Magyar Irodalomóra

The following is both my first attempt to write fiction in Hungarian and my first attempt to teach in Hungarian.  My language class asked us to prepare a presentation on the topic of our choice.  Other students presented on wine-tasting, Japan, marriage, and tourism in Hungary.  I choose to create the beginning of a story and develop a lesson plan around it.

It was fascinating to write fiction in another language.  My vocabulary is very restricted which shaped the story I created.  But it also forced me to infuse every sentence with action.

I post it here mostly for my own sake as a way to preserve my little language learning efforts.

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Magyar Irodalomóra

Olvassátok el a szöveget. Amikor találsz egy új szót, írd a táblára.

***

Rejtély

A munka után a barátok bementek a kávéházba. Leültek és rendeltek. Nyugodtan beszéltek a napjukról.
Szilvia csak nézte a telefonját. Hirtelen felállt és szó nélkül kiment az utcára. A többiek halkan és gyorsan beszéltek róla.
--Kepzeljétek el, a férje komolyan beteg lett. Azt hallottam, életveselyes.
--Ne mondd már! Kitől hallottad ezt? Nem beteg! Elvesztette a munkáját két héttel ezelőtt.
--Na, ne mondd már!  Nem igaz! Azt hallottam, hogy új munkát kapott, de az új cég arra kötelezte, hogy költözzön el valahova Dél-Koreába.

Szilvia odalépett az asztalhoz. A barátai kíváncsian felnéztek. Meg akartak tudni az igazságot. Nem kérdeztek semmit mert megijedtek az arcától. Az arca holt sápadt volt. Az egyik keze remegett. Majdnem elejtette a telefonját.  Nem ült le.

Ott termett a pincér. Letett az asztalra egy drága üveg pezsgőt és négy magas poharat.

Szilva kezébe vette az üveget és kezdte kihúzni a dugót. A barátok féltek a dugótól. Ki is jött belőle halkan és finoman, mint egy kielégitett nőből a sóhaj.

A többiek csak bámultak egymásra.

Szilvia az asztal körül sétált. A pezsgőből töltögetett a barátainak, végül magának is.

A barátok nem tudtak mit mondani. Ilyenkor sütit és kávét szoktak fogyasztani. Most nem tudták, mi történik.

Szilvia felemelte a poharát. Lassan a többiek is.
--Igaz, ugye, barátaim, hogy süt a nap? Én rendeltem a különleges buborékost mert...

Nem tudta folytatni. A barátok már tűkön ültek.

--Igyátok meg --súgta Szilvia.

A barátok kiitták a poharakból a pezsgőt.

A pincér odament és letette a számlát, mert már egy ideje a terem másik végéből figyelte a jelenetet. Úgy döntött, hogy jobb ha fizetnek és távoznak.

Csengett egy telefon. Szilvia ránézett a telefonjára és kikapcsolta.
--Barátaim, nincs sok időnk. Hallgassatok meg és csináljátok, amit mondok. A kabátotokat a táskátokat, mindent hagyjatok itt. Fussatok el!

***

Kepzeljétek el a végét! Válaszoljatok a kérdésekre. Önálló munka.

Hány évesek?

Hol dolgoznak? Együtt?

Kivel beszélt Szilvia telefonon?

Miért szól sok pletyka a ferjéról?

Miért nem ivott Szilvia a pezsgőből?

Mi a te véleményed, milyen baj van?

Szilvia jó ember vagy rossz? Beteg?

Mit fognak csinálni a barátok? Mit fognak mondani? Tényleg birkák lennének?


***

Mit történik ez utàn? Rövid legyen! Nem kell a mese végét tudni.
Mondjátok el!

Humor Project: How Scientists Make People Laugh

I have neglected The Humor Project on my blog.  I have been more aware of my humor and lack-of-humor since I vowed to do something about it way back in June, 2014.

For example, my kids begged to watch Sponge Bob. I relented when they offered the following justification, "But, Mom, it's funny!"  I thought, huh.  They need to learn humor somehow. And then months later I found myself on a Saturday morning at the theater watching Sponge Bob in 3D. And it was funny!

At some point I will write more about this self-improvement endeavor.  However, the best I can do right now is offer this:

http://ideas.ted.com/how-scientists-make-people-laugh-to-study-humor/

My recent humor fail:  I frequently, but not always, remark that something my kids do is "Hillari-ASS."  This was funny, to me.  But guess who thinks everything and everyone is Hillari-ASS now? Yep, my 5-year-old son.  Moments like this make living in Hungary super hillari-ASS.  Another loud, crude American laughing at his own jokes.  (I still think it is funny.)

And for your daily does of laughter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBXKoZQwvDE

Gender Tales: At the Toy Store

Leo, with great pleasure and excitement, trying to make small talk, says to the (male) attendant at the toy store:  "Look, we have this same toy in the nursery school!" (Lifts up a plastic hair dryer.)

Attendant:  "Oh, that's cool!  But you don't play with it, right?"

Leo: Returns the toy to the shelf.

Leo:  "No."

Me: "I'm sure you do.  It's a cool toy."

Leo:  No comment


Whom do he think he listens to?




previous posts on gender, kids, and Budapest:

http://jkkelleywritenow.blogspot.hu/2014/06/kids-are-not-dumb-what-boy-learns-from.html

http://jkkelleywritenow.blogspot.hu/2014/04/raising-kids-in-budapest-gender-tales.html

My Revolution: I am not a survivor, not yet.

I am a mother, a teacher, and a writer.

I am not a survivor of domestic abuse. 

I am not a survivor of sexual assault or rape.  At least not yet.

It is the “not yet” that I have grown up with.  That is the story I was told by my mother, and caring adults who wanted to keep me safe.  It is the only story I knew.

When I began working with V-Day and One Billion Rising, I heard many stories from survivors.  I am not a survivor, but I listened to their stories.  I became a witness.

And once you are a witness, you have a choice.  I choose to stand up for them.  I choose to stand against violence.  I choose a new story:  This is my revolution, a new story. 

Stand up! Shout it! Celebrate it! Write about it in your novels.  Write new song lyrics.  Include it in your paint.  Serve it with your evening meal. 

Tell this story:  you don’t have to live with the “not yet.”  You don’t have to accept the fear, the sadness, the anger, and the helplessness.  Whisper it into every child’s ear at bedtime:  You are loved.  Your body is holy.  We are beautiful creatures.  Whisper into your son’s ear:  You are loved.  Your body is holy.

1 in 3 women, 1 in 6 men are abused, assaulted in their lifetime.

Let’s take those numbers and bear witness to them.  Be in awe.  Be in shock.  And then do something:  Tell a new story.  Together we can bear witness and demand change.

I am not a survivor, not yet.  My children are not survivors, not ever.

-----written for One Billion Rising Revolution 2015

One Billion Rising Budapest: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Onebillionrising-Budapest/386519391435246?ref=br_tf

One Billion Rising One:  http://www.onebillionrising.org/

Secretions

The baby did not blink as creamy white milk thickened with stomach acid cascaded over her lips and down her bare stomach. The vomit coated her mother’s breast and fell onto the couch as she straightened her elbows. That was when the baby shrieked. She was dangling midair, naked, shivering in her own spit-up. She peed her diaper. Then she stopped crying. She always calmed down after a good pee. The sweet release of pressure in her stomach made her placid. Until the damp made her itch. Then she simply whimpered. Relief of one kind led to discomfort of another degree. And now her stomach, a greedy walnut, echoed across its emptiness. A groan only she could feel. A groan it would take years to put into words.


The mother set her down on the changing table and dangled a toy within her grasp. They both had the motions memorized now: the wet cloth diaper removed and tossed in the diaper bucket, the lid quickly replaced. A wipe gently eased around the babies soft, plump folds. A dry diaper velcroed into place, a tab on each side.


The mother didn’t bother with a fresh onesie and instead swaddled her firmly and put her back to the breast. Left breast, ten minutes. Then right. Then left. Right, left, right. This time the mother would fall asleep, her head angled backward into the couch’s corner, before the baby. Soon the baby would follow, still latched to the left breast. It was the sleep of exhaustion. The kind that controls you. The sleep that has no regard for hour of day or night. When the body stops, sleep takes the mind. Sleep is supposed to allow the mind to process new information and make sense of the world. This sleep cannot rise to that function. This is the sleep of the parent with a newborn. It is the sleep of the body. The body gets to reclaim itself. It is work. There is no rest. Even sleep becomes labor. Even sleep is not solitary. The baby’s sweet pucker is latched to her breast; they are still one body.


The mother remembers her panic when the baby’s cord was cut. Her husband severed her flesh with surgical scissors. She felt nothing as the scissors shut, except her heart skipped a beat in the moment after it was done. They were two. She took a deep breath and gathered the hot, slippery baby to her chest.


Now, months after the birth, the mother’s body is still the source of the baby’s every ounce of nutrition. The mother is fucking growing a human being, even now, outside her body. Yet not outside. Attached. And this connection is terrible. It is fundamental. It is the irrefutable definition of humanity. It is who we are. It is what a woman can do. It is singular. It is universal. It is the beginning. It is the future. It is tiresome. It is one long paragraph that lasts for three solid months, so far.


The mother woke from the pain in her neck and let her head roll to the other side, then down to her chin. She breathed in the air her baby exhaled. The baby made gurgles in her throat. The mother will not wake her. The baby has fallen off the breast, her face gone entirely milk drunk. The mother stared. She reached for her phone and fumbled with one hand to take a photo of this adorable baby. The mystery of her silence, her inert happiness fills the room with a giddy electric buzz. The baby will sleep for a few hours. She can see that now. She eased the baby out of her arms and into the deep cushion of the couch, placing a pillow next to her. She stood and looked at the small bundle, swaddled and serene.


The mother would fix a sandwich, a weak cup of coffee. She might dare take a hot shower, the hottest water good for her milk-heavy breasts. She will wait. And see. And scroll through the hundreds of photos on her phone since the birth. And she will be proud that this baby, her baby, exists. It is almost more than she can bear.

An American Reading Hungarian

A while ago I went to a literary event for children with my kids. Someone asked me to "read a story" and I understood that someone was going to read out loud.  We happily followed the young person into the next room. Before I knew it, I was being videotaped cold-reading a Hungarian tale. It turns out I had volunteered for a program that makes these videos and shares the stories with kids in the hospital. Here you go, me cold reading a modern Hungarian Christmas story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AytGcYM1S9U#t=18

Hungarian Love (NYT Modern Love Reject)

Hungarian Love

My husband bought a house in Brookline, MA. I live in Budapest with our two kids. The day he signed the deal, he ran into a new neighbor, who happens to be Hungarian. My husband explained that his wife and kids live in Budapest. The new neighbor concluded that I must want to live in Budapest because I have a lover.

When my husband recounted the exchange via Skype, I told him that my lovers are pint-sized. Right on cue the partially clad kids streaked behind me, climbed on my shoulders, and his image froze.

To clarify, he is the Hungarian from Transylvania. I am the American from Kansas.  We came to Budapest three years ago on vacation with our young children. It was supposed to be a three-month stay. We had invested in an apartment, our first piece of real estate in Hungary. Many people in Brookline have vacation homes on Cape Cod. It turned out that we are not Cape Cod people. Instead we put roots down in Budapest.

True, the commute is too far for weekend trips. But we envisioned summers in Europe and our Hungarian-American kids growing up with the neighborhood pack. We want them to be bilingual and bicontinental.  I had always enjoyed my visits to Hungary and Transylvania. Then something happened. An internal switch flipped. Probably it was my mother-in-law who came to live with us. Suddenly we had a live-in Grandma. She doesn’t speak English. I speak only enough Hungarian to be exceedingly polite. It was magic. And here I am, still in Budapest, planning trips home for vacation.

Brookline, where we now have (our first or second?) home is a foreign land to me as well. We moved there for my husband’s work, leaving behind my teaching job and friends in South Bend, Indiana, where we met and lived for ten years. Then we had two babies, seventeen months apart. I had made a few new friends, but felt adrift and lonely and yet never, ever alone with my little ones. Yet I was still surprised, when I realized I wanted to be in the heart of this energetic city rather than ensconced in a suburb. I stayed. He agreed to commute. Since then he has spent one month with us, and returned to Boston for one month to work. You do the math. 

Our new neighbor in Brookline suggested to my husband I must want to stay in Budapest because I have taken a lover.  Can I just say that it is very Hungarian to 1) conclude that I have a lover, and 2) more so, to say it out loud on the corner in front of the new house he has just purchased for his family. Perhaps it is not fair to categorize this as Hungarian, but it is certainly not the way I was raised.

If I thought my new neighbor’s wife had taken a lover several time zones away from him, I sure as heck wouldn’t say it to his face. I might, however, discuss it with my friends and shake my head. That poor man. His wife is playing him and eating her cake too. Budapest, as you may know, being famous for its elegant and rich cakes.

My husband bought the house in Brookline because we decided our first suburban home was too far from the city. Brookline juts up against the city, but the schools are decent. My husband can ride his bike to work. The kids can walk to school. There are excellent cafes. After we decided to try splitting our homes, he rented from a friend, a tenuous arrangement that was genial when it started as a short-term solution.   Years had passed. It was time for him to move on. The new house in Brookline has everything we need, even the price was right. The kids can walk to a great local public school. I have no excuse to not move back. 

Except that I do have an excuse to stay in Budapest. Our new Hungarian neighbor in Brookline was right. I do have a boyfriend.

At first I admitted it to myself, and then to my husband.  Budapest is my boyfriend. That sounds cute, right? I am in love with the yellow 47 tram, the covered market, the superb coffee, and the chicken paprikas. Did I mention the thermal baths? How about that we don’t need a car? I take my kids to school each day by mounting a roller and zooming the four minutes to the first school, and the five minutes to the nursery school.  We could walk to school. Most Hungarians do. But we ride our rollers because it is fun. I like being the oddball American in the staid Hungarian crowd. It gives me freedom to not fit in. Of course, it means I don’t fit in, which has a price too. But the pleasures of the expat life are many and sweet. Did I mention the thermal baths? 

Anyway, I was effectively a foreigner in Boston too. We moved there and had two babies very closely spaced. I didn’t know anyone or have family close by to aid with infant mayhem. We were new to that city too.  But it wasn’t the expat life. It was flat. Much like people claim about Kansas, which is where I started.

Life would be more comfortable in Brookline. I wouldn’t have to struggle to communicate with my kids’ teachers in my broken Hungarian. Life would be more comfortable in Brookline, but it is more exciting here. 

I walked around for weeks in love with my new boyfriend, Budapest. I had finally found a way to express my choice to live here and not there.  I was quite pleased with myself as I indulged in a slice of dobos torte on a fall afternoon while the kids were otherwise engaged. A slice of cake, a cup of coffee, time to myself. It was glorious.

It was not lonely. 

Budapest is a very good boyfriend. You have to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, of course. You have to grit your teeth when the old ladies stop your five-year-old son on the street to chastise him for wearing “girl” shoes. My daughter did not want to sign up for soccer as the only girl. They don’t offer a girl’s team. But these are part of the deal when you are the outsider trying to live inside the local boxes.

I fooled myself for quite a while that it was Budapest who was my new lover. It sounds blithe, right? Oh, you know I just adore Budapest. 

The truth, however, is more scandalous. It is certainly more strange.  But then again, I am a foreigner in this land. I don’t speak the language.  Sometimes I think I never will. My parents spoke the same language. I suppose love is both more and less than what it at first seems. It seems to hinge on real estate, I’ve learned. And cake.

I haven’t told my husband yet. I do have a boyfriend. He lives in another country and comes to me six times a year. He comes with bleary eyes and cravings for thick slabs of vanilla cream cake. He changes burned-out light bulbs when he is in town. I leave the exploded, blackened bulbs in place until he arrives. Sometimes the apartment is half in shadow for weeks. And then when he returns the kids gleefully scale the ladder with him. My daughter hands him the new bulbs with utter seriousness for the task. Then the apartment blazes with wattage, the light casting us in full relief.

Our arrangement is what it is, for now. When I describe it people, they often say, Oh that must be so hard! And I sometimes say, How long have you been married? Together? We have been together since 1997. You do the math. My parents were married for 52 years. They lived under one roof for all those years. Astounding. For me, life and love, not to mention real estate and the question of where to school the children, have produced a new algorithm. 

Should I tell him? It might destroy the romance. 

If I tell him, will he stay or go? Will we stay or go? 

I want to keep my boyfriend. I want to stay in Budapest.

#modernlovereject

bouquet of first lines

They asked her her name and said that was a lovely name when she told them.  Violets were held out to her to smell.  They said where they’d picked them.  A dell they called the place, near the fingerpost.  They could have picked an armful.

“We hoped we’d see you,” the taller woman said. “For you, my dear.”

Again the violets were held out, this time for Cecilia to take.

“We’re not meant to pick the flowers.”

Both smiled at once.  “You didn’t pick them, you might explain. A gift.”

---from The Women by William Trevor

***

Daniel stands in the funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join the playground to the estate proper.

He hasn’t talked to anyone today. I haven’t talked to anyone today.

Madeleine and I are waiting at the bus stop at the bottom of Beech Grove in our school uniforms:  green print dresses, short white socks and sandals, blazers.

Growing up in the listless 1980s, Cecilia Normanton knew her father well, her mother not at all.

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family.

While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. 

For the heart, life is simple:  it beats for as long as it can.

At dusk they pour from the sky.

The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.

The moment builds; it swells and builds—the moment when I realize we have lost.

Empty, vast, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen.

‘Get out, you cunting, shitting, little fucking fucker!’ were the first words I ever heard.

We made our vow on a windy night in 1962, by the light of a full moon, three young women, with a priest as our companion.

***