The Marsh: And Other Stories

By Tibor Hajdu

A collection of short stories reflecting various aspects of life of ordinary and not so ordinary people in Hungary from the nineteenth century up to recent days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504994132

Tibor Hajdu

This is the author’s second book in English translation following Aloma – or memoirs of an old film projectionist, which was published in June 2015).

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© 2015 Tibor Hajdu. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   11/03/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9414-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9413-2 (e)

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Contents

The Marsh

The Grey Heron

The Best Football Player Ever

The Morning After

Messages

Theft of a Bell

A Dog’s Life

To Sophie and Martin

My way with memory is to entrust it only with things it will take some pride in looking after.

Julian Barnes – Talking it over

The Marsh

At one time, on that spit of land famous for its fertile, muddy earth, which spreads out north from our town to be locked between the Maros and Tisza Rivers, in the days before the rivers were regulated, and even for a long time after, there existed a sprawling marshland. One of my ancestors made his living off this thirty kilometer long, triangle-shaped boggy area straddled with plant stalks and stems. This fact came to my attention because of a document found lying around in one of the drawers of my dad’s writing desk. My dad, who had died quite unexpectedly. It was like reminiscing: when I noticed that it was clear my dad was bringing back to life my grandmother’s habit of memorializing the most important family events, births, deaths, and etcetera, on the empty first pages of the family bible. Among these events, my great-grandmother didn’t seem too interested in the life part. My dad was working to fill in this gap, to put the normal days of our ancestors, who had lived off the land, to paper in the way that he had heard it from his own parents and grandparents.

One of my ancestral grandfathers, who lived off that land, knew every nook and cranny of the Püspöklel marshlands, how to walk through it on secret paths, where you could easily get through with a flat-boat, where you could find pangio (an eel-like fish), crucian carp, the common rudd, or crayfish, and where the herons, lapwings, great egrets and teals lay their eggs.

This wet, muddy country was his home and his subsistence. He lived there with his wife in a little shack on a piece of ground that rose out of the marshes, and his children were born there as well: they knew how to use a pole and raft before they knew how to walk. This grandfather of mine didn’t know how to swim, despite the fact that he spent his whole life on the water. In his mind, swimming was for fishes and frogs. Why should a person get himself all wet, when, as a result of his craft, he could move and work in the marsh in such a way that not a drop of water will touch either his clothes or his sandals. Such a thing should not happen to one who lives off the land, just as it didn’t happen to the people who moved on the water as their trade: the fishermen, and those who had mastered raft or canoe. If they could travel on the water, what did they need to get in it for?

As it turned out, one of his sons, it could have even been my own dear grandfather, broke away from this tradition when, on a humid, moonlit night in the early summer, he disappeared from the little island where he had come into the world, still only a toddler. His father searched for him, or at least a sign of him, for weeks, then finally gave up and decided to give him a funeral. The child’s mother, who until then had been vigilantly waiting, begin singing ancient pagan death songs every night, she would scream them out in an incomprehensible language, surrounded by the ring of her remaining children, her face turned towards the moon, which disappeared behind clouds and then, in the meantime, reappeared. She mourned her child, who had broken the unwritten rule, and dared to go beyond the borders he had been allowed. She brought it up as an example, to learn from, for the boy’s siblings, that’s what happens when one strays away from the protection of the shack: the lüdérc will take you (her lüdérc is a mythological Hungarian demon which takes several different forms). And then, some while later, towards the end of that summer and once again on a full moon, a kind of barking voice shattered the quiet of the night, soon after, the boy they had thought to be lost suddenly appeared at the shack’s door, his hair all matted, his clothes soaking wet. The family was frightened by him, they barely recognized him, as he had grown, and he was stronger, and his body was covered with moss, algae and leeches. He seemed to have half-forgotten the language of humans. Once the family got over their shock, they led him to the fire to dry out, and he was surrounded by his mom, dad, and those siblings who had woken up. He patiently allowed his mother to clean off the water plants and leeches from his body, to put clothes on him, and to stuff food into his mouth.

They asked him many questions, but he barely spoke, he seemed to prefer to point or to make a humming noise; he seemed anxious and he repeated that strange barking voice. Then he quickly jumped up and ran out of the shack, continuing the shrill barking, and then, he received a barking reply. At the edge of the reeds, shining in the moonlight, an otter lifted its neck out of the water, its head swaying slightly from side to side. The boy waved goodbye to the family in what seemed a very final way, and then ran towards the otter and with a splash they both disappeared beneath the dark water.

The next day, however, he and his otter friend showed up again, this time during the daytime hours, and, as winter crept closer, his visits became ever more frequent. The otter itself gradually became tamer; it daringly came closer, and then even entered the shack, it awkwardly stumbled around the shack like a seal, curiously looking at, where necessary opening, and of course sniffing at, every tiny corner of the shack, while its partner talked with his parents and siblings, re-learning the human language.

Day by day he spoke with more fluency; pieces of the story behind the adversities of his last months slowly, but continuously, crystallized into a picture. Overpowered by his own curiosity, he had left the little island, which had meant home and safety for him until then, and ventured into the unknown on a moonlit night, softly rocking back and forth in his water gourd canoe, using his two little hands as oars. A light wind pushed him far into the marsh; distorted shadows in the moonlight filled him with fear and affected his sense of time and his feeling of where he was. Shivering from fear, exhaustion, and the cold, he bumped into some kind of a spongy surface and climbed up on it, as it seemed more solid than his little boat, and he promptly fell into a deep sleep.

When the first rays of morning sun glistened on the water, he discovered that he was in an otter farm. He had lived there ever since, learning to swim under water and to catch fish with his bare hands. He had survived off of raw fish, grasses, wild fruit, honey-sweet thatch sugar and eggs.

The little fugitive spent the winter at home. The waters of the marsh were too cold for him in the winter. He went out with his dad to cut holes in the ice and to harvest reeds for thatch. They were accompanied on their walks by an entire family of otters, often with some of them carrying a fish in their mouths (which was meant as a present for the family), and they often watched their human friends with their intelligent, mud-colored eyes.

The next spring, as the weather grew warmer, the aging survivalist father managed to squeeze a direct profit from his rebellious son’s new underwater swimming ability. The clever man left his fishing hooks in their box and just sat and waited as his son, and his son’s web-footed friends, brought up new plunder (normally of fish) after every dive. In the meantime, the rest of his kids got caught up in the game, and learned the art of underwater swimming, and every evening they would turn up at the shack, soaked through, with leeches on their skin, and would sit to warm up at their mom’s fire where the cooking cauldron bubbled. At first, their mom worried a lot. They would tell the stories of their day’s adventures, while their mother picked off the leeches, one by one, and collected them into a ceramic jar, so that she could sell them, together with fish and pangio, at the weekly market in the nearby village and city. This lady who, while staying at home during the day and guarding the family hearth, weaved all kinds of sellable wares from cattail, sedge, thatch and small weeping willow branches, also to sell at the weekly market.

It was an old tradition, during the time when people lived off the land, to offer sanctuary for those fleeing war and strife, even from the Turkish and Labanc conflicts*. Over the years, in hard times, the marsh provided a home for quite a few poor soldiers who were hiding out, and it became a graveyard for just as many, or more, enemy soldiers. At the time this story happened, there was also some kind of big ruckus going on in the outside world, which of course meant the world outside the marsh, because the sounds of battle could be heard even here. The old survivalist had managed to successfully lead several squads of Austrian and Cossack soldiers into what the locals called the swaying marsh, which referred to an area of boggy quagmires where one could easily sink into the ground and disappear with a single misstep. And then, as so many times before, the people looking for safety and sanctuary began showing up, eventually there were too many of them to sleep on the little island where the family’s shack was located. One day they brought the Great Poet** with them. Rumor had it that he had hidden in a barrel and, in order to escape, had floated down the Maros River in it. He had suffered from blast injury and was consequently fighting against serious memory loss, but the tranquility and fresh air of the marsh performed its healing, his headaches stopped, and his memory began to return.

They first asked him questions about his adventurous years as a wandering actor, and then, by the light of the campfire, he recited the poems he had written until that point. The environment of the marsh had a gentling effect on him, and didn’t bring the ugly part of life to his mind. He responded naturally