Come Back
On her chest, where they operated
a picture was tattooed.
An angel turned to the sky, descending,
outside it snowed.
On her chest, where they operated
a picture was tattooed.
An angel turned to the sky, descending,
outside it snowed.
Pushing the stone away, the angel
sat at the entrance to the cave.
It sank into the skew-eyed evening
light: good thing there was no birth.
Six months after the first operation
her stomach was cut open too. What the
chemo left on the veins, the aorta,
they took out the lymphoma.
It was cold in the operating room. She was freezing.
A needle squirted a dream into her.
She saw a hand for the last time,
fell into a narrow mantle, which was
filled with egg-like light.
The angel waited in the corridor.
Group photographs of doctors on the walls. A nurse
at times clattered across the sick ward.
Hours went by like this. Awakening in intensive care.
Her stomach sliced open to the sternum.
You are beautiful, beautiful, the female likeness of my body,
enveloped in the palm of nothingness.
And the angel leaned above her.
And whispered in her ear:
Adonai, Elohim, Sebaoth.
Come back to the cave-night.
Gábor Schein, born in Budapest in 1969, teaches modern Hungarian literature at ELTE in Budapest. He is the author of ten books of poetry, five novels, and four children’s books. His work in English includes the novellas The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus, translated by Ottilie Mulzet and Adam Z. Levy (Seagull Books, 2017) and Autobiographies of an Angel, translated by Ottilie Mulzet (Yale University Press, 2022).
Ottilie Mulzet has translated the work of László Krasznahorkai, Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, László Földényi, and Edina Szvoren. She was awarded the National Book Award in Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming. She lives in Prague.
