Krisztina Tóth

"Hey, did it hurt? Hey, did you hear?"

I didn't. Lying back upon the couch, I gazed at

the colored circles gleaming with the back-light:

like a church window, yellow, blue and red

stained glass: something I'd never seen in an apartment.

We had to rush - by five his mom was coming.

He hopped behind me, pants around his ankles.

I squatted in the bath; he stood at the tap.

Yeah, I love it too. The morning's when it's nicest.

I was just sixteen, sixteen more years elapsed,

Then, on bus seven one day, there he was.

"The stained glass thing between the dining room and

the sitting room, you know? I guess you guys kept that up?"

"Be serious. That was just something Dad made.

He brought some colored files home from the office

and put them in between the double windows …

… I get off here and take the metro. Cheers!"

Why do all wonders have to be exploded?

Santa Claus. Storks. And now comes this.

I

The way I still picture my childhood hiding-places tents around the house.

The camera obscura of curtain or table-cloth bolt-holes drifted with light and secret things.

Is something like the way I fixed your laugh your teeth your mouth.

The echo-chamber of that year to unlock it now is deafening.

That year of whispering clothes of snow of blind clouds at the folding-in of day.

Of a short Christmas it was a slushing year with eyes shut.

Of the body of the soul I lay sure I’d never rise from where I lay.

The year of the purple bedspread the motley glass its yellow smear of light.

Shining like a sun for one who watched the darkness pinch it out.

I wanted you to hear me and once once I wished you dead and gone.

It was the mumble of the pipes the face of wallpaper the bed of lights.

The long throats of the plumbing gagged with hair along.

You were naked in the stairwell in the shower in the lift.

It was the year of tears of unbuttoned rush in that vast draughted house.

I thought I don’t know perhaps I knew but never quite believed.

It was the year of snows of white untrodden paths and nothing else.

            II

The way the teenage me would circle endless afternoons of snow.

The silences the sleeping the furniture of dusk.

The fault-lines in the drifts of snow its midnight blue.

The way the moon span a searchlight face bright in the body-dark.

Is something like the way the bitter useless juices come around and go around.

It’s just the soul its endless talking to itself you said.

Every love a dream of speech the nothing-there of sound.

When it repeats the words of a tongue of flame gone dead.

It happened long ago all of it the geometry of stairs.

The machinery of wind through a strange garden’s keening trees.

A body bent and posted flushed in empty playing fields of air.

Stands in the open wheels and wheels where no one sees.

What did time want with us oh what a year it was and oh.

Of long frosts of scarves of eyelashes silence.

I replied I don’t believe and now now I don’t know.

It was the year of snows of white untrodden paths and nothing else.

            III

In silence in darkness lying sitting waiting sleeping for ages.

I lived as if under snow as if the house were avalanched in snow.

I was fevered by the far-off rooms of lamps by far-off faces.

Everything that I am not my home a body of glass of dreams their echo.

Of everybody’s possible end mirrored in the ice-floe curtain.

The windows flare they move and flow across the walls and rooms.

Across the park the melting ground is smeared with all the colours of rain.

Darkness settles on bench and trashcan road and gravel-bed and roof.

How many years since I lived here from every window this is what I saw.

In the cloudy frozen fluffy sky all clear all speckled with crows.

The childhood coo of turtle-doves and how it comes at sundown as before.

The foghorn of the balcony how I can hear it here I do not know.

Where the time blows when did winter’s pass begin.

The wax and wane of the winter moon of a friend’s face of a lover’s face.

That there was something else before that snow-blind start that folding-in.

It was the year of snows of white untrodden paths and nothing else.

I.

The loudspeaker calls out our names

and we jump up. Our names are

misspelled and mispronounced,

but we smile graciously.

We take the soap from the hotel,

and arrive too early at the station.

With heavy suitcases, in baggy trousers,

everywhere one of our compatriots loitering.

The trains go with us in the wrong directions,

and if we pay, the small change rolls everywhere.

At our borders we’re afraid, and beyond that

we get lost, but recognize each other.

We know the other side of the world,

the sweat-drenched clothes beneath the coat.

Below us stands the escalator, the handle

of the shopping bag filled to bursting rips, and when

we leave, the alarm goes off.

Beneath our skin, like a radiating jewel,

is the microchip of a guilty conscience.

II.

I know where you live, I know that city well.

I know that black rainfall.

Your mother used to sunbathe on the roof,

in the summer you swam in the quarry lake.

I know that man, his legs amputated,

who lives in the entranceway.

I know that country, I know

its trains, its cries, its chlorine heavens,

its acid rains, its lingering snowfalls,

its pale overly-swaddled infants.

I know where you live. No matter where it is,

if you happen to think of home, the road bordered

with the stumps of acacia trees

haunts you in your dreams.

During the feast, when they drag in

the tree, like a dead man, too heavy, grabbing at the foot,

you stop and look, as it is cast out to the others.

I know what you see: the disheveled heap of human bodies,

on every one of their extended yellow hands

a forgotten jewel: plundered

blue and gold Christmas-candy wrappers.

III.

My name is Alina Moldova.

I come from Eastern Europe,

I am 170 centimeters in height,

my life expectancy is 56 years.

I have amalgam fillings in my teeth,

in my heart I carry an inherited dread.

When I speak English, no one understands me,

when I speak French, no one understands me,

It is only the language of fear

that I speak without an accent.

My name is Alina Moldova.

My heart valves are an unmanned rail-crossing,

poisons circulate within my veins,

my life expectancy is 56 years.

I support my ten-year-old son,

I get hold of some flour, step onto moving trains.

You can hit me, you can shake me,

but my earring only jangles a little,

like a loosened part

in a motor still running.

The other day I looked into your eyes in a stranger's face on the metro.

There are days like this when everything somehow jogs my memory.

Someone's a bit like someone you get off look at them and then no.

But this is another year past things can't be never-ending.

In the same way an old classmate walked toward me just like she was in childhood.

I never though it would happen to us too incidentally.

Oh god how much I would have liked to be beside you.

You're standing there in the metro and bang you grow old suddenly.

I often wonder how they'd react to each other these two bodies.

What your smell would be like I'm sure it must be different now.

If they even could react to each other these two bodies.

There's a thin scar where I gave birth to my little son.

Somehow my hips are getting wider as well I don't know the reason.

For all this I find it really neither pleases nor tires out.

Looking into that other face it was so confusing.

There you were with your stranger's eyes looking at my stranger's mouth.

II

Sometimes I get frightened I seem to hear my mother when I'm speaking.

At the cinema recently she almost talked to me from a mirror.

The way she held the soap suddenly I was struck by the feeling.

All those shitty years what a pointless waste they were.

Not to mention the man I live with in certain familiar intonations.

Our dog also reminds me a lot when it looks at me that way.

About my mother just now I wasn't exaggerating.

Mind you why I'm talking about all this stuff I can't say.

It was the last Christmas when I was still a child I got a kitten.

We lived next to a food store the busy road was snow-covered.

It saw me ran to me crossed the road in that instant.

How many times must I learn these things all over.

Prior to let's say a pebble a chestnut a tree leaf.

You'd answer that's exactly why and actually it could be.

A thing that I know as well and I who had seen it.

Nonsense I say I've become creation's keenest student.

III

Last year at the beginning of autumn when we first moved in to this house.

Nothing but dust paint everywhere nothing but thinner.

We hoped perhaps our breathing would change it chase the whiff out.

Then it got gradually cooler after that I can't remember.

Suddenly in the mornings we couldn't go out on the terrace.

You sat out with a coffee and started to get cold with your coat.

Off with your coat off try to settle in the empty places.

Somehow you sort things out you manage to fall on your feet.

Like some far-off season this light of today it's so unhomely.

It's like I'm somebody else or it's more like I'm elsewhere.

I went inside for a cardigan even though it's still only.

Not so much the colors it's more the quality of today's air.

To know it's not summer sketching itself but the face of autumn.

See that leaf a mouth-shaped rust patch silently stains it.

My little son stares from the past a baby-eyed kitten.

Still air's thin smoke signal I gaze at gaze at.

It seemed no more than a clump of earth in the thaw,

a snowball that had rolled down a steep slope.

The day was darkening, nothing to see at all

just fields like tin, the windscreen part steamed up,

but as we neared it seemed vaguely to shift

like a heavy coat raising a loose sleeve,

a ditched hitchhiker’s shade thumbing a lift

in the brief glare of the passing headlights’ weave.

It was there one moment, gone the next. Each car

in the queue steered well clear of the thing

but I looked out for it on the hard verge

and suddenly there it was again. It seemed to sink

like a body, its two near legs in sludge

as if about to run, its nose held to the air,

its upper part attent. But behind I saw

its lower half, wrecked to a pulp. And there,

from its blood-clotted coat, stuck its back leg

that to a regular, agonising pulse kept kicking;

mouth wide open, it sat there, a half-dog

though I could tell from its eyes that it saw everything.

I cried out, Stop! draw up at the side

of the road. I begged you to save it or kill it now,

anything, let the cars  behind us provide

an ending. But what can I do? What? Just how

should I end it? And so your voice grew sharp.

What do you want of me? What is it you want? Tell me!

I wanted you not to leave it, I wanted you to stop.

Once you found it you should look after it or kill it.

A week we tended the dog, because we thought

at least it’s better off home with us giving it attention,

as if it were we ourselves who had hit it and left it out

in the road, a fact we had somehow not to mention.

But I could still not help wanting you wrapped

about me at night: I watched your muscular arm

trying not to think of the body that lay propped

in the roadside ditch, of the leg beating like a drum

while your eyes were focused somewhere far away

but did not answer; about the constant fury

and resignation involved in even love-making, and the way

you asked me just what it was that I wanted you to do,

striking the steering wheel over and over again,

and not once looking directly at me ,while I

watched as beyond your shoulder rain beat down,

soaking fields under a bloodshot winter sky.

In the city you didn’t come with me,

I arrived at night. Everyone was heading home:

glum-faced women, well-groomed men.

Being a stranger was written all over my face

and also that I was bone-tired.

There was a double bed,

but only one sweet on the pillow.

The receptionist

drew my attention to the safe.

I wondered what I could possibly deposit,

that I could leave behind, as a keepsake,

something precious, an unsettled matter,

and from now on, how I might need to carry on

to sooner, rather than later

forget the combination.

In the city where you didn’t come with me,

it was cooler than at home. Wind-swept streets

saw me drift about, steadily checking for updates.

Trailing the shelves of a Chinese store,

I spent a whole hour. Suspicious, the shopkeeper

kept an eye on me from behind the till.

Being a stranger

was written all over my face and

also that I was bone-tired.

‘How fragile we are’,

Sting mumbled on the radio,

as I paid, rummaging for change.

The robot survived the cargo-hold,

but got damaged at home, straightaway.

It kept spinning around, then keeled over

onto the carpet, with a fixed gaze, as though

-          like my son would say, about the batteries –

it had its heart ripped out.

Whenever you did come with me, it was never good either.

Once in another city, all of a sudden

a sore sprung up on your mouth at night.

We didn’t know the English word for ‘herpesz’.

You pouted, pointing at your mouth,

leaning over the counter, like Romeo.

The woman in the pharmacy finally understood,

and took to serving us with great aversion.

In a third city it was the toilet that got blocked,

we stared at the bowl together, at a friend’s house. The turd

kept coiling upwards, like the tail of an animal lying low.

The animal rattled, as we tried to flush,

so didn’t have the nerve to torment it further.

The Portuguese plumber asked where we came from,

wondering perhaps if we even had running water there,

or toilet tanks with chain flush, and other such-like.

If you don’t feel contempt, you are being conned

-          you said that night in bed. And we talked about

plumbers, instead of making love.  

The city where you didn’t come with me,

I discovered really swiftly. The fancy clock in the square

measured the time not spent with you.

In the hotel lift

a man with a laptop checked me out, at length,

his aftershave lingering in the morning air.

I could love anyone but you –

it crossed my mind then. We might go for a walk,

awkwardly, he’d carry the umbrella,

and I could pretend you’re calling me from home,

though it’s just my bank balance pinging on my phone.

I’ve run out

of everything, not only arguments, my loose-fitting clothes

sagging, my very own life.

Being a stranger was written all over my face

and also that I was bone-tired.

I pressed the wrong button on the coffee machine,

the steam poured out, I recoiled,

there were no clean tables in sight.

The city where you didn’t come with me,

was conquered by the rain. Three years

had to pass for me to return.

Since then the rain has gone to seed:

cutting a path among the stems with my umbrella,

I made it to the store.

The stock had barely changed.

I bought a purse, and the old one,

the one you used to know,

I threw into the bin

in the car park near the hotel. No-one

could see me, yet I felt like

a pickpocket, who’d robbed

someone, who isn’t even in this poem,

a swindler, who absconds, suitcase in hand

leaving behind the past, payment outstanding. 

The city where you didn’t come with me,

I will remember as a place of absence.

How many places I visited without you!

I should thank you in fact,

that I’ve become a proper tourist,

year in, year out, never

forgetting that one day, from everywhere

we have to return home.

Until then

I’ll get by with a decent map,

will make it anywhere, and on sleepless nights

wandering the crowded alleys of my memories,

I revisit the continent of an old life,

where in a sunken bathroom, like an old,

insulted punk, with dried-out paste in its white hair

and facing the tiles, there lingers

your stupid old electric toothbrush.