Pálinka:
Lost in the Hungarian Countryside
Amy gets a ride from drunken farmers.
(1999)
Originally published in the Summer 2003
Literary Edition of the Cape Cod Voice.
The path became a lane that led through a vineyard, past children in bathing
suits playing around a plastic pool, to a guy sitting on the side of the
road in fatigues and a white t-shirt. His short black hair and tough face
went with his clothes. I approached him like a rabbit and said that I lost
my way and asked how to get to the lake. He said, "Hoo-ha. That’s really
far. The fastest way I know is to go down to the village and go by the road,
but you might ask in that red-roofed house up the street."
At the red-roofed house there was a white-haired man squatting to fiddle
with the trunk of a car. He was tall and the car was little. I asked him
the way to the lake. He stood upright and his sinewy, sunburned limbs were
like vines. He surveyed the land and said, "Hoo-ha." A moustached man came
out of the house and the tall man told him I wanted to go to the lake. They
discussed it and then the moustached man said, "Come on. I’ll show you."
He was a bit clumsy and smelled of wine. We walked to the end of the street
where he thought a path might be, but there was only wilderness. It would
have been very easy for him to rob me, which was why he might have taken
me there, but he didn’t. We turned back.
He asked, "Do you eat and drink Hungarian?"
"What do you mean?"
"Do you eat and drink Hungarian?"
"Yes," I said for the sake of the game.
He spoke with slangy country expressions. When I told him I didn’t understand
he would make a sweeping hand gesture as if what he said was nothing important.
Then, he would look into the distance beyond impatience or frustration with
a this-doesn’t-make-any-sense-but-I’m-still-doing-it expression. I thought
it was a bit rude of him to suddenly plunge into his private thoughts in
a way that implied I would never be able to grasp them.
"Time. What is time?" he said, laughing at the mystery of time, and said, in English, "Everyday holiday."
"Yeah," I said, chuckling to humor him.
He said, "How old do you think I am?" I paused to think it over and he said, "I bet I’m a few years older than you."
I said, "I’m 31."
He said, "I’m 34." It was surprising that we were so close in age.
"Time. Time. What is time? We were out in the fields all day harvesting.
After we work hard all day we like to drink and that’s why I’m drinking."
"That’s all right."
"What’s your first name?"
"George. What’s yours?"
"Mine?"
"Yes."
"Yani." We shook hands, but I still didn’t feel totally safe. Back at the
house he literally ordered me to sit down, so I sat on the grass and he went
inside. A third man came out. He was about forty, buffed, balding, graying
and moustached. He looked a lot like Freddie Mercury. The tattoos
on his arms were faded, and some were broken and formless. The most prominent
was a dagger going into a heart. Above it quotes it read MEMENTO. I stood
up and when we shook hands he looked at me more directly than anybody had
looked at me since the drunken woman at the Phoenix Pension, and, before
that, Maya, a long time before. Freddie was sincere, eyeing me to see who
I was, holding my hand with the right firmness and length.
Yani came out of the house saying they’d give me a ride in the auto in a
few minutes. But the way he expressed it was so nonchalant that I wasn’t
sure I heard him right, but I thanked him. I suspected he just wanted me
to hang around longer.
Freddie told me something I didn’t understand and Yani said, "Don’t speak like that with him."
Freddie asked me, "Do you know what I’m talking about?" and he made a movement
with his two hands as if he was opening something in front of him, and I
realized he had said something that sounded like a dirty word. I said, "Pussy,"
and they cracked up.
Freddie said, "Where did you learn a word like that?"
I said, "It was the fifth word I learned when I came to Hungary."
He said, "You’re bad."
The woman of the house came out. She was huge, definitely retired, with comfortably
sagging breasts and nipples showing plainly though her blue dress. She was
called Aunt Magda and smiled kindly. There was also a silent three or four
year girl who no one introduced. She was ill or sad or frightened and stayed
close to Aunt Magda.
Yani and Freddie were having a good laugh speaking in slang and occasionally
asking me questions that I didn’t understand. Their conversation sounded
like a more of a secret language than colloquial Hungarian. They wondered
how much of what they were saying I understood. Freddie asked really fast,
"You can’t understand what I’m saying, if I speak quickly, right?"
I said, ‘I understood that."
Freddie said, "Yes! You understand! Hungarian is the hardest language in the whole world!’
I said, "I don’t know. I think Chinese is harder."
Freddie said, "No. I know Hungarian is harder."
Yani said, "Chinese is harder."
Freddie said, "How do you know?"
Yani said, "I learned it in school."
Freddie said, "You know what typing is, right?" lifting his fingers toward me.
I could feel something coming. I said, "Well, yeah."
He lunged at me and typed away on my chest with his fingertips, which tickled
and I withdrew from it giggling like I was four, but it unnerved me a little.
Yani said, "Leave him alone."
Freddie asked, "Can you type?"
Yani said, "Don’t speak so fast. He doesn’t understand."
"I understand. I can type."
"Fast?"
"With two fingers."
"You know in China they can type 270 words in one second. You know what a second is, right?"
Yani said, "Don’t kid around with him."
I said, "I understand."
"Yeah," Freddie said, "270 words in one second."
I said, "Yeah, I think their machine has like 2,000 buttons."
Then he took my pen out of my pocket and it felt weird to have his hand so
close to me again, but he did it as if the pen was a delicate flower. He
said, "Here. I’ll show you how the Chinese write."
He drew carefully on his hand, furrowing his brow in deep concentration,
and then presented his hand to me. Pointing to one of the pictograms he had
drawn he said, "This means ‘He is my buddy,’" and pointed to Yani. He continued,
"This means ‘You are not Hungarian.’" Freddie put the pen gently back into
my pocket and stared at me like he had when we met, and referring to Yani
he said, "He’s my buddy. He’s my buddy." He put his thumb and index finger
to his mouth and kissed them as if he had just tasted good food and said,
"My buddy." Then he said the word for the European double cheek kiss and
mimed it and said, "My buddy." He was looking at me so squarely while he
did these things that I didn’t know how to react or show appreciation. I
felt as if he was seeing me seeing him seeing me...The tall sunburned man
came out and Freddie said, "He’s my buddy, too," and repeated the cheek-kissing
mime. Freddie and Yani embraced and I looked into the distance out over the
village.
Freddie said, "He is Yani. He is Laci and I am Laci. I am duplalas. Do you understand?"
"No."
"Laci, Laci, duplalas. Tom, Tom, duplalas. George, George, duplalas."
"Un-huh. I understand."
"So, tell me."
"You’re a duplalas if your name is doubled."
"Yes," he said, "What’s taking them so long?"
Yani said, "They’re women." To me he said, "They’re cleaning."
Freddie said, "Hold this," extending his cigarettes and lighter to me.
I said, "What?" not totally trusting him.
"Hold this."
I accepted them and he used the free hand to put on his watch, took them
back, and offered me a cigarette. The brand of cigarettes was "Phoenix."
"No thanks."
"No?"
"I smoked for fifteen years and I quit a year and half ago, so I don’t want to start again."
"What year were you born in?"
Yani said, "He’s 31."
I said, "‘68. I started smoking when I was 14."
Freddie said, "Some people are like that...When I was 14 I was working in
the mines." He talked about working in a mine using mine vocabulary that
I didn’t know. He explained how the elevator didn’t go slow like normal elevators--it
basically dropped and your stomach went up into your mouth. He was telling
me about equipment they used and he said, "Do you know what that is?"
Yani said, "Don’t bother him."
I said, "A machine in the mine?"
Freddie said, "Yes! He understands!"
A pubescent girl in a t-shirt and bikini bottom walked by and Freddie greeted
her saying, "I kiss your hand," which was a polite way for men to greet women,
but she was so young it sounded a little strange. Yani said, "Me too," which
sounded perverted. He told me, "The neighbors have a holiday home here. They
are a bit stupid."
Then Aunt Magda came out with the girl and a second woman, in her late thirties.
She was tall, slender, barefoot with painted toenails and wearing sweatpants.
She had short, messy, bleached hair with long dark roots. There were dark
circles under her eyes and bitterness and haggardness were ingrained in her
face. She was still pretty. She shook my hand and had a kind smile like Aunt
Magda’s. I didn’t catch her name, but she said Laci--the tall one--was her
brother.
Laci, her brother, got into the driver’s seat of their little car and she
sat in the passenger’s. Aunt Magda sat behind the driver with the sad girl
in her lap. Freddie was next to her, twisted sideways with his chest between
the front seats. I was smooshed between him and Yani. I asked Freddie if
his waist hurt because I was sitting on it. He said it was okay.
Yani said to me, "You have nice white legs." I paused, not knowing how to
respond, but I had to say something. I said, "Thank you," and everybody laughed.
Yani asked if the tight fit was okay. In natural sounding Hungarian I said, "It’s a lot better than walking."
Everybody laughed and Yani said, "You said that well, maybe too well." They
couldn’t know how sincerely I meant it, after so much hoboing on foot. I
couldn’t have explained this to English-speaking country people. I felt bad
that I seemed like a snob.
The car rumbled along on a bumpy one-lane road through farmland. After a
sharp turn Freddie moaned with pain. The tall woman started whacking him
saying, "Oh, you poor baby! You poor baby! I feel so sorry for you!"
He said, "But my dick is getting pinched."
She said, "You don’t have enough to pinch," and they started laughing hysterically.
Yani asked if I understood and I said, "More or less."
He said, "You don’t have to understand everything."
I understood that before we did anything we were going to have a drink. I
imagined ending up at a local place for everyday-drinkers. I felt a little
nervous about what I was getting myself into. Freddie suggested that they
drink pálinka, the plum brandy, which was the national drink. Everyone hollered,
"Yayyyy! Pálinka!"
Aunt Magda said, "No. Not pálinka. It’s summer."
Freddie said, "Yes. Pálinka. It’s summer!"
They screamed, "Pálinka!"
We stopped at the edge of the village on a flat, straight lane that was two
cars wide. As Freddie twisted himself out of the car he groaned, "Oh, ow,
my sack, my sack, ow."
On both sides of the street there was a dog barking menacingly at us. One
was a German shepherd sticking its head and paws up over a fence. His huge
white teeth snapped angrily. Freddie saw me cower from him, and he said,
"What’s the matter. Are you scared?"
I said, "Well, yeah."
He said, "Oh no, what are you scared of?"
"I don’t like big dogs."
"Why? Aren’t you brave?"
"I like little dogs better."
"What?" Freddie said, "Watch this." He put his arm in the dog’s mouth and
the dog relaxed his jaws and accepted it. He said, "Now, you do it."
I said, "I’m allergic to dogs."
He said, "I don’t care."
I said, "No no no, that’s okay." I had found that saying "no" three times
made people understand that I couldn’t be convinced into doing or buying
what they wanted me to.
Freddie said, "‘No no no.’? Come on already. Look!" He threw the dog’s head about violently by shaking his arm.
"Really. It’s okay."
Yani said, "Don’t make him if he doesn’t want to." The others had disappeared
into one of the houses to buy a large quantity of alcohol from a local seller.
I gravitated toward Yani, but Freddie grabbed my arm and pulled me toward
the dog and the dog snapped its jaws at me, tossing bits of drool. As Freddie
dragged me closer the dog began to settle down. Freddie forced my arm up
to the dog’s mouth and the dog daintily sniffed it and then gave it a little
lick and a nose-kiss. When he let go I immediately stepped away and the dog
went berserk.
"Come on! Come on! Watch!" he commanded and he crammed his arm into the dog’s mouth and shook it like a jackhammer.
I said, "He already kissed me."
In a hushed tone Freddie said, "He does this with my dick, too."
Yani asked me if I wanted to stay and have a coffee. He had gone from being
rudely pensive to hospitable, and even protective of me. I felt guilty that
I told him I would rather go.
The others came back with plastic containers full of wine. We said goodbyes
and Yani and Freddie told each other farewell as if for the last time and
hugged. The tall woman motioned me to come with her to the car. She opened
the front door for me. I thought she was going to let me ride in the front
and this seemed like too much courtesy. I thanked her humbly. She said that
she wasn’t going. She smiled and the bitterness flew away from her face like
crows.
Laci told me to fasten my seatbelt. He was lanky and mellow and smoked Phoenix,
too. There was a little sticker on the dashboard that looked humorous and
had a rhyme I couldn’t understand. I asked him what it meant and he said,
"It means ‘If you don’t smoke I won’t choke,’" He put a cigarette in his
mouth and said, "That’s why I’m lighting up." I understood how that could
be a good reason to smoke.
We whizzed down the highway and didn’t speak. He dropped me off in the center
of Badacsony and said goodbye informally and unpretentiously.
As I thought about them I could feel my tendency to reduce such people as
ignorant, racist, and role-bound. No matter how much I believed in equality
and dignity, I still felt scared of them, and wanted to hide from them as
if they were dangerous animals. Freddie ordered me not to be afraid and forced
my arm to the dog’s mouth, but I was more comfortable just respecting them.
|
