by Miklós Vámos
An hour and a half passed and Matushka opened the door. “Get dressed, my boy, we’re going to visit your grandfather.”
The two women in black walked with the boy between them, holding his hands on the bumpy road that led to the cemetery on the hill. Szulard had never known his grandfather. When he was first brought here by his mother, Uncle Pani had already lain in his grave for some time. He had never seen Babka in anything but mourning dress; when he was younger he thought all women dressed in black all the time.
At the graveside peace suddenly broke out between mother and daughter. Like some well-rehearsed couple they used a little spade to do some weeding, and cleaned up the gravestone where-Szulard could not yet read it-just a few words had been engraved in old-fashioned Cyrillic letters: Pane Vikulich Boldin, died in the year 1825. May the grave burden him not. They lit the two candles in their cardboard sleeves and prayed for a long time, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud and in a duet of mourning, Babka’s deep, booming prayers entwined, lianalike, with Matushka’s higher-pitched chant. Szulard knew Our Father and Hail Mary and to these he added his thin little piping.
Two days later they were in the post-chaise, all three of them. Babka wanted to see with her own eyes where her grandson was going. All Szulard’s worldly goods fitted easily into his grandfather’s army chest, which had been rubbed clean with a rag dipped in vinegar. For the journey Babka had prepared Szulard’s favorite food: pork tenderloin fried in fat on sliced white bread. Matushka did not want any: “Makes me feel bloated.”
“Bloated my foot!”
They were at each other’s throats again. Szulard was unconcerned; all the more for him.
Matushka would not cease elaborating on their idyllic future. Szulard should not imagine some God-forsaken little one-horse place; he would be moving to a proper big city, where the roads are paved, a brass band plays in the main square on Sundays, and the dramatic society, of which she, Matushka, is a founding member and cashier, performs twice a week in the grand salon of the Golden Lamb hostelry. “But that’s not all. We have our own house, thank God, in the Lower Town; we shall plant violets and forget-me-nots in the garden in the spring! You will see how glorious it will be!”
“Kitchen garden?” barked Babka sternly.
“At the back. But we no longer need it.”
“Don’t you get too full of yourself! Don’t forget there will be lean years.”
Szulard was sorry to leave behind only one thing: the black cat. Babka held the view that cats belong with their houses and waste away if parted from them. Szulard wept bitterly, stroking the shiny black fur with great affection.
“We will come back for a visit no later than summer!” said Matushka. As this had no effect, she promised Szulard a brand-new cat and he, with many sniffs and whispers, was at length assuaged. The black cat did not bat an eyelid as the boy bade farewell.
This was only the first of his mother’s promises not to be fulfilled. It was to be followed by many more. No younger brother or sister was born. He was not educated in an expensive school. He did not become a well-to-do landowner. He did not become a respected member of the community. He did not live to a ripe old age.
After several days of being tossed about in the carriage, they arrived, in the middle of the night and a violent storm, in a town with cobblestones that made the post-chaise’s wheels clatter so loudly that it awoke Szulard from his slumber. They clambered out in a square surrounded by terrifyingly tall houses on every side, yet a biting wind swirled through them as the coachman unloaded their baggage. Matushka leaned over to Szulard and pointed out their new home: “There it is!” she said, her scarf fluttering like a flag.
Szulard, still half in the realm of sleep, could not understand why his mother was saying this. Leaving the chests and coffers on the cobblestones, they set off, leaning into the wind, as the first streaks of dawn brought some light. They turned in the direction of a crescent that opened from the square. A loud knock on the wooden door of the third house brought a servant in a shawl to the door and, with noises resembling the bleating of goats, she welcomed them through the arch, whence the path led to the courtyard and then through several doors to the rooms. A man also emerged; he too began to bleat, but this Szulard found less odd, since he wore a goatee. He also wore a pince-nez, like the teacher back home. He picked up Szulard and lifted him high, in the direction of the oil-lamp. He burst into tears, and his mother took him. “There, there. It’s all right. He says he is pleased you are here!”
“Who says?” asked Szulard.
“My husband, that’s who!” replied Matushka.
“Good God!” said Babka. “You have a husband?”
“Of course I do! I told you so!”
“You say so many things… And it has to be such a lard-tub?”
“He is not in the least a lardtub, he is Béla Berda, town clerk of the Noble County!”
Hearing his name, the man became more animated, shaking Babka by the hand and rattling away in goatish.
“I don’t understand… what language is he speaking?” asked Babka.
“What do you mean what language? It’s Hungarian of course!” Matushka replied.
“You didn’t tell me that either.”
“Oh, mother! We are in Hungary after all! What language do you think they speak here? Romanian?”
Szulard was still in tears and the man, Béla Berda, town clerk of the Noble County, could not fathom why. He had expected scenes of joy unconfined to greet the arrival of the woman and the child, the child he had most generously consented to have in his home. Béla Berda was fond of giving his own names and nicknames to things and people. He called his wife “countress” (with reference to her role as cashier) or “artress” (in view of her other roles), and considered these terms outstandingly witty. He had decided well in advance that he would call the boy Frisky Rabbit, which he thought highly amusing. Only for his mother-in-law could he not find a suitable nickname; he had supposed that one would occur to him the moment he saw her. Later he heard Frisky Rabbit address her as Babka, so he playfully derived from this Babotchka, “Little Bean,” which was not in the least appropriate for that particular lady.
Frisky Rabbit failed to stick as a nickname, and the slight twist to the more standard Szilárd by his classmates in the school proved more lasting. He spent the first day there in a state of shock: he could not make out a single word the teachers-there seemed to be quite a number taking classes in turns-were saying. He felt he was forever banished from the cacophonous noise that united the Hungarian children. He did not speak to strangers gladly, even when they spoke his language. Matushka made reassuring noises: “You’ll get the hang of it soon enough, don’t you worry. If I could do it, with my thick skull! You will also hear Hungarian at home.”
The boy sobbed through every night; his pillows traced his tears in veiny blotches. After Babka went back, he felt very much alone. When he could, he spent his time hovering around the yard behind the now-wilted lilac bushes, where Béla Berda had laid out his dovecote, with its hundred or more black birds. Szilárd was much happier learning their language, spending hours billing and cooing with them. Naturally Béla Berda also tagged his birds with sobriquets, his favorite layer being designated Icarus, for example; Szilárd preferred the male called Pilinga, whose unusually long, straight bill did truly resemble the knife-blade that the word denotes in Magyar.
Forbidden it may have been, he nonetheless soon mastered the art of climbing up to the dovecote. His mother would summon him down because of the cold autumn wind, but Béla Berda was more concerned about the exemplary order he maintained up there: “If you foul up the fowl, you will have to clear up yourself!”
Despite these threats the boy happily spent his time in the dovecote. Unsurprisingly Béla Berda in due course dubbed him the Ace of Doves, playing on the name of the highest card in Hungarian tarot, and every time he uttered this sobriquet he would chortle at his own wit. When no one else adopted it, Béla
Berda noted yet again how others seemed to be deaf to sophisticated verbal humor.
Szilárd went in fear of his stepfather, never knowing where he stood with him, and kept out of his way as much as possible. He also avoided his mother, as she was invariably on the side of her husband. Szilárd never got close to his mother; he much preferred Babka and her absence pained him greatly. Nor did he find any support among his school friends; he was relentlessly mocked for the way his Hungarian a’s curled into á’s and for his splashy s’s. He was racked by a vague memory that this was not the first time this had happened to him. Only in the company of the doves did he find peace of mind and satisfaction. He held their warm little bodies close and was thus no longer cold; he imitated, successfully, the little noises they made with their beaks. If he was sure no one was looking he would stand up quite straight on the steep roof of the dovecote and stretch out his arms, as if flying. At times like this warm little birds of joy fluttered up in his soul.
He must have made a startling sight as he stirred the autumn sky with his spindly arms, eyes closed, head to one side, raising one leg again and again, like a dove. Those in the building paid him no heed, while on the courtyard side he was shielded from view by the tall poplars. He firmly believed that there would come a day when, as a result of all his practice, he would be able to rise into the sky, circle the yard a few times, and then fly off, far away, to the distant village where Babka lived, near the sea, the place where he last remembered being happy. Since he had lived here, he was sure that even the number of stars in the heavens was fewer.
Even rain could not keep him away from the dovecote; he welcomed the little fat drops falling on his face. At such times there pounded in him even more powerfully than usual the desire to fly south, on the trail of the migratory birds. He stood up on tiptoe.
“Get down at once!” his mother shouted at him, when she saw the boy, soaked to the skin, from the kitchen window.
The cry came as a shock to Szilárd and for a moment he lost his balance, the soles of his shoes seeking but failing to find purchase on the wet planks; he slid down to the edge, and although he reached out with his arm, it was in vain, and he plunged head-first into the air. As he fell his knee hooked itself around one of the dovecote’s supporting beams and for a fraction of a second it seemed to hold, only for the rotten wood to snap in two, and down came the bracket as well, right on the boy’s head as he landed on the ground, the doves spraying out as he flew.
The medical orderly who lived nearby came running over in his apron and slippers and promptly gave up on him. “Look, town clerk Berda, the skull has split wide open, the brain’s damaged, I will be bound; what could I do?”
His mother was hysterical and had to be dragged away from the blood-stained ottoman on which he had been laid. There was a gentle smile playing about Szilárd’s lips. Now, at last, he was able to do what he had so long been preparing for: to fly away.
He saw Kornél Csillag being teased and mocked for the German accent of his Hungarian speech.
He saw Bálint Sternovszky as a child and a young man, falling out of a window, twice.
He saw István Stern at the time of the Lemberg catastrophe.
He saw Richard Stern on the wide double bed, struggling in the presence of the congress-of this and of so much else, he understood little.
He saw Otto Stern with a wreath of tiny yellow flowers-buttercups? marigolds? euphorbia?-about his neck. He felt peculiarly drawn to this huge-eyed man with the flowing hair.
He saw Matushka, her hair let down, scantily clad, giving her favors to total strangers. What is this? He felt a sharp, stabbing pain as he saw this and how the men touched his mother.
The living dioramas cascaded and swirled around him. Fragments of present time would surface, too: the honeyed light of the curtains glittering on the windows, his mother’s tear-soaked cheeks, a man with mutton-chop whiskers and hairy hands-the professor of medicine summoned from the hospital who in the end decided, against his professional judgment, to sew up the inches-long gash: “We can but hope.” Szilárd bore the intervention-which the doctor said was particularly painful-without a murmur, so captivated was he by his sojourn in the past. He found out about The Book of Fathers, and was able to observe even its whereabouts: the completed folio was in Richard Stern’s library, hidden in a gap between the floorboards; the one begun by Otto Stern lay in the offices of the Stern & Stern Wine Emporium, on the top shelf, buried under stacks of old bills.
Months passed without the boy regaining consciousness. One day there came through the town Dr. József Koch, who had been elevated to the post of court physician by the Emperor in person, and whose ancestors, going back seven generations, had all been distinguished medical practitioners; three of his brothers, too, had chosen the same career. He lodged in the Golden Lamb. Matushka begged him on bended knee to take a look at her little boy as he hovered between life and death. Town clerk Béla Berda hovered in the background with a servile smile, repeating: “Money no object.”
“But it would be, were I greedy for money,” remarked Dr. Koch. “However, one asks for only as much as is right.”
Dr. József Koch’s fee equaled one month’s emoluments for town clerk Béla Berda, but it was no use; not even he knew the remedy for Szilárd’s condition. “If ever he were to get on his feet again, which I do not think at all likely, he would certainly be feeble-minded.”
“We had managed to reach that conclusion all by ourselves,” commented Béla Berda.
“Silence!” hissed Matushka, livid.
Béla Berda was quite certain his bankess had taken leave of her senses. She temporarily gave up her theatrical activities to devote all her time to her son. Where was that proud artress of old, who was not prepared to give up the stage even for his sake?
“I would leave any man for the stage, but there was never a man born that I would leave the stage for! That is not something you would ever understand… you… clerk of the town!”
It was through the theatrical company that they had met. A three-member delegation visited the county assembly to seek the support of the Noble County for their petition, which had been declaimed in ringing tones by the delegation’s female member. Béla Berda put his weight behind their proposals, though in fact he wished to put his weight only upon their spokeswoman. A committee was established for the purpose of considering what might be done in the town to promote theatrical activity in the Hungarian language, to raise its status, and to ensure that performances in the Golden Lamb enjoyed the support of a select public.
The lilac bushes were in bloom by the time Szilárd was able to sit up in bed, and it was the grape harvest by the time he was able to leave it. He could have fitted into his clothes twice over, and his mother had to tie his trousers with string at the waist. He was to remain anemic for the rest of his life, even if he was fed to bursting with the richest foods. He went the rounds of physician after physician, being prescribed fortifying concoctions and the oils of saltwater fish, or urged to spend summers by the sea and in the mountains of the High Tatras; nothing was any use.
“This boy’s bones seem for some strange reason unable to retain flesh on them,” remarked the doctor in the mountain sanatorium.
Little though he may have borne in terms of flesh, he carried an enormous burden in his soul. What he had seen and almost touched at the opening of death’s door remained with him forever, and as he grew older he felt with increasing urgency the need to unravel their meaning. The first sign came as he was innocently rummaging around in his mother’s writing desk: he chanced upon a broken gold necklace from which was suspended a very small gold locket. Szilárd felt that compared with the other glittering items, this one radiated warmth, and he held it tight in his hand for several minutes. Whenever thereafter the opportunity presented itself he would head for his mother’s desk and at once seek out the locket and clutch it tight. The warmth that seemed to emanate from the locket he took as a message from days long past. He fingered a
nd fondled it so much that suddenly the tiny lid sprang open. The image of a familiar face met his gaze.
The picture of Otto Stern had been made by a goldsmith in Debreczen. Yanna had ordered sketches of all her children, but only three were ever produced, as the goldsmith had lost his life in a robbery on his premises. Otto Stern had begged for the one of himself, thinking he would give it to Clara, but in the end he thought better of it.
Szilárd also turned up the egg-shaped timepiece; this came as no surprise, as he had seen it often enough in his visions. He longed to know more, but his mother was implacable: “Leave off with all that ancient history; what little I knew I was only too glad to forget.”
“All right, but why will you not say who was my father? And my grandfather?”
“Your father now is town clerk Béla Berda and that is all there is to it. You unfortunate creature, rejoice and stop moping! Now that fortune is smiling upon us, why keep twisting that dagger in my heart?”
Szilárd sighed and left it at that. Once mother puts on one of her performances, truth flies out of the window. Only one sure source remained: the wellspring of the past. But how to launch again the kaleidoscope of images? He pondered this, night after night, sensing that thick blackness was the most likely part of the day for the longed-for wonder to occur. But for a long time he had nothing more to occupy his thoughts than the images he had been vouchsafed when he was so seriously ill with his head wound. He could feel still the little trough in his skull, the place of the imperfectly healed gap; his hair grew rather sparsely over it. His mother was ashamed of her son’s gash and was constantly trying to cover it with a cap or hat or by combing his locks over it. For Szilárd it was not a problem; it made him unique. His fingers often found their way to the indentation and delicately mapped every tiny landmark in minute detail. He found much pleasure in carefully scratching his little trough, and would play with it just as other boys of his age enjoyed their penises. And he was told off in much the same way when his mother caught him: “Stop fiddling with it!”