When I was younger I rejected the idea of moving so much that when the Budapest house where I hated living with my mother for 12 years was being sold I — not consulted and in a panic — kept forgetting to start packing. I just couldn’t be reminded… Then, one day, I came home from school to discover my entire wardrobe had been disassembled in my room by the brand new husband, with all my clothes scattered around the floor, all the screws and hinges mixed into the pile that visibly included the teenage garters I’d never worn but kept hidden under sports gear in the hope of someday losing my virginity.
I’m writing this at my dining table in Brussels. I have packed out the books in a newly rented home in a newly picked city — a newly picked country — ready to be relocated further, like a shoulder, into place. The French build nice homes, and I am dangling my feet, feeling physically comfortable for the first time since for as long as I can remember…
It is so telling what one leaves behind when one moves, as I did, first from my mother’s house to my father’s house, then my own, owned, apartment in Budapest, then to a PhD residence hall in London and seven subsequent apartments over there, complete with junkie flatmates, and break-in scares, and serial-rapist-in-the-street scares, and bedbugs and head-lice and rats and mice, owning less and less. I sold all my clothes, rented out my Budapest home, put down my car keys and dismissed my boyfriend so I could emigrate, in 2013, at nearly 30, to the UK, relying on an invitation that had the warmth of a shrug.
And now I am gone... As I look up from my laptop at the few books and my guitar and my yoga-mat, at 36, I don’t have much to lie about.
But there are some things in the lower drawer of my bedside table that mean a lot to me. That’s new. That’s something I have not felt about objects since I made good business on my clothes sale (to a Hungarian studio’s costume department — lucrative!) many years ago, and then got on an airplane almost naked. I‘m writing this to tell you how they got there.
He knows I have friends more powerful than he is so he’s careful. He feeds me with his hand — meats, soup — like I wasn’t a stranger, and I wonder why that is. I, the daughter of anxious parvenus, blush in any restaurant where one’s supposed to eat without cutlery, and here I am in London licking a finger.
I am constantly cold in this country. I don’t understand their reptile existence, the cold sweat… I’m a house-cat, more evolved, pawing for the hottest kitchen tile. But now I decide to try and look attractive, to try not to shiver, and see how this affects my relative position as a person.
I talk about myself a lot. As if he had to know everything. About how I’m practicing my French in preparation for my move in a few weeks. How I am sending my books ahead. How London has disappointed me in these 6+ years, or I it. I don’t know if he even hears me, or if these things sound intelligent with my accent. He tries to impress me, but I am already impressed.
I still work at my night-editing job in Chancery Lane — got a month’s notice when I quit — so my face is a mess and my movements are vague with sleep-deprivation. But I’m building a new startup and I host important events at a friend’s house — and I’m a logistical mastermind at relocation (right?) — so I hope there’s something to like about me. I haven’t spoken to anyone intimately or safely in such a long time I don’t know how to flirt or even joke anymore. But I want to, I want to so much. To play.
The sun will soon rise. And there’s this taste in my mouth and down my throat, this beauty, the beauty — the eggshells, the soft bread, the soft curls, the curves of the stairs and the roses and the splash of the milk — and I steal it all into my head so I can remember, so I can believe it, so I can bear it.
And on the level where the monkeys choose their spots in the clearing, near or far from each other, where they grin or turn their back or extend a hand to touch, where the planets have walked slowly above the trees since the Silurian; where we’re not talking, where we’re just genetic poetry, codes constantly copying and dying, there I am being enchanted by this beauty, the beauty, and comforted, and suddenly not alone.
He is so entertained. And exhausted. This is too much for him, but he is polite.
And I wake up in the afternoon jittery with uncertainty, because there’s too much to lose; this beauty, the beauty. I keep checking my phone.
And now that I have moved and mourned, I ask my friends if this is going to be like this forever, that I will just miss this random person forever, that I’ll just soldier on with this in me like some endurable disease. But my friends have their own problems and families and homes, and they really don’t want to hurt me.
Where I come from there are no scenarios for what a woman should be doing with herself after 30. Your life is technically over, at least as yourself. You’re somebody’s wife or mother now, maybe somebody’s boss… Self-actualisation, in my natural ecosystem, cannot occur after 29.
Because of this weird cultural baggage, turning 30 — it was my first year in London! — was a liberating experience: I could be whoever I wanted to be. A yes, not just a no; action, not just a negation or rebellion. Give me all the money and fame —
But when it came to attachments, to the question of whom I should desire, since turning 30 found me single having left my longterm partner in Budapest, I realised I was clueless. Desire is convex and contextual — it has many familial and societal borders: one tends to use one’s aspirations in lifestyle, status or even religion as a proxy for picking the right partner. (And yes, desiring the “wrong” person, quite like seemingly unprompted envy, can reveal a person is deep down pining for a very different life than they imagined.)
So while post-30 the professional and intellectual — moral — purpose of my life was becoming clearer, I was growing increasingly unsure just what kind of a person I should be pining for. Not just whom I would have but, in the ever transactional London where I lived as an amusing but ultimately classless outsider, who would have me.
I watch this man, the feeder, the insider, pour my wine. I wonder who he is, what’s his context. He moves around like a metteur en scène in a set; he comes from and then retreats into darkness. He gives his backstory but it feels like just text.
He offers to help me, and he actually can. I’ve been trained to know such help for a woman is a no-no, but I say yes. And so he outperforms me, the beginner — he decides to spoil me — with this beauty, the beauty, and the gentleness. He puts on a show.
He manipulates the stage-lighting: the shadows, the fools; he blocks. A vision of my mother, with her ingénue blankness about the continuity of emotion — of how each person carries more acts in them than you know. I think about how you have to explain to her everything every time you see her… But she used to be so pretty and so people forgive.
And I look at this man cut up my meat and I think about my father, the ringmaster; all big gestures, gaslighting — who will help you out in mortal danger when this seems like an adventure to him but stub out any flicker of your dignity in all the other situations when it doesn’t. I think about being intimidated into acting… But my father used to have money and so people forgive.
And I want to tell this man I grew up backstage and so I know all too well that our feelings grow beyond the doorsteps, flow beyond the thresholds, creep beyond the edge of the knife — that there is no fourth wall, and no interval can save you from playing out a scene in full.
Instead I tell this man everything. My past. The good and the bad. The books and the Church and the rock stars. The catastrophe. The recovery. All the secrets I have been rejected or left for before. I never ever do that. I never share. There is something about this time and this place. The suspension. I can’t do it the old way again. I want him to like me but I need to see if he will like me knowing everything.
And I tell myself he must — that my tales have won — as if I hadn’t just seen the storyless Orphean darkness beyond that will swallow him right after dinner.
And so I weave my epic for him each night I get a chance — hoping he will remember. And he listens like a Shahryar because he doesn’t know how to tell when something is true.
It’s January 2015 and I’m speeding through the Buda hills in my car from a meeting. I always drive fast but this afternoon I seem to have lost my mind: I’m screaming into my phone, to the single person in the city I could call up (a lover who will later dump me on Facebook Messenger from a hotel room in DC because of how “complicated” this is, and move to Asia) so that he please come to my father’s house as fast as he can in a taxi, and rescue me. I’m flying back to the UK tomorrow and have all of my luggage in that house, and now my brother has gone off the rails again.
I am very scared.
When I pull up to our house on Zugligeti street (imagine a nice area with a lot of police and the American ambassadorial residence round the corner), to the white garden gate that was recently decorated with a swastika by a local antisemitic mob but we have washed it off, I know that this time it is very serious.
My 6.3 ft trained boxer brother is doing an improvised scene on the balcony, and his substance-fuelled howling makes it clear he intends to murder me today.
I look down at the snow at my feet, dirty with mud from the cars and mixed with pieces of recyclable rubbish blown over by the wind from the selective bins across the road, and I notice what I have driven here for: my clothes. All my clothes have been dumped from my Christmastime suitcases onto our driveway, partly ripped apart in rage and stomped on —
I bend down like it’s harvest.
It is not a lot of fun when you have to cross a living room where a person who wants to hurt you and is equipped to do so is having an episode. I tell myself I am not going to die here today and make compromises to eventually make it upstairs where I find what remains of my suitcases and belongings, with the bathroom smashed into pieces, my jewellery in the sink, my makeup on the floor. As I listen to my brother’s continued confrontation with the physical world downstairs, my brain goes into some kind of battle shock and I quickly clean and pack up. By the time my reluctant lover arrives — he has by now decided “us” doesn’t make sense and that I would understand — I know that I will probably never come back here and I will never ever speak to these people. My dirty-muddy clothes that I picked up from the snow are dripping from the freezer bags I hurriedly threw them into, and I’m shaking so much it’s hard to push me into the taxi.
I look back at that white gate closing like the mouth of Hell, and I know my life has just been reset to 00:00:00. I don’t have any thoughts in my head for the next 9 months, just dead silence.
He holds me because this is very hard for me to talk about. It’s late in the London night and some things would take too long to explain, and we don’t have time. There’s blood under his fingernails from the animal we’ve just eaten as steak.
When I sound too disillusioned he disagrees but says nothing. He must have seen it at home: how to leave things up to women wrong but loved.
Each time we see each other in town he’s moved a little bit closer. And I’ve sent ahead a little bit more of my belongings to Brussels. We meet on the border where no one knows, and I fault myself for being so alone he can come so near so fast.
It’s a game we play where in the dim light he looks like family and friend and lover, to me, all the shapes. All the warmths. Because we both know I have so many, too many, slots to fill. He shows me old photos of himself but he looks the same.
He comes from the land of gay poets and I come from the land of suicidal poets, but we show such goodwill. And we talk about family like it was outside us, and not in here, between. And I wait for myself to emerge from wherever I was for years, worried he won’t be there anymore when I get out, or that I’ll have already left. I fret about our assumed asynchrony so much I don’t notice our completely shit timing.
And it’s only much later, during a sobbed-through Christmas, that I’ll wish I could turn back the clock and say yes to going to Budapest with him like he wanted — as if I was a normal person who can just hop on a plane and fly back home in nice clothes to see a concert.
But at this time I am still in London and stressing about my planetary slowness. I call up a friend and say I’m afraid I will hurt him, that I hurt everyone I love.
He is oblivious; he sends me small talk messages with big words in them like a grownup.
And the monkeys have picked their spots by the edge of the forest, and the Earth continues to rotate with us somewhere on it.
And there’s this beauty, the beauty, in my hand and it’s soft like fur —
And we act like there’s no death for as long as there come creatures to swing from tree to tree.
And in all this suspension, all this elevation, for a brief moment I am free.
Humans are not immediately utilitarian; we like things that don’t make sense, the baroque elaboration — the fugues, the Fauves, giving oneself fully.
And I conclude that he’s a breast man and not a leg man which is good because a leg man is an ass man.
And I tell him I’m not usually like this, I don’t usually like this, I don’t usually allow this, I’m not usually this hungry.
But we have drunk too much for two little people dotting the Earth, orbiting the Sun.
And I think how every romance is a poem and every poem is an epitaph — a sonata, pathetic.
And I know this stage so well: I am home in this absence of normal, where there’s only the ritual or nothing.
And he sets the chairs and shows me where to sit, and says he just had a bad dream where his father came to warn him about me.
And I still want him to touch me because the Viennese doctor has ruined enough fun for everyone and I have Hungarian pride.
And we pretend that we’re alone in this room, that we’re just our shadows, like actors.
And I see the morning stir in the corner like a bored viewer, but I close my eyes. Not yet —
And I climb up to him string by string and I find him, the spider sprawled in the middle of his web, unsure if he wants to eat the fly.
And he yawns as the candle burns on two ends, and I’m a fallibilist, I’m a longtermist in love.
And I sit on his bed in my pyjamas, where I wanted to be, and look up at the leaking ceiling; I feel so utterly foreign, tectonically detached.
And he fondles me like a pet, like I don’t exist when he’s not looking (even though I exist more when he’s not looking), and I let him. I want to be a real boy so much.
I want him to ask me to stay here when he won’t even admit I am here.
And he tells me all the others he fondled were equally special, and I want to punch him in the face for always being able to lie except now.
And he doesn’t know that those of us who left behind everything that belonged to us are beasts — beasts — in the best way; we’re capable of anything.
And I would do anything — anything — for family and friend and lover; I want this beauty, the beauty, the sweetness. I will eat the poisoned apple, I am so hungry.
When he has had enough, he asks me to leave the scene, but where could I go, in the world? It is 3am and I technically live in another country.
And he is trapped too; he has overcommitted, and now doesn’t know what to do. And I feel so sorry for him — sorry that he met me, of all people; he didn’t know.
And I tell him I am not done yet, that for me this is just the beginning. It’s medium rare vs rare — but he doesn’t understand things he wasn’t taught at home.
(And there are people who really love you, you know, monkeys who will sit where you sit.)
When I run into him later that week he’s feeding some girl by the stairs like she’s not a stranger. I see him turn in the mirror — I’m disturbing, hasn’t he been warned? When I ask, he looks off-scene behind my shoulder and tells me to forget about him because he’s so unreliable. Our soliloquies are rehearsed. Then he holds me like I’m a stranger, and I wonder why that is.
And I ask him if I can trust him, at least, if he is on my side. He looks surprised, he doesn’t understand the question, he has never had to run, he has never had everyone who wears his name never call him again after he’d refused to lie. “Yes,” he lies to me, because he’s an innocent, I guess, with all the brutality of it.
I think how hard it is to trust a man who still trusts his father; when one is wronged one should know. And I think how hard it is to love someone who loves the ones who hurt them — I see the candle move in the mirror on the wall, but he can’t.
And I wish there was something to protect me here — family or class or reputation or money. But I am comforted by the person who’s hurting me, and if I go into full defensive I won’t be able to love.
And I wanted London, didn’t I— to fuse, to make this place have me. I tell him he’s my twin, my reflection, which isn’t true but I can’t phrase it better, and he seems offended. He shares plans; London’s eros is that he’ll now go and suck up to rich people who don’t give a fuck about him, and am I not doing the same.
Months later when I’ll have transported my supplies like an army across the tunnel, I’ll still be as warm and as soft and as touchable as in that cold house, so unlike me. And I’ll wish there was something to protect me there — the old me for instance. But by then I’ll no longer have even him around, and if I go full defensive he’ll never see me again and —
Over drinks in some city in the world I propose friendship to him with shaking knees, and then laugh at myself hysterically in an Uber. (The monkeys do bare their teeth.) Neither of us knows he will soon turn into fiction — that after all it was not me in his play; he is mine.
And he small talks at me in a restaurant like he forgot who I am. I ask him what he would ask me if he could ask me anything, and he asks me what I think about him. I got a haircut for this.
And I think to myself you can’t play mock marriage with someone like me without also having to play mock divorce — or a beheading. That something will get ripped out, that someone will get slaughtered along the way…
And I am so cold in his country, but under the big covers there’s this beauty, the beauty, and the kindness — the suspension. And there’s no battle shock for me this time for packing up family and friend and lover, just the hurt.
And I understand deeply that someone somewhere in the past should have loved him better but they didn’t; that it’s an epidemic. That they should have protected him from something but it is now too big for him — he doesn’t know where to begin. And I’ll think how I saw the best minds of my generation cradled to sleep by phone apps, starving themselves of sweetness, hysterical, bare, of love, unheld by mothers. How the darkness surrounds the carefully lit rooms, you can fall; how hesitant hands have let go of me. And he pours my wine and tells me he’s a very happy person.
I wake up in London the next morning — a shiver: winter is here. And I find my clothes: he has thrown them into a pile on the floor.
I have been busy. There’s a domesticated beauty to Brussels that leaves one space to concentrate; there’s tasty food that I sometimes eat with my hands.
It’s just my skin — which feels too hot, too touchable; there’s been too much evolution. Some nights it’s as if I heard someone move —
From time to time I pull out the bottom drawer of my bed-stand to see the few things I saved from my life’s expeditions. They’re mine— things that fell out of my notebooks and company files when I cleaned up and rearranged them for the New Year.
All human women since the invention of drawers have hidden their tokens of love in this abyss— and before the drawers in chests, and before the chests in tree holes, and before the tree-holes there was no one to want to stop time.
A couple of pages from my 2019 journal. Two concert tickets... A card with a wifi code on it. So this is it for now: the handprints on the cave-wall, the monument of our lives — a memorial and a name.
That yes, we were here. Under the satellites, under the conventions, under the crowns of trees — that we are the marks on the wall of the cave and the floor of the drawer. That we existed — listened to Beethoven and joined the network and had ideas — somewhere on Earth — as it turned a few times — the egg released, the maître d’ tipped — that we lived, and loved, and left. We were matter that mattered — together — in thin, thin layers — adding up to something that could one day be greatness.
That it mattered, my family, my friend, my lover — the curves, the tongues — carbon copy, dying animal — this beauty, the beauty — the gentleness, the sweetness, the kindness — my dear, forgive me — that there’s an output to the fugues and the Fauves too — that it is never for nothing.
The sun will soon set over Parc du Cinquantenaire, and I am where everybody else is, out running and hoping like the planets, trying to carry less weight. They’ve taken down the flags, a storm is coming. It’s okay.
