Swimming Across: A Memoir

by Andrew S. Grove

  There was silence when she finished. Then Peter took center stage again and ponderously walked us through his analysis. He explained how the psychological insights of the story were so deep as to make it impossible for the author to have such an understanding about another person. Therefore, he concluded, the author must be writing about himself. And since, he went on, the story was vaguely reminiscent of Imre's school career, and the story's hero's last name started with a V and Imre's surname started with a T, both letters occurring late in the alphabet, that just about clinched the argument that the author must be Imre.

  Imre, beet red, leapt to his feet and, waving his hands, protested loudly that he had nothing to do with the story, he hadn't written it, and it was not about him. Peter listened with condescending tolerance, which infuriated Imre even more. It took Mr. Telegdi's intervention to change the discussion from the identity of the author to the substance of the story.

  The general nature of the comments was that the story was very realistic, that it contained bits and pieces of all of our lives. Mr. Telegdi summed up the discussion by saying, “Whoever the author is, I'm sure that this is not the last we have heard from him.”

  The buzz continued as people dissected the story with great gusto. After a while, I decided that I had heard enough. I stood up, and when all heads had turned to me, I said, “I just have one comment to make. I need to support Imre's protest. I know for a fact he did not write the story because I did.”

  Pandemonium broke out. The meeting dissolved into excited kids slapping me on the back, congratulating me, and shaking their heads in disbelief while they rehashed the events of the afternoon. Mr. Telegdi shook my hand and repeated that he thought the story was great. Then Imre and a few other friends and I left and went for a long walk. We walked throughout the city for hours.

  This was the most exciting event of my life.

  When I got home, I tossed and turned in bed, not wanting to fall asleep and have the feeling stop. Even though by now I was very interested in continuing on with chemistry, it was satis- fying to realize that my earlier notions about becoming a writer had some basis in reality.

  The next day, I walked over to my aunt Iren's apartment and gave her a copy of my story. After my uncle Sanyi, Iren was the most literary member of the family. I wished that I could show my story to Sanyi, but in the two years since his arrest, we still hadn't heard anything about him. We didn't even know if he was alive or dead.

  Iren read the story while I was there and thought it was wonderful. She volunteered to pass it to a friend, a prominent writer.

  In the days that followed, I often imagined how I might be discovered as a seventeen-year-old literary prodigy and get my stories published in a real magazine. Weeks went by. I didn't hear anything. Eventually, I got a one-paragraph typewritten note from the famous writer, thanking me for letting him see the manuscript. He wrote that he found the absence of the official school youth organization in my hero's life surprising. Clearly, in real life, the youth organization would have stepped in and helped my hero before he was overcome with despair. He suggested that the story be modified to reflect how that might take place. Other than that, he thought I would learn a great deal by reading the works of the people's great writers.

  I was glad I liked chemistry.

  One of the side benefits of my short story was that it established me as a person of some literary merit, as opposed to the rest of the A class rowdies. I now occasionally attended meetings of the literary circle. Some people with whom I had had very few prior dealings now paid attention to me. Peter was one of them.

  Peter was quite different from me or my other friends. He was very well read, and he tried to act like an adult. But we had enough common interests in literature, our school, and our classmates to bridge the differences. Eventually we found that we liked each other and became friends.

  Another person I met was a girl called Eva. Eva had also submitted a short story to the literary circle that she said she had written. But after the story was read aloud, somebody found it had been copied word for word from a published anthology. Overnight, Eva became an object of derision.

  I had a different reaction. After writing about Imre, I was intrigued by trying to figure out why people did what they did, and I was very intrigued by Eva.

  I started talking to her during class breaks. Having become an outcast, she welcomed my attention. After a while, I offered to walk her home, and we started going on walks with each other. I found her to be quite intelligent and aware, but with a weird streak of trying to be somebody she was not. I thought this was a challenge. I thought that, like a modern-day Prince Charming, I would save her from herself.

  On one of our outings one afternoon, we took a tram to the outskirts of Budapest. We walked around, then settled down on a bench, and after a while, I kissed her. Something was wrong. Eva kept her mouth wide open. Perhaps she was mimicking what kisses in the movies looked like. In any case, I couldn't get my mouth to fit hers. I reached up with my hand and gently tried to push her jaw closed. She angrily pushed me away and told me I should leave her alone. She knew what she was doing, she said.

  We argued about the proper way to kiss. Whatever romance had prompted the kiss was lost. I didn't ask her out again.

  Right: Me, at 18. By this time, I was no longer pudgy.

  Below: My mother was a good swimmer. One day, during a vacation at Lake Balaton, we held on to a rubber air mattress and swam far out into the lake. We drifted, talking about everything and nothing.

  Right: Gymnasium was officially over. This is my graduation photo.

  Chapter Ten

  FOURTH YEAR

  IDON 'T REMEMBER exactly when the deportations started. Rumors of people being moved without notice to dreary locations in the countryside had been going around all through my years at Madach gymnasium. I didn't actually know anybody who was deported, but the rumors came from so many directions that they were hard to ignore. They seemed more frequent during my second and third years at Madach.

  What the stories all had in common was how the deportation took place: There was a knock on the apartment door in the middle of the night. Someone in uniform handed the deportation order to the residents and told them to get their belongings ready before dawn. At the appointed hour, a canvas-covered truck pulled up in front of the house, loaded up the family and their belongings, and drove away.

  Rumor had it that the deportations were overseen by the security police, a special branch of the police force that dealt with political offenses, and that the people selected for deportation were guilty of “bourgeois tendencies,” whatever that meant. Often, though, it was implied that the real reason they were tar- geted was that a high-ranking Party official coveted their apartment.

  The rumors of the deportations had the effect of permeating our lives with an intangible but constant nagging fear. Budapest took on a different personality. The streets, the stores, the people, our apartment, all looked a lot better to me than they had before. The possibility of being forcibly moved to the countryside and losing all this made them precious.

  One night, our doorbell rang. I had been tinkering with my chemicals, which were stored in the long hallway that led from the Big Room to the entryway. I got up to answer the bell, and through the frosted glass of the front door, I glimpsed the drab brown of a military uniform.

  My heart started thumping so hard I could barely breathe. I stopped in my tracks, swallowed hard, and then slowly went to the door and hesitantly opened it. A wave of relief swept over me, almost making me dizzy. The person in uniform was a distant relative, who was an army doctor. He happened to be in the neighborhood and had taken the opportunity to drop in for a visit.

  One reaction to the growing political oppression was the number of jokes that sprang up about it. They acted as a safety valve for feelings that couldn't be expressed otherwise. Jokes about current events in Budapest were an art form. They were created and transmitted almost instantaneously.


  Once, a rumor flashed through Budapest that a crowded city bus had crashed over the side of one of the bridges across the Danube. Everybody on board—some seventy people—supposedly died. News about local accidents was never published officially. If you believed the newspapers, accidents, floods, storms, and other natural disasters took place only in the West, never in Hungary, the Soviet Union, or other Eastern-bloc countries. So, not surprisingly, at first we didn't see anything in the news about this bus accident. Finally, there was a brief official acknowledgment that the bus had gone over the bridge, but the item stated that since the bus was heading back to the terminal at the end of its route, the driver and the conductor were the only casualties.

  In a flash, a joke started making the rounds: Saint Peter is presiding over the Pearly Gates. A man in uniform comes up to him and says, “Peter, I'm the driver of the bus that went over the bridge in Budapest.” Peter says, “Come on in, my son, make yourself at home.” A little while later, another man in uniform comes along. “And who are you, my son?” Peter asks. “I'm the conductor of the bus that went over the bridge in Budapest,” the man replies. “Welcome, my son,” Peter says. “Come on in and make yourself at home.” A little while later, a group of seventy men, women, and children come up to the Pearly Gates. “And who are all you people?” Peter asks with surprise. They reply, “We are the passengers on the bus that went over the bridge in Budapest.” Peter pulls himself up to his full height and angrily says, “Do you take me for a fool? I read the Budapest newspapers, and there was no mention of you! Get lost!”

  Telling jokes like this to the wrong person could be dangerous. This was captured in another joke: Two men are ogling a spanking new Western car. One of them says, “Isn't this car a wonderful testimony to the technological capabilities of our friendly Soviet Union?” The other man looks at him scornfully. “Don't you know anything about cars?” he asks. The first man replies, “I know about cars. I don't know about you.”

  I picked up these jokes from my classmates. Politics was no subject for jokes at home. But after years of it not even being a subject of discussion, politics now began to creep into our daily conversations.

  My mother and I saw eye-to-eye about the seamy side of life under Communism right from the beginning. We were disgruntled with the shortages of everything from sweaters to soap; the lack of some of the more basic foodstuffs in the stores at a time when the nationalized agriculture of the country was supposed to be producing record harvests; the incessant lines you had to stand in to buy from a limited selection of inferior items; the pervasive sloganeering. (The most annoying slogan was “Work is a matter of honor and duty.” It was posted every-where—on factory walls, in stores, and even on street signs— right above the heads of people who were listlessly trying to get away with the minimum amount of work.)

  My father at first tried to put a good face on things. He once overheard my mother and me comparing complaints and with great annoyance declared us “the village gossips.” After that, we made sure to be more careful where and when we aired our gripes.

  But his position, whatever it might have been, had been seriously shaken by the disappearance of my uncle Sanyi, with whom he had been close, and, of course, by what had happened to himself. He still didn't talk about the current political climate. But he stopped defending the indefensible and no longer remonstrated with my mother and me when we complained about it.

  He also began to reveal glimpses of his war experiences. He had never talked much about his ordeal during the war, but now he let slip a few bits and pieces.

  He told about the incredible cruelty with which the Hungarian soldiers treated the Jewish labor battalions. In a way, that wasn't surprising, as by now the news of what had happened in the concentration camps was known. Even so, some of the sto- ries were so horrific that I found them difficult to digest. But the clear fact was that only 10 percent of the men in my father's worker battalion had survived, and many of the 90 percent that died had been deliberate victims of their Hungarian guards.

  The story that was the most incredible to me was how in the middle of one bitterly cold winter night, my father's battalion was made to strip naked and climb trees, and the guards sprayed them with water and watched and laughed as one after another fell out of the trees frozen to death.

  I had been under the impression that their suffering stopped when my father's battalion was captured by the Russians. It turned out that this was hardly the case. Their life was no better in Russian captivity.

  Right after they were captured, they were locked into cattle cars and transported for days with no food, no water, and no heat, in the dead of the Russian winter. When they finally arrived at their destination, only a handful of people was alive in each cattle car. The survivors were then marched to a snowed-over campsite that had been used by the Russian troops as a summer training ground. They had to dig the snow out of holes in the ground with their bare hands to make shelters.

  My father suffered illness after illness, surviving against all odds while people around him were dying like flies. This explained why he was skin and bones, a run-down decrepit shell of a man, when he returned home.

  One particular story was so awful that it turned into a gruesome family joke. It was winter, and my father and the other prisoners were cooped up inside the shelter they had dug in the snow. They were too cold and weak to go outside to relieve themselves, so they used the same metal dish that they ate from, scrubbing the dish with a handful of snow in between uses. After my father told us this story, my mother and I would tease him about it whenever he didn't clean his plate after a meal.

  My father brought home some pictures that he had managed to keep with him throughout all his years in the war and captivity. They were wallet-size studio photographs of my mother and me, taken before he left just so he could have a picture of us with him while he was away. My father treasured these pictures; they never left his body. They gave him strength when he needed it most. In his darkest moments, when it looked like he would not make it, he used the backs of the pictures to scribble his good-bye messages to us.

  I read these notes over and over. One of them that my father wrote near the end of the war particularly touched me. It was dated April 1945. “My dear ones: Now that it looks like the end would be here and the prospect of seeing you again, I have had another setback—a new disease, some skin ulcers. It's spreading from one day to the next. There is no medicine. They don't know how to treat it. It's slow death. It looks like my struggles of the last three years were for nothing. And all I would like is to see you again, to know that you are alive. But I am destroyed. Just my love for you keeps me alive. Gyurka.”

  He made it home five months later.

  In March 1953, Stalin died. Stalin's figure had been indelibly associated with the images of the Soviet Union in my mind. The picture of a uniformed, mustachioed man with a kindly expression had been everywhere—in offices, schools, at celebrations, hung on the sides of buildings—for, it seemed, most of my life. Even though by this time I had become deeply skeptical about the goodness of things Soviet, Stalin's death and the disappearance of that ever-present kindly face had a mixed impact on me.

  I was glad and I was sad at the same time. It was very confusing.

  Stalin's death was the occasion for a citywide march to Heroes' Square. Much like during the May Day parades, loudspeakers were strung up in the trees along Stalin Road. But now, instead of broadcasting cheers, the loudspeakers played the same classical funeral march over and over and over. During May Day marches, we fooled around while we shuffled along. We didn't know how to conduct ourselves now. I didn't feel comfortable discussing my confused feelings with anyone, not even with my close friends. Neither did anyone else. We couldn't talk about other things, and we wouldn't talk about Stalin, so we marched largely in silence.

  At one point, somebody broke out into an uncontrollable fit of giggles. Pretty soon, a large number of us were trying to suppress giggles. Our teach
ers glared. Beyond a doubt, this was a dangerous thing to do, but we couldn't stop, perhaps exactly because it was so dangerous.

  We eventually regained our equilibrium and solemnly continued our procession. The funeral march blared overhead. I wondered if things were going to change—and whether the change would be for better or for worse.

  We got no hint from the newspapers. Previously unknown Russian politicians were propelled into periods of prominence, then faded out of sight. For a while, not much happened.

  The first real hint of tangible change came in the spring of 1954. There had been some rumors about the release of political prisoners. Then, one day, without any prior notice, my uncle Sanyi was released.

  My uncle had aged a lot while he was in jail. He'd always been thin, but now he looked even more ascetic and drawn. His hair had turned all white. He told my parents that they'd wanted him to confess to a bunch of things that he hadn't done, like fomenting counterrevolutionary activities. But he wouldn't.

  He had been sentenced to death and for a long time was on death row, waiting to be executed. Stoically, he'd waited for whatever would happen to him. The only reaction he'd had to his precarious status was a compulsion to finish whatever book he was reading before he was executed. He would stay up all night reading in his cell.

  My cousin's husband was released some time later. He had fared far worse. He had cracked under the pressure of interrogation and was a broken man when he was released. For one thing, he had no teeth; he never said what happened. For another, he now thought that he saw secret police everywhere. He remained high-strung and nervous and had to be hospitalized in a mental institution for a while.

  But at least they were out and free to settle down and get on with their lives.

  The summer before my last year at Madach, Gabi and I spent a week at a fishing cabin at Lake Velence, a lake about fifty miles from Budapest. The fishing cabin belonged to the state company where my mother worked. Employees could sign up to use it for a week at a time. When my mother found out about its availability, she signed Gabi and me up for a stay. It would be just the two of us, on our own without any adult supervision. At seventeen, we were eager for our first taste of independence.