zetoren

Excerpts from the blog of Leila Zetor  

www.combfiksz.freeblog.hu

 

 

 

Leila Zetor | 19:02

Saturday 30th October 2004

I stand in front of the big mirror, checked mug in hand, sugarless latte in the mug. I sip it as I look at how flabby my calves - the uncovered differential remainder between the bottom of the blue bathrobe and the top of the blue holed socks,- got since last summer and in the meantime I figure it out that today's menu will be rice pudding. I find some György Korda on my computer, I whine a bit at first and then take a shower with the door open so I can hear it better. Today will be one of those seventies social-reality days, I can feel it. I might even clean the big mirror in the bathrobe. I've got Péter Máté, between Massive Attack and Moloko. Alphabetical order, naturally. I'll do the cleaning to music I think.

 

 

Leila Zetor | 13:03

Wednesday, 27th October 2004

In the early morning, when my heart hammers on my chest from the inside, I get dizzy, I shiver and I see blurs even by lamplight. That's when the clever things tend to come to me, which I can't write down at the time, though I really wish I could. I had this idea, that when I won't be sleeping alone any more, I'll ask my common-law-spouse-to-be to kindly grab a pen and paper in the early morning and if I whimper in my sleep note down what I say. He shouldn't worry, I'll be conscious only a couple of my brain cells will be dying. That's the kind of partner I want. A partner in hypoglycemia, when a couple of my brain cells are dying.

 

 

Leila Zetor | 15:21

 

Green chili paste looks like some kind of exotic sea spinach. J said we should put the whole lot in the wok cause' that's what will make the meat really good. Have a look, she said, she splashed all the coconut milk into it too. I believed her. I also took a pea-sized amount of the instant pasture, because besides being a good friend I'm also a adventurist gourmet. For a moment I became an apostate. No, for many moments. The hissing created such a vacuum between my teeth and the skin on my face covering them that when I hopped over to the mirror, for a passing moment I thought that The Scream has been found, J and company are art thieves, I became a sleeping partner and will be locked up. But then the image moved and it said, I quote: "aaaaake eeeee ouuuuu cauuuuse eeees too ho!"

It was reassuring that I could at least talk. So we scooped out roughly two-thirds of the paste, so it just about didn't burn a hole in the wok. When I got a coughing fit as I stooped under the extractor fan and smashed two wooden spoons against the wall, and J asked me "what's up, why the hell do you cough so much," by that time I was able to yell clearly that "f*** it, I took a far too deep sniff of the meat, that's what's up." So there were still things to do.

Then Szke barricaded the door as a pretty Rozi Horváth, and said that no one was to leave unless we poured that bloody expensive exotic stuff off the meat and improved the dinner with the **** brand cooking cream she was holding in her hand.  She clearly wasn't joking. She had already had forty ounces of Polish fudge in her by the time and it made her quite aggressive. We did as we were told, but insisted on the bamboo sprouts. We got together for an exotic meal, after all. (Of course I was cautious enough to put the Vegeta condiment in the rice while J was fussing with the unwrapping of the algae sauce.)

J was full of wit. She said we should give the drained atomic bomb concentrate to her father, he likes hot things. J's father gulped down the warm sauce as others would gulp carrot juice, then his head suddenly turned purple and he dribbled the sauce down his belly twice. It's a bit hot, he said without taking a breath and meanwhile smoke-rings puffed out from his nostrils. At this point J left the crime scene quick as lightning. We haven't heard about his father's throat since.

We ate the meal with relish, but even with the cream on the chicken the air we exhaled raised the temperature of the room up to 40 degrees. Then we concluded that cooking together is good. During the dinner Szke performed the Chinese anthem in two parts and J rolled a small barrel of water into the room. It was a cosy evening.

 

 

Short-term loss of whatisname

I don't have a damn/faint/bloody word for what I've forgotten. This is what happens to those who, I don't remember. Once I remember I'll figure out what I wanted. And now I'm going to forget that I should sleep, because I haven't slept for how long. I always forget the whatisname. That I should be doing the thingy. Like now, for example.

Why? What's happening now, for example?

 

 

Is there anyone who can really wear these trendy stripy stockings as stockings and not as knee-highs that cut into the flesh? Should I complain at the consumer protection or should I call my parents' genome to account?

 

 

I got horriblysmelly domina-elf-shoes. Mum says it's because it's made of cowhide. I mean that's why it's horriblysmelly. And I got three new pairs of trousers two of which hardly fits me. My cheeks are too big, my legs are too long, I always peep out of the ready-to-wear chart somewhere - either up or down. In terms of bras, trousers, jackets, everything. In the shop's neon light even my elbows have cellulitis, and then my ears turn red and large, and it's clattering in my large red ears: Taigetos-positive, I'm Taigetos-positive.

 

There are some photographs I've been left on. I'm ten years old and somehow I've been left there, even though the garage in the background was pulled down years ago. My mouth looks exactly the same, only my hair got a little longer. Mum says it still doesn't suit me. I mean these pouting, Wertherian lips.

 

 

If you feel good it doesn't matter what language you feel good in. Once you can translate the feeling to your own language, and it remains just as enjoyable, you better keep quiet. The state of the emotion before its metaphorization and abstraction by words is the clearest and most exact evidence of our own existence. It's foolish to talk about the meaning behind the words. It's also foolish to talk about the emotion preceding the words, but at least it can agreed that it exists.

Nobody has the right to tell you which of your emotions have already got a word for them. Listen to your own language. Listen in your own language. And what's most important: forget about the imperative and the paradoxes!

 

I found this sentence under my pillow this morning: All roads lead to Coma.

I know, the new language... No, I haven't got it yet. Still I have to talk somehow until I do.

Lebegyogyós Maszlafári.

 

I want to be sincere in my every controlled and uncontrolled moments, and, oh God, it's so very difficult! Neither period nor the rhythm of thought can help, nor beginning every clause with "if", nor accumulating brackets, or beginning every clause with "nor." Circles are being written, they keep closing in within themselves, it's all an endless chain of metaphors and associations. Something is suffocating me as I write "something suffocates me." I'm high-flown when I write "I'm high-flown." I'm longing for the essence, some kind of quintessence that hasn't been discovered yet, which doesn't involve words like "quintessence", doesn't have hyphens, interpolations, arbitrary wordiness and verbal inventions, no quotation marks, no multiple compound sentences interlarded with repetitions of words and no self-reflection. I want to exclude self-refection. I want things like "the sky is blue!"

No. Lying on the bed a couple of minutes ago even "the sky is blue" was too much for my roughly 2 mmol/l hallucinogenic, consciousness-slimming, hyping blood sugar.

 

I didn't mean to write this. I'll go and invent a different language.

 

           

Thursday, 15th August 2002

Low spirits, low energy. Seems like the floods have called off our two-week Czech trip.

 

Information keep coming, well, no, they actually swoop down upon me, I can't take them in any more. It would be great if I could be certain about something for at least two days, and I wouldn't have to revaluate constantly.

 

If it all works out, on Monday I'll leave for the Unknown under the cover-name of Kostelecke Horky. I'm not taking a mirror.

 

Homework for All Dear Remaining Friends: forgetting is permitted, but discovering and reading loads is a must! Write and read. It'll all start again from scratch in two weeks. If anything can start from scratch at all.

 

Our heroine grabs the wheel of the control panel with both hands, turns to us with determination, lets her blond smile on half mast. She admirably stands the make-up-slide caused by the lights, but then she winks at the shaking camera with practiced spontaneity that suffers no delay, and in the squeeze of her borrowed black suit she falters at as: Goodbye!

And I'm here. And I hand something to You. This is why first and second person singular remains. It is possible to write diversely with these two alone. I'll stick to this, watching out that I don't condemn You to boredom. But because I am Me and you are You, it's out of the question. This is one of the most exciting and mysterious phenomena of the world. You and I. Two "separate" worlds, from which one can derive all other numbers and persons.

 

All forms of reading precludes all forms of solitude.

 

 

 

WATERMELON WITH SODA WATER

 

You misunderstood me. We misunderstood. I misunderstood. It was mostly I who misunderstood. Hatred exists, no doubt, unfortunately, but it's far from being the right expression for what I've been occasionally experiencing recently (for about 25 years), and which totally exhausts me and makes me go flat. It undoubtfully gets hold of me sometimes, forces me to make excuses, which means god knows what. You think what you like. Nevertheless, if anything, it's also an investment of energy. It's nice. Like it or not, we have something in common. We all do. And it's alright. It's nice.

 

"Are you nervous?"

"No. Why? Should I be?"

"No. Just asking."

 

The test results turned out to be negative, which means they're a hundred percent positive for me. The action mostly employed hand and mouth, much less the heart (my dear brother, turn away and stop reading my blog now, or confront a sister-image that's strongly sexually determined and probably strikingly new to you...)

Now I feel as if I was in control of the situation. It's a bizarre situation exercise nothing else. There'll be no follow-up. Everything has been clarified. Since we haven't even started anything. At all. We haven't even done anything.

His stomach pain probably ceased a while ago. My throat still hurts. But of course this doesn't mean anything.

 

I'm going to buy a watermelon tomorrow. Got a craving for it.

 

 

A couple of days' lack of sleep confuses your tolerance levels to such an extent that when you see a homeless person you almost get a heart attack, as he slits the rubbish bag open with his only valuable asset, a pocket knife. And no, it's not the failing existence you feel sorry for, but the sanitation workers, who'll be picking up the scattered murky cans with their hands.

And when your half-dead friend, who's ill and feverish by the way, almost loses it as she tries to stop a "little boss" in tears and a shaky voice, who has humiliated her physically and emotionally as well and trampled her into the ground just a few minutes ago, all you jak is "Are we gonna sleep in the tent or what?"

While in fact your heart is breaking.

 

 

As the great classic (Mme Britney Spears) once did say: I'm stupid, hit me (Hit me Baby one more time). Go on then.

 

I'm not overly fond of the student information centre, but I had to pop in. I'm writing from here now. My computer crashed, but I mean really. For good and all I think. Eight years of everything has gone, photographs, roughly eighty albums of mp3 files, dissertation, a couple of hundreds of seminar work papers, a couple of thousands of unsent letters. The heavens didn't even want a single trace of what I just scribbled for myself during the last few years to remain. There I go, big deal. I'm seriously thinking about never writing a single letter again in this life. Give me clet and fishing-hunting lifestyle! In the name of the rock, the paper and the scissors, Amen.

 

You can reach me on my mobile.

 

 

A mixture of hypoglycemia and semi-dry couvee. It's really quite strange. I can't lift my arm. Non informative high with sentences started over and over again. I'll start life anew as of tomorrow, I say. I say it every day. Come oooooon.

 

I feel about as strong as a marzipan weightlifter. On the two tiny marzipan balls of the marzipan weight it's written: 1000 kilograms. The fuck I'm explaining this for. Isn't there anyone else around who's made of marzipan?

However. If the marzipan weight falls on my marzipan foot it doesn't hurt. Does it?

 

Publicity moderates, even if its fictive. I don't know whether the private demo will become a public blunder or not. I've had it up to here. Or in other words, go and fuck yourselves. But since words fly away and writing remains... (I really shouldn't fuck you all round verbally here) you better find someone who would do it for/instead of you. Actually no, there's lots of the latter, no big deal. You should stick to that who does it for you. If they do it. And they do it. (Damned polyvalence!)

Done. I think the self-censoring program will expire within a couple of hours. I'll be back. There'll be no deletions, just for me to have something to laugh at in a few hours :o)

 

I must learn to select. This blogging thing will probably turn out like the word "cunt" in my childhood. My Mum and I were walking home from the nursery, where I obtained the aforementioned expression, whose meaning was pretty indistinct to me, and all the way home I kept shouting it. After a while, as we completed the ten minute journey and mum ignored me completely (because of motherly-pedagogical gut-feeling, or led by Dr Spock etc., who knows), I didn't find it so amusing any more. Once we got home all I was interested in was a lollypop.

So it's the same with this damned blog these days. For a newborn every joke is new. So for the time being I let off the steam between me and myself, and perhaps this 24 hour nonstop self-reflective pressure will subside at some point too. Then I will either venture outside or I won't. I must select, that's for sure. But before that here's the concentrate of the last couple of hours:

- A pair of plastic winter boots wander by the University Library. He's a real prick, the poor thing: mug looks, near-natural smell and body language. He's a sandwich man from around Váci Street: Buying-selling-exchange-of-mobile-phones. But! A book in his hand. He nearly bumps into an old lady he's reading it so hard. The book is: Lajos Szilvási: Bujkál a hold. Wow.

- Neat little pair of glasses, moderately pushed-up cleavage worthy of an intellectual civil servant, a kind smile with lip gloss across the counter. Ervin Szabó Library, "Book Returns." My eyes are caught involuntarily on the latest issue of Joy magazine (not 168 Hours, not Magyar Narancs, not Népszabadság, not even Szilvási) sitting ready by the mousepad. A journal that informs not only her but me also. It tells me what will make my bum tight and round, and that I can eat fresh strawberries and papaya all day because it's good for me. Wow.

 

 

Okay. Summer's here. Sitting on the trolley bus towards the Keleti Station, fifteen stone lady rattling, grunting, sucking up the mucus. She's that type, you know, who's so suggestive that you' want to spit for her just to make it better for her. The lady stinks. Civilized, European, air-conditioned intercity train, middle-aged man sitting next to me, the can of lager is on standby. The bloke stinks. Miskolc, Tiszai Station, 30 degrees, I get on the Tátra intercity train, an old man in front of me. The old man stinks.

 

It's going to be a tough summer.

 

 

B is a psychologist. The tiny skirt fits tightly on B's tall, lanky, fragile figure. Worn over the trousers. Black eyeliner, a girly twist in her hair in the front. B's got a girl's soul in a boy's body. But he looks for a girl and not a boy. A lesbian girl would never consider one who's got a boy's body, and it's logical that a straight girl wouldn't tolerate his girl's soul.

I'm telling you it's not easy. Mind you, nobody promised anybody that it will be.

 

I got a letter today that I can go to a work meeting yesterday. It's not my day. Not my week. Not my month. Not my life.

 

Döme and I were sitting by the Hámori Lake and led by a sudden idea I whispered my secrets in his ear:

"My mum taught me that I should never want to be different from who I am. That I shouldn't, for example, want to be blonde with large breasts, I should accept myself as I am. She also said that if I accept myself for what I am others will accept me too. That I should believe in myself and the people, and believe that I, the yellow apple, am not one bit less than a red apple. I should believe that I'm probably not alone with my yellowness."

And I also said to Döme that I think that either my Mum or me or the world is put together wrong, because when I close my eyes these days I'd like to see myself as a blonde red apple with large breasts and French-pedicured toenails, to whom Tanganyika and Little Greek doesn't mean the novel Good Evening Summer, Good Evening Love and Endre Fejes, but a travel agency's last minute deal, at most. Who doesn't believe in human goodness, in the painful beauty of Totally for Nothing-ness, in the invaluability of a sunrise greeted with the perspiration of two people, or in the Czech new wave, but on the other hand believes in exchange rates and the summer sale of Kookai, in the omnipotence of the vitamin Es and pore-closing effect of foundations, in the utopian power of narrow hips and clove-of-garlic bum. Then maybe everything would be easier. For me, my Mum and the world as well.

Döme looked up at me (because besides being a small breasted yellow apple, I'm also quite tall) and peed in my lap without a word.

 

I'm never going to share my secrets with a ferret again.

 

 

The greatest princess died in her sleep. She was in love.

 

The End.

 

I liked life yesterday, when the washing-machine said: listen, I give up this spin thing, figure it out yourself, and it spat out a bucketful of water right onto the kitchen floor, while we, my Man and I were loving each other like they do in developed and primitive cultures alike. So as a result - of the washing machine breaking down - we ran out to the kitchen, interrupting everything, and there we stood (my Man and I) on the kitchen floor as God spat us out into this user-friendly, washing-machine-centric, but at the time spin-less world. We stood there naked and stripped looking at the water. He (my Man) took the initiative and its objectified form (in the following: bucket and mop) and he mopped. Up. And the washing machine stood there grinning at us, laughing at our naked bums, and then we decided that we won't budge. We laughed back at it. I said to my Man "Listen, this feels like walking into Lake Balaton on tiles." Because we (my Man and I) already knew that the Balaton wasn't much deeper than that. Then all I asked him was: "Hey, remember Gizi Sánta?" And by then we were laughing so hard that the washing-machine gave up, didn't spit any more water, it just stood there feeling ashamed.

The story had a happy ending. Still naked.

 

I think I'm going to like life tomorrow as we...

 

 

He's just left. Into that strange evening light, at half past three in the afternoon. (One hour has passed since the last sentence.)

The position was the same, as if nothing had happened. I sat in his lap, He dug his nose in my neck. Perhaps we breathed a little differently this time. As he dug his nose in my neck stronger, his breathing sounded louder. I cried for him a little, although maybe I shouldn't have done anything.

Actually I didn't even know Him. What actually hurts me is that it hurts Him. The way it hurts Him. He tried to laugh even. I adore Him.

 

He's gone. Meanwhile V's popped over, brought pictures of her baby, who's only half-timer in her tummy but already wiggles around a lot.

 

It's sometimes strange the way blacks and whites follow each other.

We feel sorry for ourselves.

 

TODAY AT NOON I'M A SWEDISH CHILDREN'S POEM

I think love is when, while the boy's away, the girl counts how many sets of sheets they couldn't sleep in, and it makes her feel sad every time she hangs the sheets outs to dry.

I think a good book is after which when you start reading another you keep mixing things up for a long time, because you think you're still reading the first book.

 

 

SZEM.ÉSZ (EYE SPECIALIST)

Eye-hospital somewhere beyond the Klinikák underground stop. Following a three-hour wait my mind also dilates a wee bit from the nerve-wrecking idleness just like my pupils from the eye-drops. The letters in the book become illegibly blurred because of the dilated pupils, then after a few minutes there's no long enough arm to read with. Szigony (Harpoon) Street, this expressive and pungent adverb/localization of a place caught me in the red right then, while I was feeling sorry for myself. It whacked me on the back of my head and showed me something interesting.

The girl must have been around sixteen, she was wearing thick jam jar glasses, her curly fringe curled awkwardly up and down at the same time. Each and every single piece of her accurately combed hair seemed like wires in the hospital's neon lights, the colourless candy-floss-like thing hang down to her brows. She had a hearing aid and protruding hips that were feeling their way, which made her feet walk half-a-step ahead of her torso. There was something in her posture that turned her walk into seeing and hearing. She had old parents, who kept very close to her all the time, in order for her to see what signs they were making, and to hear what they were saying to her. You couldn't hear a loud word. As the three of them talked their hands touched. Even the parents' hands, without function or consciousness. It must have been some kind of a conditioned reflex that stuck to them sixteen years ago.

 

[My status: after thorough search 1-1 microaneurisma can be found on each side, but proliferatio or macula oedema can't be detected]

 

I hate myself for getting so impatient with my own Mother, who'd give her arm every day laughingly, for my one-day bruises. This way I'm never going to learn not to cry when I bruise my little finger. Mum, I don't want that arm. Sometimes it's not that arm I want.

 

It's so hard to apologize when nobody has done anything bad. You can't. Something got stuck. I'd put my hands together that I'd like to have something like this - if only I didn't have what I've already got.

 

I walked through the door, the backpack was heavy, a handful of flyers in my hand from the letterbox I left behind. The small pillow in my right hand is wet, watered by the rain in the boulevard. I helped myself with the backpack, I gave myself two kisses, I missed you, I said. The smelly sea pebbles rattled in the bag's top pocket. I'd rather wash for me. I grabbed my knotted laundry with helping and careful motherly hands. I didn't treat myself rough today. I even washed the smell of shells out of the bathing suits, and the traces of rotten figs from my sandals. I was grateful and exhausted. I showed myself some photos, then the camera's battery went flat. I put in another load of washing for me. You got a nice tan, I said to me and I stroked my face. I ate some crispy salty sticks, proper home stuff. You looked at me in the mirror, I looked at you. I'm going to bed, I said, good night, I said. I'm tanned and relaxed, I should be glad to see me. Tomorrow, I said smiling, I understand these things, and I turned on my left side at once. I swam a bit underwater, I forgot to tell me, got a photo as well, but it's hard to recognize me. I'd like to see it, I said as I stroked my face again. I was already half-asleep. I felt something, but it was like I imagined it.

 

Our Unuttered Key Sentences 1.

"I'm sorry. I mean, sorry."

"Come on. It's nothing."

 

I became sentimental. I'm beginning to cushion my days with boxes of tissues.

 

HE'S COMING TO ME ON HIS KNEES

Dad's washing the Skoda, I can see it from the balcony. The Sunday soup is cooking and the roast is roasting on all ten floors simultaneously. Pappági's hanging on the jungle gym, puskásjuci's writing her maths homework. The ten floors, the whole blue-balconied house pulsates as one. Two carps swim around in the Buris' bathtub, Timea failed again. Good morning, can Evi come out to play? My brother's learning to walk in the living room. Tesla is playing, I  turned six.

 

I often wet myself in the classroom even in second grade. There was the pool under my chair.

 

'Warning! Danger! The ramp is slippery. Use the stairs!" It's impossible to mistake this place for anything else. It's ridiculous, but it's a cliche. It's not a public welfare establishment, but a public undertaker's establishment. I sit on the stairs from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon holding my file. If I'd want to be proper I'd say I wait. During this brief period of time the caring hands push the following past me: a shut ergonomic tin coffin, a bus-seat turned wheelchair with old man in it, and a wheelbarrow full of cement. The doctors and nurses must have got here by mistake.

 

 

MÁS.KÉP (OTHERWISE)

I sprinkle you around as I like. To an imaginary music, slowly, gently, now more, now less, sometimes just a few grains, sometimes in a thick spirt watching the pile grow, you know like a little kid with her head tilted to the side. My lips are slightly parted, the cuspids are twinkling pearls in the sunlight. I concentrate, I kneel on you, I hold you in my palm, I trickle you out. Instead of puffy kid's hands it's long fingers that form the cornet, but the sensation, the joy of trickling is the same. You show black beneath my fingernails, you rustle under my teeth, you shine in my hair, you sting my eyes, you make me itch. I'm not watering you, not building castles from you, not moulding you with both hands. I'm not digging down to where you're wet and I could plaster you, I don't want to build you. I sprinkle you on the concrete, grass, my bare feet, I dip my hands in you, then I push you around in front of me like a little kid, on all fours, with fingers spread, with a hollow back. Then I sprinkle you around as I like.