Lilac and Flag

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THREE BUTTERFLIES RISE from the field like white ash above a fire. Let my dead help me now. One of them reappears and, flying over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe, alights on a blue flower and opens its wings. On each of her wings the same sign is printed in blackish grey — the grey of the first marks if you draw with a burnt stick on paper. I begin to think of Zsuzsa — or perhaps it is she who begins to think of me. A second butterfly comes down and covers the first; the second one is Sucus. The two of them, wings spread, quiver like four pages of a book open in the wind. Suddenly Sucus flies off. Let my dead help me now. Zsuzsa shuts her wings, slips off the scabious flower, and joins the other two butterflies to fly away over the tall grass which I will soon have to scythe. I have loved them all.

ZSUZSA LIVED IN a house on the hill behind the tanneries. They were tall, open buildings without walls and on each floor the hides were hung to dry in the salt wind that came off the sea. The hides, bulging a little in the wind, looked like giant bats suspended upside down and asleep. For years there had been talk of pulling down the old tanneries and building new ones elsewhere, further away from the coast. The plan had not been carried out because of a warning from the city health department. If the old sheds were destroyed, so the health department threatened, the million rats who lived and bred there would quit the hill and invade Troy. It was in these tanneries that Marius worked long ago, when many men still came back alive from the city.

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