Three months after my surgery, in the midst of an early-summer 2013 heat wave, I emerged from the airport into the humid haze of Budapest. The anesthesiologist’s friend, who had turned out to be the president of Nyíregyháza’s only college, led me to the spot where his chauffeured Mercedes was waiting. A Hungarian novelist and poet, Zoltán had started studying English only a year ago.
It was painful for him, he said to me in German, that, with the mind of a novelist and the desire to convey all things beautifully, he could not communicate effectively with me. Although we understood each other just fine, I could feel his frustration. For a writer, it would always rankle to be hampered by a limited vocabulary. My German was then still heavily influenced by my native Yiddish, but luckily Zoltán had grown up around Yiddish speakers, and my odd turns of phrase and archaic grammar did not stump him.
“The second language in Hungary used to be German,” he said, “but now it’s mostly Russian. English isn’t even on the table. Don’t expect to be able to communicate with anyone directly,” he warned me. He had found me an interpreter, someone who worked at the college but who had studied in America for a year. I was relieved to hear that.
We took a brief walking tour around the city. The banks of the Danube were inaccessible then, because of all the flooding—across central Europe, train lines were submerged and low regions turned into stagnant ponds. The Hungarian Parliament building, normally the architectural pride of the capital, was covered in scaffolding; only its imposing white spires could be seen amid the extensive renovation effort. We retreated from the noisy dump trucks and worker crews and walked down Andrássy út toward the famous Heroes’ Square. Zoltán had a story for everything; he knew every sculpture and statue. He’d mention them by name and ask me if I’d ever heard of this person or that, but all the names sounded equally foreign to me. Famous Hungarian poet, he’d point out, famous Hungarian artist, famous king, famous general, and famous writer. So many famous Hungarians, he seemed to be saying. I wondered if any of them were famous outside Hungary.
My first glimpse of Budapest—so different from Europe’s other capitals in that it lacks both contemporary chic and the varnished grandiosity of antique glamour—was jarring. Immediately I sensed just how influenced my childhood milieu was by the Old World aesthetic I saw around me. The voluminous block buildings, their facades cracked and darkened with age, reminded me of the impressive synagogues that rose between the tenement buildings of Williamsburg; I especially noticed the various flyers posted at eye level, some of them new, others rotted to strips and pieces by time and weather. Williamsburg, too, had been covered with such posters, called pashkevillin; because we had no radio or TV, we resorted to more old-fashioned means of communication and advertising.
In old Buda, the pastel-colored buildings, Bavarian in structure, Mediterranean in dress, seemed fake, like they were part of a movie set or theme park. Their doors and windows were tightly shuttered, and the small side streets baked silently in the midday sun. The cobblestones seemed manufactured and touristy. Only in the main square near the Fisherman’s Bastion did we find a crowd milling, which thinned out as soon as we retreated from the riverbank.
We sat in an outdoor café in the blistering heat and drank some chilled Tokaji. Zoltán taught me how to toast in Hungarian. “Egészségedre,” he enunciated slowly—meaning, “To your health!” Later I would constantly ask him to repeat it for me, because invariably I would invert the syllables or contort the pronunciation. None of the Hungarian I had heard as a child seemed to have stuck with me. “Paprikajancsi,” my grandfather had sometimes called me when I was being particularly mischievous. Although it literally translated to “pepper jack,” Zoltán said, it was actually the name of a classical clown character similar to Punchinello. Neither of my grandparents had wanted any of us to learn their native language. Hungarian was used only when secrets needed to be kept or in heated conversations had behind closed doors. It was the language of the past, to which we were not allowed any access. We were the future, and the future spoke only Yiddish.
We had a three-hour drive ahead of us to the great northern plain bordered by Romania to the east and Ukraine and Slovakia to the north, in which Nyíregyháza was only a small city. Zoltán planned to stop for dinner at a guesthouse he knew on the way, about forty miles from Budapest. I was starving. On the way out of the city there was heavy traffic, a result of one of the ubiquitous film crews that was using the highway ramp for a crash scene. Most of the big American blockbusters, Zoltán informed me, were at least partially filmed in Budapest. A stunted and incongruous economy combined with a complacent government allowed the city’s streets to be bought for cheap.
As we drove, dense clouds piled up in the sky, and by the time we arrived at the little guesthouse just off the highway, they had spread out across the flat plain and seemed to sag just above us like a structure about to collapse. I had the inexplicable thought that if Europe lived under a uniform sky—as if sharing a communal roof—Hungary, at its center, was somehow more vulnerable to its failure. Upon exiting the car, I felt a stiff wind and noticed the reeds that grew by the side of the road whipping back and forth.
Inside the simple cafeteria-style restaurant, the shelves along the wall boasted tall glass jars of pickled vegetable salads—what my grandmother had called savanyu, Hungarian for sour. She, too, had pickled cauliflowers and peppers and cucumbers, anything really, and served them alongside various dishes throughout the year. I asked Zoltán if the jars were for sale or simply decorative. “Both,” the shopkeeper answered, looking nonplussed at the question. There was no menu, because what was on offer here was apparently on offer at every guesthouse in the region, which rarely received ignorant visitors. I played it safe and went for the goulash, my first taste of the stew since I was a child. It arrived, smelling powerfully familiar, in all its brown and soupy glory, a large dollop of paprika jelly on the side. It felt like the first wholesome, truly nourishing meal I had eaten since my childhood. I devoured the entire bowl.
When we got back on the road, light rain was starting to fall. It became torrents as we raced along the flat, unchanging territory. Disheveled myrtles swayed precariously in the onslaught. Here and there the sun would streak through a tear in the clouds. Finally, we emerged into a sun-dappled mist, and an enormous, perfectly formed rainbow arced over the road in front of us.
“Look, a rainbow,” I exclaimed in German.
“Ah! A good sign, no?”
“When I was a child, I was taught that the rainbow was a gift from God to Noah. He promised never to unleash his rage onto the world again like he had in the great flood, but instead would send a warning sign for the people to repent. The rainbow is supposed to be a warning—if you see one, you’re supposed to take it as a sign to repent for your sins.”
Zoltán seemed perplexed. “But doesn’t it make more sense for the rainbow to be a symbol for hope?”
“I guess we’ll see,” I said to myself in English, wondering if I’d look back at this moment as portentous.
We entered the Szatmár-Bereg region, an area that had once been part of Transylvania, now a poor and rural place. By the time we arrived in Nyíregyháza, whatever cooling-off the rain had provided was gone. Only a few damp spots remained on concrete structures, and steam rose from the asphalt. Once upon a time, gracious town houses and courtyard apartments had lined these orderly boulevards, but no sign remained of the former elegance that my grandmother had described. Nyíregyháza seemed economically depressed, barely recovered from the communist regime that had fallen more than twenty years past. There had been no revolution here, no revival—the city seemed to have satisfied itself with a few new coats of paint.
“For the young people who grow up in this region, Nyíregyháza’s college is the only opportunity to broaden one’s horizons, to learn a field or skill that can expand the number of possibilities in their future,” Zoltán said.
The center of Nyíregyháza featured a smattering of stucco houses with clay-pot roofs, but mostly there were the ever-present communist apartment blocks, their cracked concrete facades now done up in cheerful Mediterranean colors as if in rebellion.
Zoltán told me that the college campus had been awarded a prize for excellence from a global architectural foundation in 2009. And yet, its buildings, although new, had been erected in a similar Spartan style. It was as if the aesthetic here had been permanently altered by the communist regime; the buildings were squat, functional squares around a voluminous courtyard.
“So, do many people come through here?” I asked as we pulled up alongside the campus.
“Not as many as we would like. And even the ones who do, they don’t all graduate. Perhaps it’s a problem with laziness”—and then he corrected his vocabulary—“no, I mean, motivation.”
“But why would they not be motivated?” I asked. “Especially if this is the only way to something better.”
“A lot of the students who do very well here don’t know what to do with their education once they’ve finished. Some of them are lucky and get jobs, but there aren’t enough jobs for everyone, and they are competing with students from bigger cities. It’s even harder to get work outside of Hungary, unless they’re brought into the factories in Austria and Slovakia to provide cheap labor, as they work for forints. Those employers take advantage of the poor exchange rate and pay Hungarians according to the income scale here, whereas the other employees make three or four times as much.”
We stopped in front of the college guesthouse, and then I checked in with the receptionist in the lobby.
“If you get hungry or thirsty, there are vending machines through that corridor,” Zoltán said, pointing. “Otherwise, Angelika, the interpreter, will come get you from your room first thing in the morning.”
I wrote my name and passport number on the sheet the receptionist handed to me, and she gave me a key card. I entered my room and appraised the two twin beds and their standard hospital sheeting with relief. I hadn’t been sure what to expect. The air conditioner failed to circulate anything other than hot air, but a shower room complete with multiple jets and spouts that had to be manipulated with a remote control surprised me. I might have preferred a working air conditioner, and managed even with a French bathtub arrangement—the one where you shower by using a trickling hose extension from the tub’s faucet. I threw open the large windows that looked out into the main courtyard of the campus. Tall, sturdy-looking trees with thick boughs obscured my view of the ground, but I could hear the idle chatter of students floating up toward me. The air seemed to enter the room almost reluctantly, bringing with it the faint odor of cigarette smoke and damp concrete.
I slept the sleep of the dead, regardless of the heat. I was awakened by a mourning dove burbling outside my window. For a moment before I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in Brooklyn. I recalled waking up early on July mornings in my grandparents’ house to that same sound of mourning doves cooing in the tree limbs level to my window, the last refreshing breeze of the night wafting into my room. Then I squinted into the bright early light, remembering where I was. I sat up immediately, walking over to the open windows to glimpse the foreign world in which I’d arrived and confirm it was still real.
The quad was empty except for a gardener who was trimming grass that had grown into the walkways. I could hear the faint buzzing sound of his electric cutter. I decided to explore the grounds while it was still quiet, before Angelika came to get me, so I took a shower and put on shorts and a T-shirt. In the antiseptic lobby I found a vending machine that served up every kind of Italian coffee drink for ninety forints, the approximate equivalent of forty cents. I could control the amount of sugar, the ratio of milk, and the potency of the espresso shot. My cappuccino dispensed itself in an individual plastic cup that popped out of a spout, followed by a plastic stirrer that dropped down into the hot foaming liquid. I lifted the cup to my nose and inhaled deeply. Coffee did not smell like this in the States, with that faint underlying note of almost-burnt caramel.
“Jó reggelt,” I said to the guards as I passed them in the corridor. They smiled and replied with “Good morning,” nodding their heads in an old-fashioned gesture of respect. I could feel their curious gaze follow me out the door. I had gathered by now that American visitors were rare in this part of the country. Before I left, I had tried to find a travel guide, but the one book I’d found that covered all of Hungary and not just Budapest had skimmed over this region, implying that it was impoverished and seamy, unsafe for the average tourist. I was lucky to be the recipient of the college’s hospitality; now I was keenly aware of how lost I would have been here on my own.
It was a humid morning, the kind that started out just bearable and turned positively ovenlike by 8 a.m. The sky reminded me of the clouds in classical paintings; it was as if someone had taken a paintbrush and dipped it into the fresh white paint on the canvas, blurring the edges of the clouds into off-white and pale gray smears. They were not like American clouds, which was the first thing I had noticed about Hungary. It had an old, classical sky.
We had humid summers in Brooklyn, too, although it usually didn’t get quite so bad in June. My grandmother had always been particularly good at handling the heat, refusing to turn on our air-conditioning units until it became positively unbearable. It was not until I reached Nyíregyháza that I understood why she was so unfazed. It felt like the muggy haze of a thousand summers had been trapped here on the plains, the mist collecting in layers.
Outside, two ancient gingko trees flanked the entrance to the building. Up close, their leaves weighed tremulously under drops of dew the size of nickels. Every so often, a branch would shake in the breeze, and the dewdrops would quiver and slide along the surface of the leaves, righting themselves eventually when the breeze died. Along the paths carved out between the lush gardens and lawns were the acacia trees my grandmother had spoken of to me so fondly, their dainty, fernlike leaves gently filtering the sun so that it dappled the grass beneath in lacy patterns.
Here were all the plants of her childhood, some of which she had tried to cultivate in our little backyard garden, and as I walked around the campus, I began to recognize some shrubs and flowers with joy. These were no English gardens at the college. These were the kind of gardens you might imagine had grown wild here and only been tamed, just barely, as an afterthought. Bushes and plants grew riotously into one another’s territory, and the grass in between was twice as tall as grass was usually allowed to grow in America. Willows and poplars competed for space, fat lavender shrubs lined the pathway, and tendrils of creeping fig wound their way around them. I heard a mourning dove gurgle throatily on the branch above me. The atmosphere was lush and fragrant, the sun was already hot on my skin; I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to preserve the moment into an individually packaged memory, complete with vivid sensory details. It seems funny now, how we are never really in control of the moments that do stand out later, with their smells and sounds so immediate and evocative. I recalled another moment then, instead—one that I had made no effort to retain.
My grandmother may have grown the only real garden in pre-hipster Brooklyn. It was the early 1990s, and most people had cemented over their backyards to keep away the weeds. She had made an agreement with the neighbors on either side of us: she would take care of the little plots of land behind their houses if they, the owners, allowed her to plant whatever she desired there. And so she did, growing strawberries in the damp, rich soil that lay just under the thick refuge of ivy filtering all that wonderful light that hit the back of our brownstone in the afternoons. She planted fat pink climbing roses so that they used the chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the yard as a trellis; the thorny stems climbed higher each year, inextricably intertwined with the metal. Crocuses and daffodils came up in late winter, and gorgeously colored tulips popped up
in clusters in early spring, followed closely by brilliant blue irises and delicate lilies of the valley.
She had a real eye for landscaping—it wasn’t just haphazard with her. The garden was divided into three rectangular sections, each delineated by carefully trimmed white-edged Swedish ivy and bordered on the corners with broad-leafed hostas. Slabs of rock were laid in between the sections and at the borders to create a walking path, and little tufts of moss grew between the rocks. It was a magical place, so well cared for that it gave back generously and graciously each year. I had read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic by then, and begun to pretend that it was my own secret garden. When I stood among the rustling leaves and smelled the delicate fragrance of the flowers, the incongruent urban cacophony was muted and remote, the sounds of honking cars and droning airplanes softened by wind-tossed stems and whispering petals. The ivy beds were like cushions that absorbed and suffocated the ugly sound of the city. In my imagination, it was as if invisible walls had gone up around the garden, and I had fallen, like Alice in Wonderland, into another plane of existence.
Every year, catalogs would arrive from Holland, offering nothing but tulip bulbs, and my grandmother and I would pore over the varieties and talk about which ones we might like to try. We’d survey the potted African violets on the windowsill to see if they were ready to be transplanted, but we’d leave the geranium cuttings until summer. There were always exciting plans to be made in the spring, and a summer of surprise growth to look forward to.
Exodus: A memoir Page 6