Author: Kiss Tibor Noé
Translator: Austin Wagner
March 2023

In this ward a person is just a body, a number, a data point. On the hospital room door two clipboards, on the clipboards felt tipped scrawls. 7/1., liquid diet, that’s the old woman. 7/2 is Dorka, nothing written next to her number, empty grid on the file, nobody feeds her because she cannot eat, she cannot swallow. Dorka is nourished by machines and instruments, but at least the nurses call her by name, they refer to her roommate only as the lady from ward seven. For one week my daughter has lain in this hospital room where she should be cured, but this environment will be the death of her. Day by day the old woman shrinks. I watch her vacant expression, her trembling lips, her sunken face, the two cheekbones and two eye sockets. This is no longer a face. This is a skull. As death draws near, the body loses its color, the skin turns a pallid gray, becomes brittle as a roll of ancient parchment. Dorka is flushed, but this is a symptom of the illness, her face is hot, her fever ever higher. She lays in the bed silent and helpless, the whistling of her lungs the only sign of life. I gaze at her face, and suddenly my daughter is a stranger, her features unfamiliar, her scars, her sweat-matted hair, her brittle, parchmented skin, her flaccid upper arms and spindly legs, but what is most alien in her is the silence which surrounds her.

The refrigerator thrums in the common room. The table is covered with oil cloth, the sofa with palm tree print, the floor and walls with tile. Stacks of crutches and walkers loom in the dingy entryway between the corridor and the waiting room, in the background a set of wall bars. I have found new words to fear since Dorka has been here: I fear condition, silent, alien, pneumonia. And there are words which give hope, such as rehabilitation. I see Dorka before me doing pull-ups on the wall bars, for if she’s to recover, she’s going to need a great deal of strength. But the head nurse says they won’t call for a consultation while she’s in this condition, she’s incapable of self-sufficiency, plus her pneumonia is not going away. For now it’s not realistic to speak of rehabilitation. She breaks off the sentence, I fear the situation is even worse. Then she once more begins telling me about her son who fell out of a cherry tree at nine years old and only came to two days later. Now he is a man grown, he works in Austria, took up mountaineering as a hobby. Hang in there, sir, I know how you feel, that’s what the head nurse always says, then she stands up and gives my arm a squeeze. Her grip is strong as a man’s. Two days, it’s enough to drive one mad, to say nothing of thirty-some. One month. The tiles run together before my eyes, the matrix disintegrates, I reel. The dwarf Thuja languishes beside the refrigerator. The machines whir, the elevator cables rasp, Dorka’s lungs whistle, even here I hear. I am tired, I’m going home.

*

The wind whips my face on the mountain ridge
My hair swirls my lungs expand
The oxygen courses within me
The red blood cells barrel through me
Tangerine moon in ink-blue sky
Hooves thunder in the silent valley
Metal bits glint in horse mouths
Dog runs alongside the cart
Horse-drawn carriage’s axle creaks
Iron carriage door creaks
From the courtyard we watch the jay
The dense pine forest the fog
The transparent mucous membrane
X-ray of lungs
Bed of pine needles
The forest is a downy pillow
The pillow stained with discharge
I succumb to the murderous lake
The saliva ejector gurgles
Blood pumped by the machine
Bridle tightens on the horses
Gypsy girls squat on the coach box
Wind blows away the straw
Somber shanties in the gorge
Wicker baskets on rusted hooks
Cotton sweatshirts and straw hats
I take a bite of the air
Gracefully clacking my teeth
I pull up the zipper on the oxygen tent
From the courtyard we watch the forest
The courtyard is a downy pillow
The fog the smoke they blanket us
The fire dances the logs crackle
We sit among the trees
The hiking boots broke mother’s feet
Her toes are bloody
The red nail polish has run
We sit on the edge of the tub
I paint my nails you brush your teeth
I tell you of the homeless shelter
Of people with plastic-bagged belongings
Of tuberculosis and lice
You say nothing because you are brushing your teeth
The brush rustles in your mouth
The receptionist’s TV crackles
Everybody is coughing
Coughing, the entire building
The iron filing cabinet screeches
Sets of keys jangle
The jay plays at the elevator door
I tell you of mother and of father
Mother curses the boots and the socks
Beneath the pines father is reading
All the time father is reading
I know he thinks of sausages while he does
Of the lamb meat and the mustard
Then he jokes we laugh
Women are not a toy
Men are not bears
Mother will want to play a word game
She places words that don’t exist
Father approves, I wash up
The dishes clink
Something whirs something drones
Concertsiren
Moondrama
What words, dad says
One thousand points two thousand moons
You don’t believe mother is like that
You don’t believe they really are infested with lice
How naïve you are, but I love you this way
You paint my pinky finger
I don’t move lest you ruin it
I’m back on the mountain ridge
Where my lungs expand
And the oxygen courses
And the red blood cells sluice
Where the horse-drawn carriage trundles
Hooves thunder
Horses gambol
The forest is silent and dark
I seal myself behind the tent zipper
Downy pillow underhead
Silent dark
I’m counting sheep
Something strokes me swaddles me
Father’s hand is big and warm
Father likes when I call him Hulahoop 
But to me he is Dad
Still just Dad
The locals say Hungarian for Dad
Is Romanian for water: apa
I relax
Here comes the seventy-second sheep
In the forest silent dark
The wind whips my face on the mountain ridge
Tangerine moon in ink-blue sky
Two thousand moons freeze in my dreams
My hair swirls my lungs expand 
The oxygen courses within me
The red blood cells barrel through me
I dream that I am waking up

*

This network of capillaries is like electrical circuitry. Running parallel, touching here or branching there, merging into junctions and radiating out from them. The surface of the oval junctions is darker, sometimes completely black. Fine wrinkles one after the other, miniature mountain ranges and riverbeds, dust and breadcrumbs and eraser shavings settle in the creases, the furrows and fractures dazzle me, it’s as if I’m seeing the neural pathways of the brain laid bare before me, one hundred fifty thousand kilometers on the table. A boundless land, unknown connections between the wiring, links inextricable, I don’t know where they lead or what makes the nerve bundles fire. We are lashed together, we don’t know how. Since the accident, I often can’t even follow myself, I go astray in the labyrinth of my neural pathways. Twenty-five years I’ve been sitting at this table, and it gathers ever more grooves, unwashable ink stains, rings left by steaming coffee cups, capillaries, circuitry, furrows. This is a teacher’s desk, this is a classroom, this is a stub of chalk, these are school benches, these are undulating paper planes, these are pupils, I am the teacher. The topic of today’s assignment is democracy and dictatorship, the assignment is free-form, it can be an historical example, your own experience, you can present your favorite film, write a poem for all I care, or just write letters one after the other, they don’t need to be words, this isn’t some academic competition, it’s not a pop quiz, just write, write, just be quiet, I want quiet, I want to hear my own thoughts, the electrical firings of my brain, the thrumming, whistling sounds. I scroll down in silence. Pneumonia is an illness of the lungs and respiratory system characterized by inflammation of the air sacs (alveolus pulmonis) and their being saturated with pus and other liquids (exudatum). The infection is most commonly bacterial, viral, or fungal, sometimes parasitic, in rare cases the result of a circulatory disorder, of corrosive fumes, gases, or other lung injuries, certain medications, as well as autoimmune disorders. Typical symptoms include coughing, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. A flattened picture of the lungs, like the crowns of trees in Zsófi’s favorite painting, white splotches in the roiling gray, vertebrae linked to one another, the pale outline of the ribs, a forgotten cannula, inflammation in the lobes, the blurry X-ray image, scratches on the phone screen. Twenty-five years I’ve believed this is a desk, this is a tabletop, woodgrain paneling, stuck together with lamella, planed, worn out lacquering, the class calendar atop it, a potted flower, my pens, of late only my mobile phone and my laptop. That this is a classroom, that these are items, that what surrounds me is reality.