The Hungarian song

It took her some time to settle on the national anthem. It totally befitted her, she thought. Nothing like the hymn to sing before she went away.

Fortunately – and this sent her back to the moment she had chosen it; how prescient she had been! – her apartment was on the third floor. From there, from the window facing the main street, her voice would be heard by everyone below. The park was also nearby, and her voice would bring all the evening walks to a halt, with people wondering what angelic voice had decided to enrich their leisurely walk with the anthem. Because of course she would go in the evening! That’s where glory was. Mornings were too shallow, too… early. People were still hostages of their dreams. Lunchtime, of course, was too careless; everyone was either eating or wanting to eat, and nothing could steal their attention away from the Turkish coffees or the new sweets of the season. So there was only nighttime left. Or more concretely, late afternoon. Everyone was on their late walks, talking about what they would do for the evening; what party or opera or Theaterstück they’d like to see, and voila, here comes Madame M from her apartment, shaking their world with the last song of the famous swan. For she had been famous. Very much so. But then age had arrived, much more prematurely than she had expected, so much so that she didn’t even prepare for it, and people had forgotten about her. But she had accepted it, with time. It had taken her some years, but she had recalibrated herself to the new reality. She was stubborn, as her father never failed to remind her (especially for her choice of career), but she was not delusional. So she had faded against the discoloration of time and moved to this apartment in the third district, where the park was near and people went for walks in the afternoon. Until one day she had heard the Hungarian song. It came from a rough voice, as if the person had had a cold for a week and was now recovering. It was rusty and warm, which made it very human, unlike the perfection that her opera standards required. It was maybe the only time in her career that she was jealous of not having a voice that commanded fear and respect. But no one around stopped to listen to him. Actually, it seemed no one even noticed he was there. He was a young man, maybe in his twenties, and was singing more to himself than to others. Maybe that’s why no one paid attention to him, she thought. People usually wanted the singing to be done for them. She knew this very well, and that’s why the young man stole her from her afternoon walk. What made this even more impressive, her stopping to listen to him, was that she didn’t understand any of the words being sung. They were in Hungarian. She came from Hungary, her parents at least did, but she never got to learning the language, despite her parents’ wish and the fact that they had spoken quite a lot of Hungarian during her childhood. However, she loved German, for whatever reason, and especially singing in German. Hence, whatever words remained in her memory were simply stuck there due to the simple fact that she couldn’t have stopped her brain from absorbing some words. So she understood words from the song, like Sunday and love, but she couldn’t place them well in the verses that the young man sang. This wasn’t necessary, though, for the feeling conveyed made them unnecessary. Whatever they were, they weren’t important; she knew this better than others. What was important was the pathos with which one sang. How much one felt. How deeply one reached to the roots of the soul. And this man’s soul was old; his young face didn’t fool her for one second. This was a man who had loved deeply, and now was suffering deeply. She remembered that she had had this power too: to stop people in their tracks by singing to their suffering. It had been the highest point of her career. But differently from her, this young man didn’t turn toward his audience, in this case an audience of one, to read their reaction and change the performance appropriately. He wouldn’t even bow at the end of his act – she knew this. He was completely lost in the song and the sound of his suffering, and as such he was not of this world.

Finally, she understood another word: gloomy. Why did she know this specific word? Had her mother been gloomy? Had her mother also suffered from this disease of loving suffering up to the point of gloom, just like she herself attributed the source of her singing to this most unwelcome feeling? Was she an artist only because of this specific sensitivity? If this was so, God really was a merciless trickster, gifting art to oneself but allowing one to enter it only through the door of sorrow.

The young man had opened that door again in her. She felt the old, dry river of her being filled with water again, and she felt young again. O, how she had missed this! How had she lived for so long without it? She closed her watering eyes and her life, a life lived in cabarets, theaters, and the grand operas of Vienna, passed quickly through her inner eye. She had been so beautiful. And had sung so majestically. (She was proud of herself, of not having listened to her dear father, who had meant well by her but ultimately would have destroyed her with his good intentions.) And this unknown, young man had reminded her of herself, what age and time had taken from her. She was old, all right, but not even time could rob her of the quality of gratitude. She opened her eyes and instinctively rushed toward the young man to thank him. But to her surprise, he was not there anymore. She could still hear his voice, but from afar. It was dark now and she couldn’t see what road he had taken.

She attributed his appearance to the will of fate, and his disappearance to coincidence. In her youth she would have thought the opposite, but now she knew very well that Providence had the good habit of reminding one of life’s taste right before one’s death. For her time had come; she had known this for some time, but flesh stuck to the habit of living more strongly than to that of hate, or love. Now she only needed the right closing act. She went to her apartment almost running, as much as old age allowed her. She felt again the rush she had felt every time before going on stage. She spent some time thinking about the closing song, then she went to the living room, and climbed out onto the window ledge facing the main road. People were walking below, but no one was paying attention. But then they heard a voice. An angelic voice, a thunder in a blue sky. It spoke of known things. They knew the words by heart, had learned them since they were children. It was their hymn, their anthem, and as always, it entered their hearts almost unwillingly. They lifted their eyes toward the window where they saw an old, fat lady looking up toward the sky. She looked rather ridiculous, they thought, but her voice transfixed them nonetheless. As if in a trance, they were all arrested by the anthem like never before. It was very bizarre and they would talk of this for weeks to come. And even more, they would talk about what happened next, when the last word of the anthem was finished, and the lady turned toward them, bowed gracefully, and jumped from the window. But the most bizarre thing of all? She had died happy, with a big smile on her face.