The Inheritance of Shame

by Peter Gajdics

  Late one evening I left my rented flat on Wesselényi, around the corner from the Dohány Street Synagogue and a few short blocks from the downtown core, and walked west to the Puskin, an Englishspeaking art house movie theater.

  The film was Monster, Charlize Theron’s dark and gritty portrayal of a serial killer. After not having heard a word of English for weeks, I thought that familiar sounds and syllables might reassure. But no sooner had the film begun than it seemed only to reinforce much of the atmosphere I was trying to escape in the Westernized but highly oppressive city of Budapest. Sitting in the theater’s worn velvet seats, I could not help but wonder where I belonged, if I belonged anywhere. Now all I thought about was how I could have ever believed that Budapest was part of who I was.

  The day after the movie, I visited the Central Market Hall at Vámház körút, at the foot of the Liberty Bridge. For hours I walked up and down aisles of wicker baskets overflowing with multicolored peppers, loaves of freshly baked rye bread dusted in flour, counters of Ungarische salamis and hundreds of sausages draped like spiced piping above the butchers’ blocks below, racks of spices and jars of jams and picked vegetables, apple strudels, slices of vanilla krémes and Dobos tortes, poppyseed squares.

  Upstairs, tourists bustled shoulder to shoulder past tables of elderly women selling embroidered tablecloths with roosters or traditional Magyar folk designs, crystal and textile jewelry. Around the corner, stalls of hot food, a smorgasbord of smells, arrested my senses. Beef goulash, paprikás csirke, cabbage rolls and sour cream, bratwurst and sauerkraut, sweet and savory lángos, some smothered in peaches and dollops of cream, others with cranberries, still more encrusted in garlic and herbs. I paid my forints and edged toward an open bar stool overlooking the bottom floor of the market. Stewed plums in cottage cheese dumplings squirted sweet explosions in my mouth. For the longest time, there was nothing but the aftertaste of childhood.

  Back at my flat, I stripped off my clothes and roamed naked, room to room. Located on the second floor of a stone tenement building, the flat was accessed through a rounded stairwell, marred by graffiti, and a walkway overlooking an inner courtyard where worn bedsheets and women’s braziers hung in the muggy midday air.

  After the gothic entrance and winding stairs, the flat itself was almost utilitarian, with furniture from IKEA and a washing machine that took three hours a cycle. Each room inside led to the next, and all in a circle: bedroom, living room, foyer, laundry room, bathroom, bedroom. Naked and making my way from one room to the next, I paused in the bedroom the second time around, turned on the flat-screen, lit a cigarette, and reclined on my bed. I flipped channels, past newscasts I did not understand, dubbed episodes of Sex and the City, and to a porno—a man and a woman, but still.

  Hours later I opened my laptop on a coffee table in the living room. Determined to start writing a book about the therapy, to not lose sight of it, maybe even make some meaning out of all of it, I stared at the flickering cursor on the blank electronic page.

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  Standing on the causeway at the edges of the Danube the next day, I thought of my parents. High atop the Gellért Hill across the riverbanks, the Liberty Statue—erected first in 1947 in commemoration of the Soviet’s defeat over the Nazis, later revitalized after the fall of communism in 1989—gazed down upon all of Budapest.

  In 1947, the year my mother escaped the communist concentration camp in Yugoslavia, crossing the border to Romania, my father also fled a rising communist regime in Hungary, seen at the time as a “savior” to fascism, for what was then Czechoslovakia. So many crossings. Both of my parents had been born only a few hundred kilometers away from one another, yet each escaped their homelands in search of freedom and what they’d hoped would be a far better life for themselves and their children thousands of kilometers away in some place otherworldly, called “Canada.” History had shown, for all of us, in one way or another, the oppressor was once the savior. We had all sought freedom, escaped, and started again.

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  I met my cousin Csilla at the Astoria hotel, on Kossuth Lajos utca, late one Monday morning. Csilla seemed rushed from the moment we met. Dressed in oval Gucci glasses and a skintight, patchwork skirt, she looked as glamorous as a young Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  “Quickly, sorry, we need to rush, it’s my car, I’m parked illegal,” she said.

  Then we were out on the street and around the corner and inside her red Škoda, parked on the sidewalk with a line of other cars. In another heartbeat, we were on the road, speeding toward Vecsés, twenty miles outside of Budapest. While Csilla drove—or rather, defied gravity by crossing multiple lanes of traffic nearly every other second—I peppered her with questions, most of which she could not answer. All I knew, which she did corroborate, was what my father had explained to me. Csilla and I were not “blood” relatives: her mother’s sister was married to my father’s stepbrother, Stephen, whose blood father, Imre, had married my father’s birth mother, Rozália. Or, as my mother liked to summarize before I left for Europe: “You’re related twice around the block.”

  When we arrived, Vecsés looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: moss-eaten barnyards, overgrown weeds through unused railcar tracks, abandoned storefronts, a stray elderly man walking aimlessly down an otherwise deserted street, one lone pigtailed girl on a rickety, three-speed bicycle.

  Because of a flower stand that spilled out onto a side street, Csilla spotted the cemetery easily, on the left off the main road through Vecsés. We turned the corner, parked the car, and walked through the winged, iron-gate entrance and into the graveyard. Everywhere I looked there were alleyways of tombs, marble sarcophaguses, statues of angels and weatherworn crosses, death dates from centuries before I was born.

  “My father told me about a wooden bench near the grave of his mother, but I have no idea where to look, or even if it’s still there,” I said.

  We returned to the office across the unpaved street where a woman with slug-like eyebrows and jet-black hair greeted us in Hungarian. We told her my grandmother’s name (Rozália Gajdics), and, after searching through stacks of large, dusty ledgers, the woman said she’d found the site of the grave in her books. I quickly bought bouquets of flowers and votive candles from the street florist, and then followed as the woman led us back into the massive burial ground.

  Rozália’s grave was second to last along a dirt path near the rear of the graveyard. The soil was now crusted and weed-heavy, with purple wild flowers sprouting up throughout. There was no wooden bench beside the grave, on which my father said he’d slept that last night. I looked behind the cracked headstone, to the other side of the old chain-link fence, where I knew there would have been the site of the mass burial ground.

  Csilla and the woman looked on, five steps back, as I lit the candle, and introduced myself to my grandmother. I told her that my father loved her, had never stopped missing her, that she now had grandchildren of her own, even great-grandchildren. I was glad she could not ask me why I was not married to a nice girl. I wanted to “pray” for all the dead, the mass killings, but all I could find in my heart was silence. So I stood there, in silence, head bowed, until finally I knelt down and dug up a handful of soil, placing it in a little red satchel to take back to my father.

  We turned our attention toward Rozália’s daughter, my father’s half-sister, Margit, whose own daughter, Erzsébet, I had been trying to locate in the stack of phone books back in Budapest. As my father had mentioned, Margit was likely to be buried in the cemetery, as well.

  He was right. We found the plot fifty meters away. The grave was well maintained with fresh daisies in an iron jug and a half-burnt votive. I lit another votive and stood for a moment’s silence before all three of us returned through the winged-gate entrance to the office.

  I asked the office woman—as translated through Csilla—if there was record of who was paying for the graves’ upkeep. Again, the woman checked her ledgers, and said that my fath
er’s niece and her husband, Tomas, had been paying for both graves. The phone number listed was out of service, but I showed her the address my father had provided, and she told us the location was five minutes away. The fact that I had traveled all the way from “Kanada” in search of family seemed to thrill her.

  “Köszönöm szépen,” I told her as we left. (“Thank you very much.”)

  We drove to the address, but the house was abandoned. Not to be dissuaded, we stopped in a nearby pub, where Csilla asked the owner if he’d ever heard of Erzsébet and Tomas. He seemed to recall them living about six houses down the street, he told us. One at a time, I knocked on all the doors; each of the owners told us to try three or four doors down.

  I rang the door of the last house on the block, a stucco bungalow with four stone steps leading up to a rickety screen door. Moments later a middle-aged man with puffy, sun-bleached cheeks and frizzy white hair opened the creaking screen. Csilla introduced me, mentioning my father’s name and “Kanada.” Without hesitation a panicked frenzy washed over him.

  He extended his hand, pulled me in, called, “Erzsébet!…Kanada! Kanada!”

  Erzsébet appeared, looking like a middle-aged Cabbage Patch Kid in a blue-and-white polka dot dress. She scrutinized me up and down, listening intently as Csilla hurriedly explained the situation in Hungarian: I was her cousin. I had traveled from Canada to find my grandmother’s grave and hopefully some of my relatives, whom my father had not seen or contacted since fleeing Hungary over fifty years earlier.

  Erzsébet’s initial excitement soon gave way to an edge of stunned trepidation as she spoke back and forth between Csilla and I, fast and excited, with Csilla translating as much as she could, both of them overlapping, everything confused. Languages converged like a mesh of train tracks—Erzsébet speaking in Hungarian to Csilla, Csilla speaking in English to me, and occasionally Csilla speaking the wrong language to both of us.

  “I have brain freeze,” Csilla told me, in her accented English, at one point.

  Still standing, I pulled from my coat pocket a black-and-white photograph of my father as a young man in 1948, dashing in a pinstriped suit, to show to Erzsébet. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took the photo from my hands. She motioned for us to sit. The shadowed room was filled with lace curtains and doilies, a frayed jacquard sofa, and smelled of mildew and fruit brandy.

  The rest of the twenty minutes in her living room was a whirlwind of dialogue, all of which I had no hope to understand. Language, yet again, became my barrier to information.

  “Your father’s cousin, Emma, she’s still alive,” Csilla told me after several minutes. “Erzsébet says she lives in Budapest, in the fifth district. She would be the last surviving daughter of one of your grandmother’s siblings. Your aunt.”

  “Does Erzsébet have her address, even a phone number?”

  “Yes, yes, egan, of course, she’ll give it to you.”

  “Can you ask more about my grandmother, my father’s mother? How she died?”

  “She says your father can talk to Emma herself. But your grandmother didn’t die in any bombings, like you said.”

  “How did she die?”

  No one would answer. Erzsébet and Tomas were already leading us out, but not before I snapped as many photographs of them as seemed reasonable. Then we all hugged and said goodbye.

  Csilla and I said next to nothing during the car ride back to Budapest. She was in a hurry to return home to her husband and child in Budakeszi, an hour’s drive, so she dropped me next to the Chain Bridge in front of the lions. It was early evening, but the sun was still baking hot. How do you thank someone for helping you find your grandmother’s grave—and family you never knew you had—in a country whose language you do not even speak?

  “Köszönöm szépen…” I said, as we hugged on an off-ramp by the bridge.

  And then Csilla, so fashionable in Gucci, climbed back in her red Škoda. In another heartbeat, she had merged with a sea of oncoming cars and was gone.

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  I began to walk, not because I knew where I wanted to go, but because I didn’t know where I was. Gypsies littered the Ferenciek tere underground, beneath the busy city streets, that smelled of concrete bones and cold stale urine. One legless man cupped his hands for forints, while a fat busker perched wide-kneed on a two-legged bamboo stool strung Csárdás songs for euros. After twenty minutes I walked on, past one storefront window after another, all of them showcasing various brands of dishwashing liquid, body soap, toothpaste, and toilet paper: the dawning of democracy.

  When I looked up, some forty-five minutes later, I was standing across from the Hungarian National Museum on Múzeum körút.

  In a pay phone across the street, I called home to my parents.

  “Dad, I’m in downtown Budapest…”

  “Peter? Is that you…?”

  “I just got back from Vecsés, with Csilla, we found your mother’s grave.”

  Silence.

  “Dad? Hello?”

  I could hear my father mumbling to my mother; then she came on the phone.

  “Peter? Is that you…?”

  “Mother? I was telling Dad that I just got back from Vecsés. I found his mother’s gravesite, I found it…”

  As they’d done for years, my father picked up the second line and then all three of us were on the call together.

  “You saw my mother’s grave?” my father said. His voice, even on the phone across continents, sounded childlike, forlorn. “Did you see the bench?”

  “Csilla and I found the grave just like you said, off the main road in Vecsés,” I said. “The woman in the office found your mother’s site in a ledger and your sister’s as well. She took us across the street and we found the plot. The bench was gone, I’m sorry. But I left flowers and I lit a candle and I said a prayer, Dad, and then I asked her who was paying for the graves, and it was her daughter, Erzsébet, who’s been paying for the upkeep. So Csilla and I—we drove and we just starting knocking on doors, one at a time, until we found her. I showed her your picture. She remembers you, she cried when she saw you. She gave me Emma’s address.”

  “My cousin, Emma? She’s still alive?”

  “I have her address. You can write to her.”

  And then the line disconnected.

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  If Hungary had been all about my father’s side of the family, I left Budapest, at least temporarily, to visit my cousin Ingrid in Linz, Austria, because of my mother’s side of the family. The day after I arrived, Ingrid and I drove the autobahn to visit my mother’s eighty-two-year-old cousin, Adam, in Munich, Germany. There were no speed limits on the autobahn, a fact not known by me beforehand, and which left me, as Ingrid sped along, clutching the dashboard in a state of near terror the entire three-hour drive.

  We arrived late in the evening. Adam’s wife, Maria, and their two daughters did not speak a word of English, so Ingrid was called upon to translate everything. Maria insisted we eat “a typical late-night German supper,” which turned out to be a spread of sliced meats, cheeses, dark breads, and red wine. I was not accustomed to eating at 11:00 p.m., and the food was like lead in my stomach. When I thought that no one could eat a morsel more, dessert—a six-layer white chocolate torte with whipped cream topping that Maria had spent the day preparing—arrived with black coffee.

  After supper, as his daughters cleared the dishes, Adam and I tried to figure out, as translated through Ingrid, exactly “who we were to each other.”

  We began talking about how we all were related and, like the dizzying cobblestone streets throughout Europe, the conversation quickly found its way around an array of unexpected genealogical corners.

  Adam produced one tattered photo album after another and began pointing to nameless faces, at least nameless to me, although I did recognize my mother as a girl in one. Dressed for a costume ball, she looked like a youthful Habsburg, the royal monarchy that ended with the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Em
pire, in white wig and pink chiffon ball gown. Naturally, Adam spoke to me in German throughout. I smiled politely and nodded. When he realized, yet again, I did not speak his German, he raised both inflection and pitch, as if speaking louder and more forcefully might cure me of my failure to understand his words.

  I awoke early the next morning, on the anniversary of D-day, June 5, 2004, to the news of Ronald Regan’s death. Within the hour, Ingrid and I were back on the autobahn, driving toward Dachau. I had wanted to visit a concentration camp since arriving in Europe. Considering my mother’s past, I thought this was a part of my history I should witness.

  Upon arriving at the parking lot, outside Dachau, I could easily have mistaken the grounds for a university campus. Twenty-something-year-olds sat beneath elm trees, beside beds of flowers, smoking, talking, laughing. Birds chirped.

  We parked the car and walked fifty meters to the entrance. Crossing the threshold, all sounds of birds ceased; there were no flowers or trees, only rocks and palpable foreboding. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the grounds’ perimeter, and within it, a number of memorials and churches had been raised to honor the dead. On one plaque I read of how the Carmelites had built a church on the grounds in the 1960s, led by a one-time survivor.

  We found a crematorium and, in front of it, an altar for the ovens.

  Hanging on a wall inside the barracks next door, I saw framed pictures of prisoners who had been shot deadprisoners. Because it was the anniversary of D-day, the camp was stuffed with tourists, many American. Groups snapped photos of photos of bloodied corpses, and moved on—mementos from a war long ago for their albums back home.

  The “Map Room” displayed a series of framed maps of Europe with colored stars pinned next to all the—as the sign above the maps read—Concentration camps set up in Europe during World War II. Eagerly, I scanned the maps, one after the other—looking for one of the camps where my mother, and many of my relatives, had been incarcerated, or died, in the former Yugoslavia: Kikinda, Petrovgrad (today’s Zrenjanin), Molidorf (today’s Molin), and Rudolfsgnad (today’s Knićanin). When I didn’t find them, not one, nor any mention of Yugoslavia at all, I realized that the “Map Room” identified only National Socialist (Nazi) concentration camps set up during the war. All my German (Volksdeutsche) relatives, including my mother, had been jailed in communist concentration camps erected after World War II under Josip Broz Tito. This was not a memorial for my mother’s people, for any of my relatives. Theirs was a minority still without notice, gone unrecognized—silenced, for the most part, even in the history books.