Ágota Kristóf
Hier

[ Continente K. - Bout de la Terre, Europe Selection ]
"The shadow on the side of the road always reminds me of you"

I. It Rains in Kőszeg: exercises in nihilism.

There is a forest in front of his window, and it seems the sky is preparing for rain. Then the sky darkens, and water begins to fall. It rains, a thin and cold rain falls on the houses, the trees, the graves.
The rain falls on their disfigured face. They look at it, and the cold becomes more intense, its white walls no longer protect it. The clouds are gray, a light and pearly mist floats above the house, above the street. Hours pass, the church clock strikes nine. It still rains. On the radio, they talk about it every day, there's the war, and soon, many people will die. Tobias Horvath had to stay six weeks in the hospital, he was happy to stay there because he didn’t want to return to the factory. There, he was fine; they took care of him, he could sleep. For meals, he could choose between different menus. He could even smoke in a small lounge.
That’s how he died, but of course, he didn’t die.

Horvath had a childhood ready for every occasion. He was a war orphan. He had been raised in an orphanage. At the age of twelve, he escaped from that institution, crossed the border.
- That's all. - That's all? - Yes, that's all.
Tobias Horvath was born in a nameless village, in an unimportant nation. When the peasants slaughtered a pig, they reserved the worst parts for his mother Esther. For them, everything was good. The peasants would go every day to screw his mother. They lived near the cemetery, the last street of the village, the last house.
Sometimes the sky was beautiful, but Tobias loved the wind, the rain, the clouds. He loved death.
An emptiness had settled in him. Like the modern factory where he has now worked for ten years.
And after ten years, for them, he is still a stranger at the chessboard. Alone.
None of the humiliated friends will return. He had a friend, seven years ago he killed himself.
Vera's body, already decomposing, was laid out on the bed. Their first dead. Robert had slit his wrists in the bathtub. Albert hanged himself. Magda peeled potatoes and carrots, then sat on the floor, turned on the gas, and put her head in the oven. The fourth time they collected money at the bistro, the waiter who said to them: You foreigners continuously collect for wreaths of flowers, you continuously go to funerals, Tobias Horvath replied: Everyone enjoys themselves as they can.
And Tobias writes in the evening. He only thinks about coming home as soon as possible to write a socialist funeral, without a priest. A diary.

He met Yolande while buying black, gray, and white tennis socks. Tobias, however, did not play tennis. Yolande laughed stupidly, but her stupidity didn’t concern him, only her body did, and there are millions of Yolandes in the world, beautiful and blonde, more or less stupid, you choose one and do it with her. But the Yolandes do not fill the loneliness. Tobias had watched her tan while Vera was killing herself. The mother kept writing to Vera's address, and the letters kept coming back with the stamp "deceased" on them. Vera's mother kept wondering what it meant in that unknown language. Meanwhile, Jean keeps going to Tobias’s house almost every evening, preventing him from writing, preventing him from sleeping. When he finally leaves, Tobias starts writing. Rarely a book, because he keeps burning everything he writes. The future is just dead, muddy fields. There’s only the present.
Sometimes it snows. Another time it rains, and you can’t write about your own death.

II. Colophon - Eveline: le grand gel de Neuchâtel.

Ágota Kristóf has written very little. Four novels, nine plays, five of which became radio dramas, some poetry, and a few short stories. Another novel she had in mind and never realized had the working title Aglaé dans les champs. A writer with solid forms, in the contexts of her literature, the characters return, exchange names, moods, temperaments, identities, they get confused, they remain in the background. A shy, harsh, and sometimes openly hostile ethic, showing the negativity of life as it is, just as it stands before us, even in this latest effort, highlights certain exclusive characteristics of her writing: virile temperament, changes in time and perspective, war and conditioned childhoods, the absence of clear geographical references in a defined time, mystery, lies, violence, passages of rigid and frozen poetry, apathy, haunting dreams, recurring nightmares, rarely liberating sexuality, double identities, despair, death, depression, eternal gray, overshadowed moons, and library night phraseology.

Hier (Éditions du Seuil - Paris, 1995) is a short novel of just over ninety pages, it can be read in just over three hours. Yesterday is a concept, a place, obviously a time. The drama of exile, the author’s bête noire. A punitive ending for a human novel. Depth, emotion, eternity, power ferment and reveal themselves with the days. Hier is severe, bare, intellectually mean, cerebral, an antispsychological inner soliloquy.
Tobias/Sandor is a creature that comes from nothing, an incapable homicidal-suicidal. His woman, his life, is named Line, but he has never seen her. Caroline is a creature belonging to the nothingness of her bourgeois, classist, and ultimately equally stupid background, Carole is in the final analysis a prisoner of her privileged position, Line is just an idea. The last client, and in his outstretched hands the sun. Bad days will come, and Kristóf will make them meet again in a particular reconstruction of memories. As for Tobias/Sandor’s life, it can be summed up in a few words: Line arrived and then left. - You scare me, Tobias. - You scare me too, Line.
Hungarian loneliness. The finale of Ágota Kristóf is a dance of routine and alienation, of distance and sadism. An apartment where it is not retreat that gives strength, but silence. Eyeglass cases, typewriters, ink ribbons, all the worldwide translations that have been made for the Trilogy of the City of K.


III. Mute Worker: the gray solitudes.

All this sadness is unbearable. Sandor Lester didn’t know anything about it, but he thought life couldn’t be anything but what it was, which means nothing. He writes in the evening. Others have adapted, married local women and stay home in the evening, lock their doors with double locks, and patiently wait for life to pass. So now Sandor stays in his room, sits on a chair, and does nothing. This no longer interests him. He is there, sitting on a chair in his home, and that's all. For hours, or days.
He finds no reason to get up or do anything. No one enters, no one leaves. He walks like everyone else, but there is nothing on the streets on the mornings of a workday, only people, shops, that’s it.
He had no one, so it didn’t matter where he was, the trams ran on the tracks.
When he got home, he turned on the lights in all the rooms and stood in front of the mirror. He stared at himself until his face became blurred and unrecognizable. For hours he went up and down his room. The books were lifeless on the table and the shelves, the bed was cold, too clean, it was not time to go to sleep. Dawn was approaching, and the windows of the house across the road were all black.
He thought he had never had a Christmas tree, and now he was tired.

Yesterday, Sandor experienced a moment of unexpected and unmotivated happiness. It came to him through the night, the silence, the rain, and the fog. It smiled, floated, danced before him. It was the happiness of a distant time, when the child and he were one. He was himself, was only six years old, and in the evening he would stay in the garden dreaming, looking at the moon. What became of it?
Yesterday, he slept a long time; when he woke up, it was already night. He dreamed he was dead. He saw his grave. Before sunrise, he wanted to talk about everything, but now he's tired, now he no longer writes.

Today, Sandor Lester begins the foolish race again. He gets up at five in the morning, washes, shaves, makes himself a coffee, and goes, runs to the main square, gets on the bus, closes his eyes, and all the horror of his present life jumps on his neck. The factory where he has worked for ten years. A watch factory, machinery, and a pedal to press. The watch factory is an immense building dominating a valley. The factory produces spare parts and semi-finished parts for other establishments. None of the workers could assemble a complete watch by themselves. Whether light or dark, in the immense workshop, the neon lights are constantly on. From the speakers, sweet music spreads. The management believes that, with music, the workers work better.
In the department, everyone is alone with their machinery. There is a worker like the others who sells tranquilizers that the pharmacist prepares for the working class. The day passes faster, you feel a little less unhappy.
In the evening, leaving the factory, there is barely enough time to do the shopping, eat, and you have to go to bed very early to be able to get up the next morning. It depends on that speed and rhythm for their salary, their life, and their working condition. Cooking, frying some lard and eggs. No, no potatoes. No, not even bread. Monotonous work, miserable pay, solitude. Around the workers, the machines ring the angelus. Yours wasn’t just a watch factory, Sandor, it was also a factory of corpses, and you were just another wrong number, and the only thing that can be scary, that can really hurt, is life, and you already know that.
So time will pass by, you will be home, alone, old, and happy, and under your eyelids will run the images of that ugly dream that was your life. That’s how the years build up, that’s how death builds up.