“How could Joshua stop the sun if the sun isn't moving?” I asked. “After all, we know that it is the earth that orbits the sun and the sun is stationary.”
The teacher glared at me. If the sun had been moving, his look might have stopped it. He opened his mouth and closed it, then barked at me, “This is religion, Grof! You either believe it or you don't! You never— ever —argue with it.”
The other students snickered, which made the teacher even madder. I sat down, inwardly pleased with myself. I thought I'd scored a point. Grof 1, religion 0.
When I got home, I told my father what I had done. He pat- ted me on the back of my head, his usual sign of approval. “Well done, kid,” he said.
Before I could get a grade in religion, which might have cooled my self-satisfaction, new rules came down. Religious instruction was no longer compulsory. I was out of that class as soon as I was allowed.
As I said, most kids called each other by their last names. Unfortunately, I was in a minority. In the years after the war, I had gained weight. First I got pudgy, then I got even pudgier. Kids at school started calling me a variety of nicknames, ranging from Pufi (which means “Fatso”) to Rofi (the sound a pig makes). I didn't like being called these names, but the more I protested, the louder the other kids shouted them at me across the schoolyard. So I resigned myself to being Pufi or Rofi. They became my names even in my own thoughts.
A bigger problem was that I was not particularly athletic in the first place, and the heavier I got, the less athletic I became. Whenever teams were chosen, I was always the last kid to be picked. The game we played most often in exercise periods and after school was soccer. I wasn't particularly skillful, and I was slow. I came up with a convenient excuse for my poor performance: It had been seven years since my bout with scarlet fever, but I didn't know whether my heart had fully recovered. I declared that it would be bad for my heart if I strained it. I was exempted from strenuous exercise and consequently was perennially relegated to the role of goalie in our soccer matches. Goalies didn't have to run around much.
I was a mediocre goalie. I neither helped nor harmed our team in any big way. But my career as a goalie was soon cut short. One time when we were playing soccer in the schoolyard, I tripped over the metal rod that served as our goalpost. I landed on my left arm. It didn't hurt, but when I got up, I was stunned to see that my forearm was bent—it looked like a V. I stared at it, and the other kids all came around to look. Soon the teacher, who had been overseeing another team, came over to ask what was wrong. “My arm is bent,” I said.
He walked me off the playground and took me to the school office, where he called my mother at the dairy. It so happened that there was a hospital next door, so he walked me over there. The nurse gave me some water and entertained me while I waited for my mother. I got more and more worried about my arm. It didn't hurt and I could wiggle my fingers, but the bent shape concerned me. When my mother arrived, she had a private talk with a doctor, then she told me the diagnosis: My arm was broken. I thought they would straighten it out like a piece of bent wire. Instead, I was told I would have to be put to sleep so the doctor could set the bone straight.
The prospect of being put to sleep scared me. My mother explained that setting my arm would hurt, but I wouldn't feel it if I was asleep. I didn't have a choice. As she was explaining this, the nurses took me into another room, helped me onto a table, and covered my entire face with a tentlike mask. They told me to start counting from one to ten. A sweetish smell was coming through the mask. Before I could get to ten, my tongue stopped moving and I was unconscious.
I came to with a combination of sensations. As I opened my eyes, I could see daylight through the mask over my face and I could feel something warm moving up on my arm. I had a flash of terrible sadness. I thought, They must have decided to amputate my arm, and that's my mother kissing it good-bye. Then somebody removed the mask and I could see that a white cloth, soaked in warm water and wet with plaster, was being wrapped around my arm. My arm was straight once again. The doctor told me that once the cast was completely hard, it would make an excellent weapon to elbow other kids with. Then my mother and I walked home.
I immediately put the doctor's advice into practice and whacked my classmates with the cast whenever I could. But the best part about breaking my arm was that I couldn't play the piano. I hated piano lessons, but I couldn't get out of them until I had the good fortune of tripping over the goalpost. Six weeks later, when the cast was cut off, I used the excuse of the break in my practice to stop piano lessons for good. To my surprise, my parents didn't protest a lot. It turned out that they had wanted to get some new furniture in the Big Room anyway. A short while later, they sold the piano and it was gone from the room and from my life.
The new furniture made the Big Room more attractive. Even before, it was the best-looking room in our apartment. While my father was gone during the war, his partners in the dairy business had expanded into an undertaking selling Persian rugs and, later, paintings by Hungarian artists. It was never more than a sideline to the dairy business. There was no display area; the canvases and rolled-up rugs were housed in a storefront adjacent to the dairy. The business never amounted to much, and some time after my father returned, he and his partners liquidated it. As part of the liquidation, some new Persian rugs appeared in our apartment, covering much of the floor in the Big Room. They were like the Oriental area rugs that I had played on during my island-hopping games with Lion bacsi years ago, only much bigger. In addition, half a dozen paintings appeared on our walls.
The paintings captured my imagination. One was of an old man sitting in a doorway of an alley in a small town that reminded me of Kiskoros. There was a small country scene that reminded me of the countryside that I'd seen from the train going to and from Kiskoros. There were a couple of bigger works, too. One was of a young woman sitting on a wheelbarrow, as if waiting to participate in a picnic. Judging from the way she was dressed, with a colorful hat with a wide brim, she must have lived long ago.
The picture that attracted me the most was a painting of a ballerina lacing up her toe shoes. The ballerina was very pretty. She looked a little bit like my mother. She lit up the room and attracted my eyes every time I entered. The painting was hung on the wall so that I faced it when I played the piano; having it there didn't help my concentration during the few months that I took lessons. Fortunately, the ballerina survived after the piano went.
Unfortunately, the dairy business didn't.
While I was struggling with piano lessons, religion class, and a broken arm, there was a growing din of political events going on around us. Even though the Hungarian Communist Party had the support of the Russians, it was just one of many parties that made up the political scene after the war. It didn't gain a majority in either of the first two postwar elections, in 1945 and 1947. In August 1948, however, the Communists won and took charge of the government. Soon, private companies were taken over by the state. First, large companies were nationalized, then they moved on to smaller companies. In short order, our dairy was nationalized.
The immediate impact on my life was the disappearance of the ready supply of fresh cottage cheese, butter, and yogurt that we were accustomed to. Even before the dairy was nationalized, my father had started a new job working for a state-owned department store, and he was able to continue to work there after the nationalization. I don't know exactly what he did, but he was some kind of a bigwig. I could tell because whenever I visited him at his office, it seemed that people were overly nice to me. They paid too much attention to me and complimented me when there didn't seem to be any reason for it. This made me uncomfortable. I did not like it.
Once I went to a winter party thrown by the department store for its employees. There were so many people that I was able to get lost in the crowd. Mostly, I sat with the drummer of the band and watched the celebrations. I had the feeling that my father was being treated with special attention. He seemed to be havi
ng a good time, dancing very energetically with my mother and also with other women. He danced to both Western dance music and Hungarian songs. But I had the impression that people were watching him all the time.
Sometime after this party, my father was promoted. He became the director of a state company in charge of livestock breeding and exports. Now he had even more signs of importance. He had an elegant secretary and a car with a driver. My mother never liked his secretary; consequently, I had an uneasy feeling about her. When I visited my father, the secretary was awfully sweet and attentive to me, but I had a feeling that her smiles and interest, as well as everything else about her, were for show. The driver, on the other hand, was a lot of fun. He let me ride up front and answered my questions about the workings of the car seriously and patiently.
Even as the nature of my father's work changed, things were changing at home, too. Gizi had to leave us. Increasingly, employing somebody was considered the same as exploiting them. It was something the Communist government frowned on. So my father felt we could no longer have a maid. Gizi and Sinko went back to her hometown. I missed them both very much.
My mother first continued working at the dairy; then, when the dairy was nationalized, she got a job as a bookkeeper at a state-owned company that managed the distribution of coal and heating oil. With Gizi gone, she now had to take over in the kitchen, too. My mother's cooking was a very simple affair. She mostly made simple dishes, such as potatoes with paprika and sausage. My father loved lecso, a concoction of tomatoes, red peppers, green peppers, and sausage, so my mother made a lot of that. And she made goulash, a soup made of the same ingredients but with a lot more liquid. The advantage of these dishes was that she could make a big batch and warm up little portions of it for quite some time.
I got into the routine of coming home from school, warming up some leftovers, and cleaning up after myself. This was my main meal of the day.
Big family dinners had always been rare, and with Gizi gone, they became even less frequent. When they happened, they usually happened in a restaurant on a Sunday. Some Sundays my parents visited with friends, either at our house or at a restaurant, or they got together with my father's older sister, Iren, and her husband, Sanyi. Sometimes they went on an outing in the hills surrounding Budapest, always taking care to stick near the streetcar lines because my father hated walking. Sometimes I would go with them; other times I would stay home and hang around with Gabi.
I didn't see a whole lot of my parents. My mother and father returned home from work at different times, and it was our custom that everyone ate whenever they arrived home. By the time my parents came home, I'd usually be cooped up in my room, reading or doing my homework. They would always ask me how school was, and I would give them a report, either detailed or not, depending on my mood.
I rarely needed help with my homework, but whenever I wrote an interesting composition, I showed it to my parents. They were often helpful, and I'd frequently rewrite my compositions as a result of their comments.
Having nationalized all businesses, the government turned its attention to the school system. The Communists didn't approve of parochial schools and closed them down. So two years into what was supposed to be an eight-year sequence at gymnasium, I had to change schools. Come the fall of 1949, I would not return to Evangelikus but would have to go to a neighborhood school. Even though I had no feelings about the new school one way or another, I was sorry to be uprooted. I liked it at Evangelikus. I liked the school, the students, and the teachers. But there was nothing to be done. The Communist government called all the shots.
I had mixed feelings about the Communists. On the one hand, I felt that they saved my mother's life and my own. I was very grateful for this, and my gratitude made me want to believe in them and what they stood for. On the other hand, since they had taken power, they increasingly interfered with our daily life. They took away my parents' business, they uprooted me from my school, they forced Gizi and Sinko to leave—all in the name of some political philosophy that I didn't really understand.
There were other strange goings-on with the government in the spring of 1949. Everybody was talking about the arrest of one of the top Communist ministers, a man named Laszlo Rajk. The newspapers and the radio had previously described him as a heroic freedom fighter, so it was a shock when that May he was arrested. He was charged with being a traitor and a spy for the English and the Americans. The trial was scheduled for later in the summer.
However, all these events—Gizi's disappearance, my impending change of schools, the confused political atmosphere—were dwarfed in importance because a big wish of mine was finally fulfilled. I got an air gun. I had wanted one for a long time. I ogled the ones displayed in the shop windows of sporting goods stores and imagined myself holding one in my hand. My father had said that he would let me buy one if I saved my allowance.
That spring, after a year of diligent saving, skipping numerous movies and many ice-cream cones, I had only half the money I needed. My father took pity on me and agreed to match my savings. At last, the air gun would be mine. We went to the store together. The gun I chose had a polished wood stock and a gleaming steel barrel. You broke the barrel open, inserted the pellets in a recess inside, then closed the barrel. Opening and closing the barrel pumped up the air pressure until the gun was ready to shoot. I walked out of the store, carefully clutching my new treasure. It was the most valuable thing I'd ever owned.
I took my gun everywhere. I took it to City Park to practice shooting, a bit concerned that someone might take it away from me. I also practiced at home from the airshaft window, shooting across the empty lot and watching the bullets throw up little puffs of dust as they hit the plaster on the wall of the opposite building. My father taught me never to point the gun at anyone, even when it was empty. So I would mount the tram with the gun casually slung on my shoulder, but I always made sure that the barrel pointed to the ground.
My real opportunity to learn how to use it came that summer when, once again, I went to Kiskoros. This time I did not stay with Manci. Finally, more than three long years after my fa- ther arrived home, Manci's husband, Miklos, had come back from Russian prison camp. Manci was busy nursing him back to health.
I stayed with the Kehl family, who worked a small farm that used to belong to my father's family. The Kehls were ethnic Germans. Most ethnic Germans, called Schwabs, were deported after the war, on the premise that they must have collaborated with the Germans. A lot of families who had lived in Hungary for generations were forced to move to Germany. Somehow, the Kehls managed to avoid deportation.
The farm was too small to be nationalized. It consisted of a small vineyard, a few fruit trees, and a plot of vegetables for the family. The one-story house had several rooms with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. The yard in front was also dirt, with chickens pecking for bugs among the farm implements that were scattered around.
A deep well stood in the center of the yard, surrounded by a brick wall to keep people and animals from falling in. To get water, you let down a pail attached to a long rope, which was wound around the shaft, waited for the sound of a splash, then cranked the pail back up. The water was cold and tasted fresh.
There were chickens and dogs and cats for me to play with, but best of all, Gabi was there. He had come with me. (Unlike my other schoolmates, I called Gabi by his first name. Also unlike my other schoolmates, he called me Andris, never Pufi or Rofi.)
We had the run of the place. We dug holes and turned them into “caves.” We went hunting for frogs, something I did with a vengeance, since I hated frogs and wanted to kill every one of them. And we hung around with the Kehls' son, Adam, who was eighteen years old and a man of the world. Adam was very capable with tools, bicycles, and girls, all of which Gabi and I found fascinating.
Once, we tagged along with Adam and came upon a group of girls who worked on a neighborhood plot. Adam went off to chat with them, then told us to wait while he disappeared with one of t
he girls into a grove of trees. A while later, he reappeared, looking very smug. He slapped Gabi and me on the back and said, “Let's go to work,” as if nothing had happened. I often wondered about what Adam and that girl did in the trees, but I never had the nerve to ask.
Most of the time, Gabi and I were left to entertain ourselves. A key item was the air gun. Unfortunately, I couldn't use it as much as I would have liked because the pellets were expensive and I'd already used up all of my allowance. The pellets came in boxes of five hundred, but I was concerned that we would run out, so Gabi and I made every shot count. I was a better shot than Gabi. I shot at cans and pieces of wood, then eventually at sparrows perched on the branches of trees. After a while, I got to be good enough so that I could sometimes hit a sparrow and knock it down. I felt very powerful when it fell dead to the ground.
Once I shot a pigeon. It fell down, but it wasn't dead. When I went to look at it, it looked back at me. It couldn't move. I felt awful. I picked it up and took it back to the house, made it a nest, gave it water and seeds, and nursed it back to health. Eventually, it flew away. After that, I didn't shoot at pigeons, but somehow I thought it was okay to shoot at sparrows.
Once a week, on Wednesday, Kehl bacsi and Adam bicycled into Kiskoros to go to the market. Market day was a big deal at the farm. They carefully packed big wicker baskets with grapes and fruit and strapped them onto the backs of their bicycles. Gabi and I went with them. The farm was about ten kilometers outside of town, about an hour's ride on Kehl bacsi 's beat-up bike. You took a rutted dirt road to the main road. The main road wasn't paved, either, but it was much smoother. Kehl bacsi pedaled and had me perch sideways on the crossbar. Gabi rode with Adam. These trips reminded me of riding with Sinko in City Park, except that here the roads were worse so the ruts bit harder.
Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 9