The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  From across a broad dirt road, she could see the entrance to the cemetery, a desolate stretch of overgrown meadow with the fourteen Stations of the Cross lining one side, and in the distance, rows of wooden crosses and one black marble mausoleum. She knew this was her last chance to visit her mother’s grave. She knew that. But time was slipping away, so she couldn’t stop. Soon she reached the sluice gate and waded through a slow part of the river Tisa, its icy water like balm to her bluing ankle. By the time she emerged at the other side, the water had revived her fading spirit. She was more determined than ever to cross the border and enter Romania, the neighboring country. Freedom was within her reach.

  “He had some type of special interest in me,” my mother said, scrubbing the counter of dough as I brushed the ten finished strudels with egg wash. “I’ve never understood why, exactly.”

  “Who?”

  “The camp commandant. My tormentor. The man I called my tormentor.”

  “He hated you?”

  “It was never as simple as hatred. That was their way of torture, the communists. Interrogating you as if you were a great and terrible criminal, forcing you to ‘confess.’”

  “Confess what?”

  “You never knew. At one point, when I was in solitary confinement, they gave me a typewriter and told me to type my confession or else they’d kill me.”

  “What did you write?”

  “I didn’t know what to write, so I wrote about my life. My childhood. They tell you to confess, and when you had nothing to confess, your life became your confession. You second-guessed yourself. ‘Maybe there really is something wrong with me.’ After I escaped, when I was still in hiding, I actually wrote a postcard to him back in Serbia, telling him that I’d survived.”

  “You did—what?” I looked up from the strudels.

  “I don’t think I told this to anyone; in fact I think I just remembered it, right now, as I was talking to you.”

  “What did you do?”

  “He’d always said that if I tried to escape he’d hunt me down and kill me, but I always knew that I’d be free. Always, I knew it in my bones. That was me at twenty-two: sticking it to him, telling him he hadn’t won.”

  “You knew his address?”

  “I sent the card to the camp, back in Serbia, where I’d escaped.”

  “Do you still remember his name?”

  “I remember his hands. He beat me, repeatedly. I’ll never forget his hands.”

  By this time, we were sitting at the kitchen table. My mother was staring out the window at an aspen tree with its heart-shaped leaves arched overhead.

  “For a time when I was already living in England I couldn’t stand up. I had lumbago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My lower back—I’m sure it was from the concentration camp, when they put me in the ice cold water. Anyway, I’d walk to my factory job in England, hunched over. Finally, by the time I got to work several blocks later, I could stand up again. Sometimes I couldn’t get out of bed. I was paralyzed. I had a recurrence of it for years, the paralysis. The last time I had it was when I was pregnant with Kriska.”

  “You never told me about this paralysis, the lumbago.”

  “I remember, when I was living underground in Romania, there was a church, in the town center. I’d heard stories about it, how beautiful it was. More than anything, I wanted to see that church, but I couldn’t risk being caught. Well, early one morning, before sunrise, I took the streetcar to the town center. The church was built all in stone, like all the great churches in Europe. I’ll never forget the moment I walked through that arched entrance. The first rays of sunlight were beginning to stream through the stained-glass windows, and the walls, everywhere you looked the walls were carved out of black marble. There were hundreds of candles, all lining the aisles. Something happened to me when I entered the church that day. I had an experienced that’s stayed with me my whole life. No voices, nothing anyone can ever know for sure. Such peace entered my very soul, my mind. A perfect certainty that I would make it safely to wherever it was I had to go. I was not alone. Well, of course, as it turned out, I was caught in Hungary, and then again in Austria, twice. But there was always someone along the way who helped me escape, again and again. To help me go further, and further, until I made it all the way to England. Sometimes I still wonder whether my mother’s spirit was at work, guiding me to freedom. You probably think I’m making this all up.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The facts of that part of my journey would seem fantastic to some people, even miraculous. Especially in today’s secular world. Unless you believe that when we ask for help…it is always forthcoming, somehow. Providing we ask in the true spirit and for the right reasons.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I do. I must.”

  “I wish I had your faith.”

  My mother took my hand in hers. I noticed the blue veins glowing through her aged skin, like translucent tissue paper, and her fingers, crippled like brittle twigs, curled around my own.

  “Thirty-four months of labor and death camps. When a person no longer believes in man, nothing is left but despair or God.”

  “Have you ever asked yourself why you survived? How it is that one person survives something like that, and the next person doesn’t?”

  “I’ve thought about that over the years, and I really do believe that I survived because my captors never touched the core of who I was. They might have killed my body—God knows they tried—but they never touched my spirit.”

  |||||||||||

  Later that night, I was back in the car with my father. Neither of us said a word the entire ride home. He parked the car outside my apartment. I was hesitant to leave, and I knew he wanted me to stay and talk.

  “I know that your difficulty with my sexuality has nothing to do with not loving me.”

  My father looked at me, surprised, but he didn’t shut me down. He listened.

  “You’re from a different world…a different culture. I understand that. I also know you’ve always wanted to have a relationship with me.”

  “Of course I do. I’m your father.”

  Even after all these years, he still pronounced the “th” in “father” as “t.”

  “Yes, well, I guess what I’ve always found difficult…” I had to stop and remember to breathe, stop myself from crying. “What I’ve always found difficult is that I remember how you brought me up talking about God and Christ, but all I ever wanted was for you to tell me about you, my father.”

  “But I do tell you who I am. More than you know. When I tell you about my faith, I reveal myself to you.” He was silent. Then, as if reading my mind, he continued, “You mean about my childhood. You want me to tell you about my life before. I wouldn’t know what to tell you. I wouldn’t know what was real from what was imagined. I spent so many years trying not to remember, and now…I know I cried from birth to when I escaped Hungary. You know about my mother, that she died in the war, that I was raised by various foster parents in the country. You know I never had a father. You know that I was a bastard.”

  My father had never said that word aloud: “bastard.” The fact that he could now, in old age, weakened my heart.

  “Your mother and I were orphans of the war.”

  “Do you still think about your mother?”

  “Of course. I pray for her soul every night…Some day the Lord will call me home…”

  “Please don’t talk like that…”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that. But when He does, when I’m gone, I want you to remember me. It means so much to your mother and me that since you moved back you want to come home and be with us. It means so much, so much…” He cleared his throat, as if to interrupt his tears. “To be continued,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Our conversation: to be continued. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’d like that.”

  I reached over to hug him goodnight.
I wanted to tell him that I loved him, I understood him. I forgave him.

  “I love you,” my father said for both of us, as I held him in my arms.

  |||||||||||

  One week before I left for Europe, in April 2004, my father asked if I could find his mother’s grave.

  “She’s buried in Vecsés,” he said when I was at the house, maps of Europe spread across their dining room table. “It’s a village twenty minutes outside Budapest. I don’t know if her body will still be there. But if it is, if you are able to get out to Vecsés, somehow…I mean if you have time, that is…it would mean a great deal to me.”

  “When was the last time you saw her grave?”

  “In nineteen forty-five, I was—how old?”

  “Fifteen,” my mother added from the living room.

  “Fifteen. There was a wooden bench beside her grave. I stood at the foot of her grave and I cried for hours, until there were no tears left inside of me to cry. Then I fell to sleep on that bench. I was exhausted. In the morning I left before the main gate, an iron-winged gate, was opened again from the outside. Maybe the bench will still be there. If you find her grave…”

  “Maybe Csilla could help,” my mother said.

  “Csilla? Who’s Csilla?”

  “Csilla is related to your father’s stepbrother. She would be your cousin of sorts.” My mother said the words matter-of-factly, as if I’d heard it all before.

  “You have a stepbrother?” I asked my father.

  “Stephen, yes; by marriage, not blood. His father married my mother. He lives somewhere in Vancouver, but I haven’t talked to him since the early seventies. His wife’s niece, Csilla—she used to live outside Budapest. I think she’s around your age. She should speak English. I could try and see if we could reach her. Maybe she could help.”

  After a lifetime of secrecy, all of this last-minute “help” hurt my head.

  “If you do find my mother’s grave…if you’re able…maybe you could also bring me back some soil from her plot? One day I would like to be buried with that soil.”

  26

  I LEFT MY JOB in April and traveled to London. For three days I walked from South Kensington to Notting Hill and on to Soho, around the Globe Theatre, over the London and Tower Bridges, sat through Les Misérables not once but twice in the West End, toured Buckingham Palace, lunched across the street from Harrods department store in Chelsea, and stood staring for hours at the works of Gauguin, Dalí, Picasso, and Rodin at the Tate Museum.

  In a brief exchange of letters before Europe, my friend Pearl and I agreed to meet at La Marianna, an Italian restaurant near her home in Schöneberg, Berlin.

  We greeted with a hug, like two old friends, which, of course, we were.

  “How do you like Berlin?” she asked, once we were seated at our table.

  “I stepped off the train from London and a neo-Nazi walked up to me and started screaming in German.”

  “Well, this is Germany.”

  “He sounded pissed. He had a Mohawk and his face was covered in tattoos of swastikas. I wasn’t expecting this kind of culture shock. London was like something out of Mary Poppins, and Berlin, well…”

  After some small talk, we both fell silent. Too much to say, no easy way to begin.

  “Do we need to talk about the last time we saw each other?” I said.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “You know I’m sorry.”

  She took a sip of her wine. “I don’t think about it anymore. I…stay away from the memory.”

  “Yes, but I hope you know how sorry I am, today. For cutting you out like that—”

  “For the longest time, I couldn’t even touch the memory of you. I couldn’t even think about you. It’s like you and everything about our time together was in a block of ice in my heart. I was frozen. You must know I loved you. You have to know that…”

  She reached across the table to hold my hand. I held hers.

  “Yes,” I said. “And I loved you.”

  |||||||||||

  No sooner had I arrived into Budapest-Keleti Pu, the city’s main international train station, than my father started to send me long, dictated emails through my middle sister, Barbara. He said he’d been in touch with his long-lost stepbrother, Stephen, and that during one of their many conversations, they realized that Stephen’s daughter, Mary, was a friend of Kriska’s back in Vancouver. They’d talked often and even gone hiking together, never knowing that they were, however distantly through marriage, related.

  My father also told me that my mother had managed to track down an envelope, dated August 5, 1968, to my father from his niece, Erzsébet. “Yes,” he wrote, “I had a sister, or rather a half-sister. Her name was Margit.”

  He told me his niece’s married name (“Máte”) and address in Vecsés. Erzsébet was barely three years old when my father left Hungary, he wrote, and would be in her early sixties now, “if she was still alive.”

  He encouraged me to try to look her up.

  “Your sister has attached to this email a photograph of my niece as a child, along with her family.” He then identified the family members, including Erzsébet’s father, who had been an officer in the communist secret police—Hungary’s ÁVO, as it was commonly called.

  “Also attached,” he wrote, “is a photograph of my mother’s grave, which I know you have never seen before. I do not have directions to the gravesite, but this photo may help you recognize the site. I was not present when my mother died. I’ve been told she was caught in the bombings. I honestly don’t know what to believe.”

  And then, it seemed, the family history I had longed to know for so many years came tumbling out of my father—a series of foreign names and occupations. My whole life I had asked my father to tell me anything—anything at all—about his “previous life” in Europe, and now he was revealing more than I could absorb while alone in a foreign country, six thousand kilometers from home, without the native language or a friend.

  There was Imre, his stepfather, an architect who helped design the Budapest airport. There was Stephen, the stepbrother he had mentioned, who had been knighted in Hungary for his role in the revolution and was now considered an enemy of communism. And of course there was Margit—his half-sister, long deceased—and her daughter, my father’s niece, Erzsébet.

  Then there were his personal feelings—spoken to me like the father I’d always wanted, and had searched for through my relationships with so many other men.

  “You have always asked that I share with you some of my life stories. My past has always confused me, and I fear time has not helped make any of it easier to understand. Long ago I buried what seems was my life, but with Stephen reappearing, and you now in Hungary, I can’t escape any of it. Events long forgotten are resurfacing. One memory blends into another, and I am overcome with feeling. Day and night, I dream of the past. I know there is much more to all these stories. Part of me would like to know. A larger part of me is scared to ask.”

  Toward the end of the email, he told me of one of those memories—a national tragedy that became strangely personal.

  In 1956, he said, during the height of the Hungarian Revolution, the prime minister, as well as all the members of his cabinet and their extended families, had escaped the bombings on the street and were being kept alive in the Hungarian Parliament Building. One day, the Russians arrived, loaded them all onto a bus “for safekeeping,” and drove off. They never returned. It was later revealed that the Russians had taken them to an undisclosed location, shot every one of them, and buried them in a mass unmarked grave.

  “After the Berlin Wall fell and the political climate became freer,” he wrote, “the new government in Hungary revealed the location of the mass grave. They dug up the bodies. All of Hungary wept…

  “Now, look again at the photo I sent you of my mother’s grave. The mass grave was on the other side of the chain-link fence, head to head with my mother.”

  I read his email sev
eral times to make sure I fully understood the gravity of his message. The sadness of it all—my father’s words, what he must have carried around inside himself all these years, even my own reaction—was crushing.

  “Say a prayer for all those who died that fateful day many years ago,” he wrote. “And please say hello to my beloved mother. I miss her very much. I love you, Peter. Sleep well and be safe.”

  As promised, my father also called Csilla, in Budapest, who agreed to meet me the following week.

  |||||||||||

  I found an enormous baroque post office on my third day in Budapest, but neither of the two tellers inside, whose gaunt faces never smiled, spoke a word of English. Chained to the wall by one door were over twenty phone books, all, of course, in Hungarian, each bearing no clues as to which I should use. When I opened them all, one after another, I found pages of the name “Máte.” After twenty minutes of browsing, I found not one with an address anything close to what my father had provided, so I left.

  Before leaving Canada I had read all about the female “gypsies” on Váci utca—a main shopping street in the city and one my parents had said I must visit—who were known for approaching “Americanlooking” men and speaking to them in English. Do you have the time? Do you know where so-and-so street is located? If the men responded in English, the women would ask them out for a drink. Together, they would visit nearby bars, talk, drink, flirt; and when the bill arrived, past midnight, the total amount owing would be inflated by several hundreds of euros, and the mafia would appear from a back room, demanding to be paid “or else.” I had done my research and been forewarned.

  So when I walked down Váci each night, passing stores like Nike, Zara, and H&M, and was approached by women in candy-colored wigs, I drew on my toughest inner Magyar and gave them all a firm: “Nem”—one of the few Hungarian words I knew, but enough. I was no one’s meal ticket.

  Everywhere I walked, day after day, my father’s voice was with me. Up Andrássy út, back and forth across all the bridges, over to Matthias Church in Buda or throughout Margit Island, even sipping Bull’s Blood inside Gundel restaurant by Heroes’ Square or eating slices of zserbó squares outside Café Gerbeaud—shadows flocked two steps before me. I was anticipated by ghosts. The isolation each day was palpable, and when night arrived like an unwelcomed visitor, I hardly ever slept.