Prologue
Like the
champion in Sienkiewicz’s novel, I have made a covenant and
started to look for coins. It was almost a year ago that I made the promise of
not leaving the country until the shield is complete. Aiming to complete a
puzzle is always driven by an egoistic drive. You expect that the last piece
will reveal something about you. The underlining urge in all of us is to be
special, to be a defining element in the complex mechanisms of interactions;
recognized as an individual element. Achieving greatness is not a clandestine project
for any who embark on a journey with the prospect of returning home stronger.
It is the strongest, yet most just irony of life, that the last, long awaited
piece of the puzzle was set in place not by me, but by a friend.
1. Death of the Traveller
The first
twenty-four hours are decisive. It’s been about that long ago that I
left the plane, a rather comfortable ride after the national bus company
almost landed us in the ditch next to the highway. The metal structure all
tilted, passengers screaming and grabbing the seats to save their lives… My
advice: if you drive a coach with hundred onboard, don’t sleep.
2. The Funeral Feast
All of this seems a distant memory now as I walk
down the Körút in the afternoon, jeans soaking wet from staring at the falling sky in the
thunderstorm when the night sky was made luminous to outline the rooftops of
the city. The screaming pain of the head is not lulled by coffee, but made worst
by the knowledge that my wallet is gone. I been kissed on the lips by beautiful
women, and it still hurts. I don’t remember the name, I think it was Boozeapest.
She now surrounds with the aura of decadent glow of past greatness and cheated
fortunes of the present.
3. The Passenger Reborn
Looking in the eyes of the passersby, - the workers, the students and the trumps, the lovers, the players, the good and the evil, - I know I am
nothing, but still alive. Hubris is
defeated. Yet looking in the eyes of my fellow beings I know that I am good as
ever. Ready to piss in the face of ignorance. Ready to rock again. Ready to
wipe a tear from my eye and start packing up again.
Epilogue
We, my
friends, who part from everything we used to know to become better, how foolish
we are. As we left one by one I had to recognize as Koestler’s Rubashov did, that people do not
add together their traits to make a group. They multiply. The greatness of the
individual is paradoxically in dissolving in a group. Walking on the
broken concrete of this once great capital of the Danube, I know this: everything
from the wasted ground to the vaults of the sky is connected. It is only from the
limitations of our minds that we can see only parts of the interconnectedness. Friends,
my Teachers, if I learned anything on this voyage it was from you. Even if we
shall disperse into the four corners of this globe, our connections, mark my
words, will not dissolve. If there was anything we got out of this voyage we will
carry it on in ourselves, wherever. Now, fellow travellers, wipe the tears,
start packing and smile again.
I dedicate this drama to
you.
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