Once Szera was set free, those few remaining members of the family who, after a long and convoluted process, finished up in Australia decided the situation was intolerable and sent her a ticket for the voyage out. My grandmother left on the last train before the Iron Curtain fell in 1948. She waited for her much-loved son to turn up so that they could board the ship together. But there was no opportunity even for a goodbye kiss. After wrestling with his conscience, my father recognised, not without a sense of relief, that her departure meant one less problem for him to deal with. If his conscience troubled him it was only on the rare occasions that his, by now very remote, mother wrote to him. I can’t tell how he would have felt in 1957 when, through mysterious channels, he received an anxious letter from Szera. My grandmother wanted to know whether everyone was still alive as she had heard that there was shooting in the streets of Budapest again and she wondered about sending warm clothes for his infant children. According to family accounts he answered informal manner. ‘My dear Mother,’ he might have written, ‘there are no shortages here, we lack nothing. We are building a new People’s Democracy that has enabled me to complete my studies. I have become a doctor, like my father. I will be curing not sick individuals but sick societies.’ As far as I know that was the last time they exchanged letters. As his books started to appear he would send a complimentary copy to Australia without any particular comment. Then this too stopped.
Szera’s entire being was torn between the undying and, later, unrequited love of two men. She depended on them for her very existence: they inhabited every fibre of her being and ruled each beat of her heart. My grandfather was one of the two, a talented, deeply learned man who was born to be free but who was beaten or shot to death and shoved into a mass grave by a soldier who was only carrying out orders: where, when and how we shall probably never discover. The other was my father, just as talented and learned, just as liberty-seeking, who, having failed to thank her for offering him the chance of life, indeed more than once – that’s what a mother is for, after all, to give life – decided to have nothing more to do with her.
Szera died in Sydney in a charitable foundation where the relatives had placed her because she was no longer capable of distinguishing reality from imagination, as they tactfully explained to me decades later. On her last bedside shelf lay a row of books by my father on the ways of perfecting ‘really-existing socialism’, a set of texts that remained completely incomprehensible to her. An old photograph was propped against the books. It showed Lajos and Szera on the voyage home from Palestine sometime near the end of the 1920s. Despite the urgings of my great-grandfather, they did not emigrate because, emotionally, they could not bear the loss of their homeland. There they are, standing arm-in-arm on the deck of a ship. They are holding their faces up to the fresh sea breeze. Szera wears a beatific smile. She has not yet told anyone that she is returning home, her womb heavy with secret fruit.
Barely a generation after my family hurriedly left the Golden City behind, near the end of the period of winter examinations, I set out in high spirits to visit Prague with a bunch of friends. The city was grey, melancholy and hostile. After sunset we were ambling down a street near the unlit Gunpowder Tower. Pedestrians scattered in panic when we approached them for directions. At the inns they glared at us in an unfriendly manner any time we burst into loud laughter. The cold had penetrated to my bones but I could not help but be touched by the beauty of the place.
‘Just imagine, they refused to speak to us merely because we were Hungarians!’ I complained to my father once we got home.
My father kept a dark silence. ‘Traitors,’ he muttered to himself.
I didn’t know what he was talking about but felt sad that the Eden of his childhood should have been ruined in such a mean way. I had no idea then how it was that our brotherly army had marched into the Golden City to drown in blood the last great experiment in socialism with a human face. What might my father have felt on seeing tanks rolling through the streets of Prague again? What did he think when he read, in confidential files reserved only for trusted cadres, of the self-immolation of Jan Palach and others, of street signs deliberately reversed, of dismantled machinery in the factories, of the signs of open opposition among the masses? Could he have been left entirely cold by the despair of all those who had believed that the system could be improved from within but then saw that hope crushed by tanks in a process apparently so natural it seemed the only possible way of proceeding?
I only learned about what really happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968 much later from a Greek friend. In the years of the gradual relaxation of really-existing socialism we were permitted to make an excursion to the West every third year. Once there, this young Greek spent his bitterly hoarded hard currency, not on jeans, hot-dogs and pornographic films like the decisive majority of our countrymen in the lands of the free, but on reading right through the documents of the Prague Spring of 1968 in a library in Paris. On his return to Budapest, genuinely shocked, he revealed his findings to a startled group of friends. That large group, of which I was one, was chiefly composed of the children of people who belonged to the communist movement and whose inherited faith in the resounding rightness of the system was confirmed by the testimonies of Chilean, Greek and Algerian refugees. All I remember is the silence that followed the young Greek’s account. My God, I thought, if this is all true we really are in trouble.
But of course it couldn’t be true.
The summer my father died might just as likely have begun the summer he reached the age at which his own father had been killed. This death, that he could not imagine, that was not marked with a grave, must have hung over my father’s head like a dark cloud until he reached the age of forty-three. Perhaps it was only then that he embarked on his own mortality. But that dark cloud had settled in his heart. In 1968 he contracted pneumonia and after that we were always worried about his heart. Thirty years later, when the second brain tumour was operated on and my sister and I hurried into the hospital, the doctor’s first question was about the condition of his heart. Had he had problems? I ask you! Who in this country does not have heart problems?
It was Attila József who got my father expelled from the orphans’ home. By the time he was fifteen, my father was a committed young communist who could immediately trace the cause of every ill back to the issue of class struggle. At the year-end celebration of the institution, when all obedient little orphans licked their hair into shape and joined in a ceremony to express their gratitude for the generosity of their keepers, my father stood at the centre of the podium in his short pants, his legs like pipe-stems, nervously adjusted his wire-framed glasses and, instead of delivering the lyrical passage he had learned by heart, he recited Attila József’s ballade which has the repeated end line ‘The profit goes to the capitalist’. By the third time he had repeated that line, pointing with grand gestures at the assembled philanthropic ladies and pince-nez-wearing gentlemen, they had recovered from the shock and given voice to their indignation. He never got as far as the envoi. They expelled him there and then. He travelled to Budapest and found work on some factory floor, then later as a bookshop delivery boy, earning his pittance that way while spreading the Word among the poor and downtrodden.
My father was standing in the crowded storeroom of the boulevard bookshop where he worked waiting for the manager to pack an outgoing parcel. He took a deep breath of the freshly printed and old books, relishing their characteristic smells – that long-lasting memory of the union of ink and paper – and loitered in the badly lit space, feeling there was nothing he desired more than to remain there in its benevolent half-light and silence. He stumbled about by the light of the bare bulb and hungrily surveyed books stacked on shelves to the ceiling, books he only dared approach when the manager and his older assistant were out in the shop with a more important customer. He breathed in the homely book smell and suddenly in the dim light he felt a hand on his shoulder. The light but firm touch on his narrow shoulde
rs was so familiar that a sharp mixture of happiness and grief flashed through him. He gave a mighty sigh.
‘Don’t worry, son. Sit down and read until I’m ready.’ The old man looked up at him from behind his glasses.
‘Thank you,’ my father mumbled.
Then he grabbed the nearest book and quickly sat down as if to cram back into his narrow frame the rush of desire that wanted to explode within him. Once the manager had finished packing the parcel, my father stuck it under his arm and stepped out into busy Múzeum Boulevard. He saw with delight that his fellow delivery boy, Gyuri Sándor, was also ready to set off. They were like brothers, two thin, bespectacled, orphaned Jewish boys who had found temporary shelter in the intimate cavern of the bookshop. They blended with the loud traffic of the boulevard and, oblivious to everything else, debated the politics of the Social Democratic Party.
Gyuri who, thanks to great good fortune, like my father had survived both the war and the 1950s, was his best friend. It is true that later, in the 1960s, my father was constantly upbraiding him, even in personal letters, because he spent too much time on the mysteries of finance when he should have been building socialism with the Party, but Gyuri was the only person, other than my mother, with whom my father could relax a little without feeling obliged – even while sipping at his coffee after Sunday lunch – to be fighting his corner for the Cause. In 1944 they rented a servants’ room facing the air shaft or lichthof that served to ventilate the service rooms of the elegant tenement buildings opposite. The room’s one window opened on to the window of a wealthy middle-class family’s pantry. The two constantly hungry boys would open the window in the evening and enjoy the spiced sausage smell as it wafted across the stinking shaft. One evening the window opposite was left open. The two stood bright-eyed on their creaky stool and counted the revealed blessings of Canaan before them.
‘Sixteen sticks of sausage, six cuts of ham and ten sides of bacon,’ my father announced, his voice trembling.
‘Look at the smaller piece, there on the right. They’ve eaten some of it already!’ Gyuri whispered excitedly. ‘Let’s push that plank of wood across and I’ll climb over and slice off a piece. They’ll never even notice!’
‘Are you mad!’ my father answered, though in his mind he was measuring the length of plank they used as a table and wondering if it would reach. They lived on the fifth floor.
‘No problem, you’ll see! We’ll just take a couple of centimetres. Where’s your penknife?’
‘Absolutely not!’ my father replied with sudden resolve. The champion of truth overcame the hungry child in him.
‘Come on, just five centimetres,’ Gyuri begged. ‘They’re bourgeois in any case. They deserve it.’
‘Yes, they deserve it, but that is not the way to deal with the bourgeoisie,’ my father declared. Now that he had found the right verbal formula it was easier to suppress the rumblings of his stomach. ‘Honest people do not steal. We can only triumph over them if everything we do sets an example to the masses.’
‘What masses?’ asked Gyuri, exasperated.
But he knew the game was up. They closed the window and went out for a walk so they wouldn’t have to think about what lay behind it. After that my father maintained that the window should not be opened in case they were weakened by vain fantasies. A couple of weeks later Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Arrow Cross, took over the running of the country and made quite sure that there would be no fantasising of any sort, not even by accident.
My father remained scrupulously honest all his life. He never cheated or stole, never submitted to corruption and had no yearning for any kind of material reward. This sense of utter irreproachability, to which I bore daily witness, was one reason why I never suspected the kind of distortions and suppressions of truth that lay deep below the surface.
It is possible that the summer my father died started at the beginning of the summer of 1972 after all, on that pleasantly warm afternoon when a well-dressed stranger rang the door bell of our flat in Németvölgyi Road. My sister opened the window. The man behind the metal grille was looking for my father.
‘My father isn’t at home,’ my sister said and was about to close the window.
‘I bring news about your grandmother,’ said the man.
My sister gazed at him in wonder. What kind of news could this dandified figure be bringing us about our black-headscarved grandmother?
‘Your Australian grandmother,’ the dandy added quickly when he noticed the astonishment in those beautiful feline eyes.
‘I don’t have an Australian grandmother,’ my sister replied dryly and slammed down the window.
She went back into the hall, picked up the book lying on the table and the remains of her ham roll, and immersed herself in her reading again. After a short while the bell rang again. My sister jerked her head back in annoyance and saw through the glazed entrance door that the stranger was still there. This was just too much.
‘What do you want?’ she shouted. ‘I don’t have an Australian grandmother and I don’t need any car insurance.’
‘Your aunt, Erika Holló, sent me from Australia,’ the man shouted back with a touch of despair in his voice.
My sister felt uncertain for a moment. The name was familiar. Every time we filled in an official document we had to declare whether any of our family was resident abroad. This was the name we always had to put down, but whenever we asked our father who she was he replied it was his sister but that he had no idea whether she was dead or alive.
‘Then why do we have to put her name down?’ we asked in puzzlement. ‘She’s not a real relative then.’
‘We have to put it down because it is the truth and if we kept quiet about it there could be trouble,’ came the answer. This was undoubtedly convincing. You can’t suppress the truth, not even when it is unpleasant.
‘The one who left the country with a legal passport and official permission?’ my sister enquired from the hall.
The man standing by the door couldn’t have understood this properly but was immediately aware of the doubt that had entered my sister’s voice.
‘Yes, yes, that’s it exactly!’ he bellowed heartily.
And that is how Árpi gained entrance to the hall of our flat in Németvölgyi Road. After a while my mother and I appeared and listened in astonishment as he told his story. He himself was a refugee from 1956, a friend and business partner of my father’s sister in a children’s boutique in Sydney. He was visiting home on family and business matters and was taking the opportunity to look us up on our aunt’s behalf. My grandmother Szera had finally died of old age at the beginning of the summer. Since she had continually spoken of my father before her death they felt it was important to let us know.
That day my father came home unexpectedly early. The trade union was planning the next end-of-year festivities so everyone had stopped work. His years in the Soviet Union had taught him the vital importance of alcohol in developing human relationships and he was capable of putting down a respectable amount of liquor without the least sign of drunkenness. But now, on this mild early summer evening when we were almost sick with anticipation waiting for him to come home, he returned in a mildly drunken state. There was a faint sour cabbage smell on his breath, too, as if he were a genuine rake. He clattered through the door, his sparkling black eyes blinking at us with satisfaction, taking not the blindest bit of notice of the desperate glances exchanged between my mother and me. My sister had vanished into thin air. My father took a long time washing his hands, put on his slippers and reclined complacently in the armchair, waiting for my mother to serve up his supper. After supper my mother told him about the visitor. A shadow passed across my father’s face. There was no change in his expression, but the glow of satisfaction immediately disappeared. He silently toyed with the forks left on the table, clearing his throat from time to time. He lingered in the hall for a while then retired to his study. My mother followed him shortly afterwards while I escaped
into the children’s room.
My father’s life was conducted in two places. He thought, read, made notes, wrote and slept in his study at home. Nor was his office at the university exclusively for working: it was where he met his comrades, his students and his colleagues; it was where he conducted exams with his students ; where he listened to the complaints of those who needed help and where he handed out good advice late into the night. We often joked that he should have been priest at a confessional or a psychologist rather than an academic; the long queue at his office door comprised those who wanted either professional advice, political direction or consolation. Teaching did not end for him with the delivery of his material and the supervision of his students’ work; the university was an inexhaustible goldmine where he could exercise his philanthropic instincts and set doubting souls on the right road. The right road, naturally, was the road to socialism, the building of which required absolute dedication and – when need be – a dose of constructive criticism. One could only judge the system from the inside, of course, because outside criticism weakened and undermined it: even constructive criticism from within was to be tolerated only from those who accepted the fundamental principles of the movement, such as the leading role of the Party and the overarching dogma of socialist ownership.
The Summer My Father Died Page 3