Cornelias

Beata Balogová: Cornelias

(Excerpt from the novel Kornélie, Ikar, Bratislava 2022)

PROLOGUE

A story grows in every family. A family with no story is scattered to the winds, like the ash from my mother’s cigarettes, which were slowly killing her. People tell stories at celebrations and funerals; funny stories even, if the mood of the audience allows, but they never launch into an epic tale of the fate of many generations. Because they don’t want to forget any details or offend anyone; because it may be that the person on whom the family’s decline will later be blamed is sitting right there at the table. A violent criminal, alcoholic, egoist or whore. Not everyone may agree with the choice of hero, or identify with the role the narrator gives them. People carry their stories on the tip of their tongues, as if ready to add something when the time is right. At family gatherings, people prefer to talk about their own poor health, or their children, and a story requiring a skilful narrator is suppressed right down to the tonsils, and beyond: it is swallowed and carried in their stomachs like an insatiable hunger. They do not want to bring about a bad, unintended ending.

They hope that someone else will do that work for them, pick up the shreds, memories, hopes and fears. Pick up the family myths, the small untruths handed down with eyebrows slightly raised, and the truths that later saved them. Pick up the pieces. They hope that something will be left for their great-grandchildren in addition to the houses, old photographs and crockery. They expect that someone else will shoulder that thankless task and start to collect material at an early age, like ants gather crumbs. Without stories, it would be unnecessary to meet in the cemetery on All Saints Day, because the dead would no longer have any reason to return, and nobody would remember anything except their names.

A whole, even extended, family knew that one day I would do this. It was like an unwritten, but essentially irrevocable agreement: I was exempted from working in the garden, from cleaning, from almost all manual work, but my calling was one that nobody else laid claim to. And, from an early age, even I saw it as a privilege. Something that made me different from other children.

In our family, the act of writing was enveloped in great respect. I wrote my first words in white chalk on the concrete steps: alma, család, méhecske, kutya. Poems came next, the small, clumsy attempts of a teenage poet. Then letters to myself with the ambition of leaving indelible traces behind me. Oh, but that family story! You need to half grow old and half remain a child to even be able to write it. I made so many attempts, but the words spilled out and became incoherent narratives that did not interweave with the story of our family, however much they entertained those who loved me. And now, years later, I am trying again, because my grandmother chose me for this task.

My story will first unsettle you, then rock you to sleep. Like your mum wiping a burn with sour milk when you were little. Of everything I’m about to tell you, I don’t know exactly what actually happened, and what was merely a vivid dream lying in wait for children in dusty garrets and eaves dripping with rain.

CHAPTER ONE

Cornelias

All families have their own small blessings or curses. Sometimes, it’s trivial, maybe a gesture that was later transformed into a great tragedy. Sometimes, conversely, it’s a tragedy that was converted into a gesture, which could then be avoided. Every family seeks out its own secret, something that it can hand down from one generation to the next like a recipe for pickled cucumbers. Something that grannies on their deathbeds can whisper to their grandchildren.

In our family, the women handed down one name: Cornelia. Only the strongest could bear this name. They could not give their surnames to their daughters, so they hung the name Cornelia onto their eldest girls. It’s a name you need to grow into before you come to like it, before you can accept it. It’s like a command: Cornelia!

The children are terrified of it. Not just of the way it sounds, but also because they will have to bear it for their whole lives. It terrified my mother too, which is why she was always called Nely, or sometimes Nellike, which softens Cornelia, and was a name people could use only until someone understood them, liked them.

My sister was always called Lia. This form of address had neither edges nor sound. It did not stick in the throat when you didn’t want to say it aloud, it wasn’t painful to the ears as Cornelia was, when finally you pronounced the name audibly.

The men in our family died very young. They were youthful and passionate, yet they fell from heights, their hearts ruptured, their wives were left alone. Love was difficult – lifelong, it made people happy and miserable, left them profoundly deepened. A cure for love was never found. We learned the secrets of herbs, and words that nobody used any more. We could read signs from the skies, we watched the birds, and we were good at capturing the stories that migrated from north to south at the end of summer. All summer long, they lurked in the trees in Mamaka’s garden, and when someone plucked a cherry, or a pear, or an apricot, they clung to strands of their hair, or their outer ear.

I often used to embrace the apple tree when I was a child. I felt sorry for it. One of the twisted branches was supported by a crooked crutch, put there by Uncle János, so it didn’t break under the weight of the apples. The apples were small, and there were a great many of them, strewn with black blotches, as though they’d caught the smallpox. One summer, Uncle János said that he’d have to saw off the branch come the spring. I imagined the blood spattering, the apple tree letting out a terrifying scream and the frightened sparrows hiding in the neighbouring walnut tree. I didn’t like those apples, but I ate them, to lighten the apple tree’s burden. Every morning I scurried into the garden and picked even unripe apples. I took one bite, then a second, then I threw them to the hens who stuck their heads inquisitively through the gaps in the wooden fence.

Mamaka, my grandmother, Cornelia the second, said that I shouldn’t do this, that the apple tree must carry them to term like a woman until her time comes, and the apples would then fall to the ground. She always said that we women were like apple trees. We lug our apples around until they fall from us, and we lug them around even when they are bitter and nobody wants them any more. Mamaka would never have allowed the apple trees to be chopped down. They were women. Strong women, even when they no longer bore juicy apples. Their birth pangs were transformed into semi-sour fruits, which we used to make jam.

She also said that one slice of bread was enough for her, enough to fill her up before she could walk around the garden in the morning. She liked the plums with ordinary bread. It was her early morning plum cake. I often used to see her striding into the garden, with her knife and her slice of bread, to join her sisters, the apple trees. She believed that I could learn absolutely everything I needed to know about life in her garden.

She didn’t speak Slovak and actually, back then, neither did I. I don’t remember when I first learned the Slovak words for, say, dandelion, or gingerbread, but I remember sorrow setting in after I left that sweet garden in Gemer.

I often used to walk barefoot over the unctuous Hungarian soil, which opened up under my footprints after the rain, in the same way thick plum preserves open up when you stick in your finger. I remember that squelching sound and I can see my footprints before me. Plum preserves are phenomenal. They were made in a large kettle in the courtyard. The plums were picked and their pits were squeezed out of their little bodies like small stone hearts. Then they macerated and intermingled in the jam kettles for hours on end and emitted a bluey-purple scent that fragranced everything, like the skin of the broken fruits.

Life in the garden was governed by time, which gave hints to the trees and shrubs. It was the time of strawberries, tomatoes and red currants. For a long time, I thought that currants were actually grapes from Lilliput that had decided to stop growing so they would remain small and sour like those apples. We often pretended we were bleeding. We crushed the small red bunches between our fingers and rubbed them over our faces, our knees, our bellies. We bled joyfully, we bled playfully, we bled fragrantly. We smelled of summer. Light-heartedness floated above us like the morning mist over the forest. I thought that Mamaka, too, strode as lightly as we did, day in, day out, feeling that everything was yet to come and that life would always be as incredibly generous as her garden, that blood would always be as easy to wash off as the currant juice on our chins and that pain would fade away as quickly as an autumn cold.

I was like a fat little fairy in Mamaka’s garden, in that garden where apples provided worms with refuge, where the pears were hard and sour, where the strawberries were tiny and we bled with the sheer joy of childhood.

My time in the garden grew shorter as I grew up. Until, one day, I left the garden entirely. I left Mamaka there, who promised me that she wouldn’t die until I introduced her to my love, and I promised her that I would be with her in her last moments and accompany her to the other side. I would go with her to that border, as far as I could, so I could wave to her when she slipped through into non-being.

Neither of us kept our promise.

Since then, I have tried to preserve something of that sweet melancholy that enveloped her, to capture the different way in which time passed – indeed, compared to how I live today, it essentially didn’t pass at all, but resembled the movement of a rocking chair, not so much progressing as shifting forwards and then back again. Forwards and backwards, as if past and future came together in each second, allowing the present to be fully savoured.

Mamaka was the saviour of lost and broken things. A witch. From her I learned that everything can be glued back together, everything can be reused and things are simply not thrown out. She would never throw away sugar bags; she stored them and then wrapped food in them. Sometimes my bread-and-butter was fragranced with sugar. She was the village scientist and researched the infinite possibilities of using things. She knew of tiny little objects that longed to become jewels. She knew that pebbles yearned to be ornaments and that newspaper had greater ambitions than to be read only once. My mum, Cornelia the third, also knew this, and my sister, Cornelia the fourth, knows it too. I’m teaching it to my daughter, Cornelia the fifth.

CHAPTER TWO

Cornelia the first

Mamaka knew that the summer of 1976 would be ravenous, and that it would take someone from us. The long summer holiday was approaching. I got off the old bus, but nobody was waiting for me at the bus stop. Whenever I arrived in Jablonia Panica, it embraced me like someone who is secure in their love. Always. The village was a tall, resilient woman with a pale face and eyes of forget-me-not blue. Her almost translucent hair gleamed like the full moon on a late August night.

I crossed the street to the house. The gate was difficult to open and I had to lean my whole weight on it. From the courtyard, Mamaka watched me grapple with the gate, and told me it would be a difficult summer. She asked me if we would cope. I was six and I couldn’t even open a heavy iron gate without help. I had no idea what coping with difficult things actually meant, but I nodded.

“Yes, Mamaka, we’ll cope.”

She always used to say that frequently, it’s joy that we need to prepare ourselves for, even if we often think that we should be ready for difficult things. Joy is much harder to bear than sorrow. We’re beginners in joy. We process sorrow unwittingly, it’s an inborn ability, somehow natural. We are born with tears. Where do we even begin with joy, with a sudden great surge of love? This is what we have never properly learned.

“You must learn to be joyful without being afraid that it will pass.”

She always used to say that I looked at her like someone who had lived through a great deal, but at the same time, she realised I was only a child. She was afraid that my eyes predestined me for sorrow. She told me her stories, although she knew that I didn’t yet understand them. She sowed in me the seeds both of knowing and of not knowing. She couldn’t know whether they would sprout, because seeds within people are never watered.

I walked around the house. Mamaka’s mother, Cornelia the first, was sitting in the summer kitchen. We called her Mari-Mama, because she had another name too, Maria. She’d wanted to liberate herself from the burdensome name Cornelia. She had known two Cornelias herself, her mother and grandmother. They had both shouldered their burdens, and she had hoped that she wouldn’t have to. She thought – understandably – that maybe things would change if she chose another name for herself.

Once she told me this as if it were an oppressive secret that women in the family should know. I was quietly playing beside her when she whispered into my ear:

“Alma, I am Cornelia.”

“Why am I not Cornelia, Mari-Mama?”

“You were born three months before your time. Your mum was afraid that such a heavy name would be too much for you. The angels seemed to be holding you by the legs and they saw too many bad things, and didn’t want to let you enter this life. But you wanted to be here, so you won that argument with the angels. Mamaka believed that you would survive. She said she had dreamed that a black cat brought a bird in its mouth and laid it on the table in front of her. The bird was unharmed. She said you were put into a sort of glass box and machines breathed for you. They couldn’t call you Cornelia. They couldn’t do that to you. It’s good not to be strong, because it teaches the people who love you to be strong for you.”

I wanted to be Cornelia. I felt as if I had been banished from the family line. In my childhood, I heard so much about the curses, mystical millstones and signs that people carried around with them all their lives. Back then I believed that you transported those things in your name. Today I know that we bear them inside us and that they sometimes escape in our tears, be they tears of sorrow, or of joy.

At school, I couldn’t relate our family’s stories about magical things. The teacher said that all our deeds, all phenomena, can be explained. Superstition and miracles were for the uneducated. She called it scientific materialism. I didn’t know exactly what that was, but I always imagined a long white tunnel. If I were to go through it with my eyes closed, I would suddenly understand everything. Today I know that there is no such tunnel.

Cornelia the first had one glass eye and could barely see with the other. She had lost her sight while still a child. She was so fragile. Sometimes I would imagine that she would be transformed into sand for us to pour her into hourglasses so she could tell the time for us. The Hungarian she spoke was strange and practically nobody else in the village talked like that. She pronounced words with the steadfast conviction that she knew their real meanings. Sometimes she would utter them several times.

“Alma, my little daisy, bring me some water. Water!”

Her mouth made the word water sound like a longing for rivers, for oceans, as if she were demanding all the summer rains at once. Mamaka always used to say that the wisdom within her sapped her strength, as if her brain fed on bones and muscles. Later, Mamaka would carry Mari-Mama around in her arms. She lay her down on the bed as easily as if she were freshly ironed bedlinen.

I felt that, at any time, I could lift her, run into the garden with her, and sit her on a branch for the birds to take care of. I always imagined that she would fly away somewhere for a while; that there was no body beneath her clothes; that her delicate face was only the reflection in a giant, invisible mirror.

Mari-Mama could remember the time of village healers and herbs. A time when everywhere was fragranced with marjoram, and rosemary reigned in the flowerbeds beneath our windows. The time of camomile, thyme, lady’s mantle, wild garlic and parsley. The time of quiet but never profound joy. The time of smiles but never of laughter.

I remember Hungarian weddings that were noisy, but this was not profound joy. I remember bitterness. I don’t know if it was typical only of our family, or if all weddings were melancholic. People often cried at weddings. I remember faces adorned with tears like pearls, their eyes red. I told myself that my wedding would be different. And elsewhere. Or that it wouldn’t happen at all. And in fact, it didn’t.

The last summer before she died, Mari-Mama told strange stories, as if she wanted to leave them to me, because she didn’t own anything material. They were completely different from the tales she had told me before that summer. They were the stories of people she had never met, but they all had something in common with our family.

She told me about beautiful, freckled Amalia, whose hair reached to her ankles, and when she turned twenty-five, she sold her auburn waterfall to the hairdresser and moved with her short hair to Argentina, where she opened a milliner’s shop. Her hats resembled fruit, large ripe pears, walnuts half broken open, and marrows. The business thrived. She sent yellowing postcards that sometimes travelled for as long as a year before they reached the village. Later, she made hats for rich Argentinian women. Those hats resembled exotic birds, creatures of the past. Her fame only lasted a short while, because her assistant left a needle in one of the hats, which injured her best customer, who wrote letters to her friends in her first flush of anger, asking them to boycott Amalia. However, she did not stop making hats, although they no longer sold as well. She sent a few of them home on a big boat, but the women in the village didn’t know what to do with them, so they hung them on the blossoming cherry tree on May Day. Then they would walk under the branches and waited until a hat fell on their head. Nobody knows what was then meant to happen to the woman on whose head Amalia’s hat landed.

She also told me the story of Bertalan Bolondos, who was said to have left for the Soviet Union. Nobody knew why, or for how long. He only sent gifts for the villagers; never news about himself. Every year, someone different received a different gift from a faraway land. Russian dolls, small artificial rockets, a bust of Lenin, embroidered blankets, a little wooden Kremlin, pencils surmounted with the hammer and sickle. He also wrote postcards, but they brought no answers, only more questions. They were like pages torn at random from the notepad of a secret agent: the neighbour is number three; bread is cheaper than it was last year.

The strange thing was that the gifts and postcards kept on coming even after Bertalan had died, as if the activity had been inherited in exactly the same way as the name Cornelia. Nobody knows who read those postcards, but everyone knew their stories, that sentences from them were repeated at various celebrations. If any fake Soviet goods appeared in the village, people didn’t have to think, but always said: Oh, that’s from Bertalan.

The small room was overcrowded with ghosts that summer. Everything came to life through Mari-Mama’s stories. She commanded the characters – everyone who had ever left our little village – to come from the far ends of the earth. She summoned them back, so they could catch up with their roots, now that the stories had given them wings. I still remember their names today. Back then, I thought they sounded like the myths of the Greek gods and heroes.

Bertalan Bolondos (Batty Bartolomej) was Odysseus. He travelled around small Soviet villages and collected objects that nobody knew how to use. His journey apparently started with a group from the village, but those men all later married strong Russian women, as if red-cheeked wooden Russian dolls wearing dresses adorned with huge pink peonies had come to life. Mari-Mama never saw those photos, but she described the Russian women as if she met them daily at the iron gate to the house.

She saw Russian soldiers during the Second World War and her memories of them were not the best. When the Soviet army marched through the village, a small, stocky soldier caught tall Mamaka by the shoulder: Nelly, davai v Moskvu! Come to Moscow! She wrenched herself free of him with the words: In your dreams!

Czechoslovakia was flooded with Russian dolls and every school had them. The big dolls gave birth to smaller ones, and the smaller ones gave birth to the smallest, right down to those that could not be opened up. We always thought that they pupped arbitrarily, and that there would be more every time we opened them. I locked my Russian dolls away in a little box. My bedroom was tiny and I was afraid that they would inundate it entirely and squeeze out the colours and my other dolls.

There was nobody left in the village who remembered Bertalan, what colour his eyes were, or the timbre of his voice, whether he liked to have a drink with the men in the pub or whether he had any strange birthmarks. Yet he had become real. Every unsigned postcard in the village was attributed to him. Years later, people remembered where he had lived, how many beers he drank in the inn. People pulled out memories like old clothes from a trunk that their grandparents had left in the attic: full of holes, sometimes almost translucent. They sent the trunk around and everyone patch it up in some way or another, and so was the story born that Bertalan had fathered children, who then came back to Slovakia, and that these children all had strange birthmarks on their elbows. And all of a sudden, many people remembered, if not Bertalan himself, but that birthmark that his children bore on their elbows, and they would have sworn that they had seen the birthmark somewhere.

“Mari-Mama, tell me something more about Bertalan.”

“You tell yourself something.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“I heard that he forgot his Hungarian but never learned to speak proper Russian. He got stuck somewhere between the two languages. He spoke in a strange blend of Hungarian, Slovak and Russian. That’s why he wrote such strange postcards and it’s why nobody could decipher them. Do you remember the postcard on which the words chlieb pénz nem sok stojit were written in a child’s handwriting?”

“Yes, I saw that postcard. The picture was a broad-shouldered labourer with ears of wheat.”

Sometimes the passage of time was measured by him. The family came together in order to find out who had received another gift. Mari-Mama never got anything from him. This made her sad.

Then stories were told that entwined themselves around existing people who carried them like sheep that the shepherd had forgotten to shear. There were also stories that people were afraid to tell in case they influenced someone else’s fate. Stories really did start to grow and develop until real people died: this was almost the unwritten principle of the village. It was as if the stories fed on their ashes. The story of Magdolna Itókás was like that too. Itókás in Hungarian is a gentle reprimand for someone who likes to have a few drinks.

Magdolna was warm-hearted and her chest could snuggle the entire village. She always reminded me of Uncle János. Their faces were similarly red, and they both had large noses. I thought they were related, but the only thing they had in common was the street they both lived on, and the tavern they did their drinking in. People often said that they also did other immoral things there. As a child, I thought for a while that they summoned up the ghosts of the past, laughed at old people or made counterfeit money, but Uncle János had fat, chunky fingers and couldn’t draw for toffee, so I immediately rejected the money-counterfeiting idea. According to Mari-Mama, it was nothing more than an affinity for drink, an affinity for liquids. As if everything they drank was drawing them together, a kinship in wine and home-distilled spirits born from the same soil.

Magdolna had countless pockets. Over time, she sewed them on as patches, one after another. They were rumoured to contain little bottles of the spirits that she distilled in her garden at the end of summer. Though she initially hid them, she later proudly displayed the empty bottles for the whole village to admire. They were everywhere. She used them to decorate flowerbeds, then thrust them between rosebushes, and when she no longer wanted to grow flowers, she simply exchanged them for brown and green beer bottles. She had a system. She kept the translucent white bottles on the windowsill, she tucked the brown beer bottles into the ground at the edge of the pavement; the green bottles edged the flowerbeds. Mari-Mama always said that Magdolna’s house gleamed when the sun came up, as if it were made entirely of glass, and she hoped that the road to the cemetery would be bedecked with bottles when Magdolna died. Magdolna died in the autumn, run over by a tractor from the collective farm. The driver was drunk.

Even I remembered Dorottya. She pushed an old bicycle along with her. She never went anywhere without it. People used to say that she even had an old rusty bicycle standing in the kitchen, and was always holding onto it. Mari-Mama knew exactly how all this had happened. When Dorottya was a child, her mother never had time for her. She was maybe the sixth child, so they propped her up against a tricycle and that’s how she learned to walk. Later they bought her a bigger bicycle. Then she worked as a postwoman and somehow became attached to the bike. And she also grew larger. She was the most capacious woman in the village. When she was expecting her three children, she still pushed the bicycle. The children grew up almost without their mum. Nobody ever saw them walking hand-in-hand with mum around the village. But they, too, had their own bicycles. They lived at the end of the village. When I arrived on the bus, I would see only three bicycles in their courtyard. I always thought that there must be tonnes of bikes there and that somewhere there was a rubbish heap on which they threw the old rusty ones, while they locked up the new ones in the cellar.

It’s possible that the story about the cursed bicycles was only made up. It was entertainment at a time when people did not watch television. Either they didn’t have one, or the things that appeared on the screens seemed overly real to them. Very grey, indeed black-and-white. They were absolutely fed up with reality. They wanted their stories. They wanted their Mari-Mamas, Mamakas, Dorottyas and Bertalans.

Later, they forgot what they actually wanted. It was the time of wild thyme and shepherd’s purse. The time of tiny apples and immortality. It was enough to leave an image, some sort of metaphor that people worked on intensively, like the Fates.

Of all the stories, I loved the one about Bertalan the best. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to travel the distant steppes and wildernesses, sending people objects that they wouldn’t know how to use, or what for, and send them strange messages about being and non-being, tidings from faraway lands.

“Mari-Mama, I’ll probably be like Bertalan Bolondos, but I’ll set out in the opposite direction from him. I won’t go to Russia, I’ll go to America! I’ll marry the first stranger who promises me he won’t die like your husband did. I’ll marry a man who makes up a story about me.”

Later Mamaka would tell me the stories that I first heard from Mari-Mama. They were a little different. Now they were stories for adults, not for children. Death appeared more often in these stories. God sometimes went missing in them, and people couldn’t search for him openly, in a group, but only in secret, within themselves, or within the people they loved.

Everything ripened late during that difficult summer. Mari-Mama told me that we needed to pick the plums and make preserves with them.

I helped her gather them and extract the pits from their small plummy bodies. We smashed the pits with a stone. They contained small seeds. Mamaka forbade us to eat them, as she had apparently heard that someone had once been poisoned by them. I knew that Mari-Mama would definitely know if someone had been poisoned. I went to find her so she could tell me that story. Her eyes were closed.

“Mari-Mama, are you asleep?”

No answer.

“Mari-Mama, should I go away and leave you to rest?”

Her head moved subtly, as if her mouth wanted to breathe, draw in air, but the body was no longer accepting the air that was now slowly leaving it.

I sat beside her for a while. I had heard that people find it difficult to leave. I had heard stories about difficult deaths, and so it seemed unbelievable that this could be death I was meeting in the summer kitchen.

I went to find Mamaka. At that time I didn’t yet know what it means to be the bearer of bad news. So I simply said that Mari-Mama was dead. I uttered the words as if I were saying that Mari-Mama needed water.

“Alma, don’t make things up! This isn’t a game. You mustn’t make things up like that.”

“She’s not moving. She’s different, not like when she’s asleep.”

The women came in their heavy black dresses. They sang. This singing wasn’t beautiful. It hurt your ears. They sat in the kitchen. Flypaper hung from the ceiling and I watched the one still-living fly fluttering its little legs. If only they hadn’t all been so solemn, I would definitely have rescued that fly. The women were singing melancholy Hungarian songs and it sounded like they were just learning to sing, or to weep. I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know the words, so I made some up. Mamaka sent me away. I was alone for many long hours and I started to be afraid. I didn’t know where Mari-Mama had gone or what happens to us when we die. I burst into tears. Mamaka thought I was grieving for Mari-Mama, but I was afraid that Mamaka, too, would depart this life in this way, and so, gradually, would they all, and that one day I would have to die too, but I wouldn’t know where to go because Comrade Teacher Darinka had told me in nursery school that heaven doesn’t exist.

Then I understood what Mamaka had meant when she said this summer would be hard.

I thought that Mamaka, too, would warn me the summer when she would have to leave us forever. She didn’t. She died when I wasn’t around. She died in late autumn, in November. A few days after her birthday. My mother grieved the most for Mari-Mama, who had taught her things that even the city robbed her of. She knew how ducks should be fed, and she knew how to cut their throats afterwards so that they didn’t suffer. I always suffered instead of the ducks.

Mum forgot the names of the herbs that Mari-Mama could even recognise by scent when her eyes were no longer so good. Mum believed that, if I could remember their names, maybe I would also recall what they were good for and how they should be used. For me, the loss of Mari-Mama meant the loss of endless stories.

“Mamaka, do you remember her stories?”

“Some of them, yes. Mari-Mama took some of them away with her. The ones you have heard are now yours. You can do what you like with them.”

“Anything?”

“Anything. Write, dream, expand, carve up, mix and bake a completely new story.”

We stopped talking about Mari-Mama. Nobody asked about anything else, except for me – I asked where the black car was taking her and who was she talking to now and would she finally meet Bertalan? She answered absolutely every question. She didn’t leave a single debt. Actually, she had never earned any money or ever borrowed anything from anyone. She said that her garden was her bank; the only loan she had ever taken out, and that she spent her life paying off, was to that garden.

Four men came to clear out her little room. I saw her things in daylight for the first time. The room had only one very small window, but she’d insisted she wanted to move in there. She said that the brain is better at summoning up images from the past in the dark, that she no longer needed the light. That the light is necessary when you soak the world up into yourself, but when you only exhale the world out, you don’t need light.

“Alma, I think that even Mamaka is too modern. I don’t want to start new things any more, I don’t want to watch the television or what it has to offer. I have already seen everything I needed.”

All that time I remember her, she only watched television a few times. Her excuse was that her eyes were no longer good enough, and that she could only see shadows, but she knew that what she heard was immensely disturbing for her and her stories. Her only wish was that the name “Cornelia” be written on her gravestone. She said that it was fine, that she had lived her entire life as Cornelia, so she saw no reason why she should be buried under a different name.

I barely remember the funeral. I only know that the men who carried her coffin thought that it was empty, because Mari-Mama was so light. They marched quickly, causing the entire procession to pick up the pace. I stood beside the grave. And while the others threw soil into that pit, I threw down my last questions; the questions that I now had nobody to ask.

© Translated from the Slovak by Isabel Stainsby, 2023

No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or used in any form or in any way.