My first trip to the West had led me to the south, to a Spain slowly recovering after the death of Franco, where decades of lies, silence, forbidden history and unremitting oppression had left terrible scars that had not yet healed. All this felt familiar. I also started to recognise the forms of resistance to oppression. Since my travel companions with whom I had set out on the Great Adventure could not resist the lures of jeans, hot-dogs and porn and got stuck at the very first Western place where we had to change trains – in the preternaturally clean city of Zurich – I had to continue my discovery of the Western world all alone. And, just as on my unforgettable Polish journey, it was as if an invisible companion were leading me by the hand.
It was the first time in my life that I had used a Western language in its country of origin. I was delighted to note that here words revealed realities rather than hid them. One night, in a suburb of Seville, I listened breathlessly to a series of flamenco musicians performing on a make-do stage and decided that everything Lorca had to say on the nature of the duende was true. In Córdoba I bowed before the statue of the turbaned Maimonides on the fringe of the Judería district, and cursed in Hungarian when I saw that they had built a Catholic cathedral in the middle of the Great Mosque, as if they had ruined one of my personal treasures. I spent hours sitting under the starry vault of the Alhambra in Granada, dreaming of the vanished Muslim, Jewish, Christian and pagan worlds that had conjured this extraordinary beauty into existence.
When I managed to tear myself away from this ‘paradise on Earth’, I descended to the city and spent the afternoon listening to striking workers from the tile factory as they discussed matters in a smoke-filled office. Suddenly one of them turned to me and asked me what I, a living beneficiary of really-existing socialism, thought about the problem they wanted to elucidate. On a sheet torn from my exercise book with sweaty hands I made a sketch of Marx’s theory of exploitation, silently thanking the heavens that my mind hadn’t been completely befuddled by Parmenides at that study camp on Das Kapital so many years ago. Everything I had learned back home and was becoming ever less relevant under the conditions of a reality that had been losing connection with its proclaimed values unexpectedly made sense here. One morning in Barcelona, as I leant out of the window for a breath of fresh air after a night of conversation, I saw the multicoloured ceramic giraffes of the Sagrada Familia emerge out of the dawn mist. Reality was far more fascinating then anything I had ever imagined before. ‘It’s OK, it’s all right,’ Great Uncle Reality muttered. ‘You can close your mouth now.’
I took my next lesson in reality two years later, on my first hard-won Western student exchange trip. After the Big Discoveries, now the lesson was to learn how to make distinctions. I found myself in Galicia, in the westernmost part of Spain, on the periphery of the European periphery, sitting with Rodolfo, an uneducated joiner and anarchist who had grown up in orphanages meant for the children of murdered Republicans and who had spent the bulk of his youth in Franco’s prisons. In the evenings a group of his friends – teachers, doctors, artists and manual workers – would meet in his flat; we made the round of local bars and cafés, vehemently discussing life’s great questions with a lot of laughter and flowery words, before returning to Rodolfo’s flat, where talk would go on for ever.
I listened attentively to their stories. I listened as they told me how, ever since the death of Trotsky, the cause of freedom was fatally divided because poor Leon had dared to suggest that the final struggle had not yet been won, that the revolution fought to make life more human had given birth to a terrible monster. Which was why Stalin had sent a man with an ice-pick after him to picturesque Coyoacán in Mexico, where I was to settle a few years later, and this is what lay behind Comrade Semprún’s strayings into the swamps of Eurocommunism, too. Now I understood that not even the Spanish Civil War had been a struggle between Good and Evil; that it wasn’t just a question of Them shooting at Us, but that We had been shooting at ourselves, and that that was why the outcome was even more catastrophic than I had previously imagined. I understood now how all those handsome, bearded young men with burning eyes who emerged from the forests of Latin America tended to become unbridled killers or silent accomplices to killing, much as their Eastern European predecessors with their open white shirts had done once, except if they remained miraculously bound by an obstinate respect for truth, always providing they hadn’t been eliminated by their comrades first.
By now I had accepted the truth that the heroic Soviet army of liberation really had raped girls and young women, and that they really had stopped outside Warsaw so as to allow the Germans to burn down what remained of the city, and that that took place after they really had massacred leading Polish officers in Katyń forest, precisely as my Polish friends had claimed years before on that memorable journey to Poland. I had understood that the Bund, the republicans, the socialists, the social democrats and the moderate democrats, everyone, in fact, who had dared stand up to the twin forces of totalitarianism which had been attacking them from both sides since the 1930s was condemned to death; that, if nothing else, one had to believe the account of Marguerite Buber-Neumann and acknowledge that those who survived Hitler’s death camps often found themselves in the Gulag, and vice versa; that oppression and spiritual impoverishment ran through families, workplaces, schools and all intimate relations, and that we had to fight them with all means at our disposal if we wanted to live in a dignified, human way.
When Rodolfo saw that the lesson was getting me down a little, he rose and started searching his bookshelves. Lack of education did not prevent him from being a passionate reader. Instead of smelling salts he gave me a book by Arthur Koestler.
‘See, this guy was from your neck of the woods. He understood what happened here.’
‘Mmm,’ I mumbled. ‘Koestler, a fine Hungarian name.’
It was the Hispanic world that was fated to arrange my most dramatic encounters with reality. It was as if it was there that I had to receive my invisible heritage from my unknown ancestors. Only years later did I discover from Gigi that our family’s first exile was from Spain, and that our ancestors were forced to leave the very same summer that the first ships left Andalusia for a new Garden of Eden that they called New Spain, then later Mexico.
Mexico was where I finally made top grade in reality studies. It was such a peculiar mixture of the exotic and the familiar that all I had to get used to were the altitude sickness and the regular earthquakes, along with all the images of poverty that I had not previously encountered back home in Hungary. Concerning the latter, I concluded that much of what I had considered perfectly natural at home was in fact the product of social struggle; that the change in political system that had rescued my mother, and millions like her, from misery had not yet occurred in this spellbinding country and that for much of the world the hunger for bread was still more urgent than the hunger for knowledge.
Arriving in the New World, I was surprised to find all my senses awakened. Everything I had previously known suddenly appeared in a new light. Meandering down the zigzag streets of Coyoacán I was no longer bound by the thousand strands that had tied me to the past. The words offered to veil the ever-less-comfortable reality back home (like talk about really-existing socialism instead of socialism) were missing here; I could call everything by its true name. The centuries of ruthless oppression, successive revolutions betrayed and reversed, the shadow of the Big Neighbour, the series of territorial losses, the institutionalised Party of the Revolution kept in power for decades through various combinations of corruption, repression and paternalism – all these were extremely familiar. One day I woke thinking that the laws that bound our lives back home, that I had always taken to be natural, lacked all meaning. Or rather, their sole meaning was to keep us under control, because freedom was an ungovernable danger. ‘Dear Fülöp,’ I wrote to my father in a rare but spirited letter. 'We’re so scared of everything at home we don’t even know what life is.’
&nbs
p; One afternoon I was at the zoo in Villahermosa when, looking at the tiger skin and noting the windings of the snakes, I recognised the classic patterns engraved on stone, in gold or obsidian in great masterpieces. I had spent years in the reading room of the Ernő Szabó central library, leafing through albums of reproductions of which these were the originals. I had been driven by such a desire to encounter reality in all its brilliance that I would often push aside my sheets of paper and leave my university office to take long train journeys and bumpy bus rides through the immense country, over hills, down valleys, through dense forests, my eyes wide open, wanting to register every face, every scene, every object they came across. It was there, at the end of one of these trips, on the Yucatán isthmus, where the long-destroyed palaces of ancient people lay in ruins overgrown by tropical vegetation, that I met the man who was to send me the letter in the blue envelope.
Lost in thought, I gazed at the small round letters that once meant life to me. At that time, which seems an infinity ago now, we both felt a new sense of hope. We were survivors of two decimated tribes condemned to death and the bare fact that we found ourselves in each other’s arms seemed to prove that it was possible to make a new beginning.
The letters slalomed over invisible blue hills of paper, bright beads strung on an invisible lace of love, anxiety and desire. Even handwriting, that mirror of the soul, is slowly dying, I thought, like all those varieties of corn or those turtles that laid their eggs on the seashore, swept away by the barbarism of technologies unable to respect minute differences. We might be the last generation to appreciate the hard-won elegance of writing, the smoothness of paper, the sense of a pen or pencil sliding over a limitless incline, the loops that capture an entire life, the struggle with intangible matters whereby a nothing becomes a word. Who, in an evanescent age of cheap telephones, email and texting will still be willing to commit their thoughts to paper and send those thoughts to some other person? The new generations growing up with computers and video clips, who even do their homework on machines: will they learn to write, will they produce such everyday, unconscious reflections of their soul? Will there be souls at all?
I hated the thought of returning from Mexico. All the reasons for returning – my vocation, my boyfriend waiting for me, the call of the mother country and the hope of repairing really-existing socialism from the inside – seemed poor recompense for the enormous loss against which I was preparing myself. When I could no longer postpone the journey and all the details were fixed, I set out for the prosperous quarter of Mexico City where the office dealing with my official business was situated. Before stepping into the glass palace, I had to stop for a minute in the constant chaos of blaring horns, the exhaust fumes of buses, the bellowing of street vendors, the beggar child at the red light nipping to car windows, bored young rich men in their air-conditioned vehicles, pretty fake blondes lipsticked and pouting, policemen in gloves whistling and waving their arms, great towering office blocks, swaying palm trees, and blinding advertisements. Something odd happened. I turned up the collar of my linen jacket and pressed my hands into my pockets. I was cold.
In the unusual cold of that autumn morning, I was suddenly transported to the forgotten mornings of childhood, when I first had to wear a coat on my way to school; when, still sleepy and shivering, I walked through the doorway into the low sun of Németvölgyi Road, where I could see my breath rising before me. There were hardly any cars in the street at that time; it was the pattering footsteps of pedestrians and the loud chorus of birds that escorted me as I made my way slowly, almost floating in the light. There was always a chestnut that happened to drop to the broken pavement before me. I’d pick it up, wipe the white ash from it and squeeze it in my palm. Ten thousand four hundred kilometres away, in the deafening cacophony of the Lomas de Chapultepec in Mexico City, before I even had the ticket for the flight in my hands, my body had already returned through the morning chill. You’re a traitor to the cause, I whispered to myself, and quickly stepped through the automatic doors.
As I had suspected, my return to Hungary had catastrophic consequences. The invisible chains that had previously dragged me home had snapped one by one, like worn-out guitar strings. Their last sorry reverberations kept echoing in my head. Twang, twang, twang. It looked like the only reason for coming home was that all such strings should finally be broken and that I should drop into the empty space without any safety net. The expanded dimensions of my being couldn’t be squeezed back into the narrow confines of normality. Every effort to do so was excruciatingly painful. My parents couldn’t understand what was happening to me and watched my struggles with growing concern. My friends stood around, sympathetic but helpless. My boyfriend left me. I went to work each morning, properly programmed, but once I was home at the end of the day I remembered nothing of what I had done. Nor did I make any attempt to remember things. It was autumn and there in autumn’s shadows lurked, as Vörösmarty put it, ‘winter and silence and snow and death’.
A couple of weeks after my return, I was no longer a member of the advance guard.
What we nurtured is quite gone,
It’s what the enemy’s now protecting.
I drop the imaginary gun
I spent thirty years perfecting.
I recited Attila József’s lines, my face aglow, to the astonished Party secretary (a good-hearted old lady) as I handed back the red Party membership book that entitled me to improve really-existing socialism from within. My father wasn’t interested in my recitation. He retired into his shell to mourn me, his lost child. I was surprised to see how upset he was because I thought he had long given up on me. Years before, when I first found myself in waters the appropriate authorities declared out of bounds, my father tried to convince me of the dangers of such folly by reasoning with me, before losing his temper and declaring that I was no longer his daughter. I had not the least intention of breaking with my parents, but after this I thought it best to avoid our regular Sunday lunches. My mother took to her bed and, a couple of weeks later, my father rang me to suggest we should talk things over. We walked for hours in the Castle district, the result of which was that my father no longer tried to convert me to the true path and I returned to the family table. Not much later I left the country with a legal passport and official permission. The next time we talked politics was when the first Yugoslav war broke out.
My dear sister,
Spring doesn’t want to arrive. We had a day of sunshine then we spent three days shivering. The animals are confused, too. I counted the nests by the lake this morning: there are seven, but three of them are so badly placed that they’ll get swept away by the first storm. I went for my walk, greeted the three-hundred-year-old cedar of Lebanon and, on my way home, by the small bay, I saw a swan sitting on three enormous greenish eggs. I had already spotted a young man in the distance standing very still and watching the nest. When I reached him I glanced at his face; he looked so desperate I almost touched him on the elbow. But I didn’t. I withdrew my hand and hurried home in a bad mood. I am teaching the children the old ‘Ballad of Borbála Angoli’ as well as Attila József and János Arany, and reading them the Book of Kings. I drag them to the Kunsthistorische Museum so they may experience Rembrandt and feel at home in this world. But then I feel terrified that by the time they grow up all those things that I regard as the cornerstones of my own being will have become meaningless; that I am filling their heads with all kinds of useless stuff, the way our father filled ours. What grounds do we have for claiming we are different sorts of parents?
Love
Y
Dear Miki,
The reason I didn’t like the Rabbi’s speech at Kol Nidre is because I believe that the synagogue is not the place for political agitation: neither synagogue nor church should instruct us how to vote. It might be that my sense of being an outsider makes me vain and over-sensitive but, for me, the dream of a pure Jewish state is as unacceptable as a pure Hungarian state, as Greater Serbia for t
he Serbs and the rest. Of course I know there are the historical circumstances, but even so I reject it. There are always ‘historical circumstances’. The existence of Israel matters to me, too, but if we lived there I am sure we would look at it in the same tortured, critical way as, say, David Grossman or Amos Oz do. At least I hope that the struggle for survival would not altogether distort our values.
I should also say that I have no problem at all with the fact that the majority of Jews live outside Israel. That’s good for both parties. We can learn from each other. How else could we represent the values that we were, if my memory serves me right, chosen to represent? What would Kafka have written, or Celan, or Canetti, had they not been born in completely multi-ethnic Prague, Czernowitz and Ruse?
Love
Y
In the winter following my father’s death, my mother got on a plane with us and we flew to California to visit Steven’s family and friends. We left my father at home in the frozen ground of the Németvölgyi Road cemetery while we buckled up our safety belts in the spirit of adventure. My mother, whom it had taken us a long time to persuade to travel, was like a little girl discovering the big wide world. It made life easier that all this happened before Bush Junior’s second presidency and 9/11; the proud empire of the no-longer bipolar world was not constantly rubbing it in where the power lay. When my mother saw that the mighty bastion of imperialism was also populated by human beings, she packed away her prejudices and resolved to take it all in. She reined in her much-noted sensibilities and made such extraordinary observations that I never ceased to be astonished. From this point of view it helped that it was the first time in her life she had travelled to an entirely new place without my father, whose judgements had always been very important to her. We hardly mentioned his absence; the environment was so different. What was more, we had given winter the runaround. Even on New Year’s Day my mother was more concerned about rescuing my children’s caps from the sea breeze than with the fact it was the first New Year she had seen in without my father.
The Summer My Father Died Page 20