to go with them. I really did.
We continued working on Attila József. The meticulous work on Békeffi and graphic designs, the manuscripts and images, and a growing understanding of you understanding me, or the one I could have become. One late hour, or early morning, or midday, we finally had a round tour of the building. Like a master sonnet sequence, it was a labyrinth, a mise en abyme, a palace of mirrors in which our stranger figures were doubled and duplicated. I was sick for ten days after these museum visits. Unable to move, dysfunctional, lethargic, depressed. Plates and layers shifted until I had a high fever. Then slowly they moved back to their right place. Spirit from the bottle. Book within the book. Language within another's language. Whose? Yours or mine? And then the crash, like a catharsis, took place.
And then early in the morning, the dog died. And ever since he is dying ever more so slowly.
Agnes Lehóczky’s latest books: Apropos Paradise Square - On a Literature of Consolation (Pamenar Press, 2025); Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams and Lies (Crater Press, 2023); The World Speaking Back ... to Denise Riley (Boiler House Press, 2018); Wretched Strangers (Boiler House Press, 2018); Swimming Pool (Shearsman Books, 2017)
