The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  You never know in this life who is likely to present you with a gift. While my other two grandparents, for whom I had always longed in vain, allowed history to cast them out of my life, my spiteful, dumb grandfather made it possible for me to scribble these lines in solitude in Geneva. For it was thanks to his desire for a uniform that my mother did not end up in the ovens or in a roadside ditch. I have no idea how the desire for a black uniform with braided insignia got hold of him. As far as I know, state-employed street cleaners did not wear uniform in the occupied territories. But the desire in itself was enough to ensure that at the most critical stage of the war the family moved to the Sub-Carpathians.

  My grandfather had never forgiven my grandmother for his having been forced into marriage with her. In his youth, when he seduced her in his usual fashion, it never entered his mind to marry the desperately poor servant girl with her dubious background. He must have believed that being in the service of gentry meant he would meet a better class of peasant girl and finally set one foot on the ladder of social betterment. His ambitions were shattered, however, by the landlord for whom he worked as a coach-driver and my grandmother as a housemaid. When the master noticed that hard-working little Juliska’s lovely slender waist had thickened, he bellowed at her until she confessed who was responsible. At which point he summoned my grandfather and ordered him to marry her. Grandfather did not dare disobey the master. And that is how my mother was afforded a couple of months later, the blessed circumstances of a marriage sanctioned by both God and society.

  I don’t know if the gossip circulating in the village about Grandmother’s dubious family background would have been enough to expedite the process of deportation, but who knows what might have happened if they had stayed in Hungary? With what we know of his character and political sympathies, Grandfather would certainly have joined the fascist Arrow Cross. But even if he had avoided the quagmire of politics, the war years’ dehumanising turmoil would not have been kind to his dependants. But now that his application had got him into serious trouble, Grandfather felt obliged to do something about his wife. Once he had sobered up, his contacts at the inn soon directed him to the local registrar of births and deaths, who, for a certain consideration, was prepared to line his pockets by modifying the records and producing the necessary documents. A couple of weeks later my grandfather packed the family’s entire belongings on to a cheap open cart and set out on the long eastward journey.

  Thanks to the complex windings of fate, both my mother and my father, whose families lived in neighbouring villages in Szabolcs-Szatmár County, found themselves in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Their routes differed, of course: my father’s family fled there to find refuge in an ever more threatened liberal democracy, while my grandfather arrived as conqueror, to play his part as best he could in the destruction of the very same liberal democracy. In the end there was to be no braided black uniform but, up to the arrival of the Red Army in the autumn of 1944, he was proud to wear the tin badge of pre-First World War Hungary sewn to his cap, showing its four rivers (the Danube, the Tisza, the Drava and the Sava) and heraldic three peaks (the Tatra, Matra and Fatra). On her first trip abroad my mother too had some undoubtedly important experiences. For the first time she saw something of the world beyond the mud-caked poverty of her birthplace. She saw the once-affluent towns of Ungvár (Uzhgorod), Munkács (Mukachevo) and Nagyszőlős (Vynohradiv) where now and then she could catch the last sparkling splinter of light of their multi-ethnic pasts. She learned Ruthenian, went to a different kind of school and saw how it was possible to live differently. And what was most important, she witnessed how her best friends, the two pigtailed Frankel sisters, were driven on to cattle wagons. But she didn’t have to stumble on with them.

  Long before I ever asked my mother why her father kept shouting, ‘Jewish whore!’ as he beat my grandmother, we were always teasing her that she was a real Yiddishe momme, because every morning she ate matzos for breakfast, never found the objects of our love quite good enough for us, and wasn’t satisfied until she managed to nag the best possible qualifications out of us. She went with her best friend to visit Israel and was received there like a native; she wept her way through reams of Holocaust literature and made better poppyseed and apple cake than anyone could buy from the famous Fröhlich pattiseries. But I am sure that not for one moment did she ever stop to consider whether all this was ‘Jewish’ or not. It wasn’t a relevant question for her. For my mother, being determined consciousness, as she learned once and for ever at a Marxist-Leninist mind-broadening seminar. To be more precise about this, what she learned there confirmed what she already knew. It is quite certain that her consciousness was formed by the unambiguous lessons of the conditions under which she grew up, that is to say servant-class poverty, although her ancestors on her mother’s side were likely to have been of Jewish origin. In her childhood it was the basic language of poverty she spoke, in which the only matter of importance was the short-term justice of your next meal. What proportion of my mother’s complex being is down to individual character, childhood experience or unknown genetic heritage, it is impossible to say and it is not even interesting. We cannot know how she came by her great generous spirit, her thirst for knowledge and her gift of laughter, but we are infinitely grateful for all of them.

  How far being determines consciousness, which being does the determining, or indeed whether it is the other way round – that consciousness produces being – naturally, such details did not disturb the quick-fix seminar’s successful gallop to the Great Truths. Though it was by no means a simple matter, even in my parents’ personal lives. When my mother, at the age of sixteen, arrived at her first Party school, she couldn’t tell the time from a clock, didn’t know how to eat with a knife and fork and had never slept in her own bed on her own sheets. Beside the essential concepts of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism she also had to learn the basics of everyday civilised existence, and learn them so impossibly fast that no one would notice. Her studies proved so successful that in the next fifty years that she spent with my father, who by then managed to wipe away all memory of genteel behaviour, she could trade banter with him, enquiring of him with a happy maternal smile: ‘Let’s see now, which of us had a proper upbringing with a room of one’s own?’

  The second minor point concerning consciousness-determined being is that people are conditioned not only by circumstances of which sometimes there is no outward sign at all, but by the stuff out of which they are made. My mother’s family on both sides came from the lowest depths of rural poverty. But while misery on her mother’s side led to a desperate clinging together, her father’s branch were like hungry wolves and lost no opportunity to go for one another’s throats. My mother’s maternal grandfather was a day labourer on a tobacco farm. At weekends, when he went to visit his grandchildren, he’d climb the roadside white mulberry tree and fill his cap so he might surprise them with a little gift. If he found no wild fruit he’d bring his zither and play music for them so they might forget their hunger. Mother’s grandparents were ‘in love’: an expression my mother first heard when neighbours were discussing how her grandmother, who was twenty years younger than her husband, died soon after him, of grief.

  Meanwhile, on her father’s side it was all ruthlessness, hatred, bad blood and rampant pride. When the family returned home after the war, they were greeted along the street by the sight of the corpse of one of her uncles, frozen in blood. The villagers whispered that he had lost his wife at cards with some of the liberating Soviet troops and because she was unwilling to go with them, they stabbed him. According to another version he was the victim of a simple bar-room brawl. What is, however, certain is that my mother’s favourite brother, five-year-old Jancsi, died of diphtheria because Grandfather’s brother wouldn’t allow them to use his cart to take the child to the doctor. Uncle Gyurka became a relatively wealthy peasant by forcing his own parents and brothers into service. He wouldn’t lend the cart because they couldn’t pay his expe
nses. It was no use little Jancsi screaming out in fever:‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’ Uncle Gyurka remained unmoved. My mother stopped her ears and ran to the neighbouring village for some medicine. In their own village the doctor and the dispensing chemist, both of whom were Jewish, had been taken away. By the time she returned, her legs scratched and sore, with the medicine clutched in her sweaty hands, my grandmother was already out in the courtyard repeatedly bowing over the dead child. For years my mother kept hearing his screams. When it came to dividing up the land, when people were forced into collectives, and when the legal system was overhauled ‘in the name of the people’, my mother felt she knew exactly what it was all about. Not to mention the fact that when any child in the family developed a fever, we were immediately rushed off to the doctor.

  My grandmother spent her entire life paying off the debt she owed, on account of her one act of rebellion: defying the incense-scented Greek Orthodox God she had been brought up to love by her parents of such dubious extraction. She was convinced that that was why her youngest child contracted diphtheria and died, why her second daughter gave birth to doomed Siamese twins joined at the head, why her thirty-year-old son died of a heart attack while getting off a long-distance bus, why one of her sons ended up a convict, and why all her children bar one became God-denying pagans. She dressed in black from the moment of her convalescence to the day she died, hoping in this way to forestall any further potential disasters. But despite serving such a harsh life sentence, she was never bitter. Her hands, which were lined with veins thick as tree roots, could produce an endless succession of gorgeous flowers, a thriving vegetable garden, plump doughnuts, suckling pigs and darned socks. She spent every winter at our Németvölgyi Road flat so she wouldn’t have to put up with the cold back in her village. I don’t think she understood much of what her feather-brained Pest granddaughters were blabbering at her. Once, after much rehearsal, we sang her a social realist hit song of the time, ‘Dear Grandma’. She listened through to the end, a little embarrassed, then quickly went out into the kitchen to get on with some work. At the time of the folk-song revival of the 1970s, led by Ferenc Sebő, we tried to preserve something of her store of folk tunes on a tape recorder, but she could only remember some church hymns, intoning them in a thin, reedy voice. We were always begging her to take off her black headscarf so that we might see her long, braided pigtail. She would wave us away in irritation but always gave in eventually. We touched with an almost religious awe the tender white skin under her headscarf, so strangely different from the sunburned and lined skin on her normally visible face. It was as if she were revealing, just for a moment, her secret inner being, one never before seen by anyone else, one that had preserved her untouchable purity.

  Every step Grandmother took was accompanied by a barely audible creak because she squeezed her bunion-lined feet into high-laced shoes so they wouldn’t hurt so much. It was the first sound I heard when she entered our room on those still dark winter dawns. Every morning she prepared egg yolk stiffened with sugar so that our days would be sweet and in the evenings she would carefully polish our scuffed shoes so we might be fittingly dressed the following day for the house of learning. Not that the house of learning wrought any particular sense of awe in her, but she respected our family’s peculiar notions. She loved my father as though he were her long-lost son and when, ten or so years after my parents were married, she noticed that he was left-handed, she made sure to pray that it should not lead him into trouble. She lived in a world of ancient beliefs, home soil and sheer instinct, ever fearful because the wrath of God might strike her at any time. She rejoiced when it failed to strike. She regarded every freshly appearing seedling, every new chick, anything she managed to cultivate, anything at all that grew that was not beaten down by hail or rain or war, every child that was spared, as a gift. Her generosity knew no bounds because she wanted to show how thankful she was for all these blessings. Her arms and legs were full of knots, her heart was gold and her gaze, even at the age of eighty-five, was as clear as a cloudless sky.

  The summer she died I was barely capable of weeping for her because I’d spent all my tears on another death. At the beginning of that summer my friend Vera had taken the pills that had killed her. I travelled down to the village for my grandmother’s funeral, then returned to Budapest, packed and set off to the other side of the world. Years later, travelling on the number six tram, I noticed another hand just as full of knots as my grandmother’s. I got off, turned down the first side street I came to and hurried on to my business. It was only some minutes later, when I sank down on my haunches to pick up the important documents I had dropped, that I noticed I was crying. There would never again be hands like my grandmother’s hands.

  One day when I came home from school, I found my grandmother doubled up on a kitchen chair.

  ‘What’s the matter, Grandmother? Are you ill?’ I asked.

  She wouldn’t say. Seemingly relieved that now someone was home, she hastened about her tasks again. That made me think she was not ill. She hadn’t turned on the light because she was by herself and it cost money. After a while, as she was polishing something, she stiffened again. She gave me an anxious look, then asked warily:

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘What noise?’ I asked.

  ‘That noise, now.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ I answered reassuringly.

  It was only after some time had passed and she asked again that I realised it was the noise of the lift that frightened her.

  ‘It’s just the lift, Grandmother,’ I said with all the assurance of an enlightened city dweller. ‘You know, the motor that drives the lift up and down.’

  A faint smile of relief passed across her face. I saw she was not entirely convinced, but she drew herself up and started working again. It was only when I recalled the incident decades later that I thought more deeply about it and wondered what memories of terror and exploitation had suddenly surfaced, producing in her something monstrous enough to stop her working, she who never stopped working. I saw her crouched in the corner of the kitchen, a tiny thing, and imagined how great the ancient terror of fire, of storms, of lightning, of all unknown things must have been and how the unpredictable God had constantly to be appeased with handsome gifts. What was worse, I asked myself, the terror of unknown or of known evil?

  Even now I can’t answer that question, but I do remember not laughing at my grandmother then. Despite having all the assurance of an urban elementary school girl, I knew exactly what terror had her by the throat. I had exactly the same howling and trembling animal fear of death. Like my grandmother, I would sit in my room after the lights were switched off, hearing my parents in the next room whispering about the latest political developments, and fix my eyes on the thin line of light under the door and consider how I might avoid death. My parents were of no help in solving that question. My mother stood firm on dialectical materialism, but everything she said only worried me more. My father was unwilling even to discuss the subject. Naturally, never a word was passed about what had happened to him and his family in the war, but neither did he discuss the plane crash at the beginning of the 1960s in which several of his best friends died or, some time later, the suicide of this or that friend or comrade-in-arms. When I mentioned my doubts to my sister her mocking answer was:

  ‘How do you imagine we’d squeeze into this country if everyone from the time of our founder Great King Árpád were still here cluttering up the place?’

  There was no answer to that. I listened to my sister snuffling in her sleep while I lay in despair in my bed trying to come to terms with the powers of the darkness.

  ‘Long live Kennedy!’ I whispered, my throat dry.

  I hoped that my colossal betrayal might wring some pity from the lords of the dark heavens so they might send me to the alternative queue. I couldn’t quite explain to myself why the tyrants of imperialism and their lackeys should be in the realm of the
immortals, but that didn’t matter. For a couple of days after my betrayal my conscience racked me dreadfully. It was perfectly true that no one knew about it and that the sky didn’t fall in, but I was still very troubled. Furthermore, another depressing thought quickly came to mind. Why, after all, should I be the one spared rather than, say, the great poet Endre Ady? Taking everything into account, he was far more deserving of immortality than I was. Yet still he died. That’s no answer. Furthermore, John F. Kennedy was brutally assassinated a little later, so I was forced to admit he was not immune from the great reckoning. My inner demons continued to torment me. And so it went on until two or more years later, one Friday afternoon, just as I was leaping down the stairs in the glazed stairwell of my friend Juli’s sixth-floor flat, it occurred to me that if we lived for ever then nothing mattered. Then it’s all the same. This idea seemed such a revelation I immediately had to share it with somebody. Although Juli was probably my best friend, I had never discussed metaphysics with her. Not to mention the fact that in order to do so I’d have to climb right back up to the sixth floor again. So I rushed home, but there was nobody there. I hunted feverishly through my chest of drawers for some written testimony to my epoch-making discovery. Soon enough I came across these lines by the Transylvanian poet Domokos Szilágyi:

  Good morning – and a lovely death;

  A summer it’s worth dying for,

  A summer after which death comes easy.

  I immediately copied the lines on to a clean piece of white card and pinned it above my bed so that when I felt the anxiety again, I would have them there to remind me. My father did not think the quotation quite concrete enough (summer could not be readily identified with the class struggle), my mother thought it too morbid and my sister had had enough of quotations pinned above my bed. But the card remained there for years, even after I discovered that the writer of those lines committed suicide.