‘Look over there, there it is!’ the farmer cried and pointed to the black water swirling at the bottom of the slope. I didn’t understand what he was telling us, having been struggling with Australian pronunciation this last two weeks. My friend cried out excitedly.
‘Yes, yes! There! I see it! I’ve never seen one in the wild.’
‘Me neither, though I’ve been working the land for years,’ the man replied.
I carefully slid down the slope a little way and, once they explained what I was looking for, I finally caught sight of it. A duck-billed platypus was swimming round and round. It was as if now, just as the Earth was preparing to sink into that cold, bubbling water, something had risen out of the deep well of years like a silent invitation to return to the swirling dark ancestral matter where the major issues of creation had not yet been settled, to work its humble way back to a place where no terrible mistakes had yet been made and where anything was possible, where the duck-billed platypus was not one of evolution’s blind alleys but a promising line of development that, had we followed it, might have led not to this ever bleaker, ever less forgiving world but to another, more hopeful place. While I was lost in these thoughts, watching the water, Ági and the farmer must have been discussing ways of rescuing the lost creature, because they were bidding each other a cheery goodbye, and then we set out back to the house. Once inside, we put on dry clothes, made a fire, brewed some tea and I was just enjoying the way my multicoloured socks could slide so easily over the wooden floor when the phone rang. Good God, Gigi is dead, I whispered to myself in fright.
The day before the funeral the rain stopped. The military were dropping sandbags from helicopters to make the main roads passable again. My friends made sure I could get on to the first departing train. The route back was bare and grey. Arriving in Sydney I followed instructions and hopped into a taxi, muddy as I was, and sped towards the Jewish cemetery. I arrived to see a tall, bearded man in a hat busily rocking back and forth, singing something.
‘How did you manage it?’ asked Éva when she embraced me. I shrugged uncomprehendingly and melted into the black mass of mourners.
One morning, almost twenty years after that summer of water and sorrow, I received a letter from Éva. The big padded envelope contained a weathered yellow school notebook containing some poems and diary extracts found after Gigi’s death. I opened it carefully then quickly closed it again, and sat for a while in the messy room, clutching the envelope to my breast, full of gratitude and terror. We should have already gone out with the children to make our Wednesday morning visit to the pool, but I sat there on the faded red sofa as if frozen to the spot, staring into space.
‘Come here for a moment, kids,’ I said eventually.
The children stopped playing with their Lego and sat down next to me. I opened the notebook.
‘Can you read this?’ I asked.
We started to read slowly, syllable by syllable. We noted how this long dead, ill-fated woman curved her ‘k’s and looped her capital ‘B’s and ‘E’s between the faint guidelines of the book.
Slow-ly the in-fin-ite days rum-ble past
Each with its suf-fer-ing worse than the last
Out there is sum-mer or sun-shine or rain?
Here, even i-cy cold can’t freeze the pain …
Gigi’s words of grief were pronounced by my two cheerful, carefree, well-nourished children, as far away from the place to which the memory was attached as they were from the other place where these words were committed to paper, understanding probably less than half of what they read, but reading the words again and again, delighted when they at last made sense of them. At this moment, Gigi stepped out of the mists of mortality and walked back into our lives. For here were two children, blood of her blood, who could recite her words perfectly.
It was hard to sleep in the madness of the days preceding the operation. Once night fell and time was no longer crammed with things to do, the shadows of anxiety crept out of hiding. One sleepless night I was looking out from the balcony. I saw the cars parked in the street below, the stray black dog stealing along the pavement, the withering chestnut tree in front of the flat and the sky bright with stars on a mild night. I tried to imagine my father on his creaky iron bed in hospital and wondered what he was thinking. Was he stuffed full of tranquillisers or was he awake, looking over the dark hospital yard trying to guess the future?
As the delicate currents of air drifted around me I recalled a sleepy Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t remember quite where, but in a Mediterranean city somewhere. I was wandering the empty streets as usual when I heard someone playing the ‘Internationale’ on a cracked trumpet behind half-closed windows. The tune crept into my ear with a sad, ironic nostalgia. How often had my father sung it happily at a May Day parade, accompanied by hearty colleagues, while our small, dedicated group pounded our way down Népköztársaság Road and Váci Street clutching the red flags lent to us by the union, bellowing, ‘The worker’s fist is made of steel/It deals the blows it has to deal!’ At which my father’s eyes would sparkle with pride, even though Váci Street was quite deserted and did not look as though it was trembling at the thought of our iron fists. Only the few foreign tourists we passed looked up in panic: ‘What’s going on here? We thought demonstrations were banned under the communist dictatorship!’
It was on one of those sleepless July nights before my father died that it first occurred to me how anachronistic those strident May Day parades already were by the middle of the 1960s, and how well they symbolised my father’s relationship with time. My father lived in his own time capsule. He was habitually late, not only because he was slow and obstinately preferred to stick to every detail of his normal routine, from the ritual washing to the stuffing full of his briefcase, but because he never wanted to acknowledge that there were other perfectly scientific ways beyond his own subjective method of apportioning time. According to one blood-curdling anecdote, even on 19 March 1944, the day the Germans occupied Hungary, he was still trying to raise subscriptions for Népszava, the trade union paper, instead of saving his skin, and he paid no attention at all to the startled, aghast, outraged expressions that greeted his efforts. My father did not want to get old, not just because he feared death but because he felt that the great mission of ensuring that humanity was on the right road still lay before him. It was no use Great Uncle Reality sending him his most faithful maidservant, Time; my father would not admit the uninvited visitor into his house.
I returned to my room and tried to sleep. Thoughts of things to do the next day, of the kind of night my father must have spent, and the next chapter of his book kept going round my head. I couldn’t get over that bloody manuscript. It was as if I were afraid that, by constantly missing the point, he was losing his unique last chance, that his fate was being sealed for ever. But after all, I reassured myself, growing steadily sleepier, there is nothing unusual in this. As people age, they often tend to return to the faith of their ancestors. That was his lot. If we could find the cassette player, he could carry on working in the morning and we’d progress faster. And if Dr Cserjés wears a blue tie tomorrow then my father will survive, I heard a spell cross my mind before falling asleep.
Only years after my father’s death did it occur to me to think again about the ‘Internationale’. The fifth line says:’Let’s wipe the slate clean of the past’. Might we all be victims of a gross semantic misunderstanding, like Michelangelo’s Moses with his horns? Was the future delayed by several decades because our wise leaders, as is their wont, were taking the ‘Internationale’ literally and wanted to clear away the past with bulldozers, hammers and fists of iron?
My maternal grandfather worked as coach-driver for the local landowner. He had a deep contempt for manual labour and avoided school at all costs. He did, however, understand horses, could talk to the gentry, and loved sitting in the driver’s seat in his big shiny boots. Beside horses and drink he had another passion: the ruining of tender-hearted mai
dens. Having filched from the poor girls their one valuable possession, he quickly moved on to seek new prey. And that might have been all right if he had confined himself to seducing only young women of his own class, but my insatiable grandfather was not averse to picking flowers from the gardens of gentlefolk, too. This was roughly at the time when, according to the terms of the first Vienna Award of 1938, Hungary re-pocketed the Northern Hungarian Highlands, in what is now Slovakia, and my grandfather’s seed was affectionately stowed not only in my grandmother’s and her sister’s gardens but also in that of his landowning employer’s daughter. When the situation came to light, the indignant representative of the landowning classes, instead of delighting in the potential increase to the Hungarian nation, grabbed a hunting rifle and set out to address the disgrace. My pregnant grandmother was working in the kitchen when she heard the squire bellowing in the dining room about how he was going to shoot the scoundrel like the dog he was. Grandmother leapt through the kitchen window and rushed in panic to the stables to warn Grandfather of the danger. Grandfather made his escape in time while the squire took out his fury on the horses, promising to take care that Grandfather would never be allowed to come near any respectable house in the whole of Szabolcs-Szatmár County. And that was the end of my grandfather’s brilliant career, the consequence of which was, naturally, borne by my grandmother and the four bonny children already running round the yard.
The family was driven out to Bokor, a farmstead outside the village, where a wealthy peasant was prepared to shelter them in a small room attached to the stable, in exchange for Grandfather taking care of the horses. It was from here that my mother would set out barefoot to the primary school in the village, and after school, as the family’s main breadwinner, to work as a cleaner. My grandfather became even more insufferable, if such a thing were possible. Leaving aside the fact that he was obliged to share one room smelling of horse shit with his entire family, there was not even a woman on the horizon. He’d go into the village to drink, generally when he knew the gentry were absent, and when he returned, his belt tight around his waist, he used his brilliantly polished black boots to kick the youngest child who was sitting on her potty under the table or to slash around with a whip at the rest of them. This untenable situation was brought to an end when Hungary, the ever more ardent and insatiable ally of Hitler’s Germany, occupied Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. In order to ensure the continuity of imperial politics and to disempower the Czechs, to whom the region had previously belonged and who were considered unreliable, the government offered a great number of official posts to Hungarian citizens in the newly reoccupied zone. It was in his regular hangout, the inn of Jóska Balog, that my grandfather was informed that a Hungarian could live like a gentleman among Ruthenians. With the help of his drinking companions he scraped together an application for the post of ‘imperial highway cleaner’. A state position! Steady wages! Bicycle provided! A black uniform with braided insignia! For the first time in his life, my grandfather, who was not the dreamy sort, found himself in dreamland. In the few weeks that he waited for an answer, even his domestic violence abated and the village lilies could sway untroubled in the breeze. It was as if ambition – or, to put it more kindly, the hope of a better life – could overcome his natural bloodlust.
Eventually, when he could no longer bear to wait, he strolled over to the local council offices to enquire about the fate of his application. With his big shiny boots and his cap screwed up in his hand, he hung about in the corridor until an official took pity on him and sent him to the right room. Behind a heavy oak desk piled high with documents and files sat a clerk with whey-coloured eyes, his hair licked down, his elbows leather-patched. Grandfather cleared his throat and gave a cautious cough as he did whenever he was in the presence of those of higher social status. On his third try the clerk raised his head and fixed his whey-coloured eyes on Grandfather.
‘What do you want?’ he barked.
‘I’ve come about my application,’ stammered Grandfather.
‘What’s your name?’
‘András Herceg.’
The whey-eyed clerk immersed himself in his work again. It was an eternity before he pulled a sheet of paper from the vast pile on the left-hand side of the desk. Grandfather’s heart was beating as he spotted the masterpiece they had concocted in the inn.
‘András Herceg?’ the clerk barked again, looking my grandfather up and down.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Rejected,’ the clerk replied and threw the paper back on the top of the pile, his licked hair glimmering.
‘Rejected? But why?’ whispered my grandfather, white as a sheet.
The clerk didn’t even look at him, but since Grandfather continued standing there he eventually picked up the sheet of paper again, clearly nauseated by it, as if it were a toad he was holding. He ran his eye over the notes scrawled on it, then said:
‘Because your wife is a non-Aryan.’
According to the Second Jewish Law, passed in 1939, people applying to do state work had to be able to demonstrate two generations back that their ancestors were of pure blood. My grandmother was nothing like the rest of her family: her hair was strawberry blond, her skin freckled and white as milk. Village gossip had it that her mother was an illegitimate Jewish child who, in order to avoid disgrace to her family, had been placed in a home for foundlings, and that Grandmother herself was the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish landlord with whom her mother had been in service in a neighbouring village. What is certain is that when the documents were checked my grandfather could not produce a single christening certificate relating to his wife’s family.
‘Of course she’s Hungarian,’ my grandfather replied, emboldened. ‘Both her parents were Hungarian. There must be some mistake here, sir.’
‘She may be Hungarian but she is not Aryan. You have to have proper proof,’ the superior man with the slicked hair replied.
The air froze in silence. A fly kept banging against the window pane again and again as if it couldn’t comprehend the fact that there was no escape.
‘What does it mean, “Aryan”?’ spluttered grandfather eventually. Little streams of sweat were running down the back of his strong, sun-tanned neck.
‘It means not Jewish, you idiot. Now get out of here. I’m busy.’
Grandfather made his way home as though he’d got dead drunk at Jóska Balog’s inn. Back home my grandmother was in the front yard hanging out to dry the ragged slips of cloth that served as the youngest boy’s nappy. When the children spotted their father approaching over the ploughed fields, they dashed into the back yard. The way he walked meant trouble, they could tell. Without a word, my grandfather pushed my grandmother into the room, swayed in after her and collapsed on a chair. He was so angry he couldn’t even get the words out. Then, with heavy steps, he strode out into the yard, took the rope used for raising the bucket from the well, carefully wound it round his fist, came back in with it and started to hit my grandmother. She hung on to the remaining scraps of cloth in her hand as tightly as she could. When she eventually fell to the ground Grandfather found his voice at last.
‘Jewish whore! Jewish whore!’ he kept bellowing in rhythm. Each syllable was accompanied by a blow. Through the window the petrified children watched as their father went about trying to kill their mother. When he was finally exhausted he sunk to the chair and, gasping, let the rope slip from his hand. He wiped the beads of sweat from his brow, gave Grandmother one last hearty kick and set off back to Jóska Balog’s inn to rest.
Once she came round from her blood-soaked state, my grandmother opened her fingers, which seemed to have been stuck together, and slowly let the damp rags slide to the ground. It was the first time in her life she wasn’t in a hurry. And the first time she felt she had had enough. Her parents had brought her up from the cradle to believe that one must put up with whatever life offers because only the incense-smelling God that lives in the Greek Orthodox church has any say in human affairs. But
as she lay beaten on the floor, her bones aching, my grandmother thought she had gone as far as she could. She was no longer ready to get up in the morning, her every muscle tense, and toil day and night in a smoky room, in the fields, at the master’s house, beside her husband who rolled on top of her, smelling of pálinka, even as the still-suckling infant bellowed in the corner of the room, for no other reason than that more, ever hungry and insatiable infants should be born into this world, to join the other recent lives equally fit for a beating. She had had enough of charring, of hunger; of endless work, work, work, without a break and with no product; of trudging barefoot through muddy fields, of the all-enveloping damp smell of poverty where the sun never shines. As she lay on the cool floor and half-opened her swollen eyes, she saw a strange light glimmering through the small dirty window. The thought that this might spell the end of everything filled her with an unfamiliar lightness of being. Nothing mattered any more, not even the five hungry pairs of eyes staring at her through the glass. It was as if she were already elsewhere, somewhere where there was no love, no responsibility, no pain and no fear. For the first time in her life my grandmother felt she was a full citizen of the empire of infinite freedom beyond the window: she was the mistress of her own fate. She struggled, groaning, to her feet and dragged herself over to the chair where her husband had left the rope. With slow, firm movements, moaning occasionally with pain, she took the rope, threw it over the inner roof beam and made a knot. The children huddled together to watch.
‘Is she going to have a swing?’ wondered little Mihály jealously.
He had seen swings with white-skirted young women rising and falling against the sky behind the gates of the landlord’s garden, when my mother took him along with her when she went cleaning. My not-quite-ten-year-old mother suspected that what her mother was doing was not about swings, but she could not move for terror. Mrs Fehér, the farmer’s wife, was just returning from the grocer’s when she noticed the Herceg children all crowded round the stable window. When she looked in she clapped her hands and rushed, like a lunatic, for the shears.
The Summer My Father Died Page 9