The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  Wandering through that labyrinth initially he might have known precisely what was the difference between himself and his intangible mirror image. After a while, though, he couldn’t have been at all certain who was the figure coming to meet him in the glass: he himself or his condemned likeness; he wouldn’t have known which was him, or who he actually was; which of his movements was genuine and which an optical illusion; or whether there was anyone at all behind the cold surface of the mirror, someone playing a ruthless trick on him, a light-fingered being stripping him of his carefully protected life, repossessing it as though it were a coat he had borrowed then stolen; or whether all this was just illusion, a joke in bad taste. The game turned into a hunt, a pursuit from which there was no guarantee he could escape alive. It must have taken a considerable time for my father, running ever faster, gasping for air, and after various painful bumps into the walls of the labyrinth, finally to find the way out.

  I discovered him in the dark kitchen, bent over the table, his face in his hands. When I called his name he raised his head and looked round him in confusion. His breath was coming a little fast and his eyes were wider than usual, as if he had just woken. He might have been crying but I couldn’t tell because I had never seen him crying before and so did not know how his face would change when he was about to cry. I turned on the light and quickly started bustling about so as to bring him back to reality. He continued sitting motionless at the table gripping the closed book in his hand as if afraid that the dark demon might leap out of it again.

  Some hours later, once we had put the children to bed, I asked him if he didn’t feel like getting some fresh air. We went for a walk on the windy lake shore. Slowly, silently, we ambled under the lilac sky, waiting for the streetlights to be turned on.

  ‘Well, I suppose we could call that a masterpiece,’ my father suddenly spoke up.

  Since this wasn’t the kind of thing he tended to say, I didn’t want to push the matter by suggesting that if that was the case why didn’t we call it just that. I started asking him about the book but his answers were brusque and he quickly changed the subject.

  It was another seven years before I got round to reading Fatelessness myself. I had read Kertész’s other books, treading warily through them so as to explore the territory and check out what was waiting for me. But whenever I took out Fatelessness and opened it at the part where the central character pushes the plate away at dinner and feels nauseous when his father touches him, I had to put the book down. And so it was several years before I understood what had happened to my father that afternoon in Geneva. Beyond the dramatic chance meeting of two survivors over a kitchen table, two visions of the world had also collided: the messianic dream of changing the world and the poetry of absolute zero. It was the belief in progress, the faith in humanity’s march towards enlightenment against the reality stripped naked and robbed of its high calling. The freezing cold of absolute nothingness.

  I had only the faintest acquaintance with the latter school of thinking. My father had looked to take my ideological orientation in hand early in my childhood, but my education in philosophy stopped at about the age of thirteen with Giordano Bruno. His example offered evidence of how retrograde forces deal with the representatives of progressive thought. Having got me to this point, my father considered I was ready to take a cavalier leap to what was properly essential, the reading of The Critique of the Gotha Programme and the Communist Manifesto, before proceeding on to other selected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. None of these were as dramatically satisfying as the poor torched Italian for whom I wept hot tears at night, but – or so it seemed then – they offered a more direct path to human bliss.

  My understanding of the history of ideas being relatively shallow, you may imagine how taken aback I was ten years later when, on a university summer camp studying Das Kapital, the major work of that epoch-making thinker Karl Marx, employing the critical tools worthy of a distinguished Yeshiva student, a guest professor of philosophy suddenly embarked on a reading of the Greek philosopher Parmenides. It was the first time I was confronted by the proposal, from a credible source, that life had no meaning. But, owing to my upbringing and natural inclination, I did not feel it necessary to pursue this line of thought more thoroughly. That is, until I read Fatelessness. Young Köves’s story presents us with a life as stripped down to essentials as the axioms of Parmenides. Here was someone who had travelled down the whole road to the bourn from which no traveller returns, registering everything, and had rendered an account of his experiences twenty years after. But even after twenty years he was determined not to complain of any suffering, despair or even involvement. He catalogued the range of actions of which man was capable: what man might commit and what he might endure. By way of an afterword he added that once it was over his characters would not be ennobled, none would be judged or sanctified. Time would remain indifferent to them as it moved on and would sweep them all away, like litter.

  My father’s entire life had, on the other hand, been driven by the conviction that everything was imbued with meaning, that progress was irreversible and that mankind could be saved. The fact that he could conceive only of one kind of salvation and that he found it acceptable, indeed desirable, that people should be saved even despite themselves was a different matter. Dictatorship was justified because the masses weren’t sufficiently mature to know what was good for them. We will beat you over the head with the club of salvation until your head hurts! But his blind faith in human goodness and progress at the heart of his political outlook was what made my father loveable. Even when I most strongly disagreed with both his views and his actions, I had to struggle so he did not entangle me in the web of our deepest common concerns and so make me his disciple.

  If my father had been prepared for the low blow that Fatelessness dealt him he would have rejected it in the sacred name of progress and declared in his usual passionate way that its world view was simply existential nonsense. He would have put the book neatly back on our jumbled shelves and dismissed its author as another person whose thought, experience and ideas were irrelevant because they were false. But this time it was the voice of the child that spoke to him out of the misty past, his old self, or the best friend of his youth. And he simply could not kill that child in him. He had to hear the child through, in an audition that cost him many sleepless nights. Eventually, he got over this as well.

  Author’s Advice to Reader: Beware of gift books with attractive covers!

  My sister and I lived in blissful ignorance of our origins for some time. We were deeply familiar with the countless episodes of our mother’s life but all we knew of our father’s either consisted of some colourful tales of his father who had been martyred in the cause of socialism or were stories about our wicked grandmother. Our parents brought us up to be the products of enlightened communism and to believe that birth, skin colour and gender meant nothing because all were equal. So it never occurred to me that I was a Jew, nor would it have if there had not always been someone in every one of the important places in my life, from primary school through to places of work, to remind me and then go on to conclude that I must therefore be different. In what respect ‘different’ depended on where I happened to be and it was not necessarily unpleasant. There were moments when my finest academic achievements were attributed to my genes but also the time when a close childhood friend informed me that she would no longer be in touch because her new husband found the smell of my genes repulsive.

  Practically no one talked about Jewishness in Hungary at that time. It wasn’t mentioned in my family or among my circle of friends or in public discussions, so I was always astonished when someone brought it up. The world outside, as usual, seemed to be better informed on the subject than I was. At the beginning I would quietly walk home and ask my parents whether we were Jews.

  ‘We are not Jews, because Judaism is a religion and we are atheists,’ came the answer, and that put all my doubts to rest.

  The
murky issue of my origins was of no concern to me when, one fine August morning, I set out for Poland. I had spent the whole summer working in a brick factory in Óbuda, an old district of Budapest, saving up for my first independent trip abroad. I would be travelling for a month, hitchhiking, walking or on public transport, in that soulful, vibrant country full of life-changing energy. I must have been lucky, because it wasn’t an altogether happy time there, but I found my every encounter enriching. Looking back on the early 1970s, they seem an age of innocence now.

  One day my travels found me in Kraków. It had been raining for days and I was soaked through: the damp seemed to be inside me. I was hungry and tired and did not feel like talking to strangers or discovering great sights any more. I was fed up with the world and its wonders. I checked in at a youth hostel and threw myself on the bed to stare at the ceiling for days. I heard the rain drumming on the window and felt life slowly leaking away from me. Everything that had seemed important was being washed away with the rivers of water flowing down the open drain outside. The mere thought that I had anything to do with this chaotic mess of a world seemed quite absurd.

  On the fourth day I dragged myself down to the diner on a nearby street, ordered a steaming coffee and forced myself to think of setting off again. I slouched through the wet streets without enthusiasm. But then, as I turned from the river embankment into a warren of narrow streets, a light suddenly flashed above the roofs shrouded in grey. Tentatively at first, then with ever greater conviction, the sun started shining. It was as if I had just woken up: I began to notice the beauty of the town. There was the perfectly preserved medieval square with its smooth cobbles and figures of saints carved out of stone, surrounded by colourful roofs with mosaic tiles. Close by there were women in headscarves and apprentices in leather caps bustling through the busy market. I bought a few greengages from an old stallholder and walked on, quite cheered up. It was only as I was leaving the square that I noticed I had walked on to what seemed like a film set. In a corner of the square, at the turning of a narrow passage, hung a worn old tin sign saying: Synagogue. Under it was an arrow pointing to the right. Might as well see this, too, I said to myself, and looked round for somewhere to dispose of the greengage stones. The synagogue was a freshly painted white building at the side of a small nearby square. I knocked at the iron gate, then cautiously rang the bell. After a little while a beautiful young woman in a long skirt opened the gate. Behind her stood a slightly shorter girl with very fair hair who looked a bit like her, as if they were sisters.

  ‘Good day,’ I said. ‘I’d like to look inside.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not open yet,’ the girl replied courteously. She was going to close the gate but, since I hadn’t moved, she added: ‘The opening is at the beginning of next week.’

  I thought to tell her that I wouldn’t be here in a week’s time, but in the end it didn’t seem too important. I stood indecisively in the doorway. I could easily have left but my foot seemed fixed somehow. The girl looked at me in expectation. I felt a confused apologetic smile form on my lips. I cleared my throat but still I could not decide whether to push my luck further now that I was here or just turn round, as befits a well-mannered stranger, and let her close the gate. The girl was watching me carefully. Then suddenly she said: ‘Well, if you really want to, come in.’

  There was a touching courtesy in the way the Polish people addressed me in the third person and called me ‘young lady’. I didn’t speak Polish, but my by-then substantial knowledge of Russian and my general desire to understand everything made communication possible. I stepped into the empty hall, ringing with silence and thick with the smell of paint, and politely walked around it. In the middle stood a podium surrounded by some wrought- iron rails: it must be the place where they read the Bible, I thought.

  ‘There is an exhibition in the other room, if you’re interested,’ said the girl.

  I went into the room next door. Against the sparkling white wall were placed glass cabinets containing photographs and a few objects associated with what had been Jewish life in Kraków. I examined everything thoroughly. There was only the sound of my footsteps in the hall and the rapid whispering of the two girls in the background. The last cabinet contained some photographs of the deportations. The streets I had walked down looking for a litter basket were being trodden by a mass of people with suitcases and packs. I examined each face separately. My eyes fell, from time to time, on a photograph showing a middle-aged woman walking down the middle of the road by herself. It was impossible to tell whether she was part of any of the groups marching beside her. She was holding her coat together with one hand and clutching a suitcase with the other. Her headscarf had slipped back over her hair, and she was gazing ahead with a serious look of calm on her face. This woman with her tumbling hair might be your grandmother, a voice said inside me. Or you. My gaze was fixed on the photograph of the unknown woman as if I thought that with a single glance I could pluck her out of the destruction waiting for her at the end of the journey. The next moment I was standing over the cabinet with my hands over my face, rocking to and fro, like someone about to fall. My whole body was shaken by a silent sobbing. After a while the chattering stopped behind me. As soon as I noticed it I put my backpack down, pulled out a handkerchief and loudly blew my nose. Then I carefully zipped the bag up, smiled at the two girls and turned to leave. When they opened the gate I looked round at them once more and succeeded in grunting:

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We thank you,’ said the one with the darker hair. Her hand was resting on the gate handle as if she were waiting for something.

  I stepped out into the square that was flooded with sunlight now. I stood for a while by the white walls, then, as if afraid that something might yank me back, I set off again with uncertain steps.

  I think it was that afternoon I decided I was a Jew. The constant unnamed absence inside me touched the solid sense of gaping loss that haunted those abandoned streets of old Kraków and I understood where I belonged and what it was that had eluded me.

  On my return home I felt a deeply Freudian missionary zeal to do everything in my power to lead my father back to his broken Jewish roots. I read the relevant critical literature, visited all the appropriate historical sites, brought him Purim cakes from the Fröhlich pâtisseries, hoping to ignite his Proustian reflexes. Unfortunately my father’s reflexes tended more towards the Pavlovian: he ate the cakes but they made him no keener to delve into the past. Finally, having exhausted all my ideas and growing increasingly embittered, I asked him bluntly why not. His answer was that, as far as he was concerned, the Jewish question had lost its historical relevance and was no more than a display of tribal affiliation that, fortunately, had nothing to do with him since, owing to the early development of his consciousness, he regarded himself as a member of a universal movement whose goal was the liberation of the world, not as a member of some particular section of society. Pretty much like Marx, he added with due modesty.

  I had no answer to this argument and was obliged simply to shut up and stop questioning my father’s sense of superseded identity, particularly since I also regarded myself as being a member of the same universal movement for world liberation. Yet I could not forget that more specific identity. After a long internal struggle I finally concluded that, unlike in the archaic past, Jewishness today was a matter of commitment, not blood. Identities determined by blood relations are always dubious anyway and often result in terrible atrocities.

  For a while I continued to bombard my father with cakes, but no longer to any ulterior purpose, simply because, like every other survivor I knew, he had a very sweet tooth. But eventually there was no need for that either. The first time he fell ill my mother turned her back on her vice-rectorial chair at the university where she taught in order to focus all her energies on caring for him. One aspect of this was that she perfected her knowledge of cake-baking technology and soon surpassed even the Fröhlich pâtisseries.


  All this would have looked different had the world in which we actually lived given a fig for my father’s theoretically justified sense of political consciousness and did not constantly rub his nose into the fact of his Jewishness. Clad in the armour of his superior ideological convictions, my father generally ignored this. And yet I am not altogether certain that he did not suffer it at a visceral level to the end of his life. That is to say, partly on account of the insults and partly because he had no home to go to.

  The second disturbing gift I brought back from my Polish trip and put down in front of my father was of a political nature. All those countless people who helped me along the way, gave me accommodation, carefully showed me round, explaining everything, from a bus driver through to a university lecturer, were – every one of them – opposed to the system, as we put it then. They asserted, perfectly calmly and in a clear and objective manner, that it wasn’t the first time in history that a lying oppressive political power had taken control of their lives, a power against which they were obliged to protest by means of art, political association and refusal to serve in the army; by cultivating small garden plots; by attending jazz concerts; through sexual liberation; by any means whatsoever. This clear-sighted, calm but firm conviction had an enormous effect on my dawning consciousness. That is to say, naturally, until I got home and talked to my father, who immediately set about putting me right again. But this first memory of political rebellion, as well as, to me, the quite unaccustomed sense of dignity such people radiated because they had taken responsibility for their own lives and made their decisions on the basis of free conscience, made a lifelong impression on me.

  My first Polish trip also revealed that we Hungarians were not the biggest losers in creation. When we were children, on top of all the mangled texts we had to learn as part of our proletarian internationalist tasks, we sang our passionate way through the ‘Himnusz’, our national anthem, the ‘Szózat’ – Mihály Vörösmarty’s ‘Appeal’ to his fellow Hungarians – and the burning verses of our national poet Sándor Petőfi which we of course interpreted in the then-common, purely literal sense. In this way, without realising it, we grew up with the enforced image of Hungary as a nation of incomparable talent that had undergone incomparable suffering and thus deserved the very best that fate could offer by way of recompense. In learning the various chapters of Poland’s unhappy history I realised that it was possible to suffer even more intensely than we had done. (Much later I observed that all the nations of our region had a tendency to regard themselves as heroes or, alternatively, victims, depending on whatever needed justifying at the time.) Having mourned the bitter history of the Poles I recognised that suffering wasn’t a matter of totting up numbers, and that it was pointless to compare losses and pains; they are immeasurable. What’s more, suffering did not entitle you to anything. This last observation was to prove very useful in the future.