I am a Poet by Peter Riley
We were staying in Szárhegy, near Gheorgheni, in the house of a retired Hungarian couple who constantly fussed round us in the most charming manner, totally possessed by the instincts of "peasant hospitality" although they lived in a big village now only partly agrarian. In their kitchen/living room we were given a splendid dinner with a delicious demi-sec rosé made by the man himself, and then went out to stroll the streets of the village.
The street they lived in: long, straight, unmetalled but evenly surfaced, other streets off it at right angles, a grid. The houses all one-storey, moderately substantial in the standard pattern, standing in their own kitchen-gardens with orchard trees and wells, wooden fencing round them. All individually decorated, many even with drain-pipe corners decorated with flower-like constructs of the same metal — and equal: all more or less equal to each other.
We turned at the end of their street into a slightly more important road leading towards the centre. We passed on the right one of those long low buildings we've seen in many places, probably relics of communism, which people seem to have difficulty finding a use for. A row of rather high small windows in a dirty white wall along the street, doors at each end, and no signs of use in the windows, which are unpainted and unwashed but undamaged. But the last window with its door, someone had been able to make into a bar: the white wall-paint newer and brighter for the last ten metres, lights on, a couple of tables with chairs on the sidewalk outside it, a few men sitting there. It had been a hot day and was still warm in the dimmed light of a pale cloudless sky.
As we passed by a man stood up from the tables, crossed the road and came up to us. He was small, probably in his thirties, with a drooping moustache, thick ear-length dark hair, and above all two big sorrowful eyes under bushy eyebrows. He took hold of my hand and continued to hold it gently, saying nothing at first, perhaps deciding which language to use. Then, still holding my hand sandwiched between his two but without any pressure, he said in Romanian, "I am a poet. But my brain has been destroyed by alcohol." And his big mournful eyes looked into mine while we nodded sympathetically and waited for whatever came next. He stayed thus a little longer, then without any further business he let go of my hand and returned to the bar across the road.
Copyright © Peter Riley, 2003.