Kiskutya
A Musician’s Tale
Robert James Tootell
©2012 Robert James Tootell
All rights reserved
Published in 2012 by Robert James Tootell
From the book: Krakow Stories
Kiskutya - A Musician’s Tale
i
Klara from the restaurant translated the short, hand-written note which arrived in my garden post-box three weeks ago, it's an invite for the day, that's all, she said, astonished to see me again. She took my hand and picked something off my old summer jacket, giving it (for it is shabby and neglected) a glance of disapproval. He's around somewhere, she added in a lower tone, looking me in the eye, I'd better run. But she didn't run. She seemed to want to say something more, paused, shook my sleeve. But is it Hungary or Transylvania? I asked. She looked over to the glass doors that lead to the office. It's this side of the border. The doors opened, a barman came through carrying glasses on a tray. Listen, the new guy's awful, really awful. Imagine - she leant into me conspiratorially, I inhaled her sweet scent, felt her stumbling youthfulness all around me - he picks his nose between songs! Really! But she must then have recognised the clipped, measured step of one Lajos Hanzo, for she turned quickly, still squeezing my sleeve. I have to go. Don't get lost! She lightly touched the letter in my hand, kissed me on the neck, you'll need a good map to find it! And with a smile that was already breaking into a sullen frown, she ran off.
Once outside I looked again at the note, though I had studied it a dozen times. The scrawling hand was not that of my friend; all I could think was that she had asked her parents to invite me, to make sure I came, to keep up the drama. But why? And why now, after a long season of silence?
The city was burning up in the sun and teeming with visitors who were waiting for the ferryboat, taking snaps of Buda Castle and the sparkling Fisherman's Bastion, or else moping around the shaded areas of the quay studying city maps. I made my way back to Deak ter, thinking furiously, though at the back of my mind hovered the image of the lovely Klara, as bright and illusive as I'd ever seen her. My real thoughts, alas, were not with her, muddled angel that she was, but with another. only-child of October, atheist scorpion, tormentor and lover of wild, crazy-wild horses, stubborn enigma of the forests of Buda...
I made up my mind whilst standing on the underground platform. I would let the summer go. I would chase her very absence all the way back to the mountains, reclaim the keys to my presence to this, her city. Or leave, once and for all, crushing the fly between my fingers, smashing this Magyar fly-jar that has tormented now for too long.
* * *
Before the sun had scattered its arrows across the edges of the city, before it had torched away the few brittle pins barely visible even in the darkest moments of these tangerine nights, I set off from my flat eastwards, towards the mountains of Transylvania. With the rosaries of sleep still dry in my eyes, I stole like a prayer out of the sleeping city to begin the journey across the belly of the country - that vast shimmering prairie where, when the mood takes them, greasy-brown stallions pursue rushes of freedom under the twisting ribbons of early mist, where farm workers - eyes half-shut, dumb on the backs of those thunderous carts taking them to the fields - crack open the rheumatic casings of another long day... that immense tapestry, gilded by wheat-fields and hidden farmsteads, woven from the body-cloth of Magyar peasants, sewn in the dust of a thousand oppressive years: the Great Hungarian Plain!
The journey is almost over. I feel like the blind avatar, having just begun his forty years in the wilderness, a labour of love made more arduous by an unforgiving sun and the decrepit state of my wagon. The skin around the edges of my mouth is dry and cracked. My eyes are watering. I have raced with wild horses, her tenacious, knowing lovers, across the puszta, and scurried through the most chimerical of villages, whose inhabitants seem to live as creatures of the past, timeless, invisible, scarred by many births into the puszta's seamless labour - a people unknown to me. I have sat under trees with old Magyar peasants like an outcast, short of water and in need of directions, staring impassively at the fruits of their fatigue. I have battled over stony tracks that have crackled like fire under the tyres of my wagon, and she has ridden beside me, on horseback, remote, angry, whenever I thought to recapture... whenever I called to her – Anna!
I stopped for a break, to cool the struggling engine, so close and so hungry that the fatigue had become a kind of weakness in my arms. I have been unable to think of anything but flashes of us together, her familiar shape forming on the backs of the crazy ones that have thundered beside me, urging me to press on, faster, faster. I slip too easily into time lost with her. I want to speak, to forbid her anger, her measured assaults, and to kiss her, but more than this, to rescue her from those idlers on horseback who hustled beside her, Pavel, and Katia, to break into a thousand pieces their stony expressions, their adolescent secrets held deep within the forests beyond Buda. I am thinking, what has become of my atheist linguist, who scored the preludes of torment and trust with me? With me! Horse-woman of Budapest, who disappeared so willingly into the euphony of my bewilderment, my unfailing cynicism, only to regress into an altogether different kind of beast, allowing me into its lair only to show me the arching of its back as I reached out to find, to touch...
The mountains appear like clouds in the distance. I am almost upon the village, driving up through scorched bushes and trees, breath of a hostile summer bearing down with inflammatory nonchalance, offensive nonchalance, skeletal, olive-sallow figurines, staring back at me, obscuring the unmarked widths of this smoking track; they have gathered for a feast of remembrance.
Finally, I make out the settlement beyond the stumps and dried leaves, that which I have been seeking with stones in my stomach. I am yet fearful that words will be spoken and bruises pressed. Just what I'm going to say to her I have no idea. How long has it been? But I know, to the very day. A hundred times I have run our meetings over in my mind, played out on the green inclines of Buda and the old streets of Pest, begging the question she might so easily have asked of herself: is it possible I might still save my days in her city? Now I must act as the guest must, listen and not speak my mind, wait and not ask. And yet, it is I who have taken the trouble this time...
How easy it is to perfect the part in your mind alone.