by Miklós Vámos
“Cawds! Show you how I play cawds!”
The little Mendel Berda-Stern shuffled the cards with some expertise and cut them, explaining the while, his father listening with his mouth open. The child had invented a brand-new game, distantly resembling Hungarian Tarokk, in which the rules were based on pure logic. The top trump was Mother, a kind of all-conquering Joker.
Mendel Berda-Stern drew his mother wearing a hat that looked like a fruit-basket, with the house and larder keys hanging from her neck. Among the cards with figures there also appeared his sister and the dog Morzsa, and the Sterns from Hegyhát, József and János, both with beards down to the ground. His father was assigned a value somewhat higher than the guard dog: he was recognizable only by the shape of his legs, just a little more X-shaped than in real life. At all events, his son’s deck of cards made him reflect whether he had been right to let his wife wear the trousers quite so much in the house. He had, however, little opportunity to reconsider this policy, as within a few weeks he had been arrested.
At first his mother insisted that the Daddy had gone away. Mendel Berda-Stern realized later, having discovered the truth and read the farewell letter intended in part also for him, that at about the time that Szilárd Berda-Stern was staring down the barrels of the guns, he had had a very strange dream. A well-built, rather rotund man, in the shadows of a tent, with a brown-skinned woman whispering in his ear. On the table, cards and a mysterious, crystalline ball. Mendel Berda-Stern could clearly make out the words of the woman: “Snow-white birds plunge into the fire and burn to death.”
The same man, in the company of other men, colorful cards in hand, crumpled banknotes before him in a huge pile.
A more substantial man, rolling around on the grass under God’s heaven, singing for all he was worth, his resonant voice echoing far and wide.
A child-sized man, on horseback, in a uniform of black and white, galloping alongside other gentlemen riders. The finishing-line marked by a line of white dust, he is the first to cross, the clatter of hoofs becomes hurrahs from the spectators.
Mendel Berda-Stern woke with aching limbs, as if he had been riding the horse. For years these dreams, which made no sense, kept haunting him.
That autumn, when his voice began to break, they moved to Homonna, because his mother was taking over the direction of the lace-making factory hitherto managed by her much older and long sickly sister. She had distinguished herself at fillet-work while preparing her bottom drawer, having picked up the skills from her grandmother, who had died relatively young. The factory made light lace, suitable for collars and trimmings, and heavier lace for the table or for furniture, both using designs from abroad. Mendel Berda-Stern reveled in the permanently damp atmosphere of the workshop and the rich variety of spider’s webs produced by the white strands of lace on the wooden frames. He liked especially to spend time playing with the giant set of scales used to weigh the yarns.
In school there was a card-players’ circle for both students and staff. Mendel Berda-Stern could beat his fellows with his eyes closed. On the day of the school’s patron saint, St. Anthony, students and staff competed in mixed teams pitting their wits against each other. Whomever Mendel Berda-Stern had as partner would come out on top at the end of the game. His success was based on three factors. The first was his memory, which unerringly remembered which cards had gone, and so he knew exactly which ones were left in the players’ hands. The second was his psychological insight. Not the slightest tremor of an eyelid, nor a barely perceptible touch of fingers, escaped his attention. The third was his sense of smell. The cilia of his nose had learned to detect the unmistakable odor of excitement, fear, or risk. He could even identify their synesthetic colors: he sensed fear as deep green, risk was blood-red, excitement a golden yellow. These skills made it possible for him to tell at once if someone was lying or wanted to cheat him.
His mother had hoped that Mendel would help with the lace factory, but he showed neither the inclination nor the ability to follow her into the business. For a while it seemed that he might succeed in his father’s footsteps, when he managed to assemble Szilárd Berda-Stern’s telescope and other equipment with which to spy out the secrets of the heavens. On starlit nights he would climb up to the house’s loft, pull aside a couple of tiles from the roof, and stick the telescope out. For hours he would but stare, listening to the delicate sound of silence and the occasional mouse. At such times, with the endless expanse of black sky before his eyes, the gates of the past would open in his mind. But the further back into the past he delved, the more he longed to espy the events to come, as some of his ancestors had.
By the age of seventeen he considered himself a professional gambler, though the life-and-death battles with fortune had to wait until he reached the age of majority. Then he decided to see the world. He traveled wherever he was able to do battle, all night long, for money at tables both square and round. He traveled the length of the French resorts, where English aristocrats and Russian magnates would lose everything with heads held high. He visited Swiss gambling halls, whose croupiers maintained stricter order than their colleagues in other countries. But mostly he preferred to spend his time in the casinos of the towns along the Rhine, haunted by money-hungry gamblers from all over Europe. He met miserable pointeurs who carefully portioned out their money so that they could earn risk-free the cost of their room and one hot meal a day. But at least as intimate were his connections with the select few who had access to limitless funds. One of his closest friends was Prince Rochemouille, the uninhibited noble who in a good mood might fling louis d’or to the poor in the street, or Ali Ibrahim Pasha, heir of an Eastern potentate rich beyond imagination.
Now that The Book of Fathers begun by Otto Stern has come into my possession on my most important birthday, it seems to me appropriate to record here the lessons of my life, continuing the tradition of my ancestors and for the edification of my descendants.
Its contents are terrifying, said my mother as she handed it to me. I know not what she meant; for my part I received what I expected. My father and grandfather wrote relatively little in this book. The only innovation for me was my father’s farewell letter, which he sent to my mother and inserted in here, for it was word-for-word the same as the one he sent me. It is noteworthy that he wanted all of us to know exactly the same thing. That he loves us, that he is proud of us, that we should be sensible and careful, that we should look after ourselves, and each other.
I am not ashamed to admit that I have dedicated my life to the service of Fortuna. My better days are those when it is not I serving her, but she serving me. But this does not happen often enough. I have still much to learn, to reflect on, and to experience.
For me the espying of the future is necessary not out of passion, but rather to make me more assured in my craft. At the roulette and card tables it is inevitable that one will lose unless one has some inkling of what will happen in the next blink of the eye. This is why I am so intensively concerned with every aspect of telling the future.
In The Book of Fathers, too, he kept a tally of his losses and gains. These were to prove useful chiefly later for his wife, whose trustees were able to collect sizable sums from the money-changers and money-lenders in various towns where Mendel Berda-Stern had deposited amounts of differing size, following the accepted practice of gamblers, in case he found himself in financial straits. Tight-fisted as he was with his wife until then, his generosity after his disappearance was all the more surprising. But before that happened, much water had to flow under the bridges of the Rhine, the Seine, and the other great rivers that Mendel Berda-Stern was so fond of being able to view from his hotel window upon waking around noon with the taste of dew-dappled raspberries in his mouth. He would ring for his servant and demand his coffee, boiling, with butterfroth. However expensive the hotel, he insisted on bringing his own servants.
After coffee he rose, taking a hot and a cold bath, and over his underwear donned a peasant shirt and the
wide, pleated culottes favored by the market traders in Homonna, who called them muszuj. The next few hours were spent in meditation upon his reading and writing, and only then would he summon the barber to shave him and deal with his hair. His best ideas came to him when he was relaxed in the armchair, eyes closed, under the white napkin of the barber with the razor crisscrossing his face.
The lunch brought to his room was substantial. For choice he would eat the fat-marbled flesh of wild animals. He also enjoyed it if, as in the town where he was born, each course concluded with a spicy black soup based on blood and flavored with prunes. In consequence, he was beginning to acquire something of a paunch, which, however, was disguised by the expertly tailored cut of his clothes. Not a few serving wenches lingered on his chestnut-brown eyes.
He married young: his bride was Hami’s best friend, Eleonora Pohl. He was immediately drawn to this slim girl, partly because she set as much store by silence as he, and partly because her father, Leopold Pohl, had also been arrested in 1849 as instrumental in establishing the town’s Free National Guard. Leopold Pohl thought that it was his Jewish origins that had determined his fate at the court-martial: he was sentenced to eight years in prison, though set free after six. His assets were confiscated. Withdrawing to his wife’s estate, apart from helping to run it he did nothing useful. His son-in-law was the first person in a long time that he conversed with at any length. They found a topic of which neither of them ever became bored: Leopold Pohl was also trying to peer into the future from the garden lodge that he had originally built as a toy house for Eleonora.
It was during the endless enforced idleness of imprisonment that Leopold Pohl realized he would have been able to predict some of the stations of his life had he devoted the attention necessary to those minute signs that fate had granted him. His childhood fear of water should have warned him to prevent his parents’ traveling on water; then they would not have suffered their unconscionably early death in a tragicomic accident on the River Bodrog in full spate. Whenever he touched a metal object-especially iron and lead-his skin would erupt in ugly welts: this should have warned him that for calling the youth of the town to arms he would be severely punished.
“The secret of the future,” he explained to his son-in-law, “is hidden in the difference between human and divine knowledge. This was already known in the ancient world. Have you heard of the Oracle of Delphi?”
“Yes,” replied Mendel Berda-Stern. “It lies in Apollo’s sacred grove, where Zeus killed the dragon. Yes. The problem is, often the prophecy is in vain, because its gist can only be understood retrospectively. Pythia, the priestess of Delphi, told Philip II, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great: ‘Beware of the chariot!’ When he was stabbed to death, the sword of Pausanias bore an engraving of a chariot.”
“I see you are a man of great sophistication, Berda.”
“Mendel. Or Berda-Stern. But I am not in the least sophisticated. What I know, I know from my fathers.”
Leopold Pohl took this explanation as a form of modesty. He drank the pertu with his son-in-law, so that henceforth they were on a first-name basis.
“The only question is, is it right for man to crave divine knowledge?” asked Mendel Berda-Stern.
“If He did not wish it, He would surely not permit it.”
Mendel Berda-Stern told his father-in-law that whenever he heard of a clairvoyant, he would certainly visit her. He had had his fortune told from cards, from lead, coffee grounds, crystal balls, but of course most often from his palm. He also admitted that on his unexpected trips he was not trading in property-as he let it be known-but visiting secret citadels of gambling, which were the source of his regular income. His father had left him only debts, and the exiguous annuity provided by the Stern family allowed for only a modest existence.
“Everyone to his own, according to his gifts,” said Leopold Pohl. After a few glasses of vintage wine he solemnly brought out his most treasured possession, Les Vrayes Centuries et Prophéties, the prophecies of Maistre Nostradamus.
“King of the prophets,” said Mendel Berda-Stern in an awed whisper.
The volume was published in the city of Lyon. Leopold Pohl had had it bound in mauve leather in Homonna.
“Do you know French?” he asked.
“Yes. My great-grandfather Richard Stern was a professor of French. I inherited my French from him.” He took the opportunity to explain somewhat diffidently that his knowledge simply arose in him, through force of memory, without any kind of study.
Leopold Pohl was unsure whether to believe him or not. “Let us join forces in trying to interpret the quatrains and the presages.”
They spent many a quiet afternoon among the quatrains of Nostradamus, that is, Master Michel de Notredame, the majority of which Mendel Berda-Stern copied down himself. From one of these he suspected that Master Nostradamus was also of the view that he had received most of his knowledge from his forefathers. He lost his children and his first wife to the plague, on which he became an authority… a wretched and melancholy fate.
The famous Jewish doctor’s Mischsprache led to much scratching of heads. He used Italian, Greek, Latin, and even Provençal expressions and distorted words. With Provençal Mendel Berda-Stern was able to make some headway (his great-grandfather had studied this dialect), but in Greek he had to depend rather on Leopold Pohl. His imagination was much exercised by those of the prophecies of the king of prophets that had come true. For example, the foretelling of the death of Henri II, in a quatrain that Mendel Stern rendered thus:
A young lion comes to best the old,
A battle royal this pair will hold:
An eye is stabbed through a cage of gold,
Two wounds but one, a death foretold.
And this is exactly how it turned out: the king took part in a chivalric tournament in a golden helmet. He had overcome two of his opponents when the lance of the next, Count Montgomery, broke in two at the third assay, one end penetrating the golden visor to stab the king in the eye. The first wound was in the eye, the second in his brain.
Of the 1,200 quatrains, they found one that concerned Hungary. After heated exchanges they joined forces to produce a faithful translation. They took it to refer to the years of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49.
The Magyars’ life doth change to death,
Than slavery worse the new order’s breath.
Their city vast cries woe unto Heaven,
Twixt Castor and Pollux great battle doth beckon.
They debated whether it was Pest-Buda crying unto heaven or rather one of the major Transylvanian towns that had been captured. Perhaps Arad, where the thirteen Hungarian martyrs of the Revolution were hanged?
They ordered further books dealing with Nostradamus and the study of astrology. In respect of the latter, Mendel Berda-Stern also found relevant material in his father’s bequest. In the Lyceum of Eger, Szilárd Berda-Stern had read his way through Kepler’s three-volume De Harmonice Mundi, written in heavy Baroque Latin, which he found in the collections there. He noted how to cast a personal horoscope on the basis of computations based on the exact moment of birth.
Traveling in the city of Nice, Mendel Berda-Stern spared neither money nor effort in attempting to secure Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche’s twenty-six-volume Astrologia Gallica. He managed to obtain only a French-language conspectus of the vast work. Four days and four nights he did not leave his room. He understood that the significance of the planets in the horoscope depends on which house they are lodged in. The calculations made about his own fate were in many respects modified by the arguments of Morin de Villefranche. He inserted what he read into the structure that he developed following Kepler. He experimented with complex calculations, to lift the veil covering the years, months, and days to come. He came to Nice to gamble, but on this occasion he did not darken the doors of the casino.
On the morning of the fifth day he hurried to the street of the goldsmiths and bought an ex
pensive gold ring with a mounted sapphire, paid his hotel bill, and went home by the shortest possible route. He had a difficult journey: January was saying its farewells with hard frosts and storms of snow. It was around noon that he reached the apple trees of his Homonna garden and ran to the back wing of the house, where they had moved when they were first married. He pulled off his boots, fur hat, and coat, kissed Eleonora three times, and then said to her: “My dear, I am so happy! At the end of this year, on the fourteenth day of November, we shall have a son, to whom we shall give the name Sigmund, though he will prefer to be called Sándor.”
“Oh come now, Mendi my dear, where on earth did you get that from?” asked Eleonora, bridling.
“Not really earth. I worked it out. But for some reason the boy will be born in Nagyvárad in Transylvania.”
“Nagyvárad? But I have never been to Nagyvárad.”
“Nor have I.”
On his next trip he won 90,000 francs. All evening he stubbornly put his money, all smallish bets, on 7; he lost again and again, but he waited for his turn and on the seventy-seventh spin he put all his money on the number 7. As the ball popped about, it looked as though it would settle into the adjacent slot, but then after all, it decided to jump right into the 7. Mendel Berda-Stern was in a daze as the congratulations showered upon him. His winnings were carried in a wooden casket after him by his manservant. The next day he moved on, because his calculations suggested that he was about to enter an uncertain period when it was not worth taking risks.
After this adventure he also visited Marseille. In the market of the old port he visited all its three fortune-tellers in turn. From the last woman, who read his fortune from the tarot, he would hear: “You have already taken the path of success. Advantageous journeys await, good plans are taking shape in your head.”
Mendel Berda-Stern nodded. After paying he asked: “How much for the cards?”
“Pardon?”
“I’d buy your cards. The whole pack.”