János Lackfi

Homo
Hungaricus

(Magyar Man)

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János Lackfi was born in 1971, he is a poet, writer and literary translator well known and liked in Hungary. He lives in Zsámbék, near Budapest with his wife and six children.

© 2013 Lackfi János
© 2013 P. Szathmáry István
Translation © 2013 Ralph Berkin

Translation:
Ralph Berkin

Illustrations:
István P. Szathmáry

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of Helikon Publishers.

www.helikon.hu

Published by Helikon Publishers
Edited by Ágnes Osztovits
Proofreading by Ágnes Merényi
First published in 2013

ISBN 978 963 620 245 3

E-book version:
eKönyv Magyarország Kft.
www.ekonyv.hu
E-book layout by Ambrose Montanus

HALF EMPTY

Magyar man gets up of a morn, feels like filth and his back is giving him hell. He sits up in bed and switches the radio on. The price of petrol has gone up again, an old lady has been mugged in broad daylight, the Municipal Transport Company is on the brink of bankruptcy, the opposition are on the streets demonstrating against the current government and the extremists are demonstrating against the demonstrating opposition. Bitter saliva collects in the mouth of Magyar man but he can’t spit on the floor so he swallows the stuff and begins to think his miserable thoughts. What kind of country is this after all? It’s got no oil and its mineral riches are poor… It’s sold off all its best land to bloody foreigners… It’s got no sea or mountain peaks and its capital is like an aggressive sponge sucking all the life out of the pathetic provinces… Its food is greasy, its citizens drink a chemical cocktail instead of fine wine… Its beautiful music has Roma roots and yet its youth still twitch to a techno tempo while most of its internationally recognised scientists are of Jewish origin and variously forced to seek solace elsewhere… Its national sport is soccer that is bad beyond words and yet its star strikers still earn ten times more than its world-class water polo players…

Magyar man eventually reaches the conclusion that it is a source of shame to belong to this nation that has not had an understanding of how to make a decent living since records began, learnt all it knows about farming from the straight-laced Slavs, all it knows about industry from the upright Germans and the glory of gardening from diligent Serbs. And that was only when a cultured Europe finally forced it to drop its bloody sword with which it had held the civilised Christian world in terror for what seemed like an age. “Homo” needs no explaining but “hungaricus” comes from those monstrous Huns who marauded their way half around the world leaving burning buildings and massacred masses in their wake. Magyar man of myth spent the longest time wandering to and fro in Asia before trundling into the Carpathian Basin with ransacked riches, a wheelbarrow of Turkish words, a herd of horses, a bunch of bows and arrows and in desperate need to rest a while. Suitably refreshed, he took up arms for whoever paid the highest price and his infamous ferocity led the nations of Mediaeval Europe to mutter a quiet prayer that went something like this: “Lord, save us from the arrows of Magyar marksmen!”

The first king of the Magyars was Saint Stephen who spread Christianity rather thickly with a sharpened knife throughout his kingdom and had a nonbeliever nephew cut into quarters and his entrails skewered on the gates of four separate cities across the land. An 18 warning sign was displayed by the side of the quartered remains to protect underage TV viewers. The government bureau, with a brief to maintain public hygiene, chose to ignore the risk of mass epidemic and instead recorded the number of complaints received about rotten carcass segments displayed beyond reach in open spaces but never opened the parchment envelopes. King Matthias, the nation’s favourite sovereign, sucked the fat from the bones of his loyal peasants and even came up with a cunning smoke tax so as not to limit state revenue to one man one house. He spent the money on reading matter and cannon fodder while his subjects remained illiterate but nonetheless opposed to war.

The Magyars were literally adored by their nation neighbours: the Turks for a hundred and fifty years and the Austrians for two hundred years before letting the Russians smother them with brotherly love for a further forty. Magyar man appeared inclined to rebel every one hundred years or so only for the oppressor of the day to stub out the revolt like a smouldering cigarette and find a soft-spined collaborator to build his regime around. Then came the period of independence following the political transition that proved to be full of personal disappointment, political sniping and yet more scuffles with the neighbours. Those who had once been friends were just as likely to spit on each other as shake hands. Magyar man likes nothing more than to feel good and sorry for himself and he gets terribly angry when he has that right robbed from him.

HALF FULL

Then Magyar man downs his coffee, the clouds disperse, the pain wanes in his back and he coughs up all the guff he had stuck in this throat. He suddenly recalls that his homeland is actually a country of wonder and anyone fortunate to live there has reason plenty to be proud. Its lovely landscape, rolling hills and strikingly symbolic endless plains are a constant inspiration to the nation’s poets who wax long and lyrical in a language entirely unintelligible to the rest of Europe and beyond! It might not have a sea to speak off but it has got world-famous curative waters and then there’s Europe’s largest lake that the locals modestly describe as “the Hungarian sea”. And there are all those picturesque ruins perched high on hills (Hungary’s Austrians pals blew all the castles up to quell constant rebellion!) and underground caverns dripping with stalactites instead of oil. The people are hospitable, the wines more than palatable and the food delectable though perhaps not instantly digestible. The football might be a touch off colour at the moment but any Hungarian worth his salt can still reel off the names of every player in the glorious “Golden Team” that kicked off in the World Cup final. All footie fans know the name of Puskas wherever they were been born in the world and Hungarian swimmers, canoeists, water polo players and fencers are all at the cutting edge of their chosen sport.

The history of the Magyar nation is somewhat stormy but its founding king, Saint Stephen, on passing with no heir, left the kingdom in the hands of the Blessed Virgin and his heavenly diplomacy appeared to pay off! Mediaeval sovereign masters managed to take their archer ancestors off horseback and got them planting fields. They said this made a nice change from the slash and burn of battle. (As it happens, Magyar man still picks up a title or two at horseback archery championships held in distant destinations from Asia to Africa…) The country successfully survived for centuries in strong Christian statehood and slap bang in the middle of Eastern Europe surrounded by the super powers of the period. One particularly accomplished Magyar man in military command managed to rebuff an invasion by the Ottomans that impressed the practising pontiff so much that he ordered bells to be rung at noon across the continent as a sign of thanks for this daring deed. King Matthias the Just, of whom legends speak, trained a punishing army and, like any true Renaissance ruler, also cobbled together a pretty impressive library. Magyar man of the time managed terribly well to fight off invaders like David with Goliath and held the massive Turkish armies at bay, so stopping them from trampling roughshod over the rest of Europe. Things got so upsetting under the Habsburgs and then the Soviets that the blister burst twice in relatively quick succession but failed to relieve the pain of penury. Then it all ended in an autumnal spring of 1956 when the world watched with a crocodile tear as feisty Hungarian fighters fell at the last post. And as far as the world was concerned, it had seen enough and no one as much as got up out of their seat.

Magyar folk music holds riches beyond compare collected for posterity by Kodály and Bartók with a long-playing record of inspiration and influence from its closest neighbours. This folksy flavour is still preserved in schools and continues to fill stadia with enthusiastic thousands. The country has given the world a staggering number of Nobel winners who may have been pushed by greater forces to leave their native land but still insisted on speaking that unfathomable language even in exile. Hungarian physicists at the core on the atomic programme in the United States clung on to their unusually accented alphabet back in old Los Alamos and chatted amongst themselves in their Magyar mother tongue much to the outrage of their foreign hosts who christened them “Martians”. The golden age of Hollywood motion pictures is also studded with Magyar stars both in front of and behind the camera.

Name any famous person you care to and it will soon turn out that he was in fact Hungarian or will be soon but just doesn’t know yet. Magyar man has also heard mention that his language is not actually related to Finnish as we were all told in the beginning, but is in fact traceable right back to Sanskrit that makes it the oldest on this planet. In fact, some say it comes from another planet and that, of course, is Mars. Magyar man blinks in his shaving mirror and tells his reflection that there’s a rumour Buddha and Jesus Christ had Hungarian blood but, shhh, that one’s still a secret!

HEALTH, WEALTH AND…

The residents of cities in Western Europe and especially in the north of the continent have become accustomed over the decades to living with no more than a door and a couple of walls between them and their closer neighbours and yet still knowing nothing about what they do for work, what they prefer for pleasure or how they see the world. “Stairwell gossip” is still a popular art form in Hungary, the home of Magyar man, and rambles on punctuated solely by the light clicking off and getting switched back on again. There is even a breed of old ladies who specialise in lurching unexpectedly out of the dusty shadows, grabbing the sleeve of whoever happens to be hurrying past and whipping out their latest X-ray or family photos, hoiking up their frocks and rolling down their stockings to display a recent injury as a result of a nasty tumble, reading a whole bundle of letters written by a son who moved to the States or waving utility bills and pension slips in protest at an uncaring world.

Should Magyar man happen, by some strange twist of fate, to work as a postman then he can never hope to see a shift pass without a cup of indescribable coffee, a dry slice of cake or a shot of brandy that could blister paint. There are even some specialised grannies who don’t actually smoke but keep a pack in the kitchen drawer with which to pamper their latest hostage.

One Magyar man is always careful about how he enquires as to the health of another because such questions rarely receive relevant answers and if they do, that’s even worse.

“How are you?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Just fine?”

“Actually, not fine.”

“Not fine?”

“I’ve just had an op for colon cancer, I’m taking a load of pills but none of them are doing any good, my surgery scar hurts like hell and it doesn’t want to heal, the doctor reckons I need to go back on chemo because he’s spotted secondaries, but at least that takes my mind off the fact that my new hip replacement cripples my every step and that I took a second mortgage to pay for it but couldn’t keep up with the payments so they repossessed and my wife walked out on me that led to a breakdown and I was judged unfit to see my kids, they got sick of me calling in sick at work all the time and kicked me out and, let’s face it, no one wants to employ a bloke of my age especially one who drinks to kill the pain of his mother’s recent death who died of a broken heart after watching her son suffer so much. But thanks for asking. How have you been keeping?”

“Oh, me? I’m fine. Great to catch up, have to dash!” Magyar man responds and makes a swift getaway because he fears that bad luck might be catching and if he spends too much time chatting with his unfortunate countryman, he’ll end up contracting something fatal.

CONTENTS

HALF EMPTY

HALF FULL

HEALTH, WEALTH AND…

EVERY LITTLE COUNTS

BANDIT BRAVURA

PEACETIME ANTICS

SPIRITS FOR STARTERS

ALCOHOL FOR THE ADVANCED

CHOLESTEROL AND CHICKEN HEADS

WHAT A LOT OF POPPYCOCK!

BEDCHAMBER AND CHANGING ROOM

DOUBLE STANDARDS

BUCKETS OF LOVE

DON’T STOP THE MUSIC

PEOPLE-FRIENDLY PLUTOCRACY

WIRED UP

NOT A STONE STANDING

BORN ON HORSEBACK

TAKEN TO THE GRAVE

INVENTIVE GENIUS

MAGYAR WORLD

LANGUAGE SKILLS – BASIC

LANGUAGE SKILLS – INTERMEDIATE

LANGUAGE SKILLS – ADVANCED

THE IDEAL SOCIETY

PETROL HEAD

SUICIDE IS PAINLESS

NOTHING BEATS A GOOD PIPE

PEOPLES AT A CROSSROADS

MAGYARS AT EVERY TURN

WHERE SHOULD THE BELGIANS STAND?

TIMES OF TRUST

LIFE AND SOUL

MAGYAR COWBOY

A SHEPHERD BOY AND HIS TRUSTY PENKNIFE

Forgalmazza:
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