The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  Some years later I no longer regarded Blanka as a mad old woman with a penchant for pyromania. When we were children, we tried to avoid her as far as possible because she had an unforgiving view of the world and barked at us whenever we spilt the ash from the ceramic stove that we had to clean every morning on the stairs. As I was to discover, she didn’t make a racket only when neighbours spilt rubbish on the stairwell, but also in 1944 when they wanted to take away the Jews she was hiding, and in 1956 when they wanted to beat my uncle to death on account of his light tan shoes. It wasn’t as if she cultivated communists, she just could not stand injustice. I listened to her for hours as a teenager, my neck growing gradually stiffer as I looked up at her perched in the upper-ground-floor window while she recited poetry or told me what it was like to be the first female medic at Szeged University and to roam Istanbul in the 1930s. Old Blanka’s husband was another woman. Our neighbours in the house at Németvölgyi Road were typical twentieth-century Hungarian citizens who could display both the best and worst of humankind, switching between them at lightning speed, but nobody in the house ever dared curse her as a stinking pervert. I never discovered why she was so frightened on the night of the Czech invasion, but when she died, and when her companion committed suicide shortly afterwards, the upper-ground-floor flat remained for ever empty as far as I was concerned, whoever its new tenants were.

  When I look at my children, what looks back at me is not only the ‘me’ of that age, along with her vanished world, but my child father, too. My little girl is seven years old now and my father cannot have been much older when they moved to Prague. Even if his parents didn’t explain why they had to leave home, and even if the golden years of Prague followed, this must have been the first cloud in the carefree wide blue skies of his childhood. Through my two children, happily subsuming themselves in the discovery of the world, I can imagine what it must have been like for him to find one day his parents strangely tense and quiet, dismissing the beloved daily help, starting to pack, taking leave of relatives and close friends – most of whom, as we now know, they would never meet again – with an unusual stiffness, clutching the children’s hands, while setting off on a long silent train ride at the end of which they would find themselves in an unfamiliar city, where people spoke an unfamiliar language, in unfamiliar schools and playgrounds, where the nine-year-old boy and the seven-year-old girl had to establish a place for themselves. No shots had yet been fired, no barbed-wired camps established, but Europe had sunk into a sinister silence and the age of innocence was over.

  Primo Levi says somewhere that it was all those mountain hikes that saved him in the concentration camp. I don’t know whether he meant the physical benefit or that incomparable feeling of freedom we discover on a mountain top, or at the edge of the sea, that gives us strength we may draw on once life narrows around us. But there were times on our happy excursions when the thought occurred to me that this might come in useful some time, as if the pleasure of taking deep lungfuls of fresh air and temporarily allowing myself to sink, without anxiety, into the arms of nature were not quite enough. It would be so much easier if I knew what world I was introducing these two gorgeous children to and from what terrible hellholes I might have to rescue them. But the way things are now, you can’t get on a bus or a plane or enter a theatre without the thought that it might be precisely here, in this innocent-looking place, that a terminally embittered fellow member of the human race is waiting to spill your blood. On the altar of which sacred cause would you prefer to be sacrificed tonight, darling?

  On the occasion of that memorable train ride on 19 August 1968, we were visiting Auntie Rózsi on the Danube Bend. I was always a little scared of this gaunt, cold, stiffly formal woman. It might just have been her nature, but it might have been what happened to her that made her like that. In 1942 she and her husband arrived at the harbour in Amsterdam, clutching tickets for the next boat out, but at the very last moment she refused to go because she suddenly felt she could never live anywhere but at home, in Hungary. Two years later, her entire family was deported. In the spring of 1945 she walked back home from the concentration camp at Mauthausen to discover that she was the only survivor. She settled in a small village by the Danube and spent the rest of her time keeping the locals healthy by preventative treatment. Everyone else at the time thought the idea was ridiculous and Aunt Rózsi had to fight tooth and nail with both the medical authorities and her obstinate patients to be allowed to conduct her regular health checks. She married again in the early 1960s, but she could never forget the lanky young man whose death warrant she had signed in Amsterdam.

  She was well past sixty when she decided to sign up for the evening course at the Marxist-Leninist university. Maybe she simply wanted to relieve her lonely evenings, maybe she hoped to gain a wider perspective on the narrow-minded bureaucrats she encountered, maybe she also wanted to understand better an ever more troubled world in which everything she once thought important was quickly vanishing. By the grace of good fortune, the person fate had appointed to be her tutor for the course of introduction was that assiduous spreader of the word, my father. It didn’t take them long to find each other. Comrade Holló had within a few moments become the embodiment of truth, Aunt Rózsi’s intellectual guide and spiritual support. Despite the stern front, all the passionate love that the elderly woman’s murdered loves could never receive flowed like a torrent towards my father, who returned it with shy satisfaction and all-encompassing solicitousness. All the feelings for his own mother that he himself had thought buried for decades were directed towards this lonely old Jewish woman.

  Years later, after a stormy summer night, feeling she was no longer strong enough to fight with the dark forces of destruction, stupidity and evil, Aunt Rózsi hanged herself in the attic above her surgery. She left her Budapest studio flat to me. At the beginning of the 1980s, a time of desperate housing shortages, this freehold flat was like a gift from the gods that freed me at a stroke from all the basic existential necessities that afflicted the great majority of my contemporaries, pushing them to make ever more bitter, ever more demanding human and professional compromises. I was perfectly aware that I gained my new freedom at the cost of someone else’s suffering; I did not draw yet far-reaching philosophical conclusions from this fact, but I was enormously grateful.

  In his last days before the operation I was constantly waiting for my father to speak, to reveal something important about himself, to define his inheritance. But our intimate conversations, when they didn’t concern his manuscript, consisted of minor banalities and we were often stuck for words. One day when the gaps in the conversation were unusually long, I asked him if it was difficult for him to speak.

  ‘Yes, ever more difficult,’ he said with mild panic in his eyes.

  The havoc in his body was sending unmistakable signs to his brain but it seemed he was still set on ignoring them. I pulled from my backpack a thin book, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Oriental Tales, that my friend Justine had brought me the day before I left Geneva.

  ‘Would you like me to read some of this book to you?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know what it’s like, my friend lent it to me. But Yourcenar’s a good writer, we can rely on her.’

  My father nodded, relieved. I took the book and started to read. The story, based on an ancient Chinese legend, concerns the painter Wang-Fo and his students. Wang-Fo can paint so well that after a while people say his pictures come alive with the last stroke of his brush. The wealthy want him to paint guard dogs, the nobles want fully armed soldiers, priests regard him as a saint, and common people fear him because they are convinced that he can conjure up all kinds of terrible things. One dawn, soldiers drag Wang-Fo in front of the Emperor, who condemns him to death. His crime is that his painted world is more perfect than the real one where the Son of Heaven exercises absolute power. The world is nothing but a mass of scribbles a mad painter has committed to canvas, and our tears are always smudging it, says the Heavenly Dragon. As a las
t act of grace, the Emperor commands the old master to complete a half-finished picture that is kept in the palace. While the executioner heats his iron in the fire, Wang-Fo sets to painting the sky-high mountains, the waters of the sea and the clouds gathering at dawn. As soon as he moves his brush, the water breaks into waves and slowly covers the Emperor’s palace. Soon a light little barque appears with Wang-Fo’s faithful disciple, Ling, sitting in it. Under the astonished gaze of the courtiers, he helps the master into the craft and starts rowing. When the two disappear behind the cliffs on the horizon and the last plash of oars is heard, the water slowly withdraws from the palace. There are only a few damp patches left on the floor.

  I don’t know how far the words of Marguerite Yourcenar penetrated my father’s tortured consciousness. He listened carefully and, whenever I glanced up at him, his eyes looked back, encouraging me to carry on. When I finished reading, I closed the book and gazed at him with a radiant smile as if to assure him that there would be consolation.

  ‘You do a good job of translating,’ said my father in his threadbare voice.

  We sat quietly. I wondered if I should start another story or try some conversation. We were both looking at the tiles on the floor, smiling at each other occasionally. Soon my father said he’d like to rest. I drew the covers over him so he wouldn’t be cold and crept out of the room.

  The last night before the operation, I managed, once again, to sneak past the porter in his cabin and into the hospital. To my surprise, my father was sitting with Dr Cserjés on the white iron bed. They were quietly talking and there was something touching about the way they were leaning against each other, the doctor balanced, feet out, my father with his legs tucked under, as if afraid of sinking into the bed’s worn wire webbing. As I panted my way in, Dr Cserjés stood up, adjusted his crooked brown tie and, after a few witty remarks, shook my hand and left. My mother was out in the corridor waiting to escort my father to the bathroom. We got hold of my father, who leant against us like a golem drained of all strength, and set off down the long corridor towards the showers.

  On the morning of the operation, my sister and her husband picked me up at Németvölgyi Road and we drove to the hospital to see our father before he went into the theatre. My sister shouted at me because I wasn’t ready in time, and she was right. I also knew how nervous she was and how she’d be weeping and screaming en route if she had her way as we moved through sluggish morning traffic in Alagút Street and over Lánchíd, the Chain Bridge. I shrunk into the back seat and watched people hurrying to work. When we reached the ward, my father was sitting on the side of the bed waiting for his operation. They had clearly given him a sedative, because he was a little dazed: he was happy enough to grasp our hands but found it difficult to speak. When the surgical assistant arrived with the trolley, my father seemed to fly into a mild panic like a traveller in a taxi who sets out on a long journey but is suddenly seized by the fear that he has left something behind. The envelope, the envelope, he kept saying as they loaded him on the trolley in their practised way and started wheeling him through the door. Once we were home, my mother explained that he meant the envelope of cash that we should have slipped into the assistant’s pocket because paramedics are so badly paid.

  My sister and I returned to the ward to pack our father’s things. We were trying supernaturally hard to avoid an air of catastrophe. We might even have giggled at the great pile of handkerchiefs and newspapers by the bed, but then, when I happened to look up, through the window I saw his trolley being pushed along the short corridor to the operating theatre. I knew that the shape under the green covers was my father. For a moment I shuddered to think how quickly he had become part of another reality, part of an indifferent other system where he was no longer the father whose belongings we were gathering together with the gentle, mildly mocking affection of grown-up children, but a gravely ill man being wheeled to surgery, a tired body waiting for the knife.

  We handed one of his suitcases in at administration so that he would be able to use what was in it while recovering from the operation, the other, full of books, manuscripts, brief notes on scraps of paper, newspapers already read and dirty washing, we took home, thinking they wouldn’t be much use for a while. That suitcase stood for weeks in my father’s vacant study, like an accomplice that had taken a mysterious role in the inevitable. I don’t know which of us was brave enough to open it and allow its contents to merge with the predominant chaos of the study. But ever since then when I see the copy of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes on the shelf, I always remember it was the last book my father read with the unshakable confidence that he would at last understand why everything around him was falling apart.

  The evening after the operation, I was sitting alone in the synagogue of the old people’s home in Alma Street, in the dark office behind the window separating the praying menfolk from the women, and heard the sound of prayer filtering through it, staring through the bars on the window at a sky that was slowly darkening. I didn’t know what to pray for. Dr Cserjés had talked of only three, at most six, months remaining for my father. That is if there were no new miracles. My mother and sister were, of course, waiting on precisely such a miracle. Having seen one, they mistakenly expected to see others. I sat in the growing darkness with empty thoughts rattling around my brain. I no longer expected a miracle, but to wish for anything else felt like murder. ‘Don’t let it. Don’t let it be. Don’t leave me here muttering like a fool. Don’t leave me muttering like a fool when I’m about to meet my maker. A cat is sitting on my broken stove. Don’t let it. Don’t let me be sad.’ I kept repeating to myself the mixed-up lines of Attila József’s poem, like a cracked record, my needle stuck.

  Sixth

  The last time I saw my father alive, he was in intensive care, tied to his iron bed because he constantly wanted to rip out the tubes that were attached to him. While the children, who had been waiting outside the hospital gate with my sister, ran up and down the stairs stopping every so often to study the pattern of the wrought-iron railings, I stood beside my father in a dark green jacket, antiseptic gloves and wear-once-only slippers and tried to talk to him as he fought for breath. He could still talk when my sister, who was first, went in to see him, but my mother and I heard only fragments of words. I held his hand, gazing at the lilac patches where the infusions had been applied, and felt ever more desperate. ‘I want to get out, I want to get out,’ my father kept saying, and then he just gurgled. It was no use leaning over him, pressing his hand between my two palms; no point throwing a few words his way hoping he might catch hold of them. Before he finally lost consciousness for the last time his eyes looked far into the distance. 'I want to get out,' he suddenly moaned again and, gathering all his strength, shook the bed. That’s his eternal yearning for freedom, my mythopoeic self might have said, but my mythopoeic self was squatting silently in the corner, unable to speak a word.

  Saturday morning, two days after the operation, I was wandering back and forth between the kitchen and the hall of our flat in a dozier state than usual, preparing breakfast. My mother had been on the phone in the kitchen five times already describing father’s pitiful condition in intensive care the previous night. When the telegram boy rang, I took the folded paper from him as in a dream and it was only after he’d galloped down the stairs that it occurred to me he would usually have waited for a tip. Why was he in such a rush? I asked myself as I shut the door. In the kitchen my mother kept talking to someone on the phone about the tubes my father had tried to tear out though his hands were taped to the bed. I placed the telegram on the table in front of her and went back to the hall, where the children were, to check whether they had succeeded in spilling milk all over themselves. Then I heard the terrible scream. My mother dashed about the narrow kitchen, incomprehensible cries bubbling up from her throat. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying but my body ran chill from head to foot. She was flapping uncontrollably, like a bird caught in a cage, not knowing how to
escape through the bars. She lurched against the fridge, against the corner of the table, against the entirely indifferent kitchen cupboard all the time screaming, and when she wasn’t screaming she howled as if being beaten. I was afraid she’d hurt herself and tried to stop her, pouring a glass of water down her throat, but she snatched it from my hand and carried on floundering around in the kitchen. Hearing the great noise, Simon came in, his two enormous black eyes fixed on my mother, then, having seen enough, he turned on his heel and went back out again. My hand was shaking uncontrollably as I unfolded the telegram and smoothed it out:

  Dear Madam,

  We are sincerely sorry to inform you that your husband passed away on the ward at 4 this morning.

  There might have been something else there, too, but these were the only words that kept ringing in my heavy head, each individual word like a dull stroke of the axe.

  I tottered into the hall to check on the children. I bumped into little Róza in the corridor leading to the kitchen. She was busily trying to make her way out. There was a hastily drawn picture in red crayon in her hand.

  ‘Look, Grandmother!’ she said with the clear confidence of a three-year-old to my mother, who had somehow managed to leave the kitchen and was swaying around in the corridor. ‘Here’s Grandfather! Here he is! I have drawn him for you!’

  My mother bent down to say something to the serious little girl who was gazing at her, but only faint squeaks rose from her throat. Róza pressed the drawing into her hand and fled into the children’s room. Simon sat in the living room pressed right back in the deep armchair like someone forced into a corner.

  ‘Mothers don’t cry,’ he pronounced staring directly at me. ‘Mothers don’t cry,’ he repeated.