A short story from Child Lock translated by Owen Good

HEAVENS ABOVE

Heavens above, yelped my grandma Irén when we arrived at the summer house in Füred. She keeled over backwards, and if my cousin Ferike hadn’t been standing behind her she would have measured her length from the shock. When I was born, it had seemed there was a chance – my 1 foot 4 inches had given my grandma a slither of hope the halfbreed, foreign genes of my mum hadn’t won, and her granddaughter would be a bow-legged Mongol-progeny after all. But I quickly grew out of my short stature, and on Mother’s Day at the nursery my grandma had to face up to reality for the first time: I was tall. She called the nursery teacher over and forfeited two thousand forints so I wouldn’t sing The Branch of the Lilac for Mother’s Day from the back row.

In the heavens above there was more reproach than wonder. I really could have lost an inch or two for the family photo – after all, it came once a year. My grandma immediately called an emergency council with her two younger sisters. Her bum was as big as the other two’s put together; year after year it got more and more rotund, as though it were sucking the fat out of her sisters. You’ll stand beside Uncle Laci, sounded the verdict, and wear horizontal stripes. Granny Irén’s constant nagging actually did me good. Anytime I was wallowing in self-pity over my rare, genetically caused, colossal height, I would get a right hook from her that snapped me out of it. Sometimes I grew a bit on purpose, just to annoy her.

The photographer pressed the button and as the flash went Granny Irén yelled, oh, where’s Gyula? She turned to my dad, we were supposed to pick him up at the station. The poor man had had to wait for a train with a bicycle carriage, because the ticket collector said a wheelchair counts as a bicycle and made him get off halfway at Fehérvár. Why does Uncle Gyula have no legs, I asked my dad in the car, who turned up Kossuth Radio. Ferike leaned over to me: every fifteen years the whole family has to get a check-up, he said slyly, everyone’s made to lie in a trough one-by-one, and if anyone is over the maximum length, then out comes the huge cutting board and they cut off the parts that stick out.

Gyula was already dozing at the station. Ferike and I quickly lifted him into the car. It felt strange to show my strength, over the last couple of months my limbs had grown so rapidly I could barely control them – I reached for a glass like an angler casting out across the water. The chair wouldn’t fit anywhere, we had to tie it to the back of the car and so we came back along the roads extra slow. Granny Irén was irritated when she opened the door, everything had melted under her face powder, the only thing still holding her face together, she huffed and puffed, holding her enormous, pillowcase breasts while her two sisters fanned her. We stood for the photo straight away, I edged in beside Uncle Laci in my prison clothes and Gyula wheeled himself into the seated row. Granny Irén yelled at us, you pack of degenerates, smile would you? And the second flash came. Satisfied with the shot, the photographer showed it to Granny Irén, who furiously staggered to her feet. The bottom of her bead necklace had been cut off because the back row was too tall; she turned to me and yelled, that goddam Jewish mother of mine, why did I have to grow so tall, was it not enough I had us lose half of Hungary’s territory, and Gyula getting crippled because of our type too? I was afraid; the moment had come for me to be dismembered like Gyula, but her younger sister Etelka calmed the old woman down, stop being a Nazi, Irén, would you? You know yourself them Jews are all short types.

Before the third flash, Granny Irén licked the virgin dangling on her beads to make it shine, and forced a grin. In the picture she looked more bitter than angry. The necklace showed, but now my head was out of shot. All right, said the old woman, let’s stand up, and like that, she did away with the seats in the front row, always a key feature of our family photos. The photographer dashed over to her, helped her up and Granny Irén fixed her rumpled suit, straightened her teeth, and said, ready. We stood awkwardly. Everyone glanced down at Uncle Gyula but no one dared say a word. You’re trying to make a fool of me, Irén yelled when the photographer showed her the preview: the head was the only bit of Gyula in shot. Irén slumped to the chair. My dad kneeled in front of her and stroked her freshly permed hair. No one takes it seriously, whimpered Irén, what’s going to happen when I’m gone, tell me! Etelka resolved the crisis: she appeared with a long skirt, long enough to swallow her whole, and offered it to Irén, telling her, give the skirt to your granddaughter, so the girl can hunker down without it showing.

Dizzy from the heat, I wobbled to Irén, I got vertigo just looking down at her, like I was looking down from the roof of a towering, swaying skyscraper. Irén relaxed a little. I bent down so she could pull over my head the hulking skirt which had allegedly been bought from a touring circus in Upper Hungary – that is to say, Slovakia – a giant woman had worn it and dwarves would jump out from underneath. I was practically squatting and Uncle Laci was half an inch taller than me. Granny Irén, after she’d dobbed a fresh layer of powder on her face, turned around, and for the first time in years she smiled at me. For a second, she believed I really was as short as I looked, that I fit into the family, perhaps in her mind Uncle Gyula’s legs had grown back too, and Transylvania had been annexed back to eastern Hungary.

The photographer, for the fifth time now, took our picture. As his right index finger pressed we heard a loud smack. Granny Irén was splayed across the floor. I ran to her and immediately began pressing on her chest, I pressed and pressed, as long as I could, the rhythm pulsated through me, Granny Irén couldn’t die, who’s going to nag at me, I pressed and pressed, if I wasn’t so bloody tall, none of this would have happened, I pressed and pressed, I was sweating right through the stripy blouse, the stripy trousers and the huge skirt covering them too; Granny Irén – even if it was a cruel stepmother – was like a mother to me, and I pressed and pressed. The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, they had to tear me away from my grandma. I lay in a heap beside her in the garden of the Füred summer house.

I’d broken two of her ribs, but that didn’t matter much after a sudden, fatal heart attack. And yet she looked happy lying there, I think she knew that in the last picture, even the virgin was in the shot, glistening around her neck.