Author: Kiss Tibor Noé
Translator: Austin Wagner
May 2023

One hill after another. Back home it’s all flat, level, I had trouble adjusting to this landscape. The houses bend together with the road, clinging to the steep hillsides. Small yards, narrow porches, unkempt expanse of forest. At home the spaciousness is compressed, here everything is narrow, yet free. Modest whitewashed chapel with arbor and rose bushes. Rounded domes of water towers. Solar farm on the village edge. On the hillside a western movie set, dried out shrubs, rock formations, watering holes, dust clouds coating the hard-packed earth. Grey cattle bask in the sun. A rise above the creek, lumberyard on the left, access road leading to the slaughterhouse on the right. Two rows of poplars on either side. Sharp bends in the valley, the first buildings, the closed-down inn, vaulted veranda, collapsing roof of straw. Then Cuba. That’s what everyone in the village calls the row of houses. One street, perpendicular to the main road. Small, unfinished block houses, one after the other. Covered drainage tunnels, cats and children everywhere. Baby clothes drying on fences, threadbare sofas beneath open sky.

I have hope that my father won’t be at the funeral. It would be best if the funeral were called off as well. I hate my grandmother for dying. But still, she did raise my father. I am ashamed of my own hatred, but I don’t care, it’s all too much, funerals one after the other. Twenty years I haven’t seen my father, and suddenly here he is in the flesh. Not one step from me. I see him before me, smell him, freshly shaved, wearing his dark brown suit. I abhor the polyester. He speaks to me, touches me, perhaps even wants to hug me. He spreads his arms, the great tentacles pull me in tight. I stand numb. I lose myself in this grip, I don’t see the continuation. We are in some way similar, but in what way. I am his daughter, after all. It is inevitable that I face this.

It is my ritual to go up to the hut every day. The air is different among the trees. The exhalations of the forest. The resin scent of pinecones, the scent of decomposing trees. Like the forest is exuding something which draws one to it. The forest is a home waiting for discovery, an unfulfillable dream, a monumental mushroom colony. A quiet burgeoning of decay, and then rebirth. I lean against the wooden building, and everything within me slows. Low rumble of the main road, tree branches creaking in the wind, wingbeats of birds, scurrying of critters, my own heartbeat, a membrane’s dampened vibration, sixty-four, sixty-three.

A narrow track runs into the forest from beside the hut. I want to walk off my anxiety. A person can just squeeze through the dense bushes, I turn sideways, squat down, shove the branches from the path. The thorns catch on my jacket. I head away from the houses. The forest is quiet, I am the noise within it. If I stop and listen, the animals take heart after a time, I hear the scampering of rodents, the wingbeats of birds. I forge on in the pale moonlight, after two hundred meters I reach the trail. Green triangle. Gravel-strewn hiking path, it starts at the community center, it leads to the lookout. Rest area on the right. I like to sit here, in the dark. In my childhood all I had to do was hop over the ditch and there I was in the patch of forest. Anywhere was better than home. I climbed up the tree and turned on my Walkman. They never found me. I like to sit here, feeling the strength of the tree. Branches creak in the wind, the forest is a rippling sea, boundless deeps. From the lookout you see trees, a few clearings, hunting blinds, the slaughterhouse’s concrete fence. The slaughterhouse is quiet. First the animals are sedated, only afterwards does the butchering begin. The carcass hits the assembly line, is cut in two, drained of blood, slowly. The blood containers fill up. An invisible, silent factory, but in the forest you can sense the animals’ fear. The stench, the smell of singed flesh.

The logs crackle in the stove. My father liked living in panel housing because he no longer had to light a fire. No more walking from the farm to the village, every day, six kilometers there, six kilometers back. Waking at dawn, cleaning out the pig sty, feeding the animals, stooping before the water boiler, assembling kindling from sawdust and petroleum oil. We use lighter cubes for that. Just chuck one in amongst the twigs and the fire is already blazing. The stove door is glass, we admire the flames. My father adored the carpeted flooring, the central heating, the trash chute. In their own way, everyone just wants to live comfortably, in peace. I take a sleeping pill. I haven’t spoken with mother since yesterday, haven’t even thought about her. I look out the window and I see the eyes of a buck. In the forest I hadn’t thought about the buck. Nor did I usually think about my father, but now I’ve been thinking about him for days. I can’t drive him from my head, but today I want to sleep. I want to erase all thoughts from my head. I toss and turn, I simply cannot fill the double bed. I reread Attila’s last message, at the end of the sentence he writes my name. I like to imagine him saying it to himself, but today I want to sleep, he should just fly over the taiga in that rust bucket. All I want to know is that he arrived comfortably, in peace. My heart hammers from the worry. I can tell that from this day on I cannot drive my father from my head. I didn’t know I had room for such pangs of conscience. How many fragments a person is made of. I write to Attila to send me a voice message in which he says my name. I would never forgive myself if the helicopter crashed. I scroll to the colorful hearts and select the white one. White as snow.