ON THE BATISTE KERCHIEF OF PANKA HUGYECZ

Adam Porkolab

Editor’s Note: This story contains untranslated Hungarian, retained as part of its Palóc folk texture.

Others wanted to be rid of their grief. She fed her children from it.

She had done it for forty years, always the same way. The black batiste kerchief at home, in front of the mirror, slowly. She adjusted it at the temples, pulled it over her konty—the tight tower of hair she wound to the top of her head each dawn, which held the kerchief the way a nail holds a picture. The batiste was light, barely there, like mist on the rim of a clay jug. Forty years, the same kerchief, and it had never been heavy.

Panka was a siratóasszony, a keening woman. They paid her: sometimes flour, sometimes pálinka, a fruit brandy, sometimes only the assurance that the other women would not spit after her on Sundays. The villages needed her because the relatives did not know the voice, that slow, rising wail that opens the road for the dead. Panka knew it. Panka always knew it.

Old Jancsó néni had told her: never carry it past the threshold, into the house. It will stick to you like soot from the chimney.

So she took it off at the threshold after every funeral. Came home, stopped, the kerchief slid from her head, she folded it, hung it by the door, went in, warmed the soup. The grief belonged to the kerchief, and the kerchief stayed on the threshold, like muddy boots.

She always saw the coachman.

They never spoke. He brought the bier, Panka brought the voice. When the coffin was placed on the bier, the coachman led and Panka followed. Forty years. His face—if anyone had asked, Panka could not have described it. He had a face. Hands. A black embroidered cloak draped over one shoulder.

Who watches the coachman? People only want to be rid of him, like a debt.

That day, for Mrs. Varga’s funeral, the coachman did not come. New men carried the bier, badly; the coffin rattled over dry yellow clods toward the cemetery.

Panka looked around, but no one seemed surprised: no one missed him. As though there had never been a coachman. Something shifted under the kerchief, something that had not shifted in forty years: the batiste tightened at her temples, barely, as though a wind had drawn it closer.

She began the lament. Jajédesjóistenem, miértvettedelolykorán—always this way, this fast. Then two breath-held pauses: to mime the pain.

A fine funeral, the relatives said. Among the Palóc, the Hungarian highland people, even funerals are fine.

She was at the edge of the village when the kerchief tightened again. Not the wind. The batiste—lighter than a thought for forty years—clenched around her skull. She pushed her fingers under the cloth. It would not give. The knot had fused to her konty, the fabric on her skull like a second skin.

The second tightening was the Sárközi boy. She did not see him, did not hear him—but her body knew. At her right temple, where she had stood beside his coffin three years ago, the batiste pressed against bone. Her mouth opened and the sound tore out:

Jajédesjóistenem, miértvettedelolykorán.

She waited for Bende next. Old Bende from the lower lane, dying since spring. She felt for the place at her forehead where she always took the old men. Nothing came. The cloth lay light against her again, as it had for forty years. As though the kerchief had set him aside. Or forgotten.

Then, at her crown—where she had stood beside no one—a tightening she could not place. The batiste pulled at a stranger. No Palóc face she could remember, no name she knew. The kerchief, which had been a perfect instrument for forty years, was choosing now.

Then at her forehead, late, old Tóth bácsi, taken by the winter last year. Then at the back of her neck, behind her ears, above her brows: they came back one after another, each pressing in a different place, the way a toothache tells you which tooth.

Panka dropped to her knees. Her hands in the dust, her knees on the stones. The old women used to say: it grips my head like an iron band. She had always thought that was just a saying. The kerchief was heavier now than the copper coins they place on the eyes of the dead. Except here it was not two. All of them. Forty years of the dead, whose grief she had set down on the threshold each evening, as though grief were something you take off and forget.

She walked home.

She stopped at the gate. The szentmihálylova, a traditional wooden funeral bier, stood by the fence. It could not be here.

Yet here it was: a long bier on four stout legs, like a table the size of a coffin. Four men would hoist it to their shoulders and carry the dead to the cemetery, steady, the way a riverbed carries the river. His tool, the way the kerchief was hers.

Now it stood empty. No coffin. No four men.

But the coachman stood beside it.

Panka looked at him for the first time in forty years, and what she saw had always been there: the hand gripping the edge of the bier was bone. Clean white bone without flesh, clutching the wood like someone who has held on for a very long time. On his shoulder, on the draped cloak, a raven sat, black and calm, and looked at Panka the way the coachman never had: impatiently.

The coachman raised one bony finger and pointed at the bier. The empty bier.

You have mocked me, said the finger. Forty years. Well then. Lie down. Let me show you what it is you set down on your threshold every night.

Panka reached under the kerchief. Her hair was white. It had not been white that morning. Now it was white, root to tip, the konty unraveling between her fingers like tow, and she could not take the kerchief off, and she knew she never would.

She did not lie down on the bier.

She carried it into the garden, set it under the walnut tree where she liked to sit in summer. She brought a bucket of water and set it beside the bier, as though receiving a guest.

She walked inside without stopping at the threshold. Forty years she had stopped there. Tonight she walked straight through with the kerchief on her head, into the house where Jancsó néni said never to bring it. She warmed the soup.

The kerchief no longer squeezed. It was simply on her. Like her skin.

She did not leave anything on the threshold that evening.