The Blue Moon Review

W o l v e s
a n d _ G e r m a n s
a n d _ R u s s i a n s,
a n d _ T o u r i s t s _
f r o m
t h e _ W e s t

__________by Mariska Stamenkovic

In the hall of the train station in Budapest, you line up in front of my ticket booth. You shuffle forward to my window, one after the other, and bend your head to say "One way" or "Round trip" to Szekesfehervar, Pecs, Gyor. You hand me money. I hand you your tickets. But in my mind, I wonder if you still think of an ugly village on the plains south of Budapest; of late summer, when the dirt under your feet cracks and covers your shoes with gray dust like ashes and the sky is blue enough to hurt your eyes.
You have a village like that somewhere, if you think back. It is roughly circular, with houses of baked mud. There is no through traffic; you arrive by birth and leave by death. You carry its picture with you always.
When we were very small, we watched the old men of this village whip themselves with fists full of nettles to drive out the rheumatism. We stripped the blooms off acacia trees and ate them by the handful, the taste of nectar sweet over the bugs crunching between our teeth. We ran downhill, all of us, running until we caught up with our legs. You did all that and so did I, while my mother lay in the shade of the mulberry tree.
I am no different from you. You moved away, I bet you're living in the city now. There's no reason why I should not.
My mother still lies in the shade of the mulberry tree. It was barely more than a shrub when I was small, but over the past two decades my mother has turned to dust and the shrub has turned to tree. Now it towers over us both. The fruit is past ripe and berries are all over her, belly-white and sickly sweet. I go down on my knees and brush them off. They are pale and fat like maggots.
I used to love mulberries as a child. All children do--it's the taste of trespassing, of must-be-forbidden in anything so sweet. The tree fed on her and I fed on the tree, I suppose I knew that, but the taste of the berries was sweet enough to cover the knowledge. I would still eat them but for the baby who leaves no room for my stomach. I get sick all the time now. I don't want to be sick on my mother's grave.
The graveyard lies behind the church at the heart of this village, with high stone walls on all sides. It might be just another room in God's house: all it lacks is a roof. I crawl around to the headstone to arrange daisies and cornflowers and the pictures I brought, one of me and one of her. I've brought my mother photographs of myself for years, a new one after each birthday. This is the first time I bring her one of her own as well.
There is nobody here besides me and the old man who tends the graves. When I am done he helps me to my feet and dusts me off with careful pats, avoiding the baby's bulge.
"No need for that," he says, and picks up my picture of her. "It's too early."
The photograph on the headstone still looks fine. I didn't come here to replace it.
The one I brought doesn't have a frame, it has a dark stain near the chin, two creases and some yellow around the edge. It has been mine for a long time. He gives it back to me.
He nods at the picture mounted on the headstone: my mother smiling out over her bones. "She still looks fresh," he says. "It's the shade."
I imagine I can see a fullness in her cheeks, that secret shine women are supposed to get when they are pregnant. I haven't found it in my own face, not even after seven months.
The old man looks at my bulge. "It's a girl," he says.
That's good, I don't want a boy.
"Mind me, now. A girl. I'm never wrong." He smiles at me. He has teeth like a horse. I smell palinka, strong and sweet on bad breath. "Another Piroska, yes?"
He starts brushing off my skirt, and I stretch it taut between my hands to accommodate him. "I was thinking of 'Ilonka'," I say.
He looks doubtful. "That's your aunt. Piroska is your mother."
"My mother is dead."
"Yes?" his voice curls into a question-mark.
The dead are recycled in this village. All the names are hand-me-downs. A girl should be named after her grandmother as I was named after mine, but I don't know about 'Piroska'. 'Ilonka' is soft and common and tasteless as water. I like it. 'Piroska' is different.
'Piroska' means 'Little Red', same as in the fairy tale; kids will tease you with a name like that. There is something wrong with a name like that.
My grandmother had three Piroskas in as many years. The Piroskas that preceded my mother both died in infancy, and the name moved on to the next girl and the next until it stuck with my mother. She lived, she grew up and she carried me to term. She died in childbirth. I still don't know whether it was I who killed her or the name, but I'm not taking any chances.
"Ilonka is nice," I say.
The old man pulls back his hands.
I squat without his help to put her picture down again. It is the last one, taken a week before she died, when she was twenty-four and pregnant with me.
He shakes his head. "Too early, the old one is still fine."
I put it back anyway, propped up against some daisies. It is not too early, it is late: I am older than my mother now. I have caught up with her.

I walk back to my grandmother's house. Ferenc and I have the room off the kitchen, and my grandmother has the back room, where my mother had me. I have lived there since I was born. I was raised by my grandmother, who despaired over my refusal to hear fairy tales but failed to explain how come the wolf got my mother instead of her. As I grew up I in turn raised my mother; I carried her pictures with me always, in chronological order. Every year on my birthday I replaced her photograph with one that matched my age. She lasted until I was twenty- four. I have outgrown her now, but sometimes I still look at her, a five- year-old girl with a bow in her hair, a sixteen-year-old with my wide cheekbones. A child with mother's eyes.
Today I will tell my grandmother I am leaving. My daughter's name will be Ilonka, and we will live in the city.
I am stepping on the cracks we all skip when we are young so as not to bring bad luck. There is something funny about the light, the way it slants down to bounce off the world like a pebble off water's surface. Many, many things can bring bad luck to a woman with child, and funny light is one of them. A bar spits drunken laughter at me through a half- open door. My husband will not be inside. He whispers sweet things at night, thick words in the darkness; he tells me he is on my side. That doesn't do me any good. He has no fight left. He is not in the bar because he has no money for labeled bottles. He lost his job months ago, and like most men he depends on a still in a back yard.
Heat shimmers. The air is limp and reluctant to move, I have to work hard to draw it in, push it out. Two men sit cooking on a bench, too drunk to move out of the sun. One of them may be mine. I walk past them without looking up, carrying my baby low and round, the way a woman carries when she will have a girl. The men share a bottle, homemade palinka, I can tell, but I won't pay them attention. Imagine: the daughter of Little Red Riding Hood, on her way to grandmother's house, and not paying attention. But there are no wolves left. Just this village. The light is funny only because it is late.
My grandmother told me how long ago the wolves would come down to the village out of the woods, if the winters were very cold. Then the wolves became Germans, then came the Russian Bear. Later there was talk of the Americans coming, and the men of these villages discussed the good and the bad of that. Secretly of course, because the walls in those days had ears. They anticipated a battle, maybe World War Three. They were all heroes, they were all with the Resistance. It was easy to be a man when a Hail-Mary could land you in jail and three people talking on the street would turn heads.
There was a joke we told in these villages: our side always loses. It is a good thing we are the Russians' ally, we said, because with Hungary at its side Russia will surely lose. History proves it.
In the end there was no battle; the Bear went like the wolves did, little by little, fading quietly. Now one comes here. Without a fight, we lose. There is nothing in this village, nothing but men getting drunk and women trying to raise their dead. We are on nobody's side but our own.
In Budapest the red stars came down years ago, my friend Agi wrote. One morning they took them all down, and that was that. The tourists bring dollars and Deutschmarks now instead of sanitary napkins and blue jeans to trade. Agi says there are jobs, and I can stay with her if the baby isn't too loud. Her walls, she says, are made of cardboard.
I will tell my grandmother I'm leaving for Budapest tomorrow. I will tell her my daughter's name is Ilonka.

My grandmother is feeding the chickens out by the shed where she keeps her still. She is small and round like a dried apple. Her hair is wound around her head in a braid; she wears it like a cap. The heat doesn't seem to bother her. She moves with the quick sure jerks of the chickens clucking about her feet. She clucks back at them, corn lights up gold, hangs in a still arc, then rains down. When she sees me she empties her apron on the chickens' heads and "here, here, here", she clucks, "Ide, ide, ide," and takes my hand and leads me in the back door and sits me down. "You shouldn't be doing this. You are sweating like a pig, you'll have a miscarriage. Here." She hands me a cup of water.
"It's a girl," I say. "I'll call her Ilonka."
"That's your aunt's name."
My aunt, the one who disappeared when I was in diapers, who sneaked away with some gypsy boy and never came back. My grandmother sits down and begins to cry. I wait until she is done.
She sniffs and says: "Where is Pirike's picture? I looked in your room, and it is not there."
"I gave it back to her."
"Your mother's picture. Your own mother. You gave it away?"
"I put it on her grave."
"Pfah! You don't want it anymore."
"I'm going away."
"Ilonka is a bad name. A bad, bad name. "
"Nagymama, I have a job. In Budapest."
She looks at me in silence.
"I have a ticket," I say, "For tomorrow. Seven thirty." I wave it in the air, flap flap, it is stiff with its newness.
"And Ferenc? He has a job too in your wonderful plan?"
"Ferenc is a drunk."
"Ferenc is your husband."
"I'm staying with Agi. He knows I'll send money."
"You're crazy. You are nine months pregnant."
"Seven."
"With my grandchild. And in the city nobody will know your name."
I am crying now too, and over the kitchen table her hand meets mine and we hold, hold, hold.
"You will be nobody. My Mariska, you will be nobody. What if the baby cries? What if Agi throws you out?"
I just shake my head.
"It's too early. If you want to be stupid, at least wait until the baby comes. Then you can go, if you have to. You and Ferenc."
But it isn't early, it is late. Wolves used to come down to the village, yours and mine, out of the hills, out of the woods, out of the mountains they would come: wolves and Germans and Russians and tourists from the west. Not anymore. Now Ferenc is drunk every day, and I am older than my mother. I cannot speak. I wave my ticket.

My grandmother walks me to the station early in the morning, when Ferenc is still sleeping. This is the hour of women and busy chickens and pigs, with the dirt smelling moist even though it didn't rain, and the sun being born from the edge of the world. The village is quiet, but awake. I carry my suitcase and look straight ahead. My grandmother carries a fried chicken, still hot, and an onion. Women are watching us.
We are the only ones at the station. We are an hour and a half early. We wait. The train is on time. I get in.
I sit at a window with the now cold chicken in my lap, and watch my grandmother grow smaller.

At the train station in Budapest I sit on a stool in a booth, and I sell tickets to Szekesfehervar, and Pecs, and Gyor. You come to my window, all of you, framed behind glass like photographs. You don't know my name, I don't know yours, we are nameless. In my mind I wonder if you think of an ugly village. But I hand you your tickets and say: "Teszek, ma'am, that will be twenty forint."

Mariska Stamenkovic writes, "I was born thirty-five years ago in Holland, the daughter of a Dutch classicist and a Hungarian refugee. I grew up near Amsterdam in the medieval university town of Leiden. Never deeply rooted in Dutch soil, I drifted across the pond three years ago and wound up in the `armpit' of the U.S. of A. I now live as a legal alien in Florida, where I write to dislodge myself when stuck between the `legal' and the `alien', to tunnel my way into this new culture without losing my own."
Mariska (Maris) is a writing consultant with Friendly Pencil.

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