Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth

Author:Krisztina Tóth [Tóth, Krisztina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: civil war; european literature; Eastern european; Hungarian literature; Hungary; political oppression; fraught intimacies; surveillance; speculative futures; speculative fiction; crime novels; domestic dramas; psychological thrillers; political dystopias; political fiction; dystopian fiction; women in translation; literature in translation; world literature; dystopia; election; dystopian books; novels; fiction; dystopian; fiction books; political books; politics; books fiction; political; literary fiction; resistance; sci-fi
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2025-09-05T17:30:00+00:00

maddening, unnecessary series of movements

Petra moved much more freely around the apartment once her husband left. She kept it tidy, but she no longer paid so much painful attention to the details, she didn’t clean the kitchen table with a damp dish towel, lest Mihály find any blotches on the table, and she didn’t change the children’s bedsheets every single week. Now they too could, without fear, stick the decals they’d gotten in the Metmag store onto their bed frames without their father scratching them off in rage. In the cupboard, the T-shirts and the sweaters got all mixed up, the winter and the summer clothes.

Even though she had changed the old, beige curtains for new, flower-patterned drapes, in the falling light of the afternoon, the air, turning into the color of tea with its granulated light, reminded her of those old oppressive afternoons—lasting many years—when she sat home with the children, and she just waited. She loaded the washing, took out the clothes after the spin cycle, hung them on the drying rack, and she waited. She would tidy up the carpet in the children’s room, and she waited. She’d push the baking pan into the oven, take it out, then she waited. She got the children dressed, got them undressed, and she waited. She gave them their baths, helped them into their pajamas, and she waited. She told them fairy tales, she sang to them, and she waited. She was bored out of her mind.

The she’d call her husband: Where are you? she’d ask.

Mihály always had some answer, for the most part designating a specific location: He was either here or here, in neurology, at the clinic, in the stairwell, in a therapy seminar, in a meeting, then he’d quickly get off the phone, arriving home only hours later, throwing his brown-leather messenger bag onto the chair next to the front door.

She often woke up, frequently after midnight, or even at dawn, to the clicking sound of the bag’s metal clasp. He always left it in the same place, stiffly thrown onto the chair’s wooden seat.

He’d come home.

He was here, she heard the rustling sounds as he took off his coat. He placed it on a hanger. He set down his shoes next to each other.

How much she hated these damn chairs with the curved backrests!

In the last few months before he moved out, every time Petra turned the key in the front door to let herself in, she felt as if she were suffocating. She recoiled as she stepped into their common space. As soon as she sensed their apartment’s characteristic smell—a mixture of the fabric softener she used for the children’s clothes, eternally drying, and the pipe smoke penetrating her husband’s clothes—she felt an inexplicable weight pressing down on her chest. The pressure of years condensed into cubic metres, firedamp which the spark of one single sentence could ignite.

This scent was no longer her own; this was not the air of her own home. In her own soul, she wasn’t even living here anymore.

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