‘What about taking some pictures of each other?’ I asked my father one afternoon, trying to sound relaxed.
He immediately agreed. We took our places on the bed, him first then me, and we snapped each other. Despite the great heat in the room, I shivered. Click-clack, click-clack. My father in striped pyjamas, looking very thin, his head shaved, suddenly stared into the lens, absolutely clear-eyed. He is a convict on the run. Click-clack, click-clack. I am in a summer dress that has slipped to one side, my hair is a mess and I am gazing ahead with a confused expression. My eyes look questioning. The answer was in his eyes, but neither of us wanted to see it.
One bright May day, sometime near the end of the 1970s, two of Szera’s surviving relatives – my great-aunt Gigi and great-uncle Harry – arrived without notice at the newly opened Forum Hotel in Budapest. Harry’s twin, Larry, had only just died and his death probably played no small part in the others’ decision to search out their mother’s grave in Hungary. The twins were inseparable, it was said. They looked almost exactly like each other except that Harry (or Larry) was right-handed while the other, Larry (or Harry), was left-handed. They were lively boys of a bohemian bent, both exceptionally talented at table tennis. They even played competitively for a while, performing in exhibition matches in Europe: spectators found the sight of two handsome boys knocking the ball to and fro irresistibly attractive. In the spring of 1938 they were happy to respond to an invitation to play from over the ocean when they discovered that a blustering bully of an apprentice house painter called Schicklgruber had marched into the gracious city of Vienna where they had spent their carefree youth, and wanted to install a new régime there. The twins decided they would not return home for a while and, after a couple of years of being blown here and there, they settled in Australia, where, owing to the boundless opportunities offered by the New World, their own sound business sense and the ban on alcohol in the USA that made their strong, self-produced, Hungarian-style spirits highly popular in the ships that passed by, they quickly made it rich. It was not until the early 1970s that they returned to Hungary. They looked up my father but the meeting turned out to be somewhat on the cool side. Of course, since my two uncles were the very embodiment of capitalism, they couldn’t understand my father’s feelings: he paid them a courtesy visit at the luxurious Gellért Hotel and gave them a lot of useful tourist information, after which, as far as he was concerned, duty was done.
This time, however, Harry was accompanied by his wife, a refugee from Austria, and Gigi – that is, Aunt Giselle, my grandmother’s favourite sister and my father’s first love from when he was a little boy. Gigi must have been in her late seventies, but she was still a strikingly beautiful woman. It probably never occurred to her enchanted admirers, observing her drift astonishedly past the newly renovated palaces of the inner city, marvel at the children parading past her on their Sunday walk, or laugh with the waiters while ordering her cold cherry soup, from what depths this high-spirited and witty lady had emerged to return. She was like a mirror to the beauty around her.
Gigi was three when her mother died giving birth to the twins. She must have been a bright, lively little girl; perhaps she retained to the last some faint memory of the busy comings and goings of a house suddenly stricken by an incomprehensible catastrophe. But she clearly remembered the heavy silence that descended on the hall, and the sense of loss brought about by the absence of the soft, gentle body of her mother. Despite the urging of his friends and relatives, my great-grandfather had no wish to marry again and brought up nine children alone, with no more help than a solitary housekeeper. Once Gigi was a little older she would often tiptoe into his study, put her slender arms about his neck and read a little of the book open on his desk. Next to the book there was the picture of a woman of about forty gazing back at the photographer with a sad, polite little smile. Gigi had long forgotten those soft almond-coloured eyes and the dark, heavily tumbling hair; she knew only the stories told about her mother, and the tight feeling she faintly felt in her stomach, though she couldn’t precisely tell whether the sadness was caused by the unknown woman, her father, or something else. She pressed her face into her father’s tobacco-smelling beard and worked her arms around his neck as if afraid that a storm might be brewing over the fields, one that might wipe out everything around her. Then the pair of them stood up, slightly embarrassed, and went about their business, the man to oversee the workers in the fields and the girl to tend to her younger brothers.
The storm arrived some thirty years later, taking almost everything with it: the estate, the house, the books, the photographs, and the family. The only thing Gigi was left with was the tight sense in her stomach that there were still people to bury. She was over seventy when suddenly, out of the mists of time, emerged a man who had been through similarly shattering experiences, and whom she might have loved anew. But his heart literally stopped at such a prospect of happiness. Gigi accepted the role of mourner with a veteran’s resilience.
‘Do you think it strange that a person can fall in love at seventy or more? That she can cry like an adolescent? After everything that has happened?’ she asked me thoughtfully in her hospital bed.
From the lofty heights of near thirty I did not find it at all strange. There was nothing in anything she said that struck me as strange. But this conversation was to take place much later. At our first meeting in Budapest, when I was in my early twenties, I followed Gigi about everywhere, as if under a spell. I clung to her every word, her every breath: I was like a plant seeking rain. And I saw my father too was under some spell when he was near her. His usual reserve in society melted away. Instead of a comradely handshake, he embraced her and the other members of the exiled family, laid aside political differences, showered them with countless clumsy tokens of attentiveness, from signed copies of his works exploring the deep structure of really-existing socialism to bottles of the finest Hungarian spirits; in other words, he did everything he could to be a warm and generous host. But I saw how, at the same time, he was doing his best to elbow aside the past, trying not to recognise in this delicate and scented old lady the beautiful woman of his youth whom he had once chosen, instead of his mother, as the woman of his dreams. There was just the one occasion, I think, when by chance he was left alone with Gigi in the hotel lobby. They were quietly sitting next to each other on the soft velvet settle, my father probably feverishly searching for some harmless topic of conversation, when her graceful wrinkled hands stroked his face and her eyes searched whatever lay behind the awkwardly smiling eyes and those dry but still splendidly curved lips whispered meditatively:
‘Phil, dear little Phil.’
No one ever addressed my father like this. We didn’t immediately know who she was talking about. It was still more incomprehensible that he answered. We didn’t know he was called by this name in childhood; we doubted he ever had a childhood. As far as we were aware, his story started when his wicked mother left him at that home in Szeged and continued with his admission into the steely ranks of the workers’ movement. And no one there ever called him ‘little Phil’.
When the family delegation led by Gigi first appeared, I am sure my father was frozen with terror rather than full of the euphoria of reunion. He had the survivor’s infallible instinct for danger and immediately took the necessary steps to forestall it. It is true that he behaved impeccably whenever he was around them, but he would always claim that he had too much work on and hide behind the insurmountable walls of his study. When it came to meals, he would either arrive late or leave early and, if I remember right, he even managed to organise an official visit to the provinces while they were there. He hid away whenever he was able, as if he had an unpleasant skin disease he didn’t want the others to see. That disease was the past that, despite iron curtains, despite all his precautions and attempts at obscurity, managed to break in on him from across the ocean and politely knock at his door in the figure of an entrancing old woman. And since my father was always of
ficially away, I took time off from my university studies to spend a couple of days with my unknown relatives. I walked along the Danube embankment with Gigi, though when I noticed that she was shivering I put my arms around her and gently guided her to a side street, away from the river whose waters had flown red the last time she had seen it, so many Jews had been shot and pushed into it by the gangs of the Arrow Cross. I stumbled across the still untidy yard of the great Dohány Street synagogue with them; I pressed into Gigi’s hands copies of Miklós Radnóti’s prose memoir Under Gemini, which talks about his mother and his twin brother (who died at birth), and his Bori Notebook, the volume of his great last poems found after he was killed on a death march.
My mother and I took our distinguished visitors out to their village of origin where my great-grandfather – the enlightened Zionist and democrat, faithful Jew and proud Hungarian patriot – once, so I was astonished to discover, owned an estate. We wandered, the three old folk, my mother and I, among the neglected Jewish cemetery’s leaning, moss-covered stones to find the object of their journey, the grave of my great-grandmother who had died giving birth to the twins.
‘Kup-fer-stein Ce-cí-li-a.’ Gigi spelled out the Hebrew name in a trance, her long, ringed fingers stroking the stone as if it were alive.
My poor father never suspected that, just as he was carefully moving into the fringe world of underground resistance, a timed explosive device was being planted in his warm and secure home. Gigi quickly discovered that she had found a keen and faithful listener in me. Since her own young son, along with all children of similar age, had been sent to the ovens in Auschwitz, and since the members of the family born in Australia after the war neither understood Hungarian nor showed any great interest in the confused and bloody past of their parents who had fled from Europe, Gigi felt that she had to tell the family story to someone before it completely vanished into the mists of time. It was not that I was the person most fit to hear it, it was simply that I was the nearest to hand. My sister was abroad legally, with a passport and official permission. There were no other descendants. I, for my part, was enormously grateful to receive this precious heritage. After almost twenty-five years of groping around in the dark, suddenly I had something tangible to hold on to: there was a grave with Hebrew letters, there were names, dates and stories that were part of my own past, of what I myself was. I pushed the scrappy yellow school notebook in which every night I scribbled down everything Gigi told me in front of my father.
‘This is what Gigi said. Is it true?’
It was true. True, true, and true. It was all true. Without meaning to, Gigi had knocked a hole in the carefully constructed and a hundred-times reinforced fortress that my father had built to protect himself from a great deal of pain and uncomfortable truth. At the same time, she was putting yet another nail in my father’s coffin. Not that the facts would have changed his attitude towards reality. When he died, twenty years later, he still could not bring himself to say that his mother had not rejected him but had tried to save him, and that it was not because of his socialist beliefs but because he was Jewish that his father had been transported to the labour camp. That the battle he had fought all his life, neglecting everything and everyone for it, was not the battle for which he had first staked his life, but the direct opposite.
A couple of years after our first dramatic and euphoric encounter, Gigi invited me to Australia to meet the other survivors and those born after the war. I found her in a hospital bed on her last legs. Her liver-spotted, ever elegant hands gently slid into mine and she shook her head in incredulity when one afternoon I arrived with a portable tape recorder. I pulled a cassette of Katalin Karády songs from my pocket and popped it into the machine. In Hungary we had entered an era of gradual liberalisation that no one suspected would lead to the collapse of the régime. Karády, a diva who had been at the height of her fame between the two wars, was no longer a disgraced collaborator, someone banished from national memory, but a souvenir of the tolerated past, to become fifteen years later a hero of national resistance. Before my Australian trip I recorded on cassette an album of her greatest hits that had just been released and threw it into my suitcase when I was packing.
‘Do you remember this? Do you know it?’ I asked Gigi while listening to that low, velvety voice in the private room fully supplied with all the comforts, a room, as I was later to discover, quite close to the one in which my unknown grandmother had died so many years before. Gigi gave a loud laugh. She had a week left of life. Her head turned to one side, her eyes half-closed, with a dreamy smile she sang along with the cassette: ‘Where is that summer, where is that old love of mine?’
A few days later she fell into a coma. She stopped reacting to the outside world, and started to communicate only with her inner one. I sat in a chair in the corner of the room, silently observing the peculiar dance of unknown friends and relatives as they made their way on tiptoe to the bed and out again, nodding to them as they left. I sat hugging the wall and listening to the cascade of words as her life unrolled like a film. I heard her exchanging words with her dead mother; with her father who sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, stood at the window of the dining room and wept for his late wife; her young son, who was dispatched to his grandmother in the country in order to ensure his safety, but who was then packed in a wagon and sent to Poland; her siblings, some of whom vanished into the gas chambers while others fell prey to sickness; her beloved first husband, who avoided deportation by joining the resistance in the hills of Slovakia, only to have to escape the pogrom after the war in the small highland town to which he returned to search for his deported family, but who then died in Australia, on the operating table, as a result of a surgical error before he could begin a new life in a new country; the second husband who, having survived everything, one day simply gave up on life. Even my never-encountered grandparents appeared in the film of her life; she seemed to have failed to convince my famously obstinate grandfather of something. I listened with bated breath. I trembled in case the stream of words should come to a stop and we should suddenly find ourselves suspended in the cold air, ‘perched on the branch of nothing’. I knew I was lucky to hear it all, but I was also inconsolably sad because I knew she would die and that I would never see her again, and that the past would finally vanish with her, a past to which she was the last credible witness; because there was no way for me to see through her words; her ever more broken speech would not lead me towards those whom I could never meet; I could not even catch a glimpse of their faces: they were all about to disappear for ever.
‘What is she saying?’ the sympathetic young doctor in charge of my great-aunt asked when he dropped in.
‘She is remembering,’ I whispered.
‘In what language?’ the doctor asked.
‘Hungarian,’ I replied, but my throat was too dry to say more.
It was as if the language, whose infinite beauty we only discovered when we were thousands of miles from the country where everyone on the street speaks it naturally, had become a last refuge where Gigi could hide one last time, a refuge in which I crouched next to her, along with her best friend Éva, who was herself at the edge of madness. Having only recently attended her own husband’s funeral, Éva still visited Gigi every day and we hugged and consoled each other in our secret language before she left to avoid being crushed completely by this second inevitable blow.
One day Éva took me for lunch in an elegant waterside restaurant. We took our places at the immaculate damask-covered table and Éva ordered some fish speciality. We sat in the calm sunshine of what, to me, was an unfamiliar city in an unknown corner of the world, the waiters gliding elegantly this way and that as if on skates. The chinking of glasses and the purr of the coffee machine blended gently with the murmur of the regular guests. Éva was telling me, in choice Transylvanian terms, what it was like to be on the death march from Auschwitz to Breslau. The exquisite fish dish tasted like a single, under-differentiated salty
mass. I put on my dark glasses, stared at the water and kept asking myself: ‘God, dear God, how could anyone survive this?’
When the words dried on Gigi’s cracked lips and only her body was left to wrestle with the angel of death, the family sent me off on a sightseeing trip. After an unaccountably long train journey, of which all I recall is that everything was flat and grey, I ended up at the home of a friend from my youth, Ági, who had once lived in a two-room partitioned flat on a dull housing estate and used to be one of the best teachers of Hungarian literature in town. In Australia she had become a happy mother of four, lived in a bright, spacious house with a large garden, and was at that time learning to grow medicinal herbs. Books of poetry were piled on the bedside table. We looked around the garden, admired the horses, then took a stroll in the village, down the paths squeezed between the large, clean, bright estates where everyone greeted us with a cheery good day.
On my second day the rain came. It poured and it poured as if it intended to go on for ever. The children blew off to school while we tramped the fields in rubber boots and heavy waterproof coats watching the water rise, inexorably, it seemed. By the third day the roads were impassable and the estate was cut off from the outside world. There was something comically surreal about sitting enveloped in all that wetness at the other end of the Earth where even the stars were back to front – or might have been had we been able to see them – in a place so remote that I kept forgetting its name, while talking about what happened in Budapest in the summer of 1973. That was when Ági left the country in which we grew up and where, I thought, everyone felt at home.
The next day the pavements disappeared. Now we could only walk on the tops of the banks. When we turned off where the end of the last vegetable garden should have been we found an elderly farmer on the slippery side of the incline. So this was what the local peasants looked like, I told myself.
The Summer My Father Died Page 8