Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Things To Do After My Death

Sanyi Kovács was well-liked in Ladánybene, although he despised his village with every fiber of his body. What he despised even more was his father, whose child-rearing method was limited to an old bully stick, its shriveled surface lined with a few cracks. When Sanyi asked where the bully stick came from, there was never an answer. Answers were rare to come by in the Kovács family, and therefore the questions began to dry up, too. His father, Béla Kovács, was hated by everyone in Ladánybene. His house was the last one on the street near the Csikós ploughland. He shoed horses in a small shed, tucked away in the corner of the backyard. He was Slovak, but people assumed he was a Gypsy, though the last name of his grandfather—Sanyi’s great-grandfather—was Kožicky. The family supposedly had been relocated from Slovakia during the time of Maria Theresa. Béla Kovács took on smaller locksmith jobs to better his situation, but his dark skin continued to prevent him from being able to shake off the prejudice against him. During the Holocaust he was rounded up and taken away with the Gypsies, and he could only identify himself and save his skin when his wife ran after them, waving around his great-grandfather’s baptismal certificate to prove who he was. He was a barbaric, arrogant man who refused to let anyone contradict him. He was mad at the world for labeling him a Gypsy, mad at his ancestors for not laying aside substantial assets. Mad at his wife for bearing him only one son. He did not take into account that she miscarried their second child because of the cruel beating he gave her with a whip, for what he claimed was some sort of unfinished domestic duty. She frantically ran out to the street to get away from him, with their son Sanyi trailing behind her trying to protect his mother from his beastly father who, without hesitation, flogged him too, across his face, leaving him with scars, which, once they healed somewhat, the townspeople assumed were pock marks, so he also called them that. No one warned him that picking off the abscesses would leave him with life-long scars.

He ran away three times, always with a cloth sack tied to the 95