Olvido by Alahna Alvé
Versions
There’s a color picture I found of the Astoria Hotel. Superimposed on it is a black and white photo with a Russian tank before the marquee. I found it online one night, months ago, too anxious to sleep,to come back here, yes, to see you, but not just for that, don’t let hogy elszálljon az agyad with yourself. The picture comes to mind as I smoke outside this bar, Astoria’s sleek face in clear view, my toes numbing by degrees.
You’re inside, cradling a beer, a writer on either side of you. I’m waiting for you to pay your bill, to walk me home, to take me upstairs, and I know your last two missed calls were from your girlfriend, I saw the rémület in your eyes when you reached for your pocket, and no, I don’t care. This is the least I deserve.
See, there’s a version of this in which I don’t wait for you. Not to finish your beer, not to keep me company a hidegben. In this version, I’m responsible. In this version, I don’t love you. Or maybe I do, just not this carelessly.
There’s a version in which I don’t cry tonight. I go home alone, but somehow content, and the cadence of your Hungarian does not ring in my ear with each hollow lépés. And when I wake in the morning my chest does not ache to remember your taste. Always a little like sunflower seeds, or is it pumpkin seeds? See, I’ve already forgotten, but in this version, leszarom.
There’s a version in which I never learned your taste, and versions, out there, far too many to track, too many images to superimpose on one another, versions in which this country never became anything more to me than a word on my birth certificate, and I glide into a quiet suburban life in which English never feels too full in my mouth, and I am always at home between a pick-up truck and a 7-11.
There’s a version in which I find a picture of a tank before the Astoria, and the weight of our history does not lean against me heavy, like I leaned against you all sticky, perfumed with the summer I met you and you spoke of the writer who invented my name in the novel written in my first language it will take me years to read, yet you said I should try it some time.
At the dawn of the apocalypse
I lived on a remote island of foreigners, a dorm of international students in Budapest. And because I drew my first six years of breath in this city before setting off for the desert that raised me, I was at once at home here again, but also not. The resident Hungarian, I was the only heiress in the house to that wild and rabid tongue we were here to tame, but just as much a foreigner as the rest, just as much a member of a distant tribe.
After the apocalypse began, my Hungarian mother phoned me from Las Vegas, begged I come home to the desert to watch the world hack itself to an early death. But I could not imagine a better place from which to bury the world that had raised me, just as my grandparents had done in this very city, when, as teens, they fought with stolen Russian tanks for a free and communist Hungary, and just as my great grandmother had done when the Spanish flu buried four of her siblings.
Before the start of the apocalypse, the motherland awaited my return, only to dig up the next tragedy, and lay its weight around our necks, like the heaviest of honors, knighting me a Hungarian a second time.
Of course, stripping the desert off me is impossible, even now. My skin no longer mimics its cracked floor, but I still fall asleep to distant whispers of tumbleweeds, still wake to echoes of slot machines. And one day, all this will fade, like the mark of a vaccine, but the traces, the outlines will remain.
And then there’s my tongue, oh, how could I forget my tongue, still soaked, still dripping with English. The tongue I first used to sound out the letters of another people’s alphabet, the tongue I first used to a tell a small boy I love you. And the tongue I use to tell you this now.This is the tongue I find less and less room for the more time I spend here, yet there’s nowhere for me tuck it, nowhere to dispose of it safely, like the surgical masks we throw away that will hang on till the end of time in some distant landfill, this tongue will forever rest in the deepest part of me. Somewhere beside my Hungarian.
The two occupy the most important seats in the house. Don’t worry, the house is disinfected. The seats have two meters’ distance between them.
About the author:
Timea Sipos is a Hungarian American writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her writing appears in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, the What You Need to Know About Me anthology, and elsewhere. Her debut short story was published by Juked and was nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. A 2017 American Literary Translators Association Travel Fellow, she later went on to study literary translation at the Balassi Institute in Budapest. Her translations of Hungarian poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, The Offing, Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, Waxwing, Two Lines Journal, and the Wretched Strangers anthology by Boiler House Press, among others. She will soon be a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. Learn more about her at Timea Sipos
In the artist’s words:
Alahna Alvé. With an affinity for texture, movement and every shade of blue, Alahna enjoys painting, pouring and pondering. When she is not stubbornly avoiding the Oxford comma, she spends her time reading sci-fi and studying innovation at the University of Houston. Alahna lives with her husband, their three capricious felines, and a persistent mental illness. twitter, ig: alahnaave