Kronheim smoothed out the letter and studied it.
Dear Judit,
You are probably used to strangers chatting you up when you speak Hungarian, for no better reason than they are Hungarian too. We men can be so bad-mannered. For example, I addressed you by your first name on the pretext that we grew up in the same town. I don’t know whether you already know me from Debrecen. Until my homeland ordered me to ‘volunteer’ for forced labour, I worked for the Independent newspaper, and my father owned a bookstore in Gambrinus Court.
‘Very odd,’ remarked the rabbi, shaking his head.
Judit was on the verge of tears. ‘And Lili wants to tie the boat of her life to this crook.’
Kronheim put another herring dreamily into his mouth. ‘The boat of her life. How lyrical. Tie the boat of her life to him.’
More than fifty years later, when I questioned Lili, my mother, about the moment she decided to reply to Miklós’s letter, she searched for a long time among her buried memories.
‘I don’t remember exactly. You know, in September, after the ambulance took me from Smålandsstenar to Eksjö, during my second week of being confined to bed, Sára and Judit turned up in the ward. They brought some of my personal things from Smålandsstenar—including your father’s letter. Judit sat on my bed and tried to persuade me to write back, prattling on about how much that poor ill boy from Debrecen must be hoping for a reply. Then the girls left and I was stuck in bed. I wasn’t even allowed to go out to the bathroom. I lay there bored, with your father’s letter beside me. Two or three days later I asked the nurses for pencil and paper.’
Lili and Miklós were assigned to the second transport of Hungarian returnees, in June 1946. They flew from Stockholm to Prague and caught a train to Budapest the same day.
They held hands in the crowded compartment. After they crossed the border into Hungary my father got up, with an apologetic smile, and made his way to the tiny, filthy toilet and locked the door. As usual his thermometer was in his pocket in its elegant metal case. The train rattled along on the newly repaired track. Miklós stuck the thermometer in his mouth, shut his eyes and clung to the doorhandle. He tried to count to 130 in time to the clattering of the wheels. When he got to ninety-seven he glanced up, and in the cracked mirror above the basin he saw a thin, unshaven man in glasses and an oversized jacket with a thermometer pressed between his lips. He peered closely at the mirror image. Was this what he’d see for the rest of his life? This cowardly looking fellow hooked on his thermometer?
He came to a decision. Without looking at the level of the quicksilver, he yanked the thermometer out of his mouth and chucked it down the toilet. He threw the metal case in as well. Then, determined and angry, he flushed twice.
By nine o’clock on that June evening in 1946 a huge crowd was gathered at Keleti station, even though this was a special train and its arrival hadn’t been announced on the radio. But the word had got round. Lili’s mother, for instance, heard about the train on the number six tram. A woman in a headscarf had yelled the news down the tramcar during the afternoon rush hour. She also had a daughter coming home after nineteen months away.
Lili was wearing a red polka-dotted dress; during the spring she had begun to put on weight and was now seventy kilos. Miklós’s trousers still hung off him; he left Sweden weighing fifty-three kilos. They travelled in the last carriage.
My father stepped onto the platform first, carrying the two suitcases. Mama rushed over to Lili and they hugged each other without speaking. Then she hugged Miklós, who had no family to meet him.
Lili’s mother hoped that her husband would make it back. The truth was, however, that Sándor Reich, suitcase salesman, returning home from Mauthausen concentration camp, found his way into a storeroom filled with food. He ate smoked sausage and bacon and was taken to hospital that same night. Two days later he died from a ruptured bowel.
It was a dusty, humid evening. Lili, her mother and Miklós wandered through the excited crowd. They couldn’t stop looking at each other. They were at home together.
For the next two years I was in the making, silent and yearning.
Epilogue
MY PARENTS, Miklós and Lili, wrote to each other for six months, between September 1945 and February 1946, before they were married in Stockholm.
Until my father died in 1998, I had no idea the letters still existed. Then, with hope and uncertainty in her eyes, my mother gave me two neat bundles of envelopes bound in silk ribbon, one cornflower blue, the other scarlet.
I was familiar with the story of how they met. ‘Your father swept me off my feet with his letters,’ my mother would say, and make that charming wry face of hers. She might mention Sweden, that misty, icy enigmatic world at the edge of the map.
But for fifty years I did not know that their letters still existed. In the midst of political upheaval and the chaos of moving to new apartments, my parents had carted them around without ever talking about them. They were preserved by being invisible. The past was locked up in an elegant box it was forbidden to open.
Now I could no longer ask my father about what happened. My mother answered most of my questions with a shrug. It was a long time ago. You know how shy your father was. We wanted to forget.
Why? How could they forget a love so wonderfully uninhibited and so splendidly gauche that it still shines? If there were difficult moments in my parents’ marriage—and every marriage has its share of them—why didn’t they ever untie the ribbons to remind themselves of how they found each other? Or can we allow ourselves a more sentimental line of questioning? In their fifty-two-year relationship wasn’t there a moment when time stood still? When the angels passed through the room? When one of them, out of pure nostalgia, longed to dig out the bundles hidden at the back of the bookcase, the testimony of how they met and fell in love?
Of course, I know the answer: there was no moment like that.
In one of his letters my father writes that he is planning a novel. He wanted to describe the collective horror of being transported to a German concentration camp—a book (The Long Voyage) Jorge Semprún later wrote instead of him.
Why didn’t he ever get down to writing it?
I can guess the answer. My father arrived home in June 1946. His younger sister was his only living relative, and his parents’ house had been bombed. His past had evaporated. His future, however, was taking shape. He became a journalist and started writing for a left-wing paper. Then, one day early in the 1950s, he found his desk had been moved outside the editorial office.
When exactly did my father lose his faith in communism? I don’t know. But by the time of the show trial of László Rajk in 1949 it must have been shattered. And during the revolution in 1956 my parents were concerned primarily with the possibility of emigrating.
I remember my father standing in desperation in our kitchen, which was reeking as usual with the smell of boiling sheets. ‘Do you want me to wash dishes for the rest of my life? Is that what you want?’ he hissed at my mother.
They stayed.
During the Kádár era, between 1956 and 1988, my father became a respected foreign-affairs journalist. He was founder and deputy editor of Magyarország, a quality weekly newspaper. He never wrote the novel about the journey in the railway wagon, and he stopped writing poetry.
This leads me to record the sad fact that in my father’s hands neither his own experiences nor those of his companions in distress became a literary work.
I’m convinced that the idea of a new future, the belief that grew into a religion at the beginning, was later cancelled out by his resigned submission to the political circumstances that undermined his aspirations as a writer too. This proves that talent alone is not enough. It doesn’t hurt to have luck in life as well.
But my parents took great care of the letters. That’s what matters. They kept them safe, until my mother’s decision and my father’s approving wave from the next world allowed them to reach me.
Fever at Dawn (retail) (epub), Fever at Dawn
Fever at Dawn Page 16