It was good to see Mr. Endrodi again, and I made a lot of progress during the time I had him as my tutor. He emphasized reading in English in preference to conversational English. I read stories by Oscar Wilde—moving my finger from word to word and line to line, to be sure—and even stories based on Shakespeare's plays. My favorite was Macbeth. I was fascinated by how Lady Macbeth overcame her husband's will and drove him far beyond where he wanted to go. The idea of a villain behind a villain fascinated me and stayed with me even after my lessons.
I didn't tell anyone at school that I took English lessons. My parents never warned me, but somehow I knew that it wasn't a good thing to broadcast.
Studying English added to my homework load. While it generally wasn't very much, I was pretty diligent about doing what I had to. I would sit at my little desk by the window in the Little Room, with the window open when the weather wasn't too cold, and do my homework to the accompaniment of the sounds of the traffic on Kiraly Street. I was usually at my desk when my parents came home from work. Each of them would stop by my desk. My mother would stroke my shoulder, and my father would pat the back of my head by way of greeting me. My father expressed particular interest in my progress in math, that having been his favorite subject. He never offered to help, however, but then again, I never needed any.
When I was thirteen, my father fell ill. I came home one evening from hanging out with my friends and found him in bed. He had a terrible pain in his belly. My mother had sent for the doctor, but she was worried, so I got worried, too.
Eventually the doctor arrived. He was an older gentleman with silver hair who carried a brown leather doctor's bag with all kinds of serious instruments in it. I was sent to my room while he examined my father. I could hear my father's groans through the closed door. His pain was getting worse. The doctor ordered him to be taken to the hospital immediately, and the next morning he was operated on.
My father stayed in the hospital for a week. I visited him a couple of times. He told me he had had gallstones as big as the tip of his forefinger; the doctor had showed them to him after the surgery. He was quite weak. He couldn't sit up without holding on to a strip of bandage that was tied to the bed frame. It scared me to see my father have to pull himself up into a sitting position. I worried whether he would ever be strong again.
But he did not lack visitors. Many friends came and sat by his bedside and chatted with him. They were quite cheerful and he seemed cheerful, too, so my fear gradually dissipated.
When my father returned home, he stayed in bed for some time. His friends continued to visit him at home. He lounged on the sofa bed, the center of an ongoing series of witty, intellectual conversations. As I watched people gather around him, I realized that this had always been my father's favorite activity, even before his illness: holding court with his friends, being the center of attention, sprawled out on his sofa engaged in vigorous conversation.
The visitors were almost always men. Jani and Romacz came. But there were many new people, people my father worked with or got to know through his various jobs. These new friends brought their friends. It got to the point where I couldn't keep track of who had come with whom.
The conversations weren't so much discussions as heated arguments where people shouted, interrupted each other, and waved their hands about a lot. At first, the loudness of the arguments scared me, but then I realized that while they were excited, nobody ever got really mad at anyone else.
Sometimes I would sit in the Big Room trying to follow the line of argument. My hearing was not an impediment because everyone was yelling at the top of his lungs, but the subjects were too complicated for me to follow. The arguments were about detailed points of law under the Communist regime or about the economics of breeding pigs and cows, the job my father was now involved in. Once, my father was engaged in a legal argument with a lawyer friend. I was very impressed by my father's ability to argue his case. I was even more impressed as I could see the other man retreat into a corner.
Sometimes the visitors included Uncle Sanyi, the husband of my father's sister, Iren. Sanyi was a bit older than my father, and my father had a lot of respect for him. He was a gentle, serious man with graying hair. He was a newspaper editor, and when the subject turned to politics, he became quietly passionate.
My aunt Iren was very different from her husband. Despite being more than ten years older than he, she was a bouncing ball of energy. She was also the most educated member of my father's family and was very well read. She always questioned me about what I was reading. Iren and Sanyi lived about a mile away, out by City Park. This meant that they passed our apartment on their way into the city. Iren dropped by our house almost daily, usually on her way somewhere else, and would be in and out in minutes, always speaking very quickly and fluttering like a hummingbird.
Both Iren and her daughter, Marika, who was ten years older than I and was a medical student, were usually borrowing something from my mother. Iren was trained as a pharmacist and her expertise included making hand lotions, so she would return the favor by creating concoctions for my mother. They smelled very nice. She also often made a particular type of chocolate dessert squares and would bring us a plate of them from time to time, which made me very happy.
My aunt Manci and her husband, Miklos, had moved to Budapest and were also frequent visitors. Miklos had some kind of an office job, and Manci continued to sew and repair dresses.
Once my father recovered from his operation, my parents resumed their usual social life. During the summer, we took the tram to the outskirts of Budapest and sometimes took the funicular up the mountains of Buda; then we would sit at an open-air restaurant and the adults would argue. When the weather wasn't so good, the outings took place at the neighborhood restaurant, always the same restaurant, where my father always ordered the exact same dish, his favorite stew, and the arguments continued.
At the end of a meal, it usually was my task to figure out how much of a tip to leave. My father, who was very quick with math, would watch me do this chore. Sometimes I was fast enough to win his approval; sometimes he was impatient. He would glance over to see if I had done it right, which I usually had, and nod his approval. It was a little game for us, and we both enjoyed it.
My father was an outgoing man. I was impressed and also a little envious at how easily he struck up conversations even with complete strangers. He was able to find a common bond with everyone he encountered—the waiter at the restaurant, the conductor on the streetcar, or somebody sitting at the table next to him. He seemed genuinely interested in these other people. Every once in a while, in his enthusiasm, he got me involved in these conversations. Most of the time, I would listen for a while, but I would soon get impatient to go home.
As I got older, I stopped going on these outings and hung out with my own friends instead.
One positive result of the nationalizing of all the school districts was that Gabi and I ended up in the same class at Dob Street School. We continued to spend time together outside of class, too.
After school and on weekends, we went on long walks through Budapest. Most of the damage from the war had been cleaned up, and Budapest by now was a bustling, living city again. There were people out on the streets at all hours of day and night, some coming and going purposefully, some just strolling around. The larger streets were lined with sidewalk cafés, where people sat and talked over ice cream in the summer and cups of espresso throughout the rest of the year. I loved ice cream and the way it was served in silvery metal dishes beaded with condensation, but it was a treat I could rarely afford from my small allowance. Cafés were mostly for people with money, and I didn't have much money.
The cafés were part of the backdrop as Gabi and I walked and talked. One of our favorite destinations was Margaret Island, an island in the Danube that was a large recreational area with restaurants, sports facilities, boathouses, swimming pools, and such. In the summer, the benches around the island were filled with couples makin
g out, adding another bit of interest to the scenery of our walk.
Gabi was interested in music, particularly opera. A lot of people were. There were two opera houses in Budapest operating almost year-round, and opera was regularly broadcast on the radio. My piano lessons had left bad memories of classical music, and after I stopped taking lessons, I was perfectly happy to have nothing more to do with it. I had even less interest in opera. I thought it was silly for people to sing through an entire story. It took a lot of prodding for Gabi to get me to agree to accompany him to an open-air concert on Margaret Island. Even then, he had to drag me along.
The concert program included a combination of musical numbers, dance numbers, and selections from operas. We sat close up so I could hear the singers. One was a man with a big voice who sang the “Toreador Song” from Carmen. The man's energy and booming voice and the audience's enthusiastic reaction swept me up in a frenzy of excitement. Much to Gabi's amusement, I was on my feet with everyone else, yelling for an encore.
Afterward, I sheepishly admitted to Gabi that I would like to see the whole opera. That was easy enough to do. As long as I was willing to sit in cheap seats high up and to the side, I could afford the tickets. We soon found a production of Carmen and went to see it. With that one experience, I was hooked on opera.
My voice was beginning to change. My singing voice, which I tried only when I was sure I was alone in the apartment, seemed to be a deep one. I declared myself a bass-baritone. Consequently, my interest was drawn to operas where the bass-baritone had a big part. Carmen with Escamillo the toreador was one. Faust with Mephistopheles was another.
I became increasingly fascinated by Hungarian bass and bass-baritone opera singers, particularly Mihaly Szekely, who, rumor had it, once sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City! My all-time favorite singer was Gyorgy Losonczy, who, while he did not have Szekely's voice, was an excellent dramatic actor. I decided that he made a good all-round role model for me even though he had married a large, shrill soprano whom I didn't like.
My parents had recently replaced the old wind-up phonograph with an electric record player. It was connected to the loudspeaker of the radio and didn't sound as good as the wind-up phonograph, but it could play record after record without my having to jump up to crank up the motor.
My father's tastes ran toward Gypsy music and popular songs, not opera, so whatever records we had were of that type. My aunt Iren found out about my growing interest and told me I could have her old opera records. One Saturday afternoon, Gabi and I picked up a bunch of her dusty phonograph records and took them home to listen to them.
We were eager to examine our hoard. Working through the pile, we slapped each record on the phonograph, sampled it, then took it off and replaced it with another. Most of them were not very interesting, and we were gloomily coming to the conclusion that our expedition would not yield any treasures. Without even bothering to look at the label, I put on the next record.
An incredible voice singing a dynamic, powerful song filled the room. Gabi and I froze and listened as if hypnotized. When the song was over, I took off the record to see who it was and what he sang. The singer was the Russian bass Feodor Chali-apin, and the opera was Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.
I learned everything I could about Chaliapin. He was a workingman, not musically trained. According to the stories, he never really read music and improvised beyond what the composer had in mind. He was, I thought, just like me. In my fantasies, I pictured myself as an opera singer when I grew up.
My other fantasy was to become a writer.
I went through fits of reading. There were periods of time when I read a lot and periods of time when I didn't read much at all. These reading spurts were always triggered by the discovery of a writer whose books made a big impression on me. Karl May was one of those. Jules Verne was another. Around the time I started going to the Dob Street School, I discovered C. S. Forester's books about the nineteenth-century British navy captain Horatio Hornblower.
Something about the character really intrigued me. Although I wouldn't tell anyone this, I fancied myself as a latter-day Captain Hornblower, a man of few but deeply thought-out words, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, pacing an imaginary deck with my hands behind my back, living a rich inner life that my classmates never suspected. Had they known what I was really like, I imagined, they would be a lot more respectful. Nobody would call a Hornblower Pufi or dare to push him around.
I borrowed the Hornblower books from my neighborhood library. Whenever I got close to finishing one, I started worrying that the next one wouldn't be available. After I finished the entire series, I went back and read them all over again. Partly because of these books, I started to think of becoming a writer. I had ambitions of expressing what I thought of as my rich and multifaceted self in writing.
The thought really appealed to me. To be able to display what I was really like by transposing myself into an imaginary person, set in an imaginary scene, undertaking imaginary adventures, excited me. However, this was a fantasy I shared with no one. It was a part of that rich inner life that I was determined to keep to myself.
Yet I liked writing and wanted people to pay attention to my compositions, so I came up with a compromise answer when people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. They were asking more and more frequently these days, because it was customary for kids my age to start thinking seriously about their future careers. As some of my friends had already declared their intention of becoming mechanical engineers or physicians, I felt pressure to name a profession, too. I told my parents, some teachers, and a few of my friends that I wanted to become a journalist.
I actually had the opportunity to be a journalist—at least, in a modest way. My school sponsored a gathering where students participated in a discussion of current events. Afterward, a woman introduced herself to me. She said that she was the editor of a weekly newspaper for young people and that she liked the way I expressed myself—that I seemed to have an easy time with words. Would I be interested in writing about my daily experiences for her publication? Perhaps I would like to visit the editorial offices to see what they were like.
I could barely contain my excitement.
The editorial offices consisted of two rooms of an apartment cluttered with stacks of papers and back issues of the newspaper. The editorial staff consisted of two middle-aged men, each of whom had a typewriter on which he was busily clacking away. I didn't know what a newspaper's offices should look like. This looked good enough to me.
Shortly after, I submitted my first composition. It was five or six paragraphs about what I did during my summer vacation. It was accepted! The paper was not one either I or my friends read. In truth, it wasn't very interesting. But that changed for me once I could look forward to seeing my own words in print. I became an avid reader and brandished the newspaper wherever I went. My parents were very proud of me and showed my article to my aunt Iren, who took it home to show to her husband, Sanyi, the real-life journalist. I eagerly awaited Sanyi's praise, but to my disappointment I never heard from him one way or another.
From time to time, I submitted new compositions, all brief and all dealing with my daily observations. Every one of them got printed, usually with very little modification. I was given a little identification card, with my picture pasted in it, that identified me as Correspondent #7. I proudly carried it wherever I went, waiting for an opportunity to flash the official proof that I was a working journalist. The opportunity never came. But that didn't diminish my pride.
Most of the time, I came up with the ideas for my stories. But one time, my editor—the woman who recruited me had been succeeded by one of the middle-aged men—gave me an assignment. He asked me to report on our school's participation in Budapest's first May Day parade.
All the students were required to gather at the school on the first of May and join a huge citywide parade of people—factory workers, office workers, and other students, as we
ll as ordinary people. Attendance was mandatory. Workers were grouped according to their place of employment, students by their schools, and people who didn't work by their apartment house block.
The parade was supposed to be a happy celebration of things Communist and Soviet. In fact, it was a slow, shuffling flow of unenthusiastic people through the streets leading to Heroes' Square, a big square near City Park. There, we shuffled by a reviewing stand where the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party stood shoulder to shoulder and waved as the masses of people oozed past. It was hot and dusty, and we were thirsty. As practically the entire city had to march, the parade took forever. And since everyone was marching, there were no spectators.
Loudspeakers were hung from lampposts along the parade route throughout the city. They blared energetic cheers: “Long live the Communist Party!” “Long live Matyas Rakosi!” “Long live Stalin!” I got the impression that the cheering and enthusiastic applause emanated from Heroes' Square and came from all the marchers who had arrived there before us. However, when we arrived at the square, the only people standing and waving were the Party members on the reviewing stand. None of the previous marchers had stuck around to watch. No other marchers were cheering. None of us were cheering.
Yet the loudspeakers continued to blare the same shouts and cheers, over and over. I realized the cheering was a recording. Gabi and I looked at each other surreptitiously. Later, we speculated that army units must have been called up and ordered to cheer, and it was their taped voices we heard over the loudspeakers.
I did not submit an article on the May Day parade. Some other kids did, and the magazine ran a collection of enthusiastic reports about how much fun it was and how the energetic march showed the support of the young people of Budapest for the leadership of the Communist Party.
The following month, in June of 1950, scary news broke. We heard that the South Korean army, puppets of the Americans, had invaded North Korea without notice. The war in Korea became the centerpiece of everything we read in the newspapers and heard on the radio. It became the subject of formal discussions at workplaces and at school, where all of us were exhorted to demonstrate our opposition to this act of imperialist aggression. Posters of the Korean peninsula were displayed all over Budapest, with stickers showing the movements at the front. Wherever I walked in the city, I saw posters about the war as well as posters demanding “Hands Off Korea!”
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