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Icy roads froze in mud, puddles froze. Only the rumor of a nearby source is heard, otherwise the silence is dense and deep, but this silence is also almost absorbed in the thick fog. In the mornings from Monday to Friday, hardly anyone walks through the valley. I stop at the bridge over the stream, looking at the water.
The bridge was built in 1939, the year my father was born. This match is probably not important, however, many times I remember my father while crossing this bridge. He died two years ago, in his last months he is no longer known, like the rest of the family. But that’s not safe either. The only certain thing is that he did not speak, did not answer questions, looked at himself with an expressionless face. Sometimes i notice that
I use his words, or I suddenly remember the expressions I last heard from him as a child.
As if the language was remembering for me, as if something of its being had been locked in these words. One of those ancient words triggers an avalanche of images thought to be forgotten. But it is not about concrete images, but about impressions, about condensations of the atmosphere of a scene or a scene. Like what remains of a person after reading a book. The plot, the characters, the dialogues slowly dissolve and disappear, only the “air” of everything lives on in me, indefinitely.
When I dropped the urn containing his ashes into the Danube from the ship’s stairs, I remembered when
ONLY TALKED THAT AN OLD NEW YEAR’S EVE WAKE UP IN THE ICE OF THE FROZEN DANUBE
He didn’t know how he got mixed up in the ice, he woke up with the sun on his face, and around him the snow-covered ice armor moved with subtle creaks. He had a lot of these stories, but he didn’t talk much about them, behind the few stories he told, it seemed like a watermark on how much he listened to. When the urn was washed away, my father was much further away than at any other time in his life. As if dissolved in the elemental tempo of the river, it became part of his being, surrounded by an inseparable structure of things. However, this final impersonality in a strange way showed more clearly than anyone who he was. The Danube was close to him his entire life, closer than most of the people he had anything to do with. I have recognized this mysterious, at first glance cold and indifferent tone of Alka in me countless times. The light and movement of the river, the smell, the glare of space on the water easily captivates a kind of human type. Anyone prone to melancholy knows himself in the river anyway, living in his soul as a great symbol of vanity and of time entering the unknown.
THE WATER TAKES THE PHOTOS WITH IT, IT DOES NOT KEEP ANYTHING, IT ALSO REMOVES IMMEDIATELY THE FOOTPRINT OF THE FLOATING BODY, BUT IT SEEMS TO KNOW AND REMEMBER ME.
Like he knew me before I was born. He had seen my father many times on the shore while looking at the water, his gaze then turned inward, not into the mists of the outside world. It was at that moment that he identified more with himself, in that silent inner gaze, which always made me feel as if I did not even see a man, but a tree or a stone. He had the most intimate relationship with this non-human alienation in the eight decades of his life. The bridge, built in the year of its birth, is at the gate of the valley. This is where the forest begins, which, with a slight exaggeration, reaches the border with Slovakia, which stretches for about fifty kilometers.
I go into the trees. The smell of smoke in the air comes from the other side of the valley, where the lonely old man lives in a small wooden house. He is one of the permanent inhabitants of this valley, besides him there is another lonely man, a little younger than him, who lives here.
Two lonely men, a few hundred yards apart in the dimly lit valley’s beech forest.
They both fight hard in their own way so that nature doesn’t swallow them up permanently. Many people want to live in a forest, to live a life “close to nature”, as they say. Nowadays, more and more people have a great this of such wishes. In the last decade since we have lived here, I myself have seen an incessant influx of migrants. Most of these engines apparently don’t know where they come from. Impressive houses are being built, the trees are constantly shrinking, causing the area to slowly turn into a barren garden city. Automobile traffic has multiplied. These people are accomplishing the same thing here because they wanted to escape. This is something that Béla Hamvas also writes about in Kierkegaard’s essay in Sicily. The philosopher leaves his moldy attic in vain, and in vain travels to the sea, taking there with him. The beach, full of spicy aromas with the idyllic little town, is no different from the horrible attic room, because whoever looks at it all struggles with the same dark and desperate thoughts. Also in this landscape, countless Kierkegaards are working feverishly to build here a faithful replica of their once miserable attic room. In vain is the terrace, in vain is the magnificent panorama, in vain is the pool and garden barbecue, these newly erected fortifications are actually creaky wooden stairs that lead to the old, familiar and familiar musty penthouses. We must eradicate the original nature so that the lukewarm idyll of our blissful ignorance can survive as long as possible.
The old image of the countryside will gradually become a moneylender, giving way to a scene that more closely resembles the backstage of a bad television series.
This valley, entered by crossing the bridge, remains largely original. In its almost constant silence and twilight, internal sounds are greatly amplified. The two men who live here could tell a lot about these sounds. One of them, who had just warmed up in the cabin, chose a way to defend himself that would go crazy. It becomes a person commonly known as a scarab, dagger, or battered. A man in his seventies talking about himself, meeting aliens, hanging a pocket radio around his neck, walking around in a camouflage suit. I used to have a small mixed dog. While he was, he spoke to him. Since he died, he has been debating with his radio and the space creatures that regularly visit him. Sometimes they unload dog food or a stinky chicken to see if they eat it. But they never ask for it, they just look at it with those almond-shaped black eyes. He once recounted such an encounter in detail.
The aliens arrive in the middle of the night, alarmed by the bright light flooding the single room of the chalet. The spaceship hovers over the beeches, and the creatures stand at the window and look at it.
They never speak, they don’t do anything, they just look out the window. However, for some reason, you think they are coming because they are hungry. Put the dry food and chicken thighs in the dog bowl well in advance. Of course, they don’t ask for it and after a while they disappear. However, the man goes to buy them every week at the nearby town market, in case they ever turn to the delicacies.
The other, the youngest, who lives a little higher, near a slowly fading spring, hid himself in literature, philosophy and alcohol. He has been perfecting his short stories for decades, but he’s never finished with them. Before we were fine, we talked a lot, but once he reprimanded me for something, and since then he has not spoken to me, he does not even accept my greetings. Frankly I have a deep understanding of bothbecause everything that this valley suggests is really hard to bear. Either you hide in the madness, in the books, in the vodka, or destroy this atmosphere. Anyone who comes here just to live here does not usually have this opportunity.
Tolerating loneliness is a task for the strongest, from which as few as possible will emerge victorious.
Maybe I’m lucky because I’m not alone, though obviously that’s not entirely true either. Because there is only loneliness in nature, the forest ignores us, lives its majestic life. These two men have long been dominated by valley hints, which are obviously not to be imagined as a junk horror movie in which the spirit of the forest terrorizes unfortunate hikers. These suggestions are in themselves neutral, not harmful or healing, but only bring to the surface everything that was already hidden in man. If what was hidden there is darkness, then that darkness is released. If something shiny is hidden inside, it will also be tested first. If you endure it, it is as if you are constantly living under a blessing. This is the weirdest version, it goes without saying.
We slowly left the valley. My dog that I brought with me immediately feels better in the field. A mix of sheepdogs, the actual terrain escarpment, the free and open areas. It is an elemental pleasure for him to lose his brakes, perhaps driving an invisible flock of sheep right now. Light shines through the ever-finer nebulae. They are calling the nearby town. My phone beeps all the time, here is signal strength again. A light blue mouth mask in the middle of the dirt road, frozen in a puddle. It was as if a face was trying to get out from under the ice.
(Cover Image: Our Image Illustration! Photo: Tim Graham / Getty Images Hungary)
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