TO THE ENDS OF OUR LIVES (ÉLETÜNK VÉGÉIG)
Publisher: Pesti Kalligram
Country: Hungary
Publication date: 2019
Edition: Hardcover
ISBN: 9789634681311
Language: Hungarian
An excerpt
I want to be free of it. I can’t. The pain is so strong I can’t stand up and walk out of the ward, walk down the corridor, go down to the first floor, then to the ground floor, go out the entrance, and cross the hospital courtyard – the only way I can get to the main entrance anyway is if I first enter the main building via the security door opposite the side building. It must be three in the morning. If the security door is open, then I come to a narrow corridor, I have to go the whole way along this towards the porter’s desk. The whole place is under camera surveillance; it doesn’t matter; if I get that far, then not even the porter will be able to hold me back – at worst I’ll break the glass door with my own body. I wouldn’t be seriously injured, so I could continue on my way towards the housing blocks.
To move in any way whatsoever, I need the nurse’s help. “Nurse!” I shout. She can’t hear me, I know she can’t hear me, maybe she lay down to rest or she was called to a patient. I shout again, a good deal louder this time: “Nurse!!” Pressure and tightness in my lower gut, in my bladder, in the area above it – the pain radiates throughout my body. My urine is blocked again. Let it be overall ready! I shouldn’t feel so tight! The pressure isn’t in my lower gut anymore, it’s in my head. But no, it’s all happening around my bladder. I discipline myself, but it’s no use, what I’m being submitted to is much stronger than my own will. I moan. No. I refuse to moan at three in the morning in a hospital ward, where there are other patients besides me, and who I assume are asleep. My body produces a sound: the cell walls, ready to pop, squeeze the sound out of my throat, out of the cracks below my throat. If these get any stronger than they are now, then all I can focus on is getting out, that compared to this state, non-existence would be breaking free, liberation.
I shout again. No use.
I don’t know how much time passes before the nurse appears beside my bed. I tell her my urine is blocked again. At which point she leans over my bare lower body, and pulls the catheter bag’s plastic pipe out of the pipe which is hanging out of my penis; she has to do it this way, otherwise she can’t determine where it’s blocked. She immediately notices the bits of blood clogging the plastic pipe, I can see it in the half-light because I’m lying in the bed closest to the corridor, and one section of the corridor’s neon lights are still on. I lift my upper body as much as I can; all that moves inside me is pain and helplessness. A few seconds later, carrying the catheter bag, the nurse goes into the bathroom attached to our ward where there’s a toilet; I hear her empty the contents of the plastic bag. I also hear her turn on the tap after, and wash out the catheter pipe; I don’t hear that, but I know that’s what she did, that’s what she was supposed to do. Then she comes back to my bed, and she reinserts the bag’s pipe into the pipe sticking out of my penis: I can feel her push the two pipes into one another, I’ve got used to the sensation caused by this reinsertion, compared to the tightness this is nothing. Meanwhile my urine slowly passes through the pipe into the plastic bag. Over the last fifteen hours I have experienced how my body is able to gather energy to go on enduring suffering. Not me, my body is preparing for what’s to come. Just let it be over! Let this be the end of it! Let me lose knowledge of myself! Let me stop knowing I am! Pain experienced in a state beyond consciousness is not the pain I know, though there is consciousness in unconsciousness, it sifts through. In Dr Csető’s hospital I was able to partly follow what was happening to me, this was true. Only at the point of complete detachment, at the point of complete dissolution does what binds us to our perception and through that to our senses fray away, that’s how I remember it.
Half an hour later everything starts over.
There’s no one beside me. From that alone I muster strength. There are others in the ward, but they’re strangers, though when the pain gets stronger, they’re gone too, everything and everyone is gone, apart from the pain which fills me in its entirety. And the desire.
I lay in the bed, and I focused on one thing and one thing only: disappearing. This desire was stronger in me than anything else, in certain moments even than the pain. If I don’t exist, then nor does the pain. I had a single question, a single technical question: how to get to the housing blocks. For me to get to the blocks, I have to go around the undertaker’s house, I thought, or rather I have to go along Sörgyár Street until Lavotta Street, then at Lavotta I turn left, I carry on along it towards the main road, which must be four or five minutes from the hospital. On the far side of the main road are the tower blocks. I have to go on another hundred metres maybe, and I’m at the first building. What if I get into the first ten-storey, I thought, what if they don’t lock it, or if they do lock it, what if tonight someone forgot to shut the entrance door. I just have to get into the building, it’s no problem if the lift doesn’t work, I’ll get to the tenth floor somehow. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The eleventh is the roof already, there must be some sort of door out to the open air, an emergency exit or something similar, why wouldn’t I be able to get onto the roof, I don’t seem to remember safety regulations in Hungary always being observed. I need to get to the roof of the ten-storey block! If I can’t then I have to ring the bell of a flat, anything from the sixth or seventh upwards will be fine, I have to figure something out. They want to lynch me, hide me! I could come out with something else, too; I can say something that within a few seconds makes the person opposite powerless and motionless, a few seconds is enough for me, in that amount of time I could break past, I’ll tear past anything, the point is that I get into a flat, into a room, into a kitchen: I need to reach a window, to one that opens wide, which looks directly onto the street or the park, the rest I’ll take care of. The point is I should be high up, very high, because I’m positive I have to, this is the only way to bring an end to all of this. It’ll be a single moment, a single concentrated movement executed with immeasurable precision. There’ll be drive and strength in me enough, which will then set me free.
Towards half past five, after the nurse had brought my catheter bag to the bathroom another two times, the pressure subsided. My fellow patients were already awake. “Apologies for what happened during the night”, I said, while thinking that I’ve never once been in the ten-storey buildings. I became aware of the residential blocks a few months ago when I first came out the Sörgyár Street main entrance of the Budapest Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Hospital. “This isn’t the church, spare us your confessions!” said a middle-aged man who was sitting on the bed opposite and reading a newspaper. There were four of us in the ward, he was the youngest. The other two men must have been around seventy, both of them stared into space in silence. I turned towards the window, and I thought about how in the moment when we die, it’s not our life we leave behind us, but just those one or two fragments of memory that at that moment for some reason flash into our minds. Everything else is erased, including that we lived.
(translated by Owen Good)
Excerpts from the synopsis, blurb, and reviews of the Hungarian edition
A brief summary of the novel
A historian of philosophy has just recovered from a nervous breakdown and is introduced as a novelist with a work called Ontogenea, a novel written about his childhood. He falls in love with an anthropologist, who is considerably younger than him. Their love is ecstatic but is overshadowed by illness. Two months after the release of his novel, his elderly mother dies and his family fails to notify him. At the funeral, the thought strikes him that contrary to what is recorded in the death certificate, his mother might have died of a different cause than cancer. He is trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The more desperate he is in his search for the truth, the darker the family secrets are that he discovers. While we hold our breath in excitement following the dramatic story of this family of eleven, we are also introduced to the political and cultural landscape of Hungary today. To The Ends Of Our Lives depicts a rude awakening to the fact that everything we do and every decision we make has consequences.
Excerpts from the reviews of the Hungarian edition
“The images of the family home’s decay and the spreading vegetation call to mind Marquez’s One Hundred Years in Solitude. … Barnás’s works are worth comparing with autofiction series such as Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle or Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.”Kulter, 02.12.2019.
“Owing to assiduous attention, we can read about practically the majority of the problems in today’s Hungary.” ekultura, 16.10.2019.
“The sheer number of microcosms presented by the narrator being set into motion: virtuosic.” Revizoronline, 18.11.2019.
“The text thrillingly brings to the surface the reference between the uncertain predictability of human existence, and memory, or the comprehension-building function of language.” Litera, 25.02.2019.
“All of life becomes a spectacle, a film, time caught in the act.” Sarolta Deczki, Litera, 03.12.2019.
“What if distance and strangeness are always a part of sticking together? What if the day-to-day picks at and swallows up everything we think to be sacred?” Helikon, 21.02.2020.
“It’s as if Barnás wanted to play on a duality: on the one hand, there’s fate, a sort of destiny, which lasts a lifetime and can’t be altered, on the other, the underlying content of play dulls the declaration.” Élet és irodalom, 13.12.2019