Breeding Lilacs out of Dead Land.

Chapter 8 – The Snows of Tyrol, the Clear Beer of Vienna.


\"S\'hobn breges oich di yamen, s\'hobn tfises oichet tzamen
Nor tzu undzer pain kein bissl shain, kein bissl shain …\"

-- Ponar, Alex Wolkoviski.


\"The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.\"

-- Daddy – Sylvia Plath.


…Oniko was standing in a middle of a graveyard, shrouded in the blond-silvery ropes of her hair. Smoke ascended above the incinerators, carried by the frozen wind to caress her lips and tangle in her hair. She spoke words the colour of ashes, her lips had the taste of ashes and her tears were black from the coals. Then she outstretched her hands, extending her palms, and there was blood trickling down her fingers, blood splattering into the black, bubbling cauldron.

Lowering his gaze to look into the cauldron, he saw the surface of the liquid bubbling, and out of the cauldron, rose the naked Justin Snape, his skin encrusted with dripping blood. Justin turned around to the waiting Oniko, and his lips found her ash-flavoured mouth. He kissed her, franticly, hungrily, like a madman, and Oniko was slowly fading, slowly dissipating as the tombstones around them began to glow, brighter and brighter and brighter…

…He heard soft, bright words, interwoven into an old Yiddish lullaby Oniko had used to sing to him. Yet it wasn’t Oniko’s voice, but a younger, clearer one that swallowed the R’s, and couldn’t pronounce any of the laryngeal syllables. He opened his dream-eyes to see Aubrey Granger hovering above him, with paper wings glued to her back and wire halo cutting into her forehead. Young Severus opened his mouth to protests but she only smiled and kept on singing…

Snape woke up with a start. Cheshire Cat smiles were following him from the fireplace, and the cloth of his pyjama trousers was burning hot. He remembered falling asleep in his bed –he had no idea how he had come to be sitting in the armchair in front of the fire. Snape scanned his surroundings. No books. So he hadn’t been reading anything. Probably just strayed out of the bedroom, and moonstruck, stumbled into the couch. He used to do it as a child, wander half-awake half-asleep through Snape castle. The habit lasted for several years until Justin caught him one night. His father definitely knew how handle such problems to his satisfaction.

And you are no better…

He stood up with swift motion, driven by anger and a weird self-awareness, which sometimes resembled catatonia. He was no good. Snape wondered if the strange, ominous child had known it. His child. What time was it? He reached for the ancient pocket watch, a family heirloom that was always rolling around someplace nearby. Half past nine. Fuck. Cursing, Snape strolled to the bathroom, where he wisely avoided looking into the mirror. Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved, and enshrouded in his billowing robes, Severus Snape made his way to the entrance hall.

The temperature, he noted, had dropped during the night. The massive oak doors at the entrance – usually open to welcome newcomers – were now closed against the chill. ‘Robust Auror’, whose name Snape never bothered to learn, sat at his regular place, flipping through the Prophet. Two of his fellows sat on the marble staircase playing chess, while the other three were nowhere to be seen. Neither were Granger and the child. He thought about the other day. The hangover had made him nastier. Less subtle. He was close enough to chasing them away, when the girl made her little speech. Afterwards, he could not refuse. Aubrey was right, as a matter of fact, though it was only a minor point, since she had actually amused him, and made him feel guilty and angry, and out of his depth all at once. She was too much – seeing her was too much… maybe accepting was the simple way out, the coward’s way: the only possible way to avoid direct confrontation.

Tendrils of silvery laughter trickled into the entrance hall, closely followed by the miniature figure of Aubrey Granger. Accompanying her was Dumbledore’s lovesick phoenix. The pudgy bird made some saddening imitation of flying, hovered above the girl’s head for several seconds, then landed on her shoulder with a thump.

“Professor – Severus!” The child exclaimed, rushing toward him. She looked like a swollen rag-doll, tumbling around wrapped in dozen layers of cloth and wool. “Good morning!”

Snape nodded briefly.

“Oooh!” She cried, observing his clothing, “you’d freeze your poor ears to death out there! Here, let me help you!” The child pulled his robe, signing him to get down on his knees so she could reach his face. Snape, too astounded to refuse, obeyed her.
tingting her lips she approached him, seemingly considering the best way to bring Snape to his long awaited, spy’s tortured death. Her little hands reached to touch his face, and he held his breath, fighting the urge to push her away. Small, chubby fingers: uneven nails, bitten down mercilessly. She smelled of fresh milk and dough and chocolate. The scent was heady and so was her nearness. He wanted to throw up but controlled himself. She smiled, and then those plump hands of hers were tugging and pulling his scarf, rearranging it around his face.

“Now, I know these things come with a cap, right?” She didn’t wait for his answer, but leaned forward, tugging his cloak’s hood and pulling it to shadow his face. “That’s better!”

Snape choked. The stupid girl had embalmed him within his own clothes, barely allowing a small slit for his eyes. “Now tell me how, exactly,” he growled, “am I supposed to breathe?”

The girl smiled again. “You don’t. The cold air’s not good for your lungs. It hurts to breathe it. Besides, you’re much prettier like that.”

Sneering, he raised his hand to tear off the ridiculous arrangement.

“Don’t!” The child’s hand shot immediately to grasp his larger one, her face twisted into a scowl. “I told you, it’s cold and you’ll freeze.”

He cringed almost automatically, withdrawing his hand at once. Even though covered by a dragon hide glove, the child’s touch scorched his skin as if it was raw flesh she was touching. The burn lingered, biting off his dermis like vampire kisses. His eyes flashed, and recognizing the danger, the girl jumped, retreating at once.

“I’m… I’m so sorry, Sir,” she stuttered, “I didn’t mean to-“

“-Hullo darling!” Granger’s voice, loud and clear, flowed in their direction. “Sorry about the delay – Minerva caught me on my way here and she wanted me to-,\" She halted, bending to check up on her surprisingly unresponsive child. “Aubrey, dear? Is everything all right?”

Her hand came to rest on the girl’s cheeks, lifting her face so she could look into her eyes.

Snape used this interlude in order to back up. Curious, he watched Hermione’s gaze smooth those creases of fear and caution that masked the child’s features. He wasn’t surprised when Hermione turned to look at him, and answered her with a quizzical glance. Her quick withdrawal promised some later continuation that Snape didn’t look forward to. He heard some quiet murmur, after which, Fawkes flew out of the hall, followed by the girl’s longing gaze. She watched the bird until he disappeared from sight. .

“Well.” Granger straightened, her left hand still resting on Aubrey’s shoulder. “If we’re all ready…” She gestured toward the double doors.

Snape shrugged.

The walk to Hogsmeade began quietly and uneventfully. Granger coaxed her daughter – with a mild success – into her usual chatter, though, judging by the low rumble that speckled the edges of his consciousness, the little fuzz-ball had yet to regain her full confidence. Thalkealked for a while, chatting idly, until something caught the child’s attention and she asked for her mother’s permission to roam a little onward.

“Will that be alright?” Granger, who finally gave up her attempts to interest Aubrey in any kind of conversation, was looking at him, asking for permission.

He made a low grunt, failing to see a on ton to respect her need for additional reassurance with an answer. But of course, she was too foolish to catch on the hint.

“Do you think it would be safe?”

“You tell me, Miss Granger – do you find that, as long as she is in your line of sight, you consider Aubrey safe?”

Hermione nodded. “You’re right. It was a foolish question. You may go, darling, but take care that I can always see you.” She watched Aubrey rush onward, happily plodding in the white, untouched snow. Then she turned to look at Snape. A tiny muscle in her temple was twitching, and her full, pale lips tightened. “I would like to know what happened earlier to make Aubrey so uncharacteristically quiet.”

“Uncharacteristically quiet?” He repeated with a snarl. “You’ll have to define that for me.”

She moistened her lips. “Don’t play these petty games with me, Professor. When I found you, Aubrey was afraid, and I would like to know why.”

“I told you I am not a nice person. Considering you spent almost seven years in my classroom, I believe you should be able to work that out.”

Hermioneatheathed deeply, as if trying to calm herself. When she turned to face him again, her expression was unmistakably grave. “I will tell you only once, so I hope you’ll listen carefully, Professor. I can’t say that I approve of your acerbic manner, nor of your teaching techniques, but those are not for me to judge, nor is your character or your depressing choice to trme ame as one of your many pupils. You may scorn and jeer at me, you may evade my questions and think of me as a disoriented child, but when I’m asking you about my daughter, and why she is might be scared of you’ all of a sudden, when its clear enough she wasn’t scared of your before, you will not try to distract me, and you needn’t give me any obscure, dishonest answers either. When I’m asking you about my daughter you will answer me directly and to the point. Is that clear?”

Narrow eyed, he watched her make her little speech, rushed words forming a soft, intangible cloud of vapour as her warm breath misted into the frosty air. The nip of the cold was burning red blush unto her rounded cheeks, suddenly colouring and deepening Hermione Granger’s rather ordinary features. Her anger, her insolent words, punctured Snape’s well-composed armor of indifference. Anger was familiar in his short range of emotional experiences. He knew how to interact with anger.

Amused – perhaps another default reaction – he looked at her. “Clear enough, Miss Granger, though I cannot tell why you would think an exaggerated melodrama will do anything to improve the impression? But of course, I’m forgetting this is a Gryffindor I am facing. A pity, really, as you are such a talented actress.”

“You wouldn’t recognize a genuine feeling even if it slapped you in the face, wouldn’t you?”

“Please, add ‘emotionally incapable’ to my list of advantages and spare me your infectious enthusiasm.”

“I would,” she said, “if you’d answer my question.”

For a moment, he wondered whether she manipulated him into submission, cleverly parrying the obstacles he put in front of her, to aim her saber to his heart. But, no, Snape decided at last. She was too Gryffindor and honest in her tantrums to do such a thing. “Nothing happened,” he told her at last, his face impassive against Granger’s severe expression.

“Don’t, Professor,” Hermione shook her head. “Simply… don’t. I know my daughter, and though I don’t pretendknowknow you, I could sense something had passed between the two of you. Look,” she turned around to face him. “I don’t blame you for anything, I don’t think you hit her or insulted her on purpose. I know you wouldn’t hurt her intentionally. But, I also know that for some reason, she was suddenly afraid of you by the time I arrived, and Aubrey is not an easy child to scare off. So please, I don’t want her to be afraid of you –I don’t want her to be afraid at all. And if she is afraid of something, I need to know why, so I can help her, and you.”

“I don’t need your help,” he spat.

“Maybe you don’t, though I doubt it. But even if you don’t need my help, Aubrey needs it, and perhaps she even needs you to use my help, in order to help her.”

“I would not be your pet project.”

“I don’t want you to be, I simply want you,” she waved her hands in desperation. “I just want you to be… whatever it is you need to be to make my child happy. So please, tell me, Severus, what happened that made her afraid of you?”

He despised her usage of his given name in order to pursue an artificial sense of intimacy. “I don’t remember granting you the permission to call me Severus,” he remarked.

“You didn’t. I took it deliberately.”

“I would prefer you to refrain from using it.”

“I would prefer you to answer my question rather than try to distract me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Maybe if she weren’t staring at him so intensely he’d be able to come up with sufficient answer. Her open, direct manner made him automatically withdraw. Hermione Granger’s straightforwardness was catalyzing him into defensive offense –when the other side was occupied protecting its frontline, it couldn’t possibly be busied with Snape.

Granger was quiet for several minutes, as if sensing his inner turmoil. Instead, She focused her attention on Aubrey, eyes slightly narrowed in order to prevent the sharp light that shot off the snow from blinding her.

“I pushed her away,” Snape said after a while, talking to no one in particular. “She tried to take my hand, prevent me from damaging her bizarre rearrangement of my scarf and hood and I,” he shrugged, “frightened her I suppose. I’m not very fond of… being touched.”

“Did you… physically push her?”

“No. But I would have probably done so, if she didn’t have the sense to retreat on time,” he admitted in self-disgust
Gr
Granger nodded. She moistened her lips, a gesture Snape learned to recognize as a sign of nervousness, and spoke. “I’m sorry.”

He watched her suspiciously. “What would you be making an apology for?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “Aubrey can be very… open sometimes. Very informal. She doesn’t mean to hurt anyone, she’s simply…” Hermione sighed. “Had I only known –I would have told her she shouldn’t penetrate your personal space. I’m so very sorry.”

Snape snorted. “No “No, really-“ she continued, “I promise I will make the subject clear-“

“That will be enough, Miss. Granger.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Why don’t we talk about something else?”

“Why don’t we avoid talking at all?”

Hermione blushed, and for several minutes seemed to be contented to simply walk by his side. Then, she burst into laughter. “Sorry, sorry, really, I am,” she stammered between one wave of uncontrollable laughter to another, “but situations like these really make me nervous and so I simply have to talk. Oh please don’t be furious with me.”

Snape glared at her – partially for the lack of a better response. She insisted on maintaining a peculiar air of companionship, one he refused, or perhaps was incapable of bearing. This kind of friendly camaraderie was not in his nature, while, aside from that, it was also intimida. He. He knew how to handle large numbers of people, but he didn’t have the inherent knowledge, nor did he have the will, to function as a member of a group – small as it might be. “Fine,” he said at last, not bothering to mask his anger. “Talk.”

“Oh, I can’t just… you know, talk,” she babbled, “I mean… I don’t know… is there anything in particular you’d like me to talk about?”

“I would like you not to talk at all.”

“Please?”

He made a little sound in the back of his throat, torn between anger, desperation and partial amusement. Hermione Granger was a mechanism, the workings of which Snape could not yet decipher. Perhaps letting her talk would lead him closer to the key, then he could pull her apart and shove her out the back door of his mind. “All right, tell me about… Aubrey.”

“Oh, Aubrey.” She chuckled, stumbling over a low, scovecovered heap that turned out to be a rotting trunk. “Well, Aubrey… what can I tell you about Aubrey… how odd, I can usually talk for hours and hours on end when it comes to Aubrey, then you suddenly raise the subject and I’m foolishly lost for words… Aubrey, well, she is the light of my days, the fire of my nights, my death, my life…”

Snape raised a brow. “Quite disturbing references,” he noted. “And incorrect at that. Perhaps: my mother had a great deal of trouble dealing with me, buthinthink she enjoyed it?”

Hermione laughed. “And I thought you’d be one to say humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies who like to eat their young.”

“And you would ask me to be gentle with the young?”

“I will remind you that children are always foreigners,” she said gently. Her eyes were big and vivid when she spoke those last words; luminous with insolent compassion that made him cringe inwardly. Snape was relieved Granger didn’t notice his reaction. She continued.

“Aubrey is a strange experience for me,” Hermione told him. “I always meant to have children, lots of them, in fact. I was an only child and my parents kept a tidy, neat household, so inevitably, I dreamed of big, shabby Victorian house, crowded with children and noise and animals. It seems like we’re never free of the hope that we might be able to compensate ourselves for what we missed through our own children. But then, well, life rarely happens the way you want it to, and I found myself six months pregnant, broke and living in New-York City –that’s the part where you supposed to say: ‘it must have been terrible for you, Miss. Granger,’ but I guess we can skip the sympathy, considering, after all, it’s you.” She smiled at him, clearly enjoying herself. “So by the time the contractions began I was literally lost. I pushed an unfortunate pensioner out of the way in order to get in the taxi, only to find out later that I had no way to pay the driver. Luckily enough, he was a kind man and accepted my condition with understanding. The labour was sheer hell, and afterwards they put this little, red, screaming bundle in my arms and cheerfully informed me I had a girl!”

Granger shook her head in disbelief. “I think I laughed like a maniac. Just… couldn’t stop laughing. And Aubrey was lying there in my arms, quietly, seeming very mature, inspiring this… weird sense of wicked melodrama, then she looked at me, with those huge, compelling black eyes, and I thought: ‘Very well, baby, we are partners on this absurd adventure. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to fall madly in love with you, simply because…’” Granger stopped for a moment, looking for the right words, “’simply because…. You are my life, and I need you to be my reason to live it.’ Aubrey, of course, obeyed, and…”

She halted, wrapping her arms around herself. “It wasn’t the least what I expected. I wanted flowers and tears of joy and a loving husband nervously clutching my hand while I delivered and I wanted my eyes to rest on my newborn baby and feel my heart swell with love –I wanted it to be romantic, and sticky and mushy as that. I never expected the reality of having a baby to be anything but mundane, and of course I knew labour was going to be painful, but… Saying I was a little, foolish, brokenhearted girl can sum it all up. But –not exactly. When I left the hospital I was… almost catatonic, unresponsive, exhausted to the bone, but not… not precisely desperate. It was all so strange; my baby was strange; being a mother was strange. Not in the wide-eyed, wonderment-seized meaning of the word, but with an air of oddity, of stupid, little, pink fluffy animals with venomous bite that can kill a grown man. Like a Monty Python’s movie. Monty Python – they are Muggle artists-,\" she added, noting his frown.

A quick smile lit up her face, and Snape readied himself for another dose of jabber, when she suddenly frowned, as if reconsidering. “I am babbling, am I?”

“Enthusiastically so,” he answered dryly.

“Am I boring you?”

He sneered. “No more than should be expected.”

“I apologise… As I already told you, I can become quite talkative when it comes to Aubrey.”

“I see.”

They were half the way to Hogsmeade when Aubrey raced toward them, holding something small, black furry and squirming in her hand.

“Mummy!” she cried, tug Gra Granger’s cloak with her free hand, “I found something! Can you tell me what is that?”

Hermione leaned to examine the small creature, brows knitted with concentration. “Mmm…” Snape noted she was intentionally tempering her voice, “I have no idea what it could be. Why don’t you ask Professor Snape?”

What the child heas oas obviously a niffler. Snape was hard pressed to believe the woman who once was Hermione Granger, head girl and top-student, wouldn’t recognize a niffler. He gave Granger an irate glance, scowling when he saw the mischievous glint in her soft brown eyes. The child, careful not to stand too close to Snape, had cautiously approached him.

Aubrey coughed ceremonially, piercing him with brief, anxious glances. “Ah, amm… Sir? Can you please tell me what this is?”

A muscle in his jaw jerked nervously as she lifted the niffler to him. Snape cleared his throat, watching the little black fur-ball struggling and squirming against the solid wall formed by the child’s palm. “This,” he told her reluctantly, “is a niffler. It is a small, fluffy creature, as you can well see for yourself, and it usually likes to wallow in dirt. Nifflers are known for their strong attraction for everything shiny, and therefore, are very useful for finding treasures. During the cold season they can normally be found hibernating in their burrows, so it’s quite a surprise to me that you managed to find one this far into winter.”

Cold as his explanation might be, Aubrey’s face ignited with the knowledge. She flashed him a luminous smile, then leaned to brush her cheek against the fine, lush fur of the niffler. Her eyes closed for a moment and her expression settled into one of almost feline satisfaction. The little sound she uttered was cat-like too, half a yawn and half a low, vibrating gurgle. A magical creature wrapped in an ugly Muggle coat, standing on the snow-covered ground not far away from the forbidden forest. She was a daydreamed hallucination, a butterfly who wandered across the wire fence and into the ghetto.

Szeretned megsimogatni?

Snape shook his head violently. The girl couldn’t possibly have said that. It was his own imagination fooling him. Then Aubrey spoke again.

“Do you want to hold it?” She extended her arms, offering him the curled niffler. “It’s really soft and warm and cute.”

Snape was about to refuse when Hermione nudged him with an imploring look, encouraging him to accept the niffler. Glaring, Snape took the furry animal, holding the niffler in safe distance from his body.

Aubrey gave him a toothy smile. “Touch it to your cheek.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“Oh, come on, Severus, Sir! Don’t be such a coward, it won’t bite you.”

Aubrey’s eyes were fixed on him, cautiously meeting Snape’s reluctant gaze and wordlessly, persistently, pleading with him to accept her tribute. Those coal black eyes pried into him, and the child examined his reaction with her mind’s sticky fingers, producing a response that was both polar and acquiescent. He almost expected her to chuckle at a picture of his eleven year old self, frightened and unloved and anxious for recognition. A picture that, if he was lucky enough, existed in his mind alone, only to lie there buried forever. It was probably for that eleven-year-old’s sake that Snape brushed his cheek against the soft fur. How strange, that he was still able to empathise.

The girl’s smile broadened, which made her face look almost simian. Snape hurried to give her back the niffler.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

He made a low grunt. Let her interrupt it however she wished. The child’s enthusiasm repelled him. He heard Granger ask the girl to return the niffler to the place where she found it, and found it difficult to determine whether he was relieved to see Aubrey move away once more. It meant another session of Hermione’s tales, and as much as this late encounter with the child unnerved Snape, her mother was even more emotionally exhausting to deal with. He listened to Granger’s prattle for the rest of the way, amazed to find he was following her tortuous narrative.

She spoke of Aubrey’s early years, painting little, banal moments – Aubrey’s first words, Aubrey’s first steps, her first s – w – with bold colors of nostalgia that had yet remained unobtrusive, plausible to a man of Snape’s sarcasm. Even amusing at times. She related to Aubrey’s magical abilities, telling him about the girl’s supposedly unnatural talent of summoning items at will, encouraged by a spiritualist kindergarten teacher that was portrayed as Sybil Trelawny’s American version. She spoke about being a single mother and the difficulties of handling a gifted child, who, at six, roamed into her mother’s bookshelf, this act leading to the automatic dilemma of suitable and unsuitable reading material. He expressed his opinion on the matter, and suddenly they were discussing the issue of censorship, then absolute versus relative moral – Granger enthusiastically defending Kant’s moral theory against Snape’s persistent deflecting of her arguments.

She was a quick and inspired debater – her rhetorical skills were lesser then his, but what she lacked in flow, she compensated for with enthusiasm and faith. The passing time, Snape discovered, had changed her. She was still more direct than he approved of, and his more sarcastic comments were lost on her as she disapproved of them, or insisted on taking them as a subtle form of sublimation; she in a permanent rush, a haste that often contradicted her thorough manner, and still too fond of demonstrating her knowledge. But even so, Granger was subtler, and in many ways, calmer. She had greater self-knowledge, something that resulted in new, appng sng self-restraint, and she had a quick wit that Snape enjoyed. And she was confident, no longer afraid of him or of possible failure, open to the contingency of making a mistake. She had her own pile of mistakes behind her, and so was less judgmental and more understanding toward others. All in all, twenty-seven year old Hermione Granger managed to inspire the impression of ripe maturity. It was hinted with subtle contributions of pink, enthused blunders, mixed up with the breathy quality of her voice, and nonetheless –it was somehow fullfully soothing to him. As if the toothy teenager he had once known was not yet completely gone. Reassuring.

However, when she asked him to join her and Aubrey during their actual shopping, he refused. They were standing in Main Street; the child hopping cheerfully around them like a nervous Snidget; snowflakes were speckling Granger’s tangled mane of hair, and she gave him a Christmas-card smile that nailed him unto the pastel, cardboard reality of the situation. An honest smile, indeed, dripping Christian smugness and self-righteousness.

Snape thought he’d rather decompose with fleas in his eyelashes, barefoot in the Polish winter.

He made his departure brief and polite, then Apparated to Diagon Alley, where he could buy Anna a Christmas gift that would make her smile knowingly and obliviate him of Hermione Granger’s silvery, infantile laughter.

* The poem brought on the beginning is \"Ponar\", the song of Vilna ghetto, referring to Ponar (Panerai in today\'s Lithuania), a slaughter site during World War II. An eleven-year old boy, Alex Wolkoviski wrote this prize-winning melody in a ghetto contest. Wolkoviski, presently Tamir, is a composer in Israel.

Here\'s a rather free translation of the Yiddish line brought on the beginning:

\"Even sea has shores and every prison has walls, only our suffering has no borders, has no end.\"

Aside from being a spine-tingling poem, Ponar had also been composed; if there\'s any chance you might be able to put your hands on a version of this beautiful, beautiful song (Chava Alberstein\'s cover is the best), a heartbreak is therefore assured.

* \"The light of my days, the fire of my nights, my death, my life…\" Hermione is misquoting Nabokov\'s Lolita\'s opening line: \"Lolita. Lights of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.\"

* \"My mother had a great deal of trouble dealing with me, but I think she enjoyed it.\" – Mark Twain.

* \"Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies who like to eat their young.\" – O’Rourke.

* \"Be gentle with the young.\" – Juvenal.

* \"Children are always foreigners.\" – Emerson.

* Szeretned megsimogatni? - is Hungarian, of course.