Short stories and essays on photographs selected from the Horus Archives

by Zsombor Aurél Biró

In collaboration with Hungarian cinematographer Sándor Kardos’ vernacular photography collection, the Horus Archives, we invited three everyday imaging enthusiasts who have a way with words to select a photograph from the archive and write us a text in the format of their choice. Here is text one by Zsombor Aurél Biró, Hungarian prose, film and drama writer.

Photograph: from the Horus Archives

We roll down the windows, the draft rips into our faces on the highway – five bros crammed into a car, deodorant-smelling boy bodies halfway between puberty and adulthood, with crisp new high school diplomas, scratched pimples, goatees that we all believe to be cool. We’re nineteen; we have yet to reach our final self, are nervously warming to the idea that the rest of our life is to be spent in this body, and even our gait looks as if someone just put these overgrown limbs on a torso to dangle around. But we already have the self-confidence to lecture the whole world about life and to think to know exactly why things turned out the way they are, and what should be changed to make everything better. We know what we want out of this life – one day we will be Nobel prize-winning authors, AI researchers, MP’s, psychiatrists, startup owners, family guys. But none of that matter for now, we’re not interested in what the future holds or anything but the present moment: the sweaty thighs in the backseat, the festival wristbands on our hands hanging out the windows, the metallic hiss as we pop a beer fished out of the cooler bag.

We park the car at the end of the street, next to the holiday resort of the State Railways. The garden is overgrown by weeds and nettle, the trees block out the setting sun. We get to work right away; these thirteen years have brought us together so well that everyone knows their job: chopping wood, marinating meat, putting stones around the fire pit, trying to light the fire under the barbecue rack without paper, in vain, and resorting to gasoline in the end. Slowly, darkness seeps through the tangle of branches; spritzer in one hand, we toss vegetables wrapped in tinfoil onto the embers. No one has ever enjoyed half-baked taters and black-burned chicken so much. We are getting drunk; we already know how to live but don’t have any taste yet: we mix vodka with ginger ale and splash around cheap wine – the way to the inevitable blackout doesn’t matter, what does matter is unhinged rave. We have a common understanding, unspoken, that we must pursue life experiences, pushing ourselves to the breaking point to get something that we can remember then through a lifetime.

However, deep inside we may already feel that we have run out of collectible experiences; that was it, and now begins the era of recollection. The tie that binds us together won’t be any thicker; in fact, it will be thinning by every year. We don’t even know when we’ve slipped into nostalgia: empty bottles piling up around the table, we shed all our acts, lay out, right between the cups, our deepest fears that in daylight we would be ashamed to admit even in front of ourselves, and flash up half-forgotten stories: the chess championship that ended in a fierce fistfight; girls we did and girls we did not; and that house party where we scratched smiley faces with a kitchen knife into our forearms as a kind of group tattoo. We check where the marks should be but no matter how hard we search with the flashlight, the smiling scars have long since healed, there’s no trace of them left. For some reason, this reminds all of us of the sentence we repeated to the point of headache before the oral exams: “Don’t worry, guys, the future is coming, you just have to survive this fucking present somehow.”

We fry cocoa brioches for breakfast, and everyone sips a beer with his coffee; shredded sunlight drizzling through the branches, we swallow back the acid burps eyes half closed. We set off to the lake after eating, and on the steep forest path down from the high bluff, we give great yawns and casually hand out nipple cripples and towel snaps. From this year, we should pay to enter the beach grounds but we choose to sneak in behind the fish booth at the back instead. It’s still empty, the smooth water surface glistens in green; we roll a cig on the jetty, and holding it in one hand, swim inwards a few hundred meters. Paddling in the middle of the Balaton, we watch the food stalls waking up in the shade of the sixty-meter-high escarpment. We rinse out the hangover from our body and go lie onto the sun-drenched concrete. The beach is steadily filling up, the sludgy morning air turns into a sunscreen-scented scorcher, kids are shouting on the sand soccer field, dads are blowing up the mattresses. Around noon comes the food craving; we munch the lángoses with cheese and sour cream quietly and intently, the fried dough is crunchy, the beer is sharp on the tongue.

At nightfall, we scramble back to the house, slapping each other’s sunburned back – palm-shaped white patches on the red skin. We sprawl out on the garden chairs, blankly nodding our heads weighed down by fatigue to the metal the neighbor is blasting. We’re getting to the 40th hour awake, “and a storm is coming,” shows one of us on his phone, but sleeping is out of question, the last beers are popped as we head to the village; the present has to carry on a bit more. It’s got dark, the streets are empty, the convenience store’s door is padlocked, pubs are closed too, we wander aimlessly among the usual renovated cube houses with our flip-flops dully flip-flopping in the dust. We reach the edge of the bluff without even noticing – one moment we stride on the dirt road, the next we run out of road and stand at the brink of the cliff. The Balaton is a horizontal expanse in front of us, the lamps of the main road illuminate the closed beach, further away, the water merges with the darkness, and only the rhythmical flashing of storm beacons trace out the shoreline. Then it starts to thunder, and as lightning bolts strike, a red glow reflects on the lake. We sit down on a bench to get the rest of the weed out of a chewing gum bag, and while we watch the storm silently, the go-to-bed joint passes from hand to hand. The landscape seems to rip apart every half minute when lightning strikes run across the sky, over the waves.

I remember that it was me who put the butt out on the arm of the bench when I felt that the smoke of the filter started to burn my lungs. I don't know what I was thinking of as I stood up. It must have been something about how nice it would have been if we had never finished that cig; if from now on all our existence was limited to passing it around and around. And it might have occurred to me that apparently we had survived the present, so the future could finally begin. But I kept this last thought to myself because I didn’t want to be all theatrical about something that was simply beautiful. We had to leave anyway as we felt the wind pick up and blow the storm towards us across the lake. “Same place next year then,” I said. The guys were nodding, yeah, next year, sure. Or if we can’t make it next year, then the year after. Or the year after.

The text was written in Hungarian.
Translation by: Bodóné Hofecker Zsuzsanna

The Horus Archives: Kossuth Prize recipient cinematographer Sándor Kardos’s collection of vernacular photography, is the largest private collection in Hungary in terms of size, comprising close to one million images.

Take a contemplative look at the digitised part of the archive through Horus Archives' webpage here.

Read our interview with Sándor Kardos, founder of the Horus Archives here.