I am standing in front of the mirror and I am afraid that I am bad.
I am ugly because I am bad.
I am a toad because the wicked witch cast a spell on me.
That’s why my head is like a toad.
Jewish.

Get rid of it!

There are clean people, peasants, Germans, soldiers. They go around in boots so they won’t touch a toad. They will trample me underfoot with their boots. Even the girls. The princesses will cast me from them, one after the other. I am not a human being. What a pity. They don’t recognize me and I won’t change back. I will remain at the bottom of the well. I will look up from there mouth agape. Like now.

I turned ashen gray when I thought that the devil is inside me. Why not? Why couldn’t he be? Just now when I looked at my sad face in the mirror, at how terribly ugly I am, it hit me like lightning: I am ugly because I am bad.

While they think I am good. My poor, unfortunate parents.

For a long time I was good.

But then I couldn’t keep it up any more.

Maybe I’m ugly because I am bad.

The bad entered me, and it entered me just now when I raised the question in my mind: aren’t I curious about the bad? Come on, just a bit, just a teeny weenie bit? After all, I am already a liar. What does it come from? Until now I though I was good. I was convinced of it. I’ll die if it turns out not to be true. If I’m like the rest. Not all of them, but most. And everybody from class.

Or if I don’t die, what will I do?

What did the question I heard inside sound like? What if, without my knowing, I’m not at all the way I think, but have a bad side too? A very bad side. And that very moment the shudder: he that can ask is already bad.

Whereas I didn’t even want to ask.

Now I am completely cursed.

I can see it in the mirror.

This first happened to me not long after ’56, at the Pintér Tailor Shop, 10 Petőfi Street, where I went to visit Tom Pintér when we were off school because of the coal shortage. We became friends through the window. The Russians had been here for weeks by then, having to stay in the basement and the siege had somehow ended, but you couldn’t go out on the street and school too was still out, but people could now open their windows. Tomi too was looking out the window from sheer boredom, leaning his head against his hand and daydreaming for hours on end. Theirs was the window below the stone lady with hair like snakes, now that I think of it. Wonder why. And I used to go out to the balcony to take a peek at the street below, hoping to catch a bit more revolution. Or a revolutionary. We noticed each other and for days just looked, thinking how ridiculous the other was. Then I waved to him. And then he called me over to their place. The first time in my life I was visiting someone I knew, and not my parents. A man’s tailor shop, classy, elegant. Private sector. And there was a mirror standing on legs. Both sides of it was a mirror. And it swung on its legs. Intriguing. As we sauntered amidst the busy tailor’s assistants, I took a peek whenever I could. I looked at myself in it, from top to toe. Whether that’s me. And can I be certain? Would I bet my last penny?

How can one know (for sure)?

There was a standing mirror in Olga’s tailor’s shop too. Olga was Grandfather’s lady friend. We visited there a couple of times during the revolution, on Üllői Road. Except it wasn’t this big. A tailor shop for women, small underwear. Corsettes and bras. Once I’m walking around there too, bored, and as I look askance, hey, there’s somebody looking at me, but I don’t even stop, I turn only after taking two more steps – oh! – and back, curious, a child’s looking at me! Is there a child here? And that’s when I realized that it was me. A mirror.
For a second I didn’t recognize myself. I looked like a stranger. Which made me think. I’m afraid I’m bad. I really shouldn’t be looking at myself so much.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me. What makes someone wicked? There’s nothing good to be gained by it.

Or is that the whole point?

They were counting .....s of cotton, I wasn’t paying attention to them, this whole thing here was totally off limits to me, Grandad’s secret love affair, it was strictly forbidden, him bringing me along, but he did, along Üllői Road that had been shot to ruins, among corpses repeatedly crushed by tanks. They were even uglier than the corpses on Köztársaság Square. They had turned black. Those that were hanged in front of Party headquarters had purple flesh.

I tried to distance myself from them.

I didn’t think of anything like this for a long time. Once when I was still very young I asked, what’s this, a mirror, what’s that, oh, it’s painted in the back, that’s what makes it like water. You can see your face in it. Then I dropped the subject.

It’s like a dream that keeps scaring you.

I suddenly thought, I somehow whatchamacallit, that I don’t know how I know that that’s me. What makes me think so? Is it me?

That’s good.

Except, you can’t go behind the picture.

But back then I even made a game of it. I stood next to the mirror, put my hand in front of it, and first I shot a look at the mirror image, then quickly looked in back of the mirror. Though I felt slightly ashamed, still, I had to do it. There was nothing there. Still, I kept looking.

To see that I am.

Then we had to leave, we had to leave that place, I was dragged away, and for a couple of weeks this thing went clear out of my head. I forgot, whereas it’s a fine game, no? Or so it seemed. Great fun. Why had I never played it before? We have a mirror back home too.

The meeting with the mirror, it’s always so sudden. The same thing frightens me in front of all mirrors: something is happening I had not counted on, I realize something I had wished to ignore. Except, that’s not possible. What you know you can’t not know. You can’t undo the thought in your head. It’s already there. And if you say it’s not, you’ve started lying.

I am lying.

I’m so good at it, they don’t even notice usually. Laci Sáth took me down to the boiler room and showed me Popeye’s bawdy house. His father’s creation. Photographs of a comic strip. There’s no way I’m going to tell them. I play the innocent. The Tessényi twins gave me such a beating today, that I’m practically deaf in one ear. I’m not telling them this either. They won’t notice. Only Dános still talks to me. But even he’s ashamed of me. He won’t admit to our friendship in front of the other boys in the class. He doesn’t want the others to shut him out too.

I am the most despised by far.

When I go to school, every day I think, this is the last day. There’s going to be a scandal today because if they try to beat me again, I am going to bang my head into the ground until it splits open. Then the day goes by somehow, and when we go home and I see that they’re not after me today, I’m over it and don’t want to think about it any more. I go into our house, run up the stairs, ring the doorbell with pretended cheer, throw my school bag into the corner, march out on the balcony, or go stare into the bathroom mirror. And spit. I don’t tell them anything of what’s happened. These toad eyes, these toad lips. Pulled out of his mother’s oven black. Urine, dust and ashes. I fell into the well.

How can you keep it a secret all your life?

This is still just the first moment. I could still climb back, with great effort, hanging on to the …..s in the wall of the well with my fingernails, straining to climb back up, the little worm.
I would like to think of my purity that Mother keeps mentioning. That it’s exceptional. Exceptionally suited to being bad.

They called me toad.

But I thought the same thing.

-------------------

I can’t make peace with my ugly mug/pofa.

The collar of my red shirt with the ace of spades pattern is turned up.

If the Toad Prince could manage, why can’t I?

Why is it so difficult to imagine that, just like him, who was also afraid to see a little princess home for some time, whereas he’d been bringing up what they’d been throwing down into his well for years, but he didn’t have the nerve to introduce himself, in case one of the young girls should show pity, start talking to her, let her discover what a fine sense of humor he’s got, what a brainy and mature person he is, even if he’s a toad. Whereas the Toad Prince jumped into the well without delay, he didn’t even have to be asked, he brought up from the depths, from among the slimy and slippery stones, absolutely for free, the whatever. Nobody should say about him that he didn’t have the guts to bring it up, that he didn’t have the common decency/knight in shiny armor. On the contrary. But he was hoping in his heart of hearts that one of the princesses would pity him in the end, and invite him to her home for a birthday party, a Sunday lunch, or something, anything. He’d have given one arm, had just one of them offered him a smile. But every time he emerged from the bottom of the well with the lost gold whatchamacallits under his arm, the girls grabbed it and without so much as a thank you ran home.

In case their children should turn out to be toads.

When I was small, I looked much better.

I wasn’t ugly at all. But beautiful. There are pictures to prove it. Then something happened. I don’t know when. Just look at me! You’d think somebody had stepped on my face. When it was still malleable. Then it became solid and stayed that way. And my parents pretend they don’t see. For your information, they are working, earning their daily bread, so the secret police won’t come for the family. Unfortunately, there was nobody to watch the small child. I slept on my back, helpless. Then Puss’n Boots came and just like the peasants do when they spit on their boots, that’s how he mangled/széttaposta my face. There’s a bump on the top of my head, the fontanel. It’s a fontanel because it covers the well. So the toad can’t get out.

What am I to make of this?

I can’t tell anybody this either.

I was over the Woman with the Serpents’ Hair. I didn’t tell them about that either. I now have my own little world. The bottom of my livid, lying eyes. I am.

I can’t take my eyes from the mirror.

I have tumbled into it.

January nineteenth, nineteen hundred and fifty nine, approximately seven fifteen, I guess, everything reminds me, continuously, what I thought of at that moment. The toad is gaping at the bottom of the well. Looking intently up.

I am looking to see if they’re looking at me.
I think they’re not looking at me. But it is also possible that they saw me.

Me, looking at myself. I grab my gym clothes from the red leather chair where I’d flung them, pull the bottom up on my sweaty backside, ………..it with two fingers, meanwhile I coyly turn to the side and my glance takes in the life of the beauty parlor, like that of a bored and stupid elementary school boy who had to accompany his mother to the beautician’s. Have you done tomorrow’s homework?

I lied that I had.

I like the smell of beauty parlors. Come along, if you want to. They pull her head back, dunk her hair in shampoo water. It hangs dripping, in large strands, like damp mud. Then they pull it up, strand by strand, with the end of the comb. They cover the roots with black dye, then they roll it on these aluminum rolls or whatnot.

The place is full of life.

We live, we make do. It could be worse. I turn the pages of the textbook I’d brought along, as if I were reading it. What else have I got with me? Don’t tell me it’s Winnie the Pooh? Shamelessly, pleasantly lila. Oooooh, I still got my whole maddened/strained/ hurried, senseless life ahead of me. ...................We have plenty of time, we have plenty of milk, we have time to suckle. Quiet! Watch your tongue in front of the child, Pista. And their laughter!

I break free of my glance: I won’t look at the hole in my pupils any more!

Oh yes I will!

Either me or him. Or I’m the eyes I see in the mirror, that I trust. He knows everything, the person they belong to. That’s why they beat him. You can tell. He that’s got eyes to recognize him [for what he is], would beat him, if he dared, until he breathed his last. But what if this didn’t solve his problem?

Or am I the person doing the looking?

And I’m bad because I remember it all? Is this proof too? Am I the devil? Az iciri-piciri kis kandúr? Except I pretend I don’t remember that?

I don’t believe my own eyes?

Through a lifetime?

I don’t understand how others do it, they look into them and they don’t, and if they do, how can they not find their eyes with their eyes, or if you see that dark shadow, or I don’t know what it is, at the bottom of your glance, for you see someone there, you can’t say you don’t, then how can you take your eyes off of him, and even if you do, how can you forget what you’ve seen, or if you don’t forget, how can you live with this memory, the memory of your eyes, with the thing that’s there?
Because there is somebody there.

There is somebody there.

There is.

And what if I’m as bright as the Sun and innocent as the Easter bunny, if such a Jewish bunny can be innocent at all, especially of he’s an Easter bunny who isn’t even Jewish, that’s what they say, [they say] he’s Hungarian, but possibly he’s not Hungarian after all, they just say he is, he’s a Jew, a Jew, no matter what he does. And not a bunny rabbit but a goiter-eyed toad, go ahead, say it [like it is]. The ugliest Toad Prince there is! I don’t want it like this, I’d rather not be, let me die instantly, or tomorrow the latest, or the moment when I’m about to do the first bad thing, me, the apple of my father’s and my mother’s eye, their joy and last hope. And the iciri-piciri kis kandúr, ditto.

But what if this is true?

If the essence of my being is bad and not only will I be bad, I’ve been bad all along? I am bad even now. I made myself bad with this very thought. /Or is there a chance I can avoid it /steer clear of it? I won’t take my eyes from my eyes until I can tell whether I am bad or not, there, in the depths of my heart.

Is Bara, who told me to my face that I’m a toad, right, or is Barta a piece of scum? And it makes no difference what he meant by it. I don’t even know why he said it, but it’s all the same. It’s not the opinion of the school that concerns me at this point, or my classmates, or Jutka Perc’s at all, but: who am I? Who lies nestled in the .......at the bottom of my eyes, in the dark, where, because of the shadowy area my looking/eyes remain inscrutable?

Who is that/

I stand and vibrate as if struck by an electric current. When I’m scared, I start vibrating without delay, this too is part of my toad nature, the present gives me a shock, it goes over me like a streetcar, crushing me past mending, smearing me on the wall. Fasces meat, mud meat!

I see it in the mirror.

I decided. From now on I’m not denying anything. I won’t deny it, like the others. At least, I won’t deny it to myself! I see what I see, and cheekily accept the consequences / what comes with it.

Now I am completely cursed/damned.

Translated by Judith Sollosy
In: Writing from Hungary. Words without Borders, August, 2010

Translation of "A békakirály." Copyright Mihály Kornis. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2010 by Judith Sollosy. All rights reserved.

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