The Redhead
Short Story
by Nikola Popović
Budapest, winter 2021
*
This morning it’s the Redhead at the wheel again. Buda
is biting cold in the morning, but it’s always warm on board the 149 bus. Scents
mix with words – terse morning utterances – coming from under misty eyeglasses
and masks.
She looks at everybody’s ticket, but it’s with a quick,
cursory glance, as if blowing a fly off her shoulder, with her eyes directly
back on the wheel and the windscreen-framed road. Between changing gears, she smooths
down her wavy hair.
The driver’s cab is full of stickers: there are sport
club logos, a calendar, and the timetable. As the bus pulls up, the buzz inside
subsides momentarily and a formal ‘Petőfi Rádió’ is heard from the loudspeakers.
The jingle repeats itself between the musical acts and
bus stops, immediately segueing into sonatas and string quartets. Her driving
is always to the beat of music.
I heard what people from Buda call her – Vöröshajú.
When you say it, it’s a real mouthful: sounding as lush as ginger hair, prominent
when in the written form, with marks and an accent at the tail like a pompom. And
so, a name is gleaned from out of the babble of a strange tongue, which you
listen to like a poem whose verses are incomprehensible, finding in it stillness
and flutter and fervour.
*
Budapest is no different: in this quarter called Rózsadomb, or Rose
Hill (a saddle-shaped bump amidst flat ground), a name precedes a
person, just as a story heralds an occurrence, with everything, both real and
unreal, eventually fusing with it.
No one knows where the district begins or ends. Its
metes and bounds drift like buoys in living memory. As for the boundaries and
names, those official, administrative, Budapest’s twenty-three districts are
marked with green boards and Roman numerals. But everybody living in this area,
with its magnificent prewar villas side by side with grey blocks of flats with
sandblasted balconies, will say they’re from Rózsadomb.
From Széll Kálmán Square, also called
Moscow Square by the district’s elderly, Rózsadomb bursts forth into hills,
pavilions and gardens, with vistas of the city opening up from a high,
especially as the canopies shed their leaves and the view is new and fresh. In
wintertime, the domes and roofs get sprinkled with a thin layer of snow, like
icing on gingerbread houses.
*
One does not hear much talk on a bus going up Rózsadomb.
Buda dwellers don’t enjoy the reputation of being chatty, but rather prefer keeping
a safe, kindly social distance. Yet, it’s human nature to spin a yarn even from
a smattering of threads, so people from Buda do tell their fair share of tales.
They speak quickly and with zeal, muttering a sporadic
curse, their freckly faces reddening – spells which are nonetheless brief, as
they abruptly grow quiet and wistful. Those who choose to eavesdrop will hear
in this silence, as much as in speech, reverberations of legends of captains journeying
to the Black Sea, of lovers bricked in the foundations of a castle, of a
treasure buried on Danube’s cursed river islands. Both the country and its yarns
are landlocked, the latter conflated with the stories one hears in squares and
streets, with the tales told at opera houses and bohemian bistros.
As the Redhead drives, she always listens to the radio
bearing the name of the poet of love-themed lyrics. Once she reaches the
terminus, she pops out of gear and cracks into a broad grin. She’s smiling
today as well, perhaps a bit too widely for Buda: – I’m not from Budapest. I
come from the south, from Szeged.
As she stands up, I can tell she’s slim and her
movements swift.
*
Those who call at Budapest ask what the local folk are
like, what wine is like. They have heard about the plains and the wind, and
about the kindly distance. It would be easier to start speaking in a strange
tongue in the Mediterranean, which has plenty of sunny days and words come out
uninhibited, effortlessly.
No nation is difficult or easy – they are all simply
different, singular, like this one. Wine is exactly as the soil and wind are, and
also as those who make it. As writers only know very well, a city is best
described through the lens of those looking at it while bidding farewell.
– We’re Europe’s fiercest nation – says Adam the taxi driver.
As always, he brings up horse riders, hostile tribes of the East, hot spices
and cauldron fires.
– Hungarians are as gloomy as gloomy gets – says Mátyás the
barman. – You can blame it on the misty Pannonian Plain and the warm, steamy
waters gurgling underground, messing with our heads and disturbing our sleep. Where
we build our homes, the plumb bob never swings to a stop.
It’s the Redhead driving bus no. 149, a big blue wriggling
down Fillér Street to the market square – Rózsadomb’s agora, a veritable hive. That’s
where the local Buda vernacular mixes with the speech of strangers making a
port call here, whether a short or a long one, says Mátyás the bartender.
*
A young man and woman have stopped in front of a
beer house owned by Székely Hungarians, from Transilvania, whose cuisine
is Hungarian through and through, yet also unique, distinctive, like all food cooked
along the border. The two are from Sicily, dark-skinned and of small stature, so
the yellow plastic bags with smoked cheese and spicy Hungarian minced pork sausages
seem even bigger. Lots of colours on both of them, red scarves flying in the
wind. They enquire about restaurants and streets.
They flew in from Palermo and will be flying back the
same evening. They have walked and seen a lot; they have had both sweet and
savoury food, too much of it, spicing it all up with paprika, which is hot and only
whets one’s appetite. Down there, on Sicily, it’s orange harvesting time. Light
salads are the staple, as eaten with almonds and pistachios and served on green
agave leaves.
The menu board in front of the Székely beerhouse reads
‘rabbit goulash’. She’d like to try it, but he feels sorry for the rabbit, so
they move on, across the square, heading for the metro. I look at those two Palermitani,
him speeding her up as she stops before the old castle-like building of the Buda
Post Office.
At the square, a celebration is underway: an orchestra
playing Bartók,
a piano concerto, the same the Redhead listens to when driving. Just now, it’s cadences
progressing vivaciously on the piano, with strings catching up in a cascade, the
flutes, an oboe. There are pennants and confetti everywhere, as well as baloons
and bouquets; yet, in the gathering dusk, the square is sure to quieten to a silent
rapsody.
*
I can tell the faces of the district-dwellers, coalesced
into their surroundings like creepers growing into the walls they climb up. Some
are businesspeople, but there are also those sleeping rough.
At all times one can see a busker, a Romani, playing a
guitar with a cutaway on the refuge island in front of the square. He plays
like Django, fusing jazz with Gypsy tunes; there’s a story about him later in
the book. A Hungarian man in a national costume sings not far from the guitarist;
his singing is dull, lacking in eagerness, in a way flat, like the plains, yet
melding with Django’s ear-tingling chords.
Day and night, pubs around the market serve furmint,
fresh fruit-flavoured wine. They say one can eavesdrop all they like, but there
are no big stories to be heard – well, there just might be some, since all the
world’s in the pupil of one’s eye. Both the district and the street move to a
steady rhythm; still, the next day is always exceptional and unique.
She – the Redhead – drives the blue 149 bus. With a freckled
face, she steers her vehicle following silence and sounds, her eyes and speech faster,
because she’s a southerner, Szeged-born.
*
Later, I spot her at the market, in front of a stand with
herbs. She’s tall and pretty, with smaragdine eyes, and now that she’s off the
bus I can also see her smile and her pearl-like teeth.
One can find only very few herbs at this time of year.
There’s no coriander or basil or other common herbs – gentle leaves soon get
frost-nipped. Not even tarragon, the little dragon, has more resilience, despite
its mighty name. Wet, slippery leaves and horse chestnuts have replaced the
sweltering summer and the sticky hot asphalt under one’s feet. In parks,
children kick little tennis-like green balls fallen off the trees whose name is
known to only very few people.
The Redhead recognises me, and this is the first time
I’ve seen her in something other than a bus driver’s shirt with epaulettes. While
speaking, she switches between English and Hungarian. She shows me and the
vendor – another southerner, only from Csongrád – photos from a parachuting
championship.
Parachuting is her hobby and passion, she says; she’s done
the training and taken several jumps. She’d jump more often if only it did not
cost so much.
– Is it scary, jumping with a parachute? – I ask.
There were people in the skydiving course who did the
training and even jumped with the instructor, but when the time came for them
to do it on their one, they got cold feet. She got scared the first time, she
says, but later she surrendered to the air and gravity. Still, one needs strong
arms to skydive and for soft landing.
Which is why she works out. She shows us resistance
bands; that’s how she makes her tendons and joints stronger. I ask her about
the radio connection with the plane while she’s diving, and what happens if one
gets dizzy and passes out during the fall.
– They land anyway – she responds. – In case you
faint, you’ll be brought back by the air itself real quick, and if the main chute
jams, there’s always the reserve one.
– What if the reserve
parachute fails too?
– Well, then
there’s nothing you can do but kiss the ground – says the Redhead, her tone
merry and her smile jovial and wholesome, as she pays for the coriander wrapped
in plastic, continuing to speak about death as if chute jumps were a game.
*
In every new city a traveller’s experiences result in
transformation, memories are infused with new images, and although one cannot
speak the language and does not know the street names, the road leads on. Here
in Budapest, all roads cross the river, over eight bridges, whose names are
easily committed to memory, just as their order is not. Thus, on the trams and
buses sliding from Buda to Pest one hears sporadic words coming from wistful Hungarians,
reticent, their eyes lowered.
Tales abound of Hungarian ancestry, of migrations and
the Gate of All Nations. Where do we come from – is it the Baltics or the
Vistula – where is the native land? And where are they from – do they go back
to Atilla’s Huns or the Finnish warriors of the north – what’s the share of
each of these kinds of blood in their veins?
Ancient stories tell about the Hungarian proto-face, but
one does not see it – there are people native to Budapest all around, as well
as those others, whom life has brought to the city. Mátyás the barman, who looks
like a count from a tale, and whose cocktail skills and speech are equally measured;
the Indian who goes by the name Abishak, a photographer, who is only starting
to get a feel of the new city, the same way one dreams up the curves under a
sari, while he’s learning how to drive European style; finally, there’s her, the
Redhead, slim and limber, who steers bus no. 149 to the rhythm of music and touches
down softly after a skydive, as if getting into a hot bath.
A new city will treat everybody differently. To some,
it will cut the cards of business deals and encounters; their sleep will not be
disturbed by the groundwater that keeps plumb bobs swinging. Their rides will
be as easy as the Redhead landing gently after her half-dome has inflated with
air, as she’s carried leisurely by her will and the wind, Earth’s gravity. Still
others are dealt muddle and sleepless nights by the very same place, be it a
townlet or a metropolis; to them, everything’s difficult, the water, the people
and the wine alike.
As for the tale, it’s the author himself, his reflection
in the water. He drifts into melancholy and may just as well get fretful and
whiny, but the nostalgia map is repeatedly overwritten with novel experiences
and sounds, with new landscapes and conversations. Stories do not journey through
one’s dormant soul – they run along inscrutable paths of life.
From Buda, northbound roads lead to Slovakia, those westbound
to the Alps and the Mediterranean, and there are also those following the
Danube eastwards, to the Black Sea; on a map, all this is no bigger than an
inch. The road southbound goes to Szeged, the Redhead’s hometown, straight and
empty, with common kestrels and other field birds commonly perching on the
fence along the highway.
From Rózsadomb one has an unimpeded view of the entire
city, of shadows of light and darkness, bridges, and the Parliament building,
which looks like a royal palace. It’s wintertime, so there are also fireworks –
sparks and supernovas in plain sight in the sky, with everybody looking on, including
those who don’t know what’s being celebrated.
Translated from the Serbian original by Svetlana Mitić
Nikola Popović (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
1979) is an Italian literature researcher and lecturer of Italian language at
the Music Department of the Faculty of Philology and Arts (Kragujevac, Serbia).
He has published Serbian translations of Ettore Masina, Simona Vinci, Valeria
Parrella and other authors, as well as numerous essays on the contemporary
Italian prose in Serbia and in Italy. He has authored essays in the fields of
film, theater and literature, as well as fiction stories inspired by his trips
to Lebanon, Ghana, Congo and other countries.
He has published the following books: Stories from
Lebanon (Serbian: Priče iz Libana), Sketches for Sailing (Serbian:
Skice za plovidbu) and The Dream of Cosmos Scarooh (Serbian: San
Kosmosa Skaruha). For his literary work he has been awarded several
literary prizes in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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