The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  In the winter of 1944 Vera was watching from a neighbour’s doorway as Arrow Cross youths marched her father from the flat where the family had successfully hidden out, until someone gave him away in a flush of patriotism. A child she knew pulled her and her mother into the doorway and later showed her around the house, in whose cellar they could take refuge with their forged papers, because the air-raid warden was a decent man. Vera’s father was murdered at Buchenwald and she herself would have died of pneumonia in the damp cellar had she not been saved by a young man who had escaped the work camps, returned to Budapest and, disguised as an Arrow Cross officer, set to save his fellow Jews condemned to death. After the war, this brave young man was beaten for months in the cellars of AVO, the Hungarian KGB, because of his stolen Arrow Cross uniform; another keen patriot reported him for collaboration. The AVO officers would have overlooked the collaboration but, since the young man refused to work for the newly founded Ministry of the Interior, they sentenced him to death. We couldn’t claim that the same ardent patriot reported Vera’s father and her saviour, but my beloved capital has never been short of ardent patriots ready to report on their fellow citizens. Pneumonia had another go at removing Vera from the planet at the end of the 1950s, when she and her young son were holed up in a tiny flat with no amenities because her husband had been jailed for his activities in the 1956 uprising. By a miracle it was the same disguised young man who hurried to help her again. Having escaped execution and having learned that no one from his family had survived the deportations, he had succeeded in getting himself smuggled over the border by hiding in a coffin. Once over, he didn’t stop till he got to America, where he became Mr Lang, a successful restaurant owner. When Mr Lang discovered that Vera was in trouble again, he sent her valuable albums of artists’ prints – real rarities in those days in a Hungary plagued by every other kind of shortage. Vera never even opened the plastic packing, but hurried down to the Central Antiquarium and sold the books so she and her son could eat for a fortnight. Years later I would console myself with the thought that I might have seen some of those very same albums in the reading rooms of the Ernő Szabó central library.

  It wasn’t pneumonia that did for Vera in the end, but the white tablets she filled her hands with and forced down her throat in a room she rented for the day via the national holiday booking office. It was the mid-1980s and one could sense the world preparing itself for dramatic change: its joints were creaking dangerously. Strange articles began to appear in the press, people were talking more freely, there were arguments instead of statements. Vera’s son had grown up and her husband had fallen in love with a twenty-year-old woman. Her infallible instincts told Vera it was the beginning of a new stage in her life, but it wasn’t one she cared to enter. She had had enough of survival. It was no use being appointed at last to a position more fitting to her talents; it was no use being surrounded by friends and admirers; the struggle had worn her out. Maybe she felt that death, her most faithful suitor, who had been wooing her her entire life, finally deserved to be granted his wish. She rented the tourist office room so that no one should surprise her and quietly moved into the world of shadows.

  It was a strange experience living in Geneva through the seven years between my father’s two bouts of illness. Constantly moving between places changed my sense of time: the unremitting flow was broken. Being now here, now there, became a formative experience that intensified not only the experience of all that happened, but also my sense of distance from events. The parallel realities I regularly moved between as on a paternoster taught me the relative value of things. It wasn’t just that the reality of my father’s approaching death grew ever clearer, but so did the realisation that I myself was not vital to the working of things in either place.

  Each time I returned to Geneva I tried to live as though life was normal and forget the sword of Damocles poised above our heads. But the days were soaked through with tension that distance only increased. Every time the phone rang I leapt to pick it up; every time I said goodbye to my father my stomach shrank with worry. And since it was impossible to resolve the anxieties by pottering about with small distractions – I couldn’t help him on with his coat, I couldn’t prop him up on his way to the bathroom, I couldn’t stand in a queue for his prescriptions at the stale-smelling chemist's – helplessness vastly increased the anxiety. It was a genie escaped from the bottle, towering above my head, a constant threat. I’d get a panic attack at the most surprising moments, feeling I had failed to do something that could have changed the course of events, that my father’s life, my own life, was inevitably slipping through my fingers. As soon as we touched down at Ferihegy Terminal 2, the anxiety immediately left me. I was suddenly calm, almost cheerful, because the problem, with all its dramatic and comical moments, was soluble and at hand. I could do something about it: it was no longer a threatening genie that only made me tremble.

  Since my father died, we take the train home. There’s nothing particularly urgent to attend to, nothing to force us to save hours: we can give the journey the attention it deserves. On the way back, en route to Geneva, after the change of trains at dawn, my eyes slowly adjust to a different set of realities. The enormous sky with its drifting, pink-edged clouds hovering over meadows sweating in the summer heat gives way to the calm green of forests, cool mountains and scarlet geraniums budding on windowsills. There are no coils of cable lying about in the stations, no carriages with broken windows and graffiti. Neat villages ache with centuries of reassuring order, fortresses rise from hilltops, every stone in place. Before setting off, I stuff the two enormous black holdalls not just with clothes and my mother’s miraculous home-made jam, but with unread newspapers and books, books, books, from Zsigmond Móricz through to Péter Nádas. And this is what I drag along with me, puffing and panting, moaning and despairing, from the Keleti, the Eastern Terminal in Budapest, all the way to Cornavin in Geneva, in the hope that these smuggled items might illuminate my life far away from home. But then a thousand everyday tasks propel me unnoticed between the local parameters and I find myself doing no more than looking longingly at the books and the unread piles of Libération and the New York Review of Books as they settle on the piles of Élet és Irodalom, the Hungarian literary weekly, and Magyar Narancs, a critical magazine, great piles of which surround my desk, agitating for attention for a while but eventually giving up and slowly turning yellow. Whenever Steven wants to tidy up, I scream at him and chase him out of the study, just as my father did with my mother: once there is no more room on the floor, I shovel everything in the cupboard until, having handed in a work that has passed several deadlines, and completely exhausted, I make a mighty effort to catch up with time, trying to become a contemporary of our age.

  Author remarks: As far as catching up with time goes, hardly any success has been registered.

  This is how I move between the two cities, several times a year, as though I have forgotten something and need to return to find it. My perennial return tickets demonstrate how I vacillate between the desire for home and the longing for freedom. I will never feel at home in one of the cities and the other constantly calls me, but not enough to make me move: I sit on the ground between two stools and read Magda Szabó’s children’s book Tündér Lala to the kids with a lump in my throat.

  ‘What’s up, Mama? Run out of breath?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’

  On the last visiting day before the operation, a hot, lazy Sunday afternoon, the whole family got together at the Hospital in Amerikai Road to visit my father. They didn’t allow young children on the wards and so we waited in the bare hall so that my sister’s two older children could help my father down to the ground floor. I watched how they supported him on both sides, raising him a little at each step, because he was hardly able to use his legs. I wondered what this shy, sensitive girl and the boy who laughs a lot felt as they carefully helped the trembling old man to a chair. How different it must be for them, supporting him down the stai
rs, than it is for my sister and me, standing by the white wall, watching them from a distance, or for my mother, who is sitting obediently on the seat we pressed her into, calm and concentrated, registering his painfully slow progress in every nerve, as if she knew that there wouldn't be many more images of him to store away in her memory. And what does it mean to my father, now casting a slightly ashamed but grateful glance at these two attractive young people who have been so decent as to help him along his obstacle-strewn passage? What do children, grandchildren mean to him if they aren’t comrades-in-arms or spiritual followers?

  Having reached the ground floor, my father sank into the chair and gave us a smile of relief. Then he looked around with an expression as if to say: What’s the matter with you all? We coughed in embarrassment, then embarked on an artificial conversation about the hospital and news of the insignificant world outside. My two small children snuggled up to me and studied my father from the safety of my body. Apart from not being able to walk, he didn’t look particularly ill. Rather, he looked like someone who had woken late – which was not unusual, as he was by nature a night owl – and was only still in his pyjamas because he hadn’t had a chance to wash. So we studied each other, my father on the chair, the rest of us crowded around our mother as if gauging how far we would have to leap if we wanted to cross from bank to bank on dry feet, when my son, Simon, suddenly took some firm steps over to my father and silently hugged him, before running back to us.

  ‘Go on, you go over to your grandfather, too,’ I encouraged my three-year-old little girl in a curiously weak voice. But she wouldn’t budge. With the faultless intuition inherited from the female side of the family, she knew precisely why.

  A child is a great gift in itself. Furthermore it can conduct the parent into real adulthood. When my sister’s first little girl was born, I was hanging around with my father’s old friend Gyuri Sándor among all the other excited visitors in the crowded corridor, trying to identify the newborn on the hospital TV’s grainy screen.

  ‘See, she has suddenly become more of an adult than we will ever be,’ Gyuri said when he spotted my sister radiating happiness as she approached us down the corridor.

  Now I understand what he meant, though I have no idea how he knew this. If you’re prepared to do it, you can allow yourself the luxury of escorting your children through their childhood and so re-experience your own childhood through new eyes, with greater knowledge. A peep through the camera lens and there you are, a small, instinctive, messy creature with overwhelming feelings that completely fill you up, but now you can see what is happening around you. So far the camera has been on your shoulders, following every twitch of your body, but now it shifts to the corner of the room and is fixed there. From this new angle you see the big room of the nursery, the brilliant afternoon sunlight pouring through from one side, the polished glowing parquet, the children’s faces flushed with happiness as they wait, their small, perspiring hands on knees, clad in blue tracksuit bottoms, sitting alongside each other on lined-up nursery benches, the table in the corner covered with goodies. Then you see the nursery teacher’s lush head of hair grown pale through the use of cheap hair dye, her kindly smile as she leans to one side and produces from her sack a little devil instead of a Santa. Beyond the heart-wrenching terror, you see how the smile has never left the nurse’s lips when she pretends to frown and asks in a deep voice: ‘You there, tell me now, why were you so naughty on little Johnny Kádár’s birthday?’

  Maybe it wasn’t little Johnny Kádár. Maybe no such person ever existed. But there was someone, a prominent comrade’s important offspring, whose parents were upset because I had turned cartwheels on their son’s birthday. They regarded my act as a provocation. And news of this provocation spread from the Saturday afternoon party through to nursery school on Monday morning, when I was duly told off at the very first group session. Three months later, when I waited in vain for my Christmas gift, I also understood that my crime was not just incomprehensible but imperishable. But now, with the aid of the corner camera, I begin to understand what must have happened. Now I am re-experiencing not only the shock and distress of a five-year-old – I was always a good girl! Always! – but also the nursery teacher’s state of terror that led her to call the attention of the middle group to the question of my behaviour, at the Christmas party, months after the incident. And the startled silence of the group. At home I sobbed as I recounted why Santa had no presents for me this year. My mother tried to console me; my father, if he was told at all, would most certainly have explained it away.

  To be honest, I had completely forgotten the Christmas incident. My childhood was, on the whole, happy and secure, and there were few comparable mishaps. For a while I tried to convince myself that the nursery teacher was wicked, but I couldn’t maintain this position for long because she was good-natured and kind. After a time, I simply forgot the whole thing, chiefly because at the next nursery celebration I was treated according to my worth.

  Certain memories slumber serpent-like in the folds of the brain until something disturbs them and brings them to life. The fence at Cinege Road nursery was like that. The image of it emerged from the long-buried past because of an incident with my daughter, who was by then seven. For the first time ever it had been arranged that her class should enjoy a few days in the mountains, a trip that entailed train journeys, boats and nights at tourist hostels. A couple of days before the party set out, when everything was in place, Róza announced to the class that she wasn’t going. She resisted all questions, all attempts to charm her, all reasoning, with the most obstinate silence. Half the teaching staff were gathered round her by the time she finally hung her head and answered the teacher: ‘I’m not going because you’ll only leave me there.’

  The teacher was so upset that she rang me and asked me to help. At home I went through every detail with my offspring and that was how, to my greatest surprise, I found myself by the fence in Cinege Road. Since my father was always occupied with the great Cause and my mother was constantly working, we spent much of our early childhood at the school crèche and most of the summer in various children’s homes, until our parents could afford to take their well-deserved fortnight’s holiday at one or other union holiday resort with the dizzy delights of food vouchers and organised entertainment. As a child, I had stood by the fence at the Cinege Road children’s home, aware that the other children were orphans and that I was lucky not to be one of them, but all the same I spent hours standing there, with the portable radio in the neighbouring yard booming silly popular songs in the background, waiting for my mother to fetch me. My anxiety became overwhelming at times and I went to the carers in charge to say I was feeling ill. The children’s home in Cinege Road was a real paradise: the carers smiled, the place was clean, there were masses of toys, an enormous jungle-like playground, and beds with bars set out on the terrace for our afternoon naps. But no amount of smiling carers or terrace beds could allay the ache at the pit of my stomach.

  The following message soon arrived at the repository of Unsent Letters and Words Unsaid:

  Dear Szera,

  No need to return on the wings of nightmare. Now I know you were the fifth woman hovering about my father’s bed. One day, when we find a flat we no longer need to leave we will have your photograph on the wall, too. The one in which you are walking by the lake, smiling, with your two children in tow.

  A couple of days later, I suddenly had a thought, wrote the text down on a piece of paper and made a pretty paper boat of it. I took my children by the hand and we walked down to the lake. Carefully, we pushed the boat out on to the water and watched it as the waves swept it into the middle of the lake.

  In retrospect, I had such a sunny childhood because reality and what my parents said about reality seemed in absolute agreement. At the beginning of the 1960s, the country started to come to life after the big freeze of its apparent death in 1956: survivors tentatively began to move their stiff limbs, and blood started on its war
y circuit. The feeble light of reform was glancing through the system: it was possible to go to the cinema again and there was something to eat: what I never suspected was that we were sitting on a funeral banquette over the corpse of a strangled uprising. It was only a false dawn between 1956 and 1968, but there was enough faint sunlight to warm my childhood.

  One Sunday afternoon at the end of the summer in 1968, we were visiting an old family friend, Auntie Rózsi, who was a doctor in a small village in the Danube Bend, that beautiful stretch of the river across from the town of Visegrád. On the way home, I followed my parents’ anxious glances and saw how, on the rails beside us, ran an infinitely long series of tanks and green military vehicles, all heading north. We hurried home from the station and got into bed earlier than normal. We woke before dawn with dry throats, in dense darkness. As it turned out later, our lower-floor neighbour, crazy old Blanka, had made a fire in her stove and the smoke was being pushed back by the heat. Coughing, we felt our way out to the sitting room, where my mother had already opened the windows and was sobbing while trying to fan the smoke out. At first I thought that the smoke had got to her, but her tears continued to fall after the smoke had cleared. What’s the matter? I asked her in fright, because it was the first time I had seen my mother crying. ‘We’ve invaded Czechoslovakia,’ she sobbed. ‘And what does that mean?’ I asked, even more frightened now. ‘Does it mean we’re at war?’ ‘It’s like a war,’ she answered, and sent us out to the balcony so that we would not be poisoned by the smoke. I gazed at the green chestnut tree below in shock and tried to grasp what it all meant.

  For decades 1968 meant only the fright we had that morning, something that could be dispelled by airing the room. We generously forgave old Blanka and made jokes a long time after about why someone would choose precisely that hot August night to set fire to the past.