by Susan Taubes
“Visit Budapest, the Pearl of the Danube,” the green travel folder invites the American traveler. “With its history spanning a period of two thousand years, the city has preserved a number of historical monuments and artistic relics...” The pink folder, issued by Ibusz (what the Ugric tongue has retained from the Latin omnibus), offers “WINGED HUNGARIAN HOSPITALITY” aboard Malev planes scheduled to twenty-three European and Near Eastern cities. For information, ticketing, booking: 3 Vaci Utca, Budapest, V. Telephone: 134–034. It lists under its sightseeing program a tour of Buda castle twice a week at 10:45 every Wednesday: “The motor-coach will leave Roosevelt ter and make for the Parliament, accompanied by a guide. The visit to the interior of the Parliament is accompanied by special guide. From here, the coach will go over Margaret Bridge, Martirok utja, Moszkva ter up to Castle Hill, to the terminus of the microbus. Here the visitors change over to the microbus, the guide takes his seat at the microphone, and explains the interesting spots on Castle Hill on the route that takes about forty-five minutes. From here the visitors will be taken back to Roosevelt ter, crossing the Danube on the Chain Bridge.”
There is a small Hungarian bookstore across the street that might have a map. The front is cluttered with souvenirs, shepherd dolls, peasant lace, pipes, embroidery, folk-song records. The tastefully dressed lady in her fifties, by a small table, writing on stationery paper, is presumably the owner. She could be a friend, neighbor, relation of the owner, she has such a pleasant air of indifference, of coming from somewhere else, of being at home anywhere. She gives Sophie a brief look, a friendly nod of acknowledgment, it could be to her sister or daughter coming home from work, to whom it is not necessary to speak. A map of Budapest? She thinks she has one upstairs. The customer isn’t in a hurry, is she? There are some Hungarian books in the back, she is welcome to browse around. She must go upstairs anyway in a little while to put the roast in the oven, she’ll look for it then.
Foreign novels—American, German, French—translated into Hungarian fill most of the shelves. But there are some items of interest. A bound volume of the weekly illustrated Vilag, or World, the Hungarian counterpart of Life or Paris Match for the years 1921–1922, catches her eye—unfortunately buried under a huge, dusty and precarious jumble of journals, pamphlets, as well as heavier untitled volumes. That’s just as well. Now is not the moment to look into the twenties. It’s the volume of the First World War years Sophie would like to see, that she leafed through so often as a child. There was one in her father’s waiting room and at her grandmother’s. Almost every house had it. It was a big book bound in red, with the picture of the Assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on the first page, followed by pictures of members of the Hapsburg family, beautiful young men and women, the sad old Kaiser Franz Josef and Kaiser Wilhelm in his pointed helmet. The next page showed jubilant crowds dancing in the street, hats thrown in the air, hands waving bottles: the crowds celebrating the news of the outbreak of the war in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest. The rest of the book was war pictures. The same pictures, page after page, of soldiers, men going into battle, marching, retreating; men in trenches drinking from tin cups, grinning men with bandaged heads and limbs; dead or wounded men carried on stretchers, dead soldiers strewn or in a heap on the ground; or just one dead man’s face, the empty stare of dead eyes that made her silent inside. She would like to see the First World War volume and the volumes for the issues between 1936 and 1939; where she saw in the single issues as they came out once a week pictures of the things happening in the world right then, in Germany, Italy, England and France. Those soft, flappy pliant single issues you could roll up, lying about on tables and chairs, which did not have the weight, permanence and reality of the bound World War volume. They contained the events of the week about which there was always so much discussion, where she saw pictures of Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler in the last years of the thirties. But it was in America, after the Second World War, that she looked at length at those pictures of the thirties.
The proprietress of the shop returns with a large, twenty-five-cent folding map of Budapest and its outskirts. She is taking it of course, it’s exactly what she needs but she wants to buy something more. That large new Legends of the Magyars for children, with illustrations, appeals at first, but in English it has lost its flavor. On another shelf, however, she has just spotted a schoolbook-size volume badly printed in Argentina, appropriately titled A Multunk (Our Past), with a picture of the white-haired lady who wants Hungarians wherever they happen to be to remember their past. It’s all there, from the legend of the golden stag that lured Nimrod’s sons to the promised land: a bird flies from branch to branch, a song flies from mouth to mouth.
It’s all there. She remembers looking at the same picture in her schoolbook. It was an elementary school primer for the second to the fourth grades, in which ancient legends, stories of historic battles and kings, were oddly mixed with contemporary sketches of little Gyuri’s visit to Fiume, how silver is mined, and timeless lyrics on the beauty of wildflowers.
Leafing through, it’s a shock to experience that none of this has become foreign to her. A language and stories she left behind, shed, some twenty-five years ago, read like yesterday, or simply now. As if nothing has changed, neither the reader nor the book. Sophie’s schoolchild’s feelings about Attila, the kings and legends of Hungary, have been preserved, fresh in their original color, and stored away inside her, differently, more mysteriously than in the book: the images evoked by the text and line drawings have that sudden, unexpected power, of sound that is not in the notation of the score. It is clear also that whatever more sophisticated perspectives, judgments, or suspensions of judgment subsequent study of history might produce in her, she can have no other feelings about Attila and the kings of the house of Arpad than the feelings that continue to haunt and sound from images formed in the first grades.
She is looking for a picture, but she doesn’t find it in this book: the scene of the people gathered on the frozen Danube to proclaim Matthias king while he was prisoner in Prague. She realizes, having leafed through chapters on the glorious renaissance of Hungary, the picture she thought she remembered from her elementary school primer vivid and throbbing with life is missing. Finally, from another book, or perhaps from the fleeting memory of a poem learned in class she remembers: It is the picture of a woman in a room, the mother of the future King Matthias, a writing stand with quill beside her; she stands by the window, her arm outstretched, her face lifted to the black raven who has just flown off with her letter to her son, prisoner of Frederick III in Prague.
The elementary school book of Hungarian history ends with the battle of Mohacs: 1526. Now Sophie understands why the stretch from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has to this day been a misty, insubstantial rift, a gap in time. It explains why important facts and dates she learned in school—Napoleon, the French Revolution, Cromwell, Bismarck, the Boston Tea Party and the Victorian Age—though dutifully copied from blackboard to notebook, and passing obediently from notebook to examination papers, never took root in her mind where three centuries were a swamp: endless massacres, mud, misery under Turkish hooves, Hapsburg heels. She returns the book to the shelf.
She reads, in a volume of ballads by Arany Janos, opened at random, poems she read as a child. She reads like a child: the poem walks away with her, like a man dancing with a small child, so tall she can’t see his head. She knows it’s not for real, she does not understand the power moving her, the movement stronger than emotion or meaning. This poem is silent, holding its breath, stepping like a thief or a fugitive. The poem about the woman washing a bloody sheet in the brook does not move at all. In the last stanza as in the first, she washes the torn rags, her hair gray, her knees frozen into the ice, still she washes the thin rag that the brook is still playfully snatching from hand but cannot relieve her of. The story in the middle, of her imprisonment, trial, acquittal, serves to make the
single image larger and stronger, to prepare for the last stanza that turns the key once more in the lock.
She is startled to find herself in a bookstore, tall and bulky in her coat, looking out on Second Avenue, as she raises her eyes from the book.
THREE
PAPI LIKED to talk about things Sophie did when they lived in an apartment building on the other side of the river in Pest. But she herself didn’t remember before she was five years old living in the house in Buda. She remembered the day they finished building it, and very dimly the earlier stages of its being built. There was a celebration, a wooden scaffolding tied with colored ribbons was torn down and burnt. The house was not ready to move into, there were still piles of brick, mountains of sand and gravel, troughs with cement and a lot of mud all around. But it was all built. She remembered the scaffolding coming down like a tree from the sky, the conflagration, people standing around, workmen and others, dressed nicely, clustering about the terrace and the stone steps because of the mud, but she didn’t remember herself at the celebration or remember the house she went back to, anything at all about the house, or moving out or moving in.
There was the Danube and the Parliament, apartment houses, stairways, streets, trees and trolleys. There were rooms and scenes dimly remembered, but she was absent from them, or another person; like in her dreams, she wasn’t really herself. She didn’t remember her parents before they lived in Buda or any other person, with the exception of Grandfather Ripper, her mother’s father, who died when she was three. He had a foxy pointed face and pale eyes. She remembered him in a dingy room with yellowed walls. He ran around in a loose white nightgown. They treated him like a naughty child, coaxing him to get back into bed, and he’d pop out again and rush to the table. He covered sheets of paper with marks that formed narrow columns. Then he folded a long strip of paper very small, made a few cuts with scissors and when she unfolded it, it was a row of bandy-legged clowns holding hands. Later her father explained he went wrong in the head when he lost his fortune.
She remembered that a glass door led from the room to a terrace which ran along the four walls of an inner court. There was an iron railing. Afraid to lean over, she looked down through the lattice on the cobbles below and remembered her stomach rise as it registered the depth.
“Do you remember?” Papi asked on their Sunday walks, and told her about things she did or said, and that they two did together when they lived on the other side of the river and she was three years old, or just a baby.
“Don’t you remember,” he said, “you had two enormous teddy bears when you were three years old. I must have paid fifty pengos for the pair.”
“What happened to them?” she asked.
“You threw them out the window! Don’t you remember?”
“Why?” she asked.
“You said you did it to punish them.”
“Why didn’t you go down and get them?” she asked.
“I was in my office with a patient. We lived on the fifth floor. By the time the maid went down, they were gone. Somebody walked off with them. Two beautiful teddy bears!”
What he said about her and what she really remembered belonged in two different boxes. Except she wasn’t sure what was really her own, it was mixed up with other people’s things: what they were telling her, Papi and Omama and her many aunts and uncles. She really needed a drawer where she could put away their things.
Papi claimed that she smeared her excrements on the wall. He enjoyed telling it to her. It proved his theory. Why didn’t the governess stop her? she wanted to know. But the governess had strict instructions not to interfere; in fact, she was told to call him from his consulting room should Sophie...She had confirmed his theory. He wanted to see it with his own eyes. There was nothing so thrilling as science. He predicted she might become a painter. He was full of theories about children; there were essentially three types: head-bangers, masturbators and rockers. She was a rocker. When she was two and a half years old she hit another child over the head with her shovel because he came to watch her dig and build in the sand. When Papi came in her room to give her a kiss, she pushed him away.
She also said a lot of things he thought very clever, which he put in his book. That, at least, she didn’t have to remember.
At Grandmother’s there were always strange fat women and funny men who pushed their grinning faces close to her and asked, “Do you remember your Aunt Piri who gave you a box of chocolates?” or “Do you remember your favorite uncle?” She knew she was expected to say, “You are my Aunt Piri,” or “You are my favorite uncle.” But maybe it was a trick, she wasn’t really sure. They also remembered things about her they thought clever or funny that Sophie didn’t remember. Aunt Lea prepared chicken paprikas for her because she remembered how much Sophie liked it, when Sophie didn’t.
Omama Landsmann held her pressed against her belly, rocking to and fro, and in a singsong voice told her what she must always remember: She was the daughter of the most wonderful man, a very great man. She would make up for all the wrongs he suffered and she would never be like her mother, she would be a good Jewish daughter, and God-fearing, and learn Hebrew so she could read the Holy Scriptures where it said...
Omama pronounced the Hebrew words one by one, her mouth shaping them, her widened eyes helping to define their outline, then translated it for her, bending down, making their foreheads touch; strange disconnected phrases about women who were a snare and a misfortune, beautiful wicked women whom God punished. But she was her father’s daughter and the granddaughter of the chief rabbi of Budapest and the great granddaughter of a very famous rabbi; she would always be a joy and honor to her father.
Her mother was away most of the time: or so she was told and so it seemed. She was used to her mother’s not being in the house. Nobody told her when her mother was leaving or coming back; therefore it was surprising to see her in bed or in the dining room. But curiously it was her mother who expressed surprise, who behaved the more surprised of the two. She couldn’t speak right away, she gasped, her eyes widened in a rigid stare as if a robber had burst into the room. “Who are you?” her mother would exclaim in a severe voice. “What are you doing here, little stranger? This isn’t my little girl—” and she laughed. Was she joking or serious? Her laughter wasn’t real; there was such an odd expression on her face as if she might burst into tears any minute, and her head tipping from side to side looked like a live puppet.
“I wonder if my little girl remembered to bring me a kiss,” she said very softly, staring at the ceiling. She was like someone in a fairy tale making a wish.
“I might even have something pretty for her. But she must sit in my lap.”
Now Sophie was curious about something pretty her mother might give her, perhaps from her own things, a scarf or a little necklace, or a gift from a foreign country.
But when Sophie sat in her lap her mother started laughing again, differently than before, her long fingers playing in her hair, stroking her cheek, “You’re a funny little girl,” she cackled. “Do you know why you don’t love me? Because you have no heart.” The smile and look of triumph remained on her face, but her tone softened. “People who don’t have a heart have very unhappy lives. We are not responsible for our nature,” she sighed wistfully and continued speaking strangely, perhaps just joking, saying things that couldn’t be true, they were so nasty, or so sweet. When she left the room Sophie couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe her mother was right: she hadn’t been away at all; Sophie was making up things and avoiding and ignoring her; or maybe it was Sophie who had gone off on a trip, leaving her mother all alone. Everyone in his own way was practicing some kind of magic on her.
•
Perhaps it was possible to have different parents at different times, as it was possible to move to a new house. On their Sunday afternoon walks her father pointed out some of the houses they passed. “Would you like to live in this h
ouse?” he’d ask her. Sometimes they would talk about it seriously; which room would be hers, which his, and where the governess would sleep when she had one. Her father was asking her, Do you really want it, shall I buy it? And if it was a big old-fashioned stone mansion with turrets and stone fence and iron grille she’d urge him yes to buy it now, but he’d find some small reason why not, and to placate her he’d say, We’ll go in and ask how much it costs—maybe it will be terribly expensive and I won’t have enough money. He looked so sad and upset she had to feel sorry for him. Still she would insist that he find out. “Should I?” he would ask. Yes, she’d dare him gravely, but he wouldn’t. And in the same way he would ask, if some impressive figure passed by—a peasant in sheepskin or a cavalry officer with a plumed helmet, or a small Jew with a bushy red beard—he’d ask if she’d like him for a father. At home on following Sundays he gave imitations of the people—the peasant, the cavalry officer, the bearded Jew, pretending each was her father—so she thought it was possible to have a different father or live in a different house even though it never happened; but that was only because in the end they never asked for the price of the house, or asked the cavalry officer with the plumed helmet. He was a coward, and she too; she wouldn’t ring the doorbell or run up to the cavalry officer and ask him if he would be her father. They were just a pair of cowards.