My father’s two places of work were more or less identical twins. Both were crammed with piles of books, notes, works of scholarship, newspapers. Sometimes the situation became so acute that there was only enough space on his desk for a sheet of paper. Those surfaces the word did not completely cover were stuffed with souvenirs of travels, and small, mostly tasteless gifts from people who either admired or were obliged to him, though there were one or two real treasures among them: an African mask, a genuine Russian samovar, and the Arab language theoretical review of the clandestine Iraqi Communist Party. Hidden among the books and various knick-knacks there were miscellaneous items that ‘would come in useful some time’, anything from a set of drill heads to an electric water heater. The two rooms were connected in one direction by a rumbling tramline and, very often, by a cheap and reliable taxi service that could be hailed quite easily on the corner of Böszörményi Street. It was often needed because my father was constantly running out of time and was always late. The other way, at night, it came down to a solitary walk. We were familiar, though even then only to a minor degree, with the empire at home, since we would often sneak in there and look for clues when my father was away. But not even my mother laid foot in the university office, or only very occasionally.
Anything that happened outside these rooms was of secondary importance to my father. Even though the whole of family life revolved around him, at home he was like some high-ranking, if rather preoccupied, visitor who was pleased enough to spend some time chatting with his hosts, discovering what they were thinking, but then excused himself because urgent matters of the utmost importance required his attention.
My sister and I suspected that his mysterious, impenetrable study was the true home of the Cause, the Cause being the faceless, secretive, never-to-be-satisfied stranger with whom my father spent the greatest part of his time. In so far as our childish imaginations could determine, this Cause came clothed in petitions, manifestos, notes and ordinances, as well as in long analytical essays, in meetings that lasted whole nights and were conducted in interminable, endless whispers. The Cause was there in everything my father did. It was in what he wrote, in what he read, in what he said, in what he dreamed, in how he argued, told stories and harangued; it was in the way he prepared articles or proposals. The latter were addressed to those who were even more dutiful servants of the Cause than he could ever be, people who were in a position to act on his farsighted proposals much more effectively than, as he would say, an anonymous unimportant person like him, a mere teacher at the university. One could sense a certain underlying bitterness in his way of formulating this that made us suspect that our father was not altogether happy. He consecrated all his life and efforts to the Cause, but still he did not have the self-assuredness of the insiders. He did all he could to demonstrate his loyalty to the Cause but, as far as we could tell, they let him know regularly enough that he was merely a tolerated outsider whose services they might call on as and when the mighty engine of power that worked in mysterious ways and according to an impenetrable logic so required, but that he personally was of no account.
I don’t know when the appetite for truth was supplanted in my father’s heart by the notion of unconditional service to the Cause. Perhaps it was at that first election with the blue ballot papers; perhaps it was when he, the grandson of landed Jews, had to face the disillusioned peasantry during the forced collectivisation campaign. It might have been when the Party disciplined him on account of his untrustworthy family background and when he understood that his survival would not be guaranteed in his new, personally chosen family either; when he realised that not only those to whom he was tied through the blind, uncontrollable attachments of blood but those to whom he was joined on the basis of ideological conviction could turn against him at any time. Decades later, during the series of complications that followed the first operation when he was shifted from hospital to hospital and when I traipsed the town trying to get him an exemption, I was unable to catch the moment when the serenity and trust that could be seen in his eyes, even on the Schutzpass, was extinguished, when the gaze of the seeker after truth was replaced by the look of knowledge of undisputed truth. From that time on in his life the Cause provided the right perspective on everything from classic literature through to ice-skating, from the education of his children through to weekend leisure activities. There was no point in us weeping over the fate of Dostoevsky’s Prince Mishkin, since Mishkin was a hopeless idealist, the pipedream of some retrograde element. On the other hand, we were obliged to take to heart the Protopopovs, the Olympic gold medallist figure-skating couple, because they demonstrated the superiority of the Soviet system. But at least we got to know both.
Second
My father’s days in hospital were efficiently planned. In the early morning my mother would visit, equipped with clean pyjamas, a towel, some food and the newspapers, taking care of his physical needs. After that she would yield her place to the girls, that is to say my elder sister, myself and Manyika. Manyika was a beady-eyed widow of indeterminate age who was at one time an assistant secretary at the university and who faithfully followed my father into communism’s ever more obscure corners. My mother kept visitors strictly at bay so we were a little surprised when Manyika first appeared on the ward. But my father looked pleased: it seemed that even in hospital he welcomed the unconditional hero-worship radiating from those chicken-like eyes, not to mention the accounts of goings-on at the latest Party meeting. Manyika became a regular visitor by stealth, without anyone objecting. From time to time I tried to engage her in conversation but I couldn’t make head or tail of her confused monologues. My father’s most faithful disciple, I once remarked, but my mother quickly put me right on that. After the funeral we never saw her again, though for years afterwards we kept finding withered red carnations on his grave. There must have been others like Manyika who regarded him as ‘one of their own deceased’.
My mother would return to the hospital in the afternoon to help my father bathe because he found it ever harder to move. My shift was the late afternoons when my mother or sister could look after the children. In the evenings, when I wasn’t meeting some particularly close friend, which, in those first few days, was rather frequently, I’d be grinding my teeth, reading over my father’s manuscripts so that we could continue work the next day. Not even my anxiety about his condition could relieve the sense of despair I felt reading his words. It seemed it wasn’t just physical sickness that was seizing hold of him. It was as if he had already set out on his final journey back in time and got stuck in the early 1950s, his writing having ossified into a testament characteristic of those times. There was no sign in his manuscript that anything had changed in the last forty years, nothing of the tragic yet instructive lessons he was forced to learn that made him shift from a stout dogmatic to a dogmatic ready to compromise. It was as if even here, in the work that was to be his summa, his bequest to the world, he was missing the point, omitting what was most essential, as if – and I shuddered at the thought – he had completely missed out on his own life.
And of course, once a thought like that enters a person’s head, it is impossible not to ask what is essential. Honest self-examination is at the heart of it. The admission of some truth. The debt we must pay – as the Cseh Tamás song has it – to our venerable Great Uncle Reality, a figure my father refused to recognise, much as he did with his twin uncles, Harry and Larry, long thought dead, who suddenly turned up in Budapest in the mid-1970s, just as our country was moving to the gentler slopes of goulash communism. My father’s spiritual bequest was not the honest account of a wise survivor: it was not his life and historical experience, but a word-for-word rehash of classic Marxist precepts. Given his situation, it was impossible to argue this with him, so at night on top of the trouble of grinding my teeth reading his manuscript, I had to invent intellectual acrobatics to formulate my views in a gentle way for the following day. ‘What kind and lovely words can I greet him with
?’
It might be that my father returned to the direct quotation of long moribund texts because he had a lifelong religious reverence for words. It was the point at which Jewish and communist habits of mind met in him. Facts and empirical evidence were mere data: what mattered was the Word uttered by the heroic champions of truth. Marx was, no doubt, a rare genius, someone who could see below surface trivialities to underlying systems, and even got to name them, but those who trod in his giant footsteps and called themselves his followers had no such ambitions. What they lost in following him was the very essence of his work: that unsparing, razor-sharp critique of both the world and himself. The struggle against the narrow possession and monopolisation of power was replaced by the exercise of a power more comprehensive and absolute than any before. To cover this, meaningless slogans were repeated ad infinitum, offering an ever more dilute sense of purpose that some time later could be easily converted to the equally hollow, equally false slogans of consumerism promising instant happiness to people accustomed to being guided like sheep.
The desire for an ideal society, one that would finally abolish the poverty and injustice that had been an inevitable part of our history, was always in my father’s thoughts. It offered a collective solution and those who shared it were not afraid to declare that man could not be happy alone. Even the most passionate of lovers would find their love poisoned if their paths were constantly beset by begging children and rough-sleeping tramps. Of course, sooner or later my father had to notice that the gap between reality and desire was growing ever wider and more frightening. Since reality could not be winched up to the level of desire, he was obliged to drag desire down to the filthy soil of reality. Naturally, this meant terminally downgrading the ideal, but there was no way back; every last ounce of creative effort was required to argue that the unattractive aspects of the system happened to be incidental and that the Party leadership – with the help of its allies – would quickly put those right.
I myself had inherited that unfailing belief in spoken or written words, but a few dramatic encounters with reality had shaken it. It took me a long time to realise that words were not only an irresistible source of revolutionary energy that could pass through barbed wire, iron curtains and concrete walls and uncover truths that had been suppressed, but that they could also be miserable, meaningless drudges employed to hide the truth. But in the first throes of my idealism, the word was sacred. Until I was thirteen and first saw the sea, I would spend long afternoons checking adult claims to the effect that ‘The sea is infinite!’ against elementary school maps that showed clearly demarcated pools of blue.
From the Archive of Unsent Letters and Unspoken Words:
Highly Esteemed Cartographer Kogutowitz Manó, who designed all maps hanging on the walls of our schools! Who is right?
‘Leave while you can,’ a wise and sensitive young worker told me at the steelworks in Csepel, the working-class borough of Budapest, where I was spending my school holiday so I could experience Reality at first hand while earning some money for a trip at the end of the summer.
‘I’m only here in the holidays,’ I answered as if by way of excuse while we pushed the steel rods through into the noisy workshop.
‘That’s all right then,’ he replied glumly. ‘You’re lucky,’ he added and kept his mouth shut after that, even through the ten-minute cigarette break.
We sat opposite each other in silence on the long wooden benches of the smoking room. He blew out smoke and gazed thoughtfully at his boots. What did he mean? My own experience confirmed that eight hours of exhausting work as well as the hours of necessary travelling before and after were not terribly conducive to pondering mankind’s salvation: the first thing was to get to bed as quickly as possible. I certainly never once heard my tired, ill-tempered, boiler-suited fellow workers debating the great issues of life. Conversation was restricted to everyday frustrations, the difficulties of making a living, and the doings of management. Might it be that the working class had not inherited the earth? But who had inherited it then? Surely not I, I who rushed from our book-lined flat down the chestnut-lined avenues of Buda every morning to catch the 6:30 local train to Csepel? Or was it my father? But my father was penniless. He lived in a rented apartment, without a car, without a holiday house, apparently with no personal needs, a man in a cheap suit with bulging pockets whose every evening and most weekends were dedicated to the Cause. My father, Comrade Fülöp Holló, didn’t count. But then who did?
This wasn’t a question I could ask, not even of Cartographer Kogutowitz Manó.
Decades later, when I read the British historian Bill Lomax’s book and the memoirs of István Eörsi about the workers’ organisations of 1956, works that had been carefully kept from the public eye, I began to understand the note of bleak resignation in my boiler-suited colleague. But back then in the 1970s and 1980s, in the course of my various summer jobs, sheer stupidity or innocence protected me and I couldn’t understand why the leading class, the vanguard of the revolution, was so miserable.
‘Look, Fülöp, the working class doesn’t believe it’s in charge!’ I dared announce one evening while tending to my blistered hands.
‘They’ll learn,’ my father answered with his usual self-assurance. ‘They don’t know it, but they are,’ he continued before going on to a passionate exposition of Hegel and the role of unconscious forces in the historical process.
My father had a reassuring answer for everything. He never left matters in the air with a careless half-finished sentence but explained things seriously and thoroughly. Any time my faith in a better future wavered, any time I felt some people were not giving their all in the struggle to liberate mankind, not even the official representatives of the system, he assured me my fears were groundless. There was always an explanation ready to hand and the explanation was always convincing. That is, until the facts that I was obliged to face ever more frequently as time went by grew more persuasive than his arguments.
All the same, I held firm for a long time. My faith in my father was not shaken too much even in the maelstrom of adolescence. It was the early 1970s and there were certain stirrings in the country that remained invisible to me, but I sensed them with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity. Everything seemed more complicated, more provisional. I began to see that my teachers might not be infallible, that the textbooks tended to present a watered-down version of the truth, so one was always forced to go back to a primary source and that those excerpts from poems highlighted in bold type in our classrooms always lacked something, something that would utterly transform their meaning. I understood that not everyone believed what we did, and that those who thought differently were not necessarily monsters.
My best friend of the time was István, a boy a couple of years older than me, who painted abstract pictures and read books by authors largely unknown to me. We’d argue through the night, watch movies with a ferocious thirst and laugh a great deal about the idiocies of the adult world. Some years later it became pointless beating at his door: he was either in bed, drunk or wandering the streets somewhere. But in 1972 all life lay before us. One bright morning we skipped school and sat on a park bench behind Fisherman’s Bastion up in the Castle district of Budapest, soaking in the sun. The busy city throbbed beneath our feet like a wonderful, regular heart. Above us time stood still. We didn’t know much about the world, but were properly touched by its grandeur.
‘Did you know your father is a bastard?’ my friend asked suddenly. No, I didn’t know. And nor did I want to know.
‘No need to be so shocked,’ István laughed as he looked at me. ‘He’ll get off his pedestal sooner or later. Come on, let’s see the archaeological dig.’
The well-known archaeologist László Zolnay and his team had just unearthed marble statues from the time of King Sigismund, in a ditch first dug over five hundred years ago. We had marvelled at these unexpected messengers of the past at a hastily arranged exhibition and had often called in to see how the
archaeologists at the bomb-shattered Sándor Palace near by were doing. Perhaps the soil beneath us had more to offer. We stood around watching them like supporters at a football match. These were the advantages of living behind the Iron Curtain. The Castle district was ours. Our favourite adolescent gathering places were the Tárnok café and The Black Raven restaurant. The past hadn’t yet been offered to tourists prepared to pay for it. It belonged to us, maybe because we were labouring under the misapprehension that the future was also ours.
When my father wasn’t shuttling between his two offices, when he was neither teaching nor in meetings, he’d drift about the city. Walking was an essential activity for him, as it had been for his father, as vital as his passion for thoroughness and books. The reason he had to walk in the city, he told us, was because it was his way of switching off: he looked in every shop window, read every poster and, naturally, called in at every second-hand bookshop. The only thing that could drag him from his two offices was the prospect of travel. He was a great traveller. Wherever he found himself, within moments he could locate his position and begin to understand the language; he would immediately familiarise himself with the local transport system and know where to seek out the best-hidden treasures of the place. He’d collect the publicity leaflets, the newspapers he found on park benches and on the train, the various guides and maps, and would spend the evenings working his way through vast piles of paper to acquaint himself with the territory opening up around him.
The Summer My Father Died Page 4