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

Now blazers and blouses still suffer you to select them, flares that you flat them, plaits that you ply them with greasy fingers smelling of cheap cream, you still may caress what you like, piqué and gingham and crepe, you still may crumple and measure and hesitate and buy what you see; but after closing time,

when the yard is but a yard again, and the house is a block of flats, when coloured lights climb the wall in neon tubes the hook knocks the pavement, the coat-hanger jumps off and with it the felt coat, it adjusts the belt, buttons and dusts itself, and starts across the yard, steals towards the staircase, runs up a flight of stairs, seeming to fly with wings flapping, it comes to a halt on the landing, panting, unbuttons its neck, and as it enters the corridor, it begins to feel in its pocket for the keys, the bolt clicks, but as the curtain door opens the coat throws a backward glance over the shoulder: a mackintosh hood nods to it, an oversize apron peeps from behind the blind, a pair of young boy’s breeches trots the stairs up and down so that the house resounds, while a fur-collared mantle waves to it and comes to meet it - the felt coat returns the greeting casually and then shuts the door behind itself and locks it with the key And when night will intone its roar, and neon lights are put out, with the house silent as a huge black chest, about midnight when nobody looks, from around the corridors price tags will fall like banknotes.

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