Aloma: - or Memoirs of an Old Film Projectionist

By Tibor Hajdu

The author, a Hungarian-born neurologist, bases his novel on the true story of a projectionist. The projectionist experiences the rise and fall of small art movies that were doomed to extinction by the increasing popularity of multiplex and megaplex movies. The fate of movies parallels his own life, utterly interwoven with the cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504943758

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).

Book preview

AuthorHouse™ UK

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 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 06/09/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4374-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4375-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015908867

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Acknowledgment

I would like to express my gratitude to Csaba Kerekes and Márton Hajdu for the cover design.

Also, many thanks to Michael Burgess and Bettina Horváth - for making the translation from Hungarian possible.

The show had already been over for a while. He had already lowered the curtain, from the power room, by pressing a single button. Don’t let the screen get dusty. He just finished closing the emergency exits and was walking back between the rising rows of seats. He stopped at the highest point of the auditorium. The last row. The row for lovers. On the edge were the two fireman’s seats. From habit and superstition, he turned around to take a last glance around the room. Hey, what’s this? The curtain is moving. Maybe it’s the wind. Something is coming out from underneath it. A little blackness. A cat? These people are unbelievable! Once someone had tried to bring in a ferret. No. It’s someone’s foot. Who’s there? A man in a black suit climbs out from behind the curtain. Then another. And another. He is too old to get frightened. But this has never happened to him before. He is petrified. Laughter. Suddenly the voices and movements become familiar. But the contours are misty. And then the vision is gone. He touches his head. Was it a seizure? He shakes his hands and legs. I’m fine as a fiddle. Maybe I’m going crazy? He looks back one more time. The curtain is still moving. He staggers back to the lobby. The cinema is empty. The last customer, the cashier, and the snack-bar guy left a long time ago. He has no place to go. He clambers up the stairs, formerly the stairs of the box seats, to the power room. He had already reeled in the movies. He glances out the spy hole. The curtain is not moving anymore. One more button to push and the auditorium will be plunged into darkness. Doubt settled into him. He turned on the auditorium’s lights again. He looked out the spy hole. Nothing. Just empty rows of seats. Let’s leave the lights on a little. The doubt remained. He wasn’t wondering if there were thieves in the cinema. He was doubting himself and his own common sense. It’s like a bad movie, he thought. Now the laughter in the lobby could be heard. He walked out the open door of the projection room. Steps echoing, shambling, and laughter again from downstairs. He carefully looks down from the balcony. The same three figures again. One of them has a top hat on. He looks up and raises his hat. The other two, laughing and slapping their knees, are sitting in the lobby’s chairs. Now he recognizes all three of them.

Get back! he yells at them. You have no business here. The vision is gone again. He touches his head once more. I have to do something so I won’t go nutty. Now he steps into the dressing room, which opens right next to the power room. There’s a little mess here. He starts to rummage in a metal locker and takes out a spiral-bound notebook. He touches its hard, marble-patterned cover, turning in the direction of the stairs. As he goes down to the lobby, step by step, it’s like he’s going back in time. One step equals two or three years. The lobby is empty. The closed, curtained cashier’s window. A row of couches next to the wall. Posters on the wall. On the other side, the snack bar with the popcorn machine. He takes a seat on one of the couches. He opens the spiral-bound notebook. He scratches his head and sighs deeply.

*

June 19. How should I start? Like this.

The last time I did something like this was when I was a teenager: my first love asked me to write something in her book of memories. I immediately came up with a poem, like it was the most natural thing in the world. I remember it even now: Do not believe that your future will be nicer than today, nothing can replace the sweetness of youth’s dream sway. She asked who wrote the poem, and she was really surprised when I told her that it was me.

Really? You’re kidding! You’re going to be a poet, she said, or something like that. I was really happy about her words, then I got flustered, and I am sure my cheeks turned red. I was pretty shy when it came to women. But since then, more than half a century has passed, and I wrote only bills, receipts, and a letter or two. I’m not afraid of women anymore; I just like to keep my distance. If I ever considered an artistic profession, it wasn’t writing; it was film. At the beginning of my career, I flirted with the idea of becoming a cameraman. But that didn’t work out either. Instead I became a projectionist. Today I’m an old, lonely, homeless projectionist. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. But these are the facts. I don’t even have any artistic ambitions left. What I would like is an apartment and a little more security than my tiny pension so that I would not have to work at age seventy-four. My job, my joy and passion for decades, has become almost robotic for me. I guess a lot of other people feel this way too. Now I would be just fine without my job. I had to realize that my job is a profession, just like any other. But now I should start writing too, even if I am not really a man of words.

Silence and darkness cover the old cinema of the guild. Well, we have this. The first sentence. It’s bearable, if a little gloomy. Like a ballad from the poet Arany: In the dark woods of Radvanyi … But in this late hour, this building truly is gloomy, even if there are no corpses to be seen. Let’s see the next one: It’s been three months now since I moved here, to the only and last theatre that remained intact in the city: to my workplace. This sentence ended up a little too long, depending on how you look at it; I squeezed three sentences into one. Never mind. So much the better. This will work out. It’s midnight, and the show’s been over for a while now. And I finished everything I had to do after the film. I closed the exit doors and reeled in the movies. Gyula, the snack bar guy, is also gone. I accompanied him to the gate, we talked a little, and then I sat out on the bench in front of the cinema to cool down after the unbearable heat of the day. Then I got bored with that too. I walked back to the lobby, I clambered up to the power room, and suddenly I got confused about whether I had closed the exit doors. I walked back to the auditorium and, as it turned out, I had good reason to doubt myself. The doors were shut, but I had not locked them. Then that certain vision hit me two times. So I decided to keep myself busy with something. I looked for the notebook and pen I bought for writing days ago. I’ve been suffering from insomnia for years, but only here, in this environment, did I think to fill my empty, boring night hours with writing. Now that this building is not just my workplace but my apartment (if not my home), I started to realize that every corner, every stair, every nook, from the basement to the loft, reminds me of long-submerged memories. I had expected those memories never to emerge again, but they do. They appear unexpectedly, insidious slinking things, or in flashes, a feeling I associate with rainy afternoons (I liked rainy weather better even then), or when prompted by a laugh. A remembered film frame whips past. Sometimes these frames" are frightfully real, like the one I just mentioned. This experience is the effect of my common-law marriage with the cinema (if I think of it as her, and I do). It’s no wonder. I saw my first movie in this building. That one was followed by hundreds more, if not thousands. Here the wonder of the movies touched me, a magic wand. And here I started to understand the film business from the inside.

*

In the crowded auditorium, there was almost complete darkness. The little boy was sitting in his mother’s lap. All around them were people, moving, rowdy and munching. They smelled like cologne, sweat, manure, and smoke. Above the formless, squirming crowd, there was a trail of light, shaped like a cone, peeling, curling and vibrating. The light came from a little window from a corner of the room, like a ghost from a bottle—first just like a dot, but then it started getting wider. By the time it crossed to the other corner of the room, it covered the whole screen. That light came alive on the wall, on that screen. People, streets, oceans, and flowers started to grow out from it in a gaudy swirl. But the little boy was only watching the cone of light that pulsed above them, as it made its way out that secret little opening—whirling, swirling, and growing. Dust motes and flies and moths flew around within the light. He sometimes turned his head toward the screen, other times toward the projector window. And then he followed the light’s direction as if it had been the Milky Way. From time to time, his mother told him not to fidget so much. Then the movie ended, and the room became