One foot on every continent
I used to think the world was my home. I wanted to have my coffee next to the Pantheon in Rome in the morning, because there is the best, go to one of the many small theaters off Broadway in the evening in New York, in the afternoon take a swim in one of Yucatán's dream beaches and the monkeys in one Feed park in Singapore. I come from a family that has sprung a whim of history into the world, which has left its mark on all the latitudes and longitudes of this earth and whose curvy coordinate system I was always ready to expire.
The uprising in Hungary had ravaged my parents overnight in 1956, and with relatives and friends they had turned their backs on their country to wander the globe and settle in a safe distance. We've always been getting mail from Canada and Australia, from Italy and the Netherlands, and there was no difference between Budapest and Sydney or Amsterdam and Boston for me as a kid, all these names sounded similarly spectacular, and the places stayed close to home or away me, whether there were a thousand or ten thousand kilometers between us.
Wanderlust - go on a search and discover the untraceable
The world map above my bed, which I took with colored pins, had hardly any white spots. For every continent I knew a house where I would be received, a chair pulled up and a plate put on the table for me. I jumped over the continents in my mind, every time I lay in my bed, watching them spread out across the blue oceans, sticking red and green and yellow out of its waters.
What is it that drives us and scares us? We search the distance and for a while despise the tiny that always surrounds us. We leave our prison, we release the shackles, we say goodbye to everyday life, we drop, somewhere, nowhere. We dare the departure. We move and hike. Once be good for nothing. Escape the everyday noise, listen to a distant silence. Dissolving us in the foreign, to be unrecognized. Just go away. Go on a search and discover the untraceable. Meet giants and dwarves. Be a Gulliver once.
My wanderlust might have been nothing but a longing for a home, strangely twisted, as if I could find a home out there, like others that belonged to me, found them. As if it made no difference where I was, as if I could wander the whole world with the same step. There were no limits in my mind, foreign languages did not scare me, something always made me believe that I could learn and master them, and while my friends were traveling to the Allgäu, I was already sitting alone on a plane that took me across the Atlantic Ocean Toronto brought a chair for me, put a plate for me and later spoke to me in the spray of Niagara Falls Hungarian and English.
Is the counterpart to wanderlust really homesick?
Wanderlust was for me the dissolving of distance, the shortening of seemingly infinite distances to my human dimension. To make the big world smaller, to get closer to the others with whom I was connected through all directions - that's what I wanted. Pretend that they live in my neighborhood, as if I would not have to board a plane, as if my parents would not drive me in our car across borders, as if I had to be with them, just cover my coat and take the few steps to Run the end of the road and not to the end of the world.
Whether the counterpart to wanderlust is really homesick - I do not know. Do we need the distance, so that we long for home, so that we even recognize what it is for us? Secretly, I admire those who do not know the wanderlust, have never known, because they are so firmly anchored in their homeland. My aunt Jolán never used the word, it does not belong in her vocabulary, maybe she does not even know it. She was born, raised and married in a small Hungarian village, giving birth to her children, burying her husband and eventually going to die there. She has never gone anywhere when she looked from her garden over the nearby fields and vineyards. Not even Budapest has seen her. As I grew up, I wanted to set foot on every continent, including those parts of the world I had not traveled before, perhaps a mania of domination, my personal, crazy conquest. I became a flight attendant to finance my studies, and my life was much the same as I had imagined as a child.
I woke up and looked over the Copacabana, I went to sleep with a last look at Lake Michigan.I bought china at Wabash Avenue in Chicago and perfume at a market stall in Cairo. Colleagues who spent their holidays on Lake Garda, although they could travel almost all over Asia, I thought that was crazy. Nothing bothered me when buying a ticket, no fourteen-hour flights, no rampant dengue fever, no wild desert dogs, no blindness from malaria tablets, not dragging my backpack through a forty-five degree desert and not the daylong waiting for the one barge me into the South China Sea to a small island. I knew a lot about Manhattan, I knew very well in Rome, where I had lived for almost a year, but I knew nothing about the hiking trails through the Taunus, which started on my doorstep, and none of the meandering winds of the Main, to which one of the excursion ships could have brought me every Sunday.
I knew Manhattan, I knew Rome, but not the Taunus.
We from the north can only long for the south. Paul Theroux, the great poet of travel writers, wrote to Bruce Chatwin, who left us the most insidious travelogues: "If I imagine traveling anywhere, I imagine I drive south." Wanderlust is therefore a southern pain. Maybe we should do it this way: Let's just replace the word Wanderlust with the word Southweh, and let's just ignore the question as to whether, conversely, a person from the South is ever so painfully longing for the north. Let's just ignore it.
At that time, it was places that really quelled my wanderlust and showed me a beauty I had not suspected. In Yucatán, I climbed alone with friends over mossy Mayan pyramids, we lay alone under the palm trees in the powdered sugar sand, we caught the fish ourselves in the afternoon and grilled it over a fire in the evening. We walked alone through the ruins of Tulum and looked from far above to the turquoise Caribbean Sea, where no one bathed. My dad and I shared Kuta Beach in Bali with a scattered bunch of weird dropouts and matted dogs, and when we walked through knee-high rainwater to the only restaurant to wait for our beer under fans, my dad saw with his beard and Sun-stained face like a brother of Ernest Hemingway. What if the traveler disillusioned and he asks himself bitterly: What am I doing here?
Where do we have to go to be alone?
Kuta has now become a limbo, the worst thing tourism can do in one place. Do I want to travel for two days to look at a concrete beach on a gushed sea? Or dance with two thousand ecstasy-swallows at the Full Moon Party Ko Phangans, where not too long ago I lay alone in a hammock and tiptoed through the warm sand? Even on Australia's west coast, where rarely anyone gets lost, I shared the water while bathing between dolphins with a woman from Frankfurt, who poured her wide Hessian well audible over the soft waves. Where do we have to go to be alone? To escape the people of our homeland and the shameful that has not screwed up with mass tourism? How far do we have to go, where do we have to carry our luggage? And do we see the landscapes and faces there for the first time? Do we marvel at their virginity, or have we already brought them through the screen in the living room into our visual slumber consciousness? As our closest neighbors in the Global Village, where all the paths have been ceded, all the flags have already been plugged in and all the cameras have already run?
The places of my early journeys have sunk, submerged in a sea of the irreplaceable. If I were to be dropped off today on Yucatán beach, where the water belonged only to us, I would have to cry. About the loungers and stalls on the white sand, the felled palm trees and the ten-storey condemnation that the hut had to give way, which we then shared with fat tarantulas and a certain jock who had left the US for reasons that were criminal Referred to gambling and for which we naturally did not ask with the nonchalance far traveled world citizen. What is left to me is the longing for these lost places. Maybe that's the essence of real wanderlust.
In general, it seems to be declining in proportion to the increasing age. At any rate, I develop more neurotic features when it comes to traveling. In the past, I did not mind waiting for a bus at Nairobi, which never came, while next door the mice darted over the clay and I drank the Coke from a bottle with a bottle cap rusted on it. For two dollars I stayed overnight on a bunk in a backyard in Bangkok, under an air conditioning system that did not cease to boom, and in the morning I was well rested and awake. Today, one could torture me like this. If someone tells me he is flying to Burma to travel the golden triangle, all sorts of feelings come to my mind, just no jealousy.
From which mileage can one call the woes Wanderlust?
But at what distance, from which mileage can we actually call the woes also wanderlust? Can I have a pain after the Danish coast, which is no further than a thousand kilometers from me? After these little pastel-colored coastal towns, nestled so outrageously in the summer on a lead-colored sea, where there are ice in ten barely distinguishable shades of pink and flax-blonde children with butterfly nets on the rolling hills gymnastics? After this wooden house between buttercups, at whose window the lemon butterflies beat at night?
Does it sound outlandish when I say that Denmark is my new destination, this land of the Snow Queen and the valiant tin soldier, the country with the flying horses, the light blue whitewashed fences, the gleaming white castles and hollyhocks under that sky? its color changes two hundred times every day, at least two hundred times? Maybe the distance has come too close to me in all these years, maybe my world has been twisted during the earthwalking. In any case, the magic that used to seem only remotely is now apparent elsewhere.
A tender yearning has remained, she slumbers in me and wants to break out soon, I can feel it. On a Sunday morning, I'd like to wake up in Manhattan and walk down deserted streets to Central Park, drink the latte from a paper cup with the joggers in a small, clean-lipped café, and skim the headlines in the Sunday New York Times. After this Sunday morning Manhattan with its extinct streets pretending that the houses are uninhabited, after that I have a woe, after that kind of silence that only exists here, only on those wide lonely paths, only on this one day of the week ,
A place of longing: Broome in Western Australia
And I want to go to Broome, Western Australia, which I can not forget, that has infected me overnight, this provincial nest above the Tropic of Capricorn, with its blood-red evening sky and never-ending warmth, with its whitecaps pointing the way for surfers, and the rising sidewalks pushed back by the mighty roots of the baobab trees.
When my children are big enough, I want to go with them to this quiet place where the only sound of the ocean waves seems to come and which is at the bottom of my world. I want to see them jump into the screaming blue water and talk to the poisonous green sun worshipers who sit on their arms in the evening. How they look for the dolphins and cockatoos flying over their heads screaming from eucalyptus trees. I want to see how they open their eyes when someone warns of crocodiles and tells of the recent cyclone that swept away two tiny coastal towns farther south. However, as long as they are still too small, we should make the walking routes that cut up the Taunus. Finally, they start at our doorstep.
Zsuzsa Bank was born in 1965 in Frankfurt, her Hungarian parents fled to the West in 1956 after the uprising. She trained as a bookseller and then studied journalism, politics and literature. In 2002 she released her debut novel "Der Schwimmer", which plays in Hungary and for which she received several awards. In 2005, her story volume "Hottest Summer" followed. Zsuzsa Bánk lives in Frankfurt, she has two children aged five and four.
