Sloan Creative

I tighten the tarp; Maxi stomps and rustles her bridal.
Cool morning, nice for driving.
Our eyes meet, welling, there’s far too much to say;
Just another turn of history’s wheel, I’ve left before, ahead of fevers and hot rebellions.

Today, harvest in, house ready for destruction, Anni and the girls safely ahead.
If I don’t turn and go now, the centuries of stories
And now Jóska’s embrace will hold me here forever,
Until my life hangs at the end of a red-eyed, young peasant’s barrel, or a revenge court’s decision that I am an enemy of the people.

I flick the reins, the horses strength creaks the leather, the tongue, the wagon,
Onto the road and turn east, facing the red masses over the Tisza river who are starting west this morning; killing this way for another day.

By noon, I’ll be turning west, toward the Duna, my first watery protector, and a future anywhere but here.

Today, I write, at my grandfather’s age that day, trying to unravel the darkly poetic forces driving his story and mine, knowing

“that the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the living.”*

Can the living live with anything but the exact intensity and quality of life imparted to them by the dead?

Today, I wonder.

In the first days of October 1944, as the Russian army approached, my grandfather Zoltan Bárczay packed what he could into a horse-drawn wagon and left the family farm in the Hernad Valley, family seat for the last 800 years. He had sent his wife and daughters ahead towards safety the day before.

*Quote from Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes