Home Game

by Endre Farkas

  “Thank God no one was shot.”

  “Actually, I was.”

  “What?” Emma shouted.

  “Yes, but the bullet just grazed me across the temple.” He showed them the scar.

  “Oh, God.” She reached over to stroke his temple.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Apu carried me. Anyu told me that she was crazy with fear. She said that she kept putting her hand over my nose to make sure that I was breathing. She said that they were so panicked that they got lost, walked in circles in the sucking mud of no man’s land until somehow they managed to get to the Austrian village on the other side.”

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! What an adventure!”

  “Yeah, it sure was,” Tommy said.

  Loud clanging filled the air. Tommy glanced across the fence.

  “They’re still here?”

  “Oh. Yes. Every morning at seven, the music begins.”

  “Joska, Dragon Mouth and Fire?”

  “Un hunh.”

  “And Attila?”

  “He died a few years ago. He was quite old. But they got a new one. They can’t wait to see you.”

  “Sure, but hang on a minute. I have to get something Apu gave me to give them.”

  As they made their way across to the blacksmiths’ yard, a German shepherd charged toward them. “Attila, stop!” Gabi commanded.

  “I thought you said he died.”

  “He did. They named this one Attila too.”

  It seemed that nothing had changed. Except the yard was smaller. It was still filled with wagons and wheelbarrows waiting to be fixed. The three-sided barn with its huge hearth was still smoky, warm and inviting. And the three figures hammering away in leather aprons still reminded him of powerful giants.

  Gabi yelled out to them and the hammering stopped. Tommy remembered them as makers of fire that melted iron. They were sorcerers who had made Gabi and him magical swords that transformed them into brave Hajdus who fought nobly against the terrible Turks. They had made Tommy and Gabi invincible.

  Though Joska, the chief blacksmith, now had grey hair, he still looked like he could strike the red-white hot iron with a force that would send sparks exploding into the air. Dragon Mouth still had his fierce black eyes that glowed like the fiery hearth he tended. When he saw Tommy, he opened his mouth in a wide smile. Most of his teeth were gone, which made him even fiercer looking. And there was Fire, his face sooty, glistening with sweat and his ear-to-ear grin, just as Tommy remembered.

  Tommy reached out to shake hands with Joska. Joska pulled him in and like a bear, squeezed so hard that Tommy almost cried out in pain. “Little Tomi,” Joska shouted as he pounded him hard on his back. Tommy gasped. The smell of the fire-infused leather apron filled his nostrils. He felt protected.

  He and Gabi had spent many mornings having breakfasts with the blacksmiths, playing in the yard with Attila, patting the horses’ necks and stroking their manes while Joska shod them. The last time he had seen the blacksmiths was on a dark night. The three of them and old Attila were defending Tommy and Gabi’s families from the mob outside their home.

  Tommy extended a gift-wrapped box to Joska. “From Apu and Anyu.”

  “What a fancy box,” Dragon Mouth said when Joska passed it to him.

  Fire undid the ribbon with a woman’s delicateness. He passed it over to Dragon Mouth, who ran his rough fingers tenderly over the shiny silky red ribbon and carefully rolled it up.

  “Just tear it.”

  They looked at Tommy as if he were crazy.

  “I don’t want to tear the paper, it’s so beautiful,” Fire said.

  “We don’t have paper like that here,” Gabi explained.

  Tommy nodded and reached for his Swiss Army knife. He took the box from Fire, felt for the Scotch-taped part and with the tip, delicately sliced it. He gently removed the box and gave the paper to Gabi, who folded it neatly and gave it to Joska.

  “My wife will love it,” he said.

  “My father told me to tell you that he hopes you will like what’s inside.” He returned the box to Joska.

  Joska held the blue box of Crown Royal whisky as if he were holding King Stephen’s crown. He opened it, careful not to damage it, and reached inside. He lifted the velvet-bagged bottle out of the box. The gold drawstring and the dark royal velvet with stitched lettering drew ahhs and ohhs from the blacksmiths.

  “My God,” Joska said. “This is for a king.”

  “What do the words say?” Gabi asked.

  “Crown Royal,” Tommy translated and laughed. He pulled the drawstrings apart and took out the bottle. “Scotch for three fine kings,” he added and handed the bottle to Joska who stroked the bottle the way a man might caress a woman.

  Joska’s eyes shone as he smiled at Tommy. “This calls for a toast.” Joska shouted. Gabi ran back to the house and returned with five shot glasses. Joska poured each a glass. They sniffed it.

  “To your Godly health and return,” Joska said.

  “To your Godly health and return.” They saluted Tommy.

  “To honourable men,” Tommy replied.

  The five men lifted their glasses and saluted each other. In unison they downed the whisky, smacked their lips and sighed.

  Crossing back to their yard, Tommy and Gabi stopped at the gate and watched Emma among her roses. To his seven-year-old sense of time she was forever bending over them, stroking their petals and inhaling their fragrance. Now in her flower-patterned dress, she seemed to have become one with them.

  “Remember how she’d come after us with her broom whenever we kicked the ball into the bushes?”

  “Yeah. And chasing us down the street with the same broom, sweeping us to Chaider when we would rather have been playing soccer?”

  “I even remember her dancing with it when she swept the verandah.”

  “Yeah, she wanted to be a dancer. She told me she used to sneak off to the dance master’s classes until she got caught by her father.”

  “Why didn’t your grandfather let her be a dancer?”

  “Her father was very religious and thought that being a professional dancer was the same as being a prostitute. And then the war came along.”

  And then the war came along. So many of his parents’ generation’s dreams ended with that phrase. So many of them had died because of that simple fact.

  Emma waved. She arranged the cut roses in a vase on the verandah and disappeared into to the kitchen.

  Emma-mama had done most of the cooking when he was a kid. The delicious smells wafting from the kitchen was a rich part of his childhood. “You know, Gabi, I didn’t know how much I missed you and Emma-mama until now.”

  Gabi put his arm around Tommy and squeezed hard.

  “They’re the best in the world,” Tommy said as he dunked the golden-crusted pogácsa in his after-lunch coffee.

  Emma beamed and went to fetch more. “The last time I made it for you was when we set out to escape.” She got choked up and closed her eyes.

  “Apu sent a joke for you. I’m not as good a joke teller as he is, especially in Hungarian, but I’ll try.”

  His butchering of it made Emma laugh. “Apu also told me to tell you to not pee yourself.” Emma ran off to the kitchen holding her sides.

  “It’s good to see her happy like this,” Gabi said. “She doesn’t do it much nowadays.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s lonely. She really misses your mother and especially your father. Since Apu died, she’s even lonelier ’cause she has no one to be angry at. She feels abandoned. And me leaving next year and you being here makes it worse.”

  “Why was she angry at him?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said as Emma returned with another plate of steaming pogácsa.

  “Can we go down t
o the Békes soccer field?”

  “Sure, we’ll go after supper. That’s when they practise.”

  “Okay.”

  “How about the synagogue? Apu gave me something for Rabbi Stern.”

  “If you’re going, take some soup.” Emma went into the kitchen to fill a pot.

  “What happened after you and your parents came back?” Tommy asked as they walked toward the synagogue.

  “I was still too young to know the consequences of their escape attempt. They didn’t say anything to me about it. After serving their sentences, Apu was given the shitty job of cleaning out the stalls at the collective farm. He didn’t mind that; he was a farmer at heart and for him that was no punishment. But they assigned him to the collective farm that once belonged to his family, until the Party nationalized it. They wanted to rub his nose in that, and he was angry about it. He drank more and more and took up with another woman. He abandoned us.”

  Listening to Gabi, Tommy felt uneasy. He was having an adult conversation. It was as if the roles between child and parent had been changed. There was a maturity to Gabi that Tommy didn’t feel he had.

  For a while they walked in silence. Tommy noticed that people were staring at them.

  Tommy wasn’t used to being stared at. Everybody in Békes knew Gabi. He was a local hero, at least until the last game. Now he was the plague. People avoided him. But they were curious about Tommy, so they had to acknowledge Gabi. Tommy was an exotic animal. He was the stranger from Békes.

  “We kept to ourselves. Carrot and Frog were the only ones I played with,” Gabi said, as he stared back, forcing people to avert their eyes. They still called me names at recess but after a couple of fights, they stopped. I had a few fights with Szeles. My punches had a lot of anger in them. Did you know that Szeles’s father was one of the leaders of the mob that attacked our house?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Tommy wasn’t sure if he remembered it or it was his parents’ recollection of that evening. They had all sat in the kitchen, his father and Dezsö-papa armed with hammers, his mother clutching a kitchen knife and Emma-mama holding her broom. They waited. Though Tommy and Gabi didn’t really understand what was going on, they knew it was serious. They ran to the kitchen stove and from behind it drew out their swords and stood beside their parents.

  “Anyu told me,” Gabi said, “that after the uprising was subdued, most of the people pretended that nothing happened. But since my sin, it seems okay again to show their hate. It’s almost like they feel they have to. Until they accept that something did happen, nothing will change.” He paused. “You know, it felt good kicking that ball into my net.”

  The synagogue was damaged beyond repair. The outside walls, leaning precariously, were riddled with bullet holes. The door had been ripped off and all the windows smashed. The inside reeked. Mould and rot gave it a sickly-sweet smell. The pews were overturned and chopped up. Most of the roof was gone. Only the spiderwebbed frames of the stained glass dome that Tommy, Gabi, Frog and Carrot had used for slingshot contests remained. The bright sun shone down on the desolation. Their footsteps set off scattering noises.

  “Rats,” Gabi said.

  Gabi knocked on the door of a small building next to the synagogue. A slot in the door slid open and a pair of frightened eyes peered out. “Mrs. Stern, I brought Tomi Wolfstein, Sandor’s son from Canada. He came to see the rabbi. And my mother sent some soup.”

  A tired-looking woman in a tatty sweater and black shawl opened the door.

  The windows were shuttered. It took Tommy’s eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness. The mustiness made him sneeze.

  He heard a man’s voice. “Tsu gezunt.”

  Tommy squinted at the lump in the armchair. As he approached, he could make out a small man with a yarmulke on his nearly bald head, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and a shawl like his wife’s draped over his shoulders. Although the man was no older than Tommy’s father, he looked ancient.

  “Shalom Aleichem, Rabbi Stern. I have returned,” Tommy said in Yiddish, as his father taught him.

  The rabbi’s eyes came alive at those words. He stood. “Aleichem Shalom!” He began rattling away at him in Yiddish.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Yiddish,” Tommy apologized.

  “So, what was that?” Rabbi Stern asked.

  “Just a phrase my father taught me.”

  The rabbi shook his head. “You would think in a free country like America, you would be happy to learn Yiddish.”

  Tommy expected a slap to the back of his head, the way the rabbi used to hit them when they didn’t know the alphabet or how to pronounce a word or couldn’t remember a Biblical name or a prayer or when they weren’t paying attention. Slaps to the back of the head were more frequently handed out than praise. It was more the rule than the exception.

  Again, the obvious struck Tommy. Everything was much smaller than he remembered, even Rabbi Stern. Though Tommy was a head taller, he was still intimidated by the little man before him wrapped in a shawl.

  The rabbi’s wife pointed to the bench. “Sit, sit.”

  It was the same bench where he had once sat reciting the alphabet, the names of prophets and the lineage of the Jews. Anxiously, he had eyed the rabbi, at the head of the table, waiting for him to nod off so he could sneak out to play soccer.

  “How are you?” Tommy asked awkwardly.

  “God knows, and that’s enough.”

  Tommy reached into his shopping bag and presented him with a carton of cigarettes. “Anyu and Apu said smoke in good health. They also wanted to give you this.” He handed over an envelope which Rabbi Stern slipped into his pocket unopened.

  “May God bless them,” he said.

  “They also sent this.” Tommy handed him a small box that contained a mezuzah.

  The rabbi’s eyes widened with joy when he opened the box. He gazed upward, past the ceiling toward the heavens. “What a great gift from God. And a blessing on his deliverer,” the Rabbi exclaimed.

  “Oh, my God. It’s beautiful,” his wife declared, watching him stroke the silver mezuzah, tracing every contour of it. He smiled as if he had just been brought back to life.

  “Do you want me to put it up, Rabbi?” Gabi asked.

  “There are nails with it,” Tommy said.

  “God is generous,” the rabbi’s wife said. “I’ll get the hammer.”

  “And two yarmulkes,” said Rabbi Stern.

  Gabi took the hammer. “No,” Rabbi Stern said. “Zev Yankov Ben Shmiel Yisroel drives in the first nail.”

  Tommy was surprised that the Rabbi remembered his Jewish name. He was being given a special honour, like being called up to recite from the Torah. He walked over to the doorpost and tried to slip it into the existing empty space.

  “No,” the rabbi said. “Leave that hole as a reminder of what happened. Put it next to it to show its miraculous return.”

  Tommy tapped in the top nail and handed the hammer to the rabbi, who gave it to Gabi.

  “Now you,” Rabbi Stern said.

  After Gabi hammered in the bottom nail, the rabbi reached up and stroked it. “Now repeat after me. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to affix a Mezuzah.”

  Rabbi Stern raised two fingers to his lips and touched the mezuzah. He signalled for the boys to do the same. Tommy reached out and touched it with his kissed fingertips. Gabi hesitated.

  “His father’s son,” Rabbi Stern said.

  Gabi nodded then followed suit.

  Mrs. Stern appeared with a bottle of pálinka and three glasses. The rabbi poured and recited a prayer. “La Chaim,” Tommy said as they drank it down.

  “You and your family have done a great mitzvah,” Mrs. Stern said to Tommy as the boys were leaving. In the gloom behind her Tommy watched the rabbi disap
pear, back into his armchair. A wave of guilt passed through Tommy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said under his breath as they left.

  Tommy pointed to a small, dilapidated box overgrown with weeds. “Is that the chicken coop they stuffed him in?” Gabi nodded. The way Tommy’s father described the scene when he and Dezsö-papa came upon it after the mob night was funny. But now, imagining that bearded little man, a rabbi, a survivor, a human being, in that confined coop, face pressed against the chicken wire, made his stomach churn. How could anyone pretend that nothing had happened? he wondered. He lifted his camera to take a picture but stopped himself. “Bastards,” he muttered under his breath.

  “What?” Gabi asked.

  “Nothing.”

  They walked in silence for a while, Tommy lost in his thoughts about what happened.

  “What’s the story about Frog?” he asked after a while. “Why are you saying we shouldn’t go see him?”

  “As I told you, it’s a long story.”

  When they got back, Emma was in the kitchen preparing supper. Tommy and Gabi sat on the verandah, watching the summer afternoon turn into a perfect cool summer evening. He was glad to be sitting. His ankle throbbed from all the walking. He was afraid to take his shoe off for fear of never getting it back on. He was glad Ben had left him the spray.

  Emma brought out steaming chicken soup. “Your father liked it to burn the roof of his mouth.”

  “He still does.”

  “What is life like in Canada?” Emma asked as she sat and watched him eat.

  “Fine. Anyu and Apu work really hard, from early morning to late at night, but they are happy. Apu was homesick for the first couple of years. He kept a suitcase under the bed. Anyu told him if he wanted to go, then he should, but without her and me. Oh, I’ll be right back.” He came back with an envelope. “Here are some pictures they sent for you.”

  Tommy spread out pictures of his Bar Mitzvah, of his parents in their factory, of Margit in front of her restaurant with her name on the sign and one of his father beaming next to his Chevy Impala. Emma and Gabi were transfixed.