Dear Marcia,

It seems that my writing would end being another “unfinished task”. I was thrilled to read about our characteristics and felt for the first time in my life bursting to tell you about my deepest fears which I never dared to speak of or coldly analyze. All weekend I wanted to sit and write them down. But instead I went around all day dreaming about how I would write to you about the grotesqueness and tenderness of my lover's sex life, and how I would laugh about it and be intellectual and smart and charming. But then I got deflated... I said, “oh it's disgusting to expose your intimacy like that, you are so vulgar and exhibitionist... There isn't such a thing as healing power in narration, you are just sickening with a sick curiosity and those whom you write to are just like you. A fine lot you are!” The Shitty Committee voices, as you said.

I blame two things for blocking me from writing. They upset and obsesses me...

Two weeks ago I went to the editorial office of a Gypsy avant guard magazine to promote my play which has a topic related to Gypsy culture. The editor in chief is a fine poet whose imagery feeds on his handicap - he has crippled legs.

He started to read my play on the spot. It was getting late, around 6 p.m. - people were leaving the office. I was alone with three men. They were drinking beer and turned flirtatious. One was nicer, but he was nervous about qualifying as an alcoholic because he said he drank enormously. The other one was making sleazy jokes, which I pretended not to understand because of my poor Hungarian... I felt awkward. I couldn't leave because I was waiting for his critique. He seemed nice, joked intelligently, so I thought appropriate to pretend not noticing their flirtatious mood and be pleasant but talk about serious topics like my depression, my boyfriend's drinking problems, my article about alcoholism in Hungary...

The editor told his colleagues he felt like eating a large Viennese schnitzel with a beautiful woman at a good restaurant, while I was saying that nobody can help an alcoholic to give up his drinking, except for himself... Then one of his colleagues brought him his boots from the repair shop. The poet said “excuse me” and pointed to his deformed boots. I - as the discreet lady I am - asked where the toilet was. After visiting it I looked, absorbed, at the photos on the walls while he was putting his boots on his contorted and skinny legs (actually sort of bones like branches) and he looked at me strangely, as if sexually provocative! He said, “Maybe it's not polite to put my boots on in your presence?” He forced a strange intimacy on me, so I slalomed the obstacles and said casually “it's all right, we are creative people, we have to experience, don't we?”

Then he asked me inocently to have dinner and talk about my play at a cheap Gypsy pub. I accepted, imagining the reactions my fur coat would raise but also hoping to get a good interview with him in a more relaxed atmosphere. The elevator didn't work. So down we went three floors.The editor was chatting while tightly holding the stair arm as if it was not painful to walk down on those many steps with his crippled legs. Then in front of the gate he gave a manly, dignified farewell to his employees, and motioned me to his gray tin Trabant. I confess I was mighty amused with his grand airs after being Noel's companion... We drove for a few meters. He gave me a huge, red shiny apple which I was pleased to take home for my son. We arrived at the “pub” which was actually quite a good French restaurant. I remembered the last time I'd been there with my friend, I had made a scene about how I couln't take it anymore and that I was loosing my time with him. I was screaming like hell and the waiter was running away. It wasn't the sweet Lea you know, Marcia.

We sat: I gingerly, he wobbling.
He said “You know what? Let's leave your play aside and talk about other things.”
“Okay,” I said cooperatively, hoping to get him started on avant guard intellectual stuff. Avant-guard indeed!
“What if you give me your hand?” he stretched his right palm towards me. Healthy hand it was. I stretched mine and brotherly shook his.
“No, not like that. Nicely!”
“This I don't know how to...” I smiled. I got started again on how depressed I was.
“What do you think of me as a man?”
“You are very handsome.” I heard myself volubly saying. “Very beautiful.” He looked sort of surprised, but didn't get annoyed. Not in the least.
“How wonderful it would be to make love,the two of us,” he smiled, ravished.
“We already did in my fantasy,” I was laughing my head off. It was so vulgar, his cheap romanticism. Did he take me for a goose?! Wasn't he saying the very words I would have been in heaven to hear from my beloved, words which never came? “You have a most charming voice on the phone,” I went on. Bewildered, he was looking under the table. I felt the horror ebbing in my eyes, but I'm a trained actress, so without a muscle falling down on my face I said, “I’m sorry, I'm not good in bed.”
“Me, I'm not even good next to the bed, nor under it.” He was funny, I must say. But he went on with men stuff... “Sex is wonderful. I mean not it's obscenity...”
“I was raped, you know...” it came out of my mouth.
“Oh...” he said, disappointed when I expected him to be compassionate.
“ Right now I am in the middle of cosmic whining, 'I don't know why God designed this life for me, for it's obvious it was designed: my mother, because my grandpa was alcoholic, married an alcoholic and me, I am stuck with an alcoholic.' It's so tragic that it's comical.” I was wasting my wisdom on our sensitive poet.
“What if you open your button slowly?” he thought appropriate to ask. I did it instantly as when I take the garbage downstairs. Because I like to surprise myself.
“And another one, please...” In the middle of the restaurant, two blocks from the townhall after a press conference on dog shit banning, I was opening buttons uncovering my black laced bra...
“And another one please, be discreete...”
I thought, “Fuck off. Enough of playing Catherine Deneuve in Bunuel!” There is a scene when she opens her gown, no underwear on, in front of a retarded teenager.
“Slowly please...”
“I am sorry, I don't like these games...” I said with a faked regret disguising my uneasiness.
“Wouldn't it be a nice gift to make?” I was appalled that he had read my mind. Wasn't it I who thought I was making a nice gift to all the wretched males I slept with? Wasn't I a Christian even when I sucked cocks, even more then!
“It is late. My son is alone watching TV now, I have to go.” But I didn't move. I felt pity but also anger.
“Anyway, it was not nice of you,” I said softly. “I came to you trembling, for advice and support, and you haven't even noticed that...”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“I’ve guessed your motive was sex, but I've hoped not...” I was arranging the toothpicks in a square, then scribbling with one on the table cloth. “Isn’t it a pity that I am not a blonde?” I grinned. I imagined a Barbie Ella with huge tits and curly hair; I’d make him choke with excitement.
“This is how you'd like to be?” He was really incongruously stupid for an avant-guard poet, on top of it a Gypsy who knew what suffering was! ... an editocrat poet feeding on the pity he knew he raised in women.

“Actually, I am like you, only not visibly. My soul, my insides are crippled.” I said this wanting him to bleed. Asshole. “You are my metaphor...” His face didn't show too much. “Your poetry is horrible. The horror of your scabrous vocabulary, the way you see sex as chilling and disgusting, which I agree with. Then, in this alienating mess, a flicker of tenderness comes out like from your burning Gundel pancake. Here is your personal hell served without a second delay this evening, in this perfect restaurant... I am sorry, I have to go now.” Of course I was pleasantly mild. Ladylike. I got in his car. He drove 500 meters then informed me that he had to go the opposite direction. We said good night gracefully.

Like him, I have many times introduced myself with one agenda and then turned out a different one.

This one was tougher to digest.

The other day I walked to the metro, widening my short sighted eyes in an effort to remember what I saw around so that I could fully describe the morning human scenery of Budapest to you. I was thinking of what I should censor out of the love night description I was to produce for you guys, the promissed “Journal Entry No. 3”... Noticing the three little girls that seemed to be sisters, dragging dirty bags after them, uncombed, hungry, dirty and tired - guessing them homeless and aching for them... Looking around at the other homeless people sleeping on the plastic stools inside the metro stop... Remembering my schizophrenic, vagrant ex-husband sleeping on icy benches in parks... Reading the posters advertising for Chokitto bars looking really unappealing: “The liverwurst is uglier than me!” or “I won't ever be a fairy tale prince,” or “Love is blind.”... Looking at Brand Pitt’s photo on a movie poster listing seven death causes: laziness, envy, lust, greed and others I forget...

Focusing my eyes on my poor boat-like shoes and feeling pissed off at my friend. The very friend whom, when we went window-shopping, had helped me chose a pair of black shoes I needed for the reception in which the guest of honor will be the President of Hungary, on first of December, my very friend, I say, who had promised to buy them the evening before but in the morning he said he might consider to buy them for Christmas. Though it's cold in November! And he concluded, “Leave alone with your talking about those new shoes.” He wants me to go around in silk stockings because he says it's not becoming of women to wear trousers. We women don't know how to walk gracefully. And the skirts hide it. Yes. So I go around in skirts, even if my ass freezes.

I was staring in front of me, when a lady with a white silk coat, curled blonde fringes and dark sunglasses looking like Greta Garbo hiding from her fans, turned her back on me. I am short sighted, as I said, and I don't wear my glasses because they give me head aches. I was admiring the huge amount of hair she seemed to have - she had a headband around her head, covering its sides. She seemed double headed. In front, the blonde pleasant curls gave her a most respectable bourgeois air. In the back, the hair was of a darker shade, and as my eyes focused on her tresses, I could see they were dirty. Enmeshed with dirt, as white rastafarians hair is. Her hair was glued with rusted hair pins. I was sick, nauseated. The train came and I followed her, fascinated, but my legs took me to the next coach. When I got off, I looked around to see if she got off too. She didn't. Her image has obsessed me all these days. She doesn't leave me alone. The horror, the monstrosity we host. I am fond of images; symbols conveying meanings. Most of the time I take them as God's answers to my uncertainties. This woman embodied the horror of my past, the disgust and grotesqueness that I've dragged after me for years, unaware that I should cut and throw away this dirty abnormality. Let life invade me afresh and regenerate. Let my hair grow like grass, soft and shiny.

If you are still reading these lines, I would like to ask you if it's okay to write about how I thought I was abnormally different. It might be disgusting to you... and might also seem just a stupid trifle. I would be relieved. I would like to write you about our ways of sex. To hear what you think about it. That might be hilarious to you, and this would be good for me. I would like to write about my beautiful images from childhood and the scraps I heard from my boyfriend's childhood... Also about our last therapy group meeting.

While I wrote this at 21 - 22:12 Hungarian time and I already got 9 letters in my box from America. Maybe this is the time of day we can communicate faster?

Ella

One thing I remember (besides the evenings when my mother screamed and cursed while opening the window to look if my father didn't show up staggering along the street) is this: I was reading next to the hot fireplace. My father was morose. He asked me to fetch him something and I answered him over my shoulder, “No”. He got mad and smashed my book and tore it to pieces and threw some in the fire. I was so ashamed. How I could go to the library now? What could I tell the librarian? That my father - an intellectual - tore my book? I was confused and angry for days and complained bitterly to my mother.

I read all my childhood, classics especially. I went to the cinema again and again. My mother was always disdainful about my novel reading. “You read novels again.” She uttered it so despising. “Better tidy up the house.”

The other night when my friend served dinner - I love the way he goes about with his salads, seriously, and then watches me eating and always asks me concerned if I like it - I was telling him how my son had started to make comical smiles and funny faces and how much I enjoyed him clinging to me when we go to kindergarten and the wind stirs the yellow leaves, how he talks about his front tooth and how Eva neni (auntie), the teacher, would pull it out, and how I mediated between him and another little boy who was constantly kicking him, though my son asked him to stop it. And Zoli, the other boy, was saddened by our complaint and took my son’s hand and said mumbling, almost crying: “Please forgive me, I won't do it again.” But in the afternoon he started to kick him again. My son said gravely: “Zoli, remember what you promised...” and Zoli stopped kicking.

And I told my friend about our superstitions in the country side, when children gathered branches of wild roses and put them across the windows to bar the ”moroi” - a sort of vampire with hooves who was invading people's bodies or sucking dry the cows' milk on solstice day. How we made wreathes of flowers and threw them on the roof. If yours fell in the barrels gathering rainwater you would die. (It happened so with the brother of one of my friends.) How on Christmas we went caroling around our village...

“There isn’t such a word as 'caroling', “ was what my friend had to say.
“There is now.”
“No,” he wanted to have the last word.
“... and it was cold. Peasants welcomed us in their guest rooms where they never made fires except for on Christmas evening, so it was still freezing. Cold outside, cold inside... Mushrooms meant a lot in my childhood... (we do a lot of Proust rambling me and my friend) My mother used to take me, early in the morning to Berta neni and Andras bacsi and leave me there for the day. Miklos bacsi - I'm not sure if his name was Miklos, no... yes he was Miklos - had his little toe curled on top of the others, like a pretzel, and he had a huge white mustache. He always took me to the forest to pick mushrooms and we filled his basket with white mushrooms. My father also took us in the woods, me and my brother. One weekend, it was drizzling. The wood was on the right side of the black shining road. We went through the tall grass. I remember a flower, purple bell, they call it, was taller than me...”
“Oh, have mercy on me...”
“But it was really so tall, with drops of rain on it. I had gray rubber galoshes over my shoes... I used to go uphill to school, around three kilometers, and I liked to pass through an orchard where there was a deserted house, actual a hut with only one room, that seemed so mysterious... I always searched for nuts in the grass, with their greenish coat.”
“They make natural dyes out of it, I think black.”
“Yes. And out of red onion leaves. Or yellow.”
“No.”
“Yes. I did!”
“No.”
This guy is so stubborn! But nothing could stop me rambling either. A fine pair we are.
“...they always made us gather scraps of iron and paper and empty bottles for school, when we were scouts?! And acacia seeds...
I remember my father took me once on his horse, the worn out leather saddle had a nice brown color. Riding it was hectic. I was high, looking down on my little friends running on the side walk following us...
My mother took me on my seventh birthday in her coach and at a crossroads in front of Christ I made a furtive cross with my hand. ‘Do you know how to cross yourself?’ she asked amused looking at the coachman. ‘Yes...’ I said timid and proud looking up at her. It was forbidden to cross yourself. I still mix up the Catholic and Protestant way of crossing...
She took me to the hills to the cow herd. It started pouring, out of the blue, water turning into smoky vapors. We ran inside the herdsmen’s tent-like wooden hut and they gave her as a gift-bribe, mushrooms. They were beautiful. Some were like an egg without shell, white and on top there was a coin of orange, others, mature, were like an orange umbrella growing from the white that was falling apart like an opened orange, but white! Oh, I messed up the image... like a water lily!... In the autumn she took me to the orchard where they picked Jonathan apples. They made hills of fragrant apples... It was foggy and cold. She put me in someone’s coat that smelled unfamiliar...”
“In somebody's coat...” mumbled my beloved, already drunk. My eyes dropped on the soiled plates with chicken liver leftover.
I looked at him, summoned from my childhood’s movie: “You had a beautiful childhood?” No answer. “I've always imagined you in coats with papillons, with your hair always freshly cropped... with your mother telling you to eat properly... and straighten your back. Why don't you stay straight? You have a hunchback!” “They left me on my own when I was 16...” he said gingerly.

He always says we shouldn't make love when my son sleeps in the other room because sons get traumatized if they see their mothers making love.
That's my beloved.