The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  This impressive knack of landing on his feet was certainly an aspect of his secret genetic inheritance. The experience of those generations before him of being constantly on the run had worked its way into his very cells: shifting landscapes were second nature to him. The scenes of his childhood were dispersed among East Central Europe’s then still comfortable nooks and crannies and he moved between them with ease. But this ready and natural sense of mobility came to a sudden end in his adult life. The borders were concreted over and fenced in with barbed wire. Crossing one, even between comrade countries, became a frightening procedure that could take hours, entailing a baggage search at every station manned by armed guards, in the course of which every compartment, every seat and every luggage rack was thoroughly examined, while the guards frowned on people as though everyone had something to hide and it was only because of their generosity that they let us get away with it – this time. My parents behaved as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

  But my father’s restlessness would not let him be and, whenever he could, he set out on a journey. His professional trips were for decades restricted to the countries of the Eastern Bloc. He was like a caged animal. He seemed to know by heart the timetables of all the Polish, Bulgarian and East German railways, to say nothing of the outstanding monuments of Our Great Soviet Homeland, and then, finally, in the mid-1970s he was allowed to explore the sinful West. This was, of course, only so that he could unmask it all the better. My parents embarked on this journey happily, my mother bringing enough supplies for weeks of travel, while my father had two enormous briefcases stuffed full of books, notes and the obligatory bottle of Ararat cognac.

  All roads led to the city for my father. There was never any time in the programme for trips to the countryside. Unlike other members of the workers’ movement, who enjoyed country walks, singing and popular culture, for him nature was first and foremost an obstacle to be overcome. The role of the crowning triumph of nature (Homo socialisticus) was to rein in nature, and with a loud flourish of trumpets to conduct it into a life of noble servitude. The point of the flourish, of course, was to blot out the ancient caveman’s dread of forces that could not be controlled, though, understandably enough, these were not matters that tended to preoccupy the apostles of scientific socialism. In cities it is easier to maintain the illusion that our business is with a world we ourselves have created and can control. It is no accident that the most crackpot dictators of the twentieth century, from Mussolini through to Ceauşescu, wanted to turn their lovely cities into vulgar images of themselves. My father felt much safer in a city than among mountains or by an unpeopled seashore. In foreign cities he relaxed, strangely enough, and allowed himself to be led by their tides. It was as if the impressionable young boy who could never get enough of the world had taken over from the disciplined, stern adult.

  The first trip abroad my parents took us on was to the capital of East Germany, Berlin. For a child like me who had grown up under the spell of concrete borders it was a memorable occasion. The night before we set off I was so excited my mother had a hard job getting me to bed. At dawn I dreamed that the world beyond our borders was exactly the same as ours: grass was green, sky was blue and roofs were red. The next day when, hearts wildly beating, we eventually succeeded in crossing the border, I kept quiet about my disappointment in finding that my dream was true. Apart from this, Berlin served up plenty of nice surprises. The city was ringed by roads with buildings made of concrete blocks and great linked lakes that you could row around. The most impressive sign of technological advance, like a modest herald of the promised socialist paradise, was the escalator, the moving stairs in one of the department stores. I spent hours riding up and down it, dazzled by the brilliant new dawn it promised.

  The apartment in which my parents’ friends lived was of spotless Spartan rigour and demanded impeccable behaviour on our part. The tablecloth was at perfect right angles to the table and Auntie Gerda set the table with silver cutlery including a special knife for fruit. The only time I had seen such tableware was in the grandiose salons of Festetich Palace in Keszthely.

  ‘Are they nobility, Mother?’ I asked anxiously one night when we were getting ready for bed. My mother gave a great laugh.

  ‘Of course not, my dear. They’re comrades, like ourselves,’ she replied.

  In reconsidering it years later I understood that our hosts belonged to the upper echelons of the East German nomenklatura. My father had met the husband during his doctoral studies in Moscow: some fingers of his right hand were missing, because he had shot them off himself when he had been conscripted so that he did not have to fight on Hitler’s side. After prisoner-of-war camp he found himself at university where, among other things, he learned Hungarian. On the odd occasions he visited us in Budapest he would fool around with us children, in high spirits, but the one time we stayed with him and his wife in Berlin he seemed distracted and reserved and always had to be going off somewhere. Soon after the régime change of 1989 the couple both died, quite suddenly. They disappeared without ceremony: it was as if they wished to leave absolutely no trace, as if they had never existed, much like their country, the GDR.

  The other lesson I learned on my first trip abroad was that the world was divided into two. On the outskirts of Berlin stood an enormous tower from whose top one could see another country. That other country was also called Germany. There was West and there was East, my parents explained. We learnt in school that the sun set on the left and rose on the right, but I didn’t really understand why this made them two different countries, with the same name on top of them. Our parents took us to see the Wall, too. It was high, made of brick topped with barbed wire, and ran between two great look-out towers. Some six feet or more away there was another one. Between them a red circle.

  ‘What’s that red circle?’ I asked uneasily.

  ‘A soldier died there,’ replied my mother.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was shot.’

  ‘Who shot him?’

  ‘Those who wanted to get over the wall.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the other side.’

  ‘Why? Aren’t people allowed to?’

  ‘What do you think the wall is for?’

  ‘What is it for?’

  ‘We have to defend ourselves.’

  Since we happened to be in Berlin, our parents also took us to see the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. In the taxi there they quickly explained what we were going to see. When the man with the funny moustache was in power that is where they took people they wanted to kill, those innocents who did not agree with him. There was no mention of the fact that a good part of our own family finished up in places like this. The man with the funny moustache was Hitler. Hitler’s name was not to be mentioned the entire time we were in Germany so as not to offend our hosts. Why? Because they might think we held them to blame. But it wasn’t them. The people who had done the dreadful things we had seen in Soviet movies lived on the other side of the Wall. The people this side were decent people. I saw the piles of human hair, the shaving brushes, the worn-down shoes. I saw the lampshades made of human skin. I saw the huts with their tiered bunks, the shower rooms whose walls were scrubbed white. On the way back in the taxi, in the amber-coloured afternoon light, I was shouting with all the fury a seven-year-old can muster.

  ‘That swine! That rotten swine! The rotten swine!’

  Now I understood why we needed that high brick wall with its barbed wire.

  What was my father feeling when, with his usual rigour, he examined those bunks, the Appelplatz and the narrow paved path to the gas chambers? Did he say anything to my mother as they crept between the stiff cold sheets on Auntie Gerda’s bed?

  One afternoon on the metro, on my way to the hospital, I was reaching into my bag for something to read when my hand stopped in mid-air. It suddenly occurred to me that there might be someone among my bored fellow travellers whose face would turn into a
dripping mask of hate if I happened to take the Jewish magazine, Saturday, from my bulging backpack. What hostility might I rouse in this pale green carriage – manufactured by Mytischinskiy Mashinostroitielny Zavod, as homely and warm as a pigsty, if I were to sit there holding hands with a black man. Or with a Roma boy, because in his case you couldn’t even pretend he was some rich foreigner. In Geneva I simply cannot understand the sense of natural reserve that separates people from each other; in Hungary, though, I am always shocked by how quickly people lose their temper, the sheer fury that erupts when someone emits an innocent, but apparently wrong, signal. Whenever I come home, I feel a sense of blissful relaxation and the sudden outbursts of such fury hit me like a cold shower. So, by way of compromise, instead of Saturday I pulled out a copy of HVG, the Hungarian equivalent of The Economist. It’s a small country choking on its own hatred, I told myself in a foul mood.

  ‘So this is the democracy you wanted!’ my father screamed, purple-faced, one Sunday lunch after the régime change.

  Hegel, Gegel and Bebel grinned in satisfaction. They loved it when we lost our tempers. A terrible political brawl ensued. It was only hours after, once the combatants had tired of the shouting and, exhausted by my mother’s feast, had declared a ceasefire, that my father was capable of telling us what had upset him so. Some days earlier he had been sitting on the 49 tram when a middle-aged man had clearly and loudly addressed him.

  ‘You, yes, you, you stinking Jew! How come you weren’t burned to a cinder at Auschwitz?’

  ‘What?’ we gasped and went pale. ‘And what did other people say?’

  ‘They carried on looking out of the window, just as they did in ‘44. A few kids were chortling away in the background.’

  ‘And you? Did you say anything?’

  ‘I got off the tram and walked home.’

  The walk home from the Gellért Hotel to Németvölgyi Road can be very long. And then we had no idea that this was just the start. At that time it was still unacceptable to taunt Jews and gypsies: the new régime tried to wash its hands of any such unfortunate incidents. The language and style of newly awoken racism had not yet been elevated to the parlance of everyday politics as they were by the time of the third democratically elected government after 1998. Luckily my father did not survive to see that. But the beginnings were enough for him.

  As far as my father was concerned Jewishness was a form of atavism. Not only because survivors of the war were of the generation that had tried to rip from their very being the ties that bound them to the terrible exterminations, but because he was convinced that if he redefined himself as a communist that would trump every other definition. Although after his death all the documents we found in his study showed that precisely the opposite was the case, he claimed that he had never worn a yellow star, was never deported and, apart from one unsuccessful attempt to enter the great synagogue at Dohány Street, had never been in the ghetto. He once indignantly told the story of how, in 1944, the illegal communists had smuggled him into the ghetto where he tried to persuade its occupants to undertake a Warsaw-type uprising. Being ejected from the foul-smelling, corpse-covered synagogue by his fellow Jews confirmed him in his opinion that he had done well to distance himself from them once and for all.

  As I discovered later, this story was probably true but with one significant difference: my father had not been smuggled into the ghetto but had actually been living inside it when he tried to persuade the others to action. But his own version of events must have become fixed in his mind and was not to be shifted. According to his writings he survived by becoming an illegal communist and taking part in the underground resistance to fascism, using forged papers. What he didn’t mention is that those papers were obtained for him by his mother from the Swedish Embassy. It wasn’t just the religious aspect of Judaism my father rejected; he hated hearing Israel mentioned and always spoke of Jews in the third person. That is, bar one occasion in 1990 when someone in the new, freely elected parliament suggested that the speaker, a person of Jewish background, should be given a barrel to stand on. I had returned from England that morning and was about to move on to a conference in Prague in the evening. My mother and I were standing on the twilit platform of the Western Railway Terminal when my father turned up. I was touched that he wanted to see me. In the few minutes we had together we quickly gabbled out our respective most important news, at which point my father, for the first and last time in his life, said: ‘They’re after us again.’

  It was a cool October evening and we could already see our breath before us. Maybe it was the sharp smell of smoke, or the rumbling of the train about to depart, or maybe it was because he was disorientated by the brevity of our meeting and the suddenness of our farewell, but it brought out the first person plural in my father. ‘They’re after us again’ he said and in my shock I grabbed the cold handrail of the carriage door and buried my face in my scarf. I had waited decades for a sentence in which he dared claim the past as his own, to admit who he was and thereby let me know who I was: it reconnected us to our history, even if that history has been flooded with tears for centuries; it established us as part of a community, even if that community had been decimated time and again and even if we could only relate to a relatively small section of it. We were of that community and from this time forth the fact was established. Proceeding from that fact we could set out on whatever path our consciences dictated. We stood in the orange light of the evening lamps, wrapped in the autumn mist and the cloud of our own breath, silently glancing at each other. Then the conductor gave a loud whistle and I leapt up on to the slippery carriage step. The train slowly started to move off. I watched my father waving awkwardly from the platform, his figure shrinking to a speck in the cold neon light. I stood in the corridor for hours, shattered, staring out into the approaching night, watching the trees beyond the rails as they rushed backwards.

  I know it is mere coincidence, of course, but the hyperactive myth-producer who shares the tenancy of my brain with its socialist realist counterpart can’t help remarking that it was at the end of this particular journey that I met the man who ever since then has been sharing my life.

  In what remained of his life my father had one last painful opportunity to shoulder the burden of his Jewishness. It was when, through no fault of his own, he read Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness. This must have been near the beginning of the 1990s, when he paid us a visit in Geneva. One sleepy afternoon, at a most unexpected moment, the past suddenly grabbed my father by the throat and squeezed it with an iron fist, compelling him to confront facts he had succeeded in avoiding – facts that, owing to his good fortune, he had declared were, as far as he personally was concerned, non-facts. According to my father the fate of the Jews in the Second World War was a natural product of the murderous capitalist system, one of a long series of similarly awful, hidden or overt genocides that he, being a communist, utterly condemned as a matter of principle, but which had nothing to do with him. But that late spring day, in our apparently innocent home in Geneva, running his eyes over our chaotic bookshelves, my father stumbled across a minefield. Having woken from his afternoon nap while my mother and I were taking the children for a walk in the park, my father was looking for something to read when fate, in its usual arbitrary way, happened to guide him to Fatelessness in the old paperback edition, the one with the etching of Dürer’s Melancholia on the cover. The book was a gift from my friend Tamás, who had presented it to me some years before as one of the undiscovered treasures of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, but I had not yet had the time to read it.

  Chance had guided two very minor characters of that still incomprehensible and unforgivable drama that took place some fifty years before into the same darkening kitchen: my father, who now sat at the table crouched over the book with his head in his hands; he who had had the great good fortune to avoid what posterity was to call the Holocaust so it should not have to live with even more uncomfortable nominations; and the survivor wh
ose story was presented in the book and who had not been able to escape the clutches of fate and who, decades later, decided to give an account of what it is like when the experience of hell fills every last pore of your being. My father certainly had read some pieces of ‘Holocaust literature’, among them the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún’s The Long Voyage, written before Comrade Semprún strayed into the swamps of Eurocommunism – an act that rendered him persona non grata on our bookshelves, and the books of Mária Ember and Béla Zsolt that relate their experiences of deportation, but whenever he read such texts he carefully prepared himself in advance so that he would know into which secret recess of his consciousness to lock the terror so that it would not destroy him.

  But that late afternoon in Geneva, in a foreign city, surrounded by foreign languages, when this book, written in Hungarian and with an attractive female figure shown deep in meditation on its front, fell into his hands, for a moment his guard went down. And by the time he realised the book was about him, about that bright-eyed, solitary adolescent boy with a desire to live, about those separated parents, about a father killed in the course of forced labour, about his own family before fate in the form of an Arrow Cross or a Nazi uniform struck them down, it was too late. He couldn’t escape the power of nightmare. He was terminally caught in the looking-glass labyrinth, at every turn of which he was obliged to confront the image of himself which he had been trying all his life to avoid, whose very memory he wanted to wipe from the memory of the world, of which he was as terrified as he might have been of fire and brimstone. One glance of that condemned young boy who my father himself had been was enough to bring down the walls of ideology, lies and self-defence he had erected around himself for decades.