Replacement Girl

by Ann Beaglehole

  Lots of kisses from Zsuzsi.

  Day after day my parents line up to see men in dark suits and fill out forms. We are too late for America. They are trying to find another country for us to go to.

  ‘We should have got out earlier,’ my father says.

  I know why we didn’t leave earlier. We didn’t want to because of my grandmother.

  ‘Israel wants us.’ My father grabs my mother’s arm, his eyes alight.

  ‘No, no, Gyuri, I’m no pioneer.’ If only we could go back home.’ She looks afraid.

  ‘You call that land of murderers home!’

  Sándor Kunz tells us that New Zealand is taking people. My father looks up New Zealand in the encyclopedia.

  ‘Gutsy around Wellington,’ he reads out. ‘No…gusty. What means gusty?’

  ‘Get the forms. Why not?’ my mother says.

  Trentham Army Camp smells of lamb chops. It is July and the cold wind blows the icy rain through the window that will not shut, no matter how hard my mother yanks. I shiver under thin grey blankets in the unheated room.

  My mother piles my winter coat, her winter coat and my father’s greatcoat on top of the blankets on my bed.

  ‘If only we could leave. It is a curse, this country.’

  My father puts his arms around us. ‘It will be good here, wait and see. It will be better when we are out of this refugee camp. Be a little patient, wait and see.’

  ‘I should rather not be an earl. None of the other boys are earls. Can’t I not be one?’ said Cedric on learning of his sudden inheritance.

  When my mother finishes reading out a chapter from an English book called Little Lord Fauntleroy, she puts it down, hoping I will pick it up and start reading to myself in English. But I don’t want to.

  Tomi is in a room just down the winding corridor. He finds some buttons and a big piece of cardboard and we play button soccer in the corner of the dining room.

  ‘Do you want to play?’ he says to a boy about our age. His name is Joe and he is also Hungarian. He is with his father who is giving out more of the thin grey blankets to the refugees.

  ‘Don’t speak Hungarian where people can hear you,’ he says.

  At Te Aro school, Tomi and I have English lessons every morning with the deaf and dumb children. Even they know how to say the words better than we do. All together we chant:

  Isn’t it funny

  How a bear likes honey?

  Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!

  I wonder why he does?

  After that comes drawing and painting. Tomi’s pictures are of guns and tanks. I sit with arms folded, my paper blank.

  ‘Draw a picture of your Hungarian school,’ the teacher says.

  ‘I don’t remember it.’

  ‘What about a nice picture of a friend from home?’

  ‘I don’t remember her.’

  ‘Our teacher told us to be kind to you, poor little refugee girl’, Angela says.

  ‘She told us to ask you to play so that you’ll forget the bad things that happened in your country’, says Christine.

  They sit on the ground, throwing knucklebones in the air and balancing them on the backs of their hands when they land. I don’t know how to play their game.

  At the end of the day, the class sings: ‘I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.’

  Zsuzsi had dark brown hair, with red lights. Hers was long and plaited.

  ‘Dancing like a…in the summer air.’

  Dancing like a what? I’m the only one who doesn’t know the words. It’s stupid not to know them. I start crying because I feel so stupid at my new school.

  Mrs Shapiro from the Welfare Society calls to see my parents in our Webb Street flat.

  ‘Nice day, isn’t it,’ she says as she sits down.

  ‘How are you people settling in? I expect the child has a few problems.’

  She puts down the coffee my mother has given her after one small sip.

  ‘Would you mind? Just a drop of water?’

  She looks pointedly at the windows, shut tight to keep out the unhealthy gales.

  ‘Fresh air will do her a world of good,’ Mrs Shapiro says.

  New Zealand is the best country in the world to bring up children. It’s summer. We catch a train to Paekakariki and sit on the beach. When the cold wind blows the sand into her eyes my mother says, ‘Here is a wilderness. It is a God-forsaken country. If only we had gone to America.’

  My father puts his arms around us. ‘It will be good here, Kati, wait and see, be a little patient, wait and see.’

  There is good news. The Ranki family have at last received their permits to come to New Zealand. I am so excited about seeing my friend Zsuzsi again.

  ‘Dressed in many layers of clothing – three jerseys, three trousers, three pairs of socks, three pants, three singlets, hat, mittens, coat – in the pitch dark on a snowy night, we climbed the barbed wire fence over the border. In the distance we could see the Christmas lights of the Austrian village. When we were at last safe from the Communists, my mother gave me an orange. It was very hard to peel and the first one I had ever tasted.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Eva, for a most interesting talk,’ says my teacher Mr Donald with a smile.

  At play-time, as we sip our milk, they surround me.

  ‘Eva, Eva. What are communists? Did they shoot at you? Were the soldiers good looking? Have you seen a dead person? Do children go to school in Hungary? Can you say something in your language?’

  Again and again. The children chortle when I say the strange-sounding words. I laugh loudly to show I do not mind.

  ‘Were you scared crossing the border? Are there cats and dogs in Hungary? What’s it like in the snow? What’s it like when there’s gunfire?’

  My new friend Mary Mundell asks the most sensible questions. She really wants to know what it is like to leave your home and go to live in a different country. When she grows up, she is going to become a nurse and help the people of India and Africa to have better lives. Mary is fair and blue-eyed like me, but her skin, unlike mine, is pale. When we compare arms and legs, mine always look suntanned beside hers.

  I had wanted my morning talk to be about a favourite film star, but Mr Donald had said to tell them about Hungary. I do not like answering the questions. It is hard to talk about my life before we came to live in New Zealand. There is something shameful about being a refugee.

  How far away Hungary seems. In the photo album, there are several pictures of me when I was little. In one photo, I am standing by the big coal stove in our Budapest flat. We huddled by the stove in winter. The flat had only two rooms – the room with the stove and another where we slept. There was also a small balcony. In the summer, my mother says, I used to sit out there in a basin of water to keep cool.

  ‘Look, Eva,’ my mother points, ‘there is you on the balcony, holding keys. And here you are on the toboggan in the park across the road.’

  I look at the small girl on the toboggan. She is bundled up against the cold, surrounded by thick snow. What is she thinking about?

  On Tuesdays, the tall stooping minister comes to school to tell Bible stories and teach us about our duty to God and Jesus. We colour in pictures of stories from the Bible. If your parents write a note, you can get out of going to religious instruction.

  ‘Just go to the class,’ my mother says. ‘There is no need to broadcast your background.’

  All together we sing:

  What a friend we have in Jesus

  All my sins and grief to bear

  What a privilege to carry

  Everything to God in prayer

  I don’t mind the religious instruction. Colouring in is boring but the stories are interesting. But why did the Jews kill Jesus? He was Jewish, wasn’t he?

  Mary and I sit next to each other in class. She has a crush on Mr Donald and asks me who I think he likes best of all the standard five girls.

  Mr Donald dresses like a soldier in khaki shirts, trousers and boots, a
nd teaches us German tramping songs. Mary and the other girls giggle when a patch of sweat appears under his arm as he conducts the class.

  After they have listened to a programme on the radio about the capture of Adolf Eichmann, Mr Donald says, ‘I’d like to know, Eva, what your people think.’ He puts his hand on my shoulder. ‘Someone with your background should have a story or two to tell the class about this man.’

  How has Mr Donald found me out?

  Later, Mary says, ‘You’re so lucky; how did that feel?’

  I look at her, not understanding.

  ‘His hand on your shoulder, how did it feel?’

  ‘Oh…so lovely.’

  I have to pretend. But in my bed at night, I see Mr Donald in a black shirt, rifle ready, patrolling the snow-covered banks of the Danube, shooting people and hurling their bodies into the freezing waters of the river.

  I am ten minutes late arriving home from school. My mother is already sobbing. ‘I thought the louts in the park had attacked you, or those leather-jacketed youths who hang out in the next street.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t notice the time.’

  My father shakes with anger. ‘How can you treat your mother like that? After what she has been through, how dare you behave with so little consideration towards her.’

  When he calms down, he pleads, ‘All we ask of you, Eva, is that you think of us a little and be careful.’

  ‘Be careful, be careful, be careful,’ I write in English in the old exercise book that has become my new diary. The language isn’t hard after all, only the spelling. The world is a dangerous, scary place. When I want to run around barefoot like New Zealand children, my mother exclaims, ‘Are you crazy? What can you be thinking of?’ When I go out without a cardigan, even on a boiling hot day, she calls after me, ‘Come back, get dressed properly, you’ll catch something.’

  I wash my hair once a week. When it is wet, I have to be especially careful. If I have a cold, I am not allowed to wash my hair at all, but even when I do not have a cold, while my hair is wet, I have to stay in a warm room. My mother will not let me go into the cold kitchen or bedroom with wet hair. She says that if I do not look after myself when my hair is wet, I can get meningitis or at least a bad cold.

  When I stay the night at Mary’s house, her older sister Jean, eyes and nose streaming with cold, washes her hair and goes out straight away into the southerly gales and hail. Mary’s mother calls out, ‘Have a nice time, dear.’ Jean does not get meningitis. She returns several hours later, red nosed, hair dripping. The next day her cold is gone.

  Whenever my father gets up to leave the room, my mother says to him, ‘Be careful.’ When my mother leaves the room, it is his turn to issue a warning. Each night my mother checks and double-checks the gas heater in the lounge. Is it really turned off properly? She sniffs, her nose puckered. Yes, she thinks she can smell gas. Is Gyuri quite sure that the pipe is not leaking? He will check again. Sometimes he is not quite sure and the gas company has to be called.

  When the gas man has come and gone, reassured for the time being, my mother at last believes it is perhaps almost safe to go to sleep. But before she can go to bed, she has to talk to the photos on the mantelpiece. They are of her dead relatives who were hurled into the ice-cold Danube. My grandfather Imre is there too and several aunts, uncles and cousins.

  I ask my father why his dead relatives don’t sit on the mantelpiece too. Where are his mother, his sister, her child and his cousin Tibi.

  ‘That is a long story, Eva,’ he says. ‘One day soon I will tell you about it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mary cries out, holding out her hand. ‘It’s stuck.’

  A fishhook is lodged in the index finger of her right hand. The accident happened because the pictures of the film stars we were looking for turned out to be in the wrong box – in an old one at the bottom of the cupboard with all the fishing gear. No one else is home. Mary’s mother has gone out shopping. With a sinking feeling I realise it’s up to me to help Mary.

  ‘I’ll go and phone a doctor. What’s the name of your doctor?’ My voice is firm and it’s not at all apparent, I hope, that I feel sick and am about to faint.

  ‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Mary says. ‘Move out of the light so that I can see what I have to do.’

  ‘Of course you need a doctor.’

  ‘No I don’t. But please get out of my way so I can get on with what I need to do. If only the point of the hook, not the barb, is in the skin, you can safely take a fishhook out.’

  She tries doing this, but does not quite manage it, with the result that the barb is now embedded.

  ‘Get me a razor blade and some clippers,’ she says, hesitating only a moment.

  I can hardly bear to look as my unflinching friend pushes the hook further into her flesh until it makes a shallow curve and the point peeks out through the skin. She cuts off the barbed end with the clippers, carves out an opening with the razor blade and gently, with a steady hand, eases out the hook through the wound.

  All that she leaves for me to do is to help her wash the finger and cover it with plaster.

  I tell my father about my new friend who thinks nothing of digging a razor blade into her finger. But he’s not listening.

  ‘You do not know how lucky you are,’ he says, ‘that you did not grow up in Hungary.’

  And I do not know.

  ‘We left for your sake, so that you would be safe, so that you could get a decent education.’

  Seated peaceably round the kitchen table, he begins.

  ‘I dug a deep pit, Eva, and my mother carefully put in the papers, the jewellery, the photos. Then I covered them over with many layers of earth and took careful note of the exact location. Afterwards my mother, your other grandmother, prepared a meal. I was sick with fear and worry, and hardly ate a thing.’

  He falls silent, remembering.

  ‘How I loved her. She was so trusting, always believing the best of everyone, which explains her unlucky second marriage after my father died.’

  Gyuri’s stepfather turned out to be violent and betrayed her with other women.

  ‘If only I, her only son, had been able to protect her! What she had had to put up with!’

  My father presses his hands onto his stomach and chest to fend off the distress and the despair that is deep inside his body. I feel the pain too and cannot breathe because of the hurt.

  Although I don’t want to hear any more, I say, ‘Tell me more about your mother.’

  ‘She was the kindest person: the prettiest, the most tenderhearted, the best cook. She had a special way of making a person eat up their food. If I was foolish enough to decline a particular dish, such as potatoes, she would say, “What do you mean no potatoes, Gyurika? You think I’m trying to poison you? OK. Take only two.” This was to show she was a reasonable mother, willing to compromise.

  ‘“OK, but no more,” I would say. This she would take as permission to fill my plate right up with potatoes. Just as I finished swallowing the last mouthful, she would say, “There, I told you all you had to do was try and you would like them. Now are you ready for some more?”

  ‘“Please, no,” I would beg.

  ‘On the night we buried our belongings, my mother said nothing about the potatoes I had left uneaten. My stepfather had not been seen for several weeks, which was not unusual as he only turned up at my mother’s house when he wanted more money. The next day we moved to Pest. A few days after that was the last time I saw my mother. She was sobbing as my cousin Tibi and I clambered into the cattle trucks to be transported to Russia.’

  In Hungary, during the last months of the war, my mother did not throw anything out, not even potato peels. Potato peels were the luxury food – you were so lucky if you managed to get some potato peels. I see my mother and grandmother at the stove, anxiously watching the bubbling water, then lowering the precious potato peels one by one into the saucepan.

  One day in our Webb Street flat, when my parents are out,
I boil up a pot of peels. I want to know what the taste is like. I am spooning my peel soup into a bowl when my parents get back. My mother grabs my pot, hurling it across the room. Bits of peel fly around the kitchen; some settle on the walls.

  ‘Leave that now,’ she says to my father, who is starting to clear up the mess. ‘They have accepted our offer, so let us go and look again at the house.’

  We have to catch the tram to get to Newtown.

  ‘Two sections please,’ my father says in his thick foreign accent.

  ‘Thank you,’ says my mother to the driver in her equally thick foreign accent.

  I walk along the street, trying to be always a little in front or a little behind my embarrassing parents.

  The house has to be big enough for my grandmother, who will be arriving soon. She is allowed to leave Hungary because the authorities want her flat.

  The other families are all buying houses in the same area. Zsuzsi already lives in the street. And Tomi will not be too far away.

  The only drawback is the cost – £3500 with £650 needed for the deposit. As we only have £450, the Welfare Society will lend us £200. But my parents have to get second jobs. They are going to be cleaners at my school. There is no point in telling them how I feel. I will have to deal with the shame as best I can.

  Most of our friends come to the housewarming party: Rudi and Vera Farkas with their son Joe; Sándor and Klára Kunz with Tomi; Gábor and Maria Ranki with Zsuzsi; Paul and Krisztina Szép with their baby daughter Anna; and Stephen Lucas, the only bachelor in the circle.