From a meeting between Mihai, who is spending his honeymoon in Italy, with an old friend, the events of this novel begin. He soon finds himself leaving his wife at a train station, and begins his own journey, searching for himself and the memories of his youth. Traveling from one city to another, Mihai experiences the anxiety of his existential questions, and meets friends of that period. He learns the reason for Tamas’ suicide, and Eva’s relationship to this incident, but what does he really want from recalling stories told by time?
In this novel, which is considered one of the most prominent Hungarian novels in the modern era, which achieved great success, was translated into several languages, and was adapted for theater and cinema, the reader feels as if the author is able to penetrate his depths, and not only the depths of his characters.
It is said: “Writing theater is, in a way, knowing how to tell our story.” But the past ten years have undermined the axioms. Instead of asking how, we began to ask: Why do we talk, and about what? Thus, these four texts come today to answer these questions in their own way, and carry the concerns of their writers “here and now.”
A text depicting the city as he sees it: two elderly people guarding public toilets on a street in Damascus; Where stories seep out from under dirty bathroom doors, another about a young man who spends most of his time in the kitchen, unable to work and interact with others, and instead tries in vain to stop the water dripping from the tap so as not to drown him, and a third text about a faltering relationship between a Syrian young man residing inside... A Syrian woman residing in Germany. As the two try to maintain the connection that unites them in the face of the difficult circumstances of their lives, a final text sheds light on the mentality that prevails among Syrian artists in “Despora,” and affects their work mechanisms and their relationship with cultural institutions, by shedding light on the rehearsals of a theater group preparing for the play “The Return of Danton.” With projections on the Syrian situation.
Taken together, the texts of this workshop form an image that resembles its spaces with the questions of these spaces, or with the absence of questions, with the blurring or dominance of memory, with confusion, with boldness, with violence, and with death. Stage masters.
People wanted to escape the void
They built big cities
They became gears, hammers, bags and hats.
...
City people wanted to return to nature
When their bones were broken
They filled their balconies with flowers and trellises
They raised cats and dogs in homes.
...
They made the cities fortified and walled
It is surrounded by soldiers and guarded by aircraft.
...
When wars break out
Balcony roses will still survive
Battles rage in the mountains of the villages.
...
Peasants, harvesters and truck drivers will die
But the crops
It will still flow onto store shelves.
