I myself naturally continue to regard Budapest as my home, not Geneva, where I live. After all, how can anyone feel at home in a city where they leave the lights on in the corridors? I once even asked the electrician why, if you please, are the lights left on all night in the stairwell? Of course I didn’t mention Pilinszky’s ‘Quatran’ that came to my mind whenever I saw the illuminated long corridors late at night:
Nails asleep under frozen sand.
Nights soaked in poster-loneliness.
You left the light on in the corridor.
Today my blood is shed.
But, however he tried, he couldn’t convince me that it was cheaper to leave them on than to install an automatic system.
In Geneva everything is solemn, spare and regulated, even humour has certain limits. One misses the blurring of lines, those secret nooks. No romantic feeling for strollers through the Old Town, not the kind you get in the Castle district in Buda, in Hradčany Castle in Prague; or the warm orange-brown coloured streets of Bologna, where the sheer material of the city plays on the senses and where getting to the marble white central square is an offence to modesty; or in Barcelona, where, even putting the work of Gaudí aside, you are continually tempted to run your hand along any surface whatsoever, including the pavements. Even the café door-handles are so nice to touch that they are hard to let go. I won’t keep on about Budapest, where the Danube flows so regally through the swelling hills and buildings, and – that’s quite enough of that!
(That is your socialist realist fellow lodger speaking, who can’t bear talk like this.)
So where was I?
Ever since the glorious triumph of the Reformation the heavens have been like a brow frowning over Calvin’s city. People look grimly disciplined and get on with their work. There is just one majestic and ungovernably free inhabitant of the city: the lake. Without the lake I couldn’t bear to live here, not for a moment. No doubt it’s no accident that the heraldic emblem of the city, the 130-metre-high fountain, one enormous phallic symbol, is situated dead centre of the lake and that tourists from all over the world, of either gender, all fully equipped with cameras and videos, love to have their picture taken against it. Snap, snap. Zzzrrrr. The lake tends mostly to belong to our part of the city, a quarter of ill-repute full of immigrants and simple natives, situated in the elongated triangle formed by the main railway terminal, the red-light district and the big hotels. Every morning after I have taken the children to school, my first steps lead me here. It’s not a proper day if it does not begin here.
I leave behind the lakeshore’s heavy, charmless civic buildings that act as bulwarks against the burgeoning chaos behind them. I turn my back on banks that look like churches, on the hurrying feet of the faithful servants of Mammon, on gentlemen with ties and briefcases and pink newspapers under their arms, on young women wearing identical smiles and earphones tucked into their ears as they make their way from car to entrance so that nothing of the world’s noise should accidentally reach them. I turn my back on the hotels with their glazed fronts where bored couples sink into deep leather chairs and where early morning business meetings proceed with the stirring of coffee cups. I pass the Palais Wilson, which is the only lakeshore building to remain solemn and harmonious – maybe because it recalls the time when the League of Nations gathered here to debate and repair what remained of the world after the First World War.
Once the Palais Wilson vanishes behind me, I enter another dimension. The space opens up. The eye caresses the sky, the water and the distant blue mountains, the trees, the harbour, the scattered buildings in the park, with nothing to detain it, even for a moment. Here nature infiltrates the domain of this severe, self-denying town like the advance guard of the great dark wood, however the town tries to encircle and control it. Here one notices how a single cone suddenly opens up and disperses the seeds, that the pine on top of the hill has lurched into a dance in the tentative sunlight, and that barely a hundred metres away, despite the grumbling car noise in the background, one can hear the heavy beat of swans’ wings as they rise from the water. Eventually I have to return to the high enclosing walls, but my heart, my eye and my lungs remember the wings.
Had the Great Planner ever got round to consulting me, I would have chosen a city better fitted to my affinities, but He never did. On the question of freedom of choice, a subject we might ponder while we’re at it, it occurs to me that we are a privileged generation to have grown up with a sense of long-term security. We could still believe that, with a little help, we were able to predict the world, and that given, let’s say, twenty-five years, we might prepare ourselves for it. But today I can only spread my hands and admit I haven’t a clue what’s to come, never mind what I would like to happen. But it surprises even me that, after moving around for several years, I should have wound up in an immaculate town like Geneva, on the ever faster hamster-wheel of everyday life, work and child care, in a world of dirty realism, not of curing people or even sick societies, but producing specialist papers on how they might be cured.
I moved to Geneva to join the man who was to become my husband, Steven. Like my friend Elie, whom I met in the early 1980s in Budapest, Steven was an American Jew and, before we met, he too had been travelling around Eastern Europe looking for the sparks of freedom. But, unlike Elie, he wasn’t in love with it: he was trying to understand it. Elie was spellbound by the intimate smell of humanity, the discreet charm of absurdity and destruction that hung about our picturesque domain in those times; Steven hated to see all that ground under the heels of the police. His indignation prevented him from succumbing to such discreet charm and continually spurred him to seek out the possibilities for change. He happened to be concentrating on the Germans, who were divided by a wall and by two supposedly different ways of thinking, when the phone rang and he was called to Prague. This was in the euphoric months following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989, when it seemed that we were entering an age of genuine choice among possible futures; that once we had succeeded in freeing ourselves from the false prophets of salvation, we need not immediately follow robber barons for whom freedom, equality and brotherhood, or even honest business or the concept of long-term rationality, were the relics of a vanished age that could be consigned to the wastebasket. One evening Steven appeared at an international conference of those who were dreaming of a new Europe among the sumptuous walls of the art nouveau Obecní Dům, the Municipal House, where my long-dead grandparents used to go to concerts, and asked me if I fancied a stroll. We set off down narrow cobbled streets, watched the black swans on the Vltava and talked as if we had known each other for ever.
Apart from my father, Steven is the only man who can really make me lose my temper. I have known others who have made me despair, but he and my father were the only men I could scream at, red in the face. Steven didn’t like my father. In the seven years of suspense between my father’s two bouts of illness, true to his character, he offered his continual rational support, rational not only because he finds high-emotion scenes difficult, but because to him, as no doubt to the rest of the world, my father was just an old Stalinist who had been sitting on the bench of the accused, a seat he had earned time and again with every dramatic turn in our region’s history. Steven had grown up on the writings of Victor Serge, Edward Thompson and Hal Draper; he understood very well the significance of the workers’ councils of 1956 and Solidarność, and had read Trotsky when I was still gazing at the empty space Trotsky had left behind on the photo of Comrade Lenin addressing the masses. For him, those communists who forgot the dreams of a free and just society and once they had come to power just hung on to it for decades, whatever the cost, were unforgivable criminals. Thanks to the gun-toting, baying Cossacks, half of Steven’s ancestors had been eradicated and the other half had been exiled from their never-to-be-forgotten Odessa, so he had grown up in idyllic California, where he hadn’t had much chance to meet too many living examples of Eastern European adherents of really-exist
ing Stalinism. I suspect my father occupied all the seats on the bench of the accused in his mind. There they were in a row, closely pressed against each other, all those Fülöp Hollós, listening, stubbornly and uncomprehendingly, occasionally indignantly, to the never-ending charges against them. And more than likely they were wondering how they might turn the whole thing into a trial like that of the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, in which the accused turned the table on his prosecutors.
Luckily, my father was not apprised of the storms he had caused in my husband’s soul. They rarely met in person, and language set a benign limit on their foggy communication. I alone knew of the insoluble, fierce antagonism between these two decisive figures in my life, but naturally I kept deadly silent about it. We had some mighty quarrels on this account at the safe distance of our Geneva flat. Not that I didn’t admit Steven was right, but I wasn’t willing to drop my father in the dustbin of history, not with my own hands. His views, his work in the Party, the Party itself, yes – but he himself, no.
America, America. The first time I visited the United States, years before I met Steven, like many others, I was impressed by the freedom, the apparently endless possibilities, the dazzling wealth of people, cultures, styles, the myth on which America is built. I was living in neighbouring Mexico at the time and the only reason that I crossed the border was that I badly wanted to see my old friend Miki Winter, who had become a professor at a leading American university, and Elie, who was visiting home. At the same time I could put my head in the lion’s mouth and take a look around, a prospect that excited my curiosity. I had to answer a vast number of questions for the entry visa: to what race did I belong and what political party was I a member of, among other things. There was a long, anxious queue at passports, periodically examined by police dogs on leashes. This felt like home. When I finally managed to enter the stronghold of imperialism, a wild cheerfulness seized me. Right in the middle of New York, among the endless queues of cars, the skyscrapers and flashing neon signs, between a Sikh in a turban and an enormous black guy, a kaftan-wearing orthodox Jew was shouting down a wall-mounted public telephone in a thick Szabolcs-Szatmár accent.
‘It’s me! Where am I? Am I awake?’ I too found myself shouting down the telephone.
‘Where are you? Can’t you just tell me where you are?’ Elie bellowed back a little impatiently.
I had to put the phone down to read the sign on the street corner.
My friend Elie was a New York Jewish boy, from the third generation of an immigrant Russian family who had long forgotten the language, their grandfather’s original name and the stories passed down from father to son, because the struggle for existence that consumed every last bit of energy had completely drained even the possibility of nostalgia from their minds. Like my future husband, Elie carried the holy trinity of persecution, flight and survival in his cells, but, unlike my future husband, he felt it was important to give these feelings names. When, at the beginning of the 1980s, at roughly the age of thirty, he visited Eastern Europe for the first time and saw the russet brown fences made of wide wooden boards that looked exactly like his grandfather’s in Queens that at that time still counted as a village, he felt he had arrived home. The first person who had taught me that being a Jew was not an agonising secret, something to be ashamed of, but a fact that might occasionally be a source of strength, had been Vera, my childhood physics and chemistry teacher at the elementary school in Németvölgyi Road. Elie was the second.
Elie had often visited me in Budapest and now it was his turn to show me proudly around New York. New York had everything and every kind of person. People were ready to get into conversation, just like at home; this was the empire of immigrants where no one had the privilege of the firstborn, or, to put it more precisely, those who might have had such a call had long been wiped out in the name of God and freedom. The bookshops, the museums, the skyscrapers and zigzagging fire-escapes, the walk down Brighton Beach, the alleys of the Lower East Side, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Thai soups and Russian bortsch: the town received us like a vast big-hearted playground. We played hide-and-seek between the supporting columns of the World Trade Center and, ugh, how ugly, we cried. We only liked the old skyscrapers, the ones on which Mexican migrant workers had laboured, those whose bodies still guarded the faint memory of the road to the Sun God and who weren’t scared of the dizzying heights when they were building these big money palaces for the white men.
One Sunday morning, Elie took me to a klezmer concert, where a childhood playmate of his, Andy Statman, was playing. I had never heard of klezmer, the celebratory music of the Ashkenazic Jews, but through the long subway ride Elie briefed me and entertained me with stories of the adventures of the rock band he and Andy had founded when they were adolescents. Before they went on stage, we met Andy’s klezmorim in the corridor: three Americans, a Yemeni, two Iraqis, an Ethiopian and two Russians. A vast crowd had gathered in the auditorium while we were talking. As we entered the loud, packed hall, the thought struck me that it was the first time in my life that I had been with so many Jews at once. Back home, in the Nagyfuvaros Street synagogue that I had started to attend after Vera died, there were only a handful of people in the gallery, even on Yom Kippur, and on the rare occasion that there was a Jewish theme at the clandestine ‘flying university’, there were never more than fifteen people present.
Along the rows of seats my fellow Jews started by loudly quarrelling over something, then calming down, then pretty soon putting their arms around each other before starting to dance. Up on stage the one-time rocker was warming to his task with ever more enthusiasm. The tunes shifted into ever more ecstatic sound. It was as if every single shriek of the high-pitched clarinet were peeling away a protective layer of my soul. Very soon my whole being had set out on a passionate and unpredictable journey. Everything was opening up. Beyond the topmost branches of the trees stretched an endless sky to which my soul completely abandoned itself. Then, suddenly, I fell into the deepest pit. It was dark and cold, and I was hemmed in by thick damp walls. A little way off I seemed to see a faint flickering light. I tried to turn towards it, but my body felt leaden, and invisible weights obstructed me. I could hardly breathe. The smell of vomit and excreta mingled with the all-pervasive smell of death. Straining every muscle, I tried to make my way to the door when I saw a pile of corpses on the benches beside me, the bodies there hadn’t been time to carry out into the frozen yard of the synagogue. There was a figure leaning over the Ark of the Covenant. I don’t know whether I cried out or simply whimpered, but Elie and another strong lad helped me out of the hall into the fresh air and trees full of birds.
‘Don’t move, I’ll get you some water,’ said Elie, and propped me up against the wall.
‘The trees are twittering,’ I mumbled to myself while slowly sliding to the ground. Elie handed me a glass of water, his hands shaking.
‘Are you pregnant or something?’ he asked anxiously. There were tiny beads of sweat above his lips.
‘Am I pregnant?’ I asked in terror.
‘I’m pregnant with the past,’ I said as he packed me into a taxi.
‘You’re delirious,’ he answered nervously, then turned to the driver to tell him where to go.
I was shivering as with a fever. We went home and I used what remained of my strength to drag myself into bed and pulled the covers over me. Elie was in the kitchen clattering about with the kettle. I heard his footsteps as he came in with the steaming tea, then I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. A good fifteen years later I visited Elie in Berlin, where he had settled, to my great surprise, after wandering around all over Europe. We were sitting in the yard next to the Garden of Exile and Emigration beside the Jewish Museum. The imposing building was still resoundingly empty. We walked round it in silence and agreed that it should remain empty. Out in the garden Elie talked of the poems of Rose Ausländer, I of the documentary films of the Cambodian Rithy Panh. We weren’t the first, I told him, and we wo
uldn’t be the last. Behind our fathers’ bodies, haphazardly piled and thrown into ditches or burned to ashes, there were long queues of dismembered Armenians, Indonesians killed by machine-gun fire from helicopters, Cambodians with slit throats, Tutsis hacked to pieces with machetes, Bosnians burned to death in their own stables, and all those I have forgotten, an endless abhorrent stream of them. We sat in the garden where the first buds of spring had already opened, listening to the birds’ chorus, and I wondered about what kind of gardens our children would find themselves sitting in.
So, long before Elie, the first person who had talked to me about Jews had been Vera, my elementary school teacher. Vera was a brilliant teacher and an irresistibly charismatic person. I had been so eager to please her that I had learnt by heart Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, the three states of water, and my first poems by Attila József. She taught science, but she knew more poems by heart than any literature teacher in school. This surprised me at first, but she just laughed and asked: ‘Why so surprised, my innocent bumpkin, don’t you know we’re run by a bunch of good-for-nothings?’
I had been enchanted by her since our first physics lesson. My father had arrived from Moscow the night before. All his returns were ceremonial occasions, but this time he had bought me an unusual present: an enormous school satchel with several pockets. When I dragged my lovely burden to school the next morning, arriving in class a good ten minutes late, the new teacher didn’t reach for the register to note my lateness but gave me a brilliant smile and remarked: ‘I see you are set for a long voyage with that sea chest of yours. I hope you will have the stamina to fill it.’
The Summer My Father Died Page 14