Author: Kiss Tibor Noé
Translator: Austin Wagner
May 2023

The earth and the sky meld together in the milk-white mass. The image is slightly blurred. Spring is near, but the ground is frozen, ice coats everything. The riverbeds shimmer through the haze, thin lines wandering among the pine woods. Their surfaces are fragmented sheets of glass, an intricate webwork vignette. Mountain ranges, exposed peaks of boulder. Impenetrable densities of forest. From above, a million tiny shards of snow, crowns of fir trees. Chain tread tracks over the fields of ice, roads drawn by ruler crossing the expanses of birch. Metal domes of oil containers, the workers’ plastic dwellings. Natural gas burns in towers like torches. The labyrinth of pipes swallows the light, above the oil extraction bases the sky is blue gray.

Every morning the smells blend together. All at once it hits, the acrid chimney smoke and the scent of pine, for several days the slaughterhouse has been quiet. The cat leaps up to the window sill, blinking in the sunlight. The lights and runoff of early spring, soon enough the sheet metal will warm. The bedroom looks toward the village. The houses on the steep hillsides, the main road bisecting the village, the chapel in the vineyard on the opposite side of the valley. The painted dome of the church tower and the tin cross, alpha, omega, origin. Here we are all together, they say. The people speak with reverence before the priest, their voices lower and change. Homemade pálinka in the plastic bag, praise be to Jesus Christ. Attila must be soaring somewhere among the clouds now, twelve thousand meters up. I can write to him at any time, but now I can only rely on myself. Four months, a long time. There could not have been a worse time for my grandmother to die.

I drink my coffee on the terrace. Happiness is spending the morning in a bathrobe out on the terrace. That’s Zita’s saying, but it doesn’t help now. I see my grandmother in everything, then the buck as it snuffles in the bushes. My, but how a black pair of eyes can glimmer in the night. I try to recall my dreams, but all I remember is the creaking. The bathrobe comes undone as I stretch, but there’s no one here to see it. Attila doesn’t like when I yawn too loudly. The neighbor scolds his hens, they’re lazy, they don’t lay enough eggs. The brakes of a truck squeal on the main road. They installed a speed camera on the traffic light when we moved here. Everything makes noise down this way, and yet there is quiet.

I stood before the refrigerated section in Aldi, in complete shock. I couldn’t decide what kind of yoghurt to get for her, banana, strawberry, or black currant. My grandmother was dying, the nurse tried to smile, but I saw in her eyes that it was all over. I couldn’t bear the yoghurt shelf any longer, the image blurred before me. Which two cartons would it be, my grandmother’s last supper. There was nothing more I could do for her. When last she’d called, I hadn’t even paid attention to her, I’d just put her on speaker and set the phone on the table. Listened as she droned and sighed, scolded her sibling, the neighbor’s cat, the TV program. The doctors who were stuffing her full of medicines which were slowly killing her. I occasionally grunted my approval. I hope she didn’t hear me typing a few emails. Two cartons of yoghurt, somehow stuffed into her mouth. At the time I didn’t know she would hang on for weeks. The cartons drifted away from me on the conveyor belt, inexorably. Two strawberry. The maddening beep of items being scanned, three hundred twenty forints, the cashier said.

Riverbeds, mountain ranges, expanses of birch, ice covers everything. Again and again I look through Attila’s photos, read his messages. Sometimes he sends me his journal entries too. I try to imagine the world he is in, where he feels so at home. It’s like he’s on another planet. Five thousand kilometers as the crow flies. The distance is measurable, but there is no measure for longing. When he leaves it’s as if he is slowly covered by the snow, or swallowed by the fog, the vapors of the marshes. I understood that he’s safe and all right, and he yearns to be back, and he does come back, but for those five thousand kilometers I am left alone. I feared for him every moment. The plane landed, the last photos are of the airport’s main building, a three-story tenement house stretching into the middle of nowhere. Fish and black oil drops adorn the city’s crest. Enormous billboards, concrete statues, gray houses, gray ice. You be careful now, nothing better came to mind.