László | Derkovits street

‘I’ve had all kinds of jobs since the 70s; I had my own car repair workshop, I had a job at Geodézia, I was a janitor at the end of the 80s and I also operated as a side-actor for a while so I’ ve taken part in many things.” “Do you have a family?” “I realised soon that with such a lifestyle I cannot take responsibility for more than one person. I went up and down in the country and it would not have been fair to leave my wife and children at home alone. I almost got married once, we were engaged with a lovely little ballet dancer girl for three whole days but then her father, who was a locksmith, didn’t support this thing for some reason. And after this I have never been in the mood for this whole thing. My parents couldn’t support me and this was difficult at the time, too, on top of the my mother struggled with cancer for ten years, she had cervical cancer. Girls today don’t really understand how important those bloody check-ups are, either . Very-very important! I went through three little stories like that, unfortunately we are at high risk in my family. I don’t wish anyone to get into hospital, not in this country. I’ve just heard that Hungary is on top of these things, unfortunately.” “What things do you do nowadays?” “I try to make a living. I’m 65, I advertise, handyman service, I work like a dog. I wake up at 4 o’clock and it happens that I get to bed at midnight. I build motorcycles, by the way. I’ve been working on this one thousand Kawasaki for a long time, it’s a USA Police, a very rare type, people usually don’t know it. I’m putting it together. But I don’t get a permission for it, I can’t leave the garden with it. I’m slowly at the point to write to Viktor (Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister) because it doesn’t make any sense what goes on here, one works hard and it’s treated as nothing, and it’s not even only about building motorcycles. I’m good at quite a lot of kinds of handy work, I work with cars, I have almost 50 years of experience. I would pay taxes gladly but there’s no such thing as a jack-of-all-trades. They don’t know this concept. They send me packing because: what is a jack-of-all-trades? When you endeavour to do something, I fix a computer, I cook fisherman’s soup for the Germans, I clean the latrine if it’s necessary, these don’t really matter. And as I travel the country a lot, I see how people live so I don’t want to complain as I have somewhere to live, or at least right now and there are things I can do for others.”