Home Game

by Endre Farkas

  “Shh. Not here, darling,” Schmutz said.

  Like a dog with a bone, Speedy turned back to Tommy. “If she’s got a mind of her own, why doesn’t she see that it’s stupid?”

  “Why is it stupid?”

  “Because it’s not right. And my parents would go crazy.”

  “You haven’t told them?”

  “Are you crazy? My dad would kill both of you.”

  “I thought they liked me.”

  “Yeah, but not that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Boyfriend way.”

  “Who would they like? Schmutz?”

  “No, some nice Spanish Catholic boy.”

  “And when you said that I should fuck my kind of people, who did you mean?”

  “Hungarians.”

  “You sure you didn’t mean Jews?”

  Speedy averted his eyes, then nodded.

  He regarded Speedy not only with anger but curiosity. He wondered if this was how their friendship would end. Was this where an old truth raised its ugly head? Was this how his father felt when his goyim friends watched him being marched off to the cattle cars to be shipped to Mauthausen? His mother was right. But about the wrong Gonzales. Or would she think it too? He was sure she wouldn’t.

  “What’s wrong with Jews?” Tommy asked.

  Speedy said nothing for a while. The silence was louder than the loud talk in the tavern.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Tommy took a long swig. “I told my parents,” he said.

  Speedy was surprised. “What did they say?”

  Tommy took a deep breath. “My mother said that Marianne would call me a dirty Jew the first time we had a fight. They’re as afraid, if not more, of me dating a shiksa as your parents are of her dating a Jew-boy.”

  “What’s a shikass?” Speedy asked.

  “A shiksa. That’s a non-Jewish girl, you schmuck,” Schmutz said.

  “What?” Speedy said.

  Tommy laughed. “It’s a not-nice name for a non-Jewish girl. Jews don’t trust non-Jews. Especially after the last war. Can you blame us?” He paused briefly. “My parents were betrayed by their countrymen and deported to concentration camps just because they were Jews. My mother’s mother and younger sister were gassed.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Tommy and Speedy eyed each other. The silence became a bridge.

  “From what they told me, our family was also persecuted under Franco because we had Gypsy blood. And the other side didn’t like us that much either.”

  “Maybe you guys are related?” Schmutz smiled.

  “Well, my mother told me that because she didn’t have enough milk I was breastfed by a Gypsy. I don’t have Gypsy blood, but I do have Gypsy milk in me. Does that help?”

  Speedy gave him a weak smile. Schmutz signalled the waiter. “How about we get more Canadian beer in us?”

  30

  Slowly the team’s chemistry returned. Tommy and Speedy were in sync again, most of the time. Anticipating each other’s moves became almost natural again. The spirit of the team picked up. And although Tommy and Speedy didn’t hang out after practices, they didn’t let that distance interfere with their game. They needed each other to succeed, for the team to succeed, and the team picked up on it. They won their next four games and were in third place. Coach Hustle’s yelling was back to his usual pitch. The frustration was gone. Practice now focused on their upcoming games in Hungary.

  “We need some sort of advantage over them,” Coach Hus told them at the start of practice. “Hustle is one.”

  “Wolfie told me that they love the Beatles but can’t get any of their records. We could bring a few LPs and trade them for goals,” Schmutz joked.

  “My cousin from Moscow is always asking me for jeans,” said Ivan. “Maybe we can bribe them with some.”

  “My parents send jeans to my cousin too,” Tommy said. “I can threaten to cut off his supply unless he lets in a few goals.”

  “Okay. Enough with the joking,” Coach Hus said. “I wish we could find out what kind of system they play.”

  “Maybe I can,” Tommy said.

  “How?”

  “Let me talk to someone. I’m not promising anything.”

  “Okay, till then, we hustle and strengthen teamwork.” Coach Hustle blew his whistle to start practice.

  Tommy showed up at Mr. Papp’s store a half hour before closing so there wouldn’t be too many customers and Mr. Papp would have time to talk, but not for too long. Mr. Papp liked to talk. He spoke a much more refined Hungarian than Tommy’s parents, forcing him to listen more carefully. Mr. Papp was from Budapest and had gone to university. His phrasings were more complex, and sometimes Tommy had trouble following what he said. He didn’t mix English and Hungarian. And he spoke softly, forcing people to lean in to hear him.

  The bell above the door tinkled as he entered. Mr. Papp was dusting his books before drawing the curtains across the shelves.

  “Nice to see you, Tamás. I have your parents’ magazines ready.” Mr. Papp always called him by his Hungarian name. “One’s name is one’s heirloom, one should value it. It is one’s calling card, it should not be sullied by misuse,” he was fond of saying.

  “Thank you,” Tommy said and paid for the magazines. “I was wondering if you could help me? Well, actually our team.”

  “How may I help you and your team?”

  “Would you know how we could find out something about the Debrecen team? Like, how they play, defensively and offensively? I mean their system, who their star players are and what positions they play. Stuff like that.”

  “Stuff like that? Tamás, you have to be more careful with the way you use language. Words are precious. People have been celebrated for their brilliant use of them. They’re also weapons. People have been imprisoned for their words and many have died because of them.”

  Uncertain of what he was going on about, Tommy clammed up. He didn’t want to say something stupid or something that would set Mr. Papp off on another tangent. He was here for soccer information, not a history or a language lesson.

  “Have you read the books I gave you?”

  “I’ve started to but it’s slow going because of my poor Hungarian. And I haven’t had much time. Too busy with work, practice and games.”

  “One can never be too busy to read. But yes, I noticed that the team is playing well again. What happened?”

  “We hit a rough patch and weren’t playing like a team. We seem to be back on track now.” Tommy didn’t want to get into the whole story.

  “My boy,” he said taking Tommy’s hand in both of his, “in spite of your clichés, I will try to get you some information. By the way, I want to give you this.” He went to the record shelf and took down an album.

  “Mr. Papp, I can’t take this,” he said.

  “It’s my ongoing contribution to your education. You will not always be a soccer player.”

  “Thank you,” he said. It was Gypsy music. More to his father’s taste. “I have to go; my parents are expecting me.”

  “You are a fine young man,” Mr. Papp said as he shook his hand. “I will call you when I have the information you and your team seek.”

  “Thank you.” He left quickly. Only a block later did he realize he was going the wrong way.

  Tommy took the bus to Naomi’s. He was anxious to see Marianne. He hadn’t seen her since their day at Expo.

  They’d been keeping their relationship low key, not wanting to upset his parents or get Speedy riled up again. Speedy seemed to have grudgingly accepted it. Tommy’s parents were aware of their relationship and although he knew they were hurt, there were no shouting matches or ultimatums. He knew it wasn’t just about him dating a shiksa. It was about what they had been through. And the family members who had died. Were thei
r deaths for nothing? He felt guilty, but it didn’t stop him wanting to be with Marianne. He didn’t think it was wrong or a problem. His mother was always going on about girls with loose morals every chance she got. He couldn’t convince her that times were different. Women should be equal to men, Naomi was constantly lecturing him. If women are to have equality then they should have it all the way, and that includes control of their bodies. Recently she pinned a bumper sticker on her bedroom door that read Women equal to men? Why aim so low?

  The argument sounded so much better coming from Naomi. Maybe because she was a woman. His mother didn’t believe in women’s liberation, even though Tommy thought she was liberated. She ran a business and made most of the business and household decisions but still believed that men and women each had their traditional roles and should behave accordingly. Yet she was the one who took her box of tools and crawled under the sewing machines to repair them.

  They had Naomi’s apartment to themselves until ten. The anticipation was almost as arousing as when he actually was with her. Just thinking about her got him hard. They’d had sex only twice, but his imagination got him off when she wasn’t around. God, girls can really get you horny. Thank God, he said to himself.

  He was hardly in the door when he reached for her.

  “Slow down.” She pushed him away.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing, just slow down,” she said. “I’m not just a piece of meat to be devoured by a wolf.”

  Though she smiled, he felt something was off. “How was your day?” he asked.

  “A long day of blood sucking.”

  “Did you know that the guy who played Dracula is Hungarian, Béla Lugosi?”

  “No, I didn’t. Are you related?”

  “Yes,” he said and bared his teeth.

  She made a cross with her fingers.

  “It won’t help,” he said. “I’m Jewish. Remember?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said in a serious voice.

  They sat on the couch. There were two glasses of wine on the coffee table.

  “I see you brought some of their blood home with you.”

  She smiled but in a nervous way. “I have something to say.”

  His stomach started to churn.

  “You remember what you said during the fight with Speedy?”

  “I said a lot of things,” he said, trying to figure out what was coming.

  “No,” she said, wearing a serious expression.

  “About loving you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah. Do you remember what I said?”

  He tried but couldn’t. “No.” He said wondering if he had screwed up again.

  “That’s because I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back. It’s been bugging me ever since.”

  He didn’t dare say anything, afraid of what was coming next.

  “Well, I think I didn’t say anything because I was shocked. It came out of the blue and I thought you said it because you felt that you had to.”

  “I wasn’t thinking, I just said it.”

  “How did you feel it? What did you feel?”

  He tried to remember. He sipped his wine. “There’s a Hungarian drink called pálinka. It’s a kind of schnapps that you drink in one gulp, I don’t know what you call it in English.”

  “A shot.”

  “What?”

  “It’s called a shot.”

  “Oh. Okay. You drink the shot. At first you feel nothing, then it hits you like an explosion that takes your breath away and then your eyes start to water, and then something starts to seep into you, you start to feel a warmth spread all over. The Hungarians say that you become a man when you take your first shot of pálinka. That’s what I felt.”

  She stared mutely.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “That’s a big thing to say,” she said. “And I can’t say it.”

  Here it comes, he thought. She pulled out a joint. She lit up and took a deep drag and passed it over. He took a small toke and sipped some wine to help it go down smoothly.

  She leaned in and pretended to be a vampire. “I vant to suck your blaaad.” She nipped Tommy’s neck.

  “Ouch!” he yelped.

  “Now you viilll become one of us,” she said in her vampire accent.

  “Who are the us?”

  “We are the unsure and the afraid,” she continued in her own voice.

  He couldn’t imagine her unsure and afraid. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I like being with you, but I also like being by myself, free to be me.”

  “And you can’t be free with me?”

  “Nobody can be totally free to be themselves in a relationship.”

  They sat quietly.

  “Here, I drink your blood.” He toasted her in his best Béla Lugosian.

  “And I yours.”

  He leaned over and with his tongue brushed her moist lips. They tasted of sweet wine and grass. He set down his glass and stood. He reached out to her. She rose to meet him.

  “We’re here and now and that’s enough for me,” he lied.

  Marianne stroked his face. He liked the feel of her nails on his skin. A hint of her strength, a hint of danger.

  Her nail traced the scar behind his ear. “How did you get that?”

  “A dog bit me.”

  “What? Are you serious?” She pushed him back to see if he was kidding. The candlelight in the room made it hard to see.

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t his fault.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was seven. I antagonized him. There were lots of dogs in Békes. Most of them were friendly and were free to roam the streets. Somehow, I got hold of a roll of film and I started to wind it around the tail of one of them. At one point, it got too tight and he leapt backwards and bit my ear.”

  “Shit, that’s funny,” Marianne said and started to stroke him again. “And this?” she asked when she touched the scar on his forehead that gave him a brooding look.

  “That? I got shot in the head,” Tommy said.

  “What?”

  “That’s a story for another time.” He said reached out for her.

  They were fast asleep when Naomi showed up. “Hey, you lazy lovers,” she called. “Up and at ’em.” Or were you already up and at ’em?”

  They emerged a few minutes later, dishevelled and grinning. Naomi was sitting on the couch, sipping wine and toking. She passed the joint to Marianne.

  “What’s this?” Naomi asked, turning the album over in her hand.

  “Oh. Mr. Papp, the Hungarian bookstore owner, gave it to me. He told me, to use his words, ‘your Hungarian education is lacking.’ He keeps giving me stuff, like books and records. He thinks I need to know stuff for when I go to Hungary.”

  “Sándor Lakatos, Budapest Éjjel,”Naomi tried but mangled the words. “What’s that? Sándor and Budapest is all I can make out of that.”

  Marianne passed him the joint. He took a toke and held it. Tommy corrected her pronunciation after he exhaled. “A man’s name is his calling card; it should be treated with respect.”

  “What?” Naomi said.

  “Another one of his lessons. The title means Budapest Nights.”

  “Let’s give Budapest Nights a Montreal listen then.” Naomi tore off the plastic wrapping. “Who’s Sándor Lakatos?” she asked, emphasizing the ‘sh’ of the ‘s’ letters.

  “Who knows?”

  “So, Mr. Papp is right, you are lacking. Sándor Lakatos, 1924, an educated Gypsy based in Budapest, is a fifth-generation descendant of the Bihari clan and leads one of the finest traditional urban Gypsy orchestras,” Naomi read from the back of the album cover. Marianne put the record on. They leaned
back and closed their eyes.

  The piece began with dramatic violin strokes followed by slow, melancholic lamentation. Tommy’s father played this kind of music all the time except it was Yiddish. Tommy had no interest in them. He had preferred the pop songs on the radio. But since smoking grass and listening to Naomi’s records, he’d begun to listen a different way. The music on the radio sounded superficial, simple and vapid now.

  The music filling the room was heartbreaking. For the first time he understood why his father loved it. It was about loss. And Tommy’s parents certainly knew that well. His parents had lost most of their family in the concentration camps and then the life they had pieced together after the war. Maybe it was a kind of balm that soothed the deep pain.

  The lamentation became the sound of sparrows. Then a manic rhythm followed. The music alternated between sadness and joy. When it was slow, it made you yearn and when it went manic, it made you want to dance. He opened his eyes and there was Marianne, dancing. One minute she was swaying and the next, doing her fast flamenco moves. He and Naomi watched her weave about the room, swinging her skirt like a matador cape. Tommy rose, raised his index fingers to his head and pretended to be a bull, charging. She sidestepped and swung her dress to let him pass. He charged again and again she let him pass. He charged once more but this time, he grabbed her by the waist and started to do a kind of csárdás that he had seen his parents dance at Bar Mitzvahs. Except he was doing it at breakneck speed. When the music slowed again, he held her close and they hardly moved. Then the music picked up speed and Naomi joined them. They held hands and circled wildly. They were children again.

  31

  “Come by my apartment at seven and I will tell you all that I have learned.” Mr. Papp gave Tommy his address.

  “I don’t want to disturb your evening,” Tommy said. “I can come by the store.”

  “No. The store always has people coming and going and I won’t have time to talk. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  “I have practice till eight.”

  “Actually better,” Mr. Papp said.

  Mr. Papp lived a short distance from his store. Classical music was playing when Tommy entered the small second-floor apartment. Mr. Papp was dressed as formally as he was in his store. But instead of his indigo lab coat, he had on a dark velvet smoking jacket and in place of his bow tie he sported an ascot. His apartment was as meticulously organized and as neatly kept as his store. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf covered one of the living room walls. Against the other were a dresser-sized stereo cabinet and a record shelf. Everywhere there were paintings of Hussars. One depicted them in colourful traditional costumes on horseback dashing across the plains; another, in a fierce a battle; and another, relaxing in a tavern smoking long-stemmed pipes. Above the record player was a portrait in profile of a man who looked like a Hussar chief. He had shoulder-length hair, an aquiline nose and a distant serious stare.