Читать книгу Darling, impossible! - Eva Novy - Страница 10

The phone wakes me at midday.

“Lily, it’s me. Where on earth are you? I’ve been calling for over an hour.”

Me who? I sit up to look out the window. It’s raining again.

“Lily? Honey? It’s Camilla! Are you all right?”

“I … I’m … I’ve just been …”

“Never mind. I need you. Jacqueline called in sick and I need someone here to help set up for this afternoon. The Big A is coming! Can you get in here?”

I waver. It’s my day off. I want to spend the day on Anyu’s portrait. I’m grumpy. It’s raining.

“Umm, let’s see. Hold on a minute.” I press the mute button and throw the phone down on the bed. I already know I’ll help her out. I’m too curious to meet the Big A. But it’s good for her to sweat. I go to the toilet, brush my teeth, and turn on the coffee machine. I can hear Camilla’s muffled pleas from within the bedspread. I choose an outfit she’ll probably hate and finally pick up the phone.

“Okay, I’ll be there,” I say, putting the phone down before she has time to hang up without saying thank you.

The bus is almost empty when I get on at Bondi Junction. An elderly woman with empty shopping bags on her lap grapples with her mobile phone and a teenage boy with industrial-sized earphones nods emphatically to the beat.

“Vun ticket to Crown Street,” I say, almost in a whisper, as if that’s the way I always talk, and find a seat by the window. The traffic is stop-go-stop-go all the way down Oxford Street and I watch people in their cars talk to themselves and pick their noses like they are all alone in their bathrooms.

Vot idiots, I think to myself.

It’s been almost a week since my first Hungarian lesson and I’ve been reluctantly working on the homework Eva gave me.

“For one week, speak only with a Hungarian accent,” she said to me.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” I said.

Why wouldn’t anyone take me seriously?

She laughed. “Isn’t that vonderful, daahrlink … I’ll teach you how to speak English with a Hungarian accent.” But she wasn’t joking. “Vell,” she con­tin­ued, looking straight at me with big eyes. “Do you want to learn Hun­garian or not? Do you trust me or not?”

I don’t trust her. But she’s all I’ve got.

“You think it is easy talking like this?” Eva, like Anyu, sounds like she just stepped off the boat. And it’s only been fifty-two years! But apart from the occasional mistake that I’d classify more as charming than grammatical, her English, unlike Anyu’s, is quite respectable.

So I go along with it. How hard can it be? The Hungarian accent is the music of my childhood. I can recognise Hungarians speaking English from the very first sentence. It’s not their morbid cynicism or their unmitigated disdain of whatever the other is saying that gives them away: it’s their sound. It’s not simply pronouncing ‘w’s like ‘v’s and ‘th’s like ‘z’s; it’s all in the melody. In Hungarian, the stress of every word is always on the first syllable. It’s IMportant to UNderstand BEfore you BEgin any CONversation. Think of a steam train chugging up the hill. Chugga–Chugga–Chugga … It’s as though they need to give every single word a little push at the beginning just to help it out. They have no sensitivities around how word stress may change the meaning of a word, so they can’t hear that REcord (the vinyl type) and reCORD (to write down) are two completely different words. It’s REcord all ze vay …

After I left Eva at the Oktogon, I practised talking to myself in the rear view mirror of the car.

It was quite fun.

Vot’s for dinner, daahrlink …

Vell, you know, she likes to talk a lot, but it doesn’t mean she knows everysink …

Bloody bus drivers! Move out of ze vay already …

Now zis is somesink I can do. I’m not an idiot …

But it had been all academic until I was suddenly faced with the cheerful, obliging smile of the shop assistant in front of the acrylic paint display at the new art supply shop on Bondi Road.

I froze. I’ve bought paints a thousand times, but never as a foreigner. I opened my mouth but nothing came out. I wanted to put on the accent, but I didn’t want him to think I was stupid. I thought about turning around and coming back when this ridiculous game was over, but I was in the middle of Anyu’s portrait, and had run out of blue. So instead I smiled, tilting my head just slightly to the left, batting my eyelids furiously. Just like I’ve seen Anyu do when she’s with my friend Sam.

“Vell …” I stammered.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

I wanted to know whether the Chromacryl Cobalt Blue came in the new two-litre bottles. But how do you say Chromacryl Cobalt Blue with a Hungarian accent? Hungarians don’t say Chromacryl Cobalt Blue. How idiotic, I thought to myself. I’m not a bloody refo. I was born here for God’s sake.

I tried to keep calm. All I could think about was how crazy this whole thing was.

“I vood like … vell … you know …” I looked around the shop hoping no one I knew was in here. “Um, vood you have ze two litres Chromacryl? You know Chromacryl Cobalt Blue? In ze bottle?” I finally said, looking at his shoes.

He wasn’t fazed a bit. He smiled, then answered me straight away. It took me a moment to realise I couldn’t understand a word.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He looked at me again.

“So sorry, daahrlink, I don’t speak Hungarian!” I said in a panic as I fled the shop empty handed.

Now it’s almost a week later and I’m exhausted. I have spent countless happy hours talking to myself in front of the mirror, but every now and then I have to venture out into the real world. No one understands a word I say (except the baker and the late shift attendant at the petrol station, both of whom have turned out to be Hungarian). Sam thinks I’m on drugs, which pleases him immensely. The lady at the pharmacy started talking more slowly and loudly, using broader and broader hand movements. Camilla won’t let me answer the phone anymore after I accidentally blurted out a grandiose “no vorries, daarhlink” to a customer. And I’ve spent the week working on my portrait of Anyu in the wrong shade of blue. I don’t know how I managed to steer clear of my mother this week; she would have positively killed me. And now I’m on the way to meet the next big thing in the Australian art world.

The bus turns off Oxford Street and heads down Crown Street through Surry Hills. Shiny glass skyscrapers and vast, brightly lit chain stores gradually give way to narrow colourful terrace houses and one-off designer boutiques. You know, daahrlink, ver even a look costs you an arm and a leg. There are still glimpses down dead-end side streets of the cheap fashion wholesalers and housing commission apartment blocks that once gave this part of inner Sydney its sleazy character, but the main road is now bustling with homewares and gift shops, fluorescent 24-hour convenience stores, and cafés selling organic, conflict-free coffee beans. Vot bullshit! I never heard such nonsense in all my life.

I see Crown Street before me, but all I hear is Anyu.

The street narrows to a single lane as we enter the residential zone. Three more blocks and we are there. I have to clear my head, prepare myself. I can’t walk in there with a Hungarian accent. Besides, Camilla’s instructions were clear: do not open your mouth under any circumstances.

I put away my phone – I am sick of those medical websites with explicit pictures of lupus symptoms. Instead I take out a copy of the marketing material Camilla designed: a shiny, double-sided, postcard-sized flyer with a landscape print of the artist’s most expensive oeuvre on one side and his bio and postage stamp-sized photo on the other. A few short paragraphs capture his world.

Roger “Sunny” Anmatjirra was born some time in the forties in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory, two hundred and fifty kilometres northeast of Alice Springs.

He has a large, artistic family and is part of the Anmatyerre people. He is the half-brother of internationally renowned Australian Aboriginal desert artist Bindi Pultara Freeman.

Sunny spent most of his life as a stockman and only started to paint acrylic on canvas at the age of sixty-five. He has custodial rights to the crocodile dreaming.

Sunny’s style has developed rapidly over the last couple of years. He has progressed from a very traditional, literal, dotted form to the more abstract, modern character he so wonderfully exhibits today, earning him the much deserved title of Australia’s newest rising star of the art world.

Camilla did a wonderful job on the visuals: deep rust-coloured font with black trim on an ochre/burnt orange background, sponged for a rustic effect. You could almost taste the red desert dust on your scorched lips. The story, though short and probably not too inaccurate, is certainly compelling enough for the lion’s share of our audience: armchair art critics, moderately wealthy collectors, accidental European tourists, and WASP-y housewives. But I can’t help wondering why she didn’t print my version (which reads better in a Hungarian accent):