Itt nem sziv hanem ko
With a gesture at his left breast, and a glare -- the minicab driver from Nigeria, six years in London, summing up his twenty-nine years in Budapest as first an apprentice, then an auto mechanic, brought to Hungary through a socialist gesture of friendship toward developing countries from the government before the Pan-European Picnic began. Stones where their hearts should be.
Oh, there were mates at work. Yes. They were OK. But on the street? Go home. Go home. Now they are in the shit, he said gleefully. Britain wants people who know how to work, who want to work. The Hungarians want only Hungarians, but their country is in the shit and their children are running away.
And he could not talk in English about the Rendorseg, the guardians-of-order, the police, and about what we sum up as driving-while-black. He could only splutter.
From the Hammersmith flyover out to Heathrow Terminal 4, then, the conversation mostly in Hungarian. His wife, a Magyar -- "good for fucking, Hungarian women, but not for love" -- came with him to London, has found a younger man, a Turk, wants a divorce and to keep the flat. Legrosszabb a magyar no, Hungarian women are the worst! I make Igen, yes, noises from my corner of the darkened minicab.
An African language, Hungarian, English. If phrenology were true I should have been able to look above and just before his left ear and watch Broca's area throb, put my hand on his head and feel the metabolic hum through the temporal calvaria, its tables paper-thin, hollowed out, remoulded, bosselated from beneath.
Oh, there were mates at work. Yes. They were OK. But on the street? Go home. Go home. Now they are in the shit, he said gleefully. Britain wants people who know how to work, who want to work. The Hungarians want only Hungarians, but their country is in the shit and their children are running away.
And he could not talk in English about the Rendorseg, the guardians-of-order, the police, and about what we sum up as driving-while-black. He could only splutter.
From the Hammersmith flyover out to Heathrow Terminal 4, then, the conversation mostly in Hungarian. His wife, a Magyar -- "good for fucking, Hungarian women, but not for love" -- came with him to London, has found a younger man, a Turk, wants a divorce and to keep the flat. Legrosszabb a magyar no, Hungarian women are the worst! I make Igen, yes, noises from my corner of the darkened minicab.
An African language, Hungarian, English. If phrenology were true I should have been able to look above and just before his left ear and watch Broca's area throb, put my hand on his head and feel the metabolic hum through the temporal calvaria, its tables paper-thin, hollowed out, remoulded, bosselated from beneath.