In 1944, when the Red Army began its unstoppable push west and had reached the foot of the Carpathians, the soldiers carried off every male of Hungarian descent for some malenky robot, or ‘little work’ – a euphemism for forced labour in Soviet territories – in my grandfather’s case, to the barely concealed relief of his growing infants. Grandmother sent my teenage mother off to try and find him. She didn’t succeed but as she was rushing across a ruined railway bridge to escape some low-flying war planes she fell and broke her knee. She was discovered by a young Soviet major who put splints around her swollen leg and helped her hobble home. The next evening, before the troops marched on, the major returned to the road mender’s cottage to bring my mother some pills to soothe her fever. It was hard for my mother to find the right words to thank him. For the first time in her life, here was someone who thought it mattered what happened to her.
It was only in the late 1950s that my grandfather finally found himself back home after malenky robot: long years spent in the Gulag and in the village to which he returned after he had been released and which he could not leave since in the meantime he had become a Soviet citizen. We don’t know what happened to him in his long absence. He never spoke about it and it seems no one asked. All we know is that after a few years of forced labour they let him go and he was allowed to return to his last place of residence in the Carpathian foothills, which had in the meantime become part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He might have worked in the local co-operative, like everyone else, and certainly could have played some part in the region’s demographic recovery.
When the liberalising effects of the Gorbachev period reached the frontiers of the USSR and the authorities gave us permission to travel, my mother, my Uncle Mihály and I paid a visit to the village where they spent those crucial war years. Everything had changed so much as to be unrecognisable. It was as if the pre-war period had vanished into a distant Neolithic past. People seemed to be living in a numbed version of the eternal present. There was only one toothless old woman in a black headscarf who faintly remembered the time when Jews, Roma and Hungarians all lived in the neighbourhood, and that among them there was one road mender from Szabolcs-Szatmár County with his extensive family.
In the spring of 1957 when, thanks to the milder political climate under Khrushchev, my grandfather was able to leave the Soviet Union at last and return to his birthplace, he picked up exactly where he had left off. The house had stood empty and locked, though the evidence of my grandmother’s work was visible in the garden. My grandfather was enraged when he discovered that his wife had learned to read, had signed on to the local co-operative and at this moment happened to be in Budapest on a visit. His ungrateful children had not only taken possession of his treasured bicycle but had moved away, learned trades, set up families without his permission and, what’s more, his bastard daughter (my mother) had married a stinking Jew.
When, after suppressing the 1956 uprising, the government re-established order and the railway service was restored, my grandmother went home to see her husband after more than a decade of absence. A couple of months later we received a letter from the neighbours warning us that if we did not intervene my grandfather would beat my grandmother to death. My two uncles, Mihály and István, who were grown-up by then, went over to the village with a solemn vow to pay their father back once and for all. They had almost kicked the life out of him when my grandmother threw herself between him and them and begged them to have mercy. Grandfather never again raised a hand against her, but drank himself quietly into terminal cancer and, twenty years later, coughed his life out in her arms. Whenever we visited them – very rare occasions – he’d waste no time necking the bottles we brought as presents and hung about the tiny yard in front of the house with a dreamy smile, muttering through a throat that had undergone surgery: ‘The smaller the house the greater the happiness.’
Fourth
My father, the stinking Jew, never suspected what a storm he had caused in the shallows of his father-in-law’s soul. He was spending his week’s holiday at one of the Party’s Lake Balaton resorts along with a teacher colleague and a group of outstandingly able students. Naturally he continued his strenuous efforts to educate them. However, when the time came that there were no more seminars, no more work to mark, not one comrade to be affirmed in his faith, he walked and walked the dark streets so he shouldn’t be left alone in his room to confront the vacuum in his soul.
One hot, balmy evening, he was pounding the streets of the resort, hurrying past the lit garden restaurants so no one would recognise him. But as he was passing one of them he heard ringing laughter. He hardly noticed as an invisible force carried him up the worn steps and deposited him at a table by himself, opposite the noisy young crowd. He watched them in some confusion but with satisfaction. It was a group of first-year students, the hope for the future in whom he, among others, had nursed the seed of faith. He didn’t understand much of their loud conversation and jokes because all his attention was fixed on the beautiful creature with sparkling green eyes who, he thought, was the source of that ringing laughter. He was right. A couple of minutes later one of the young men made a remark that brought on a fresh bout of cackling. The brown-haired girl was laughing with her head thrown back and in her wild movement she upset the glass of cheap brandy in front of her. But she thought this was so funny that her peals of laughter reached a new bright pitch, rising ever higher. Her unselfconscious laugh filled my father with such unknown happiness that, for a moment, he forgot the clumsy language of the Party and his own uncultured directness and, with a gallant gesture that he must have observed in his father at some Prague café, he stood up, bowed in front of my mother and said: ‘Let me order you a fresh glass!’
My mother looked up, her eyes still wet with laughter, and met the gaze of what seemed to her a dark-eyed little boy.
‘What lovely black hair he has!’ she thought.
The next moment she realised that the gallant gentleman standing in front of her was none other than Comrade Holló, her lecturer in Marxism. She was so embarrassed that she blushed from ear to ear, which only made her appear more beautiful. She turned back to her companions without a word. But she accepted the watered-down sherry brandy and sipped awkwardly at it for what remained of the evening, as if she felt that this love potion might have life-long effects.
With his first and possibly only gesture of gallantry my father won the jackpot, my mother’s hand. My mother who, through her contacts with Party education at various institutions, had started getting used to being thought of as a person in her own right, felt with all her unerring female instincts that the clumsy youth teaching her the principles of Marxism-Leninism did not regard her quite as his colleagues did when they delightedly marked the progress of this poor peasant creature, watching the effects of the drip-drip of knowledge on her flowering consciousness. Returning to the Party school in Budapest, she couldn’t help but notice that that warm brown gaze was following her everywhere. It was not coincidence, was it, that she kept bumping into Comrade Holló at the most unexpected moments, whether in school or out of it? It was as if the young tutor knew her precise weekly timetable, as well as the times of the main-line trains to Nyíregyháza on which she travelled once a month to visit her relatives. And, despite all her natural shyness, my mother might have admitted to herself that she instinctively looked for that abundant dark head of hair whenever she was on the move. A couple of months later she was prepared to walk out with the owner of that head of hair and was enthusiastically joining in discussions with him on the education of the rural proletariat.
And it might have remained thus, and my mother might have returned at the end of her course of study to Szabolcs-Szatmár County to help build up the young national democracy, had not fate stepped in in the modest figure of Comrade Kovács, the local Party secretary. One sunny May afternoon Comrade Kovács called the trainee cadre with the long pigtail and sparkling eyes into his office to discuss
the bright future that lay before her.
‘You know, comrade,’ said Kovács, leaning forward unexpectedly, ‘a highly promising young cadre like you shouldn’t be spending time with a Jew.’
My mother went as red as the flag of the ‘Internationale’. She didn’t immediately realise what Comrade Kovács was talking about. But she recognised the sick feeling at the pit of her stomach. She felt the same terror mixed with shame that had gripped her every time she saw her father at the end of the path, his belt tightly buckled. Or when she had seen her closest friends, the Frankel sisters, being marched up the middle of the road with yellow stars over their hearts. Suddenly an invisible fence had divided her from them and my child mother had known that terrible things would happen on the other side of that fence. She had stepped out of the staring crowd to slip a piece of bread into their hands, but the soldier guarding them had pushed her away with the butt of his rifle.
‘I’m afraid your warning comes a little late, Comrade Kovács,’ she replied boldly. ‘We’re getting married tomorrow afternoon.’
She rushed straight from Comrade Kovacs’s office to my father’s room.
‘Get ready. We’re getting married,’ she announced in a voice that would brook no argument.
My poor father gasped in surprise at having the secret object of his desire drop into his lap like that, without any notice. He could only mumble in confusion that he had a class the next afternoon, and that he lacked a suit. My mother with her aforementioned unerring feminine instinct knew that now their lives were conjoined she’d have to arrange everything. She found a suit, some witnesses and someone to sit in for his class and the next day, a mild afternoon in May 1952, before the XIIIth District comrade registrar they settled their lives by stuttering the appropriate vows.
Not counting the golden years of Prague, the next few cloudless months he spent with my mother in a single room sublet in Visegrádi Street were probably the happiest of my father’s life. It’s true that she kicked up no end of a fuss when on the first of the month he turned up with a sackful of books rather than his pay, but she quickly calmed down and soon enough they were rolling with laughter on the narrow bed. Then, little by little, her siblings from the village moved up to Budapest and my mother settled them in various schools so they might escape the lives of poverty they had been fated to live so far. Some self-destructive urge had led them all to leave education early, something they regretted only decades later. Even the partners they chose ensured that their childhood nightmares would never be over. The girls married handsome, violent drunks, the boys married pretty, servile women and after a few decades they regretted that, too. It was as if only my mother had inherited the curiosity, resilience and furious desire for change that must have built up over the generations. But the various family members remained in the Visegrádi Street sublet until their fates were settled, usually for the worse. In the meantime my parents’ own first child arrived and the international situation grew more tense. The father of the nations, our guide Stalin, died and the Soviet Union under Khrushchev seemed nowhere near as solid a fortress as when the aged dictator had it firmly gripped in his iron fist. By the end of October 1956, by which time I was supposed to have been born were it not for the ‘regrettable October events’, my father had probably forgotten that the purpose of life could be the search for happiness.
Due to the above-mentioned historical events the relationship between my father and myself set off very much on the wrong foot. According to the doctors, I should have been born at the end of October, but in view of the great rebellion I decided to spend a little longer in the comfort of my mother’s womb. Nature follows its own sense of order despite the chaos outside. Every day my mother suffered labour pains. Since there was no public transport, despite severe cramps, she was obliged to walk all the way to the Kútvölgyi hospital from the Németvölgyi Road flat into which, after much pleading, my father had consented to move two years before. My father anxiously gripped my mother’s arm and tried to cover her enormous belly with his own thin frame. The rebels were firing on the comrades from Kopaszhegy Hill, or it might have been vice versa. Whichever way you looked at it, it was an uncomfortable situation. When they reached the hospital, the revolutionary representative or the Russian doctor, whoever momentarily had the upper hand, took turns to remind my mother loudly that she had chosen a fine time to give birth. It was only in the middle of November, well after the return of the Soviet tanks, that I was finally ready to show my face, by which time there had already been quite enough trouble on my account.
In the meantime the storm of history had swept away all the co-habiting relatives who had faithfully followed my parents into the new flat in Buda. My grandmother was stuck with relatives in a village on the Pest side of the river, my aunt had a cycling accident and was lying unconscious in the János hospital, while my uncle was hiding in a garage because our emboldened neighbours wanted to beat him to death on account of his tan shoes which indicated to them that he was a member of the security police. As to my father, he was on call to protect the alliance of workers and peasants, led by Soviet-supporting Comrade Kádár. My two-and-a-half-year-old sister was left to play by herself in the Németvölgyi Road flat. The neighbours fed her and she always had somewhere to sleep, but who knows what was going on in that clever little head of hers in those two weeks? Whatever it was, for years, whenever she was cross with someone, she didn’t call the person an idiot but simply blazed at them: ‘You counter-revolutionary!’
Postpartum fever and other associated problems kept my mother in hospital until the beginning of December. She made her way home in flurries of snow with the baby swaddled up against the cold. Back home in the flat she was confronted by her chubby and filthy firstborn, who looked suspiciously at the silent package in her arms. The neighbours were so preoccupied with the dramatic twists and turns of history happening outside that it hadn’t occurred to anyone to give my sister a bath. My mother set to getting some hot water and tried explaining to the little girl that her much-anticipated sister had arrived. A few days later my father reappeared having played his part in the defence of the Cause, peeked into the bundle in front of him and declared that my nose was too big.
It may be that the summer my father died really started in the summer of 1956, when one by one a series of terrible truths burst upon him which he did not have the strength to confront. What was more, as a final tribulation, his second child was born at the end of it, the false heir who was neither a boy nor a fit person to tread the path already laid down by him with so much sacrifice. Poor Father!
Decades later, when I came across some strikingly different interpretations of the 1956 events from those I had grown up with, I was astonished to discover that not only my origins but the circumstances of my birth were far from what I had understood them to be. It was not only the yellow star but 1956 that I would carry as a stigma for the rest of my life. Nobody had bothered to inform me that I was too late for history because the very seed of the ideal with which I was to be brought up, that is to say democratic socialism with a human face, had been quite stamped out before I was born. So successfully had it been stamped out that some thirty-one years later, when political change became possible again, socialism with a human face was not even on the agenda. I grew up with an image of 1956 that had been one of a thirst for vengeance, for lynchings, for revisionism and anti-Semitism. It was with shock and shame that I learned that all this was just the scum left behind by the wave. That wave was the conviction of the majority of people that they could no longer live a lie.
And of course no one informed me that my beloved parents were on the side of those who thought 1956 was not a wave at all, just scum.
It’s another question that after 1990, under our newly reestablished democracy, 1956 became ever more the possession of the scum. By the time the more enlightened members of my parents’ generation, such as my mother, came to re-evaluate the events of 1956, gangs of booing and spitting ‘freedom fighte
rs’ howled down our much-loved president, Árpád Göncz, one of the few genuine heroes of the uprising, when he tried to make a speech at the annual commemoration. Friends of my parents saw this and solemnly wagged their heads as if to say: ‘See, we told you so!’
The constant blare of horns and the whine of ambulances racked the heat-drowsy city. But inside the cool green shade of the hospital there were only hushed voices, the sibilance of trolleys, the dull clip-clop of wooden sandals. It was close to silence. It was as if within the shell of the agitated world some calm kernel were secreted, a place where the essential carried on happening. But what kind of ‘essential’? My doomed father was shivering with cold: he was still fiddling with the sails of the political windmill. One afternoon when I escaped the noise outside and dropped in on him I found him bent over, sitting on the sagging metal bed, staring in front of him with a vacant expression. In those few seconds before he noticed me his face was a picture of absolute loneliness.
Loneliness is born of lack of trust. My father trusted no one except my mother, who had become so much a part of his life that, after a while, he hardly noticed that she had her own individual existence, that she was someone the merciful deities had assigned to him. After the joy of the first few years of their marriage her presence became natural to him, not a daily gift he had to thank the gods for. He had no trust in his children, and indeed time proved he was right not to trust us, though his distrust predated any such proof. Without trust there can be no love and without love there can be no friendship. It didn’t matter how many people he had around him: he remained lonely.
The Summer My Father Died Page 11