ANDREA KOVACS (KURSZÁN

I would love to put it in your mouth, 2020

THE SEASON OF IMPORTANT THINGS

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY

Sometimes I wake up in a place completely different from where I went to bed. It happens rarely, but more often than it should. I’ve tried to find the reason for it, polish my technique, but there’s just as much mis-awakening. My dentist appointment in Kyiv gets fucked. Here, in Casablanca, I usually wake up to the sound of birds flapping against the window. I don’t know why they do it. They fly against the glass, then stagger on the balcony in a daze, embarrassed. I can certainly share their embarrassment, I suppose, while I let the smell of coffee, wafting in from the kitchen, spread out in my nostrils. I love waking up here. Of all the lives, this is my favourite. And it is so not only because here, after breakfast, we swing a dash of Pastis into the coffee. Nor because the bar owner from downstairs, Pierre, a calming presence despite his deliriousness, stares fixedly at a spot on the wall every Wednesday, expecting it to emanate his grandfather who had gone missing in the city. I like his conversations with that spot – he only does it on Wednesdays when there’s a weather front. You open the coloured, double glass door wide open and enter. You smile and hold the flowergilded mug you so brazenly haggled for over at the market last year. You sit down and talk to me, but I can’t hear you. I can’t hear your voice. It hasn’t arrived to me yet. “Let’s go and have breakfast on the balcony,” I suggest, when your lips stop moving for a moment. And in the meantime, I wish Pereiaslav would put off calling me for a while, after all we still don’t know about the venue of the memorial event for Taras Shevchenko, and anyhow, there will be fifteen of us at most, including the cello trio, so the winter-weary Ukrainian spring can wait.

By the time we settle on the balcony, I’m fully there. I can feel your lips on my neck and hear you swear in joy when the fish fry arrives. I can see the unbearably giddy retriever, Aziza, knock over the son of the fish fry seller in front of the gate and I see myself head to the kitchen to prepare something for breakfast instead of the fish that landed on the pavement. As I fry the bacon, the headline of the memorial evening for the Ukrainian polyhistor, Shevchenko, pops up in my mind, tragedy floating lightly in the air like a sandstorm disguised as a whiff: “The verdict of Nicholas I of Russia: «Under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint».” I have always thought that if you come and go between parallel lives, and you do it in such

It’s the fulfilment born out of absence, and an absence provoked by fulfilment.

Love In The Time of Covid, 2020 Digital Collage

an unpredictable way, then this whole thing at least would have the advantage that while you’re in one, then you don’t think about the other, nor do you feel guilty, or miss anything from the other. But I do! What a load of bollocks! Who in their right mind would want to think about the April schedule of a cultural centre in Pereiaslav, while chilling on a balcony in Casablanca? Music comes up from the street. This music is like something that you have to savour and slowly get to because it’s too hot or too spicy, even though you’d like nothing more than gobble it up and even rub it into your clothes for it to dry into so that you can feel it for a long time. You’re angry about the fish, I try to calm you down, you rattle on, “come on, let’s eat something greasy,” I say, I look at you, we eat, we laugh, we get dressed, we’re almost ready to leave. “Isn’t it nice here? Peaceful and brave. If I don’t move, it’s as if never embraced forever. One evening we could sit out on the balcony, you, me and time, and condense infinity into a dinner,” I say.

“I’d prefer some grilled meat,” you say. You look at me. You want to understand me, but you’d rather I kept silent. You think that I always obfuscate what’s obvious and calm. You want nothing but silence, presence, cuddles and play. What you get instead is the shadow of my eyes, which tell the story of a windy, Ukrainian afternoon in that dark room, cosy but cold, where I went to bed last night before waking up beside you here. The room where I abandoned that unfortunate humanist, the cello trio and everyone who had been my life for so long. It all started two years ago. Pereiaslav suddenly turned grey, jaded and suffocating and nothing would add colour to it, not the memories, nor any plans. Then, one indifferent night, I went to bed and woke up beside you in the morning. In my

parallel reality. It was fantastic. It was liberating. When I opened my eyes, I saw the huge, green balcony for the first time, and the centuries-old tree which so consolingly enfolds passing. (In truth, there was a short detour for a few weeks in a tiny, Norwegian village but that must have been a glitch.) And now I live in two realities. But I’m not present in both. You can feel it when I’m not really here, even though you can see me. You hate it, I know. It’s the fulfilment born out of absence, and an absence provoked by fulfilment. But most of the time I have no idea where I’d be waking up the next day and why there of all places. What keeps me here and what drives me away? The place of awakening is never certain. As we run down the stairs and turn out from the square onto the wide street leading to the salty sea, I sense a thought rolling around in me, soon I have to make a decision. Couldn’t I bring Shevchenko to Pierre’s? They would stare at the spot on the wall together. Shevchenko has a 200year head start and some experience with the dead, Papa Pierre might listen to him better and emerge if this unfortunate national hero speaks to him nicely. I would give him some paper, I’d let him paint and write freely. It would be better for him than a memorial evening, no doubt. Meanwhile, we’d be grilling bloody meats on the balcony, until they are crisp, hoping the smell would lure others into this life.