Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Attila regaled his new friends with childhood tales, such as the time he earned the dubious distinction of being the only person ever excommunicated from the small Catholic church that his entire village of Fitód hiked over the hill to attend every Sunday. He and two other boys had been assigned to guard the valuables in the church the day before Easter, which happened to be the same day that the country’s only television channel was showing Tarzan. One of the village’s homes had recently been equipped with a black-and-white television, so the boys agreed to guard the church in shifts so they could watch parts of the film. Attila drew the first shift and reported for duty. When his friends didn’t return to relieve him, he was so angry and starving that he gobbled up the bulk of the church wafers, gulped down a bottle of wine, and then passed out on the dais, only to be discovered by the priest. Bubu and Karcsi pounded the table. This guy. They loved him.

  When the plum pálinka started kicking in, it was time to sing “The Sparrow of Hargita.” Who had an accordion? A cappella or accompanied by a willing diner with a harmonica handy, they croaked out the tune until they cleared the place, were too drunk to keep singing, or some combination thereof. Afterward Attila usually slept on the floor of Bubu’s convenient new bachelor pad, the police dormitory near the stadium. Ceauescu was gone, but Hungary’s mistrust of anything Romanian wasn’t.

  Back at the hockey arena, UTE was struggling to get in playoff shape. Attila wasn’t quite ready to see game action, but Pék and Bóta were intrigued by his development. Whether emboldened by his new Transylvanian confederacy or by two years of intense physical conditioning, the janitor now spent as much practice time screaming as he did suffering. If someone wasn’t working hard enough, he got a mouthful from behind the face mask of Attila Ambrus. How could you miss that play? Am I going to have to make it for you myself next time? That’s your man! Attila ended most practices bloody, bruised, or at least buckled from exhaustion. He became such a regular at the Interior Ministry hospital—chipped clavicles, eye gashes, dislocated fingers—that the staff finally just gave him a ministry ID so he didn’t have to bother signing in each time.

  But injuries and ailments notwithstanding, Attila was the only member of the team who never missed a practice. No one—neither the players nor the coaches, some of whom had played with the big boys in Russia—had ever seen someone as competitive. And despite his relatively diminutive size, Attila was the second-fastest player on the team after Bubu and possessed the quickest reflexes. But it was Attila’s entertainment value, as much as his fanaticism and textbook goalkeeper lunacy, that endeared him to his teammates. Listening to Attila’s entreaties to play poker in the sludge-gray cafeteria after practice, one might have thought he was offering free tickets to the moon. When someone asked him a question, he didn’t just answer, he began by saying, “I’m going to tell you…,” as if his explanation were the start of an epic novel. More often it sounded like the stuff of fairy tale. A thick plume of smoke emanated from the roof of Attila’s childhood home, which doubled as the village’s pork smokehouse. And when his mother left the family, his father had retained custody of Attila by bribing the town judge with a pig.

  By the time the season started, no one called the Zamboni driver Attila anymore. He was, from that point on, the “Chicky Panther” (Csiki Párduc), or just Panther for short, a reference to his roots in the Transylvanian mountain town of Csíkszereda and his catlike speed and reflexes. It would turn out to be an apt nickname. Like a cat, Attila Ambrus would have many lives.

  Six

  Professional sports had never paid much in Hungary, but under communism at least there were perks: government-approved sportsmen could get out of their military service, and if they were good enough to make the national team (as many of UTE’s players were), they might return from international tournaments with only outpatient injuries and a suitcase stuffed with Levis and Marlboros to sell on the black market. Now, however, if they wanted to make a real buck, they had to find a second job. Pék was trying to make a go of opening a 24-hour convenience store; Bóta attempted to become Europe’s shortest pimp. Some of the players printed T-shirts to sell at a lake; others started driving their cars as cabs.

  If most of the team were part of the new lower-middle class of the emerging capitalist caste system, UTE’s Transylvanian trio were lodged somewhere between classless and philistine. Before and after practice, for loose change, they washed and vacuumed their teammates’ cruddy cars, cleaned the apartments where many of them still lived with their parents, and carried things around for them like bellhops. When the other players went out to the clubs at night, they never invited Bubu, Karcsi, or Attila to join.

  The rejection both was and wasn’t personal. A resentment of Transylvanians was brewing in Hungary as their sudden mass immigration and willingness to take jobs at lower pay was making already scarce jobs even tougher to come by. During practice, some of the players teasingly began to call Attila a bozgor, a nasty Romanian term for a homeless person. Unfailingly, this unleashed in the janitor a fury beyond his control. Regardless of the offender’s body mass, the Chicky Panther would chase whoever it was, sometimes all the way into the locker room, and batter him until others could pull Attila off. Attila broke a few noses that way, including his own (again). And thus was revealed our young hero’s Achilles’ heel: the insinuation of irrelevance.

  Attila always did his best to brush aside the hard feelings the following day, but his all-too-predictable reaction to the bozgor slight made it something of a parlor trick to send the unsuspecting Panther into instant paroxysm. Attila began detecting other slights as well. For instance, many of the UTE players were falling out of their chairs trying not to laugh when he, Karcsi, and Bubu argued in their antediluvian accents about the proper thickness for salami or how many times Ceauescu shot a bear in Csíkszereda. To their teammates, they were a joke.

  Though he tried not to let it show, Attila was crushed. In Romania he’d been nothing but a lowly Hungarian. Now finally in Hungary, he was living in a horse paddock with no hot water, was still waiting for Hungarian citizenship, and, at least by some measures, was nothing but a lowly Romanian. He didn’t need his teammates’ sympathy. He just needed their acceptance.

  Attila had never cared about appearances before, but he became obsessed with winning the respect of his peers. He had his bowl-cut brown hair chopped into the popular military-style crew cut, stopped doing grunt work for his teammates, and the next time General Bereczky asked him in front of others to pick up the trash around the stadium, he quit his job as UTE’s janitor, shouting, “I don’t need to be your field hand!” at the highest-ranking Interior Ministry official he knew. It felt great, but when he turned to see his teammates slinking away from the scene, he was quickly reminded just how tenuous his entire existence was. Though he was too ashamed to admit it to anyone but Bubu, Attila was the only player on the UTE squad who wasn’t paid a player salary. His only income had been from his custodial work.

  One of the team’s retired players, János Egri, who had become the announcer for the five or six UTE games per season that were broadcast by the country’s only television station, witnessed the Zamboni-obliterating goalie’s second, and potentially ruinous, confrontation with General Bereczky. In his playing days, Egri, a slender argyle-sweater-wearing man of strategic action, had made a decent living doubling as Hungary’s first television game-show host (for Játék a Betkkel!, or Scrabble). He’d made his connections, and he felt sorry for Attila, who surely had none. True, the Chicky Panther was marginally insane, Egri thought, but he was a good egg. Egri talked the general down, then pulled Panther aside after practice a few days later.

  There was a three-story apartment building he knew of in the south part of Buda that needed a live-in super, Egri told Attila. It was on the opposite end of the city from Újpest, an hour and a half each way to the hockey stadium—the tram and two subways. But it was a good neighborhood. Residential. And Attila could live there rent-free as lo
ng as he kept up the small grassy grounds, the eight-space parking lot, and the stairwells. “You could make it work,” Egri said as they sat in the empty bleachers, watching the junior team practice. Attila had just one question, but it stumped the game-show host. “What do you mean, does it have hot water?” Egri replied.

  It was time for Attila Ambrus to enter the modern age of plumbing.

  The basement-level one-room apartment on Villányi Street that Egri found for Attila was a groundhog hole with parking compared with the gated palaces with moats that were going up in the undulating Buda hills just miles away to the north. But it came with—yes—hot water, a bathtub, a door without holes, and a ninety-year-old woman on the fourth floor who would provide an unexpected link to love and language lessons.

  Margit, whom Attila quickly took to calling Ninny (a term of endearment he’d used before only with his aunt, also a Margit, back in Csíkszereda), had a thing for her new super ever since she saw him taking out the trash in a sweatsuit. He was polite, too. She asked if, for a small retainer, he would help her do her food shopping and walk her to the post office once a week so she could pay her bills. Attila saw her book-lined apartment, which featured not just Hungarian but English titles, and made her a deal. If she would teach him English and help him learn to speak Budapest Hungarian, he would even take her to get her wig done.

  A few weeks later, on her own initiative, Ninny placed a personal ad on Attila’s behalf in The Express, Budapest’s free weekly classified newspaper: “Gentlemanly, smart, handsome young man, learning English, in search of a nice, well-educated girl.” Attila didn’t have a phone, so Ninny left her own number. The day after the paper came out, a woman named Judit Milos rang. Ninny listened to her details (“rich, blah, blah, rich, blah, English teacher”), then told Judit how lucky she was. Her ideal man would call her back shortly. Then Ninny buzzed the super.

  As promised, Judit found Attila sweet, intelligent, and not the slightest bit arrogant for an athlete. Attila was smitten as well. Judit was twenty-six years old with short red hair and an excellent command of English, as Ninny had required. She had a few extra pounds in her thighs, and her breasts were a little big for Attila’s taste, but she wore fox fur coats, was a graduate of Budapest’s prestigious ELTE university, and was from a well-heeled family, the daughter of a construction engineer who also owned a confectionery factory he’d won in one of the government’s privatization tenders. That could only mean Judit’s father was important and connected, two things never before associated with his daughter’s new boyfriend. Judit’s family even had a small summer place at Lake Balaton, the Hungarian Hamptons, sixty miles southwest of the city. It was like a dream for Attila. Opportunity had finally come knocking on his life’s door, and it would soon lead him to the top of a profession few (including Attila) knew existed.

  Although his experience in the ways of wooing had so far been confined to chatting up Katalin about her family’s electrical output from thirty feet up a wooden pole, Attila did his best not to blow his chances with Judit. On their dates he always remembered to bring flowers, as per the Hungarian tradition, whenever he saw her, which wasn’t often, given the extra work he’d taken on in order to make enough cash to keep dating: Egri got Attila a third gig with his wife, an applied artist, and Attila spent months with her building an ornate glass chandelier, which was eventually hung in the supersize McDonald’s adjacent to Budapest’s biggest train depot, Nyugati Station. He also took jobs doing everything from walking dogs to selling Parker pens door-to-door to stocking shelves with Karcsi in a toy warehouse to working as a security guard at Hungary’s National Savings Bank, OTP. He regularly toiled from 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. six days a week, with two hockey practices in between, then showed up exhausted on Sundays at Judit’s apartment near the heart of downtown’s construction-burdened Deák Square business district. “I got you an electric knife,” he would say; another week it was a tennis racket; another time, an afghan for her armchair. He liked Judit a lot, could maybe even love her if he could figure out what she wanted from him.

  Between Judit, his half a dozen jobs, and his unsalaried hockey career, the last thing Attila needed was a letter like the one he received in November. His aunt and uncle, with whom he’d by then corresponded a couple of times, must have given his new address to his father, because there was a piece of mail in his box from Károly Ambrus. Károly hoped to visit for a long weekend and gave the date of his planned arrival in two weeks. For Attila, this was like receiving news that all the details had been arranged for his head to be squeezed in a vise.

  Attila didn’t know his father well, and he tried not to remember anything about him at all. Yes, Károly Ambrus had bribed the town judge with a pig to keep custody of his only son. But he’d also beaten Attila every time he got drunk, which as far as Attila could recall was something like always. He hadn’t seen his father in years, but it was still his gruff pálinka-coated, Carpai-cigarette-burnished admonition that kept Attila awake at night: “You’re going to die a gray nobody!”

  Attila spent a week cleaning and preparing his apartment. He put all of his hockey team photos on display, borrowed some history and travel books from Ninny, and waited for his father’s arrival. The stocky, hook-nosed Károly Ambrus had once commanded significant respect in the Hargita Mountain Valley for his job as one of the chief electricians charged with bringing electricity to that cold, dark corner of the world. When a graying, slower-moving version of that man showed up at the door, Attila shook his father’s small hand. “Apám,” Attila said, using the formal word for father, “you’re going to see the whole city. But before we go, I must inform you that it is not advisable in Budapest to mention Székelys”—the name of the particular tribe of Transylvanian Hungarians to which the Ambruses belonged—“or Erdély,” Transylvania.

  “I understand,” said Károly, who had never been to Hungary.

  Attila and Károly traveled the city by subway and tram. They went to the Royal Palace on Castle Hill above the Danube River, where until World War I the Hapsburgs spent their summers. They visited the seven-hundred-room Hungarian parliament, with its ludicrously unusable 12.4 miles of staircases and which, despite the fact that Hungarians Ede Teller, Jen Wigner, and Leó Szilárd had been among nuclear energy’s pioneers, was still cooled in summers by ice blocks and fans. And they toured plenty of unimpressive museums whose ocher facades and arched mosaic-trimmed entranceways gleamed grime gray. At night Attila found some new csárdás, or traditional Hungarian restaurants, with the live Gypsy music both he and his father loved (and cots in the back for patrons unable to make the trip home). Attila did not introduce his father to Judit, or anyone else.

  Károly could see from Attila’s limited pocket change, ill-fitting clothing, and sparsely furnished apartment that although his son was making a mighty effort to appear otherwise, he was struggling to make a go of it in Hungary. He didn’t expect Attila to admit it. If there was any trait he and his only child shared, it was hardheadedness. Károly could still remember Attila, bloody-nosed after he’d administered a good slapping, running back inside to yell at him, “I’m going to be somebody! You’ll see! I’m going to be famous! I’ll make you proud!”

  Károly had plenty of his own memories to cry about: his wife, Klára, leaving him when Attila was a year old; finding his only brother’s dead body a few months later on that electric pole where he’d sent him to work in a storm; eight years later his mother’s untimely death from pneumonia, when Attila was nine. Károly had made a mess of things, no doubt, but he was getting older now and, in his own strained way, wanted to do something right. As hard as it was, he refrained from drinking during his stay with Attila, and on the night before he left, as he and Attila changed for bed, he asked his son to sit down because he had a surprise. “I want you to have my car,” Károly said, referring to his Dacia, the Romanian equivalent of a Yugo, which he’d driven twelve hours over the mountains from Csíkszereda.

  It was a generous and
, in some ways, enticing offer. Though Attila didn’t yet know how to drive, he desperately wanted a car. But he also knew that driving a Dacia was an unambiguous sign of two things: first, you were broke; and second, and perhaps even worse, you were a Romanian. Relishing the opportunity to strike back at his father with the only power he’d ever been granted, Attila refused. “In Hungary, that is not a car,” he said.

  That night, Károly and Attila lay awake in Attila’s lumpy fold-out sofa bed, stubbornly passing Károly’s last hours in Budapest in silence. When the first light glinted from the apartment’s only window in the upper corner of the kitchen, Károly rose, collected his things, and left without saying good-bye. It seemed to both father and son a fitting end to a stilted trip and a stunted relationship.

  When the Christmas holidays rolled around, Judit invited Attila on a ski vacation with her family to a resort they frequented in Zell am See, Austria, outside of Salzburg, near Hitler’s famed Eagle’s Nest. Attila had never been west of Hungary, or skiing for that matter, nor did he have a passport. But Egri came to his rescue again, spiriting Attila down to the Hungarian consulate and using his celebrity Scrabble influence to spell out “Give this guy a travel visa and skip the crap about the fourteen-day waiting period.”

  Attila had his reservations about the trip. He’d met Judit’s parents a few times and, despite his efforts to appease them, was afraid they, too, thought of him as a bozgor. One night when he was having a steak dinner at their Budapest home, Judit’s mother asked Attila why he wasn’t eating much of the meat, to which he’d replied as delicately as possible that it wasn’t his favorite type. “What do you know from meat?” Judit’s mom had responded coldly. Right, thought Attila. As if he hadn’t grown up in a smokehouse.