Péter Gerőcs: Orphan Photos
An excerpt from Péter Gerőcs's novel Orphan Photos (Árvaképek, Kalligram, 2018), in Anna Bentley's translation.
3 November 2020
The boys’ parents and grandparents spent all the afternoon cleaning, and, as this time it was being done in a spirit of good-humour, the children were happy to get involved too. Andriska helped his mother with the washing-up and Tamáska cleaned the bathroom, huge rubber gloves engulfing his little hands and Grandmother providing him with precise instructions how to use the various cleaning agents. Tamás found the work soothing: the slow transformation of the light-blue tiles, the restoration of their former sheen, which he and only he could claim as his own doing. When his arm got tired, as it did from time to time, he would give it a shake. After he had had to do this several times, he went out into the garden and swung his arms in circles. He was only vaguely conscious that he hadn’t thought about the twins at all, or maybe only once or twice, looking for them out of the corner of his eye. He hadn’t seen them, and at that moment, he was reassured by that. He had bumped into Dad on the veranda, who was just taking a break for a cigarette from his seemingly endless dusting, vacuuming and mopping of the first floor.
“Now then my boy, what’s up? Tired?”
“Of course not. I’m just making my arms stronger.”
Dad let out a laugh.
The smell of cream cheese pogácsas was drifting into the living room. In the early part of the afternoon, when Tamás had left off picking plums from time to time to go and have a wee or have a drink of water, grandmother had still been wrestling with the dough in the living room. She would check from time to time on three pans she had bubbling away in the kitchen, as well as the oil sizzling in the frying pan. Then she would hurry back into the living room to cut out the pogácsas and brush them with beaten egg. Mother had tried to help at first, but as grandmother wouldn’t yield up any of the baking, she had decided to go and do some weeding instead. And now there was that smell of baking pogácsa.
The windows and doors were still standing open. The cleaning was nearly finished. No-one was allowed to walk about and the sheen on the floor tiles in the living room was melting away. From time to time the two parents fell over Loni, stretched out as he was on the threshold. The children would sometimes throw themselves on him and ride him like a horse.
The little carved bird on the cuckoo clock popped out and sang for all it was worth.
It was seven o’clock.
Grandfather seemed a little uptight. He scolded Loni for lazing about, and for having bad breath. Grandmother might have been feeling the same way, but she just hid in the kitchen. She came out quickly at one point to get changed, then hid away in there again. “Don’t let them burn!... Just don’t let them go burning on me!”
Dad was reading the newspaper out on the veranda, Mum was poking at the weeds in the garden. At the terrace table, Andriska was rounding up matchboxes on the tablecloth, and had to be spoken to by Dad from time to time. Tamáska was also sitting on the veranda, deep down in one of the plastic chairs. His hands were in his lap and he was fiddling with something on the palm of one of them, peeking up from time to time at his brother, who was throwing himself into his game and showing off a little. Anyone doing something with such abandon, he thought years later, was always showing off.
“Évi, love,” shouted grandmother, “leave those weeds alone now. Come and get changed instead.”
Mother didn’t reply. A few minutes later she came to a triumphant halt in front of the veranda. Though she didn’t say so, we all understood that she had done battle with a mighty battalion of weeds and emerged victorious.
The doorbell rang. It was seven twenty-one.
The windows had been closed, the pogácsas arranged on plates, and the apartment was clean and fresh-smelling.
Granddad Jancsi hurried across the veranda to open the garden gate. Earlier, he had complimented Tamáska on the bathroom.
“Well now, Tamáska, I see you’ve given the bottom of that lav a good scrubbing!” Tamás, then, was excused in part or in full for his early afternoon sluggishness.
“What’s going on, then? I was starting to think you were going to keep us out on the street!”
The garden gate creaked.
“Oh, fuck it, mate! I swear these steps get steeper every time!.”
Tamáska and Andriska grinned at each other.
“Karcsi, language! There are children here!”
“But you’ve got such shitty steps… I can’t get down them, see. Fuck it!”
A few moments later, Uncle Karcsi Czibere and Auntie Erika appeared.
“Ha, ha! And here are the sprogs! I’ve brought you all a shitload of booze,” shouted Uncle Karcsi, brandishing a bottle of fancily wrapped brandy above his head.
He was in a pair of saggy pleated trousers and a checked shirt with a green hunting waistcoat over the top. Auntie Erika was in a skirt and blouse, her backcombed hair looking like a tidied-up cobweb.
Uncle Karcsi always brought brandy with him if he was invited somewhere, and was always the only one to drink any of it. Sometimes Mum would join him for a glass, but only for the entertainment value of it, so she could make faces at it and amuse the others.
“They’re here at last!” shouted Tamáska. “Now we get to have a pogácsa!”
His parents laughed.
Clambering up the veranda steps, Uncle Karcsi raised his eyebrows dramatically, apparently overawed.
“He likes his food this one, Isti. You won’t catch him starving to death.”
Andris guffawed.
“Come on in, Károly!”
“Whatever for? It’s warm out here too.”
Erika handed a plastic bag to the boys’ grandmother, adding with a meaningful look, “Terike, my dear, I baked this today. It’s got no sugar in it, so János can eat it too.”
“Oh, Erika, you didn’t have to.”
Karcsi Czibere suddenly turned round.
“And where’s that mad old witch?”
“Kati? She’s not here yet.”
“I can see that, Terike. I can see that. Trust me, if she wasn’t coming, I’d be out of here, rather than die of boredom with you lot. I sincerely hope she’s not the one driving the old banger today!”
“Karcsi!”
“Now what? Someone who kills their family in a car crash, shouldn’t be getting behind the wheel.”
“Karcsi! That’s enough!”
The children loved the way Karcsi talked. Tamáska sometimes felt an urge to impress him. He understood enough to know that being crude was a delicate art. He didn’t know for sure, it was just a feeling, but he suspected that behind Uncle Karcsi’s rough language was a kind nature. It was there in his eyes, if not in his words.
“It’s a shame you won’t come in, Uncle Karcsi and Auntie Erika, seeing as we spent the whole day cleaning the house up. I’d be happy to take you round, if you want, and show you who did what.”
At this, his parents laughed uneasily, and Karcsi Czibere was amused too. Only Andriska brought his brother into line with a hard kick under the table.
The doorbell rang again.
This time, it was their grandmother who answered the door, and a few moments later, Kati swept into the garden. She dumped a plastic bag on the terrace table and, just as the old woman caught up with her, whipped her scarf off her neck with a devil-may-care sweep of her arm.
“Teri, give me a pair of slippers, will you, so I don’t stink the place out in my boots.”
“But what did you come in your boots for?” asked Uncle Karcsi.
“They came to hand. Ciao belli!”
And she vanished into the house.
“Was that a hello or a goodbye?” asked Dad.
“You know what she’s like,” said Aunt Erika.
“Tamáska, bring another chair,” said Mum.
“Don’t bother the child, I’ll get a chair,” said Granddad.
“I’ll do it, Granddad. Mum says I’m a big capable boy these days.”
The grown-ups laughed.
“I could tell you a thing or two about that,” added Dad.
Tamáska leaped over to Granddad, who, with everything that was going on, had not managed to sit down yet.
“Where are the chairs, Granddad?”
“In the cellar, next to the ping pong table.”
Tamás dashed off down the steps and out to the back, towards the cellar. Mum called after him.
“Don’t run!”
The rusty cellar door creaked. This cellar was really just a small basement, with one larger room and two smaller ones in it. The ping pong table was in the larger room. In each of the smaller ones was a bookshelf with a few books and a couch. Though he knew these rooms well, just out of curiosity, Tamáska went into one of the smaller rooms. It had a window which opened onto the side of the house at leg height, round the corner from the veranda. It was still open, and the grown-ups’ conversation came filtering through.
“ …because my father was born in ’84. Eighteen eighty-four, just to be clear: not seventeen eighty-four… He and that tart would meet at the Astoria Hotel when my mother worked the night shift.”
“That’s not very nice,” came Mum’s voice.
“What makes you say that? She was a good little squeeze. Anyway, they had one of those old gas-powered tiled stoves in the rooms there, you know… what are they called, now?”
“Karcsi, enough already!. Let’s have a toast.”
“All right, Jani my boy. I’m with you on that one!”
There was the sound of chairs scraping on the veranda tiles.
“Well, here’s to your health! I say we drink to someone finally creeping up on our prime minister and shooting him dead.”
“Karcsi, behave! Please!”
“Where’s that kid got to? Not sampling the must, is he?”
“Now, where was I?”
“Your dad was cheating on your mum,” came Kati’s voice.
“That’s right. Thank you, Kati. So, these old tiled stoves, they didn’t use to light straight away and you couldn’t press the button for a spark again straight after. You had to wait a bit. But my dad was really in the swing…”
Uncle Karcsi giggled at his own joke.
“… and it’s possible he’d had a little too much to drink. Anyway, he bent over to peer into the stove and he pressed the button again. The tart was standing behind him. The stove blew up with such a bang that the pressure sent the bricks flying. My dad was fine, but one of the bricks hit the tart on the head. My dad ran down to the reception with brick dust in his hair, to get them to call an ambulance. That was the last time they met, so his and my mum’s marriage was okay again for a while.”
“Yes, but Isti, know who that woman was? Do you remember Laci Csongrádi? He was in the same class as the Nádudvaris.”
Tamás grabbed a chair and headed out with it. At the top of the basement steps, he was seized with anxiety: in next-door’s garden Lili and Réka were playing with a little, freckled blonde boy he didn’t know. He looked longingly at the twins, but they didn’t look back at him.
It got dark.
Andriska and Tamáska were starting to get tired and fussy. They wriggled around in their parents’ laps, who were talking about people they didn’t know and telling long anecdotes.
Uncle Karcsi was holding forth again.
“Jucika? Of course I remember her! She slept above Isti on the top bunk, till it collapsed. Though it was a solid bed, that.”
Karcsi began to whoop with laughter, Dad too.
“Who’s this Jucika?” asked Mum.
“Jucika? Well let’s just say you needed a shoehorn to get her into her desk, and a corkscrew to get her out.”
“Dad, do you love Mum?” asked Tamáska, out of the blue.
There was a sudden silence.
“What kind of question is that? Isn’t twenty years of marriage proof enough for you?” said Dad with exaggerated indignation.
“Proof of what? That you haven’t poisoned each other yet?”
They proceeded into the living room, where Grandmother Teri and Mum had already laid the table. There was frankfurter soup, then a few stuffed eggs, then pork roulade, salad, mashed potato and dessert. The courses came one after the other in steady procession. Grandmother Teri was continually urging the assembled company to eat up, because the next course was coming, and did anyone want any more of any of the sides, and to collect up the places, because she couldn’t bring out the dessert otherwise.
“Coffee anyone? Any more cake? Évi, my dear, fruit?”
“No thanks. I’m stuffed. It was all very tasty.”
Uncle Karcsi’s language was getting cruder and cruder, and he laughed more and more often, sometimes even making comments about Granddad.
“You’re middle-class, Jani, old man. That’s why you’re ashamed of the truth.”
“I’m not middle-class, I just have common decency.”
“Let me reassure you, Jani, old man. There’s no difference.”
“And you’re an idiot, Karcsi,” put in Kati, calm as you like, grimacing at the pálinka she had just downed.
“Kati, my dear, about that we’re in perfect agreement,” said Uncle Karcsi, and he too banged his empty shot glass down on the table.
By the time all the pogácsas had been eaten, it was dark.
Mum turned to the children.
“Children, time to brush your teeth.”
“Already!?”
“Just a bit longer!”
István was more lenient.
“All right, kids. Just a bit longer.”
“Take the kids’ side, why don’t you?”
“Now, Évi,” said Kati, turning to Tamáska’s Mum, “Don’t fuss over the children all the time.”
“What’s it got to do with you, Kati?”
Tamáska headed them off.
“I’d rather go to bed,” he said, and backed this up with a yawn. His mother gave him a kiss on the forehead for siding with her.
“But I can stay, can’t I?” asked Andriska, who had slipped right off the chair.
“Both of you, off!”
When the children had brushed their teeth, Évi took them up to the attic room, where Grandmother had made up beds for them before the guests arrived. She settled them into their beds, tucked them in, then sat down on the edge of the bed for a little.
Tamáska was already half asleep, when his mother bent down to give him a last peck on the forehead. As she straightened up, she winced.
“What’s that?”
There was a needle in the bed: it was sticking up out of the mattress, and halfway down it was a potato beetle, speared through its wing case. For a moment, Éva’s head swam in the half-light filtering through the open door. She pulled the needle out of the mattress, but still didn’t feel steady enough to stand up.
“Mum, don’t go,” whispered Tamáska, squeezing his mother’s hand.
“I’m not going,” Éva said. She smoothed Tamáska’s hair back from his forehead, and he immediately closed his eyes to stay in his mother’s good books.
When Tamáska’s grip relaxed, Éva peeled his hand off her own, stood up carefully, and unfolded her hand. The needle had pressed deep into her hand.
Not knowing what to ask or who to ask about it, she decided not to say anything.
Tamáska opened his eyes. Only a few moments had gone by, but his mother wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Translated by Anna Bentley
Tamás Szemere, a successful portrait photographer in his early thirties, holds in his hands his first ever shot. The novel, spanning almost forty years, laden with passion and silence, is the story of the mysterious relationship between Tamás and the twins in the photo. Can we inherit a face, and do we have possession over our own? With forgetting, a shadow is drawn across the the photographer’s lifelong, obsessive struggle: what does a picture capture of our consciousness, and what will happen to our lives if we lose the already doubtful control over our own memory.
Péter Gerőcs was born in 1985 in Budapest. His novel Győztesek köztársasága was awarded the Artisjus Literary Prize in 2016. Besides writing, Gerőcs is a filmmaker and has made documentaries about the writers Miklós Mészöly, László Márton, and Péter Nádas. His published works include: Zombor és a világ (short stories), Scolar, 2010; Tárgyak (short stories), Scolar, 2012; A betegség háza (novel), Kalligram, 2013; Győztesek köztársasága (novel), Kalligram, 2015; Ítélet legyen! (essays), Kalligram, 2017, and Árvaképek ('Orphan Photos', novel), Kalligram, 2018. Orphan Photos won the Pál Békés Prize in 2019.
Anna Bentley has been translating Hungarian literature since 2015. She graduated from the Balassi Institute, Budapest’s Literary Translation Programme in 2018. Her translation of Ervin Lázár’s well-loved children’s book Arnica, the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children’s Press in 2019. Bentley translated Anna Menyhért's Women’s Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers (Brill, 2019).
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