Soldier with Flower
This translation of Gion’s 1973 novel, set in the years leading up to the First World War, opens in Szenttamás (Srbobran, in the Voyvodina district of Serbia). Recurring throughout is a painting of the flagellation of Christ in a Calvary chapel, in which a soldier wears an incongruous flower. This corner of the dying Austro-Hungarian empire is populated by ethnic Hungarians, Serbs, Germans, Ukrainians, Jews, and, at the margins, Gypsies.
The story alternates between the distanced third person and the first-person account of a zither player and eventual soldier, recounting his friendships with the servant turned thief Ádám Török, and Rézi, tough as any boy, daughter of the miller Stefan Krebs. In some ways the novel is a portrait of a place as much as of its people, but what people: the card-sharping landowner János Váry with his beautiful horses and taxidermied goose, the swineherd who tells stories on his fingers and rides a boar the size of a foal. This world is fraying, and not only because of the imminence of war, but because of the erosion of language and custom and the poverty forcing emigration to America and Brazil.
Gion’s language in this limpid translation is rich, as in this description: ‘the winter cold froze their clothes; when they walked back with their baskets full of fish, their clothes sounded as if they were wearing rusty armor.’ In its portrait of a vanished world, Gion’s lyrical novel at times recalls Isaac Bashevis Singer.
