Székesfehérvár, Hungary
The last time I was in Hungary, a year ago, my family got doxxed in the village Facebook group, which is admined by a retired kindergarten teacher. Covid regulations at the time were such that after entering the country, you were given an A4 red sticker to put on your front door to indicate that you were in quarantine. I guess the retired kindergarten teacher spotted the red sticker on her daily constitutional and took it upon herself to verify that I was quarantining adequately.
The trouble started when I did not answer the door; I was upstairs in my brother Milan’s bedroom being let go from my job over Zoom. So the retired kindergarten teacher published her findings (quarantine breaker!!) in the Facebook group and by the afternoon a sort of mob had formed in the comments, demanding that the police be called to our address, which she had helpfully made public. The police did come, the day after, and asked me things like “How long do you expect to be in quarantine miss?” which felt like a trap.
A couple of days later I lost my dad’s dog. What happened was that some roofers had come to fix a leak and, in the process of letting them in, I left the garden gate open. Within seconds the little fucker had darted for freedom. I was in slides, no phone, the door to the house wide open. I chased the dog halfway to the next village, as it became increasingly clear that there was no way he’d be coming home with me. Local alcoholics and the roofers looked on. I suppose some people can still be trusted though, because the incident went unnoted in the village Facebook group. Later, my dad and his wife found me crying hysterically at the kitchen table. “What happened?” my dad’s wife asked with concern. “I think she’s having a quarter-life crisis,” said my dad. To the dog, when he eventually came home, he said, “Try to have some dignity.” He was sent to live with another family a few months after that.
Recently I had dinner with my boyfriend and his mother. She is a very formidable woman and what I like to call (not out loud) a triple threat: a Jewish lesbian who’s a therapist. At dinner, they got me to recount a dream. The only one that came to mind was a recurring dream I’ve been having about dating my dad. Since my boyfriend is sixteen years older than me, this felt a little on the nose. So, under pressure and on the spot, I made up one where I am having to sit a maths exam, despite not having taken a maths lesson in years. “Oh,” my boyfriend’s mother said, visibly disappointed. Later she was talking, enthusiastically, about a patient who was “disturbed”. “Do you think I’m disturbed?” my boyfriend asked, hopeful. “No,” she said. “You’re troubled, but not disturbed.” The pressure!! I asked my boyfriend if he could warn me next time if this was going to be on the agenda because I’d hate for his mother to think I have a basic interior life.
My five year-old sister is in love with a TV vet from Yorkshire called Julian. My brothers and I think this is because our dad has threatened to shoot any real life suitors in the ass with an air rifle. “And that,” my brother Peter offers, “is how dad ended up shooting the Panasonic. ”
In the beginning of the summer I had an abortion. I found out I was pregnant the day after my 27th birthday. My mum was 27 when she had me which could, I suppose, feel symbolic. I have felt, thus far, no sense of loss, except for my life as it is right now.
A month or so ago I was at a new friend’s birthday party. I was slumped, sort of, against Holly on a rattan chair, petting a dog. I’d had some mushrooms. Anna and Marina called us, they were maybe going to come. I was googling ‘Where are we right now?’ A tentative friendship was forming between two boys – watching that always feels intimate. I felt my life was romantic and complete.
I did think about baby names but I mean, who hasn’t? For the record I like old world names: Vita, Adele, Vera. I think they are dignified.
My youngest brother is fifteen and has Tourette’s syndrome. He has long guitarist’s fingers and looks like a Balkan Timothée Chalamet. He’s impatient and overfamiliar so people often think he’s rude. Ticket inspectors and shopgirls love him though because he looks everyone in the eye and says, “Good morning miss, thank you, have a beautiful rest of your day.” I learn a lot from him about being looked at. We’ll be on a train or escalator and people will catch him having a full body convulsion out of the corner of their eye and expect to see something weird and unseemly, but it’s just this waify teenage boy. Sometimes when I’m with him I think I understand what it might be like to be a parent: to be unbearably anxious about how someone who isn’t me treats others and how they treat him, to feel so proud even though (no offence) he hasn’t tangibly done anything to make me. He still texts the old dog’s new owners and sometimes asks to take the dog for a walk – he doesn't, I suppose, care that much about dignity.
I have spent the summer trying to ascertain whether or not my boyfriend is a good person, which has been stressful for us both and annoying for all our friends. On the last weekend of July we went for dinner at the new Noble Rot in Soho - formerly, a Hungarian restaurant called The Gay Hussar. It used to be a bit of an institution - the story goes that because it was a known meeting spot for trade unionists and Labourites, it’s where the Tories went to discuss overthrowing Thatcher. When this anecdote was recounted to me by a friend, he caveated it with “although it’s not very leftist any more”, to which I joked “neither is Hungary” but it didn't really land. On the way home there was a man passed out on the floor of the Victoria line. A girl in espadrilles was presiding over the situation: “DO WE ALL AGREE THAT I SHOULD PULL THE EMERGENCY STOP?” Everyone tried their best to look noncommittal. “Okay at the next station I’m going to pull it! Do we all agree???” At Highbury and Islington she pulled the emergency stop and then immediately got off and walked away. The carriage returned to business as usual, released from having to care about the man on the floor. My boyfriend sighed and got to his feet. “Can you sit up for me mate?” he asked the man. “Hey, can you hear me?” The man rolled to his side and shat himself. I tried to look busy and edged slowly away until I reached the other end of the carriage.
The day before I left for Hungary I had a long look at the actress Sasha Lane’s instagram and decided that I think I could have a child, actually. On the same day my boyfriend cycled through Stoke Newington and concluded that the whole endeavour looks quite undesirable. This caused some friction.
Some lessons I learnt this summer:
A lesson in friendship
A girl I went to primary school with went on to train as a therapist in Hungary’s highest security prison. Every week she would have regular supervisions with the inmates, checking in, if you will, about how things were going. There was one guy who’d come each week and be like, “Things are great Miss Doctor, the food is good, the people are good, I speak to my girlfriend every week.” So, understandably in my opinion, she thought, “Well that’s one person I don’t need to worry about.” Except it turned out that while she assumed that the guy had been talking to his girlfriend on the phone, they were talking instead, in his mind. So she suggested that he begin weekly therapy on top of his supervision. He was furious. He recounted the whole thing to his cellmate, to the effect of ‘can you even believe this fucking bitch?’ “I mean,” he asked his cellmate “you can hear my girl talking to me, right?” “I can,” his cellmate said, “I totally can! But look, maybe there’s no harm in seeing the doctor anyway.”
A lesson in tact
Recently Holly and I were at a wedding in Glasgow. I was wearing these platform Robert Clergerie clogs from eBay. After the ceremony, the clogs got caught in the courtyard gravel and I fell embarrassingly onto the concrete floor. I was helped to my feet by some strapping men in kilts. “Well stop moaning already,” said a hot waiter, as he handed me a glass of champagne with a wink. Some minutes later one of the kilted men came up to where Holly and I were standing. “How’s the knee?” he asked, nonplussed. “Oh it’s fine, not even bleeding,” I said. We all looked down at my knee which was bleeding somewhat profusely. I went to the bathroom to clean up, marveling at the Scottish gift for knowing how one might want a situation handled.
A lesson in conflict resolution
I saw the retired kindergarten teacher on the street. I was in the car with my brother Peter. He honked, longer, probably, than strictly necessary. The retired kindergarten teacher jumped and stumbled. She steadied herself by grabbing with both hands onto a thorny, overripe blackberry bush.
Zsofia Paulikovics is a writer.