The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  Decades afterwards, it dawned on me that the brick factory where I earned the money to pay for my tour of Poland, doing hard physical work in the happy days of my youth when unemployment existed only inside the factory and not outside, and undermined morale but not, as now, existence itself; in those days when physical work and the objects produced by intelligence, strength, skill and sweat still meant something and were a matter of honour; it was possible that this brick factory, of which remains now only its huge chimney, towering above the shopping parade of Bécsi Road offering the most glittering trophies of consumer society, was the same factory in which my fellow Jews from the outer suburbs were kept under guard all those years ago, before being piled on to the wagons. If that was the case, then this was also the very factory from which my great-aunt Gigi, who had given me the keys to the past one summer, had escaped, thereby avoiding Auschwitz – the same factory where I, quite unbothered by shades of the past, worked some twenty years later with blistered hands, trying to learn the ABC of the life of the proletariat. Now let someone tell me that things don’t fit together.

  Maybe I should consider the possibility that the summer my father died began in the December of 1970, when Poland’s then leader, Władysław Gomułka, ordered live bullets to be fired at workers protesting before the Gdańsk shipyard. Nineteen fifty-six might have been too soon after the war, when memory of deportations, starvation, freezing winters were still too fresh; the new power might still have appeared promising, without showing yet the cracks in the system. By 1968 you could perhaps have argued that the noble scheme of reforming socialism had taken an unfortunate turn. But after December 1970 you could not in all conscience insist that the people being shot at were just over-excited members of the intelligentsia, deluded students or rootless cosmopolitans. It was the ruling working class that took its stand in the shipyard at Gdańsk to demonstrate its discontent. And it is true that it was ruthlessly silenced then, but ten years later when the ruling working class once more downed tools to stand in the yard, the memory of those blazing guns rose like a bloody ghost and swept right across Eastern Europe. After December 1970 it was no longer possible to maintain the fiction that the workers were in power, that our high ideals were being realised. The reality was that it was in the name of those same high ideals that those whose condition was supposed to be the chief concern of the ideals were being shot.

  It was in the early summer of 1981, when the latest struggle between society and authority was assuming ever more dramatic proportions, that my father went to Poland on a study trip. He arrived home early one morning. It must have been the exam season because I was dozing over sheaves of paper on my desk when he walked in.

  ‘Hey, you’re back already,’ I remarked enthusiastically. ‘How was Poland?’

  Though we agreed on ever fewer matters by then, I always enjoyed hearing his accounts of his journeys, so full of minute observations. But that morning my father sat down on the chair next to me without a word and stared straight ahead with an empty look. He wagged his head from time to time, as if arguing with an invisible companion. When he finally looked at me his expression was as desolate as a house set for demolition.

  ‘They’ve ruined everything,’ he whispered, almost to himself.

  I stared at him in shock. I had never seen him like this. Perhaps it was getting up so early or the fear of flying that rendered him so vulnerable. Or maybe something else had collapsed inside him.

  ‘They shot the workers,’ I whispered back. ‘Imagine the dictatorship of the proletariat shooting down its own workers!’

  At the time, the 1970 shootings at Gdańsk, like the Prague Spring, seemed to be a distant, incomprehensible event that had nothing to do with my life. And so it remained, until history brought them to mind again: my conscience needed time to catch up. In the feverish months of 1980 and 1981, while the whole Eastern Bloc was anxiously watching developments in Poland, the astonished Budapest intelligentsia was being flooded with handmade stencils filled with accounts of the 1970 shootings, the 1980 clandestine commemoration of the shootings, the documents of the KOR (the Workers’ Defence Committee) and the fiery debates of Solidarność. The 1980 events in Gdańsk proved to me without doubt that the high-minded system in which I had firmly believed from childhood was, like Cronus, devouring its own children. But that morning, sitting opposite my father in the draughty children’s room, I was not up to a decent political row, the kind that always ended in him steamrollering me. I tried to relax the tension by making a joke, but my whole body was shaken by an icy shivering. I think I feared that if doubt settled in his soul, if the great, apparently impregnable defences he had so carefully built around himself began to crack, there would be nothing to hold him together. But by the evening, once he had bathed, shaved and eaten and returned from the university, he had an explanation ready. And when, a couple of months later, General Jaruzelski with his dark glasses brought in a state of emergency in Poland, that was ‘restoring order’.

  Maybe it was that summer that his ideals and his sense of reality finally began to separate. It must have been a superhuman effort for him to persuade himself – and others – that, despite the firing squads, the arrests, the imprisonments and the conversion of a whole country into a sinister barracks, everything was all right, and that whatever was happening was simply a strict but justified course of action against dangerous and treacherous elements. It may be that the sources that sustain in a man, at least a man of my father’s stamp, a belief in truth and sense of mission began to dry up in him. And in order to balance this clearly perceptible inner exhaustion, he had to use an ever more significant proportion of his energy to maintain appearances, which unavoidably swept him even further from reality and the world he still wanted to save. A decade later, when everything – even the last hollow appearances of the Cause – had collapsed, burying any distant prospect of a life not spent in the pursuit of money or suffering from the lack of it, forgetting every dream of dignity, freedom and community, my father continued to run through the ever-deepening quicksand of ideologised reality like a demented, blinkered, ear-stopped lunatic.

  In the period of grace between my father’s two bouts of illness, at the beginning of the 1990s, I found myself in Poland again. The geographic coordinates were familiar to me but the country itself was not. This was post-shock-therapy Poland, the economic success story, the laurelled victor of post-communist transition, the land of the so-called boundless possibilities promised by the market – and a profoundly depressing place. It was missing the assured dignity that had made such a deep impression on me in my adolescence. The freedom of inner resistance was replaced by the freedom to consume and an ever-less-meaningful choice between political hucksters; the overt, stupid suppression of the past having given way to a system of subtler, less transparent but almost limitless manipulation. And behind all this lay an infinite sadness. Just like at home.

  I was in Kraków again, in the entirely restored Jewish quarter: the absences that had once broken my heart were filled out by stalls, Jewish bookshops, pâtisseries, fancy restaurants and gift shops: not even the Jews were missing, having arrived from every corner of the world, obediently trailing behind tour guides who were loudly explaining what the group should be looking at and what they should be moved by. I was hanging around in front of the synagogue again, with a tiny child in my womb preparing to be born, having either missed the Saturday morning service or been too embarrassed to go in, I no longer remember. On the basis of my visual memory I decided that this was definitely the same synagogue, but everything was different outside.

  I went to a café and sat down, confused. Instead of rejoicing in the crisply renovated houses, I felt something was lost under the fresh plaster, that the little that remained of the past would from now be cheap pickings, that memory would serve a function that was new to me, one that had nothing to do with either the dead or the survivors. Suddenly, just as it had all those years ago, the sun came out. A young man holding the ha
nd of a child was walking up one of the side streets that feed into the main square. The little boy was happily bouncing up and down beside his father. I recalled my own father’s warm, enormous, bear-like paws into which I was delighted to slip my tiny hand in childhood and relaxed a little, taking a sip of my tea. When I looked up again, though, the street was deserted as if no one had walked that way for hours. I leapt to my feet as if I were hunted, quickly found a phone booth and rang my father.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked, his voice flat as if he had just got out of bed.

  I could imagine him in the hall of the flat in Németvölgyi Road, sitting by the bookshelves and crouching over the phone in order to hear me better, doodling as we talked on the back of a beer mat he had brought home from one or other trip to Prague. I started to tell him where I was but then realised as I was speaking that the story was too long, too complicated.

  ‘Nothing special,’ I said eventually. ‘Just ringing to see if everything is all right.’

  We said goodbye and I put the phone down.

  The day before leaving Poland, I walked round Warsaw a little. Here everything was new and blank. The Palace of Culture and Science rose above the dense traffic like a solitary scarecrow. Slightly sleepy and a touch distracted, like a well-meaning tourist, I noted the fruits of progress until I stumbled over the first black granite blocks marking the boundaries of the old ghetto. Immediately I woke up. I thought there was nothing left. I thought the whole ghetto had been razed to the ground, as in Robert Capa’s famous photographs, and that the very name of Krochmalna Street had vanished. But it hadn’t been razed to the ground and the name of the street was still there. And the two old buildings at the end with their rusty wrought-iron balconies hanging loose might have been left over from the time when Krochmalna Street was the centre of the universe for the young Isaac Bashevis Singer, and where some decades ago the leaders of the Warsaw uprising might have met.

  I walked the street over and over, ever more slowly, as if looking for something. Stucco had been dropping off the tenement walls since time immemorial, there was graffiti by the gutted postboxes and the rotting salad and tins of Bulgarian baked beans in the greengrocer’s window looked abandoned. The road widened surprisingly in the middle and I imagined the size of the crater remaining here when they blew up those elegant blocks. A little further up there was a ‘garage’: a vacant lot surrounded by fences guarding Western cars from the increasing number of people with sticky fingers; a wooden hut with a watchman inside listening to a crackling transistor radio, its batteries held in by elastic bands borrowed from jam jars. At the end of the street were some concrete tower blocks built in the 1960s, with their shattered decorative tiles and broken Venetian blinds on their cell-like bedrooms, where even dreams smelled liked boiled cabbage. Janusz Korczak’s famous orphanage was somewhere around here, too, I suddenly remembered. Władysław Szpilman’s memoirs, on which Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist is based, tell of that bright August morning when the children set out with their nurses towards Umschlagplatz. What had Dr Korczak told his beloved charges so they could proceed so calmly towards the train that carried them to certain death? They were singing, as if out on an excursion. How could he have got them to suppress their fear and tension so they thought only of whose hand they should be holding, trying to remember the words of the song?

  Adults can say whatever they like to children. For a long time in childhood an adult’s words constitute the firmest reality. The words they hear can help children survive the most terrible ordeal, but can also cast them into the deepest despair. The same is true of what adults conceal. No one said anything to my father. Children were rarely regarded by that generation of parents as people one talked to. ‘You’ll understand when you grow up,’ his father told him when they met for the last time at the café next to the Astoria in Budapest. ‘I’ll be back for you soon,’ his mother told him by the fence of the foundling home in Szeged. My father received no parental advice on how to handle the universal catastrophe that would tear his entire life up by the roots. There was no survival handbook. Nor was there any available information about the new world being built on the smoking ruins of the old one, only what he read in Party pamphlets and in books of simplified Marxist-Leninism. He had to construct his own reality.

  My dear sister,

  I was heartbroken not to see you, but at least you were away and I was here to stand watch over him, so we could change roles. I found Father in a reasonable state though there were a few alarming incidents. One day we were delivering something to a female comrade near Őrs Vezér Tere metro station. Having got off the train, it took half an hour to struggle up the stairs. On reaching the top Fülöp declared that we were in the wrong place and, before I could say anything, he had set off across the six-lane street. I tried desperately to yank him back but he was quite determined and pressed ahead among screeching brakes and drivers cursing us with a few choice words. When we reached the far side, our legs shaking, I asked him why he did that, but he just blinked at me as though he had no idea what I was talking about. When I repeated the question he said he couldn’t bear to go down those stairs and up again.

  By the way, we never did find the house. We spent at least an hour scouring the area: it must be here, just round that corner, where that tree is, or rather no, next to the tobacconist’s. He hadn’t brought the address with him, of course, because he thought he knew the way. The public phone boxes were either occupied or vandalised. By the time we found one the line was engaged, our mother having an endless conversation with someone. But she wouldn’t have been able to open Father’s locked drawers to find the address anyway. We turned round towards the raggedy market because Fülöp remembered that the female comrade helped out here in the afternoon, earning a little extra income to supplement her pension. We asked the stallholders but they stubbornly denied all knowledge of her. I was dead on my feet by then but he wouldn’t give up. On the way to the underpass a nice gypsy guy from Salgótarján sold us a four-piece set of enamel saucepans that, Fülöp was immediately convinced, was the set of Mother’s dreams. (I cannot begin to describe to you the face she pulled when we arrived with our booty.) While we discussed the incomparable workmanship of the enamel works at Bonyhád, Father busily gathered information about political and economic conditions in Salgótarján, the life story of the vendor, the condition of his housing and the fate of his children. The only reason he didn’t get round to having the man sign his Party enrolment statement was that we were getting very cold. On the way home in the metro we leaned against each other panting under the weight of the saucepans. ‘Well,’ Fülöp remarked, ‘at least we haven’t completely wasted our time.’ ‘Oh absolutely not,’ I answered, exhausted.

  Our other adventures were not quite as colourful as this. The fact is, all the tests have proved negative. We’re coming back at the end of June. Hold out till then!

  Love,

  Y

  P.S. Yesterday we went to a concert at the very barracks-like conservatoire in Geneva. Márta and György Kurtág played Bach, Bartók and some of their own compositions in between. I was quite blown away by that heavenly flow of music when suddenly the motif of ‘The Ballad of Borbála Angoli’ emerged: ‘her lovely slender waist had thickened’. I simply burst into tears.

  My dear Miki,

  If Odysseus is the archetype of the European soul we’re all doomed. Odysseus learns nothing. After twenty years of adversity and suffering he returns to Ithaca not a whit different from how he left it, just as ruthless, vain and greedy as before. The first thing he does is to massacre everyone and would have immediately set about more bloodshed if Pallas Athene hadn’t intervened. No doubt Odysseus is wily, curious and tenacious, but he is driven by nothing more than ambition and a desire to win. He never understands anything. Even his visit to his mama in the underworld is futile: her warnings go in one ear and out the other. That’s not even to mention his skewed values and relationships. How can someone who has tricked an
d betrayed everyone he has ever met demand loyalty?

  I far prefer Gilgamesh. In the beginning he is as ruthless and vain as Odysseus, but on his journey he encounters friendship, love and death and so he changes. By the time the story has ended it is a man’s eyes we are looking into, someone whose gaze, even at a distance of three thousand years, sends cold shivers up our spines. Or my spine at least.

  Hugs,

  Y

  Third

  On the way to the hospital, while sitting on the metro and searching in my bag for a bottle of water or something to read, I came across my camera. ‘How did this get here?’ I wondered, though my backpack was so full I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d happened to fish a kangaroo out of it.