Korniss Péter - Erdős Virág: Courtyards - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

You’ll drop in here one day and look around. And you’ll hurry on to catch up with... You’ll hurry on and then tell me, or maybe someone else, or, simply, before falling asleep in the evening, you’ll muse:

I saw that house. I saw it inside and outside. Storeys, a yard, ivy, windows. Like a renaissance palace, you’ll think, loggias, vaults and pillars. And then the pattern of a dishcloth will cross your mind, a petticoat hanging loose. What a pity, you’ll think pursing your lips, that people, too, live in that house in washworn clothes and not only the plaster putti peeling off the staircase ceiling.

But the house lives on as if you’d never been there. Because you have no idea, for one, of the little old man who’ll sit at the window at five to sip his coffee slowly, with a drop hanging on to the tip of his chin.

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