ferenc szekely – simple twist of fate

        It was an unseasonably warm October’s day in Budapest. The year was 2016. Ferenc Székely, as was his wont, awoke with the midday sun and started his day by honoring his wife. With a soft smile, he patted the sagging recess in the bed where Ilona once slept, and then said a prayer in her memory.
        Ferenc Székely hadn’t always prayed. It was an affectation he had picked up during the War, when his family had to convert to Christianity in order to hide. Ferenc still remembered their neighbor, the priest, who was kind to them.
        Now, he was a Jew again, but he still hung on to those same prayers that Father Gábor had once taught him. He liked them. It was like taking God aside for little chats at key points throughout the day. It was comforting to imagine that Ilona was there in room with them, too.
        He opened his window, surprised at the temperateness of the weather. Usually he liked when the brisk air channeled into his small one-room apartment; but, this morning, he felt equally grateful for the warmth. God had surely blessed them today, after all that cold.
        Mr. Székely was not a rich man. His living quarters were unassuming indeed—you might generously call them “quaint.” It was just a shoebox with a bed along one wall, arranged so that Mr. Székely’s head was underneath the window when he laid down, and a shared kitchen as well as some toilets down the hall. He did have his own sink, in which he proceeded to splash water over his face—his traditional start to his day for the past eighty-some-odd years—since before running water was first brought to his childhood village. He used to fetch the vibrant ice-cold water from the well himself every morning. But he always splashed it over his face, and it was always vibrantly cold. There were some days where he might, under some circumstance or another, have been forced to wake up at dawn, when it was just him and the cows. But if he had his way about it, he wouldn’t wake up until long after the sun.
        He proceeded to put on his loose shirt and buckle his loose pants, just like he did everyday. The shirt was a white coarse fabric with faint blue stripes, and the pants were beige and heavy, but comfortable. Mr. Székely was always comfortable. Although it was a little warmer out, Mr. Székely still opted for his itchy green sweater. God, how many years now had he had this same sweater? He was too old now to think the weather wouldn’t change in a heartbeat.
        As was his wont, he went down the stairs to the courtyard of his building, taking care to stop and say good morning to all his neighbors who were leaning out their open windows or sitting in the courtyard, enjoying the sun. There was little Ádám again, throwing his hard rubber ball against the wall, playing catch with himself. There were large chips in the wall, and even in perfect condition the stones were rough and uneven, so more often than not, the hard rubber ball wouldn't bounce straight back to him, and little Ádám was sent running after it in every direction.
        “Good morning Ádám!” the old man loudly and excitedly proclaimed, setting a cheerful tone for little Ádám’s and his morning both.
        “Good morning Mr. Székely,” Ádám responded. He dispensed with any formality and carried on running after his ball—he was too familiar with Ferenc at this point. “Good luck today!”
        Ferenc chuckled good-naturedly. The boy’s mother had more likely than not instructed him to say this. Ferenc was almost entirely positive that little Ádám had no idea what he was wishing his highly esteemed elderly neighbor good luck for. He probably didn’t even know what Mr. Székely was so highly esteemed for, anyway—but he knew all the neighbors treated him with extra deference, even more than was usually paid to the elderly, so he had to, too. In any case, after his brief well wishes, Ádám immediately went back to throwing his ball, thoughts of Ferenc Székely—the famous novelist, the Holocaust survivor, the proud Hungarian, the nondescript neighbor—far from his mind.
        Every day, Ferenc went to the same café. If it ever had had a name, the white lettering had long ago faded off the broad red sign above the café’s façade.
But whatever it was called, this café was like a public square for the wise and wizened Jews of Budapest’s 7th District—or, Ferenc Székely and his illustrious circle. 
        He could have walked there in his sleep. The bright perennial trees of the park on his block were as austerly green as ever, in fact possibly even more so because of the way the autumn light hit them. The sidewalk was brown and unassumingly tidy, and cars were not yet on the street. The few people he passed, he gave a broad grin too. “Good morning!” he loudly proclaimed—Mr. Székely’s rapidly diminishing hearing was proverbial in the neighborhood—and the passerby would nod right back at him, incapable of resisting making the same grin back. One young man, in all likelihood a student, based on the way he was dressed and his imperious, prematurely self-serious bearing, also offered Ferenc the same well wishes as the little boy from his building.
        “Good luck, Mr. Székely,” said the young man.
        “Thank you, young man,” Ferenc replied. “And tell me,” he said—the young man, who had passed him walking in the opposite direction, deferentially stopped and was all ears to whatever this old distinguished gentleman—a personal hero of his—would have to say. “Are you a writer as well?”
        “How did you guess it?” said the young man, genuinely astonished.
        “Then I would like to wish you good luck as well!” Mr. Székely said with inimitable enthusiasm and earnest, good-hearted cheer.
        “A thousand thanks, Mr. Székely! And might I add,” the young man made so bold as to say, “I, nor any of my peers, would not be writing today were it not for you.”
        Ferenc merely smiled—as broad and as artless as ever—waved, and passed along, humbly requesting that the young writer might have a good day.
        By and by he made his way to the simple café, unadorned even by name. Ferenc Székely was feeling bright, clear-headed, and clear of heart. The world, even at eighty-nine, was his oyster.
        His acquaintances were already there, drinking paper cups of bitter espresso on their rickety chairs, rusty at the joints, in an arrangement they were all but assigned to by seating chart. Already they were holding court with a decorous energy, quiet yet assured and unstumbling, the talk of men who could converse with one another as freely and precisely as one talking to oneself in the confines of one’s own head, the product of years. Naturally, it helped that the subjects they touched upon were always the same, so that the viewpoints they shared were all, almost word for word, rehearsed to a high sheen.
        Ferenc Székely took his place to a fanfare that might have seemed restrained to the outside observer. Yet in the context of the 7th District, and of this particular café, it was as if the services of a brass band had been retained in Székely’s especial honor. Today was not just any other day. They were awaiting the delivery of the newspapers.
        “Today’s the day, old friend,” said Lajos Tóth, baker’s son turned literary renegade. When he graduated from university in the ‘50s, he was thirty-four years old; but before that, he had already graduated from the school of hard knocks at Birkenau.
        The door to the café jingled and out walked István Farkas. Farkas’s family had been spared deportation during the war because of their advantageous political position in the capital, but his father, God rest his soul, had lost everything. Farkas had established his literary reputation in the free-thinking Paris of the 1980s—but he was back in his home of Hungary now, and he was as frank, political, and cuttingly cynical as ever.
        “I just woke up Aunt Margit Nagy,” said István, “and told her no-good son still has not returned with this morning’s shipment of the papers!”
        Old Margit Nagy—who was young to the six gentlemen assembled—was the amiable and toothless proprietress of the comfortable khaki and peeling moss-green establishment. Her loafing son, Tamás Nagy, or “Tomi,” as he was affectionately known, was almost fifty, and perennially late. He would be late to his own funeral, Béla Kovács, another of the famous literati of the café terrace, liked to say.
        “That Tomi,” Béla chimed in, like clockwork, “would be late to his own funeral!”
        This aside was met with much merriment—but to the outside observer, he would have only heard scattered grunts. But that was how these men were. They could often be very forthcoming, but like well-worn bearings, tried and true within their long-rambling wheel, amongst each other they could dispense with much of the brittle edge that characterizes performance.
        Old Ms. Nagy liked sleeping in even later than Mr. Székely, which was saying something. Until she had dusted herself off the small bed she kept on the second floor of the café, the old men of the terrace were at liberty to operate the espresso machine themselves. Tamás Nagy would have been no help for that—he probably didn’t even know how to use his mother’s espresso machine. But he had his own way of going about things, Ferenc Székely was fond of saying. Who knows, he was probably the wisest out of the lot of them, expounded Ferenc.
        Jósef Németh too soon appeared in the threshold of Old Ms. Nagy’s cafe.
        “Look what I found in Aunt Margit’s cupboard!” cried Jósef. Out of the bunch of them, Jósef Németh was the youngest, a hale and hearty seventy-three. So he didn’t hobble carefully down the small step down to street level from the cafe, but veritably leaped it. He hoisted a bottle of vermouth over his head like a prizefighter’s belt, to the general approval of the terrace.
        Out of all of them, he was also the most well-known, and the most wealthy. This was for one reason, and one reason only; and as was typical of Jósef Németh, he wasn’t long in reminding his friends of what that reason was.
        In his other hand, Németh was carrying a stack of six small glasses, and he quickly, yet in no particular hurry, began pouring an early drink for each of the old venerable writers on the terrace. “I’d like to propose a toast,” he said. “To Ferenc Székely!”
        “Hear, hear!” came the general mutter, along with the clinking of glass.
        “But if it isn’t you Ferenc,” Németh added hastily—here it comes, thought András Kocsis, by far the least well-known and least wealthy of the group, who never recovered after the Kádár era, and now ran a laundromat. 
        “—then I still hope we can at least toast to celebrate the great democratic writer, a defender of liberty, and a great Jew—not unlike yourself, Ferenc—Philip Roth. Hear, hear!”
        Again the men toasted—but really, most of the men were enjoying themselves and would probably have taken a sip of their drinks anyway, without having needed Jósef Németh to prompt them to it. András Kocsis was a conspicuous exception, and although he was thirsty, he instead turned his head away from the table and looked at the road, and the dust rising off it.
        “Roth, as we all know, was a great champion of the Hungarian people. It wasn’t so long ago that, with the series he put out from Penguin Press, ‘Writers from the Other Europe’, many great careers were given an important boost in international attention due to his efforts. Barring Ferenc, the beauty and obvious literary quality of whose work is beyond reproach—then if any man is worthy of the Nobel Prize, I have no doubt in my mind, it’s Roth! Hear, hear!” Once again, he had to say the “hear, hear!” part himself.
        As Németh was the only man at the table whose work had been translated into English, and thus stood better able to enjoy international recognition, certain others at the table took umbrage with what they characterized as his grandstanding.
        “Shut up about Philip Roth!” said András Kocsis.
        Actually, a slight correction—Jósef Németh was the only man at the table whose work had been translated into English. Just last year, Ferenc Székely received the same honor himself.
        “In my mind it’s all but assured. How it could not be you, Ferenc, after all the good things they’ve been saying about your career in the press? And what with your new translation. For Christ’s sake, it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize!”
        “Almost longlisted,” Székely raised a finger and humbly corrected.
        “My own career was cut down in the very spring of its potential,” Kocsis went on, somewhat ponderously, “but you’ve devoted yourself tirelessly to the overhaul of all those old mores that held me down in the mire. You fought for freedom. And you, you were stronger than I ever was. Look at you—you made something of yourself! And you didn’t need Philip Roth to do it for you! The Nobel Prize committee sees that—anyone could see it. No one more richly deserves that prize than you.”
        Around the table, everyone’s glasses were refilled by Miklós Varga. He was the only one in the old men’s circle who wasn’t a writer—although it’s been said that he was a very literary man in his day. Now he mostly just drank. If Jósef Németh hadn’t come out with that bottle of vermouth, rest assured, Miklós Varga would have just as lief taken frequent, cautious little nips from the golden flask he always kept with him in the chest pocket of the shirt he never washed.
        He was also by far the oldest, just as Jósef Németh was by far the youngest. It was hard to say with any precision because, by dint of either a temperamental humble reserve, or extreme old age, he didn’t or couldn’t talk, but most estimates around the neighborhood clocked him at over a hundred years old. No one knew where he lived, or how he got there every morning, but come as early as they like, Miklós Varga was always there waiting for them before any of the rest of the group arrived. He was always the last to leave, too, sharing a bottle of schnapps with old Aunt Margit while she sweeped up the terrace. As far as Ferenc Székely’s claim to the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miklós Varga had no discernible opinion on the matter.
        Everyone else, on the other hand, went around audaciously voicing theirs. Everyone, that is, besides Ferenc himself.
        “Rumors have been circulating for a while now,” Lajos Tóth chimed in. “I know of at least six nominations already. But I suppose you already know all that, huh, Ferenc?”
        Ferenc shyly shook his head. “I know nothing about nothing!” he said, matter-of-factly. Everyone laughed. Even old Miklós Varga—in his hoarse, grating sort of way. Mr. Varga tried to refill his glass from the bottle of vermouth, but there was only enough for half a drink. He shrugged, and used his flask to fill the rest of the glass.
        In the midst of all this, István Farkas abruptly cleared his throat. “Ahem,” he said. “I have to make an announcement—forget those nominations. Forget the illustrious names the whole world over who have done our countryman the honor of recognizing, as he has always, and rightly, been recognized, the euphonium and incisive high tone of dear Ferenc’s work. As writers, thinkers, and peers, their estimation means everything to us as men. But we are more than just men,” István declared, cantering his way up to the gallop of a speech—“or rather, we are not just men of the world. We are sons, brothers, fathers, grandfathers. As our reputation strengthens and grows we may retain great satisfaction. But we must never forget where we came from. And my friend Ferenc—I know that you, for one, have never once forgotten.”
        He looked keenly into his compatriot’s eyes, his voice full of emotion.
        “Hear, hear!” rasped András Kocsis.
        “I’m not finished!” István corrected. András immediately became flushed, and the smattering of discreet yet enthusiastic applause and cheering of glasses amongst the men that had erupted quickly died down in embarrassment of having interrupted István’s speech, whom all who were present were in agreement in thinking of as especially illustrious.
        He continued: “Ferenc, I have here in my jacket something fittingly special for you on this special day.”
        “Where did you get that?” gasped Ferenc, who already recognized the handwriting on the envelope that, just now, István pulled out from his pocket. “Is that what… what…”
        “What you think it is?” István finished the thought, helpfully. “Yes, my dear Ferenc, it is. Here, read for yourself.”
        With shaky hands Mr. Székely gratefully reached for what Mr. Farkas held out to him.
        It was a letter from Ilona Székely, his late wife (obviously written from before she had passed).
        “Would you do us the honor of reading it aloud?” István asked.
        Ferenc, in a trembling sort of voice, answered in the affirmative. Lajos and Béla, who were sitting on either side of Ferenc—and who were also probably the two men at that table who were closest to him in life—patted him on the back. András Kocsis got up and walked around the table just so he could pat him on the back too, and all the men around the table gave him encouraging, yet knowing, little grunts. Tears were running down the historically great Hungarian literary figure’s face.
        He choked momentarily, then proceeded to read:
        “Dear Ferenc.” Once more, Mr. Székely choked momentously. He read on. “If you’re reading this, that means you’ve been selected for the Nobel Prize. I always knew one day you would achieve this lifelong dream of yours. No artist deserves it more richly than you. I only regret I could not be there with you on this occasion you have so often longed for. I love you, my Feri. You are an honor to all of our people the world over. Long live the Hungarian!”
        Székely was in full-on tears now, weeping joyously, companionably. How did Farkas even get this artifact? Ferenc—everyone—was in awe. Truly nothing could have better underscored or elevated this important day.
        “My friends, I am so overfilled with joy, I cannot even speak. Can it be true? Can all of this be real?”
        “It is real,” said István. “It’s real. Enjoy this. Soak it in.”
        “Ahem-hem-hem.” Béla Kovacs cleared his throat. “Ferenc, before we begin the festivities proper—and trust me, there will be festivities”—good-natured cheering all around—“I would like you to do me the honor of permitting me to read, with you as my audience, a toast I have composed for just this glorious occasion.”
        “Hear hear!”s all around—even from Ferenc, who coughed them out through sobs.
        “My family, it’s true,” Kovacs went on… he was choking up himself now… “It’s true—my family was transported to the very same camp as the Székelys.” 
        A brief pause, while he sobbed violently, yet briefly.
        “It was so long ago…”
        Again, a brief, violent sob.
        “Yet the memory of the people I once knew lingers on as vibrantly as if it were only yesterday—as if we were never transported to the camps at all.”
        Everyone was weeping now. Even old Miklós Varga was weeping, weeping into his flask… Actually, what he did sounded more like a whinny, but still—for the men of this small, 7th District circle, it was a very spectacular occurrence indeed.
        “To be able to sit at this table with you today is a miracle, and also a miraculous blessing. Aside from how I might feel personally, however, it is also the greatest honor: as a Hungarian, as a Jew, and as a man who has eyes, who has been blessed with the marvelous capacity to see, as well as the marvelous gift of education, who can read.”
        The whole table had now progressed, like Varga, from weeping to whinnying. Who among us would not have whinnied with them? We are not made of steel.
        “Professionally, I can also say that as I sit beside you today, I am sitting beside the object of my greatest envy. What you have managed to achieve in the arena of belles lettres would be inconceivable were there not irrefutable proof of your accomplishments right in front of me—in every book store in our great, proud nation of Hungary—on the shelves of every great, proud Hungarian home!”
        “Hear, hear!”
        “So let us raise our glasses—and Varga, you can go ahead and raise two—”
        Laughter abounded on the small patio in the Budapest 7th District.
        “Here’s to the toast of Hungary—the toast of the Jews—and from today on, the toast of the whole world!”
        It’s funny, it was only six old men, and one old woman, clapping, but why did it sound like the deafening applause of the concert hall after the soloist walks on stage for an encore?
        Just then—beep beep. Who should have arrived but old Tamás Nagy.
        “Tomi you old laggard!” cried Béla Kovács, trying to reprise the successful joke he made earlier. “Look who decided to show up!”
        Tamás Nagy emerged from his old, ramshackle car only with great difficulty—the car sat very low to the ground, and it took considerable maneuvering for him to contort his big belly around the steering wheel and out of the narrow chassis, and he then had to rely on old, creaky bones—as old and as creaky as the car itself—to lever himself up. He then waddled his way to the other side of the car, where with equal difficulty he was constrained to lean back down in order to retrieve a twine-tied bundle of today’s issue of Népszava through the passenger-side window.
        Now, Tamás had parked rather far away, so the whole congress of men had to wait as he approached them. This provided for all a splendid opportunity to toast and mock the poor mental invalid, the café mongerer’s son.
        “Keep limping, loser!”
        “You’re lazy! Ha!”
        “Your mom’s my bitch!”
        That last one was József Németh, and even he knew he’d gone too far. Tamás Nagy paid him no mind, of course—as he carried the bundle of newspapers to his mother’s café, he seemed hardly to notice any of the old men’s screaming at all, and was as beautifully sanguine as ever. But it was as if the air had been sucked out of the group.
        “Hey József,” András Kocsis averred, “Philip Roth is my bitch.”
        Good—everyone laughed. The air sucked back in.
        “Ferenc,” Lajos Tóth said, deciding to break up the wait as Tómas came trundling towards them—“I want to ask you something personally, as someone who’s known you for a long time. And I’m sure all the rest of us guys will want to hear too…”
        The “hear, hear!”s that Tóth all but summoned came rolling duly in.
        “What does it mean to you, to be honored in this way, with the whole world watching? I mean really, from the heart? You’ve dedicated your whole life to literature—you practically eat, sleep, and breathe it! To be finally recognized in the pantheon of the world’s greatest writers…”
        All the men started chatting at once, mostly mumbled remarks about the startling profundity of the question their friend had thought to ask.
        Until István Farkas told them all to be quiet.
        “Shhh! Hey, guys, pay attention. I want to hear Ferenc’s answer. Go on, Ferenc, tell us. We’re listening.”
        The group now quiet, Ferenc Székely took another moment to gather his thoughts.                 Finally he spoke to them:
        “How else can I feel? A lifetime’s worth of toil. There’s a part of me that feels that this is what all my long years have been leading towards… Look—I would be lying if I said the recognition would mean nothing to me. The truth is, it would mean everything. But mostly what it means to me, I’m sorry to say, is not even as noble as that vulgar pride to which I have just admitted. As you know, I have had, over the years, many children.”
        Much nodding of heads and mutterings of acknowledgement from around the table. Ferenc’s wide network of romantic entanglements and legal dependencies was proverbial.
        In the background, Tamás Nagy was still hobbling his way towards them.
        “My children with Ilona are already grown up, and can take care of themselves. As are my children with Svetlana, Erzsébet, Katalin, and Júlia. But when I think of all my children with the other Erzsébet, and with Rebecca, and with Anikó, and with Magdolna, along with the son I adopted with Bedřich, and the children I had with Yuki, Min-hee, Tsao-tsai, Eszter, Abigail Watson, Zsuzsanna, and Teréz as well…”
        Ferenc was forced at the very thought to lean back in his chair and wipe his brow with his handkerchief.
        “Frankly, gentlemen, my biggest motivation, and the largest part of my hope that that prize today is my own…” He looked off to Tamás Nagy in the background as he said this. “Well, to put it crudely, it’s financial. I am in debt. A lot of debt. I lead a simple life—monastic, really, if you think about it. And yet the thought that I might remain a burden to my beautiful families, even after death…”
        A stifled sob—
        “Well, it just pains me more than I truly care to say.”
        There was not a dry eye on the café terrace. 
        “Well said, Ferenc!”
        “A man for others to his end!”
        “Hear, hear,” someone cried out.
        “Hear, hear!”
        It was then, with everyone clapping, that Tamás Nagy finally hobbled his last few steps up to the café terrace.
        “Hey everybody!” he hallooed, blithely clueless to the raillery to which he had been exposed during the long walk over.
        Everyone appreciated this cluelessness. It endeared him to them. But perhaps only Ferenc Székely admired it.
        What Ferenc did next surprised everyone. Usually the quiet, shrinking one of the group, on this particular morning—well, actually it was afternoon, but it was the morning for Ferenc Székely—he got up to greet Tamás Nagy, clasping his hand.
        “Tamás fiam,” said Ferenc—Tamás, my son—signalling ultimate respect. “What news do you have for us today?”
        Blithely clueless as ever, Tomi plopped the bundle of newspapers down in the middle of the seven men.
        Immediately, József Németh jumped on the package, tearing it open as if he were a desperate refugee, tearing open a ration of food.
        “Aha! Aha! I got it!” he cried, as several of the men pounced upon the individual newspapers at once. Finally having it in their hands, a calm cascaded over the assembly of Hungarian literati present on the café terrace that morning.
        On the front page, a notice read: “NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS ANNOUNCED. PAGE 7.”
        The whole assembly of old men flipped to page seven at once.
        Although they were outside, in the open air, the suction of air from the café terrace was palpable as one by one, in quick succession, the old men turned the pages of their newspapers, as old Ferenc Székely looked on in a humble affectation of anxiety…
        Tamás Nagy, blithesome as ever, looked on at the proceedings with a broad, toothy grin.
        Jószef Németh was the first to see the headline. Audibly, he gasped, as, one by one, the rest of the gentlemen assembled at Aunt Margit’s nameless café came to read what he had already discovered.
        Ferenc Székely—had not won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Instead, what the gentlemen assembled that day at Aunt Margit’s nameless café in Budapest, in the 7th district, saw when they flipped their issues of Népszava (many of them huddled over Béla Kovács’s shoulder, but some of them had grabbed a copy all to themselves in an anxious rush) to page 7, was the face of—American pop singer, Bob Dylan.
        “What?” shouted out István Farkas, incredulously, upon reading the news—quickly followed by Lajos Tóth, quickly followed by András Kocsis. The remainder of the men, dumbfounded, were struck speechless, their jaws on the floor.
        The winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was not a member of the literati at all. Bob Dylan. An American. He had written no novels. He had nary written an essay. He was a pop singer—a troubadour—an American!
        “Ach!” cried out Székely, involuntarily.
        “This… this isn’t possible!” Lajos Tóth, his longest and loyalest friend, cried out, dismayed, alighting, despite himself, from his seat, the metal chair clanging against the gravel and kicking up dust. “What… what…”
        “What have they done!” pronounced István Farkas, finishing the sentence for him, calm and assertive though stunned.
        All the while, old Miklós Varga kept taking sips from his tarnished flask, sputtering, like an old lemon that won’t start, with scarcely regarded laughter at the whole scene. And in his corner, simple-minded Tamás Nagy, somewhat scared by the sudden change of atmosphere on the patio, jumped back, visibly startled, and crept back to safety, inside his mother’s shop—slowly, as if in fear of being discovered and jumped upon by the seven angry men congregated outside.
        The rest of the men mopped their brows, mortified at their friend Ferenc’s expense, immobile and at a complete loss for words to say. 
        József Németh went first.
        The youngest of the group, he was still overbrimming with an optimism of which the rest of his companions at the café had long since divested themselves. “There has to be something that can be done about all this!”
        “What’s the use?” Ferenc, recollecting himself, said. He was attempting to sound strong, but the effect was muddled. “The decision has already been made.”
        “Besides,” he also said, after a moment. “There’s always next year.” A charming glint shimmered in the old man’s eye, as everyone, himself not least, already knew—he would not live to see the year’s end. He was too old, and had lived through too much already.
        At this, András Kocsis, the firebrand, got up. Flustered, he groped for words for a few seconds—sputtering like old Miklós Varga—before saying:
        “Something that can be done? Something must be done!” He was seizing upon the unfortunate infelicity with which his countryman, Németh—whom had never been dear friend to András Kocsis, no sir—had phrased his entreaty. It was a personalized attack, and rather out of place given the circumstances, but it was subtle enough to go unnoticed amongst the men.
        “The Academy has turned into a political theater!” he continued. “No one cares… no one cares about real art anymore! No one cares about literature!”
        “Here is a man who has given his life to the medium…” Béla Kovács finally made bold enough to say. 
        Ferenc Székely, this entire time, surveyed his friends erupting into battle as though they were mere empty surroundings at the top of a long hike. He made a half-hearted attempt to stop them but was immediately shot down. What could he do? He was embarrassed.
        “Did he win?”
        Everyone turned.
        Old Aunt Nagy must have woken up. She was standing at the threshold of the café, looking at the men with ingenuous cataracts.
        “Did he win?” she again asked.
        “No!” shouted András Kocsis, louder than usual so Aunt Margit Nagy could hear him. “He didn’t win Aunt Margit, he was robbed!”
        “He won?” she asked, genuinely enthused.
        “No!” came a general shout.
        “No, he didn’t win, Aunt Margit!” shouted András. “Tragedy, Aunt Margit! Disaster, Aunt Margit!”
        Aunt Margit immediately got the gist, and erupted in tears. “He was stolen from him!” she cried out, convincingly, albeit in her frail voice, overshadowed in a whisper. “Who won?” she demanded. “Who stole him?”
        “Bob Dylan!” came again the general cry.
        “Bob Dylan, Aunt Margit!” András Kocsis shouted. “Bob Dylan!”
        Aunt Margit Nagy, in return, attempted to repeat the name András had just told her, but it came out in a loud rasp that came nowhere close to the mark.
        “Vladimir Lenin?” she choked out.
        Jószef Németh suddenly stood up with confidence, drawing everyone’s attention back to the main circle.
        “I know, I know, wait,” he said—“maybe we can apply to Philip Roth to help you!
        “Shut the fuck up about Philip Roth!” Ferenc suddenly snapped.
        “Yeah, shut the fuck up!” Kocsis was glad to take the opportunity of shouting.
        In his head, Németh made a mental note: I must remember to write to Philip, sending my condolences that he was once again skipped over. What a shame, he thought. A pop star in his stead!
        And then, in the same letter—he’d throw in a plea anyway, asking Mr. Roth if he couldn’t get Székely published in the States as well. Despite what his friends, who were always rude to him, might have said on the topic… But look!
        Székely, while Németh was making that mental note, had, in a fit of passion, gotten up.
        “F-Ferenc…” sputtered out Lajos Tóth, survivor of the gas chambers. “Where are you going?”
        “I gotta get outta here,” Ferenc Székely yelled out behind him, not turning his head but throwing his left hand up aggressively as he did so.
        The assembled gang was silent. All of a sudden it became apparent someone, in the midst of all their badinage, was singing.
        “I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me!” Miklós Varga drooled.
        “She showed me her room, isn’t it good,” he pronounced with an insane emphasis—“Norwegian wood!”
        “That’s not Dylan,” laughed Németh. “That’s the Beatles, Miklós.”
        “You think I don’t know the Beatles? Pussy!”
        Now Miklós Varga was silent.
        Now everyone was silent.
        “I once had a girl, or should I say…”
        It took everyone a moment to even register. Someone was still singing. Then, as a body, they all turned. It was Tamás Nagy—oh, that old Tamás Nagy again...


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