Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Never in my life have I seen her cry. She did not cry when my father died, nor when her sister died. She cannot, she could not, perhaps she never wanted or allowed herself to give direct expression to intense feeling, not in words and certainly not in wild gestures. When either of us was going away on a longer trip she would embrace me and give me a light, brief kiss while gently patting my back by way of encouragement, then drawing a little cross on my forehead with her thumb. That’s how we parted in December 1956 at the Southern Terminal, both of us in ruins, like the town itself, silently, crying without tears, since we both knew we would not see each other again for years, maybe never. Nor did I ever hear her sing or hum. Or, and this is another scene I often conjure, the telephone is ringing there, at her home in New York, and she looks at me in confusion, pleading with me once again silently rather than in words to answer it again because she has difficulty, particularly on the telephone, in understanding the language. Most of the time, of course, the caller is Hungarian. She hardly knows anyone here who is not Hungarian. Nowadays I have her pull this pleading face time and again, as if repeating a scene on DVD; I torture myself with it, it is my punishment. I always regret it but once or twice I rebuke her rather sharply for not having in all that time learned the language properly. But no sooner have I said the words than I am already regretting them: I don’t know what has made me say them, made me want to lecture and criticize her, what makes me want to assert my independence, to push her away from me time after time. It’s some obscure, as-yet-inexplicable urge I have to prod her where she is most vulnerable and often I am unable to resist it. I see she resents it; that I have hurt her; that it saddens her, that it makes her suffer, and that she closes up, but, wisely, accepts the latest rebuke, generously adding it to the rest. Perhaps she understands this instinctively better than I do. Even in the years before prison I was subjecting her to these low tricks; she bore the pain, but maybe, at that time, she could inwardly smile at the thought that her biological destiny had presented her with such a difficult adolescent. Very quickly though we’re back to the usual way of doing things. Her patience, her calm, her seemingly endless wisdom in understanding, spring from a source deep within her. But she will never be more demonstrative than this. There are no sudden embraces, no pet-names, no uncalled-for affectionate kisses, no light laughter, no playful teasing, no letting-one’s-hair down, no messing about.

  Nor was there ever. I myself lack the capacity for at least two or three of those. We live in conditions of withdrawal and reserve, which is not the same as living in solemnity or dullness or indifference, nor does it exclude—not by any means—warmth, kindness, solicitude, gaiety, and a sense of humor cloaked in delicate irony, something I am particularly fond of. I have instinctively grown used, to some degree at least, to seeking what was missing in her in others: ever since I was born I have received generous helpings of them from Gizi, my godmother whom I adore, and, in her simple, modest way, from Fräulein too. Later I look for these qualities in girls, in women, with wildly varying results. But all in vain, since anything you were not given by your mother, indeed anything she did actually give you, will not be found anywhere else. That is my definitive experience. I have been feeling closer to her recently, ever since she died in fact. For a long time I believed she was a simple soul: that she lived by instinct alone, was prejudiced, was incapable of articulating her feelings, impressions, and passions, or only doing so when she was forced to and absolutely had to take a position on something. Then I realised I was wrong. She had a complex, rich, many-layered inner life, consisting not only of immediate feeling but of the tastes and ways of thinking traditional to her family and class. Over and over again in my head I replay the most memorable things she said, examining and analyzing them, and I always come to the same conclusion. Her opinions were thought through, never spur-of-the-moment or improvised, but properly considered and, when called upon, she could present excellent, concise arguments for them. She had outstanding moral judgment, impeccable taste, and her understanding of human character was all but infallible. She was not a snob but open and kindly, never condescending even in the genteel role of “madam,” as she was to the servants for example. She was no blue-stocking, of course, but was reasonably well-read. It was thanks to her that I was introduced to Balzac and Dickens in my early adolescence, at a time when I was still reading Karl May and Jules Verne. In her later years she enjoyed reading Churchill’s memoirs. She had studied at a girls’ grammar school in Arad, her Transylvanian hometown, and, after the Romanian occupation, when her family—a fully Hungaricized landowning family of ancient Serbian origin, some of whose members played important roles in Hungarian history—fled to Pest, she studied the violin with Hubay, as long as they could afford it, which was not long. The photograph of the long-haired, slender, beautiful teenage girl passionately playing her violin—if one can go by such evidence—seems to indicate that she was deeply imbued with the love of music.

  When the money ran out, she told me, they presented the violin to a poor, blind child genius. In view of that, it’s surprising that she never showed the least interest in music later. Might she have taken offence at the hand fate had dealt her? Not one concert, not one visit to the Opera. The program of classical selections on the radio at lunchtime on Sunday—it was always on while we were eating—represented the entire musical diet of the family. Maybe that was because my father had absolutely no interest in music. From childhood on I would pick at the keys of my godmother’s wonderful Steinway grand—a present from the Regent Horthy—and was strongly drawn to music, but year after year they kept rejecting my plea for lessons, dismissing it as a passing, infantile fancy. It was the only thing they ever refused me. Even today I can’t forgive them for it.

  But what I chiefly desire is to have her tell me stories: I want her to answer my questions, to annoy her by making provocative remarks, to correct her, instruct her, occasionally to cause her overt pain, to punish her, to let her know that she is my intellectual inferior, to confuse her and mock her and, immediately after having done so, somehow to convey to her how helplessly mortified I feel, to show that I know I have hurt her; but I can’t quite say it, cannot quite bring myself to apologize, not even to mention the thing that continues mournfully to rattle around inside me like a sheet of newspaper caught on the railings. Not even when she appears to have put it all behind her. Even today when I dream of those things as have passed between us, I experience such a sharp pang of conscience that it feels like a pain in my chest and I wake up in a sweat. But she is capable of retaliating, not out of revenge, but in self-defence, and she can upset me too as when, for example, I ask some question about the family and she retorts: fat lot you cared about the family back then! What did her aristocratic ancestry—which is mine too, by the way—the aristocracy of which at a certain time in my life I was so deeply and genuinely ashamed, those historical names, matter to me then.

  I wasn’t even interested in the legendary patriotic general who was executed by the Habsburgs with twelve others at Arad in 1849. And grandmother, who was a baroness, she couldn’t help it, what was my problem with her? Today, grandfather’s ornate family tree, hand-painted in bright colors on parchment with all the coats of arms going back six generations, hangs on the wall of my flat along with pictures of other famous ancestors.

  Right now she happens to be cooking, cooking for me in that kitchen, and as she does so, she is half turned to me, in a slightly demonstrative pose as I see it, while merrily chattering on, a pose in which there is no little pride. Her tall slender figure is an elegant exclamation mark in the humble kitchen: see! I can cook! She wants to prove—she is always trying to prove something—that she has learned to cook, and not just any old way. Before, she could manage—when she had to—a soup or two, semolina pudding, an omelette, a slice of veal, a bit of French toast, and not much more. She tied a green-and-white checked apron over her cream-colored silk blouse, her string of pearls (a cheap yet pretty piece of bijouterie, t
he real thing having vanished into the Soviet Union), her smart beige herringbone skirt, her stockings, her elegant, narrow but, by now, not-too-high-heeled shoes.

  She wore these things until it was time for bed (having discarded the apron of course), wearing the same clothes she wore to the office, not even removing her shoes, which is the first thing I do as soon as I get in, here, as I do at home. Or rather there, as at my home. She can’t understand why the shoes bother me.

  Slippers are for wearing only at night before bed, or on waking up. During the day it’s so non-soigné, she says, Hungaricising the words to sound: unszoányírt. I hate this verbal monstrosity with its German prefix and French descriptor domesticated for home use: it looks even worse written down, something like a mole cricket.

  I had heard it in childhood from her sisters and my cousins. It must have originated in Arad, presumably inherited from a series of German and French governesses. Naturally, I tick her off, not for the first time, gently but with an obviously annoying superiority, and tell her how many different ways there might be of conveying the same idea in Hungarian, so there is no reason to use a foreign word, especially not one so horrible. She is offended, of course, but does not show it; I am sorry, of course, but I don’t show it. We fall silent. We often find conversation difficult in any case or stick to small talk. We are not particularly talkative people, either of us. Not with each other, at least.

  The veal with caper sauce turns out to be perfect. I had never tasted it before. Back home whole generations had grown up never having heard of capers. I must have eaten one last when I was a child, when it shimmered in the middle of a ring of anchovy, like the eye of some sea creature: that’s how I remember it. The flavor is familiar and yet entirely new. She is watching me to see how I react to her cooking. Do I like the capers, she asks. I don’t let her take pleasure in it: so what if you can get capers in America, you can get anything here we can’t get at home.

  Occasionally you can get bananas at home now, I answer on the spur of the moment with Lilliputian self-importance, and there were oranges too just before Christmas. One had to queue up for them, of course, I add for the sake of objectivity. Really? she asks in a slightly disappointed voice. In my opinion she should feel cheered by this. Could she have forgotten what a banana or orange means to us there? We carry on eating. I sense that the caper sauce, the grilled veal, and the whole baked potato in aluminium foil was a long planned-for surprise, one of many, intended for me. It’s a real American thing. Later she lists all the other dishes she can cook, just you see. And it turns out that in her free time she sometimes bakes cakes too, for Hungarian acquaintances, and acquaintances of acquaintances, bakes them to order, for money. So far I had known only—and that was because she told me in a letter—that she occasionally babysat, chiefly for Hungarians but also for some American families, and that she’d had some amusing evenings with naughty children who did not speak Hungarian, who might, for example, lock her into the bathroom for hours. Most recently she made ten dollars baking a huge Sacher torte, she proudly tells me. She buys the ingredients and calculates her fee, which, it seems, is the going rate in Hungarian circles, makes up the bill according to the cost of raw materials and often delivers the cake directly to the house. It sometimes happens, she tells me, giggling, that strangers offer her tips. Does she accept them? Of course, why not? I have to take a deep breath. These earnings, taken together with the modest income she has scraped together, have paid for the parcels of clothes, chosen with exquisite taste, that would arrive at my home on the Groza Embankment, and later for children’s toys and clothes at the flat in Vércse Street. And clearly my airfare too, as well as the ample pocket money she has been giving me while here in New York, come from the delicious torte as well as the soiled diapers. The People’s Republic had, somewhat unwillingly, allowed me five dollars of hard currency for my three-month visit. It is my mother who keeps me; a rather disturbing feeling at age thirty-four. She bakes four or five different sorts of cake, following the recipe in the book of course, and all eminently successful bar the caramel-topped Dobos layer-cake, she tells me.

  Caramel is hard to handle. She pronounces it kaahraahmell, with wide open “aahs,” not long, in the regional Palóc mode, but quite short, like the German “a.” This irritates me no end, I don’t know why. It has been aah, aah, aah all the way—aahkaahdémia, aahgresszív, aahttitúd, right down to kaahpri (capers) and kaahraahmell—ever since I can remember. And maahszek too, the colloquial word for semi-private undertakings. This time I don’t stop myself pointing out that this is not a foreign word, but a Hungarian portmanteau, combining “ma,” pronounced “muh,” from magán (private) and szek from szektor (sector). It is a form of what we call an acronym, I add; adds the conceited, repulsive litterateur, her son. She does not answer. She has no counter-argument. She carries on saying maahszek and aahkaahdémia.

  We eat. As a child I used to enjoy watching her as she adjusted the food on her plate with great topographic precision, shifting it here and there with careful, tiny, sweeping movements of knife and fork, like the director on the set of a film, arranging the shots and instructing the cast before rolling the camera. She pushes the meat to the right side of the plate, the garnish being neatly separated and ranged on the left. Turning the plate one way or the other is common, an unspoken taboo. She cuts and spears a small piece from the meat, loads the appropriate amount of garnish on the round back of the fork, and so carries it to her mouth. This is a far from simple operation, as may be demonstrated now, since the caper seeds would drop from the fork were they not perfectly balanced there and flattened together a little, if the speared piece of meat or potato did not block their escape route, and if she did not lean progressively closer and lower over her plate with every bite so that they might find their way into her mouth all the sooner. When the garnish includes peas, which means that only a few peas succeed in remaining on the curve of the fork behind the meat, that is to say leaving a surfeit of peas on the plate, she is forced to consume extra forkfuls of peas only. But she has a strategy for coping with that too. Using the knife she spears a few peas that will support a few slightly squashed ones behind them.

  I have seen others deploy this technique but while they shift and prod the peas about, creating a mess on the plate, she manages to eat them in an undeniably elegant and distinguished manner. It is all done with great skill and grace. She divides the meat, the garnish, and the salad so that everything disappears from the plate at precisely the same time, every piece of meat with its due portion of garnish and vice versa. She never leaves any food on the plate. Nor do I. She has lived through the meager rationing and starvation of two world wars, I only one.

  Any sauce or juice left on the flat dish, however runny, is conveyed to her mouth with the fork. One simply can’t imagine her using a spoon. She leans forward and makes rapid spooning movements with the fork, turning it up a little so there’s still a moment before dripping and thus she can safely steer it into her mouth. This spectacular technique requires close attention and speed: it demands a lot of time and energy, but it works. She turns the obvious pointlessness of it into a display of elegance. I eat the same way myself, ever since being allowed to dine with the adults, as did the German Fräulein, the whole act having made a great impression on her. But to the two of us it is like a private second language, and while we often make mistakes, it is the equivalent of a mother tongue to her, it is what she grew up doing, quite possibly never seeing any other way of eating, only this. My father, whose education had been under quite different circumstances, ate differently. That which could not be speared, he swept into the hollow of the fork and stuffed into his mouth. If sauce remained on the plate and he liked it he was quite happy to spoon it up, if he didn’t like it he simply left it. If there were no guests he would dip his bread in, sometimes on the end of the fork but sometimes with his hands! He was allowed to. He was the only one. In my first days at the university canteen I was laughed out of countenance a
s I was unmasked as a trueblooded bourgeois leftover from the old regime when, out of habit, I started employing my mother’s technique. The class-alien aspect of the art must have been painfully obvious, a blind man could see it, you didn’t have to be a Marxist-Leninist to recognize it. Ever since then, when it comes to eating, my strategies are somewhat eclectic, though lately, since I have been dining alone, I have fallen into decadent ways; she out there, on the other hand, alone, is almost certain to have continued using her fork to spoon the sauce till the day she died.

  Silence. She clears the table. She starts on the washing-up while I watch, she having refused my help. Her hair still looks chestnut brown and though this is merely a matter of appearances, there is no gray there. Her face is animated, refined, gentle, very beautiful, her eyes warm though she will soon be sixty.

  I understand why in the thirties the Budapest tabloid press referred to her as “one of the most beautiful women in town.” The ritual of the nightly removal of makeup—though, of course, I am not watching this from bed now as I used to but walking up and down behind her, chatting to her, recounting what I did with my day in New York—is quite unchanged right down to the “shaking lotion” and the same old movements, it’s only the lovely antique mirrors that are missing.