The Hungarian

I first met him on my way home from work, walking the 1.6km up the hill from the park as I always do.  He, limped ahead of me, stooped.  I overtook him easily and in doing so he smiled, turned to me and said “it’s always been this way for me - beautiful women, passing me by”.  Not one to turn away from a compliment I engaged interest - noted that despite the limp and the stoop he would have been good looking once. His white handlebar moustache carefully groomed to resemble a Czar or a Cossack or someone equally exciting. 

And so we began that summer Les Affaire du Intellect - every afternoon at 5.45pm.  From Grosvenor to Walcott Street every subject would be thrown on the table and devoured - world issues resolved - pavement politics outside Than Than‘s liquor store (another refugee from a different war).   He announced himself as Hungarian first and Sagittarian second - seemed to revel in being blessed with a free spirit twice.  I imagined him as a resistance fighter holed up in the mountains outside Budapest fighting communists.  Surviving the winter on wild skinned rabbits, bitter grass and freezing water. Imagined that perhaps his limp was due to a bullet, or worse, a spell in a concentration camp. 

I began to believe him when he said that I was the only friend he had in the world, treasured the violets he would pull from his coat pocket which he said he grew in his garden just for me.  I imagined myself - a Sister of Mercy - dispensing romance to exiled resistance fighters - bestowing upon them all the charm, beauty and grace he insisted I possessed by the spade-full.  Summer stumbled into three other seasons. There was hardly a pause in our sentences. 

One day I arrived early.  Saw him limping ahead with another Sister of Mercy.  Flourish from his pocket a bunch of violets.  Heard him say he was Hungarian - and a Sagittarian.

We don’t speak anymore.  I have hung up my habit and resigned from dispensing charity to the romantically negligent.  The road ahead, all 1.6kms of it - is now simply a road. A strip of tar and stone - there are no heroes holed up in the mountains.  These days as we pass, we simply nod at each other.  Leave the problems of the world to escalate at their own giddy pace, unresolved.

I only tell you this because you remind me of him.  Something about the way you limp down the road, violets drooping from your pockets.