annashay 
Janos picks up his friend’s aunt and remembers her love of Hungarian poet Petofi.
| Image generated with OpenAI |
A text message arrived one morning from my friend. His aunt was arriving from the countryside that morning for her annual physical. She was planning to stay at the apartment of her two oldest friends, two spinster sisters, but the friends were out, just then, at a cherry-picking festival. Would I be so kind to collect his aunt at the train station and usher her to the apartment until the sisters arrived home later that day? The key would be under the mat. I checked my schedule, and, finding no other occupations in my morning, I sent him back a short response asking for the arrival time of his aunt’s train.
I boarded the tram for the station, and, as the car slowly moved through the streets, I tried to remember what I knew of my friend’s aunt. I met her when my friend and I were in high school together, when she still lived here in the city. She had lived in a little neighborhood in the city’s south, far from the bustle of the more touristed areas. She worked for a district-planners office until her retirement, and never rose above the ranks of secretary. My friend told me this was all according to her desire. After witnessing the country’s changes year by year, she had no desire to draw unnecessary attention to herself. Many people of her generation felt like this. One of the most common bits of colloquial advice during those earlier years was, “A protruding nail gets beaten down.”
When was the last time his aunt had visited the capital? I couldn’t recall. I fished forth my phone and texted my friend, asking him if there was any activity his aunt might enjoy in the city. It seemed a shame, I thought, that she should sit boarded up in the old apartment waiting for her sister friends. It was just as the tram arrived at the train station that my friend’s reply arrived. He reminded me that she liked Petofi. I searched my thoughts and then recalled that the wing in the humanities building at the university where I worked had recently installed a poets section. It was meant to be a rotating exhibit, and Petofi had been the first one chosen.
I pulled up a map on my phone and saw that, with a few minor changes to our commute, it would be possible to pass by the university on our way to the sisters’ apartment. When I entered the large vault of the Western Station, I scanned the arrival schedule, and saw that her train was a bit behind schedule. The announcer’s voice came through the loudspeaker informing me that the train had been delayed due to sheep on the tracks.
I sat down on a bench to wait. As I sat, I scolded my faulty memory. Of course she liked Petofi. I knew that. But when did I learn it? I sat and tried to remember the first time I had met my friend’s aunt. It was just after his move to the city from the same country town where his entire family lived. He was accepted to a preparatory high school, a first for anyone from his family, and the only person they knew who already lived in the city was his aunt, for she was already working in her government job. I met him on the first day of classes and we became fast friends, falling into the easy rhythms that exist between high school chums. One day after school, in invited me back to the small apartment where he and his aunt lived.
She made us dinner that night, something I didn’t appreciate fully at the time. Thinking back on it, it was remarkable now to imagine her spending her whole day at her government job and then summoning the energy to still go to the market and cook up the soup she gave us that evening. She asked us what we were learning in our classes. When we mentioned our poetry class she sat back in her chair and said nothing for a moment.
“Is everything alright?” my friend asked her.
She nodded, standing to cross the room, and, when she returned, she held a well-thumbed copy of Petofi’s poetry. She passed it to us, and we leafed through the yellow pages. She had written on the sides of some poems. Her written style careful and precise, fitting for someone who would go on to an office job for the entirety of their life. Most of what she wrote seemed to be dates and places, things like “April 5, 1959, park bench” and “December 22, 1962, Danube bank.” We asked her what they meant.
“It was when I read them,” she said with sheepishness in her voice. It was as though we had stumbled upon her in some illicit moment, some tryst from which she was embarrassed to have been caught.
One of the pieces had several dates and places. When we pressed her on that one, she confessed it to be her favorite. As I sat in the station, I tried to remember which poem it was, but my memory failed me. The train announcement came finally, and I stood and walked to the platform. Other passengers streamed past me, office workers bound for the city center and merchants heading for the markets. Finally, the platform was almost empty. She was the last one to descend, coming from the last car, walking slowly. A kindly porter was next to her, for she was bearing down on a cane and the porter carried her only bag.
When she was finally close enough, I was surprised to notice how she had aged. She had always seemed old, as anyone above a certain does when one is young, but now it was decidedly clear what age had done to her. Her hair was completely grey, what of it I could see, at least, as she wore a black kerchief which was knotted under her thin chin. The rest of her clothes were also completely black. When she drew to within a few meters of me, she looked up, and her face curled into a smile.
“Oh, Janos!” she said. I stepped forward, taking her small hand and kissing it. I thanked the porter, pressing a few bills into his hand, and then took her bag, while listening to her talk about her train journey. We managed the walk to the station exit with little difficulty, and I had soon flagged down a taxi. Once in the car, I asked her instead about her retirement. She didn’t seem capable of stringing together her memories into much of a coherent narrative. She went back and forth through a number of subjects. She mentioned exchanges with neighbors. She had chickens in the yard. One was ailing. Feed was expensive. The weather was wet just then in the countryside. I nodded from time to time, but mostly allowed the lightness of her words wash over me.
As she talked, another memory surfaced for me. During our senior year, and many of us were pressing for various university options. My friend and spent many afternoons after school at his apartment, going over our sums together and choosing which dates to review. His aunt came into the bedroom every hour or so with fresh plates of biscuits and to refill the tea pot. The hour grew late, and I was putting on my boots in the entryway, when I heard my friend speaking to his aunt from the other room.
“I’ll fail, I think,” he said. “Then what will father say?” I couldn’t make out her response, only the sentiment. She spoke soft words and many of them, as if she meant to overwhelm my friend’s despair with a torrent of good thoughts. I looked at this same woman, older now, sitting next to me in the car and wondered how many others like her had given similar words of encouragement to the young over the years. Our generation silently and unknowingly were blessed by her generation’s years of work and countless pots of soup and many late night prayers.
The taxi pulled up to the university building. I paid the driver and helped her out of the car. She looked up at the new structure. She asked why we were here. I smiled, simply telling her that there was a surprise for her before we met up with her sister friends. We entered the building, and, while I summoned the elevator, she stood in the center of the lobby, a bent, black figure from another era. The elevator took us to the poets section, and, when we stepped out, I pointed to the brief hanging next to the entrance. Her eyes grew large when she read Petofi’s name.
“What is this?” she asked.
I told her about the university’s plan to rotate the exhibit through different poets. “And they started with your favorite,” I said, as a tease. “Perhaps they knew you were coming?”
“Anyone could come here?” she asked, shaking her head. She crept through the front doors. The exhibit was arranged in chronological order, but as anyone who knew Petofi could guess, there was not much of a timeline, he having died so young. There were pictures of his home on the Alfold prairie with snatches of the pastural and situational poems. Black and white photographs of him and his fellow literary revolutionaries bracketed other historical notes. A map showed the key locations of the 1848 Revolution.
She held her cane in her hand, but didn’t use it much. Her steps were slow. As she read the timelines she kept nodding. I stepped behind her as she walked. At one point her back began to shake. I realized she was crying. I stepped next to her, offering a handkerchief. She shook her head brought out one of her own, wadded and wrinkled. I looked up and saw what she had been looking at. It was a poem, one of Petofi’s revolutionary observations, entitled “Prophecy”; an imagining of his own premature death.
At once the years flew away, and I was back at my friend’s side in his aunt’s apartment, leafing through her treasured Petofi collection. Yes. This was her favorite, the one with all the dates and locations. I read some of the words: “You said, mother, that a heavenly hand paints our dreams as the eyes of our soul look to the future.”
I looked back at her and wondered what else I didn’t and couldn’t know.
An hour later we stood at the elevator, waiting for it to arrive. She couldn’t stop shaking her head.
“I don’t want to go,” she said, and perhaps I understood why.
