The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  When she returned to Budapest a couple of weeks later, I felt we had navigated the first circle of mourning remarkably well. It seemed that even my father was happy to convey his sense of satisfaction. Two days after my mother’s return home, the ancient East German food processor that was of considerable importance to her ever-more-baroque ventures into cookery finally gave up the ghost. My mother did the rounds of the city’s household supply shops, but they just laughed at her. East Germany? What on Earth is this, madam? And the French manufacturer Moulinex has just gone bankrupt! Maybe in the spring, madam, if we’re lucky. It seemed that chopping was out of the question for a while. But that was where my father came in. Not long after my mother decided to stop bothering with the shops, my father’s study produced a brand new East German mincer.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you it might come in useful some time?’

  Ten days after the first anniversary of my father’s death, I found myself, to my own surprise, in the synagogue at Nyíregyháza where those members of my family who had survived to this stage had been taken before deportation. I stood a while in the cold, echoing hall, thinking how terrible the silence in synagogues was. No more prayers, no crowds, no weeping, no squabbling. Only the worn stairs, only the trees seen through the windows remained. Only when I am inside, looking out, are they, the dead, present.

  Two summers after my father’s death, I had to go on a study trip to the newly dismembered Yugoslavia. I felt such anxiety that the children watched my preparations with concern. Just as two years previously, when I feared my father might drag me down into the dark with him, now I had the entirely illogical feeling that I might become the first sacrificial pawn in his long game of chess with Yugoslavia.

  ‘If you die you’ll give me your bracelet, won’t you?’ my daughter asked me when I tucked myself into bed beside her to wish her goodnight. That was rather too scary for comfort.

  According to the calendar, it was spring when I touched down in Pristina, at an airfield that looked more like an unploughed field than a runway, then fought my way through the ring of grim-faced men waiting silently and impatiently at the exit. There was no trace of spring in the fields. It was as if nature had not yet had time to recover from the violence of two years before. The evidence of war was apparent everywhere: on bitter faces, in smashed windowpanes, on ripped-up pavements and walls blackened by smoke. Despite the order established, with great difficulty, by international forces, the embers of violence were still glowing. Late at night, alone in the bullet-riddled hotel towering over the town, whose upper floors were in a state of utter disrepair, I listened to the noises of the night in case I could catch the ‘sweet silence’ Ivo Andrić once wrote about. But the icy wind whistling through the window brought only shouts, the drumming of feet and the unsettling sound of speeding cars. There was no crackle of gunfire, only the threat of it at any moment.

  The dawn before we left Kosovo, the minibus of some British organisation rolled up at the hotel entrance because there were no taxis, or at least none willing to carry passengers to the border. My colleagues sat me next to the driver, the rest squeezed in the back with the luggage. I did what my father would have done and started asking questions. The young driver had been a schoolteacher who had been sacked soon after Milošević had taken office and who had later continued teaching in the parallel educational network that tried to operate in private flats. Along with other family survivors of the massacre in Kosovo, he had made his way on foot to the Albanian border.

  ‘Look, this is me.’ He fished in his back pocket.

  I watched frightened as the bus juddered over potholes, but didn’t have the nerve to ask him to hang on to the wheel if he didn’t mind. The carefully folded German-language newspaper he produced from his wallet showed a Reuters photograph. In it a never-ending queue of people with bundles and suitcases were making their way up a hill top. ‘That’s me,’ said the driver as, by great good fortune, he finally managed to grab the wheel with one hand while using the other to point to a weary-faced young man with what looked like an enormous backpack, his arm around a little girl carrying a doll. I stared in silence at the picture shaking in front of me.

  ‘Do you know who that is on my back?’ the man asked. ‘That’s my cousin. She’s paralysed, can’t walk. The Serbs snatched her wheelchair so I had to carry her all the way to the border. And do you know why she is paralysed? Because the Serbian doctor wouldn’t give her a vaccination.’

  I didn’t dare ask if there were any other men left in his family that could carry the child. He was the only young man among the group climbing the hill.

  ‘Who is the little girl?’ I asked him.

  ‘My daughter, just turned three.’ His face brightened into a smile. ‘Every time a convoy of Serbians escorted by UN troops passes us, she shouts from the car: “Scum! Fire! Fire!” “Scum” means the Serbs. She keeps shouting “Fire” because every time she sees a uniform it reminds her of our burning house. She doesn’t know the difference yet,’ he added when he saw I hadn’t really understood.

  It grew quiet, a quiet disturbed only by the squeaking of the minibus and the bodies being thrown about with the luggage at the back. I cleared my throat.

  ‘And what do you say to her, then?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Say to who?’

  ‘Your little girl.’

  ‘I try to calm her.’

  ‘But not all Serbs are scum,’ I muttered half to myself.

  He gave me a quizzical look, then silently turned to face the road again.

  ‘If a child is brought up to hate, there will never be an end to it,’ I muttered, still more quietly.

  ‘You saw what we went through,’ he retorted.

  I noted the wrecked military vehicle at the side of the road, the broken trees, the sacked buildings. My fingers were blenched as I clutched the white plastic handle over the door. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Look, I am a Jew,’ I said eventually. I was aware that the noise behind me had stopped. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘The People of Israel.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, and thought a little. ‘In that case you should know better than anyone,’ he almost shouted, turning to me again.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I answered. ‘I spent decades fearing Germans. But in the end I discovered that it wasn’t the Germans I had to fear, but the people who drove them to do such things.’

  As far as time and circumstances allowed, I held a rapidly improvised lecture about those who exploited the concept of national identity in oppressive régimes. When we reached the border, he helped me from my seat and quickly turned away. I followed him.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said and extended my hand, aware that I was looking at him rather beseechingly.

  He shook my hand as if he didn’t want to and went to help unload the luggage, then drove off without looking at me.

  Although it was early morning, I felt exhausted and broken as if I had been breaking stones all day. We walked across the no-man’s-land between Kosovo and what was then still the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as inconspicuously as we could because at any moment someone might take a shot at us. Once there, we waited for a couple of hours before getting on another minibus. A dour-looking silent man sat next to the driver now. I watched in silence as the trees at the edge of the road rushed by, saw the big Serbian flags planted by the fresh graves and gazed at the tractors puffing at the edges of the road, while to our left glittering Mercedes saloon cars cruised by.

  I felt confused walking around Belgrade. I couldn’t decide whether the well-dressed, loud young men in the street were protesting for or against the current régime, or whether they were just youths messing about; I couldn’t understand why the national flag was displayed from the windows of cars taking people to weddings or why anyone would cover the pedestals of statues with graffiti saying: We love you Slobo, despite the fact that Slobo had spent the last six months in a well-heated cell in The Hag
ue and no one needed to fear him any longer. If there was still killing or if those who had brought it about were still at the peak of their power, this sense of solidarity and collective amnesia might have been explicable. But with Milošević gone, what was the point? Is it true that you become an unwilling accomplice of a crime committed on your behalf?

  In all the bitter arguments I had with the inhabitants of the country still known as Yugoslavia, it seemed as if the map drawn up in Karađorđevo between Milošević and the President of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, showing the dividing up of Bosnia and what it entailed in terms of those hundreds of thousands of people who had been murdered, raped or exiled from their homes, was a secret known to me alone. Everyone I spoke to, from the taxi driver to the ministerial representative, knew only about the havoc caused by NATO’s bombings, about the hardship of the NATO embargo, and about Serbian refugees spending the winter freezing in wooden barracks. All this was true but, I insisted, we should start from the speech made by Milošević in 1987 at Kosovo Polje, the speech that led directly to Karađorđevo, the destruction of Bosnia and the cleansing of Kosovo in 1999. There you go again with that same old scrap of paper, they sighed, rolling their eyes. What damage can a scrap of paper do to solid walls and centuries-old bridges, and to flesh-and-blood people?

  Only now did I finally understand why my father ranted at me in the hall of the Németvölgyi Road flat claiming that the ‘fundamentalist’ Izetbegović was set to loose a jihad on the world. It was the peculiar speciality of the Yugoslav war (or any war?) to twist historical facts in order to create a mood of terror. Having read Misha Glenny, Malcolm Noel and other historians of that war, it became clear to me how these deceptions worked, but those affected by them apparently had other sources of information. There was a vast chasm between reality and its representations, but it was pointless me saying that those on the other side were prey to misconceptions and false myths. Misconceptions and false myths formed reality as well. Those people were my own frightening reflection. They were, after all, subject to the same desire for myth and wish-fulfilment as I was, or at least the part of me that was constantly trying to escape the grip of the socialist realist tenant. What was it my mother used to say? ‘Being determines consciousness.’ Or was it the other way round? When do ideals become false consciousnesses? At what point does the pursuit of myth become murder?

  I was relieved to climb the steps to the plane. Up there, riding the highways of the sky, I could admire the crimson light above the layers of cloud and try to imagine what I would tell my father. ‘You see what happens when you refuse to face the facts? When you try to sweep the truth, the past, and the sense of responsibility under the carpet?’ I muttered to myself grumpily before I remembered he had been dead for years.

  My dear friend Miki. Stop. Odysseus is rehabilitated. Stop. He is the archetype of the European soul. Stop. We have learned nothing. Stop. We don’t even have the good fortune. Stop. To experience history the second time as farce. Stop. I give up. Stop.Y

  My beloved sister,

  I was searching the bookshelves this afternoon when, confidently leaning against the Kosztolányi volumes, I spotted Komoróczy’s book on Jewish Budapest (an essential work – you really should read it!). I’d long meant to look up what those menorahs were doing on the fence of the hospital on Amerikai Road. I thought it was bound to be in there. And in fact, I found it in the chapter ‘What You Can Still See, but Not in Its Original Form’. The hospital was originally built by the city’s Jewish community as the Chevra Kadisa Charity for the Incurable and became a sanatorium after 1919. In the entrance hall, where we sat with our father on our last visit, the walls are so bare because the marble memorial tablets commemorating the builders and funders were turned facing into the wall at the time of the 1985 renovation.

  The three Jewish hospital foundations, as conceived by Béla Lajta, were to resemble the lay-outs of village synagogues, with buildings around a yard. They were surrounded by a huge garden that extended as far as Korong Street, the street where we’d go for coffee sometimes. A few houses beyond the pastry shop in the single-storey building was Attila József’s last flat. At the end of the street was the Institute for the Blind. Next to the entrance, on the right, you can still see the metal notice in Braille with the first words of Vörösmarty’s ‘Appeal’, so the little blind Jewish children should never forget: ‘To your country be forever true.’

  Do you think our father knew this?

  Love

  Y

  P.S. Today, on the way home from the park with the kids, we saw a swan that had built its nest on top of a pile of rubbish, next to a gutter. It was a pretty nest made of dead leaves, broken twigs and bits of plastic bottles and the swan was struggling with a bigger piece of branch that kept slipping out of its beak. It wouldn’t give up, and time and time again it tried, despite everything, to establish it as a part of its home. I was very impressed to see how much strength that relatively small body possessed and started to drift off pondering about eternal struggle when I realised that we were late and had to run. Hats off to the swans!

  My father was stirring Barbon shaving foam in the bathroom, humming to himself. I sat on the small stool watching as his face disappeared under the foam so that the skin might reappear fresh and flushed in the stripes following the careful strokes of his razor. His skin made a barely audible scraping noise. Occasionally he cut himself and small red patches spread across his face. My father seemed enormous, viewed from that small stool, but as the years went by he shrank. Once I was grown-up and somewhat taller, I sometimes stopped leaning against the bathroom door and hardly needed to raise my head to view the morning ritual. My father was humming the letter aria ‘E lucevan le stelle’ from Tosca. I knew from family legend that Tosca was my grandfather Lajos’s favourite opera and that he particularly liked the letter aria, in which the hero, in full throat, declares: ‘Why should I die when I want to live? I want to live!’ – or something like that. My father did not sing in full throat because his mouth was closed on account of the shaving foam, but when he got to this part the humming definitely grew louder.

  My father had long stopped humming while he shaved and I myself was a long way from the bathroom in Németvölgyi Road the next time I heard the melody. A couple of days after Simon’s birth, when I made my first tentative foray down to the hospital yard, I heard it pouring through an open window. I stood under the window with my eyes closed as if I was sunbathing, letting the music flow over me. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to go to the opera. When we were young, my sister and I were subjected to opera – all in the memory of my grandfather, of course – to such an extent that we both grew to regard it as a form of torture. Although torture turned to comedy when our parents took us to see a visiting Soviet company perform Eugene Onegin. Two clumsy mountains of flesh were pining for love of each other. The leading man might have had a fine voice, but his mouth was crooked. We were bursting with suppressed laughter and when, in one unguarded moment, we glanced at each other, we did indeed burst out laughing. We were immediately dismissed from the sanctuary of the opera house. Unshaken by this terrible punishment, we played at opera for years, choking and giggling in bed after lights out. ‘Here’s your cloak, Eugene Crookmouth,’ I piped, with melodramatic gestures. And at the finale I always burst out: ‘Though I die of grief, I will never be yours, Crookmouth Onegiiiiin!’ Then we swapped and my sister played Tatiana.

  On what would have been my father’s seventy-fifth birthday and close to the third anniversary of his death, I found myself sitting in the Grand Théâtre in Geneva awaiting the letter aria. That weekend Geneva had its Festival of Music, when the whole town becomes a series of concert halls: there is music everywhere and people move happily around from one performance to another. In the afternoon the children and I were wandering around when, passing by the Grand Théâtre, I saw that the opera season was closing with Tosca. On the spur of the moment, we went into the cool entrance hall and waited in the lon
g queue for unreserved tickets. I got one of the last. We dashed home, I ran the children a bath, shared out the various treasures gathered that day and, quickly splashing some water over my own body, grabbed the first decent outfit I could find in my wardrobe and flew down the stairs.

  ‘I’m off to meet Grandfather!’ I shouted to the children, who were busy figuring out what the lipstick stains on their cheeks reminded them of.

  When I sank into the extra chair on the first tier of the balcony, all I could think of for a while was getting my breath back and wondering if everything was all right at home. Only slowly did the music manage to exert its spell on me. I sat there, on my dead father’s birthday, with dead Gigi’s watch on my wrist, in a silk dress chosen by another dead woman, my lungs working hard, the sweat running down my back, a whole day’s worth of dust on my naked feet, every nerve alive. To my greatest surprise, it was not my father that emerged from the music but my grandfather, Lajos. When, in the first major duet, Cavaradossi, the painter, is courting his beloved, the beautiful, famous singer Tosca, suddenly I felt quite sure that my grandfather would have hummed the same tune, in exactly the same way, to my grandmother, his cheek to her cheek, murmuring how there was nothing brighter than her brilliant dark eyes. Since I had no previous idea what happened in the opera, except in the letter aria, it wasn’t just the music but the story that carried me away. To my amazement, I discovered political drama under the romance. The values of liberty, love, solidarity and enlightenment were all embodied in the music along with the struggle against the powers of darkness, the very ideas my dead grandfather passed on to my father, the ideas with which I too had been brought up, though by that time the brew had been spiced up with a few ingredients of communism.