TE23 Double Feature

Andrea Tompa

The Hangman’s House

of Snagovs, and she’d got a 6 for a punishment test on the industrial geography of Hungary, but in fact had made her mind up, she wasn’t going to do Geography any more, she’d decided, because she was offended and felt that the 6 was unfair, but she hadn’t known the coalmines, only the bridges and rivers, and according to her grandfather, who came from a mining family, Hungary really had no coal to speak of, and what was more the teacher, the fat Aristid Nagy, had suddenly, just like that, from one year to the next, taught Geography in Romanian with an execrable accent, which he was not disposed to explain, and what had been when she was in Year Six Tanár elvtárs, jelentem, az osztály létszáma . . . a year later was Tovarăşe profesor, raportez că clasa . . . because from Year Seven the subjects of History and Geography had ceased to exist in Hungarian 5 as hostile and uncontrollable sources of knowledge, and thus it had become a language dispossessed of a territory and a 5 An example of the anti-Hungarian measures taken by the regime in volved restricting usage of the language in bilingual schools. 346

place on the world map, as of a past and a present . . . I t was the same in Dés after 1922, we had to do History and Geography in Romanian as well , Grandfather assured her, he’d been good at Geography, and the teachers read the lessons out because they didn’t know Olah, 6 we were better at it than them, because I used to play tiddlywinks with my Romanian friends in the courtyard, but after we moved to Parajd the Székelys couldn’t speak a word of it —and in any case her mother’s illegible, scribbled initials was there by the Girl’s bad marks: something like ‘Kut, Kut’, even by the black mark for smoking which had led to her being put in Square and disciplinary proceedings, better not reveal anything at home, especially what the alcoholic gym teacher had written in unsteady capitals, that she hadn’t been to a single gym lesson that year and hadn’t brought a note, nor was she going to, thought the Girl, because the gym teacher groped the girls, We haven’t had 6 From the region of Wallachia; a Hungarian pejorative term for Romanian. 347