by Miklós Vámos
And why do you not want to share with me what you know? Why do you not ask how I’m doing with the girls? It’s ridiculous but since I have been alive I can recall just one solely no more than one serious proper conversation, and that happened because I humiliated you in front of your friends; I think you remember that. I couldn’t have been six yet, when I heard some dirty words from some of the others and I asked right there in front of all the guests: Daddy, what does fuck mean. But you didn’t laugh even then, not like the others, you just told me off, to be ashamed of myself, and locked me out; I hadn’t the foggiest what was so awful about what I’d done. The next day you set about giving me the birds and the bees and mutual respect and love among human beings; I didn’t get a single word of the whole business, but I was afraid in case I brought your anger down on my head bring your wrath down on me and when you ran out of examples from the world of fauna and avia was exhausted, I nodded that I had understood. Then Pityu Farkas lifted the veil on the whole big secret, at first I couldn’t believe it, it sounded so revolting, I parroted back to him what you’d said about the birds and the bees and, among human beings, mutual love and respect, he laughed his head off so I kicked him in the groin; then he gave me a good hammering. You didn’t even teach me how to fight; all I got from you was “Don’t let them get away with it.” That’s easier said than done.
The more
The moral
The more I write, the less it contains what I want I would like it to the point.
By the time, however, that this letter was ready to send, Dr. Balázs Csillag was no longer in the land of the living. Vilmos Csillag did not stop writing. It might take months for him to add or delete a sentence. The point was not the text, but the thinking about it. The fragment of autobiography destined for a nonexistent addressee took long years to write.
You couldn’t have known Gabi Kulin; we were thirds when he transferred from the Apácza. Once, during form master’s class, we were discussing the oldest Hungarian families, those that can trace themselves back to the seventeenth century, and silly old Boney picked on Gabi Kulin. He was a tall, well-built chap, with girlish locks.
I wonder what you would have said if I’d behaved like him: in vain did Boney and the head constantly go on at him about his hair; he didn’t give a damn, until the head went ballistic and came in with a pair of hairclippers and cut a swath lengthwise through his hair, saying, “Now you will go and get a haircut!” Gabi Kulin did indeed go to the barbers’ and had another swath cut, crosswise! God, they almost threw him out.
But that’s not what I wanted to say this time; in that class he eventually stood up and declared: as Sir seems to be so interested, I can reveal that my ancestors go back to the twelfth century, because we are descended from the Bán of Kulin, that’s why my parents were sent into internal exile to Nagykáta. Boney was speechless and eventually said there must have been other reasons as well. Gabi Kulin snapped back: I am no liar, we had committed no crime and had only the patent of nobility, because the family fortune had been lost at the card tables. Boney ended the exchange saying: sit down, my boy, and don’t answer me back.
I became good friends with Gabi Kulin; they lived out in Hidegkút and he had to change four times to get to school. I often went to see them; his mother made the best jam butties. I used often to ask him about his family, and he often answered with wonderful stories. When he asked about mine, I felt ashamed, as I didn’t know anything about anyone.
When I ask Mama about her family, she gets everything mixed up. She confuses names and dates. She will not even tell me how the two of you met. I know from Uncle Marci that you were a secretary of Rajk’s, but how did that come about? He mentioned that you walked home from labor service, and that the Nazis killed all your relatives. But nothing more. That’s all I know about my history.
I feel I have come from nowhere and I suppose that someone who has come from nowhere is headed nowhere. Is that really and truly what you wanted?
Is that really how you wanted it?
Is it??
Father??
Many things he never ever wrote down. Most importantly the fact that, over time, he did not miss his father less; on the contrary, he felt his absence more. The wound had perhaps healed over, but beneath the scab the infection had become permanent. In the time that remained at secondary school, he brought the house down with his rendering of Attila József’s “With a pure heart” at the poetry recitals. It was enough for him to say the first line-I have no father, I have no mother-for genuine tears to course down his cheeks, which students and staff alike regarded as unsurpassable proof of the reciter’s skill.
As the years went by, his mother’s tongue loosened dangerously; in fact, she could not stop talking. She was now prepared to speak of her late husband, but the picture she painted had no resemblance to reality. Dr. Balász Csillag was apostrophized as a model husband with outstanding do-it-yourself skills, who was a leading figure of the antifascist movement during the War, who failed to receive his due only because his noble and sensitive character could not endure the compromises that necessarily had to be made in the course of a leader’s life. Vilmos Csillag’s modest interpolations (“Actually, it wasn’t quite like that…”) she rejected with a high hand and a loud voice: “Come now, my dear Willie, what do you know about it? You know nothing!”
In this one respect Mama was probably right. Although… there were also things that she didn’t know of. Vilmos Csillag well recalled his father’s last month at home, when his health was still tolerably good and before he was caught in the hospital treadmill. He behaved like a pensioner who had taken early retirement: he rose late, went to bed early, spent all day on the balcony wrapped in a blanket, the crossword in his lap, taking occasional glances at it, when he would quickly insert letters, barely looking. Vilmos Csillag often went out to the balcony and watched as the thinning hair at the top of his father’s head was pushed upright by the pillow behind his head. On one such occasion his father spoke. “My boy.”
He was so surprised it took him some seconds to respond: “Yes?”
“Tell me. What would you say if I were to move out?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your mother and I no longer get on. Marital relations have long ceased. I am a burden to her. I could move in with a former colleague. Start a new life. What do you think?”
Vilmos Csillag was quite thrown by these six full-fledged sentences. He had already forgotten that his father was male and his mother female, if ever he had thought about it. He found it even more surprising that his father should start a new life when he was so close to… well, everyone knew what he was close to. Such a turn is completely absurd for… for such a short period. On the other hand, someone with only a few years (months? weeks? or who knows?) left is perhaps able to take more courageous decisions than lesser mortals.
His father was waiting for his answer, each deep furrow on his brow glistening with an amethyst-colored drop of sweat.
“But… why?” Vilmos Csillag asked.
“Long story.”
A dark shudder went through Vilmos Csillag as he suddenly imagined his father should no longer be there, an arm’s length away. “Have you told Mama?”
“I’ve mentioned it.”
“And?”
“She laughed her head off.”
“Huh?”
“She doesn’t think I’d dare.”
“Aha.”
“And you?”
“I think… you’d dare.”
“I asked for your opinion.”
“For that I’d need to know why-”
His father broke in: “I’ve told you: we no longer get on. What else do you need to know?”
“Well then… my opinion is… that it’s not worth it as long as you are ill. It’s better for you here at home, where you get first-class service from Mama, and I’m here too, if needed. When you’re well again, you will have time to ponder the problem.”
“
When I’m well again,” his father repeated matter-of-factly.
At that moment they both knew that Dr. Balázs Csillag would never get well.
His father gave a sniff like a sniffer dog, then buried himself in the crossword on his lap. The conversation was over. Vilmos Csillag continued to watch for some time as Papa got into his stride and rapidly filled the grid: whenever he managed to tease out the meaning of a clue, the flicker of a smile played about his lips.
This proved to be the most enduring image. Five years after the death of his father, Vilmos Csillag could summon up his face only with effort, and ten years later, in the man preserved in the black-and-white snapshots, he found it difficult to recognize his father. If he dreamed of him, it was frequently the terrace scene, where he was wrapped in a blanket, his thin hair, pushed skyward by the pillow, tousled gently by the wind, and around his lips that little almost-smile.
His father died before Vilmos Csillag finished secondary school, before he took his final exams-A+, A+, A+, A (French), A (Maths)-before his unsuccessful entrance exams, three years in succession, for the arts faculty, for law, for stage school, and for the teaching diploma, by which time he was resigned to not going to college and had to manage without.
About these things
Of such matters
Of all these matters you were unable to could not know anything. Nor of my other lesser or greater achievements of mine in the university of hard knocks, in which you might have taken pride. Perhaps. With you it’s always difficult to know. When I won the poetry recital competition at secondary school, with “It’s not yet enough,” you said you were ashamed that I had recited such pseudo-patriotic poems. Was it my fault? It was a set text! Why did you never make the stress the effort to tell me that not all the poems in that are found in the textbooks are OK?
I got no guidance from you, nothing to help me think, no framework or
It’s difficult to…
You didn’t hand on even what…
You didn’t bring me up to know about life nor…
You did not spend time…
You did not care…
I did not count…
I am not reproaching you for anything, but what you don’t get in your childhood, you will always miss, and that’s not from me but from Jung. I guess you would never have imagined that I would read such books; as far as you knew I was a middling student in every respect. I wonder what you thought would become of me. Did you think about that at all?
I became a professional rock musician. I think that would surprise you, as in those days such a thing did not exist, there was only Studio 11, Mária Toldy, Kati Sárosi, and Marika Németh, who Mama said people loved soooo much, the way only Mama could say soooo much. Can you believe that four guys go on stage-three guitars and a drum, perhaps an electronic organ-and this band can make ten or a hundred times more noise than a symphony orchestra?
It’s a pity that you can’t now any longer by then
It would be so good to talk to you Papa.
FATHER
PAPA
FATHER DEAR
We should have talked.
It would have been good to have talked more.
Or ever
Never
Vilmos Csillag’s visits to the cemetery were rare. In his view his father was not to be found there: if he existed anywhere at all, then it was in his, Vilmos’s, memory, and it therefore followed that it made not a whit of difference whether he visited the area demarcated by others for mourning him. He argued this view defiantly to his circle of friends and generally won them over.
“My dear little Willie, even the lowest peasant visits his loved ones in the cemetery. You are the only person who comes out with this pretentious guff!”
“Get off my back, Mama.”
“Well, you might at least drive me there. You don’t have to come in, you can walk up and down outside. I need no more than ten minutes, or even less, five!”
This was the trap. You can’t turn down your mother’s desperate plea, but it would be absurd if, having reached the arched wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, he were to just hang around, obstinately clinging to his ideas, while Mama placed a bouquet in the little marble vase affixed to Papa’s small marble plaque. If I’m going there… I’ll go in with her and do the honors.
Since the visit to the cemetery was unavoidable, he kept putting it off, with the wiliest tricks. By the time they got around to it, it was again February, windy and bitterly cold. Vilmos Csillag grumbled: “We might as well wait for spring!”
His mother launched into a tirade: “Have you any idea how long I have been begging you to take me? If it’s too much of an effort for you, I’ll go by tram, like the other peasants!”
This was Mama’s trump card, the other peasants, down to whose level it is piteous yet sometimes inevitable to sink. Vilmos Csillag never understood where his mother got her invincible hauteur, which decreed that there are us, the cultured ones, all of us potential doctoral students of morality, manners, and superiority, and there are, by contrast, other peasants, who have been vouchsafed little or nothing of this. His mother’s father-and grandfather-were in all likelihood either unpretentious carpenters in the community of Beremend or perhaps tillers of the soil, in which light the “the other peasants” tag seemed even more ludicrous. There was not an aristocrat or even an intellectual in genealogical sight, who might have had some genuine grounds for differentiating themselves from the uncouth plebs and country bumpkins.
Vilmos Csillag had no memory of his grandfather and only the very faintest of his grandmother, as if the negative of a photograph; by the time he was five they were both dead. Mama wanted to see their graves also. About the place of rest of the remaining relatives she told her son an unbelievable horror story. The village cemetery that had been the final resting place of the Porubszkys as far back as anyone could remember had been eliminated under socialism-“sir-shelism,” as she pronounced it-the gravestones that could be moved were transferred to Pécs, the bones remained in the ground, and some factory or power station had been built over the site. It sounded insane. Why would anybody want to build a factory right where there was a cemetery? Vilmos Csillag added this story to the catalogue of his mother’s mad tales. There were many of these, one more (or less) made little difference.
Sometimes his mother would come out with astonishing stories, and not always in connection with her late husband. The carpenter of Beremend rose to become the proprietor of a factory employing fifty, then a hundred, people. By the time Vilmos Csillag grew up, the family home at Beremend had expanded from three rooms to twenty-two. The sand buggy soon acquired an elder brother, a six-horse carriage, which resembled the garish phaeton in Vilmos Csillag’s favorite storybook, 77 Hungarian Folk Tales-though that had belonged to the King of Prussia, not the Porubszkys of Beremend. Their original two-hectare holding increased fivefold, to twenty Hungarian acres. Dashing hussars turned up, claiming to be related at the great-grandfather level or beyond. Vilmos Csillag had only his own, unreliable memory to draw on when he protested: “Mama, in the old days you never told me this!”
“Come, come, what do you know about it, my dear Willie? You don’t know anything, so it’s better if you keep as quiet…”
“… as shit in the grass!” he completed another of his mother’s favorite phrases.
“Exactly.”
Similar transformations were effected in Dr. Balázs Csillag’s career, in the level of affluence of his relatives in Pécs, and indeed in everything on which Mama gave little lectures. Her parents left Beremend for the capital in 1953, already burdened with serious illnesses. They died here so soon after their move, it seemed as if they had been destroyed by the sins of the metropolis. Vilmos Csillag occasionally felt the desire to find out something about the past, but if he asked his mother, he set off an inflation of the temps perdu, the exaggeration of the people who lived in the past, and he felt that he ended up knowing even less than before he put his q
uestions. He could not understand what joy Mama could find in making such notorious over-statements-the most polite term that might be used for this activity.
The mustard-yellow Dacia came to a stop by the flower sellers’ stands and he immediately took charge: choosing the flowers, paying for them, and gripping his mother’s arm as if she were too frail to walk by herself.
The grave of the grandparents was covered by a modest slab itself covered in greenish lichen. Under it the text: DEUS MUNDUM GUVERNAT.
Once Vilmos Csillag asked: “But weren’t they Jewish?”
“Not very.”
“How can someone be not very Jewish?”
“You can if you don’t want to be. They became practicing Catholics after the war and paid regular visits to the Basilica. And I pay my tithe to the Church to this day.”
“Tithe? I had no idea there was such a thing.”
“There are many things of which you have no idea, my dear Willie.”
Vilmos Csillag had a sneaking suspicion that GUVER-NAT should really have been written GUBERNAT. He wasn’t sure. He never took Latin. He had studied Russian for eight years, but he did not consider himself competent to correct a Cyrillic notice. He had no talent for languages. What did he have a talent for? Good question.
In his own judgment he had not gone very far in life. In his mother’s judgment, he had got nowhere at all. The Sputniks, a band that spent the summers doing gigs around Lake Balaton and in winter performed at shows organized by the state-managed National Organizing Office (ORI), was difficult to take seriously, even though they had a single released on the state label Qualiton, and the radio had recorded four of their own compositions, three of which were approved for broadcasting. Of these numbers “The Pier at Szántód” reached the semifinals of the 1972 Pop Festival, which is to say that television viewers had the opportunity to see and hear the Sputniks on two occasions. This was his tally at the age of twenty-six. He had composed the music for “The Pier at Szántód.” The first line of the chorus-“What we lose on the swings, we get back on the roundabouts, yeh, yeh”-was, for a few months, on every teenager’s lips. Mama was rather proud of her little Willie at this time, laughing as she received the congratulations of her friends. But in private she was nonetheless advising her son: “Quit while you’re at the top… I’m sure now you’d get into university-apply!”