Excerpt from a Book (4): Gizella Varga Sinai

A beautiful, tall girl walks through the streets of Budapest. To her, the East is a distant realm—a place situated between dreamlike palaces, Khayyam, poetry, and ambiguity. The Hungarian girl is alone. She weeps. She loves humanity, yet she loathes it. Humans are ruthless; their long claws have pierced her body to stain her life and pour their venom into her veins. She walks through the narrow, silent alleys of Budapest. The war has ended, but the scent of death, sorrow, loneliness, and the burning tears shed over cold corpses fills the air. Doors and walls are mute, and the dread of silence makes the stillness even deeper. Where is the East? She had read somewhere that the East possesses green expanses, legendary palaces, and brave, handsome, tall warriors. Today, she walks through the alleys of Vienna, but this time she is not alone; one of those Easterners walks beside her. The dream of the overlap between East and West has reached an unbelievable point here—a point so powerful that it flings her thousands of kilometers away from her birthplace, among a people she finds herself loving without knowing why. She longs to immerse herself in their legends, myths, sorrows, joys, and their ambiguous lives. Perhaps she is one of these legends herself. She is the legend of the Hungarian girl who one day vanished like smoke from the misty alleys of Budapest and Vienna, only to descend like cold rain on a warm dawn over Tehran. A vast canvas lies beneath her hands—no, it is a wall! No, it is a land! No, it is the earth itself! She splashes her colors upon it; she pours her soul into it. She longs to dive into it like the sea at daybreak and feel its coolness against her skin. Angels fill her paintings; pigeons, Eastern men, and women appear, while in the distance, their magnificent palaces remain invisible, leaving us to see only the dust upon crumbling walls. The Hungarian girl is alone—utterly alone. She migrates from her native tongue and builds a home for herself within the language of the people she loves. Her Eastern lover is still by her side, but her childhood Eastern fables have transformed into a lost innocence. Her designs and colors, like herself, have evolved from simplicity to maturity, covering vast expanses. She has learned Persian and speaks it with a sweet accent, a blend of German and Armenian. When you are with her, kindness and love radiate so generously from her being that you can close your eyes and return with her to the era of Khayyam. Has she lost her illusions? Or perhaps, was she herself an illusion? She will never know the answers to these questions. She wishes to emerge from the sea. The waters cling to her body. her body feels as heavy as the entire universe and a lifetime lived. She is the water itself; she is the very colors splashed upon her canvas. The Hungarian girl is no longer alone. She smiles and walks softly through the streets of a lost Eastern city, through the dreams of her childhood, and within the labyriths of her cloudy home.

Note: This is an AI-generated translation by Gemini, based on an excerpt from the book “Book Fifty-Five” by Nasser Fakouhi. The original Persian text can be accessed at the following link:

پاره‌ای از یک کتاب (۴): کتاب پنجاه و پنج