The Summer My Father Died

by Kiss, dit; Szirtes, George;

  In the story, Cavaradossi promises the consul of the fallen Roman republic that he will save him though it will cost him his life, because the cause of freedom is what matters most to both of them. When, at the end of the opera, he is preparing to die, the knowledge that he has remained true to his ideals gives him strength. To what ideals could my grandfather remain true? What faith, what love, what values persisted in him? Did he think of the letter aria when they took him away to kill him? Did he recall the soaring melody, and could it out-soar the whistling of the icy wind, the groaning of his fellow prisoners and the rattle of gunfire after which there could only be eternal silence? Immersed in that flood of music, I saw my grandfather Lajos for the first time, or, more accurately, I saw what he saw: the bare branches of winter trees, those great dark admonitory bones against the leaden sky, the clouds suddenly rising above the earth; I saw the earth sliding away, the bushes shrouded in despair, the dark pools rising to my eyes. ‘Is all this happening to me?’ he may have asked himself, as my father may have asked himself, too, that evening when my mother told him that his cancer was back, just as I sometimes asked myself. ‘Is this really happening to me?’ Grandfather Lajos might have asked as he finally hit the dried mud of the ground under his feet.

  The fourth summer after my father died, I was on my way to town one afternoon, on the same line I had taken all those times my father was in hospital. I was in a sticky, foul mood. Maybe life is indeed no more than a meaningless measuring exercise between two arbitrarily drawn lines, beyond which lies nothing but indifferent matter, and between which there is only violence, stupidity and egotism. It may be that life really is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. The paper lay open in my lap but I didn’t feel like reading it. I was staring at the plastic seating and waiting for the train to start. When the doors closed, I looked up. At the end of the carriage there stood a couple, an Asian girl and a Hungarian boy, clinched in an embrace. They bent towards each other drawn by the shy attraction of first love. They exchanged a word now and then, in Hungarian as far as I could tell in the noise, and gave a light laugh, like a soft breeze ruffling the surface of a lake.

  A group of boys in heavy boots got on at Batthány Square. A couple of times they drew themselves up on the aluminium handles above their heads and shouted loudly to each other, happily slapping each other’s shaved heads. Once they had established their territory in the middle of the coach, they ran half-closed eyes over the rest of it. Their eyes fixed on the young couple. As if on cue, they started singing a song the meaning of which, as far as I could tell, was that foreigners should go home and no longer sully the sacred soil of our country. In the refrain I could make out the repeated phrase ‘slitty-eyed’, aimed at the lovers. That I heard clearly enough because we were approaching a station. Suddenly I was overcome by indignation and fear. My fellow passengers were busily staring at the non-existent view or burying their heads in their papers. The few eyes that dared follow events showed the same mixture of terror and anger as mine probably did. I resolved to say something once the train reached Deák Square, but here both the couple and the gang got off. As the couple moved to the door I could see they were no longer radiantly happy, that they hung their heads and clutched each other’s hands anxiously as they stepped from the swaying coach, giving the boot boys plenty of room before ascending the moving stairs.

  I hurried out of the subway as if on urgent business and walked rapidly towards the Danube. I saw the long queues of cars, the pedestrians as they shoved each other impatiently out of the way, as if they had been cut off from their life supply on the way from their computer screen to their TV screen, or the other way round. I saw tempers flare and tasted the poison pouring from their mouths; I heard the inane chatter that constantly rolls through the street with them. I stood on the embankment and gazed at the city, out of sorts with itself as the ashen twilight slowly covered it. The old rat, the ancient rat that Attila József saw in the 1930s, that ‘ancient rat that spreads disease among us: unconsidered, un-thought-out thought’, had been chewing away at us, but how big had it grown in the meantime; good God, how enormous it was.

  It was on a morning walk, several years after my father died, that it first occurred to me that I should really thank him for keeping quiet about the past. It might not have been a simple question of self-denial, he might just have wanted to save us from whatever was breaking his own back. Perhaps it wasn’t only the terror he couldn’t speak about, but the shame, too, the shame of all he was obliged to witness and yet carry on living. What options do survivors have once they have escaped? Should they bury the past for ever, or remain victims for ever? Should they vow ‘to forgive but not forget’, or should they take revenge? Should they become ever-vigilant guardians of memory, like Elie Wiesel, or chroniclers of the nameless millions of victims of colonialism, like André Schwarz-Bart? Should they become silent, like Marek Edelman, who was reluctant to say anything for decades after the ghetto uprising, and only talked about his heart patients in the Sterling hospital of Łódź?

  Often even the families of those returning from the camps were incapable of hearing their stories through – that is, even if the victims were able to tell them, which was rarely the case. The experience became incommunicable. Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan had all wanted to tell what had happened to them so such things should never happen again, but they soon understood that it was better to keep quiet. The silence destroyed them in due course. It was only the fortunate few who were afforded the opportunity, decades later, once time had inevitably swept away the greater part of the terrible remembered past, of speaking about what had happened. The trauma of survival became unresolvable for lack of catharsis. Normal everyday life could comprehend neither the existence of hell, nor the extraordinary ordeal of escaping it. The world no longer made sense.

  Returning from the Gulag must have been even more soul-destroying. Once he was liberated, the nightmare continued for the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov, but the reflex of survival had so soaked into him that he no longer felt entitled even to kill himself. He perished, deaf and blind, in a mental institute and it was years before anyone paid attention to his words. When the main character in Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows, Ivan Grigoryevich, returns from the camps after many years, all he says is that prison outside has slightly bigger cells, but he still has to fight each day for his bowl of thin soup.

  The burden of silence I inherited from my father might have been easier to bear than confronting the facts. Perhaps I should in fact be grateful to him, as he angrily pointed out to me once. His past did not burden my childhood, or at least not on a conscious level, and I, unlike him, grew up in innocence and, by the time I lost that innocence, I was capable of coping with that loss. It might be thanks to that innocent childhood that, unlike a good many children of survivors, I have never been tempted to leap through the window when seized by overwhelming happiness. I have wanted to enjoy every moment of happiness, because I know it will come to an end sooner or later.

  And because my parents brought me up not with a past that could never be spoken about, but with the promise of a bright human future, however unfulfilled in their lifetime, or even in mine, I retain the memory of those brilliant historical moments when humanity was at its best, when it showed me the face I wished to see as its true face, even if those moments were unforgivably rare, and even if they often took place in circumstances that testified to the murderous egotism of the human soul. Even in the histories of the camps, I clung to moments at which, say, Ana Novac leans from the window of her barrack in Auschwitz to offer water to those condemned to death; when the Czech writer Milena Jesenská, even on her deathbed, plans a party for her fellow prisoners; when Resnik, the Polish prisoner, helps Primo Levi carry the heavy beam, and when the hero of Kertész’s Kaddish is lying on a stretcher on his way to the camp hospital and the Teacher runs after him to give him his daily ration.

  My father took on ever-more volati
le forms after his death. His real being dissolved behind ever-neater stories. Our living images of him were unconsciously displaced by photographs, and even though we occasionally discovered a set of as-yet-unread notes in the now manageable anarchy of his deserted study, they no longer upset us as much as they had done in the first few months. Mourning became an experience we could share, like first love, like a new idea, or the discovery of a good book. Every time someone close to me lost a friend or relative, I got better at consoling them. Our visits to the cemetery became part of long walks; the choice of flowers slowly became more important than those tiny rituals by which the children could conjure my father back to life. There was still the bitter taste of coffee in the morning, a street corner or two that made my heart ache each time I visited home: here once, here no longer, never again. My father returned most often in dreams, most often to my mother. In them they were generally starting on a journey and my mother was happy to let him guide her through unknown worlds. Waking was always agony. However my mother tried to drown her grief in feverish bouts of cooking, I would wake in the mornings with the sense of deep mourning hanging about the flat, like an enormous, dark-winged bird.

  I saw him for the last time one summer three years after his death, after a conference in Barcelona as I was rushing from the metro station to my hotel to pick up a suitcase I had left behind because, of course, I had stretched time to the last minute. An ageing couple were walking towards me on the pavement. As I ran past them, a familiar face looked up at me for a second with the inward, almost absent look my father wore at the end. A few paces on, when the connection between the image and its possible location came to me, I stopped but dared not turn round. I don’t know if I was afraid that it would be a completely different face or that I would miss the flight if I didn’t make the next airport bus, but it was only when I was on the bus, when I leaned back in my seat exhausted, that it occurred to me that it was here he had brought my mother as a birthday present the year before he died and that it was in this city that I myself had first breathed the dizzying air of freedom. It was here that he walked the streets on the last journey of his life, with the same childish sense of wonder he felt every time he left home; perhaps it was here, in an unfamiliar city, that he bequeathed his features to a stranger, so that I should find him years after his death and briefly greet him again.

  One night Simon dreamt that he had gone out by himself to visit my father in the cemetery. The moment that he placed the stone on the grave, it was bathed in light, the flowers came to life and a dark shadow emerged from the earth. He took the stone that was emitting a pale light as though it were a lantern and set off home through the silent city. Simon followed him, his heart pounding with excitement. Everyone was asleep in the flat in Németvölgyi Road. When they arrived, my father sat down at his accustomed place at the desk and leaned over a sheet of white paper on which someone had already started drawing the first letter of the alphabet.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my family, friends and acquaintances whose lives and histories, in various ways, were woven into this book. Special thanks to George Klein, Imre Kertész, Magda van der Ende, Anikó Vári, Mariann Kiss, György Turán and a nameless swan, without whom this book would have never been published.

  Author’s Note

  Unlike geographical Hungary (93,030 square kilometres, 10 million inhabitants), Hungarian literature is a vast, extremely rich country that is unfortunately mostly inaccessible to non-Hungarian speakers. There are, however, some excellent translations available in English, thanks to a few committed and gifted translators.

  Most of the poems quoted in the text can be found in the following anthologies:

  In Quest of the ‘Miracle Stag’: The Poetry of Hungary: An Anthology of Hungarian Poetry in English Translation from the 13th Century to the Present, edited by Ádám Makkai (Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur, 1996; second revised edition, Budapest: Tertia; Chicago: Atlantis-Centaur: Framo Publishing, 2000).

  The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry, edited by George Gömöri and George Szirtes (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996).

  The Lost Rider: A Bilingual Anthology, selected and edited by Péter Dávidházi, Győző Ferenc, László Kúnos, Szabolcs Várady and George Szirtes (Budapest: Corvina Books Ltd, second edition, 1999).

  There is also a bibliography of translated poems by Christina Peter: ‘An Annotated Bibliography of Hungarian Poetry in English Translation’ in The Audit is Done, European Cultural Review no. 14, 2004: http://www.c3.hu/~eufuzetek/en/eng/14/index.php.

  Quotes:

  p. 43. Sándor Petőfi, Egész úton hazafelé (‘On My Way Home’), translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 91. Miklós Radnóti, Ikrek hava (‘Under Gemini’), translated by Kenneth McRobbie; Razglednicák, translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner.

  p. 94. Attila József, Reménytelenül (‘Without Hope’), translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 141. Sándor Petőfi, Szabadság, szerelem (‘Freedom, Love’), translated by Anton Nyerges.

  p. 147. Árpád Farkas, Mikor az öregemberek mosakodnak (‘When Old Men Wash’).

  p. 148. Endre Ady, A fekete zongora (‘The Black Piano’), translated by Adam Makkai; A grófi szérűn (‘The Earl's Threshing Floor’).

  p. 156. Miklós Radnóti, Második ekloga (‘Second Epilogue’), translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer.

  p. 159. János Pilinszky, Quatran, translated by Ted Hughes & János Csokits.

  p. 191. Attila József, Repedt kályhámon (‘On My Broken Stove’), translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 206. Sándor Petőfi, Egy gondolat (‘One Thought’), translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 222. Árpád Tóth, Lélektől lélekig (‘From Soul to Soul’).

  p. 227. Gyula Juhász, Anna örök (‘Eternal Anna’), translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 240. Mihály Vörösmarty, Előszó (‘Prologue’), translated by Peter Zollman.

  p. 240. Attila József, Irgalom (‘Mercy’) translated by George Szirtes.

  p. 258. Attila József, Ős patkány (‘An Ancient Rat’) translated by John Bátki.

  Hungarian books in translation (or not) that are mentioned in the text:

  Endre Ady, Poems, introduction and translations by Anton N. Nyerges (Buffalo: Hungarian Cultural Foundation, 1969).

  György Bálint, A toronyőr visszapillant (‘The Lighthouse Keeper Looks Back’), (Budapest, Magvető 1966)

  Mária Ember, Hajtűkanyar, (‘Hairpin Bend’) (Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1974).

  István Eörsi, Emlékezés a régi szép időkre (‘Remembering the Good Old Times’) (Budapest: Katalizátor Iroda, samizdat, 1988; Napra-forgó, 1st legal edition, 1989).

  Ignác Goldziher, Az iszlám (‘Muslim Studies’), edited by S.M. Stern, translated by C.R. Barber (originally published Budapest: 1881; Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005).

  Attila József, The Iron-Blue Vault: Selected Poems, translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1999).

  Attila József, Poems, edited by Thomas Kabdebo, translated by Michael Beevor, Michael Hamburger, Thomas Kabdebo, John Székely, Vernon Watkins (London: The Danubia Book Co., 1966).

  Attila József, Winter Night, Selected Poems, translated by John Bátki (Budapest : Corvina, 1997).

  Imre Kertész, Fatelessness, translated by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; London: Vintage, 2006).

  Imre Kertész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, translated by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 2004; London: Vintage, 2010).

  Imre Kertész, Liquidation, translated by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; London: Vintage, 2007).

  Géza Komoróczy, Viktória Pusztai, Andrea Strbik, Kinga Frojimovics, Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995).

  Dezső Kosztolányi, Anna Edes, translated by George Szirtes (Budapest: Corvina, 1991).

  Dezső Ko
sztolányi, Kornél Esti, translated by Bernard Adams (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2010).

  Dezső Kosztolányi, Thirty-six Poems, translated by Peter Zollman (Budapest: Maecenas, 2000).

  Zsigmond Móricz, Be Faithful Unto Death, translated by Stephen Vizinczey (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995).

  Zsigmond Móricz, Captive Lion, translated by Bernard Adams (Budapest: Corvina 2011).

  Péter Nádas, A Book of Memories, translated by Ivan Sanders and Imre Goldstein (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

  Péter Nádas, The End of a Family Story, translated by Imre Goldstein (New York: Vintage, 2000).

  Ana Novac, The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszow, translated by George L. Newman (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997).

  János Pilinszky, Passio, translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri (Tonbridge, Kent: Worple Press, 2011).

  János Pilinszky, The Desert of Love: Selected Poems, translated by János Csokits and Ted Hughes (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1989).

  Miklós Radnóti, Bori Notesz (‘Camp Notebook’) in the Visible Poets Series, translated by Francis R. Jones (Todmorden, Lancs.: Arc Publications, 2000).

  Miklós Radnóti, Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti in the Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation, translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

  Miklós Radnóti, Forced March, translated by George Gömöri and Clive Wilmer (London: Enitharmon Press, 2004).

  Miklós Radnóti, Under Gemini: A Prose Memoir and Selected Poetry, translated by Kenneth McRobbie (Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1985). Jenő Rejtő, The Blonde Hurricane, translated by Istvan Farkas: http://mek.oszk.hu/01000/01022/index.phtml