Fishing Blues
In Panait Istrati’s The Thistles of the Bărăgan, a classic of interwar Romanian literature written in French, a peasant woman, a mother, dies in the Bărăgan plain after jabbing her finger on a fishbone. In András Visky’s Kitelepítés, or “The Expulsion,” a loving mother’s son who has been banished to the Bărăgan loses his eyesight after a fishing accident.
Fish, not fowl, in the same Romanian steppe, but history complicates the dialogue between these two misfortunes. That’s not only because Visky’s novel was written in Hungarian — not against, but outside of Romanian literature — or because its protagonists are jailed in the Bărăgan for essentially being Hungarian, but because the blinded kid was — is — Visky’s own brother. It’s only outlandish writing until it happens to you.
The Bărăgan deportations were organized in Bucharest and started on Whit Sunday 1951. Kulaks, ethnic Germans, alleged Titoist spies, and other enemies of the people were taken from the Banat and deported to this steppe at the other end of Romania, condemned to forced labor and harsh winters.
Whether understood as an extension of the Gulag or a belated footnote of Vertreibung, by 1956 the Bărăgan chapter was officially closed. And yet, that was the year that sealed the fate of Visky’s family, religious Hungarians with family ties to insurgent Budapest. Visky’s father, a priest, was sent to jail, his mother and his six siblings sent to live in a Bărăgan barrack among other political unreliables, among ghosts of deportations past.
The impact of those four years, two months and eighteen days (as Visky is able to quote from official documentation) on his work as a playwright and theater director is strong — his is a “barracks dramaturgy,” the stage a place of freedom and of captivity, he forever the young boy who, once his departure was granted, kissed the Bărăgan’s ground in gratitude.
He devotes the dramatic monologue Julia or Conversations About Love to the inner life of his mother as she waits for her husband’s release, a compass of sorts to the truly panoramic Die Aussiedlung. Its 822 paragraphs, some just a sentence, some almost a whole page, flow so effortlessly between voices and times, despair and defiance, until nearly every word is like a fountain dug into this bitter earth.
The rivery sentences bring to mind the Soviet writer Leonid Tsypkin, and the whole project owes a lot to the sardonic exile Norman Manea, as in the passages dissecting the language of bureaucracy, or those inspecting the Romanian words the Hungarian-speaking kids gather and collect like jagged shells.
Tsypkin wrote for the desk drawer; Manea started to feel like he was writing for the censor. Their writing had no choice but to be a political act, not least because, before their Soviet lives, these writers had survived Nazi violence. Visky, by contrast, lived in cruel deprivation, but not in the abyss.
Visky can sidestep certain political questions, which usually means stepping into other problems. What grounds him are gratitude and memory, points of arrival after a lifetime of dialogue against historical odds and an existence in and between languages. This is writing so heartfelt and meticulously timed that at some points the mere layout of a page can make you cry.
