Stubborn People [antikvár]

FOREWORD A Few Words On My Classmate, Magda Zalan One day I was in the Public Library in Lima, Ohio, where I have lived for many years. I was waiting for the librarian to locate a book by an obscure, nineteenth-century Hungárián author. It was one of the few foreign-language tomes on the shelves of the library which from time to time I borrow not so much to reád as to help the book escape the cruel fate of uncirculated volumes - dumping. To pass the time, I absent-mindedly flipped the pages of the first book around - the telephone directory for Toronto, Ontario, left on the reference librarian's desk probably by a previous reader. At one point a name caught my eye. "Zalan, M." My heart jumped. Magda? My highschool classmate and, much more, one of my two best friends despite the fact that she and I never exchanged those confidences that girls of that age are supposed to share. In 1950 the three of us founded a highly exclusive little club. We called it The Three Coquettish Worms. We were the sole members. Why that name? I could not teli. We all were tall and skinny but none of us was a coquette. I was so shy I would blush to my toes at the slightest opportunity. Sari, who no longer lives, was an awkward mix of an ice-cream-soft heart and a marble-hard ego. Magda was a tom-boy, straightforward, even errogant, with little interest in boys to date but with an acute curiosity for humán beings. The least conventional fascinated her the most. She was always alert; her myopic blue eyes which did not see who passed in front of her seemed to penetrate your skin. Teenage girls love to gossip, and although Magda proved to know everything about everybody, none of us considered her stories to be gossip. They were seldom sympathetic yet they were always entertaining fables. She presented them with a sort of pride, the way deep sea diver shows you his pearls. When I found that "Zalan, M." in the Toronto phone book, God knows why, I was certain I had found my Magda Zalan even if it was rather improbable. There are several thousand miles between Toronto and Budapest which I knew she had not left in 1956 when so many of us fled. Alsó in three decades a woman could change her name more than once, as I did myself... Yet I did not find it difficult to imagine Magda, my schoolmate in Toronto. But I could not imagine her in any profession. I could not visualize her either as a diligent employee or as a passive "flower child." The answer to my question could come only from her Then and there, at the reference desk, I scribbled a few lines on a post card