I was soon enrolled as a member of the beginner's class. It started much like dance class. A bunch of boys and a few girls wearing gym clothes stood in a line in front of a mirror. A coach yelled, “Lunge!” and we lunged forward awkwardly onto our right foot. Then the coach explained what we should do with our hands and our knees and demonstrated what a proper lunge looked like. Then we did it again and again. The next morning, I could barely move.
After a while, though, as with dancing, we mastered the basic foot movements and progressed to working with a foil, the easiest of the weapons. I was disappointed. The Hungarian Olympic heroes were all saber champions, and that's what I wanted to be, too. But the progression of instruction required that I master the foil first and only then move on to the saber.
I was not much of an athlete. I hated gym at school and was poor at it. But fencing captivated me. Partly it was because of the draw of the Olympic champions. But partly it was because for once I was no worse than any of the others in class, and arguably better than most.
I attended classes diligently, practiced incessantly against my partner, and worked on my footwork at home. I even practiced my parries with my right arm as I was walking down the street until a neighbor lady commented to my parents in a concerned tone that something was wrong with Andris. She had been following me on the street and noticed me making weird motions with my wrist. She thought I was suffering from seizures.
To my disappointment, fencing didn't build muscles in any notable fashion or reduce my weight. The only visible impact it had on my body was that my right forefinger became thicker than the left one and it was bent back from supporting the weight of the foil.
In time, I was allowed to represent my club in official fencing events. These were the lowest class of competitions, but I was excited about getting ready and visiting other clubs and fencing with referees watching our bout. I soon discovered that I wasn't going to go to the Olympics any time soon. I was eliminated either in the preliminaries or, at best, in the semifinals. But I still fenced whenever I could.
That summer, at age fifteen, I got my first job. Imre's father worked for a state publishing company and got Imre, Bubi, and myself a job loading and unloading books on a truck. We managed to stick together and worked as a team most of the time.
We loaded a truck with boxes of books at the printing plant, then hoisted ourselves on top of the books for the ride to the warehouse, where we unloaded the boxes and threw them down a chute to be unpacked and stacked inside. Then we went back to the printing plant for more. It was a physically challenging job, but we made it into a sport, forming a chain and racing with each other to see how fast we could throw the boxes of books from the plant onto the truck, then from the truck down the chute of the warehouse. In between, it was fun riding on the truck bed through the streets of Budapest.
The truck driver was a permanent worker, a young man who watched our activity with older-brotherly amusement. While we energetically threw the boxes of books around, he lounged against the side of the truck and smoked cigarettes, chatting with passersby and flirting with girls. He seemed to have a much easier job than we did. I grew quite envious of him as the summer progressed. He made me wonder, albeit fleet-ingly, if going to school was all that worthwhile.
Throughout my years at gymnasium, I got more and more involved with chemistry. It all started during my last year at the Dob Street School. I had come across a book of simple chemistry experiments for kids. The experiments themselves were fun, but I had additional motivation for getting interested in science: After the fiasco of my potential journalism career, I was eager to cultivate an interest in a new profession that was less prone to subjectivity.
The chemistry experiments were innocent at first, involving ingredients I could find at home. I dissolved sugar in water, suspended a string in the solution, then let the water evaporate and watched the sugar crystals precipitate around the string. I heated some sugar over a little alcohol burner and watched it melt, change color, and give off a caramel-like odor. Sugar was a delicacy, particularly in cube form, but I always managed to appropriate a bit for my scientific purposes.
After the first simple experiments, my book led me to more complicated ones. But for these I needed more specialized materials.
The book was published before the war, a more prosperous time when chemical supplies were easy to find. After describing an ingredient, the author would blithely end the section with, “This compound should be available from most good drugstores.” I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently.
Even the places that specialized in chemical compounds generally didn't have them in stock. In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace.
I had already experienced the frustrations of central planning when I tried to buy photographic paper. My aunt Manci had taught me some photography, and I also tinkered with developing my own film and enlarging photos at home. During the summer, my pictures had strong blacks and whites, and I needed low-contrast paper to print them properly. On the other hand, in the winter, when everything was in shades of gray, my pictures required high-contrast paper. Needless to say, low-contrast paper was always short in the summer and high-contrast paper was unavailable in the winter. I ended up buying my supply of paper during the prior season and then hoping I had stocked enough for my needs.
Buying chemicals for my experiments was also a hit-or-miss affair. There were no stores that sold chemistry supplies, so I went from drugstores to paint stores to chemical warehouses at the outskirts of Budapest, where I would plead with the clerks to give me small amounts of whatever I needed. People generally tried to help me out, but since no single store had everything, I had to go to a lot of stores before I could build up what I needed for the next group of experiments.
At first, I was satisfied just to mix two liquids together and watch them turn blue or purple or result in the precipitation of a white powder. I only vaguely understood what was actually happening, so the experiments had an air of magic. But as my school chemistry class began to cover the same ground, I began to understand the chemical reactions behind my experiments. Conversely, doing the experiments at home gave depth to the formulas that I learned in class.
Then I discovered pyrotechnics.
If pouring two liquids together and seeing them change color was interesting, mixing two powders on a metal plate and hitting them with a hammer to trigger a big boom and a puff of smoke was thrilling.
I had several favorite experiments, which I demonstrated over and over to my friends after school. In one, I turned a wad of cotton into an explosive. After I performed my magic on it, it still looked like cotton, but if I set a match to it, it flamed up in a flash and was gone without even a trace of ashes. In my favorite experiment, I wadded a bit of this processed cotton in the bottom of a metal tube and dropped a marble on top of it. When I lit the cotton with a fuse, the marble shot out of the tube like a miniature cannonball.
Another experiment involved mixing a tiny amount of phosphorus with another chemical to make a powder that exploded on impact. With great care, I would sprinkle a small amount of this powder into the hollow pellets I used with my air gun, then seal it in with warmed wax. When I fired one of these loaded pellets at a wall, it exploded with a little flash and a crackling sound. This was great fun.
One time, I fired the pellets out of the window that overlooked the airshaft, where I was hidden from sight, at a building on the other side of Kiraly Street. I hit a wall not too far from where a romantic-minded couple was looking out of their window, and I watched with great amusement as they jumped apart and peered around frantically, trying to figure out what might have caused the explosion.
The highlight of my chemistry career was making real nitro-glycerin. (I knew that nitroglycerin was used to make dynamite, so this was a little scary.) The process involved a complicated se- ries of ste
ps, each of which had to be done just so, and at the end there would be a small drop of heavy, yellow liquid that could really blow things up.
I first tried this experiment at home, when my parents were not around. It didn't work. I flushed the remnants down the toilet and tried again. It didn't work the second time, either. The third time around, I was getting discouraged. I figured this would be the last time I tried it. I followed every step precisely as the book said and ended up with a drop of viscous yellow liquid, just as the book said I would.
I put it on a metal plate and hit it gingerly with a hammer. I was very nervous. Nothing happened. Then I hit it again, a little stronger. Still nothing. I hit it again, this time like I meant it. There was a deafening bang. The force of the explosion kicked the hammer back in my hand. When my ears stopped ringing, I realized that my heart was beating madly and I was perspiring all over. I felt like I had climbed a mountain.
When my parents came home that evening, my mother immediately started interrogating me about what I had been up to that afternoon. Evidently, the superintendent's wife had heard the explosion from the other end of the apartment building. Even our neighbors, who had gotten used to my occasional hisses and bangs, announced that this was too much.
I got another chance to make nitroglycerin at, of all places, school.
Back in my first year at Madach gymnasium, I had told the chemistry teacher about my experiments at home. After that, he often asked me to help set up and break down the experiments in class. When I was in my third year, he asked me to demonstrate the making of nitroglycerin to a class of second-year girls. I was delighted and polished up my knowledge of the process.
With thirty girls watching my every move, I went through the complicated process and produced the single precious drop of heavy, yellow liquid. I asked for a volunteer. When one came up, I handed her the hammer. She closed her eyes and timidly banged at the liquid. Nothing happened. She sheepishly handed the hammer back to me and, like a proud, accomplished scientist, I manfully whacked the drop of nitroglycerin. Bang! The class broke into shrieks and excited applause. I was on the top of the world!
Flushed with victory, I started up a conversation with the volunteer. Her name was Erzsi, and she was a cute, buxom girl. She continued to be friendly enough as we talked, so I worked up my courage and asked her if she would meet me after school one day to go for a walk.
I was still shy and sensitive from being stood up a year ago, but Erzsi showed up and we set off for our walk. We headed toward City Park. It was an early winter evening, and it quickly got dark and cold. Halfway to City Park, I reached for her hand. She didn't pull it away. The feeling of walking with a girl and holding hands filled me with almost as much excitement as exploding a drop of nitroglycerin.
When we got to City Park, we headed for a fake castle that housed a museum. The door was locked. We both bent forward to try to make out the sign on the door, only to discover that visiting hours were over. We looked at each other, shrugged, and laughed. Our heads were just inches apart. Still high from the electrifying feel of Erzsi's hand in mine, I bent over and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed me back.
I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. She didn't, either. We turned around and walked home, holding hands in silence.
I walked her to the entryway of her house and said goodbye, then I turned and ran home as fast as I could. As I ran, my excitement gradually dissipated. Then the thought hit me: What kind of germs did I pick up? So when I got home, I furiously rinsed out my mouth.
Although I finally had something to report to my friends and my uncle Miklos, I never said anything. I went walking with Erzsi a few more times, but our encounters were never as exciting again. A few months later, there was a school dance. Erzsi showed more interest in a good-looking classmate of mine than in me. Soon, they started going out together. I was only a little sad.
While I was feeling that I might actually have a future with girls and chemistry, something bad was happening to my friend Imre.
Imre had started out at Madach gymnasium as a pretty good student. He was particularly interested in literature and history. But as the years went on, he slid more and more into mediocrity. He started missing classes, each time claiming some vague medical problem. But his “medical problem” never got cured and his grades slumped more and more. This got to be an acute problem in the third year, when grades took on more and more meaning as a key determinant of the looming process of university admission.
All of our circle were worried at seeing Imre slip, and I was particularly frustrated that I couldn't figure out what was going on with him. Our friendship faltered. I tried several times to rebuild our relationship. We went for long walks, but Imre didn't tell me much. Once, he let slip that when he cut class, he walked all over Budapest, exploring all the back streets and discovering old buildings all over town. Otherwise, he remained mysterious.
In my mind, I started to spin theories and possibilities that would be consistent with the few morsels of information he divulged. My imagination got going, and suddenly, during one of our walks, I felt I had Imre's story figured out. I was so sure about what was going on that I decided to write a story about it.
It was nine or ten in the evening when we finished our walk and I returned home. I put some paper into my father's typewriter, closed the door to my room, and started writing. My mind was racing. As I pecked away at the typewriter, the story started to take shape. I finally went to sleep at two in the morning and couldn't wait for the next afternoon so that I could finish spinning Imre's story. When I read it over, I was as excited as when my nitroglycerin exploded. It seemed I had an honest-to-goodness short story in my hand. I titled it “Despair.”
I read it again and again, but the more I read it, the less I could tell whether it was good or not. I eagerly awaited my parents' return from work. When they got home, I shyly told them, “I wrote something I'd like you to read.”
They sat down next to each other on the sofa. My mother started reading the story, and as she finished with each page, she handed it to my father. I sat in a chair, watching them. I couldn't tell anything from their faces. My heart was racing and I needed to fidget, but I didn't want to interrupt their concentration, so I made myself sit still.
When my father finished the last page, they looked at each other for a long moment. Then my mother said, “Andris, this is serious work.” My father emphatically agreed.
I had passed the test with my parents. I was ready to raise the bar.
There was a student literary circle at school. Mr. Telegdi was in charge. He and the students got together every couple of weeks to discuss something they had all read. Once in a while, they read a composition or some poetry by a member of the lit- erary circle. No one from the A class ever attended the literary circle. It was populated and run mainly by kids from the B class.
I wanted to submit my story. But I wanted to do it in such a way that they wouldn't know it was my story. I wasn't sure why I didn't want to be openly associated with the story. Perhaps it was because I'd never gone to the literary circle; perhaps it was because I carried the stigma of being a member of the rowdy A class; or perhaps it was because I was still sore about the rejection by the youth newspaper. In any case, I really wanted an objective reaction. So I worked out an elaborate ruse.
First, I showed the story to Imre. He denied that it had anything to do with him in real life but thought it was a wonderful story. I was happy to have him as an enthusiastic fan. I folded the story in an envelope, addressed the envelope with the typewriter, and asked Imre to give it to the school custodian and ask him to give it to Mr. Telegdi.
Then I waited for something to happen.
A few days later, something did. At the beginning of one of our Hungarian literature classes, Mr. Telegdi assumed his usual awkward stance, then, after clearing his throat, announced that something quite unusual would be taking place at the literary circle next week. A student had anonymously submitted a very in
teresting story, he said, and we should all come to hear it read.
Such an invitation was highly unusual. In fact, I couldn't think of any other time that Mr. Telegdi had invited the A class to the literary circle. I would have liked to savor the moment, but I was too preoccupied with trying to pretend utter disinterest.
At the appointed time on the appointed day, I showed up at the literary circle along with several A classmates and Imre—a first for all of us. The room was overflowing with kids to the point that a number were standing at the sides and at the back. I found a seat in the middle of the crowd.
The chairman of the circle was a serious student from the B class, named Peter. He called the meeting to order. By way of introduction, he made a convoluted speech about how this story was very unusual and, he went on, it was contemporary and interesting. In fact, he said, he was so intrigued by the fact that it was written by one of the students that he couldn't resist doing some detective work about the identity of the author. He would, he announced, share his findings after the story was read.
I didn't like the sound of this. I did not want to be identified, particularly not in front of a crowd of students. But I was trapped.
Then Peter sat down. One of the girls in the literary circle took his place in front of the class and read my story. She read very fluidly, giving it all the right inflections. The students listened intently, right up to the final paragraph, which described how my imaginary Imre character fought against the realization that he would not make it into the university:
“His head ached but he continued on. His mind turned into pulp; he could no longer think. When the clock in the other room struck one, he turned out the light and dragged himself to his bed in the dark. He undressed slowly, like a robot, put on his pajamas, and stretched out on the bed. In an instant, he was overcome by the deepest despair. He pushed his face into the pillow and sobbed until he fell asleep.”
Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 14