Photo by Botond Wertan
High Tide
— Translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood with the author
When my daughter turned six, she persuaded me that we should move and live by the sea. I didn’t mind, as a software engineer I am freelance and can work from anywhere. The village we ended up in bordered salt marshes and dunes. I’d never been there before. Apart from us, it was populated almost entirely by well-off pensioners who had mounds built in their back yards for benches so they could sit looking out at the sea. From there they watched as the ebb and flow of the tide daily rewrote the landscape, redrawing the footways and laying siege to the sand dunes. There the pensioners are every day, with clockwork precision, in their raincoats and wellingtons and with mugs of tea in their hands, watching as the water gently raises the boats mired in the mud, while the smaller dunes with their pale tufts of grass shiver in the wind. At this time of day the last of the dog-walkers on the wood-decked footpaths are hurrying home to beat the high tide. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them say a word. They might sometimes smile at Julia or maybe it’s at the dog, but then we rarely speak when we pass them either.
Every morning I take Smudge out for a walk before Julia wakes up. As the sun rises I cut across a mile of this undulating landscape to get to the sea. The rusting docks look like a disaster zone at this time of the day, the oil spills giving the mud a rainbow-like sheen as the hungry gulls circle above the nets in the fishermen’s boats. The brazen endlessness of the sea, its foam-laden breath, comes as a shock after the abandoned, labyrinthine world of the tracks. When I reach it, joy pounds in my temples. I am elated, as for the first time in more than ten years I feel I’m home, even though I know no one here. As the rhythm of the waves washes away my floundering thoughts I relax at last. Smudge is equally delighted by the sea, even in winter he is a bundle of black Lab glee, all awkward wiggles, as he leaps full-tilt into the water. He never seems to regret it afterwards, or at least he has yet to learn anything from the fact that he invariably shivers all the way home.
In the afternoons Julia and I take him out together, often going straight from her school. Everyone in our lives has a walk-on part: we deck them out with stories because our actual conversations with them rarely make it past the weather. Our daily soap opera is fairly predictable, filled with failed writers, ageing acrobats, mad scientists, and evil inventors, even though the locals all appear to be retired bankers and company directors. Fortunately Julia is not yet interested in romantic plotlines. I think she’s at last beginning to warm to school. When I go to pick her up, I can see from quite a way off the kids playing in groups in the school yard, Julia shouting with abandon at the top of her voice. My presence mutes her, she takes my hand: radio silence as we set off for home. Her precocious eyes make me feel guilty, so I promise to invite her friends over. We’ll all jump together on the trampoline and roast apples on a spit.
The days swell into months, winter turns into spring, and the cycle of our new life by the sea becomes as predictable as the ebb and flow of the tide. Then one afternoon I notice that instead of one of the regular matrons on a back yard bench there is a woman with prominent cheekbones staring out to sea, and suddenly the world does a somersault. The last time I saw those lips they were parted, those cheekbones were raw with bitemarks, those fingers pale and clenched tight. It must have been seven years ago. Now she is a glass statue in the rain, hands trembling on the head of the grey cat in her lap, both of them buried in the folds of the enormous chequered blanket across her shoulders. She gives a start: she’s noticed me. I am staring at the arch of her projecting neck, bare to her collarbone, where her sweater begins. I’m not subtle about it and I don’t look away. Before I can say anything Smudge makes a mad dash for the fence and the cat hurtles off, panic stricken. Heel, Smudge, Julia and I both shout, heel!
How are you? You have a very beautiful daughter, she says calmly, coolly, as if the vast hiccup in time were nothing. We go indoors, of course, because she invites us in, and as we enter the thought sneaks up on me that her parents did indeed live hereabouts. I thought I’d forgotten the name of this place, if ever I knew it, but now I’d rather stifle my suspicions. Julia doesn’t understand who this lady is. Emily explains that we were at university together, her look telling me that I shouldn’t elaborate. I would bite my tongue about what happened, even if it wanted to spill forth out of me, but her frostiness seems to numb even my memories. Julia knows I moved to this country after secondary school, but it was only my Budapest childhood that I ever spoke about, not the years I spent here. Now that Emily’s mother was dead the flat was all cat hair and crocheted tablecloths, silly knick-knacks from the former colonies and graduation photos. Wrenching my attention back to the present I catch Emily eyeing me, but she immediately looks away and goes to put the kettle on, while Julia keeps a hand around Smudge’s collar, to be on the safe side. Emily’s movements are somewhat exaggerated, her kindliness a little off-key, or perhaps I just can’t help seeing it that way.
Horror stares back at me surreptitiously from every corner of the flat with wide-open cats’ eyes. The reflexes I had of old have become alien to me. They tempt me to provoke her, but thankfully I’m still paralysed and the only way I can wind her up is by staring at her neck. I was pregnant when she last saw me, or maybe not quite yet, but even then she wouldn’t look me in the eye. I think she was embarrassed. I’m not staying here very long, she says all of a sudden, between two sips of tea, I just need to find an estate agent and throw everything out, I won’t hang around until it sells. She jokes lamely that we can have all the cats for dog food if the neighbours won’t take them. She had to fly here at a moment’s notice to deal with everything, including the funeral, so has not much leave remaining and is so sorry our meeting must be so brief.
The next morning my stomach is in knots, I don’t want to look at that bench, I want to smash down that door, but of course I don’t. Smudge, bless him, does a shit right by their fence, staring as always straight into my eyes. A more melancholy sight can hardly be imagined, especially on such a dreary morning. The steam rising from the shit melds into the mist. I don’t pick it up and we move on. Ringing in my ears is Emily’s excitement, I want a kid, she is saying, spreading her bare legs as she sits on the lid of the seat in the university’s accessible toilet. That’s where we used to sneak between classes, once she even pulled the emergency cord by accident as she was coming. The sentence makes my tongue stop up her ear, her hand in my hair. I draw my fingers out of her, my cardigan, under her so she doesn’t catch cold, is sopping wet. Right, so let’s make a kid, a scaredy joy bounces around inside me. She spends the rest of the afternoon mocking me, saying the hormone-drenched cardigan is sure to make everyone unwittingly go wild about me, or rather for her, via me. I mutter that what I’d rather go wild about is a washing machine.
This morning the sea is roiling me, but Smudge is happy. I can’t bear him just now, poor thing, whatever he does today will get on my nerves. Not much later it turned out that Emily was infertile, though I didn’t really believe her: I’m pretty sure she once had an abortion. I only realised the scale of the problem when I discovered that up until the announcement of the let’s-have-a-baby project, her mum didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, about me. I was just some friend. Perhaps I really was. She certainly never registered my name, and Emily never invited me over, but I imagine her mum was just like the pensioners in the village today. In fact, that’s exactly what she was, a pensioner in our village, watching the high tide, stiff and full of sneer. I imagine her eyes flashing like a neon sign, narrowed, accusatory: homosexual, sperm donor, foreign genes, betrayal. I can see her at weekends giving Emily the evil eye for her love-bitten neck, and the cold-war blast as she impassively offers her orange juice at breakfast. Christ, after all these years why did I have to move here, of all places.
Her gynaecologist was her mum’s best friend, which is why I didn’t believe the whole infertility thing, but I didn’t dare tell her so. I would’ve had to backtrack, I would’ve had to ditch the whole idea there and then, but fear made me stubborn and I told her: no problem, I’ll have the kid myself. But she always cut in, licked the words off the tip of my tongue, or dragged me off to see a film, so out of sheer spite I started going to the fertility clinic on my own. I can’t remember if she got that overseas job before I told her Julia had been conceived, or if it was only after an awkward conversation. She vanished from my life silently, like a mirage. But one thing I’m quite sure about at this moment is that I don’t want to ask her anything, I don’t want to talk to her. At long last I’ve managed to get over it all. She could have been a mother to Julia, but as she wasn’t, her walking off the stage meant far less than the disappearance of a father would have done.
Smudge’s wet, rubbery nose nuzzles my hand. It’s hard to credit but he’s bored, and wiggles about apologetically. My hands are raw from the cold, I try to warm them on my neck. I have a sudden urge to laugh: it’s the seals’ heads poking up above the water, taking deep breaths through their comically flaring nostrils as they bob up and down like corks. I squat down and wrap my arms around Smudge, enveloped in his wet-rag smell, and a thick fog finally lifts from my brain, suddenly every colour is bright, and I’m hysterical with joy and tears. Come on, Smudge, let’s have a swim, I yell, throwing off my top and shoes and sprinting into the water towards the seals. I hear him bark, the water is freezing cold, but I don’t care. The seals of course flee and I can barely stand it in the water for more than a minute, then like a happy, defeated army we run home. Julia is still asleep when I step out of the steaming shower to make her some cocoa. I stroke her hair as I try to wake her, and when she opens her eyes in surprise, they are still gummed up with sleep. Mum, why are you being so nice all of sudden, she mumbles, almost spilling the hot cocoa over herself.
DIÁNA VONNÁK is a writer and a social anthropologist currently based between Austria, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and Hungary. Her debut short story collection Látlak (I See You, 2021), from which this story is taken, was awarded Hungary’s Margó Debut Book of the Year in 2022 and was shortlisted there for the Libri Award. Her social research has focused on Ukrainian cultural and heritage politics since 2014. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote and The Calvert Journal, among other periodicals. After holding a postdoctoral research fellowship at Stirling University in Scotland, with a particular focus on wartime heritage rescue and the international mobilisation of care in the sector, in 2023-4 she was a Junge Akademie Fellow at the Art Academy in Berlin and has recently taken up a Fellowship at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. She is also working on her second book, a documentary novel.
About the Translator:
PETER SHERWOOD is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Hungarian Language and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, now based in London. His translations from Hungarian include novels by Miklós Vámos, Noémi Szécsi, Zsuzsa Selyem and Edina Szvoren (both of these with Erika Mihálycsa), Ádám Bodor, Krisztina Tóth and Krisztián Grecsó; collections of essays by Béla Hamvas and Antal Szerb; and poetry by, amongst others, Bálint Balassi (with Keith Bosley), János Pilinszky and Krisztina Tóth. He was awarded the Árpád Tóth prize for translation from Hungarian in 2020. With his wife Julia Sherwood he also translates contemporary Slovak and Czech literature.