Marc Fitten: "Valeria's last fight"
The book
Valeria is the terror of her Hungarian village. A bristly old maid in black clothes, against whose cynicism nobody is sure. Not the market women, whose vegetables are never fresh enough. Not the men who spend their day in the pub. Not the young and avaricious mayor who would like to bring capitalism to Zivatar. The fact that Valeria once was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world is what most people consider a rumor. But one day Valeria meets the potter's gaze and is now transformed: she smiles, she wears a flowered skirt, she does not care about old cucumbers and tomatoes. The village thinks she's crazy, and the widowed potter does not know what happens to him when Valeria suddenly turns up and starts scrubbing the kitchen.
An extraordinary heroine that you will never forget? and a bizarre and irrefutable book about the renewing power of emotions.
The author
Marc Fitten was born in New York in 1974 and grew up there. In 1993 he moved to Hungary and began working on a novel, which he never published. His debut "Valeria's last fight" originated after his return to the USA and became a surprising public success there. Marc Fitten lives with his family in Atlanta today.
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Leseprobe "Valeria's Last Stand"
Valeria never whistled and did not like people whistling. Whistling was a ruffian, they had taught sixty-eight years of life experience. Someone who whistled was unreliable and irresponsible, sluggish and vulgar. Butchers whistled. Farmers too. Instead of taking care of their fields or performing other duties that peasants should have, they sat in the village pub with beer-wetted jaws, whistling after the slut who owned the pub, and telling indecent jokes. Valeria was sure of that.
And the butcher was clearly the worst piper. He whistled his client directly in the face, blew his stinking breath into the nose of anyone who came to him. Those who stopped by the whistling butcher on Monday had to go to the clinic a few days later. That's what Valeria thought as she scrubbed the joints of her verandah early in the morning. She was sure the Queen of England was not whistling. Even the Hungarian president did not whistle. She went backwards through Soviet history: Trotsky may have whistled; Lenin certainly did not, and Stalin whistled only when he was angry. The later Soviet leaders never whistled, not even Gorbachev. And Yeltsin? At the thought of Russia's head of state, Valeria's stomach turned. Yes, she decided, Yeltsin probably whistled.
And before the Communists or Reform Communists, or whatever they called themselves today, there had been noblemen who never whistled. The Habsburgs are not determined. At the show, Valeria laughed. A whistling Habsburg!
She wiped a single sheet with the back of her hand. She remembered the village mayor's whistle and cursed. It had only happened once, and he did not know he was being spied on. But Valeria watched him. She did not like him. She did not believe in his flashy German car and his young fancy-hearted bride. For her, the mayor was a cleverly trained chimpanzee, though he was much more tactless and limited than a human ape.
Valeria sighed. The mayor was how he was? like all of his generation. The younger ones were all tactless nowadays. Since the Soviets left Hungary? without any ceremonial, it might have complemented?, the country had like a cheap gangster bride brought to the West. With the self-respect, it had actually gone downhill. Young men appeared from nowhere. They drove expensive cars and frequented expensive, long-legged women who, apart from sex, were of no use and no contribution to improving society. Certainly they were not revolutionaries. With their narrow hips and small breasts, these stupid androgynous sex bombs could not even give birth to the revolutionaries of tomorrow.
Valeria imagined the mayor's bride giving birth and had to laugh. Ornaments! Only as a decoration, the new women today. You have to imagine that, Valeria thought. to allow one to be treated with the same scorn that children of the Christmas decoration have to pay for their sweets and gifts.Just the idea! ? to allow them to be pushed aside or thrown violently to the ground or hurled against a wall or, at best and luckily, stuffed in a box until next Christmas. Valeria shook her head. Imagine! A whole generation of women who was trimmed to take off their entire inner life and only spread their legs at any time.
Valeria scrubbed harder, her face flushed. Meanwhile, Valeria thought, the mayor and his buddies slapped their back appreciatively. Their bank accounts were filling up ... the gentlemen blew smoke in the burghers' faces and boldly dared to call the whole stinking flea circus a democracy. Compared with the jovial capitalists who were responsible for Hungary's new and improved free market economy, the Communists had been real philosopher kings. Valeria spat on the white speck of bird dung and scraped it away with her short fingernail. She wiped her forehead. Nothing was sacred to the new system, and that was the problem for them.
It produced contempt. The masses need something inviolable, and even Stalin knew that. Those who want to take proper care of them and feed them must have an opium for them! But the capitalists ruthlessly went over everything. They touched and stained everything, and even trivial matters bowed to the pressure of the market? their beloved Brazilian soap operas, for example, were interrupted by garish advertising for French intimate towels and toilet paper! Why? Who allowed that? What should that be? Why were loud loud commercials? much louder than the program? so loud that you did not escape them, even if you went to the bathroom, where you still heard them. Why were loud shrill advertising blocks? four pieces in the last broadcast? Part of democracy? It was incomprehensible ...
And to make matters worse, the mayor was also someone who whistled! Thank goodness, she thought to herself, that they lived in a small village, deep in the steppe, in the middle of nowhere? Oh, how thankful Valeria was for that. She had the certainty that even the loud whistle of the mayor fell on deaf ears. If the mayor? who was just a super-smart farmer? did not mind whistling; nobody important would hear him and think worse about the village? If the Queen or the Hungarian President actually heard the mayor whistle from afar while they were writing letters to each other, they might look up briefly and wonder, but the soft whistle would instantly shrug the wind away somewhere a sugar beet field stroked? The mayor's tinny whistling would be as unimportant to her ear as the withered foliage that fell on forgotten hunting grounds, as irrelevant as the candelabrum flickering in her study.
For a while, the mayor brought strangers to the village. As if he had intuitively known that he needed listeners. He called them investors. In the past, almost no one from outside had come through their village, that's how it had been since Valeria was born. She remembered how, as a little girl with friends, she saw German tanks racing along the horizon, heading for Russia. Then she saw, again on the horizon, pushing British tanks. The phalanges beat each other for a few days. Later, as a teenager, she saw a Russian tank parade on the horizon for three days, heading for Budapest.
Not a single tank ever came to her village. They were always looking for more important and interesting goals that would be worth their while. Actually, that was a great relief, but some felt it was almost an insult. The sheer disinterest? not just the tank? In fact, the villagers suffered so much mental damage that when the new highway was built, they stubbornly opposed a sign that led to their village.
"Coming to us is not worth the gas," some said. "After all, we only have one hot spring," others said. "The tourists go better to Balaton." The gypsies who built the road shrugged their shoulders and handed the villagers the blue street sign, which was immediately hung in the village pub.
