THE FLY
1.
It was like a mystical revelation. I remember it. Having cleared passport control, I was sitting in a café at the airport in Budapest waiting for my flight. OK, let’s not get carried away, it wasn’t a revelation, let alone a mystical one — more like the gentle prick of an acupuncture needle, the prick of recognition. Glancing idly at the contents in the display cabinet — sandwiches trying to become “European” and cakes fortunately trying to remain “Hungarian”—I saw it: a fly languidly meandering along the inside of the smeared plastic. The imaginary acupuncture needle hit a random spot and provoked a mental twinge, which sent the untranslatable Russian word rodnoe (roughly meaning kindred, close, familiar) flashing across my internal screen. Russian words don’t usually happen upon me out of the blue. This one dropped from my internal thesaurus like a burly winter fly.
Communism had fallen; Hungarians had flocked to newly-opened shopping centers; IKEA furniture had begun its occupation of Hungarian homes; the grand houses of Budapest had ditched their dilapidated façades and slipped on crisp new ones; unsightly communist sculptures had been shunted to the distant Memento Park. But the fly, it was as if the sprays of transition hadn’t even come close. It sauntered past like a middle finger aimed at transition enthusiasm. I hate insects, the lot of them, but contemplating this Hungarian fly, a légy, I felt a wholly ambiguous feeling of conciliation. I swear it was only later that I read somewhere about the fly as protector of the balance of Mother Nature, and about the special place it occupies in American Indian mythology.
Not long afterwards I traveled to Warsaw. Once again at an airport café, my gaze wandered over the food display, and there it was: this time a Polish fly, its little legs languidly crawling along inside the plastic cabinet. Myxa, moucha, mucha, muva, muha. . Sofia, Krakow, Prague, Warsaw, Belgrade, Skopje, Moscow, Zagreb, Sarajevo. . With a practiced eye, I now searched it out in the cafés of Central and Eastern European airports, and each time I spotted it, I’d feel the same ambiguous sense of relief. Eastern Europe is not lost. The fly is here. Everything is in its place. Something like that.
2.
Literary festivals criss-cross the European continent. Today, even the smallest European towns and cities have their own literary festival, and every writer in Europe, whoever he or she may be, is deluged with invitations. Even if a writer decides not to attend, sending off polite refusal letters takes more time than grabbing a suitcase and jetting off for a couple of days in Köln, Mantua, or Ohrid. Festival organizers treat writers like penniless tourists, or at any rate, like people who are happy to flit from one place to the next in search of a little gratification. Festivals are a chance for writers to get out from behind their desks, or to spend a few days somewhere they’d never go of their own accord, or to meet readers and do a little work on their chronically tattered self-confidence — or, as is most often the case, all of the above. At literary festivals the writer is putty in the hands of the youthful organizers, who, kitted out with mobile phones and little headsets, can barely remember the writer’s name. So writers wander around with little name badges pinned to their lapels. With a well-practiced eye, your interlocutor’s gaze flicks down to your name tag, snaps your surname in a second, and then glances back up, looking at you like you’ve known each other forever.
All the activities at literary festivals are geared towards festival visitors, the potential reading public. Random people come up to you with a photo they’ve downloaded from the Internet asking for your autograph, although, incidentally, you barely recognize yourself. The photo was of course taken and uploaded by some chancer who had never entertained the idea of asking permission. You wonder why they want the autograph, and what any of this has to do with literature, so at first you refuse, but a second later you reproach yourself for your arrogance, and resignedly sign your name. And then there are the autograph cranks with their bits of paper, notepads, and programs: Yes, there, please, next to where your name is printed, yep, below’s fine too. During your appearance — either on your own or as part of group, where you have two minutes to explain who and what you are, and five minutes to read something — the mobile phone generation sit holding their phones above their heads, and snap away at random, taking pictures of who knows what and God knows why. Then, transfixed, they start fiddling with their slinky toys, caressing the display, tapping away as if they’re solving a mathematical puzzle, flashing pictures to each other for a quick peek. Then there are those who come up holding a copy of your book. You’re nicer to them, like a teacher with her star pupils, only to realize in the next breath that they’ve got you mixed up with someone else. If you correct them, an apologetic, slightly derisory smile flickers across their faces: They never thought you’d be so sensitive!
The majority, however, just come to check you out: what you look like, how you speak, how you hold yourself, whether you match the picture they’ve created of you — assuming they even have one at all. Some come to learn a little about where you’re from, others to reminisce about a distant holiday (Yes, we went there one summer, a beautiful island, Hu..ar! Hvar? Yes, yes, Hvar!). Some of them gawk at your shoes, others at your outfit. With all the staring, you feel a dizzy spell coming on and clutch at a copy of your book, as if it were a railing that could save you from a possible fall.
Most people attend literary festivals out of a childlike curiosity about creativity (How does that work, you just sit down and write a novel?! What inspired you to become a writer? Are you more creative in the morning or in the evening? How long does it take you to write a novel?) You and your writerly persona are second fiddles; it’s all about the secret of creativity, whose chance flag bearer you are — I mean, you’ve got the proof, haven’t you? For crying out loud, it’s right there in front of your nose, bound in your book.
The secret of creativity is where the fundamental misunderstanding between writer and festival visitor lies. As Joseph Brodsky wrote, “SEEN from the outside, creativity is the object of fascination or envy; seen from within, it is an unending exercise in uncertainty, and tremendous school for insecurity.” [1] And there, right there, is where the mutual disappointment lies. A writer doesn’t appear at a literary festival out of geographical curiosity, but is driven by an internal search for the ideal reader, one whose words will salve, who’ll say that the architectonics of her novels leave him or her as breathless as the Hagia Sophia; that her dialogues are more graphic than Carver’s; that the dynamics of her novelistic texture are awe-inspiring, on a par with the overwhelming awe one feels at the sight of New York’s Grand Central Station. But instead of the desired ego-stroker, the writer encounters a shrinking violet who thrusts a bit of paper under her nose in the hope of receiving a lame autograph. It turns out that he or she, our festival visitor, wasn’t on a desperate mission to meet a writer, but someone whose words would salve, who’d say that every life, however insignificant it seems to its owner, is worthy of description; that each of us has a hidden creative wellspring, we just need to let it flow; that life’s truths are more important than a writer’s bag of tricks. Instead, the festival visitor encounters a person who is evidently insecure, who clings to his or her own book like a handrail, and who obviously hasn’t seen a fashion magazine in at least fifteen years. And on that subject, it’s high time he or she got a new haircut.