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burnt, traced, scatched then dripped, moistened then dripped, painted then scratched,

Die hellen Tage (Bright Day’s) by Zsuzsa Bánk

The Bright Days of Zsusza Bánk, tells the story of three children who find their way in life. “The adolescents gradually learn that all idylls are fragile, that dark shadows may be present even if we can’t see them, […]” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) The provisional and ephemeral little house of the Hungarian artist family is a guiding theme in the book and stands symbolic for the characters. The Mother Evi is as oblique, unconventional and detail-loving as the house she lives in.The selected section from the very beginning of book supports this impression. The description focusses on the unusual parts, marks out that it is unorganized, arbitrary but also bright and pending. Contrasted with German bureaucratisation, an image of freedom is emphasised. As the children are growing up, their look on this home is also changing. What initially seems to be paradisiacal, is later reflected. The author confronts those two perceptions in the section.

Aja lived with her mother in a house that wasn’t a real house, just a little cottage held together by boards and wires, a shack to which new parts would be screwed whenever there wasn’t enough room, when it got too tight even for the few pieces of furniture Aja’s mother owned, the boxes and crates that she stacked up, and the shoe boxes she collected for the many letters she kept. Wires and duct tape ran like spider webs through the two small rooms, the tiny kitchen, and narrow hallway, for the lamps that were on even in the daytime when the sun was shining and light penetrated every nook and cranny of the house. Back then I knew nothing about houses, nothing about what they should be, what they should look like, and where they should stand or, that they needed to have a street and house number, and that it wasn’t enough to say it’s on the other side of Kirchblüt where the fields begin and the gravel paths intersect, not far from the signalman’s little house, and it looks as if it were floating. I didn’t know that you had to get permission to do hammering and to keep chickens; that there was someone who was in charge of deciding where and what Aja’s home should be. And I had no idea of the mornings Aja’s mother spent in the corridors of government offices. I thought Aja’s house was a house that had everything it needed, even though it had no lock on the door, which is why Aja never took along a key. Aja’s mother left the crooked garden gate as well as the door to the house unlocked. When someone asked her whether she wasn’t afraid of burglars, robbers, and thieves, it made her laugh in that way she had, just a little too late, a little too softly as if she’d just now had to think of something that would never otherwise have occurred to her. What is there, she’d say, that they could possibly take from us?

Sometimes Aja’s mother would fall asleep before finishing a sentence, before expressing a thought; and at night, when Aja woke up and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, her mother would be sitting next to the circle of light cast by the lamp as if waiting for morning. In any case that’s what Aja would tell me. Her mother had scratches on her hands, green stains on her knees and legs, and she looked funny with all the dirty band-aids and bandages made of rags. Peeling onions, she’d often cut herself with a knife that she would hang on a hook high up so that Aja couldn’t reach it. She’d bang her head on cupboards, get tangled up in electric wires and drag stuff along that would then break, and she’d put those fragments away in a pail together with other shards and splinters that could no longer be mended. She walked through her house, her garden, and through all the streets of our little town as if there was nothing in her way, no obstacles, as if everything had to get out of her way and not the other way around. And it was as if she couldn’t waste a thought on it, as if her thoughts were too precious, as if she had too few and had to be frugal with them.

[translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo]

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