A month or so later, he invited Imre and me to visit him at his apartment to talk about literature. He lived in a couple of shabby rooms facing the inner courtyard of a run-down apartment house. There were books scattered all over, piled on the floor and tables. Everything was covered with dust. Mr. Telegdi sat on an old sofa, we pulled up two kitchen chairs, and we all talked about literature. The conversation was very interesting, but I found the overall atmosphere incredibly sad and depressing. To my surprise, I realized that I felt sorry for Mr. Telegdi. It bothered me even more that I, a student in the disrespectful 1A class, should dare to feel sorry for him. After Imre and I left, I tried to wash the picture of Telegdi's sad apartment out of my head, and my confused feelings with it.
Mrs. Vasarhelyi, our history teacher, was quite a contrast to Mr. Telegdi. She was young, good-looking, and animated. Even though she was supposedly married to a Party functionary, she was a good teacher. Before history class, all my rowdy classmates got busy combing their hair and checking out their reflection in the window. We had no trouble keeping quiet for Mrs. Vasarhelyi.
As always, I sat in the first row because of my ears. Sometimes, when the student whom I normally shared the bench with missed class, Mrs. Vasarhelyi would perch on his desk, with her feet on the seat next to me. She was close enough that I could smell her perfume. She wore open-necked blouses, and from my seat, I could see her neck and the underside of her chin. I felt I was staring at her, but I didn't know what else to do with my eyes, so I stared at her neck. I was terribly embarrassed, but I was always happy when my seatmate was out sick.
Every once in a while, during recess, we would see Mrs. Vasarhelyi and Mr. Telegdi chatting together. They kept their voices low and leaned toward each other intimately. Each sighting ignited a speculative buzz in our class. It was hard to think of them as being romantically interested in each other, yet the possibility was intriguing.
My favorite teacher of all was Mr. Volenski, the physics teacher. He was a small man, older than most teachers in the school, with thinning reddish brown hair that he combed straight back over his head. He was a very good teacher, and physics was one of my favorite classes. But above all, he was a character.
He always regaled us with stories about his dog, Muki (an affectionate slang word meaning “Little Guy”). The stories often involved physics, as in, “I threw this object to my dog, Muki. Would it be easier for him to catch it this way or that way?” Sometimes, our performance in class was compared unfavorably to the performance of Muki.
Everybody in the class got a kick out of Mr. Volenski's stories. Perhaps that was why he never had a hard time keeping discipline.
Mr. Volenski had a fantastic memory for things that happened twenty years ago, but he forgot who you were even if he had seen you just a few hours earlier. I liked him a lot. I think he liked me, even if I wasn't always sure he could identify me. Then one day, I knew that he could.
At a parent-teacher conference that fall, Mr. Volenski told the assembled parents, “Life is like a big lake. All the boys get in the water at one end and start swimming. Not all of them will swim across. But one of them, I'm sure, will. That one is Grof.” Both of my parents were there, and when they returned home, they told me about it with great pride.
They also told so many other people about it that over time, my swimming across the lake of life became a family cliché. Even though the story grew a little tiresome and I was embarrassed by my parents' insistence on repeating it, I continued to get some encouragement from each telling. I hoped Mr. Volen-ski was right.
Mr. Telegdi also spoke highly of me at the conference, but his description troubled me. In front of all the parents, he said, “Someday we will be sitting in Grof's waiting room, waiting for him to see us.” I imagined him huddled in this waiting room, ignored by the secretary and other people, and felt sorry for him. I already felt sorry for him anyway because I knew he must be wrong. The notion that someday I would have a room to keep people waiting in seemed inconceivable.
My uncle Sanyi and my cousin's husband were still in jail, and my father was still officially disgraced. After my father lost his government job, a friend of his was brave enough to hire him to run a small accounting group at the state dairy organization. He was paid exactly as ordered—one-fourth of his previous salary.
The loss of my father's earnings had a significant impact on our lifestyle. To be sure, we had never spent all that my father and mother made before. Still, the cut in income was large and the little luxuries of life were gone. Eating out on Sundays was gone. Going to the theater was gone. Any notion of my getting anything better than the cheapest seats at the opera was gone. Delicacies like chestnut puree were gone. We had meat only once a week now.
A few months after my father started working at the state dairy, this friend told him about another job, also an accounting job, at a construction company that paid a little more money. After suitable applications and much checking and rechecking with the authorities, my father changed jobs. The construction company was located in the outskirts of Budapest, so my father had a long tram ride to get to work. He made the long commute without complaining.
I never heard my father complain about the loss of his job, either. In fact, I never heard him complain at all, but he became very quiet. He was a man who used to thrive on political discussions. Now he refused to discuss politics. And in any case, there was no one to discuss it with. Most of his friends still stayed away.
Some of my classmates had discovered girls. At recess and during breaks between classes, they constantly boasted about going out with this girl or taking that girl to the movies. The ones who claimed to be successful tended to be good at sports and looked more stylish than the rest of us. While everyone else wore ordinary clothes to special school events, they wore jackets with carefully padded shoulders and tapered pants. They didn't care much about getting good grades; according to them, grades were not an asset in attracting girls.
Nobody in my group of friends ever talked much about girls. I didn't want to admit that I didn't have anything to talk about, and I guess my friends didn't have much to talk about, either. However, I wanted to be the first of our group to succeed with girls, and I wanted to have something I could boast about with the other boys.
There wasn't a whole lot of opportunity to get to know girls in school because we were in separate classes. I had to figure out another way.
Some of my classmates in the “in crowd” knew how to dance. I envied them. I did not want to compromise my place among my brainy friends, but I did want to meet girls and impress them the way some of my classmates did.
The whole prospect of dancing seemed like a mystery. I couldn't imagine how people knew what to do with their feet, and the idea of walking up to a girl and asking her to dance paralyzed me with fear. But the very fact that I was puzzled and scared by dancing pushed me to learn.
There was a dance school on Kiraly Street a few blocks away from our house. The school was one flight up from the street, and at night when I walked by I could hear the music through the open window and see the couples gliding by. I worked up my courage and checked out what it would take to register; basically, all it took was money and not very much of that, because, like many enterprises, the dance school was partially sponsored by the state.
I didn't have an allowance. The family's spending money was stashed under my father's underwear in my parents' wardrobe, and whenever I needed some, I was allowed to take it from the folded bills as long as I told my parents that I did so. I was very mindful that I was dipping into the family's living money.
But dancing lessons weren't very expensive, and with my father's new job, we had a little money for extras. My parents agreed that we could afford it, so in the spring of my first year at the Madach gymnasium, I signed up for an introductory class.
It was not nearly as difficult or as scary as thinking about it had been. The class was made up of kids my age, a bunch of boys and a few girls. The teache
r was a middle-aged man, lean and craggy but with an air of assurance and sophistication. He wore a suit and tie, which added to his polish. Few men in Budapest wore suits, and when they did, their suits didn't fit well. The dance teacher's suit was obviously old, but it was so well cut and the cloth was so fine that it didn't look at all old-fashioned. His dapper elegance reminded me of my former English teacher, Mr. Endrodi. I was impressed and a little envious.
We formed in straight lines opposite a mirrored wall, and the teacher walked us through some very simple steps. We all counted “One, two, three, four” and put our left foot one way, then our right foot another way. It didn't feel like dancing. I avoided looking in the mirror and focused instead on putting my feet in the right place. Then the teacher put on a record, and as we counted to the music, everything started to make sense. We practiced over and over to the same records, playing tunes for the fox-trot, waltz, and tango. I began to feel quite confident—at least, when I was dancing by myself.
Then the day came when we were paired up, boys and girls. The instructor demonstrated with a woman who hung around the dance school and served as his assistant. She was frumpy looking, but when they danced together, they glided around the floor very gracefully. We were expected to perform the same transformation.
There were more boys than girls, so we had to take turns. Finally, the magic moment came when I put my arm around a girl's waist and held her hand. It wasn't all that magical. Both of us had sweaty hands, and I was busy counting “One, two, three, four.” I couldn't wait for the dance to stop. I had the impression that my partner was as relieved as I.
Eventually, the steps came more naturally. I could do them without counting in my head. I even learned to tap on a boy's shoulder as he was dancing with a girl and cut in. But the dance school itself never delivered any kind of romantic adventure. We were so serious about learning our steps that our partners were just objects to practice with.
I liked the fox-trot, waltz, and tango well enough, but they weren't going to impress anyone. The rage in Hungary was American bebop music, which you danced to with fluid steps, swinging your partner out so that her skirt swirled up and doing intricate contortions with your feet as if your knees were made of jelly. Because of its Western origin, this kind of dancing was frowned upon by the Communist authorities. People could dance this way only in the privacy of their own homes to records that had been smuggled in from West Germany or Austria.
We all wanted to learn this kind of dancing, but, of course, it wasn't taught at the school. One day during a break, one of the students tried to perform a few bebop steps in class. The instructor frowned in disapproval. The student continued to contort himself. The instructor watched a little longer, then stopped him curtly and said, “If you've got to do those steps, at least do them right.” To our surprise, he replaced the fox-trot record with a faster, contemporary song, then launched into a private dance, his legs elastic and his hips as supple as putty. We stared at him, awestruck. After a few minutes, he seemed to come to his senses. He stopped and said, “Unless you can do it like this, don't even bother.” Nobody did.
After six weeks, the dance course was over. There was a graduation ceremony that the whole dance school attended, where we danced as couples under the watchful eyes of the instructor and his assistant partner. Now that I knew how to dance—or, at least, thought that I knew how—I dared to show up at school parties and special events that I had avoided before. But for the most part, I stood against the wall. I realized that there was a lot more to impressing girls than knowing where to place my feet.
Meanwhile, in addition to studying Russian in school, I had also signed up for a free class in remedial Russian. The Russian instruction at school was still so elementary that I was afraid I wouldn't learn anything. Since I had to learn Russian, I thought I might as well learn it for real.
The class met in the evening. Ironically, it was held in the building that used to house the Evangelikus gymnasium, which had been nationalized and was now used for other purposes. The class was made up of all kinds of people—mostly adults, but some other kids my age. One girl in particular caught my attention; she was short and blond and had a spunky personality. The students were expected to refer to each other by the Russian version of their first names. This girl's name in Russian was Galina.
Galina walked home the same way I did—it turned out she lived past my house—and we fell into the habit of occasionally walking back from class together. I always looked forward to the walk. In fact, I realized that I looked forward to the walk more than I looked forward to the class. The teacher wasn't all that good, or maybe I just wasn't motivated to learn. The main reason I kept going to class was Galina. But I never managed to work up my courage to try to arrange a date.
My only other opportunity for socializing with girls was during recess at school. It wasn't easy. The girls tended to cluster together in groups that were difficult to break into. The boys hung out in groups, too, and it was difficult to break away. You might drift by a group of girls and say something, or you might catch a girl's eye on the stairs on the way to class or to recess. But there was no place in the school courtyard where you could talk without everyone noticing.
I was fifteen, and other boys my age were going out with girls. So at the end of my first year at Madach, I worked up my courage to ask one of the girls if she would meet me after school to go for a walk. To my delight and surprise, she readily agreed. We made a date for three o'clock in the afternoon the next day. The meeting was going to be under a street clock at the corner of Kiraly Street and Ring Street, near where we both lived.
I got there fifteen minutes early. I paced up and down along the busy street corner, waiting for the clock to move forward and practicing what I would say when she showed up—how I would say hello in a suave and self-possessed manner, as if I did this every day. Three o'clock came. No girl. I told myself that she would probably be a few minutes late: Girls probably tended to be a little late anyway.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. Sour, heavy feelings started to grow in the pit of my stomach. My thoughts went from excitement and anticipation to a bitter argument with myself. As I walked up and down, I looked at my reflection in the shop windows. How could I really expect her to want to go out with me when I was so pudgy and awkward? At half-past three, I looked around one more time, then headed home. I was very down on myself and very angry at the girl—at all girls.
Back in school the next day, I forced myself not even to glance in the direction of the girl. I just hung around with my friends from 1A. There was only one piece of good news: Out of caution, I had never told anybody of my would-be encounter, so I didn't have to tell anybody about it not having happened.
I never talked to my parents about girls. They knew I had gone to dance class, but they didn't ask any questions about it, and I didn't volunteer anything. I was grateful for their restraint.
Manci's husband, Miklos, on the other hand, was very interested in my experiences with girls. I had the impression that he thought of himself as having been a great success in this arena as a young man and that he was dying to share his stories. He would put his arm around my shoulders and, with a professional look and a quizzical glint in his eye, ask, “Andris, how are you doing with girls?” He did this just about every time he saw me.
I dreaded seeing him and cringed at his questions. I didn't have much to report, and I hated to admit it. I tried to put him off with an attempt at closemouthed Horatio Hornblower-like solemnity. But it didn't discourage him from greeting me with the same winking and conspiratorial backslapping the next time he saw me. All of this left me with even more of a desire to have something to tell Miklos and more frustrated that I continued to have nothing.
That summer after my first year at the Madach gymnasium, I spent a lot of my time at the Palatinus public pool on Margaret Island. It was farther away than the pool in City Park, but I preferred to go there for two reasons: First, the pool was enormo
us, and if I got there early, I could swim really long laps uninterrupted; and second, it had a livelier social scene.
People came with groups of friends, and these groups settled down on the large expanse of neatly groomed grass surrounding the pool. By the middle of the day, the lawn was covered with colorful clusters of people picnicking, playing volleyball, sunbathing, and socializing. Sometimes I arranged to meet friends after I got my laps in. Other times I went by myself, but even then, I was sure to run into some people I knew and could settle in with them.
I liked to swim, but the main attraction was gawking at girls parading around in their bikini bathing suits. Looking at them from a distance was all I could and would do. The notion that I might actually talk to a strange girl never even entered my mind.
Once I ran into Galina from my Russian class. She seemed happy to see me. I was certainly happy to see her. We swam together for a while, but then when she was ready to leave the pool, I realized that I had got too excited and couldn't follow her. I energetically threw myself into swimming a couple of lengths of the pool as fast as I could in order to distract myself. It worked, but by the time I was able to get out without embarrassing myself, Galina and her friends were long gone.
It was 1952, the year of the Summer Olympics in Helsinki. The Hungarian team did quite well at these games, and the Hungarian fencers in particular acquitted themselves mar- velously. I listened to the play-by-play commentary of the matches on the radio and was mesmerized. The sport seemed very Hornblower-like, glamorous and wild, yet something for a thinking man. Without ever having seen a fencing match, I decided to learn to fence.
It so happened that there was a fencing club in our neighborhood. Membership and the equipment were free because the club was supported by the state. Many sports clubs were state supported, especially those that trained athletes who one day might participate in the Olympics. Athletic excellence was a matter of pride and reflected on the superiority of the state.
Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 13