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

And he perches to rest on the seventy-sixth bough.

Yet he but stares at the hollow for a minute or so. Mow both his eyes are closed and he fearlessly enters the picture as an invisible ghost.

And the trailer of false mercury tightens like a wire as in it the visor is stuck fast, but the living net gives way at last, and he stands in the middle of the yard so vast, with heavily trembling mouth, and feels the wind blow through him from north to south.

The women sit around on the corridors.

The plaster of old age is the make-up of their faces, they wear wrinkles in the place of necklaces, and they stretch to see the champion below.

“Whom do you seek?”

A fly rings the iron railing with its left wing.

“Whom you seek has moved long, long ago."

The fly rings the railing with its right wing.

“She has grown ugly and old.”

The railing rings and trembles without a noise, then the oldest and ugliest of them leans forward to cry: “It’s me you seek, and here am I” - but by the time her voice goes round the hollow and the yard turns a bit to follow, the foliage flutters into the picture from the right, and like the picture into its frame, now the knight returns to his wandering again, but as from the boughs he still looks back, the scene to spy, he lifts his hand and feels honey trickle from his eyes.

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