The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  Right in the middle of the Bosnian war, for some mysterious reason that I can’t recall, I landed at the old airfield of Budapest. I sat down on the steps to the arrivals hall and waited for whoever was coming to fetch me. In the empty airport car park stood an enormous, sparkling clean bus with the word Yugoslavia proudly displayed on its side. It was a warm, late autumn day and the sun was blinding but its rays no longer warmed me. I sat in the deserted square and felt an odd calm. It was as if time had stopped and I felt the kind of unexpected happiness that I had felt in my innocent youth. Perhaps it was all a bad dream? Perhaps Yugoslavia was not falling to pieces? Perhaps the dead weren’t really dead? Perhaps my father was in good health? Perhaps it was possible to get back to a point where everything was all right?

  ‘Seriously, darling, how far back do you want to go?’ murmured the voice of the socialist realist co-tenant in my head.

  But I paid no attention. I was sunning myself on the sparkling wings of illusion.

  One day when I arrived relatively early at the hospital I sat on my father’s bed and watched him washing. He washed slowly and systematically. Face, neck, ears, the shaving foam behind his ears, under the arms, his chest and the upper part of his back. The careful movements that covered every part of the skin were a reminder of his childhood, when there was no properly equipped bathroom and he had to bend over a full basin or a tub to perform the most thorough of ablutions, and though the luxury of running water might have rendered the whole process unnecessary, the habit persisted even in this last phase of his life when my father had to lean against the basin because he was no longer capable of standing on his feet. Our habits of movement never leave us, remaining with us to the end so that we should be able to hang on to something firm when everything around us is gradually sinking; our fixed gestures, our turns of phrase, the shreds and patches of our thoughts all trying to render familiar our temporary lodging, to stuff the gaping holes in the fabric of our existence through which howls the cold wind of non-being. It’s quite pointless for him to wash so thoroughly, I thought, because my mother will soon be here and she’ll help him out to the neglected shower from which unknown hands have long stolen both the handle and the shower-head, and she will carefully sit him down on the one remaining plastic chair and scrub him down like a helpless overgrown baby.

  Perhaps this is what old age is, I thought distractedly as I watched the fugitive drops of water run down his back, reaching the shore of his crumpled striped pyjamas, while the outside world finds ever-narrower channels by which to enter the consciousness, its place being gradually usurped by habit. One becomes a kind of self-powered automaton that conscientiously grinds through its established routine, now and then dropping the odd hollow phrase that has ever less to do with the constantly changing world beyond; a desolate machine whose battery is running out, that stops in the middle of a room or on a street corner and the world pays no attention at all, but rushes by on its business, until tender hands finally pick it up and clear it out of the way. That might be what old age is, and my dying father – who has never wanted to be old – might have to take a quick course on the difficult subject of ageing now. As I watched his slow, methodical movements, a poem by the Transylvanian poet Árpád Farkas came to my mind, ‘When Old Men Wash’ – the one in which he talks about old people bending over a sink, trying to wash themselves clean of all the filth of the twentieth century. Are we the last generation for whom poetry remains a natural language, for whom verses spring readily to mind and are constantly on the tips of our tongues whenever we fall in love, or break up, or suffer, or go mad? Who nowadays has the time to contemplate a line of poetry?

  Farkas’s poem reminded me of an evening long ago when my father came home unexpectedly early and found my sister and me still awake though in our pyjamas. He didn’t even bother to take off his jacket, but washed his hands and came straight into our bedroom to say goodnight. We were bouncing wildly on our beds and were choking with laughter, yelling: ‘This Ady poem is mad. Ady is an idiot. Just look at this rubbish! “Those without wine had better run,/This is the black piano, son!”’

  My father leant against the doorframe and gazed at our hysterics in astonishment. For a while he simply stood there quietly smiling, as he did when he wanted to find a clinching argument, then he left the room and returned with a small black leather-bound volume.

  ‘Listen to this!’ he said and he read the whole of ‘The Earl’s Threshing-floor’. ‘The Black Piano’ was one of Ady’s first Symbolist poems, while ‘The Earl’s Threshing-floor’ was a dramatic description of the misery of the rural poor in early twentieth-century Hungary.

  When my father finished there was an awed silence. I had an enormous lump in my throat and, if I weren’t so ashamed, I would have burst into tears. My father smiled.

  ‘Is this mad, too?’ he asked.

  We sat on our beds, stunned. My father didn’t even wait for an answer, but wished us goodnight and switched off the light. That night we didn’t keep getting up, but went obediently to sleep without a word. We didn’t even have our usual bedtime chatter.

  ‘Do you remember “The Earl’s Threshing-floor”?’ I asked my father when, having finished towelling himself down, he proceeded slowly to button up his pyjama top. He smiled but I couldn’t work out if it was because he remembered the incident or if, in his own clumsy way, he wanted to do no more than indicate that he was happy that I was here, that he had succeeded in washing, in scrambling into his pyjama top and that now, having done with all this hard work, he could rest satisfied. I didn’t pursue the matter. I didn’t particularly want to question him about the past; I did not want him to think I was thinking he was dying.

  This story tells you everything about my father as regards the craft of parenting. He never taught me to write, to read, to swim, or to cycle; never took me to the playground; never came to parents’ meetings; never put a plaster on my cuts and bruises; never read me goodnight stories; in other words, he never lived up to the image of the father I expected for my children. But when he did rarely appear, he always gave me something to help me along. Once he consoled me when I was unhappily in love, with all the concomitant despair and fire of first love; on another occasion he explained why it was always necessary to be honest; on yet another he told me that I must be responsible for my actions. Everything else I learned from others. It was a little, short-haired communist veteran who taught me to swim, for example. Her skin was as brown and wrinkled as one of those calfskin handbags so fashionable at the time. I’ve no idea how or why, but this old lady took me under her wing at the Római part baths where the big shots of the Party would go to swim; she taught me how to breathe regularly, how to swim with my head under water, how to turn, how to dive, and how, at the end, to take first a scalding, then an icy shower. I never learned the lady’s name and nobody in the family remembers her, but whenever and wherever I find myself in any kind of water, when I turn on to my back, let my head float and begin to paddle in the waves with my palms half-closed, I thank her for the lessons.

  While on the subject of swimming lessons, I should mention the crowded beach of some union resort by Lake Balaton where my father suspended me in the water by the straps of my swimming costume. I shook in terror as he assured me that I wouldn’t sink, although I swallowed more water than I trod. Years later, when I visited my parents on another holiday, I watched my father swimming. His head was lifted painfully clear of the water so he shouldn’t get water on the thick lenses of his glasses and so ruin his clear view. Even there, in the very centre of the broad lake, he had to be on constant alert: the glasses mustn’t ever be removed. Fully submerging himself in the water was as dangerous as diving into life; there were too many risks attached.

  The summer my father died, when once again I set about a course of daily visits to the hospital, I relived the months of seven years before when the sequence of recovery, relapse and complications following the first operation sent us scuttling all over town through
a series of similar run-down hospitals. I saw again those long corridors, the uncomfortable benches of which there were never enough, and the patients, their legs swollen with standing about, their mouths dry with fear, clutching their medical notes, while ambulances howled and builders drilled around them because in hospitals there is always something to repair. In the minds of the fearful the beating of hammers tends to conjure the nailing down of a coffin lid, though, and I saw again how anxiously the patients noted the enormous eyes of those rolling off the ambulances, the pale luminous faces of the newly afflicted visible above the trolley blankets, or watched the lime-white faces of other people being wheeled out of the operating theatre, people with eyes that were expressionless, and might remain expressionless for ever. I saw the sick, surrounded by anxious relatives, who expected the Messiah himself to enter every time the door opened, a Messiah who would save them from the wicked disease that had treacherously infiltrated their minds and bodies. But when the white uniforms and gentle shuffle of Scholl sandals vanished behind mysterious glass doors, they lost hope and would sink into themselves again, their flushed cheeks fading, so that a couple of hours later they were no longer animated because now they understood that they too were assigned to taking their place in the constantly turning machinery, lethargically accepting the results of their examination, the date set for the operation and the details of post-operation procedure as if it had nothing to do with them. They would not protest when the knives came out because they had neither the strength nor the desire to do so; they had become indifferent, their hearts numbed, having realised that they were no longer human beings but merely cases in a hospital; just the matter of one ward or another, a file that enters the registry and proceeds from there, in perfectly ruly fashion, to the dustbin. It was a great distinction for my father in the hospital, that busy antechamber of death, that while remaining as nameless and impersonal as the rest, he could still be addressed as ‘the Professor’.

  Fifth

  Time slowed down the summer my father died. Every day there was some important event that stood out, distinguishing itself from the great confluence of currents that is time: one day he felt a little better, another he could walk right down the corridor, on a third he was no longer able to button his pyjama top. The days before the operation were particularly crowded and hectic, and if I stood still for a moment I immediately felt dizzy: it was like falling slowly but unstoppably down a bottomless pit. Everyone went about their necessary business, following the rhythms of the hospital. There was the shopping, the arrangements, the doctors, the nurses, the entertaining of the children, the consoling of my mother, all the various toings and froings. We concentrated on our tasks: it was as if the thought of the most natural and most dreadful end of life had never occurred to us and we were simply floating towards it; as if we didn’t know my father was about to cross the threshold into the void. Death was not in the picture yet, it was biding its time and, though it cast a shadow over everything, we told each other it was merely a passing cloud. That was right until we were told he was dead, when everything in the picture became the domain of death. One day I was surprised to notice a black vest in my shopping basket.

  ‘I don’t know what to prepare for, a long-drawn-out period of dying or a funeral,’ I told my friend Justine as we pushed our daughters on the playground swings the day before I left Geneva. I could talk like this while I was far away. But from the moment the plane touched down at Ferihegy airport the possibility of my father dying never once entered the conversation.

  We had lived in Geneva seven years by then. When, after years of itinerant living, I had settled there, my father remarked: ‘At least it’s a safe place.’ Some part of him might perhaps have added: ‘And at least you avoid the expense of escaping.’

  My father’s second remark was that, if champions of freedom such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lenin could leave their marks on the town, there couldn’t be much wrong with it. My mother didn’t like Geneva. For her, the decisive factor was the memory of visiting this Swiss paradise on their first trip to the West in the mid-1970s. They travelled with their scraped-together dollars, staying at cheap, dirty hotels, or with the network of comrades the Party had stationed abroad: they were real explorers. My father acted as guide and my mother was happy to rely on him. Then they arrived at this crisply laundered town where houses, streets and faces – indeed everything – is unnaturally smooth. One day in the supermarket my mother knocked over a bottle of olive oil. The uniformed and suited shop assistants looked on scandalised while the pool of oil spread, as oil tends to, slowly, unhurriedly between the shards of broken glass. My mother apologised profusely to everyone in her incomprehensible native language, and searched feverishly in the plastic bag she took with her everywhere for a packet of paper hankies with which to wipe away the evidence of her crime. No one raised a finger to help, no one tried to stop her; they all gazed on, calm and patient, as she blotted the pool at her feet and finally threw the oily paper handkerchief into the bin that of course she only located after looking around for a while.

  This incident, which my mother would often recount full of indignation as if she had never got over it, reminded me, unwillingly, of that photograph taken at the time of the Anschluss in which the elderly Jew with the long beard is shown scrubbing a Vienna street with a toothbrush while German soldiers stand around laughing, their boots polished to a high gloss. It’s true that my mother was surrounded only by lacquered shoes, not boots, and that she was not about to be shot through the head, but based on this image I had formed an opinion of Geneva long before I set foot there. When life eventually took me to Geneva and it turned out that I would spend a considerable amount of time there, I cheered myself with the thought that the great genius Jorge Luis Borges wanted to die there. Typical of Borges, of course, he would fill my head with all sorts of contradictory things but I couldn’t decide what his true message was. I had been living in Geneva ten years before I discovered Borges’ obscure grave in the city and what was written on it. It was a sentence from the forgotten tenth-century English poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’: ‘And ne forhtedon na’, ‘And be not afraid’.

  Despite having drunk the bitter-sweet brew of exile for a dozen years now, I still can’t work out whether that blank Genevan look covered a real emptiness or a well-concealed sorrow. That is despite having read the obligatory books as well as Elias Canetti’s Swiss memoirs and suggested reading list about the country. After some years of strenuous effort I decided that, while I would never feel at home here, at least people would leave me in peace. Politics can be repellent even in seasoned democracies like Switzerland, but here it doesn’t poison everyday life, at least not to the level it does in Hungary. France Culture and the BBC were always worth listening to, irrespective of which governments were in power. That teachers teach their classes, that doctors tend to their patients, that policemen support the law, that locksmiths repair locks and that ‘small fish coyly spawn’, as Miklós Radnóti puts it, goes without saying, whatever the government. It’s not quite so simple at home.

  The heaviest burden laid on us by our fathers who were busy building really-existing socialism was the assumption that individual life was of no value. The Horthy régime had not rated individual life particularly highly, and the new ideology had turned life upside down precisely so that human dignity should be restored. ‘Nothing that is human is alien to me,’ wrote the Roman playwright Terence: those words were inscribed on the walls of our classrooms (as a quote from Marx), precisely when everything human was being swept away. In the beginning it might have been an understandable sacrifice on the sacred altar of progress or one of the necessary casualties along the pilgrimage route, but step by step it became an essential characteristic of the system. The Gulag was the physical embodiment of a philosophy in which human life counted for nothing. And little Gulags were created in the schools and hospitals, on the tram and in the press, screaming at you: ‘You are nothing! You are nothing!’ And however
loudly the commercial placards bellowed their messages from the crumbling façades of our buildings, however free we were to choose between twenty-five varieties of yoghurt, and despite being able to found parties, start up newspapers or establish institutions, we were unable to cast off this most heavy of burdens. It was there in those who barged past others in the queue at the post office, in the way people cursed each other on the bus, in schools where children were abused and where abuse was silently tolerated, in official corridors where people were made to wait for hours, in unanswered letters and unreturned phone calls, in everyday minor compromises, in our guts, even in our dreams, and it was impossible to know when it might finally vanish.

  My father found the country he was trying to save just as much ‘a dreadful hole’ as his distant soul buddy the great orientalist Ignác Goldziher did, but, like the Professor, he never thought to leave it. His sense of mission tied him to the soil, and that loyalty to the soil was bound together with his almost mystical faith in his mission, inherited from Jewish messianism, which helped him overcome various failures and humiliations. Maybe he himself did not notice how well he mixed his antecedents’ romantic patriotism with the proletarian internationalism preached by the Party. Whenever we went on a field trip with my mothers’ students, my father was as happy to sing the Polish revolutionary anthem the ‘Warszawianka’ as he was the old Hungarian folk song that goes: ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving / I’m taking the long road / From the dust of that long road / I’ll weave myself a coat.’ Despite all this, he was far less upset than my mother when I took up residence abroad. He had long given up the hope that I might be a comrade in the struggle for the Cause. I had no longer a mission at home, so, fortunately, I could not be regarded as a traitor, but instead could function as a sort of foreign correspondent enjoying special observer privileges. Whenever I visited home, he politely admired the gifts of Swiss chocolate and the Bowmore whisky intended to compensate for the lack of Ararat cognac, but what he really wanted were my impressions of life abroad, and he continued to enquire about these until illness forced him to retreat into himself.