He read Tolstoy at school. But Péter Zilahy did not discover what can be done with language until he was eighteen, when a cousin brought him a book of poetry by contemporary Hungarian authors. It was 1989, and Zilahy was travelling about a lot to experience the end of communism in Leipzig and Prague, Poland and Romania. During a train trip, he met a well-known classical philologist and showed him his poems. The philologist immediately sent them to five literary journals, which all published them. Zilahy did not start also to write prose until after his volume of poetry had come out in 1993 ¹ – at the urging of his publisher, who suggested he should put his experiences during a trip to Morocco down on paper.

Our fear is unfounded. The house is empty, only the women and children have remained. On the white walls the shadows of the eucalyptus trees. ²

In 1996, Zilahy took part in the big demonstrations in Belgrade against Milosevic. »Every day was Carnival, four months long. 100,000-200,000 people took to the streets to express their courage and the absurdity of the situation.« He photographed policemen there, both with a hidden camera and openly, and began at the same time to work on his book »The Last Window Giraffe«. He later used the photos for his web site, a CD-ROM based on the book, and for exhibitions. ³

Three thousand cops in front of the Albania, opposite the inscription >jugoslovenska knjiga<. One guy gets pushed into the display window. He breaks through the glass and gets caught up in the scroll with the Philips advertisement: >Let’s make things better<.

The »window giraffe« is called that because window, ablak, and giraffe, zsiráf, stand at the beginning and end of the Hungarian alphabet. The model was a seventies primer for children starting school, like its East German counterpart »Von Anton bis Zylinder«, from which are taken many of the illustrations for the German version that is to come out for the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair. ⁴ In »The Last Window Giraffe«, Zilahy spells out the world once more from the top:

In the beginning was the chaos that we deciphered, and we understood everything, because we could read between the lines. Now, however, we have to decipher that which we understood as >everything<; that which was still clear until recently.

The book came out in 1998; a radio play followed just one year later. ⁵ At the same time, however, Zilahy was already thinking about creating an interactive CD-ROM made up of text, pictures and sounds. He had quickly acquired the necessary skills, but Zilahy needed help if he was to realize a project that was to keep altogether forty assistant occupied for more than two years. Finally, the CD was produced by the cultural centre C3, which was financed by the Soros Foundation. ⁶ Later, when Soros dropped out, the Goethe Institute and the Europen Cultural Foundation stepped into the breach.

The CD shows Europe as a carpet pattern, patched together and oriental, and as a special effect the users can pull out everything that has been swept under the carpet. Or they can choose first letters on the alphabet roller or simply scroll through the text. At the same time, socialist children’s songs are played, little elves fly here and there, athletes exercise on the horizontal bar and a steam engine pulls dates from Hungarian history behind it on a banner: »1526, at the battle of Mohács, the Hungarians lost against the Ottoman army.«

»Without humour I can’t take things seriously any more«, says Zilahy. The interactive form rids the CD of any stiff solemnity – and the same goes for the exhibitions: in the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, for example, where 1,000 visitors a day were counted, you could climb up a rope to the ceiling, whereupon a painted moon appeared in a new light. This playfulness, almost childishness, has a precise reason: »The era that treated us as children and slowed our growth suddenly collapsed, turned into nothing. And I did not grow any more.« His childhood under socialism has taught Zilahy to mistrust all official explanations, an experience that was only underlined after the collapse of the old regime. Since then, he has worked unceasingly on exposing patterns of language and contrasting them with his own experiences. At the age of thirteen, the sight of the Cologne Cathedral already awakened in him the boundless desire to convince himself of the globe’s realities with his own eyes: »I decided to travel the world and look at the Cologne Cathedral in every country.«

If the USA is the melting pot of the peoples, then Eastern Europe is the scrap yard of the peoples. There, a little bit of everything, here, not enough of anything. We drink together, a Croat, a Bosnian, my two Serb mates and I. We speak English, and everyone swears in his mother tongue. We give ourselves up to nostalgia about a submerged land where the stars were red, the girls rosy, the boys dashing and the mountain herdsmen faster than the mountain goats.

Now, Zilahy has travelled the world and seen that there is not a Cologne Cathedral to be found everywhere. »I can learn a lot more from my travels than from my books.« In his book »Drei«, which came out recently, there are stories from China and New York; last autumn he gave readings in Colombia; in January he gave a lecture in New Delhi on the absurdity of reality. Wherever possible, he combines CD presentations and readings with performances: in the Trafó in Budapest, four actors mimed a celebration for the anniversary of the October Revolution in a school classroom. In The Kitchen in New York, two actors recited seven sentences about the hero that can by no means be applied only to communist rhetoric: one only moved his mouth, the other, hidden behind the first, gesticulated with his hands and spoke.

In 2001 the Belgradians were a bit peeved when a speaker in a cage hanging from the ceiling of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination delivered a text from the »Window Giraffe«: »Belgrade’s immortal soul is born again in the bomb craters, with which its foes impregnate it with unending lust.« But the text was written long before the NATO attacks and was about – paper planes.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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