The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  In the nervous half-hour before the burial, we gathered in the upper section of the Németvölgyi Road cemetery near the Hóvirág Street entrance. We had left the children with my friend Márti. They didn’t complain: it was as if they knew that it might be best to steer clear of the day’s events. My father lay on the bier in his best black suit, white shirt and tie, but without shoes. The funeral director advised us to take the shoes back with us as they’d be stolen otherwise. My mother had placed a small notebook and pen in his right-hand top pocket so he could carry on making notes in the other world. Speak, Charon! Tell me about your life story, the conditions of your dwelling and the fate of your children. And how about your social background and work experience? And what did it all amount to?

  My father lay obediently in his coffin. In the ten days since his death he had shrunk into a defenceless old man. His eyes were sunken, the joyful little smile on his lips had vanished and he seemed to be frowning as he waited to see what would happen next. He looked a little like Lenin, whose embalmed body we were privileged to glimpse on one occasion, having waited for several hours in the vast Red Square where the endless queues wound and crossed each other. This time I was brave enough to look for his childhood scar, the souvenir of his accident with the axe. It was there on his right thumb. Lost in thought, I gazed at his still hand, laid carefully next to his body. It looked as if it was clad in a small, horn-coloured glove. I glanced at his face, looked back at the glove and came to the conclusion that my father, the great fugitive from death, had found a new secure hiding place.

  The state funeral service did not seem fully in control of the situation. There was some confusion with wreaths and, after the speeches and some initial crackling, we found ourselves with the middle of the letter aria from Tosca, ‘E lucevan le stelle’, coming at us with such power I thought it would burst the eardrums of everyone present. The second time they managed to find the beginning of the track, and Giuseppe di Stefano’s tenor voice soared and settled on the dark mass of mourners like a soft, light black veil. A poem by Neruda was recited by my friend Judit, who had just recovered from cancer and was wearing a sexy black mini-dress, her smile as dazzling as if we were at a christening. For a moment the hands of the Party comrades who were distributing leaflets at the back trembled at the sight of her bold décolletage.

  As I scanned the ranks of familiar and unfamiliar faces, some I hadn’t seen since childhood, I was humbled by the sheer number of people who had come all this way in the stifling heat to pay their respects to my father. The family was lined up behind the coffin like prisoners awaiting execution. Poor Steven stood behind me shifting from foot to foot. I could sense him thinking tensely: Good heavens, are these people about to start rending their garments? The dark hall floated in front of me with its miserable artificial lighting, while the sun blazed in triumph outside. The black-clad sweating bodies seemed to melt together in the heat. Faces blurred in front of my eyes. I found my lips muttering quiet courteous responses as I stood up straight, clutching my mother’s arm like someone fated from birth to stand like this for ever. I strained my every sinew to make sure everything went smoothly, so she wouldn’t faint, nothing would be forgotten, there would be no mishap. It was only when I saw my friend Magda’s face harden with grief that I realised that I, too, was involved in this, that the helpless weight in the dark brown wooden coffin was my father waiting to take up his last lodging in the Németvölgyi Road cemetery.

  ‘It’s only his body,’ I muttered to my mother through my teeth as we stepped stiffly uphill, like wooden puppets, following the car bearing the coffin.

  I noticed how one of the gravediggers spat in his palm before thrusting his spade into the pile of earth, then, with beautiful, regular movements, started to fill the hole. I was relieved the speeches were over and that no one had anything more to say: you could see the gravediggers were in a hurry as there was another funeral procession waiting behind us. The thought occurred to me that, had not my father refused to be a Jew even in death, his body might have found itself among some good friends further down the cemetery, in the Jewish section. But children’s graves and enormous trees are not such bad company after all, I thought, and kept staring at his name with incomprehension. What was this name that was written on the front door to our apartment doing here on a label nailed on a yellowish strip of wood stuck into a pile of earth.

  After the burial, the family got into a car and drove home. Back in Németvölgyi Road we sat in the living room with the blinds down on account of the heat. In the oppressive silence my uncle Mihály suddenly produced a bottle of something alcoholic and started to tell an incomprehensible story in a cracked voice. Immediately everyone livened up and we fell over each other with stories about the dead man; we offered each other drinks in the dead man’s glasses; we shouted and laughed, drunk on the dead man’s liquor, drunk with the proximity of death, drunk on sheer despair; we were laughing so much that we had to lean against each other to support ourselves. My mother sat motionless in the middle of the room, as if completely deaf to our unruly noise.

  Back there in the silence and heat of the cemetery, a black-suited man wearing a kippa was bowing over the grave. It was Miki Winter, once the leader of the Endre Ságvári young pioneer troop and the first great love of my life.

  The days after the funeral were leaden and slow. My sister joined her family on holiday, unable to bear the flat with its deathly closeness. My mother and I busied ourselves with things that had lost their meaning. In the evenings, once the children were asleep and my mother was not crying so much, we talked about my father. It was as if we wanted the summer my father died to fix him in our memories while his presence and absence were still fresh. The image the two of us arrived at was probably the closest we ever got to my father’s complex and contradictory personality.

  But beyond grieving together we also had to come to terms with our individual loss. Once we parted, we vanished into our separate dimensions: my mother into despair; myself into a void. I lay on the bed with open eyes. My head was a numb emptiness in which thoughts flew about like specks of dust in the sunlight. Sometimes I felt pain, at other times I was prey to a host of unanswered questions. In order to control the pain, I occupied myself with logical speculation, on the assumption that once I could explain things I could fill the hole left by my father’s departure. I tried to number the factors that determine the kind of death waiting for us unannounced around the corner, while we are still full of our everyday thoughts. Could my father have lived a different life? Could he have broken the ties that bound him to communism? Did he have any choice in the matter? I thought about the Polish theatre critic Jan Kott and the economist Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom underwent dramatic changes in their lives. Their examples showed that early commitments are not necessarily lifelong. But what does it take to bring about such a radical conversion? Courage, honesty, accident, vanity?

  My father’s self-defence mechanism was in perfect order; he tried to ignore, deny or rationalise away anything that might lead him to question his faith. It speaks well of him that he lied, but wasn’t cynical; he tried to hand on only those lies in which he himself believed. The trouble was that by erecting such powerful defences he did not see that he was losing the chance of development.

  In the farewell letter he wrote before his first operation, when he still had the strength to write farewell letters, he claimed that he had not lived in vain. By his own lights therefore he was happy. So why did I want him to account for himself?

  One night it struck me that it wasn’t my father I was mourning, but the person he might have been. I thought he had failed to realise his true self, but that the possibility remained in him right to the moment he died. Under that badly cut commissar suit there was an old-fashioned humanist patiently waiting to emerge. It was the weight of two deaths that had settled on me.

  When it was our turn to take a holiday, the evening before we left, I opened the door to my father’s study and looked a
round. I had the strange feeling that he was still there. He might still be hiding, who knows in what form, among those thousands of unopened, unread notes and letters, among that pile of things, in that overwhelming saturation. I quickly closed the door behind me and started searching. Everything was as we had left it in the last rush of tidying; now it was possible to get to the window without tripping over too many obstacles on the way, and nor did the heaps of books look like they were about to collapse. I leaned against the bookshelves and took a deep breath. It didn’t matter that my father had been buried for ten days, I could still smell him in his study. The next time I would return, the chaos – more manageable, perhaps – would still be here, but this smell, the characteristic smell of his living body that had permeated everything in the room: that would be gone.

  The greater part of his books and notes remain where they were to this day. We drank the bottles of mineral water and distributed the more expensive drinks among doctors and plumbers. Items that ‘would come in useful one day’ actually did come in useful and, if they didn’t, we discreetly threw them away. My mother’s brothers inherited most of his clothes, while the polo-neck jumper bought for his birthday but never given to him passed to my friend Tamás and his knitted waistcoat went to Miki Winter. I brought the only top-quality shirt with me to Geneva and gave it to a friend’s husband whose own father had been working for the Red Cross and had been killed in the Liberian civil war by a stray bullet. My friend’s husband was so taken aback by my gesture that he avoided me for some time – a good example of the kind of Genevan tact I sometimes ramble on about.

  When my sister arrived back from her holiday and started re-arranging life with her usual energy, we went away to the small Greek village where we took our regular summer vacations. My mother was unwilling to move from the flat. The plane touched down late at night. We got into a taxi, I wound the window down, the children leaned against me and immediately fell asleep. The taxi’s engine struggled loudly up the hill as I gazed out at the scented silence and asked myself why I wasn’t feeling anything. Where was the annual joy that used to fill me as we passed each familiar village, olive grove, bend of the road, each familiar house and hedge? I felt the breeze and the fresh air mingled with the smell of vegetation; heard the noise escaping lighted inns; noted the wayside trees caught in the circle of the headlights, the dry earth under the wheels, the brilliant starlit sky and there, over the hill, like a secret promise, the endless velvet darkness of the sea. Good to arrive, I sighed to myself, but I might never be as happy as before. I might never again be astonished by the way the afternoon sun illuminates the olive groves, opening a secret door into another world; unable to lose myself in the delicate web of green fern leaves or in the never-ending music of cicadas. I might never again watch, enchanted, as the children play their mysterious games, smile at the transparent rituals of flirtation on the beach, or be moved when the waiter in the out-of-the-way fish restaurant comes straight over to shake my hand. Will I ever be happy again walking on my favourite old paths, discovering a half-eroded inscription on a crumbling gateway, feeling the sea stroke my skin, hugging the old woman in her black scarf, breathing in the heavy scent of flowers in the evening? Will I sit again on the balcony admiring the brilliant Milky Way? Will I make love again for the pleasure of it, not just to prove, despairing lump of flesh, that I am still alive?

  After the anxiety of the first few days had passed and I felt at home again, I was surprised at how tranquil I felt. It was good to be the familiar outsider in the cliff-top house, the foreigner who visits every summer wearing the same sun-faded dress, the same dusty sandals, the same decomposing straw hat, walking along with her family on a boiling hot day, greeting passers-by with a hearty hello, a nameless statistic in a place whose laws and regulations are as much a mystery to me as my world’s are to them. The sleepy little village we stay in each summer is a small universe of which we become a part in our holiday weeks, the part we have paid for, a part just long enough to let the time allotted pass with as little disturbance as possible. We turn off the Calor gas flasks, draw down the blinds and go for a swim. We greet the locals. When we pack up at the end of summer there is no trace of us left in the house, nothing preserves our memory. The owners throw away the stones we carefully gathered on the beach, and the villagers may occasionally mention us in the long damp winter months, but they can’t quite recall our names and if we didn’t turn up one summer, someone else would take the house.

  It doesn’t hurt to be an outsider here. On the contrary, it is a kind of protection, especially this particular summer. I don’t have to look sad, I don’t need to show what I feel. As the days pass, everything gets simpler. We don’t have to make life-changing decisions: all we have to decide is whether to turn left or right to the nearest sandy beach. We save our energy to attend to the essentials: the changing colours of the sea, the path of the sun, the secrets of the night, the twisted trunks of the olive trees and the billowing of silvery-blue dragonflies.

  But two weeks later, on the point of leaving, I suddenly feel a new wave of sadness. I remember my father: it isn’t an overwhelming flood of feeling this time, more a kind of regret that I can no longer ask him simple questions, like why he drank his coffee without sugar, when precisely did he have that accident with the axe, or what street did they live on in Prague? I regretted it, because I had been too busy with big questions that I insisted he should answer, even while knowing that I would have to solve them for myself without his help. I realised suddenly that the fact that he was no longer a moral or political compass, that he was growing ever less significant to people, might have played an equally important role in my father’s death as the wildly growing number of diseased cells in his brain.

  The last time I turned to my father for an answer was probably when, on one of my autumn visits, we went to the typist. He could still walk pretty well and he made his way up Goldmark Károly Road without too much trouble. We were taking something to be typed up, because he never learned to use the small laptop I had bought him for his great new work and he always remained dependent on others to produce a presentable hard copy of his chaotic manuscripts. Fortunately there was still one warm-hearted typist left over from the old days who had an out-of-date electronic typewriter, and who was willing to type up his scrawly longhand, full of emendations, excisions and stuck-on notes, working hard to decipher the more incomprehensible parts. We were walking down Határőr Road, towards the cogwheel railway, when I asked him whether it was an inevitable part of adulthood to feel permanently that everything is crumbling around us. It was worse before the war, he said, and his answer comforted me in a strange way. In that case destruction is just the usual way of things, I told myself, not realising that I had just broken with one of our most important principles: an optimistic view of human progress.

  I took my leave of the sunny island and the warm sea, packed all my family’s belongings into the big black suitcases and we set out on the journey back to the calm, ordered and measured city of Geneva where, unlike in Budapest, my father’s absence did not shout at me from every street corner.

  Summer ends all of a sudden in Geneva: one moment it is there, the next it is gone. The temperature drops abruptly and it begins to rain unendingly: the light sandals, the thin summer dresses immediately vanish into the dark winter prison of the clothes trunk, even though our bodies protest, hoping that some good weather will return, an Indian summer, with the sun stroking us one last time before we face again the icy wind. There may be days of brilliant sunshine, but it is an autumnal sun that we enjoy, wearing pullovers and proper shoes, and it is for our eyes only, not for our whole beings. The summer my father died ended in Geneva as abruptly as if it had been cut with a knife. We dressed in heavy clothes and wore solemn expressions. School started. We worked according to precise routines, reacquainted ourselves with the hard task of getting up early.

  My father’s death excused everything. When the children shrank from strangers, when
I found myself ringing home all the time, when I didn’t finish my work to the given deadline, it was my father’s fault for dying. Autumn produced its usual fruits: pears, apples, full-bodied grapes, a second generation of strawberries. The trees by the lake wore purple and gold. I wasn’t in mind-bending agony, just numb with anxiety for my mother. I still leapt with fright each time the phone rang. Death was the constant presence in everything I did.

  In mid-October I called on Dr Vesely for the usual homeopathic prescriptions against winter colds. Dr Vesely was a surgeon and our local practitioner. Energetic and intelligent, she was a formidable figure. Apart from the normal medical qualifications her passionate interest in the human body had led her to diplomas in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. One morning, years before, when I rang her on account of a persistent bout of bronchitis, her normally cheerful voice sounded rather hollow. When I asked what was the matter, she told me, after a brief hesitation, that her thirteen-year-old daughter had had an accident and was still in a coma after two months. The girl eventually emerged from the coma with the consciousness of a two-year-old child, screamed with pain for a whole year, then died. She was the second child Dr Vesely had lost. Her first had died of cancer at the age of three.

  ‘At the time I thought nothing worse could happen to me,’ said Dr Vesely. ‘As if one could make deals with pain.’

  Dr Vesely had married a Czech man, which might have helped her to understand the tormented Eastern European soul slightly better than had she married into a regular Genevan Calvinist family. All I know of this man is that he had had to flee Czechoslovakia when our comradely tanks invaded and that, even after the resounding loss of two children, he, like my own dear father, was unwilling to look death in the eye.