Extract from Michael Mitchell's translation

György Sebestyén's A Man too White

‘I am different. I am different. I am different.’ I wrote it on a piece of paper. In the evenings I would take it out of my pocket and look at it. Why was I different? Gypsies were gypsies, Jews were Jews. Their fathers and mothers, children and relatives looked just the same as they did. I had no family apart from my mother. I knew no albino except myself. Sometimes, in the street, I would see a man who was very blond and I would think, ‘There's one. At last.’ He would look me in the eyes for a second as he walked past and I saw that he was not an albino, merely blond. That look was one I had come to know well. People glanced at my face, were surprised, realised that I was different from the rest, and then behaved as if they had seen nothing: curtain up, curtain down, and in between a tiny drama was played out in the depths of their pupils. In three acts. Act One: The Discovery. Act Two: Shock - Horror - Fascination. Act Three: Mockery or Pity. But at the end of the play the blond man who had initially taken me for one of his kind walked on, and all the others walked on, too, the dark ones and the pale-skinned ones with reddish hair.