Ready to dig deep? The narrator of Panni Puskás’s novel That Any Might Be Saved is, as demonstrated by this dizzying excerpt, brilliantly translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner. Asked by their psychotherapist to recall their childhood, the narrator draws up their very first memory: a tantrum provoked by their inability to find a plastic ball to play with. From here the narrator’s monologue unfurls in a dazzling spiral, transitioning seamlessly from their childhood recollections to their frustrating relationship with their perpetually unemployed friend and finally to the liberatory violence of vandalism and of the destruction of their mother’s possessions—an apparent rejection of their own richly remembered past, which frees them from the strictures of polite society and psychotherapy alike. Read on!
Zoli Vajda’s BMW
My therapist said we’re going to really dig deep today, which made me wonder what the hell we’ve been doing for the last fourteen sessions, twelve thousands forints a pop, but I just smile, of course, let’s dig deeper, and I ask what she means by deep, well, childhood, why don’t I tell her about my first childhood memory, she smiles back, she thought she’d caught me with that one, no way José, I remember my first memory perfectly, I’m crawling on all fours in a room with green carpet, and there are two balls in my field of vision, one of them is red with white polka dots, the other is larger, an inflatable beach ball with yellow, blue, and white stripes, I beeline for it, I want it, but when I get there and make a grab for it, my clumsy little hands accidently bop it, and away rolls the ball, who the hell knows where, it leaves my field of vision, it’s like it was never even there, and then I think, okay, all good, there’s still the polka-dot ball, I’ll have a go at that one, and I turn, but the polka-dot one is nowhere to be found, and that brings on a proper tantrum, yes, you heard right Klára, I say to my therapist, my first childhood memory is of me losing my shit because I couldn’t find something, to which Klára says that’s interesting, what is your second memory, and that tells me she’s testing me, if my answer is acceptable then she’ll ask for a third memory, then a fourth, fifth, and so on, right up until I say I don’t know, well now, then she’ll have to give me an F, no hope of me improving it before the end of the school year, and I detest getting F’s, then it comes to me, my mother and I on the shore of Lake Balaton, we’re sitting on a bench staring at the water, and Mom is crying, but not just crying, the tears are streaming, she says to wait here on the bench, and she walks into the water fully-clothed, even from here I can see the dark smears of makeup on her face, Mom’s tears are a sea, they cast waves upon the shore, breaking ever higher, but meanwhile Klára is asking me to instead try to recall what I actually saw back then, but all I can say is that Mom’s tears are an ocean, they cast shells and octopuses onto the beachgrass, shoreside stones are wrenched about, I have to climb to the top of a willow tree to get out of danger because I am not a strong swimmer, Mom’s tears are all the liquids of the world, they whirl and eddy, pulling everything in, but meanwhile Klára isn’t giving up, she’ll stop at nothing to interrupt my second childhood memory, which is quite annoying considering she’s the one who asked me to share it, but now she’s curious what it was that hurt my mother so much, but I ignore her, I haven’t finished yet, and she needs to know that I remember Mom’s tears being the universe, her tear ducts the Milky Way, and they flooded all the planets, Pluto, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, and whatever the others are called, I don’t remember, but it caused flora to spring forth on barren planets, life to move in, and I wanted to move to Pluto, because it was the one whose name I knew, and also it was the smallest, plus it was the name of Mickey Mouse’s dog, but Mom didn’t let me, she said that these planets will only be beautiful so long as no human sets foot upon them, so I just stayed atop the willow tree, but Klára is adamant that I say what it was that saddened my mother so, to which I retort, what do you think, who’s the sad one here, because my second childhood memory isn’t at all sad, in fact, it solved a whole mess of the world’s problems, the climate catastrophe for instance, plus it swept away all the idiots in a flood, and created a new world in space, if she hadn’t noticed, but of course she doesn’t notice, she says it’s difficult to work with me, but she’s wrong, and if I’m being honest, I feel her professional education is lacking, and it doesn’t help to advertise on your website that you got your clinical psychology degree from a top English university, doubts could certainly arise regarding its veracity, for example Tuna, who shows up at my door each afternoon asking if he can borrow some money, he says he could whip me up a website just like this woman’s, a fancy degree with my name on it is easily photoshopped, then I too could be making bank pestering whoever about their mother, but honestly I don’t give a shit about anyone’s mother, any more than I do my own, so it really would be pointless to become a therapist, except then Tuna could finally get himself a real job, seems like dealing isn’t bringing in enough dough, plus you can go to prison for it, as we all know, but Tuna doesn’t think it’s a good idea, he says society needs people who are actively thinking, and the kind of work with which I, for example, am poisoning myself is good for nothing but emptying your mind, and really, I should tell him when I last had an original thought, and he’s right, I probably never had one, but I don’t tell him that, instead I say just take a look at yourself, you’re like a shriveled old junkie on death’s doorstep, you’re fifty kilos soaking wet, and only once you’ve downed six liters of water and put on a winter coat, I don’t mean to offend you, I’m worried about you, but of course he’s offended, he ripostes, you’ve got a big mouth, and you’re not exactly in great shape at the moment, the ravages of time, what do they say, they come for us all or whatever, why don’t I stand in front of a mirror and explain it to him afterwards, and I don’t know why, but I really do stand in front of the mirror, it’s the first time I look at myself in this light, my neck is starting to get wrinkly, there are dark circles under my eyes, I’m wearing shorts, how could I have thought I could pull these off at my age, the skin around my knees is wrinkled too, there are vast dry spots on my upper arms, I should have had a dermatologist examine them ages ago, but the worst was the ennui of life that had settled in every line of my face, what point is there to anything I’m doing, is there a way out, or is it too late, but Tuna says it’s not, let’s be honest with ourselves, we’ve already let every joy in our lives slip away, this unexpected turn weighs heavily on me, I sink back into the couch, fiddling with my phone so I don’t have to look him in the eye, and then, like a sign there’s still hope, I see that Márk Waller friended me on Facebook, he even sent a message, there it is in the requests, saying he’d like to meet with me because it was very interesting what we talked about last time, it would be nice to continue, and I write of course, gladly, and there I am at eight in the evening in one of the shitty pubs on the Ring Road where they serve wine by the liter, so I’m forced to drink whiskey, and watered down at that, it’s disgusting, but I don’t care, because Márk actually does show up, and only a bit late, and we take a seat, and for many hours we talk about how we could most effectively seize power through violent means so we could finally live happy and thrilling lives, and we talk about other things too, literature, faith, collective memories, and meanwhile I wonder how so much fire can fit into one man, how everything Tuna and I missed out on had without a doubt gone into this boy, no cynicism, no bitterness, just pure unadulterated passion, beside him I grow younger, I would do the absolute silliest things because of him, I think just so the feeling would stay a while longer, but he says he thinks we should practice more at violence, so that by the time we really need it, we have it down pat, so for a start let’s smash something, I don’t know, a garbage can, here on the Ring Road, at which I suggest a car instead, which seems to frighten him for a moment, but I tell him there’s a car I can’t stand, it’s in the company parking lot this very moment because Zoli Vajda took his electric scooter home, that for me this car symbolizes all the evil we’re purporting to fight against, plus I know that we can sneak into the parking lot unnoticed, and then Márk nicks a bench from one of the pubs along the Ring Road, hefts it onto his shoulder, and at the next corner over we smash it, pick out two good-sized planks, and clamber onto Zoli Vajda’s BMW, I’m standing on the trunk, he’s on the hood, we’ll have about three minutes from the sounding of the alarm before the security guard shows up, so not a lot of time, I’m a little worried, Márk smiles at me, wets his lips, asks if I’m ready, and I’m ready for everything, we begin wailing on the car, the alarm goes off, the sound is deafening, the windows shatter, its mirror-smooth surface gets dented, we jump, we shout, then we’re quickly hopping the fence, running out to the street, into the park, we lie on the ground, laughing, embracing each other, it’s so good we just have to go a little mad, and no one can take it from me now, just like they can’t take my third childhood memory, which I tell my therapist about one week later, how one morning, when everyone was still asleep, I filled a metal bucket with oil, tossed in a burning match, and one by one burned every piece of my mother’s clothing, then every one of my sister’s dolls and stuffed animals, the cloth crackled and the plastic ran, the objects screeched in pain, they begged me not to hurt them, but I told the jean skirt, the purple blazer, the stuffed Timon and Pumba, and the style-it-yourself dolls, I told them no mercy, you must be destroyed, because violence is the only path to happiness, and I want to be happy, and Klára just shakes her head, she’s convinced that what I’m telling her in no way corresponds to reality, and she inquires as to why I made up this moderately entertaining horror story for her, and I say but it’s all true, from the first word to the last, then I dragged the bucket of oil closer to the table, which also caught fire, and the chairs, the kitchen counter, the curtains, the door, the dresser, the rug, all the furniture, everyone who was living and everything that wasn’t, the objects wept, and I wept with them, only they were tears of joy, but Klára stops me, she says if I continue my therapy with this attitude then she cannot help me, and as she sees it, I am in dire need of help.
Translated from the Hungarian by Austin Wagner
Panni Puskás, born in 1987 in Győr, Hungary, studied Hungarian at Pannon University in Veszprém and Theater Studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Budapest. She has been an editor and theater critic for Revizor since 2011 and is co-chair of the Hungarian Theatre Critics Guild. Her cultural and political essays appear regularly in HVG Extra, Glamour, and Szinház, and her literary fiction can be found in Jelenkor, Élet és Irodalom, and Műút. Her debut short story collection, A rezervátum visszafoglalása (Taking Back the Reservation, 2021, Magvető Publishing), was shortlisted for the Margó Prize for best debut work and won the Budapest Writers’ Shop Book Prize for the best book by an author under 35. Her first novel, Megmenteni bárkit (That Any Might Be Saved, Magvető), published in 2023, was nominated for the 2024 European Union Prize for Literature.
Austin Wagner is an American living and working in Budapest as a HU-EN literary translator. His translations run the gamut from speculative fiction to contemporary prose and poetry to children’s literature, and you can find his work at Asymptote, The Continental Literary Magazine, Versopolis, Lunch Ticket, The Los Angeles Review, and Hungarian Literature Online, where he is also co-editor. His translation of excerpts from Ádám Nádasdy’s The Bearded Neptune was shortlisted for the 2023 English PEN Presents award.