When I appeared for my autumn visit to the surgery, after the customary courtesies, Dr Vesely did her usual check-up, found everything to be all right and then, after looking at me again, asked what was that enormous rock over my head.
‘My father died,’ I told her.
I quickly recounted the circumstances. She looked at me thoughtfully, then suggested we arrange a brief ritual through which I could take leave of my father. I was a little taken aback, but nodded automatically as I did to everything she suggested. Dr Vesely told me what should be done. The ritual would consist of three parts. In the first I would say out loud everything I loved about my father and our relationship. In the second I would say what I didn’t like. In the third I would go through all that I had inherited from him, everything that, because or in spite of him, had become part of my life. After this was done I should imagine an infinity sign, with my father in one loop of it and myself in the other. Then I was to cut the link between them.
Some weeks later I caught the bus to the surgery. Dr Vesely laid me down on the bed where she normally administered acupuncture and, as if nothing could be more normal, opened the floodgates. I was embarrassed at first because I found it hard to get over the absurdity of the situation: here I was in a foreign city, lying on a couch in a surgery, with a near stranger beside me in the fading sunlight, speaking to a dead person in an incomprehensible language. But once I got through the first few minutes, I was surprised how naturally one thing followed another. After a little while I sensed my father crouching in the dim yellow light, in the left-hand corner of the surgery. He was there without his usual defences, more real than I had ever seen him. After the initial heart-in-the-mouth feeling I spoke to him without fear or caution, in a way I had never done before. In the torrent of liberated words and feelings there was a moment when I heard the shuffling of paper and a gentle noise like a pen quickly passing over a smooth page. Poor Dr Vesely, she must have had quite enough of this and was writing up her medical notes, I thought. Perhaps it was a prescription she was writing, or an instruction that I should be removed immediately to the nearest locked cell? But then my thoughts returned to my father, who was still squatting in the left-hand corner of the room. We were at the third stage of the ritual now, where I was to say what mark my father had left on my life. Once I had finished, I listened in exhaustion as Dr Vesely spoke again.
‘Now imagine the infinity sign with you in one loop and him in the other! Then cut the link between the loops.’
I saw the infinity sign with my father in one loop and a shape in the other that might have been me. I waited a while trying to understand what kind of space we were occupying. When I looked over to him, my father was still there, unmoving, his whole being clinging on to life. I waited a while, then started to speak again. ‘You can go now,’ I said. ‘No one will threaten you there. There’ll be neither shame nor pain. You don’t need to fear anything any more’. I spoke quietly, patiently, like someone persuading a child to put on his raincoat so he’d not be soaked to the skin. After a while I felt my father was no longer in the room. But he hadn’t left, he had simply been absorbed slowly into the available space: he’d turned to water. I’ve no idea why specifically water. Perhaps so that he might remain among us a little while longer because in our worldly lives we had always been water monsters, always settling by some river or lake, always dreaming about the sea. For a fortnight or so after that I continued to feel his presence in the lake, then he vanished for good.
When, tearful and covered in perspiration, I sat up and tried to pull my body together, I saw Dr Vesely sitting perfectly politely behind her desk. For a while we looked at each other in silence.
‘He didn’t want to go,’ I said at last.
‘And?’ she asked.
‘I had to persuade him.’
‘And then?’
‘Then he slowly dissolved into water.’
‘What water?’
‘I don’t know. All kinds of water.’
I stood up weakly, my muscles trembling. The rock did not hang over me any more.
‘He has left this message for you,’ said Dr Vesely and gave me a scrawled prescription. My hands were shaking so much I couldn’t have read it even if her writing were legible.
‘I can’t read it,’ I grunted.
Dr Vesely took the slip of paper back and read it to me. My father had responded to everything I had said in the ritual, item by item, and then he had said farewell. Now he was letting me go my way, wishing me the best. I stared at Dr Vesely.
‘But how did he say all this?’ I stuttered. ‘Did he learn French after he died?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she laughed. ‘There are other forms of communication. From soul to soul.’
This was too much for my tortured brain, brought up on dialectical materialism. I felt I should escape immediately, before Dr Vesely started reciting the entire volume of Árpád Tóth poems, From Soul to Soul. My legs were about to buckle.
‘Aha! Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha, ha ha!’ I started laughing hysterically.
We smiled at each other blissfully. Then, forgetting the Swiss medical code of practice, she took a couple of steps, embraced and kissed me, then helped me out of the surgery. It was evening and dark by then. I made my way home down the deserted streets as if lost in some strange town. For a while I followed cars’ headlights, then the constant mingled noise of the traffic. Suddenly I felt the ground vanishing from under my feet and had to sit down on a cold stone bench to recover my strength. After a long while I stood up cautiously and set off again.
I seemed to have been wandering in the dark for hours when I finally saw the lake. I gave a relieved sigh. There was a refreshing breeze blowing on the bridge. I looked down and gazed at the black water, a dark maternal presence, far from home, but still a landmark.
When, a couple of months later, I told my mother about this visit, she listened attentively and assured me that the piece of paper full of scribble in my possession was a proof of Dr Vesely’s remarkable perception and psychological skills enabling her to put my mind at rest.
My beloved sister,
To pick up on our earlier conversation. What matters is not what he gave, or what he wanted to give us, but what we received. In any case, what people choose to leave and what we really inherit are two different things. One of Simon’s most important memories is of Father reading the story of Moses to him. I know what lay behind this distinctly formative element in his life: Father was left alone with his grandson for an hour, but had not the least idea of what to do with a five-year-old child. The simplest thing was to hide behind a book and communicate with him in that way. Since they had already read the dinosaur book that was on the top of the pile several times, he grabbed the book under it and conscientiously read it from cover to cover to my bright-eyed little boy. It told the story of Exodus and of how Moses had gone to Mount Sion to get the Tablets of Law. It was a big book, with colourful illustrations, that had emerged from the permanent flow of things at Németvölgyi Road; I have no idea how it got there. Whether by heavenly decree or by blind chance and circumstance but certainly despite himself and quite against his own wishes, Father presented his grandson with one of his most important early experiences and revealed what he most wanted to hide: the fact that he was a Jew.
Love
Y
Dear Miki,
A short while ago I discovered that my father was born on the same day many years after Ignác Goldziher. This must be the utterly scientific explanation for my overflowing love of Persian civilisation. Last week I saw an exhibition of Persian art of the last seven thousand(!) years. There were a couple of stunning miniatures, some wonderful gold artefacts, some gorgeous ceramics and the account books of Xerxes graven on stone. But what moved me most was a tiny cream tub made of that deep blue material that was only manufactured in the East. The tub was being held by an owl with a sad, knowing expression on its face, as if it were saying: ‘Make yourself pretty, my dear, s
ince life, for all your beauty and charm, is as brief as the beating of a wing.’ I shuddered as if someone had suddenly greeted me. From the depths of a forgotten past someone had said something perfectly contemporary and conversational. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you read Rumi’s poetry, when you start to suspect that the translator has smuggled in your own worries and thoughts.
In one room there were pictures of long-vanished cities projected on to the wall to the sound of classical Persian music. I sat in the darkness listening to the sound of the kamancheh, staring bewitched at the images that passed before me. Just as our bodies retain the memory of our traumas and pleasures, so the earth absorbs and preserves the traces of people as they follow each other: ruins of streets and houses that are now hills and mountains, regular geographical features. The past is gone for ever, but from a certain height we can see that it was once the present and that there are traces of it all around us.
I would have stayed there for hours but the attendants politely ushered me out. I bought a catalogue – I’ll show it to you in the summer.
Love
Y
P.S. Regarding birthdays, I discovered among Gigi’s notes that I was born on the same day as Szera, my grandmother. Imagine how many forms my father must have filled out listing the birth dates of his mother and his daughter, without ever saying anything to me about it.
Seventh
One grey morning in the autumn following my father’s death, on Yom Kippur, when I was still in mourning, I was walking through town, deaf and blind, simply a robot fulfilling all the tasks required of me. The pain was not as heavy as it had been, it was rather as if I was wrapped in a thousand layers of aluminium foil, so that I would not fall apart or feel anything. I followed my routine mechanically: bathroom, wardrobe, kitchen, stairs, lift, peeling paint on walls, grey morning street, look left, look right, a small hand in mine, my only contact with the living. Nursery, hop on the bench, off with the shoes, on with the slippers, ‘Bonjour, bonjour’, newsagent’s, baker’s, post office. This time a letter to pick up. A faintly familiar handwriting on the small blue envelope.
I left the post office deep in thought. I certainly felt that I knew that handwriting, but had no idea whose it was. My mind was still focused on the blue envelope and the half-recognised postmark, trying to work it out, but my heart was already racing and suddenly I felt unbearably hot. I hadn’t opened the letter yet but, by the time I reached the shore of the lake, I knew who it was from and had to sit down on a cold stone bench to read it. I took great care opening the envelope: it was as if the letters were made of glass and the merest knock might shatter them. The text spoke of years and distances, of a new job, a new life and a grown-up child trying his luck in America. And about my shadow that had flitted across a good many evenings, across ‘mistaken greetings and unfinished letters torn into a thousand tiny pieces’. Who knows how long I stayed sitting there on the damp bench. When I finally managed to stand up and look at the sky, a window had opened in that desperate mass of grey and an invisible hand had written a character on the surface of the lake.
Life
The figure that suddenly emerged on that grey autumn morning from the fog of dreams, yearnings and memories after a thirteen-year absence was the second great love of my life. If we are lucky we are granted one true love in life, a romantic old man once told me; he having found his just a few months before he died. For me there were two. You little Stakhanovite, always over-producing, muttered the socialist realist in my head. I’m sorry, I inherited it from my father, I answered modestly. Yes, but which of the two was the real one? quibbled the eminent hair-splitter. Both, I answered, but then I remembered my father making his way down the spinach-coloured corridors of the hospital with the aid of his Zimmer frame. I had never dared ask him whether he ever felt, even for a tiny second, that overwhelming feeling of perfection.
I did once gather up enough courage to ask Gyuri Sándor. We happened to be on our way to visit my father after the first operation, as he was recovering in some hospital. We’d arranged to meet in Moszkva Square because it was convenient for him on his way back from work, Gyuri being one of those people who prefers to work till the day he dies. We stood by the flower statue and gazed at the various commercial goings-on: the loud youths, the gypsy traders in their long skirts avoiding the police, the idle day labourers waiting to be picked up for some chore in the city’s affluent outskirts. We were like two survivors of an earlier age, turning our heads around like frightened chickens.
‘Gyuri, my dear, have you ever been in love?’ I asked, slightly to my own surprise.
When in his late forties, Gyuri had married one of his colleagues at work, a woman who, like him, was the only survivor of a once-thriving Jewish family. Fugitive with fugitive, stray seed with stray seed. Marriage then was often a covenant between survivors, a form of defence and defiance. They had no children. Gyuri studied our children with the curiosity of an anthropologist. He died just as my children were getting to the age when they could have started having proper conversations.
Gyuri stood next to me, wearing a tie and an impeccably tailored suit, his face expressionless, as if he hadn’t heard my question.
‘What’s your problem?’ His clever eyes flashed at me behind his glasses. Because of the fierce light I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or just screwing up his eyes against the sun.
‘I asked if you have ever been truly happy in love,’ I persisted. ‘If there was a moment in your life when you said: This is it; time should stop right here.’
Gyuri gazed at the queue of people at the ticket office, lost in thought. Then he gave me a cheeky grin.
‘Ah yes. Talking about Faust reminds me to thank you for the Camões book. An excellent translation. It’s an essential work. You really should read it.’
I sighed and gave up, and took his arm as we set off slowly for the 56 tram.
A couple of years later, shortly after waking one morning, Gyuri had a stroke. He lay slumped at the foot of the bed, looking helplessly at his wife who was having coffee in the armchair. The woman, who returned from deportation unharmed but had lost a leg in 1956, did not see anything wrong with him, hobbled out to fetch the newspaper and threw it into his lap. Gyuri sat there with the copy of Népszabadság in his lap, watching astonished as the world unwound in slow motion, until the haemorrhage in his brain started to make him feel sick. By the time they rang my mother, it was too late. Gyuri took two weeks to die. My father and I visited him in hospital every day.
‘Gyuri, my dear, do you want to live?’ I bent over him to say once while my father nipped out on some errand. Without his glasses his face looked naked. He blinked at me through his left eye and a teardrop started meandering down the wrinkles of his face, as though seeking a path. His wife, a sharp-witted, grim-humoured commissar of a creature, died a couple of months after him. When their flat had to be emptied, my mother spent days clearing the pantry of flour, sugar and bottles of sunflower oil long past their use-by date.
It was in Mexico that I met the second great love of my life. I had arrived there with the modest mission to liberate the Latin American continent. My father, my sister and I had divided the world between us: he watched over Eastern Europe, my sister took care of Africa and I, out of my great enthusiasm for Che Guevara and the heroes of the Spanish Civil War, took on Latin America. I had learned Spanish and read everything I could get hold of back home to prepare myself for the task, and, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, won a scholarship that took me to my mission field. I had no idea that this innocent-looking research trip would completely change my life. It’s true that I had had a few encounters with sobering reality before, but every time I returned home my father saw to it that any resulting cracks in the façade should be quickly plastered over. This time I was far away in Mexico and the cracking process became irreversible. To nobody’s surprise, I did not succeed in liberating Latin America. It became apparent pretty quickly that I was agai
n the victim of a gross semantic misunderstanding. It was Latin America that liberated me.
My father read thick books in English and in German, but when he read aloud it was impossible to understand him because he spoke phonetically, as political prisoners did in the past, learning the languages of people they could never visit. On his rare ventures to the West, my father stumbled haplessly along the tangled paths of a living language. Fortunately there was always some printed matter he could use as a butterfly net to catch the odd bit of speech as it fluttered past him so that he could study it at his leisure. He generally managed in this way. Perhaps my father saw the truth, as presented to his eyes behind the Iron Curtain, over-literally, too. He had no problems of interpretation in the East, not only because of his perfect knowledge of Russian and Czech and the linguistic gift he inherited from his father that enabled him to understand practically everything, but because reality seemed to adjust itself to the twisted and simplified language that was applied to it.
Western languages were pure fiction to me, too, and for a long time I didn’t see the point of wasting my time on them. I learnt English after university, through miscellaneous courses, having discovered that I couldn’t get by without it. When, a couple of years later, I was awarded a scholarship to England, I was happily making my way home with the good news, thinking about how once there in foggy Albion I could drop into an ordinary English shop and ask for a bottle of milk in Shakespeare’s language, and I grinned so widely that a man passing me in the street stopped and raised his eyebrow expectantly. I could of course ask for milk in Pushkin’s language as well, during my student exchange trips to the Soviet Union, but this did not always lead to the desired results. Spanish was a completely different matter, because it was the language of my mission; but I also felt from the start that it was the language of the heart.
The Summer My Father Died Page 19