Interlude

Chargarden*

( *A fiction. )

A cicada's singing a twist of loud static in the shadow out under my window. Across the hill, lit by embers, a plume of billowing, licorice smoke tells me all has been erased. I wait, my fingers blackened, the window blown out by the heat.

This shadow, I, who has been thrust into the ruin of a sky, has crash-landed. It is a black day, and the broken branches crackle beneath my feet.

In this territory, mine for however long it takes for a fire to burn, I catch oncoming glimpses of green. Divesting themselves of the hold of the conflagration, the cicadas are still, done with their urgency.

The smog lifts off over us. Our bones and skin have been seared. There's only the night and there's only the sun.

A coolness squeezes under the branching heat. I stare out the blown window, not to nothingness, but to a movement come though from over the hills, asking me to wait and be still.

A Fidelity

 

I confess to having no political allegiance. For me it's hard enough trying to understand my neighbour without having to try to understand a game played without compassion. To me, anything that veers to the right or the left is suspect.
So then, I've found Tibor Dery's 'Niki - the story of a dog', published in English by Secker and Warburg in 1958. 
A Hungarian from a prosperous background, the author sympathized with Communism up to a certain point in the 1950s when he began to satirize it. From what I can gather, he'd been both a popular figure in Hungarian culture, and then its outcast.
"On November 13th, 1957, the Supreme Hungarian Court pronounced sentence against four leading Hungarian writers, accused of "hostile activities during the events of November 1956 and subsequently aiming at 'overthrowing the order of the state.' "

Communism, like Fascism, equals death to me. Both of them are a sickness of the mind and the feelings. You see the author above. It would seem that Tibor Dery had humanity sufficient to write this story, a story of a man and his wife befriended unreservedly by a stray.

"The imprisonment of Dery and his fellow-writers brought protests from all over the world." 
I'm still reading this marvelous book, capturing, as it does, the paranoia and restrictiveness of a police state. The corrosion of the regime can only have occurred because some among the oppressed remembered to love, and remembered to report that love.