YUDIT KISS
The Summer My Father Died
Translated from Hungarian
by George Szirtes
TELEGRAM
First
The summer my father died the sun in Budapest was sweltering and oppressive. The chestnut trees along Németvölgyi Road were bowed in the extraordinary heat and the leaves of the tree in front of the house had begun to yellow much too early. Polluted air shimmered above the city. The light low-necked summer dress I had put on for the journey to the hospital seemed inappropriately coquettish in the dramatic circumstances. Neither of us knew just how dramatic at the time. On the way to the southern railway terminal, I ran past the dank-smelling cellar doors of Nagyenyed Street and stopped for a moment where the roads crossed. I looked up at the Magdalena Tower on Castle Hill; it was like a faraway, undulating mirage. The road was being mended in Alkotás Street: one section was closed off and the traffic in both directions was diverted down the lane the other side of the tramline. The throbbing machinery seemed to be swaying ominously in the heat: three iron witches stirring black soup in a cauldron. The traffic lights weren’t working. As I crossed the tracks keeping an eye on traffic from the right I was almost knocked down by a car moving in the opposite direction. The car braked in time but almost broke Gigi’s watch on my wrist. I started back in shock. The driver shook his fist in fury while I spread my arms in apology, as if to say I had never expected the traffic to come at me from that direction.
My father knew nothing of the heat. He was shivering in vest, pyjamas and dressing gown in the private room that Dr Cserjés, the man with the golden touch, had procured for him at the end of the corridor on the second floor of the hospital. My father sat in his narrow domain of off-white ceramic tiles, complete with metal cupboard and metal-framed chair, his iron bed squeezed between two of its walls, untouched by the heatwave that was turning the whole city into a sticky molten mass. He was preoccupied with the task of getting the manuscript of his latest book into shape. It was the second time he had found himself in hospital with a brain tumour, and the very day the children and I had arrived from Geneva. When it first happened seven years earlier Dr Cserjés operated and after the critical five years of post-surgery my father was supposedly cured. In the summer of 1999 when, to the surprise of everyone, the tumour reappeared, secretly reinstalling itself in my father’s ever-active brain, the doctors decided on a second operation, my father’s only regret being that this meant the loss of precious months of work on his book.
His room was on the second floor of the National Neurosurgical Institute, commonly known as the hospital in Amerikai Road. The hospital had once been a Jewish charitable institution. I have no idea whether my father knew that he had returned to the bosom of his ancestors to die or whether his iron will had wiped any reference to Judaism from his encyclopaedic mind. In the first few days, with a great deal of determination, we managed to help him downstairs to the courtyard with its stunted trees and scratched benches which was all that remained of the gardens that once surrounded the hospital. Since then movement had become so difficult for him that we no longer tried to get him into the fresh air. The next time I saw the courtyard was when my sister and I crossed it a week after the last walk, on the way to the mortuary. I was astonished to see how small the remaining island of green was among the mass of chaotically built ancillary buildings. The week before, when every step was a struggle for my father, it had seemed enormous.
In the first few days of that hot July we did not yet know that they were to be my father’s last. Most afternoons, I hurried down the metro steps, slipped in through the automatic doors of the carriage, changed to the rattling little Millennial Line and, once out, ran along Hermina Street, my mind preoccupied with the problems of everyday life. There were no eloquent messages of farewell, no right to famous last words. I strode over the steaming asphalt with the blind self-confidence of the living, a mother with small children, someone replete with qualifications, quite capable of making a successful career abroad; I cut through queues smelling of perspiration, smiling at the porter whose brows wrinkled with suspicion as I passed him like someone on a special mission. The mission was to arrive at my father’s bedside. I did not admit, even to myself, that this apparent self-confidence concealed the silent terror of not finding him on the ward.
When I entered the room my father was sitting on his bed fiddling with his notes and trying to consume the rest of his by-now cold dinner. His movements had slowed, his look was a touch clouded, his voice weaker and more shaky than before, but beyond that there was no sign that he was about to die. His face lit up when he saw me. He put down whatever was in his hands and looked up at me expectantly.
‘What news?’ he asked.
Apart from referring to the business of doctors’ rounds and general hospital routine, he had nothing new to say. My mother brought him the daily papers each morning but he no longer wanted to speak about the news printed there. He listened patiently as I recounted the previous day’s domestic affairs, then turned passionately to his chief concern. The most pressing of these was the manuscript in which he was trying to explain why ‘really-existing socialism’ – to the building of which he had given his entire life – had collapsed. Each evening I would carefully read the chapters he had finished and we’d spend the following day’s visit discussing how to perfect the text. Despite the fact that it was many years since I had read anything he had written and that he had long given up the idea of discussing with me the things that were most important to him, we made allowances for each other. Perhaps this should have served as a warning that some major change was about to occur at a deep level. But we both pretended not to have heard the ominous rumblings of that change and spent our time discussing whether the third chapter should come before the second or vice versa.
It was my mother who saved my father’s life while it was still possible to save it. The first time he was ill the diagnosis showed two large growths in his head: they were assumed to be of such distinct metastases that they were not worth operating on. It was at the end of a hot August and, by some quirk of fate, I had just arrived in Budapest on my way to a conference in Helsingør, Denmark. Before leaving, I spent a couple of days happily traipsing the streets of my birthplace. One afternoon, on the way home, to my greatest surprise, I came across my father on the metro. He was sitting opposite me with two enormous suitcases, one on either side of him, a red-faced, heavy-breathing fellow passenger.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him, astonished.
‘Home,’ my father groaned.
‘And the two suitcases?’
‘Books. They kicked me out, you know.’
My father had been teaching a good thirty years in one of the Budapest universities. He had long passed pensionable age but would have been happy to work on had they not unexpectedly told him at the beginning of the summer that he must go. I knew this was a terrible blow for him, but he looked perfectly all right the morning he set out.
‘Are you ill?’ I asked.
‘I have a terrible headache,’ he answered.
‘Have you taken anything for it?’
‘Nothing works now.’
‘What do you mean now? Has it been hurting long?’
‘For weeks.’
We made our laborious way to the flat in Németvölgyi Road. One of the suitcases was so heavy I could hardly lift it. Fortunately my mother was home. We quickly put father to bed and were in the adjoining hall discussing what to do when my friend Tamás called unexpectedly and took us all straight down to the Kútvölgyi Street hospital. There they judged my father’s condition to be so serious that they would not let him go home. Indicative of the dir
e condition of the Hungarian health care system, the result of the tests only became available after I returned from the conference in Helsingør.
Having received the diagnosis, my mother, sister and I sat in the hall, stiff with shock. We stared in front of us, my sister and I, shoulders hunched, stealing the odd glance at the widow-to-be. Hegel, Gegel, Babel, Bebel – my eyes ran across the familiar spines of the books. Family life at our place revolved around the hall. It was where we ate and left each other scrawled notes when we missed each other. The hall, like the rest of the flat, apart from the bathroom and kitchen, was lined with bookcases. Everything was flooded by the material evidence of my father’s inexhaustible curiosity: books, mountains of books, that with the passing of decades had got out of hand. From classic works of philosophy to the series of ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About …’ handbooks; from the glories of world literature through to books about practical joinery, they had gathered here, books in all languages including those my father could not speak or read but some day hoped to learn; books of which, incredibly, he had actually read the most significant part.
As far as we could tell, the obsessive love of books had passed from father to son in my father’s family, but since he himself was only capable of begetting girl children, it was to my sister and me that the virus was transmitted. According to family legend, my great-grandfather, after whom my father was named and whose Jewish name has now passed to my son, was a landowner who stuffed his country estate with books. He kept himself busy cultivating the seed crop he brought home from Palestine during the day, and read through the nights so as to cover the vacuum left by the death of his beloved wife. She had died giving birth to my twin great-uncles, Harry and Larry. The passion for second-hand bookshops was probably instilled in my father by his father, maybe still in Budapest but more likely in the Golden City of Prague, where they had been able to spend more time together than ever time before. When I learned to read I would run my fingers along the spines of books in the hall and repeat the authors’ names aloud: Lenin – Lenin – Lenin; Lenin – Stalin – Engels; Hegel – Gegel – Bebel. In another room I discovered Babel, too, and liked to add his name to the list: Babel – Bebel, Hegel – Gegel; Gogol; Lukács – Machiavelli – Marx; Marx – Marx – Marx; Montesquieu – Jenő Rejtő. Books, books, books and, under their variegated covers, an ever-open, inexhaustible world of wonders.
At noon on Sunday, which was the only time the family was together, we would dine for hours in the hall, then sit round the now-bare table for more hours. My father would lean comfortably back, my mother would screw the serviettes into paper balls, and we would debate the great universal questions. The books on the shelves in the hall served as witnesses to discussions about such historical decisions as the introduction of gas heating (instead of coal) or the allocation of pocket money and, as we grew older, to ever more passionate exchanges and clashes between parents and children with increasingly divergent views of the world. But each time, in the end, we united to clear away the wreckage.
When Kútvölgyi Street hospital rang to inform us of the diagnosis, my mother must have felt her world had collapsed. Although he was in some respects her third child, my mother always looked up to my father. To the last moment of his life and in every second of his death my father was the sun in her sky, the hub of the natural order of things. He embodied for her everything that was noble and wise, qualities missing from her own childhood, qualities she never noticed in herself. We sat hunched and silent in the hall digesting the contents of the telephone conversation. I turned my eyes away from the books and feverishly tried to assess the likely effects of the diagnosis. My mother remained silent. She stared glumly ahead of her as if weighing up the balance of power. Then suddenly she declared:
‘We’re not going to let it happen.’
My sister and I looked at each other in surprise. My mother had, from her earliest childhood, been a thoroughgoing materialist. According to the medical diagnosis there was absolutely no chance of survival. But then she repeated it, even louder this time:
‘We’re not going to let it happen.’
It was as if she had declared war on death. Careful who you pick a fight with! The infallible primeval strength that had possessed my mother at critical points of her life began to flood through our own numb bodies. Soon the sense of helplessness was gone and we fell furiously to proposing plans to overcome the danger.
If fate had deposited him in the womb of some dreamy young woman in a country slightly west of here, Dr Cserjés, the man with the golden touch, would most certainly have been a well-groomed, moccasin-wearing, red-Cadillac-driving star of the medical profession, sauntering into operating theatres to execute a few delicate cranial incisions with his magic fingers before, having tired of it, pondering with leisure which exotic corner of the Earth he had not yet explored. Having been born in Hungary, however, he found himself in the neurological department of the hospital in Amerikai Road where, day after day, he was obliged to fight his way through a besieging army of anxious patients in fear of their lives, people stinking of poverty and crowding every spare inch of his consulting room. He had to fill in certificates by hand, stating how many pills he had prescribed and for what purpose, then to quarrel with his duty colleagues over where on Earth they could get sufficient numbers of sterile gowns for the medical students coming to watch him perform his operations.
The primeval strength emanating from my mother must have gripped the unsuspecting Dr Cserjés late one afternoon as he sipped his lukewarm Nescafé from a polystyrene cup and glanced at the acacia trees coming into leaf in front of the hospital. A mysterious gust of air must have touched his heart just as it was tiring of the struggle for survival. Mechanically, he took out the professor’s file. The two lumps were clearly visible on the computer tomography image, the only question being where the original nodule was. It was a hopeless case. Dr Cserjés was just about to replace the images in the dossier when the brilliant afternoon sun that shone through the window clouded his gaze for an instant. In that beam of light the curious little suburban boy, eager for adventure as he had once been, leaned over his coffee-stained gown and pointed to a narrow, almost invisible line on the image suspended above the lamp.
‘The North-West Passage,’ the little boy whispered almost inaudibly. ‘Don’t you remember?’
The next morning Dr Cserjés’s assistant called my mother and told her that the doctor would, after all, undertake the operation in the hope that there might be a single dumb-bell-shaped growth that had not spread. The chances of survival were twenty-five per cent. It was still better than certain death. We had won the first round.
Dr Cserjés was right. There was only a single tumour in my father’s brain that, after an operation lasting several hours, he succeeded in cutting out. It is quite certain that it was Dr Cserjés who saved my father’s life, or, more precisely, the little boy watching over his shoulders who would not be satisfied with halfway solutions. But Dr Cserjés had four indispensable associates. Before the operation and for months after there were four women – my mother, my sister, myself and a long-time colleague of my father’s, Manyika – who tirelessly laboured at his various hospital beds. When my father first stood – what am I saying? – stood once more on the threshold of annihilation and peered in, repulsed, we formed a tight circle around him, orbiting him day and night, and fended off the death that stalked him. Out of one hospital and into an another, from side-effect to complication, we sat at his bedside, talking, listening, arranging affairs; then, when not beside him, meeting up to console, support and question each other; or when by ourselves in town calling on the very stones with which it was built, those dumb witnesses to his personal history, to help us. We could not relax for a single moment in case the Fates found an opportunity to wield their sharp scissors.
By the end of autumn I felt hollowed out like a butterfly’s abandoned pupa, and returned to Geneva to reconnect what were, by now, the stray ends of my life.
I was sure my father would survive. The ebony-black hair my mother had once fallen in love with had dropped out, his bear’s growl of a voice had changed to an old man’s falsetto, he had become deaf in one ear and lost his sense of balance, but he had survived. He hadn’t changed an iota in terms of what he had constructed as the fabric of his life, and he had not lost faith for a minute. He saw both my children and, for a while, even thought of starting life anew. The following spring we sat on the shore of Lake Geneva eating the sandwiches my mother had prepared and packed for us.
Seven years later, in May, on a day of brilliant sunshine, Dr Cserjés informed my mother that the tumour had reappeared. My mother rang my sister, my sister called me, and I rang Manyika, saying: ‘Please come, we are starting all over again,’ and soon we were all together once more, ready for action at the doors of the hospital. What could be missing? My mother and sister brought the same conviction to this new trial of strength, not a whit less resolute than seven years before. But the bonds of comradeship were not as strong as they had been. Nor did I feel so much part of it. That is not to say we allowed my father to die. It was just that seven years before we were certain that my father would not die. Now, seven years older and wiser, I simply knew that everything was possible, even the prospect of my father dying, partly because he was mortal like the rest of us, and partly because – and it was only somewhere deep inside me that I dared even to form the thought – he had exhausted his resources.
‘My only regret is that I am leaving with my luggage fully packed,’ Béla Bartók is alleged to have said on his deathbed. That, perhaps, is what my father whispered to himself – although not to us because to do so might have been an admission that he would not only find himself in the surgery again but, this time, be obliged to remain there. But by now I knew that the suitcase had long been empty. Seven years ago I thought it possible that he could really start a new life, since that was what he had been talking about before the first operation, when he said he had been wrong and that he should have followed a different path, written different kinds of books and lived differently. For the first and only time in his life he admitted that he had loved his mother. ‘If I manage to get out of here,’ he kept saying, ‘I will show you what is in the yellow suitcase.’ The yellow suitcase contained his buried past.
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