I'm safe E-Book

Szöllősy Ervin

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 250

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Look behind my mask! There live my foster parents, to whom my doctor father had me sent when I was an infant, because he was distracted by my baby writing in his academic work. Then you can hear the cry, "God, save me from my relatives, I can deal with my enemies myself. You can find my socialization among the tenement Roma and in inventory there are 4 degrees, 3 children, 1 grandchild, 3 evictions,11 fractures (6 bone, 5 psychological). I left the traces of an adventurous life in Palermo and a quarter of a century of Italian work. You can see the pain of Christmases spent alone for decades, and I no longer have the love gene in me, replaced by a hatred that has become a character. All of this has caused such a change in my eyes (in the mirror of my soul) that going without glasses is not recommended.

Leseprobe

Citation from

I DRAW THE ATTENTION OF THE READERS TO THE FACT THAT THIS BOOK IS LIABLE TO DISTURB THE PEACE STORIES.

BUT ALSO DEMONSTRATES PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOUR THAT ARE GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOU SMILE TO THE ARCUK.

THE CHARACTERS IN THE STORY ARE FICTIONAL, ANY CORRESPONDENCE WITH REALITY IS MERELY IS A COINCIDENCE.

Motto: "Darkness is always scary, whether it is physical darkness or darkness of the spirit."

(Sándor Szöllősy)

I've been made safe

On 27 July 1985, on a Saturday, my one-liner "Pig's Head" appeared in Délmagyaroszág, which had a back-and-forth effect. Here is my article.

When he walked into the company, he had no idea what kind of day he was in for. He had a quick coffee and went to his boss for a "work assignment".

The boss lady leaned back in her chair, her large case glittering with a wide gold chain. From under her green eyelids, she looked at her subordinate, then gingerly took out a long SAN cigarette and lit it. He knew that his authority demanded that he should always answer a question put to him within a minute.

- I have never given you such a big task before. We started a pig's head sales campaign. Your task will be to go out to the shops and, in addition to the publicity work, convince the shop managers of the impeccable quality of this curren product. And get them to order. Make a firm stand and sell as much as you can. Take a sample with you, I've already called the butcher's.

He soon hung his load on the handlebars of the bike. He headed for the new part of town, targeting the ABCs there. He didn't know how he would go about it, but for the moment he didn't give it much thought.

He was looking for the manager at the ABC. He introduced himself. He was offered a place to stay, then cigarettes and coffee.

- "We have started a sales campaign for a curren product," he said, "I would like as many orders as possible, we can satisfy the demand without limit.

The manager looked at the large bag with interest. He was hoping for pick salami, maybe Festival sausage, or at worst Mako hot from the representation fund. Our hero didn't pique interest any further, he stuck his head out wide on the coffee table. The effect was beyond imagination. The manager's mouth began to tremble. It was impossible to tell whether he was going to curl up in a ball and cry, or whether his brain would soon flood with blood and he would burst into a rage. He himself was not sure how to react: laugh, so he would take it as a joke, or cry. And the pig laughed. The whole head consisted of a big, huge mouth full of teeth. One eye was closed, as if winking. He seemed to be the one who was definitely enjoying himself.

The awkward silence was broken by the manager:

- Well, please, if you think we're going to buy and sell everything... besides, for that kind of money... Get this prosthetic out of here and tell the authorities...

He did not wait for the cue. He made his way out of the office, through the shop and towards the exit, nose hanging down, under his arm, with the huge pig's head in his bag. All around him, the shoppers were whispering, "Did you see, Mancika, where this young man came from? From the office. He must have been caught red-handed. It's no use, it's the youth of today..."

The pig's ears kept slipping in between the bicycle senders. He didn't last long, stuffed it back in the bag and zipped it up.

He arrived again, he said his sermon. The manager had a nice cut of salami in the bag from the representation fund. But the bag did not open. The pig's ear was caught in the zipper. Two people tried.

- "I'll hold it," said the manager, "you try the zipper. But it's heavy, you guys are not short of repi-base.

The zipper suddenly went all the way down and the head rolled out of the bag. He staggered across the office, teeth bared, knocked over a floor vase, and then settled in the corner, bleeding into the wallpaper, laughing. The manager jumped about a foot in the air in shock, or rather fright. His mouth open wide in a stiff face, he started to laugh. But so did the employees, who burst into the office at the noise. Finally, the market researcher burst out laughing. The situation was like a scene from a movie.

- "Look, comrade," the driver finally spoke quietly, but later his voice got louder. - Take this whirlpool away! Give it to your boss, make a trophy of it, or hang it in place of your mirror, but get it out of here!

Driving to the next shop, he decided to draw on his immense cynicism and become a slicker in the next store. He would not feel self-conscious.

He entered the office with determination. He took out the pig skull and said nothing. He held it out in front of him.

The head turned serious, the cheeky grin disappeared. He felt he was on top of the situation here. Our hero began his monologue in this pose:

- To buy or not to buy, that is the question...

The shop manager looked at the market researcher, confused. Then he asked for his access pass. More confused, he said only this:

- Thank you, but I don't want any.

He headed back to work. The pig's head sat gloomily in the bag. He was no longer enjoying the situation. He regretted not only that he had been born, but perhaps also that he had died.

It was five minutes before the end of the working day when there was a knock on the matron's door.

- Well, colleague, how many have you sold?

- "Nothing," he replied, dejectedly.

The boss's complexion had turned red, her wrinkles widened, her chin sagged, only now did she really show how ugly she was. That was all she hissed:

- So just tell me, what do we consider you to be here, what do we consider you to be?

I think it's stupid.

This article, my little friend, even measured on the Richter scale, has shaken my environment. My aunt had a stroke, I was fired from my job, if that status could be called a job at all. I was a market researcher for a meat company. I have another good story related to this position. As the pay was not high and I had the qualifications, I took a job as a night shift supervisor at my workplace, in addition to market research. I worked the night shift in the red goods department, where, among other things, they made Parisian cheese, better known as parizier. At one point the internal lab indicated that the parizer had fecal coli, which can only come from human feces. We could not imagine where it had come from, but we had to confiscate and destroy several hundred kilos. I used to go up from the factory to the reception at night at about midnight and have a coffee there, which was about twenty minutes' absence. On one occasion, as I was going to the reception, another colleague came across from me and told me not to go to the reception because the rubber of the coffee machine had burnt out and there was no coffee. So within minutes I was back in my work area, where I was greeted by the following picture.

The worker in charge of the parizo production was clinging to the cutter in which the parizo is made, mixing it in, and with a reddening head and a gloopy eye, he was shitting in the material. My head was red too, only my eyes were round. The mystery of how fecal coli gets into the parizer was appealing. Meanwhile, a journalist published an article in the local paper about how in a big town like this where there is a salami factory, you can't get parizier in the shop. Then he went to the factory, where he asked the production manager and the sales manager this question, but he did not get an answer. Then he walked past my door, where it said "market researcher". He thought he would ask me his rhetorical question. And I just said: because he's in over his head. Then he went to the CEO in a huff, complaining that I was being cynical, that he was doing his job seriously and that this was the answer he was getting. Then the CEO, with a frightened look on his face, and with a tone of "the Russians are in the pantry", said: the parizer really has been shit on, more than once, several times. He then received a minor rebuke for his honesty from higher up, and I was fired, now for double cause. I didn't have any problems getting settled then, because I was called up "just in time" to join the army.

For a long time I trusted in the Kossuth "only those who like it should join the army", but there was no appeal, I had to enlist. In addition, I was a grain of sand in the machinery of the army's general staff, because I, as a novice engineer, was not called up to the engineer squadron as a "thrush".

As I later found out, at the local military headquarters, my military record in my school record book was marked 6 elements - that is, six elementary schools. So that would describe the milieu in which I was placed:

"Walls of desolation are dusty,

Dark minds are ringing,

Forcing many."

The nights were spent in fear here, my little friend. For example, if you tried to masturbate quietly (as much as possible) on the bunk bed, a soldier dressed as a gypsy (by the way, out of the sixteen men in the group, fourteen were a minority, and my friend and I were the white majority) would say: 'If you keep squeaking the bed, I'll put your blood in the horse piss'.

Where he would have been in the vicinity, I don't know, but it was an unmistakable display of self-serving aggression, and his intonation suggested that he meant it as a serious threat.

The days were more frightening, my little friend, because if you laughed at an officer, you were locked up. I, for example, spent more time in the barracks in detention than I did at large. Ambiguous orders like:

- Your Honour!

- Order, Comrade Staff Ensign Bokor!

- The day after tomorrow, we'll have the pyjamas (Major Generals, that is), so make sure the outer perimeter is as clean as the altar cloth. So take that shit and fuck it.

- Comrade Staff Ensign, please repeat the order.

- You don't understand, you idiot, how can you take that shit and fuck it!

(After a long conversation, it turned out that shit was a hedge trimmer, and the word to encourage reproduction meant to trim the hedge evenly. Of course, the building orders didn't end there, but as it turns out later, I didn't have to bleed the order because of my obstruction.)

- When you're done with that, you'll have a job to do, but until I forget, you four, the trio, come here! Paint the grass in front of the mess hall green, get some oil paint from the warehouse. If you fuck up, I'll lock you up for ten days. If not enough, a week. Now, back to the Glue House. When you've done what I asked you to do, I want you to cut the canopy out of the grass behind the mess hall.

- Excuse me, Comrade Staff Ensign, but again I ask you to repeat the order!

- You're quite a heavy thinker, honvéd. I want you to pick the dandelions out of the back of the barracks.

- Comrade Staff Sergeant, you mean taraxacum officinalis?

- You're mocking me, what are you talking to me here, you Yugo?! Disobeying orders! Issue the badge, Szöllősy, go to the barracks, and tell the lawyer Kovács to send him to me.

(I should note that Honvéd Kovács was a research biologist and worked as a research assistant at an institute, but he too had a grain of sand in the machinery of war.)

- I report, Comrade Staff Ensign.

- Well, Kovács! I've had that dumb-faced bastard, Owlface, locked up, so you can go and tear up the canopy yourself. But I don't think that's degrading to you, since you're a civilian kind of helper.

- Understood, Comrade Staff Ensign!

Anyway, my little friend, it was not a bad barracks. It has its advantages when the officers are not members of the academy. I, for example, was able to go on leave several mornings on the pretext of having a foreskin constriction and in the absence of sanitation (there was hot water once a week) I had to go out to wash the clown's head with special fluid at the local STC. This went on for a while, until one time in the precinct, Staff Sergeant Bokor yelled at me:

- Do you know when I'm going to let you out for more sitz baths, Söllősy? He'll take his girl, fuck her in chamomile tea and stick his dick in it. Do I make myself clear?

- Understood, Comrade Staff Ensign.

By the way, my little friend, this Bokor was not such a bad guy. For example, when I was an hour and a half late from a recent leave because the clown's head was being polished, not at the SZTK but by a ceiling guard at the local clinic in his home (because even then, the paraszolvency-free hunger wage in the health sector had to be supplemented, to each according to his own area and abilities), I slipped on the way back. Within sight, he was shouting from afar:

- Make the tooth mark for the Owl!

- Comrade Staff Ensign, it's true that I'm late, I'm a little bit drunk, but I'm bitter. I'm going to have to have an operation on my foreskin, and after that I can only use my bum for six weeks for low metabolic processes, but I'm not the one who stuffs the muff.

And guess what, my little friend, the miracle has happened. First of all, he put the tooth mark back on, and looked at me with a kind of human look, as if he had at least exchanged his watery eyes for glass in my absence. At first I didn't understand it. Then it turned out that there was only one way to get him off his feet: if you couldn't use your tool. His priority in all situations in life was orgasm. For example, a request for leave for a funeral was like this:

- Comrade Staff Ensign, Honvéd Balogh, please give me leave for my grandmother's funeral.

- I give, I give, that melancholy prick.

So, he wouldn't let you go home for your relative's funeral, but he'd give you a leave of absence to relieve your swelling libido.

There were no really significant differences between barracks. For the most part, you could try out several barracks in an eighteen-month cycle. Usually, if you pulled the plug somewhere or caused an extraordinary event, you would be moved on. I was the match-pulling type, so I went through five barracks.

In the Fifth Barracks I had the most memorable briefing and seminar of my life, given by a lieutenant colonel as a political officer whose cortex resembled an apple peel. In short, the gist was this:

- Now, comrades, before I start the seminar, I will give you a brief briefing. The sub-unit surveillance and the gate service are in conflict with each other! What are you laughing at? I was going to say contact! Because I haven't done my first year, I'm still as much of a phenom as anybody. Well, let's get on with the seminar. What are you laughing at behind there, Softies? Your ideological training is the most important thing here, so don't laugh, or I'll lock you up. I have two important things to tell you today. One: maybe I could tell you that the Csepel trucks are not factory trucks, but we can always use them to stop NATO troops.

- They produce.

- You're stupid, Szöllősy, aren't you listening? I just told you they're not factory chicks! The other thing is that socialism has already won in one tenth of the world. But you know what I'm telling you? It will win in a century of the world, and I will go further, in a thousandth of the world.

My little friend, comrade colonel had serious problems with the fractions. He thought that if he increased the denominator, he could...

Of course, there were also some really sad cases. Do you remember, my little friend, the EDDA Tower? Its message is something like this: you guard nothing.

In a barracks in Hmvhely, in the southern lowlands, one of the guards took a radiant heater (electric) and a bottle of long-necked wine into the watchtower. He put the radiator under the guardhouse (it was about minus 15 degrees in the tower) and drank the wine. You can guess the rest. He fell asleep, the suba caught fire, the guard was burned. The hospital was about two kilometres from the barracks, but the officer on duty decided to take him to the Kecskemét Defence Hospital with our own military ambulance. We had no chance of getting there alive, even if it was a hundred kilometres away. During the first twenty kilometres he screamed in excruciating pain, but by the 40th kilometre he was dead. We could walk halfway, when his body was completely cold, because all the windows were closed, because the smell of burning flesh was unbearable. It must have been half past midnight when we stopped in front of a precarious pub or nightclub. We asked for a bottle of brandy and two beers. The following conversation took place between the attendant and the barman:

- Where are they going?

- Kecskemét, to the central military hospital.

- Which one is the patient?

- None of us.

- So they're bringing something this late?

- Just a dead body.

- "Very funny," he said, and then swept the money from the counter into the till in one motion.

My first rebirth, by the way, was on 21 January 1983. We were returning from a military exercise in the Bakony, it was less than minus 10 degrees. We were packed dead tired into the wagons. When we were done, we stood beside the wagons in the bloody cold, exhausted. An officer took pity on us and allowed us to get into three wagons before the locomotive hitched up. Many fell fast asleep from exhaustion, I stayed awake. Then I noticed that the train was slowly moving, but there was no sign of a locomotive pulling us. I called my friend, but he said we were probably being pushed. That was the last thing he said. The television news said that three wagons had run off. Actually, they weren't well wedged and got loose. They soon accelerated on the sloping track and we ran into the freight train slowly moving ahead at 130 kilometres per hour. This was the Herend train crash.

Five child soldiers died on the spot. There were many wounded, and I was thrown out of the window with several of them. I escaped with scratches and bruises. One of the boys, who kept eating, as he did at the time, was gagged from the shock and drowned. I used a pocket knife to pry his mouth open, trying to get the food out of his mouth by grinding his front teeth through the slit so he wouldn't choke. We used to tease him about his teeth until he was discharged, saying that he was a "snaggletooth". Little Polauf, you must have had your window fixed since then because you looked pretty stupid, but at least you survived.

Then, my little friend, death smiled on me again. It also happened in a military exercise, and in a joint exercise with my friendly Soviet comrades. Exercising with the Soviet soldiers was as safe as hugging a suicide terrorist tightly before he detonates the bomb strapped to himself. I didn't even want to go because I wasn't feeling well, I had a cold, fever, etc. I signed up for the sickbay, but the medical soldier with the iron steel said I was faking. So, as a military intelligence officer, I built telephone lines in the mountains in the horizontal snowfall. Then the next day a retarded officer figured out that we could play a game where the kitchen was "shot out", ergo nothing to eat for 24 hours. (Of course, the officers were eating for two mouthfuls the whole time, and some of them brought 14 litres of brandy with them for the week-long exercise).

I had a tin of canned liver cream - must have been about 3 years old - for a rainy day, and I decided that this was it. Since there was a strict detention for anyone who ate it during the "kitchen shoot-out", I saw fit to eat it secretly next to the shit pit known as the toilet, until I could even crack it open with my numb fingers in minus 10 degrees. Then the 24-hour "kitchen firing" was over, and the chef cooked a goulash soup, thick and with lots of meat. The two hundred litres of the delicious meal was cooked in the two hundred litre pot, but the cook was terribly drunk despite the food stop, probably from the brandy sold at a five hundred percent mark-up by the officer who brought the 14 litres.

Then the distribution of the food would have begun; I think that's how they would have waited for the Messiah. The cook's coordination was no longer good, he staggered, leaned over the bowl and threw up into the soup in a stream. We were so stunned we couldn't move. Then my most constructive friend started to strain the vomit from the top of the soup with a pasta strainer, and we started to eat the soup, which was declared unhygienic by the Health and Safety Executive. However, after the fagocytosis was finished, no chef had ever been beaten up the way we were.

(In parentheses, I would note that today's young people could do with a poem by Géza Gyóni entitled Send them away for one night only - if not 18 months of service, then at least a month of turbocharged version. I am reminded of my former doctor Sandi friend who had two spoilt brat sons. The kind who doesn't want to work or study, lazy, but will tell you what's what. Dr Sandi, if she had been born much earlier, would not have been admitted to the local TSCS because she only had "two bastard sons". So the only way to wake one of her sons, little Bencus, aged 22, at 11am on a Saturday morning, was for his mother to bring a mug of cocoa to the baby's bedside, with a straw in it. Little Bencus would not lift his head from the pillow, but would turn it and suck the contents of the cup. I can imagine little Bencus sipping from the bowl the supernatant-free, vomit-cosmetic soup. Well, in any case, only a "potter" could make two of these for Dr Sandi.)

Leaving the bracket and returning to the soup we had consumed, we warmed up in the evening in the tent by the drum stove. The skin on the front of my cheeks was almost burnt off by the stove, and the snow was frozen on my back and the microwave. By nightfall I was very sick, and I told them to take me to the hospital because I might have a high fever. I was told that the exercise would be over in a few days and I would be better by then. By dawn I must have had some strange vision or dream, the gist of which was that if I stayed there I was going to die. I must have stabbed myself in the thigh (to this day I have a cut in a half a foot wide on the inside of my right thigh and it looks like part of the muscle died there, because it's much thinner than on my other leg), and then I woke up in the hospital.

As my companions told me, I started screaming terribly in the tent, and then I stabbed the knife in my leg. I was losing a lot of blood, I had an open wound on my thigh and they took me to the hospital to stitch me up, but they were afraid I would bleed to death. My vision or dream continued with me being examined by a doctor who tells the nurse, "The least of this soldier's injuries is a cut. He has a high fever and barely any air in his lungs, central pneumonia". He was admitted immediately to intensive care. The dream was further compounded when a motorcyclist who had been in an accident was brought into the ICU later that night; he had such a head injury that they couldn't take the helmet off his head. The nurse told the doctor that there was no room in the ICU right now, but there would be soon, because the little soldier would be dead by morning. After a while I woke up and they took me to the ward. When the nurse saw me, she took two steps slowly backwards in amazement, and her chin fell off, playing Michael Jackson. She thought I had died days before.

Then I gradually got stronger, and after a week I told the nurse that her legs always reminded me of Toldi.

- Why, are they thick? - he asked.

- No, he just knows: "hey, if I could be one of you."

The next day I was declared cured and sent back to the army to continue defending the country from imperialism.

As it turned out later, we lost the battle against imperialism, but even before that we had a few "mishaps" in barracks, because, as I mentioned before, I was always being drafted on.

For example, I was also at the Szeged Military Prosecutor's Office, as a photographer and sergeant-major. It took a strong stomach, and a strong stomach needs a strong drink. We usually received the RES (extraordinary incident) by phone, often on the civil defence line, and then I had to go as a photographer with the prosecutor, driver to the scene of the crime. Usually we were alerted to suicides of young soldiers . Many times I photographed the rope marks on the neck of a hanged soldier; when the border guard shot himself in the head, the skull bones and brains scattered in a ten-metre circle; when the jealous lieutenant shot his wife several times in the breast - I remember one bullet entering right through the nipple. Of course, I had to develop these photos in the prosecution photo lab, it was not possible to submit the film to the local OFOTÉRT.

It was depressing. Yet it wasn't these cases that threw me off, it was when a policeman was brought into the detention centre. There were three detention cells on the third floor of the prosecutor's office, where prisoners were very rarely held, and don't ask me why and for what reason, my little friend, they were only 'housed' for a few days. The police officer was arrested because he drove his car to a family's farmhouse, accused their 16-year-old daughter of stealing chocolate from the shop and had to be brought to the police station, and then raped the girl in the police car on the way to the station. Not a word of the theft was true, and then the police officer turned himself in. My fellow soldier and I escorted him handcuffed up to the detention centre, opened the cell door and all he said was 'don't meet me outside'. I indicated to him that we would not be seeing him outside for a long time because he was about to be sent to a prison where rapist policemen were very welcome. I told him he was going to get fucked so many times that his ass would feel like a train had run through it in the morning. For emphasis, I punched him a hell of a lot. I was doing martial arts at the time, I was in pretty good shape. The next day, he reported to his supervisor that he'd been assaulted. He couldn't prove it against us by a ratio of 1:2, but I was taken from the prosecutor's office to a barracks in Szeged, and I was given a commendation for my merits.

This was my fifth station during the military and I was very welcome here. For I had brought my cadre card from the previous places, on which I had been painted so much that I was sucked in here in the Vorosilov barracks as much as I could be. Every other day I was put on 24-hour duty, constantly pushing the ÜTI officer (also known as TBK officer) and the guard. They did not let me go on leave either. So when I was conscious from insomnia, I would sneak out at night as , because as a constant watchman, I knew the guards. However, I did not know the guards of the Zalka barracks, which was right next to us. For there was a regulation (?) or implied rule that if a guard saw an escape, he could immediately tell the escapee to stop, and if he did not, he could shoot and kill him. If a guard apprehends a fugitive, he immediately gets 3 days off with pay, if he shoots the fugitive dead, he is immediately demoted. A lot of motherfuckers have played on that. The definition of a deserter here is that if they didn't let someone out of the barracks for months, they'd sneak out for a beer or two, or to their girlfriend's house. I had previously photographed the body of a soldier who had been shot dead by a guard while trying to escape. Once, when I was returning to the barracks at night from the illegality of a local pub with three beers under my arm, I was told by the guard of the Zalka barracks to stop immediately because he had spotted me. At first I even slapped him back, but when I heard him loading the machine gun (a very distinctive sound), I started running, dropping my beers, zigzagging. He fired several shots; whether into the air or aimed, I never knew. This was in February 1983. I tried to inquire about the guard's identity, but a total news blackout was ordered.