Noémi László

The invisible one nourishes her hair,
her skin, takes good care of her teeth
and polishes her nails.
Covers a sleeping child.
Cuts up an onion, throws in some spice,
stirs coffee,
bends over the stove.
Does this and that, fighting asphyxiation.
Wherever she glances, time and space
lie bent, entangled,
in towering piles.
A vein starts throbbing in her temple.
The invisible one waits, stumbles and hopes,
runs without gasping up the slopes.
She starts imagining things.
Years are paper squares on wings,
wetted in body fluids.
Splinters cover the ground.
Only the broken ones would spot them,
and somehow notice when we are around.
They’ve cracked to match us, they might like our skin,

our hair or anything a visible one
can possibly perceive.
We try to help by putting makeup on
and glowing in the night,
in the clear sea of eyes ready to sleep,
where shallow waters meet the deep.
Prepared and undone,
aliens in her care, herself
bent on alienation, but she wouldn’t dare.
Quietly breathes the invisible
one.

It was like this:
the Russians meant a hat,
vodka meant winter, a pocket-knife meant dad,
we hang, grabbing something one-handed,
from the doors of bus thirty-five,
swinging,

grabbing
each other one-handed,
we talked about Moscow: Lomonosov
University, the Kremlin, Tretyakov Gallery,
we thought we were all-knowing just
because we knew about Lenin, Napoleon,
Maria Theresa and Prague,

about Mexico, Maya
and Aztec people, pyramids, carved onyx,
crocodiles and a wooden horse, but the sadness
of knowledge, the weight of words, words, words
sank to the bottom, stuck in our throats
with cigarette smoke,

truth without filter

was never
mentioned, only familiar notions,
scratching from the inside familiar frames,
the frames of our sane, orderly and virtuous
lives, when there was no God and there were
no sacred scriptures, just arguments, logic
and fables of the world,

progress
and evolution, and people had
nothing to hide, we loved each other
like kids in a song, and no, none of us
were sick, and no, nobody
at our table was cold,
we were all happy

to welcome
the sight revealed behind the Iron Curtain,
the gleaming, super-healthy, perfect smile
which spread across the sky after the bloody rain,

the universe subtitled in blue and green,
and our faces red
with shame.

Briar bushes in a Georgian fall,
fourth-fifth century orthodox churches and
colourful beehives awaiting their move,
atop the tossed-up clods of earth:
an unreal October forest,
roads, concrete, asphalt, but mainly dirt,
a grayish block of flats high on a bare hill
confoundingly rising from the grass.
Flatbread and loaves and rounded crunchy bread,
in the marketplace, white, yellow and brown,
heaped on canvas thrown upon the cement table
and the dried, crumbled, ground pot-gardens of the
East,
sights of the first exotic trip,
which I, Croesus, keep revisiting now,
encountering impossible lamb dumpling stews,
goat-cheese pies, vodka, red wine
and beetroot soup, frolicking servicemen,
armed civilians stopping our bus,
in a place of endless toasts and constantly

restated offers, where, following a legendary feast,
two dozen exhausted Central and Eastern European
writers heaved nervously, sleepless from dusk till
dawn
in the departure lounge of bleak Tbilisi Airport.

In eighty-nine my brother went to China,
with two other kids from kindergarten
and with miss Margaret – they are trying to regulate
the rebirth of Tibetan monks there, while my brother
writes software for the Germans.

In eighty-nine my father went to Mexico
with men from Romanian heavy industry, but he heard
Hungarian speech atop the Pyramid of the Sun –
our city council
has just excised the Hungarian from
the sign in the wedding kiosk.

In eighty-nine my mother took my brother
to Budapest, where he refused to visit the Basilica
with her,
though mother had planned to take him to the National
Gallery too – they are showing Magritte, Duchamp,
Man Ray, Miró, and Dalí now.

In eighty-nine my sister fainted in the dissectingroom,
and swore she would never become a nurse; she chose
a brilliant career in pharmacy instead, visiting
Brussels and Bombay,
Paris, Cairo, Athens, taking photos of towers,
statues, ships,
main squares and Red Sea goldfish.

In eighty-nine Julie jumped out the window to prevent
the revolution from happening in Cluj without her –
now she is filming documentaries in Paris, she has
two children
from two different men and is keen on social issues
like any proper, left-wing French subject.

In eighty-nine József, Lajos, István and Zsolt and Béla
managed to save the day and draw the curtain, to
throw a veil,
wipe the slate clean, unlike László, András and
Géza, whom we prefer
to picture playing parts in the underground resistance
now and then.

In eighty-nine Pegas bicycles vanished from the
shops,
Aro jeeps from the streets, pioneer songs from our
throats,
the Romanian Communist Party faded out on
industrial
facades as women threw their scythes
and men their hammers away.

In eighty-nine humanitarian aid arrived from
Switzerland, Malta
and other states to Transylvania, Doctors Without
Borders
came to Romania, now it is we sending packages,
joiners, waiters, technicians, farmers, artists, doctors
in all directions.

In eighty-nine we calculated the natural logarithm,
sine
and cosine, talked about benzene, entropy
and tensile strength, in gym classes we ran
three thousand meters along Farkas street and I balked
to study the godly poems written by Balassi.

In eighty-nine we had to walk in snow, to stand in
line for milk,
oil, sugar and bread, we knew that the Americans
had landed
on the Moon, oranges and bananas were a sensation,
nobody really thought candle-light dinners
were romantic,

no insurance agents, bank officers, students with
queries and cable TV mechanics knocked on our
doors,
but the parish-clerk came to collect church taxes,
and in Petőfi street
we could still see the hangman’s house, we watched
the News, applauded
like hell and saved money to buy a Dacia,

factories, blocks of flats, bridges were being built,
we had dams, power
houses and a work ethic, we were socially
conscious, disciplined,
trustful and true, the Danube Black Sea Canal
steadily grew,

we had show trials, and we still do, as if
in eighty-nine nothing had happened.

We lived together
in an empty home with empty
bottles, marijuana stalks,
paper tissue, cigarette butts and a few
tattered volumes of poetry
under a flickering monitor and a
noisy box,
we lived together between ever-frigid
walls covered in cobwebs,
as if objects, sentences,
dirty clothes, dishes, and plans,
imagined pasts and futures
could never harm us in
our early winter pub life,
running shoes heavy with mud, good, bad
and brilliant layouts,
we lived together amid multiplying
secrets, hunches and threats,
newspapers, price tags, leaflets,
as if the boundaries of common sense,
the last vestiges of logical thinking,

the need to eat -- had all been weak musings
of a distant land,
we lived together in an empty season
of tired glances,
as if we were tortured but terrible,
fearless persons in a film noir, under
days floating by like coloured shadow,
congested, chattering nights,
vacated happy times,
fabulous promises,
broken.