Copper Flowers
by Andrea Tompa
Translated from the Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly
The body departs, but hasn’t got enough time to actually arrive. This fast-paced and highly demanding time simply runs out while matter tries to bargain with matter, and the body with the visible world. This body can no longer arrive anywhere despite being the subject of wide-scale admiration: her mother made it to a new homeland at the age of sixty-seven. She came on the insistence of her daughter who had helped her, though it wasn’t possible to also help with all the packing and with liquidating her old life. Her mother started packing ten months before they finally loaded those carefully chosen pieces of furniture, the boxes of books and kitchen utensils onto a van, and on a sunny February day sat her in the car and arranged for her to arrive at a freshly decorated one and a half room flat in a random block on a random estate. From one set of orderly circumstances to another. What’s more, this new flat even came with its own cellar.
– Copper flowers. They call these copper flowers around here – the daughter points out when she visits her mother in the new flat and brings her a bunch of zinnias.
– Copper flowers – the mother replies in the affirmative, without a hint of interrogation, yet with the indignation of someone caught uttering something absurd or plain stupid, perhaps because of misapprehension.
How can people possibly call zinnias copper flowers? This is more of a theatrical outcry, a pretend shock. This is her new voice adapted for the here and now: the voice of surprise and rejection.
She could of course continue riffing on this business with the copper flowers, the zinnias that are also known as Turkish buns in the Eastern counties. With this minor theatrical indignation, the mother sends the unequivocal message that despite having arrived here for good, she’ll refuse to call zinnias copper flowers. Besides, the water is undrinkable here. Un-drin-ka-ble, she firmly emphasizes the syllables.
At the class reunion, the Szabó family use the same theatrical syllabication for undrinkable. It’s shocking that city folk just gulf this stuff down, they are their own worst enemies, seeing that they have no idea what proper drinking water tastes like. This water here is dead and undrinkable.
Their parents have been classmates by the way, aunt Szabó and her mother.
The Szabós use spring water for everything, even for making soup, and they take a trip to the Holy Spirit spring with their jugs once a week. Now, this is water, proper water, they keep stressing, and always use it for making lamb soup. You must visit us at some point, you’ll see that this way the soup tastes just like at home, provided you manage to lay hands on some decent meat and vegetables. None of these are to be taken for granted, as people aren’t familiar with milk-fed lamb and parsnips around here. Believe it or not, you have to buy such stuff in a halal shop! She pronounces it hálál. In our neighbourhood, there’s a halal shop on most streets. When did they manage to become so numerous? What’s most bizarre, the Szabó family tell us at the class reunion, tarragon tastes completely different here and they’ve just recently realised this. As it turns out, there are two kinds, one of which is completely useless, it has no tarragon flavour whatsoever, you can just as well stick five stems in the soup and it still ends up tasting of nothing, Mária explains, come visit us, then you can sign your books for us and we’ll make you some proper homemade lamb soup.
The Szabós arrived a decade later than her and, as they labour the point, their child was still born back home.
The visible world has itself being carried along by the traveller, like thistle. Take me with you, the water cries out. So does the fresh air from home. And the winters from home. Take me with you, the sour cream, the cottage cheese, the zinnia join in. Take me with you and don’t lend me to anyone else, ever. Don’t get to know anything else. There’s no other world.
So the mother moves into the new one and a half room flat. One and a half? she asked in her new voice, half a room?, she asked indignantly when they bought the flat. During her long and hard life of sixty-seven years to date, she’s never heard of half rooms. She has of course heard of basement rooms, family rooms, box rooms, guest rooms, loft rooms, rental rooms, but no half rooms. The mother wobbles over to this half room, holding the vase with the copper flowers in her hand, and shouts back at the top of her voice, as if she was trying to draw the attention of the occupants in the block opposite to the fact that her flat was engulfed in flames and she had to flee, what did you say the name of these zinnias was. She hasn’t yet seen any of these flowers at the market by the way, even though she’s had a good look around at all the markets in the borough, they have nothing on sale that she hasn’t seen before. Battle cries in a new hostile world.
– Copper flowers – she says in a colourless voice. Copper flowers, in other words zinnias or Turkish buns, as they are known in the Eastern counties because of their pom-pom shaped forms. Elsewhere, they call them youth-and-age. They are magnificent flowers, with a thousand names, just like any other creation for that matter.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go for these flowers, for something old and common that her mother could recognize and that could remind her of the world she’d left behind. It’s been nearly seven years since her mother had moved away from home.
Bodies move away. And cells get replaced in this amount of time. Her own body has already exchanged its cells many times in this new homeland. Perhaps she has already changed altogether. She has adapted. Perhaps she’s no longer the same person who has once left. Could she be different at the level of her cells, too? How much time would her mother’s cells need before this could happen to her? And how about the soul? How much time would the soul require?
(Excerpt form the novel Home)