Right Effort

There are a lot of women, and most of them will eventually want to have sex. Most likely more than once. Julia's husband counted on this. He depended on this. And he worked the situation well.

But pedophilia was not one of his sins, so he had been watching Réka Mátó since she was 14.

As a child, Tamás had watched the Maros push and shift the sandbar islands from year to year. First here, then there. Massive movement achieved through no obvious effort. He came to understand the depth and subtle power of the flow. Nature will always win.

But sometimes it does need a push. So in 1964, when Réka turned 21, he brought her a bottle of Chanel (albeit counterfeit) from Yugoslavia. In 1969 he heard of her love for Elvis and managed to secure an LP copy of the Comeback Special (albeit with a Cyrillic cover).

She called him Uncle and thought he was very sweet. Everything controlled. Everything proper.

The breakthrough came on a late spring day in 1974 as the two chatted on the sidewalk in front of the Cultural Center. There was no obvious sign, no wink, no brush of the breast. But he knew the time had come.

"My little Réka!" he had said in his most Uncle-like voice, "When will you make me your famous beef stew?"

"Tomorrow" was the reply. And he knew.

Pulling up in his Niva cop car, dressed in his pressed uniform, hair greased like Elvis '68, he felt secure.

He passed through the gate, leaving restraint behind. They met. Undammed, they moved together: one steady river pushing the sand, working together as they acknowledged the inevitable. Massive movement achieved through no obvious effort.

Máto Réka ... Check

ferryman

"Sarge! This one's a real troublemaker! Lazier than a pig! Let me take him down and finish him off. No one'll miss him. We'll say he croaked on his own... that we buried him in the dyke. C'mon Sarge! He's holding us up!"

The sergeant was glad to be able to have one less Jew to worry about. So long as they could finish the job.

The guard took the Jew down to the bank and told him to swim. Swim like a frog, dammit! Just swim! His shots splashed into the water as the Jew swam. About 20 rounds should do it.

..................................

Misi was the kind of guy who liked sitting in the shade of a willow on the banks of the Maros with a makeshift fishing rod in one hand and a jug of wine in the other. His little sister Julia had always laughed at the idea of Misi as a soldier. "Too bad our János wasn't a bit older. He'd show the Russians a thing or two" she used to say.

Misi's instinct was to throw himself under a tree and snooze, but he knew it was not an option. You can be shot for sleeping on guard duty, even if all you're doing is watching over a bunch of scraggly little Jews doing the first manual labor of their lives. Whiny bunch, but harmless. Always cleaning their glasses with their greasy shirts. Why do Jews always wear glasses, anyway? Whatever. Better a bunch of skinny Jews with shovels than a battalion of Cossacks with machine guns.

The dike they were repairing along the Raba was coming along nicely. The spring air was pleasant; the sun strong. Misi liked this part of the country. Hills in the distance. Actual hills! To Misi, who had seen nothing but the flat expanse of the Great Plain, they may as well have been the Alps. Maybe they were.

The new group of Jews threw themselves down for a short break. A voice addressed him from one of the twenty-odd sunburned bespectacled, big-nosed faces.

"Misi!? Misi Kardos!? Is that you?" the voice was hushed but enthused. "I am Gluck! The brick factory... you know... on the road to Mezohegyes. You carried bricks for me. Yes! Yes! Misi!"

Out here they all look the same, but hey! I'll be damned! Old Mr Gluck! Always gave me a nice tip when I made the delivery without damaging any bricks.

But Misi had enough sense to hide his enthusiasm. The sergeant was a real bastard. With a glance over his shoulder, Misi turned cautiously to old Mr Gluck.

"Misi! Misi! I give thanks to God for you, Misi!"

..................................

Years later, a letter arrived from Tel Aviv, written in slightly ungrammatical Hungarian. Not that Misi noticed.

Dear Mr. Mihaly Kardos,

Through my agents in Hungary I have arranged an account at the Southern Plains Savings Cooperative, account number 5541-2211-KARMIH-001. All funds found therein are at your disposal. I am sorry that it has taken me so many years to arrange this for you.

I thank you again for my life.

Peace be with You,
Henrik Gluck

an angel came and rolled away the stone

When the local priest finally passed away in 1962, Rozi, a believer, naturally turned out to pay her respects to the man who had shepherded the community through war, collectivization, and more. All in attendance were impressed with the stunning rose-speckled black marble headstone.

"A beautiful stone for a beautiful man" one of the old ladies commented. Only Rozi recognized it. She had remembered her father cleaning pigeon-shit from the same stone back in the days when it was carved not with the name of the priest, but instead with Hebrew letters and the name Ábrahám Lichner. It had disappeared in the weeks after the deportation. And here it was again. A kind of resurrection.

incubate back-end markets

Kovi drifts down the street, asking all he meets "Don't you know me from somewhere?" But no one hears. And he's back in his cell, blending into the wall, wondering if he's really there.

And time goes by like the man passing lonely on the city street -- no one blinks an eye. Movement is inevitable. Irrelevant.

Stopping at a mirror, he has no reflection. He rushes to a meeting. No one expects him. People stare at his hands. They know, but none can speak. Nothing is shocking. He fades into the floor.

Look at me.

Right Action

Though Kakas was the tractor repairman at the co-op, Mari never could have imagined that he had such a big tool.

If the gate's open, go in. That's a basic rule of village life. It was then. It is now. So Mari naturally strolled right in to the Kakas home as she made her rounds checking infants and newborns.

And there it was... Well... there they were: young Kakas, with all his muscles showing (and more), making love to his wife (baby asleep) with a tenderness and intensity that left Mari transfixed.

At the co-op Kakas was known for being slow but thorough, and Mari now saw that his reputation was deserved. Mari watched for what seemed like a very long time, sneaking out only after the climax, exhilarated, guilty, and undetected.

The next day, she returned. After all, she had to check on the little eight-week old, a handsome little boy who was already the subject of gossip. And again there they were. Again Mari watched. Only on the fourth day did she finally manage to check the baby, whose beauty she now understood.

To this day she can not pass the Kakas house without wanting to check the gate. And she thanks her lucky stars for late-night German TV.

shepherd the weak through the valley of darkness (cricetus cricetus)

Kovi now knew that a helluva lot of blood pours out damn fast when you slit a man's throat. So looking back to last winter, he wondered what biological miracle had allowed him to make such a big pile of carcasses without spilling more than a few drops.

His mate Béla knew all about blood. He had gone to England where the Hungarians have a good reputation in the slaughterhouses. But Kovi didn't want to swab blood and guts all night and then sleep all day with a bunch of rotten guys in some London slum (four to a room if you're lucky). It had even been enough for Bela. So he came home and talked his old friend Kovi into the first straight job he'd had maybe ever: trapping hamsters. Müller, a German trader, paid pretty good money. He came around once a week during the month long season after hibernation but before the little rats shed their thick winter coats.

But the damn fleas bite your arms and the whole thing gets old mighty fast. OK, sure... there's no blood. But snapping skulls with a pair of pliars, picking corn kernels from the mouth pouch, yanking off the little pelt and stretching on a homemade coathanger rack to dry.... and of course tossing the leftover fetus-thing of meat-and-bones onto the pile... (so many that the cats stops paying attention pretty quickly)... No thanks. Gets old fast, no matter how much pálinka you have.

So when he got a call from some of his old connections he was more than happy to get back to his old business where money came easy. In the glory days it had been fuel and cigarettes from Romania, but this time he had a chance to move something much more profitable.

"The future is in People," his man had told him.

And like the damned idiot he is, he believed it.

a willful decision

"She was the daughter of the veterinarian. He killed his whole family." (Tired after her visit to the prison, Mari was patient as she listened to her mother repeat the story of the Jewish girl with beautiful hair.)

"He had that sort of thing... since he was a vet. Horse tranquilizer, they say. He heard about the orders. For the ghetto. In Makó. He knew the gendarmes would be coming. They had these big feathered hats." She drew out the word "big" as she traced the feather in her make-believe hat. "Even we were afraid of them. And naturally he was afraid... naturally! I mean, she was so beautiful. Who knows what --" (Mari knew why her mother paused.)

"Such lovely hair. Such a sweet girl. So kind. So beautiful." (Mari wondered what kindness the girl might have done to have made such an impression. Or was beauty alone enough?)

"And he was a good man, too." (Mari's mind wandered further. What would it take for her to kill her own family out of mercy?)

"Why them? They were good people." Her mother turned indignant, now talking to no one. "I mean, why didn't they take the gypsies?" (Mari, meanwhile, developed her answer. Not such a difficult question. Not so difficult at all. Not at all.)

easy come, easy go

For Rozi, whose gentile parents had been the caretakers of the local Jewish cemetery before the war, it was a cruel irony that despite the death of every Jew from the village there was not a bit more work for her Mom and Dad. Quite the opposite, really.

an exile from my native soil

Peddling home in the sunset along the western edge of the village where the houses give way to fields, it surprised Mari that it only now occurred to her that with a slight twist it's easy to turn Butcher Street (Mészáros) into Deep-Shitty Street (Mély-szaros).

Deep. Yes, like the mud she had to dance through and around on her way to school as a little girl before they finally came in '76 with the asphalt.

Deep. Yes, like the ditch on the north side of the street that they'll fill once the central sewer is built, but that for now rots each summer with stagnated God-knows-what because the money from the European Union is still a long way off and once it comes who knows what we'll see of it anyway because the mayor and his cronies will figure out a way to siphon it off anyway.

Deep. Yes, like the potholes that appear every Spring, especially in front of Matyi's house where he's always driving in and out with his big American tractor and his new combine onto a road that just wasn't made for that kind of weight. And he even has one with air conditioning and fancy lights and a hi-fi that he blasts so loud that you know he's only doing it to make everyone look at him as he comes down the street destroying public property -- and public peace for that matter.

"Never trust a kulak!" That's what her mother had always said. And that's all he was. A rotten modern kulak. He even had the cheek to drive out to the Makó Road last year in a convoy with the other kulaks with a sign on his tractor saying "I belong to the bank." And meanwhile he's got the nerve to pay her boy next to nothing for working all day in the fields in the heat and sun and even firing him just for taking a few sacks of onions that Matyi would have anyway left out in his courtyard under a thick green sheet of plastic held down with bricks from the new house he's building (been building for three years now) and stinking up the whole street while he waited for the price to go up. You belong to hell, Matyi. Like this whole damn place.

Deep. Yes. And Shitty. So obvious.

fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you

The high school boys were too busy peering down at the monokinied college girls sunbathing along the river to notice the smart but unfashionable fifty-something lady crossing the bridge. They didn't notice, that is, until she stopped about ten meters away and pulled something thick and long from her Moroccan leather bag and with an unceremonious flick tossed it into the Tisza.

"Check it out," one of them commented. "That old hen just dropped her dildo into the river! Musta hit menopause!"

They of course had not heard the conversation between Mari and her mother just before Mari left to catch the 10:47 to Újszeged (otherwise she'd have to take the 1:47, which wouldn't leave her enough time, and there are so few trains - they're forgetting about the villages these days). Mari tried to explain that it was against regulations for visitors to bring food, but Julia insisted that she take the salami, because who knows what they might be feeding him and whatever happened he's still her grandson, even if he's too much like his grandfather (but at least he never hurt anyone, at least not like that).

Mari took the salami.

"He was very grateful," she lied when she returned that evening on the 6:47. "He's really quite well."

She would regularly try to sort out what she had done wrong, but could never manage anything more than a vague sense that it was everything.

* disclaimer

Despite his awareness of the beauty of bilateral symmetry, when violating boys the local parish priest was not consciously avenging Csáki's impalement. The thought had occurred to him, but the derived pleasure was purely residual.

slow death

On the outskirts of the village among pheasants and hares and below the power lines heading to the ghost town of Milk Production Facility 3 is a stone cross of gneiss ferried down the Maros from the Carpathians and carved by unknown craftsmen in the Maltese style, raised in honor of Miklós Csáki, the Bishop of Csanád, who had an iron rod stuck up his ass* by rebellious peasants on a late June day in 1514.

His captors had been careful, so the Bishop hung there alive for three days watching the flow of the brook that once meandered free across the plain but that now trickled in an arrow-straight path of marshy reeds that Csáki would certainly not recognize as the waters that had reminded him that he would soon be joining his maker as need be, must be, will be.

All the party leaders and coop members had been there for the ribbon cutting along with four new red Belorus tractors and 60 head of Holstein just brought in from the DDR. But when the changes came, Milk Production Facility 3 was bought by a Dutch dairy concern and shut down in a matter of weeks.

So Kovi figured this would be just as good a place as any to hide the body. He knew the place well. There, behind building three. "That's where the shit goes," his boss had told him on his first day. Just following orders.

They take everything from you and stick you in the ass and leave you there and expect you to rot but I'm not gonna let em do it to me dammit.

Floods are rare these days.

which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?

They say that before you die you have to have sex with a gypsy. So when his colleagues brought in a wild brown 19 year old for petty theft, Tamás knew his time had come. By the smell of her he decided to keep his expectations low: must not have seen soap for weeks. Typical. Probably lived in a hole in the ground up in Szabolcs. Still. At least once.

His police oath meant as much to Tamás as his marriage oath, and he had been as faithful to the law as he had been to his wife. Julia had been a sweet girl, but a man is a man, and what she doesn't know can't hurt her (ever since the incident with Erzsi he had been much more careful). Besides, she takes good care of Mari (the first Varga to attend high school). Julia had given birth at 19 and it hadn't been easy. They never managed to have another. Just as well. Kept her in shape for when there's nothing else. If there's no horse, ride the donkey.

But now he had a horse: a fine chestnut mare locked up in the stable and all his for a ride. And ride he did. Winnetou and the Mustang.

The only problem came ten months later when the girl showed up again at the station, swaddled newborn in her arms, with her enraged father and two buck brothers demanding retribution.

Tamás had never wanted to be a cop - or to be married, for that matter.

Just like they say.

ritual

As a murderer, Kovi didn't get out much. He'd lodge his head in the frame of his window, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the park where the high school girls would come out to play pétanque. The distance was far enough to slim them all down to seventeen year old perfection, yet close enough so he could make out the tight black shorts that were the apparent fashion.

The fat little gym teacher must be in on it with the warden. Why else would he bring them here? Cruel and unusual. Where is it that those whining gypsy's had gone?

No. Instead he throws himself on the field, lying flat as the girls instinctively encircle. The fat teacher lifts his cigarette upwards to the height of his eyes, waves it forward toward Kovi, then brings it back to his side. He repeats the motion, then calls out: Shorts! (In unison they come off, held high for 6 seconds, then...) Throw! Shirts! (same) Bra! (same) Panties! (same).

And once they're all naked and Kovi's buried in a heap of sweaty lycra, their priest, receiving a signal from the warden-pope, let's out a deep and solemn TAKE HIM! and the silent and naked girls let fly their barrage of Boules, their hard young breasts barely jiggling as they unleash, with Kovi receiving their offering and welcoming the punishment he knows he deserves, like the other priest had told him that day when he first learned he was a sinner.

Strasbourg. That's it.

Like a damn gypsy.

family heirloom

The pleasure of finally avenging his honor (as he put it), was tainted by the thought that in America he'd have blown the bastard's head off with a .38, while here in the Hungarian shit-nest he had to slice the dickhead's throat.

In the folktales Grandma Julia used to tell him, the hero always sits in a tree eating a pear with his jackknife when a bear comes and snatches him away, dragging him to his lair where Mother Bear waits, toothless and witchy, ready to cook up a nice kid stew (plenty of parsnips). Kovi never understood why the kid didn't just stick it to the beast and be done with him. That's what he would have done.

And now, that's what he had done.

And he had to do it. Self-defense, cause what they were doing was eating him away, just like the damn bear would have done, though nowadays they're less obvious about it and the witchmotherbear is the goddam European Union. Goddam border guards. Can't pay em off anymore with a few bottles of brandy. That's democracy: no work, crooked or straight. With only eight years of school they won't even take you at the new tire factory even if they're just paying you to breath in your death. And the old trade's dead now. They'd even taken his 405 with the 200 liter tank. And now they'd even let in the damned hairy-soled Romanians. Damned border guards. Can't pay em off. Gotta hunt em down and kill em. Goddam European Union.

the rewards of collectivization

The Varga family (kulaks) owned the land she and János had been working when the accident happened. Tamás, the youngest of the four Varga boys, six years older than Julia's 14, had placed the body onto Laci the mule, who had been given quite a start when the charge exploded. Julia had never given Tamás much notice except as required by the rules of village life and social position. He was neither handsome nor kind, and, unbeknownst to Julia, had a developing reputation as a letch.

Yet that day in the field Tamás showed tenderness - or rather, Julia perceived tenderness - as he lifted (not hoisted, not jerked) her brother's mutilated body from the bloody mud and gently balanced the load on Laci's back. He had even left the sacks of onions behind, returning for them later only after cleaning the blood from Laci's coat. The silent walk back to the village seemed longer than it ever had, and longer than it would ever be. Julia interpreted silence as chivalry.

Eight years later she finally caught Tamas with that damn whore Erzsi, having his way with her from behind like the animal he is, right in the coop banquet hall under the reproduction of Sokolov's "Lenin's Arrival at Finland Station," with Erzsi's whore-belly sprawled over the table like János on Laci, only her legs were both intact and spread wide to make room for the squash of a dick that she should have cut off then and there in the field with her dead brothers jackknife had she only known.

blood is blood

While her brother's foot was being blown off, Julia's happened to be grinding the life out of a mole cricket she had unearthed some number of rows away at the other end of the field. "Thank God I couldn't keep up with him -- he was such a good worker," she would say whenever the subject came up, even to her grandchildren 60 years removed from the event. She always focused on the positive, certainly never mentioning --never to anyone-- the sensation of holding her brother in her arms as he died, his blood mixing with the soil to create an ochre mud that reminded her instinctively of the aftermath of a pig slaughter. Certainly she never mentioned that.

Katyushas were not known for their accuracy

Lifting his head as he reaches the end of the row, his browned neck creasing as he rises, János looks blankly over the crest of the dike to the soft tops of the willows snaking east and west toward the horizon. The smell of ripe onion lingers unnoticed like the accustomed smell of home. A rest, a nap on the shaded banks? No. They don't pay you to dream.

The river flows fast. Straggler swallows skim the top as the swirling brown mass moves in its assigned path. Every few years the snow will be heavy in the Carpathians and the river will come out, maybe even to the top of the dike, but eventually receding, staining the willows a brownish-gray to their midpoint and leaving folks with a topic for some number of weeks. Floods are not so common anymore.

Everything is under control.

Even the Russians have moved on. Malinovsky and the Red Army crossed the river a few weeks before, crushing the 7th Hungarian Infantry and then heading toward Szeged and allegedly now north to Debrecen. Everyone has pretty much accepted that the war is over; at least in these parts.

For János and his little sister Julia, the hiss and roar of the "Stalin Organs" had been all they had known of the battles that raged along the road to Makó. One villager had met a single Soviet soldier hiding in his shed: an Asian boy deserted from his company, not much older than János. "The little Tatar almost shit his pants when I found him." He received some food and moved on, heading east along the river, away from the war.

János puts his head back down and starts the next row. Somewhere in the middle, his foot catches a stone. Giving it a shove with his boot, it glints silver in the surprisingly strong October sun and explodes.