Swimming Across: A Memoir

by Andrew S. Grove

  My parents and I set out to do whatever we could to increase my chances of acceptance. I hoped that some hands-on experience with chemistry might help, so that spring, I had applied for a job at Chinoin, a chemical factory on the outskirts of Budapest. Getting hired was an arduous process. I took the tram out to the factory—a long ride—asked the guard at the gate how to apply for a summer job, and was sent from one office to another before finally getting an application blank. I filled it out and handed it in. I went back several times to find out about its status but never got a definite answer.

  I realized that I needed help. Everything, from getting a job to getting a telephone, required “connections.” My father found somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody inside Chi-noin. This person moved my application along, and I got hired as a laborer. My friend Bubi, who wanted to go into electrical engineering, had applied with me. My “connection” got him hired, too.

  We started working the week after graduating from gymnasium.

  I had a vague hope that I would learn something about chemistry by working at Chinoin. During my repeated visits to the factory in the spring, I was enthralled by the chemical smells that permeated the area, and I identified them as a symbol of my chosen profession. Once I started working, I grew so accustomed to the smells that I no longer noticed them.

  We worked twelve-hour shifts, four days a week. It was hard work, and the four days were like a blur. All I did was work, commute, and sleep. I got up early in the morning, took the tram to the outskirts of Budapest, worked all day, took the tram home, fell into bed, then got up and repeated it all. It was good to have a three-day weekend to catch up on sleep. I still went swimming at the Palatinus pool on my days off. But the three days were over quickly, and then it was back to work.

  Our job involved tending a big machine that filtered out sludge from a chemical process. Bubi and I were supposed to take the machine apart, remove the canvas filter, scrape off the sludge, clean the canvas with a powerful hose, put it back in its place, bolt the machine shut, then repeat this process with the next machine and the next one and the next one. There were many machines. When we finished replacing the filter in the last machine, the sludge had built up again in the first machine, so we repeated the job over and over.

  It was hard and boring work, but Bubi and I worked well as a team and we made it into a sport. We happily slopped around in the sludge, throwing our weight into turning the handles that tightened the bolts on the filters as if it were some kind of competition. We were covered from head to toe in rubber coverall suits, so mucking around in the slippery stuff was actually fun. Sometimes we slipped off the handles and fell backward into the sludge. We called this “the rubber ass exercise.”

  The man who was assigned to supervise us and make sure we didn't cut corners watched our enthusiasm with cold condescension. Like most of the other regular workers, he moved slowly and deliberately and took frequent cigarette breaks. At first, I thought he was cold to us because we were students. But then I learned otherwise.

  Bubi had gone on an errand and I continued cleaning the sludge all by myself. Our boss came over and watched me work for a while. Then he said to me, “Your friend isn't Hungarian, either, is he?”

  I was confused. What would Bubi be if not Hungarian? Then, as I looked at the man's unwavering, steady gaze, I got it. What he was asking was if Bubi was a Jew like me. I turned red and, in a mixture of embarrassment and anger, furiously attacked my sludge without answering. The silence was broken only when Bubi returned. After that, I didn't mind that our supervisor stayed away from us.

  I was hoping that my experience at Chinoin would help with my admission to the university, but my parents and I knew that this was far from enough. Their search for “connections” continued.

  Then we got lucky.

  My father discovered that the brother of one of his mates from the worker battalion was a professor at the university. He checked on my application and confirmed my worst fears: I had been classified as a “class alien” and was being rejected.

  Our “connection” did something. I never actually knew what it was that he did, but I suspect he removed the papers that caused me to be classified as a “class alien.” Without those, I was reclassified as “other.”

  In late summer, a postcard arrived at our house. It briefly stated that I had been admitted to the natural sciences branch of the University of Budapest.

  The postcard arrived in the middle of the day on one of my days off. I grabbed it and stared at it with my heart pounding. I stroked the words with my fingers to make sure they were real. I was going to university! I was going to be a real chemist! My life had a direction. A weight that I didn't even know I was carrying lifted off my shoulders.

  I ran out of the house, jumped on the tram, and victoriously marched first into my mother's office, then into my father's office, to tell them the news. Both were ecstatic.

  Soon after I got the admission postcard, I cleaned my last filter of sludge. I celebrated my university admission by joining my parents for a week's vacation at Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Hungary.

  This was the first time my parents and I had ever gone on vacation together. I was hesitant at the prospect. Other than afternoon outings, I had never spent much time with them. Being cooped up at a resort with them for a week seemed like a long time. To my relief, I actually enjoyed spending the time with them.

  We got rooms at the guesthouse owned by my father's company. Lake Balaton was farther away than Lake Velence, but it was much bigger and much more developed. It had been Hungary's traditional resort area and was surrounded by hotels, guesthouses, and fancy lodges that had once been owned by wealthy people but now belonged to state-owned companies. Their former grandeur was dulled by the transformation, but they were definitely a step up from the rickety fishing cabin on Lake Velence.

  Our guesthouse was a good walk from the lake, but once we got there, there was a sandy beach with a long shallow bank. You had to walk a ways out before the water was deep enough for swimming, but you could float around in the sun-warmed shallows to your heart's delight.

  My mother was a good swimmer. One day, we held on to a rubber air mattress and swam far out into the lake. We drifted, talking about everything and nothing. I felt very close to my mother.

  When we got back to the shallows, I saw my father floating on another mattress with his eyes closed. I snuck up behind him and, as a joke, flipped over the mattress.

  This didn't turn out to be a good idea. My father didn't swim at all. Furthermore, he had been deeply asleep. He thrashed around furiously before finding his footing. Then he steadied himself and slapped me across the face. He had never slapped me before. I was stunned. But when I looked at him, I noticed that he was as stunned by his action as I was. Neither of us said anything, not then and not later.

  All of the guests at the hotel hung around together. Among the guests were two older teenage girls who worked for the company. They weren't particularly pretty, but given my lack of exposure to girls for most of my school years, it was fun to be in the company of girls of my age. We all went out for dinner and dancing every night. My father and mother would dance together; they were good dancers, and I was quite proud of them. Sometimes I danced with the girls. One night, I asked my mother to dance with me. She was very pleased.

  When the week was over, I took the train to Lake Velence, where I met Gabi for a few days at the fishing cabin. After graduating from the wood industry technical high school, he had gotten a scholarship to a university in Romania that offered a special curriculum in wood technology. (I never really knew what that was about.) This was our last summer before we started on new and separate chapters in our lives.

  I had brought a marble-size ball of potassium from my chemistry stash in a bottle. On our last night, we took the row-boat far out on the lake. I tossed the ball of potassium out on the water to create our own fireworks. It skipped along, then settled on the surface and reacted violent
ly, forming big metallic blue flames that shot high above the dark water, making loud sizzling noises. Then the flames sputtered out and we rowed back to shore.

  Summer military training: We were handed ill-fitting, well-worn, faded uniforms with no insignia and a plain, foldable cap. I am the one standing on the left.

  Chapter Eleven

  UNIVERSITY—FIRST YEAR

  THE ORIENTATION CLASSES for the first-year chemistry students at the University of Budapest were held in a nondescript room in an ornate nineteenth-century building with high ceilings and tall, narrow windows. As I walked up the columned steps leading to the heavy entry door, I felt I had arrived at my promised land.

  As rumored, the entering class was small—twenty or so students, about two-thirds boys and one-third girls. Many were bantering and chatting with each other while we all waited for the administrator to come in and tell us our curriculum and schedule.

  I silently took in the scene, nowhere near as disinterested as I pretended to be. As I sat and listened to the excited conversations around me, I figured that about half of the class was made up of kids from outside Budapest. They stayed at a dormitory for out-of-town students and seemed to know each other. A number of the Budapest contingent were graduates of the Chemistry Tech-nikum and knew each other from there. That left just a few who were not members of any group. I was one of them. It was scary not to know or be known by anyone.

  It was even scarier to think that the kids in this room were the best students in the country. True, many of them would have been given preference for being descendants of workers or peasants. Still, my shaky confidence sagged even further.

  I noticed that the boy sitting next to me didn't seem to belong to any group, either. While the rest of the boys looked like clean-cut, good-student types, with short-cropped hair and conventional clothes, my neighbor had long, shaggy hair combed to the side in what I assumed was an attempt to mimic Western style. He wore green-tinted glasses, which he had let slip down his nose, and he gazed out over them with an air of condescending boredom.

  The administrator came in, and the orientation process started. As we filled out form after form, I peered over at my neighbor's papers. His surname, I discovered, was Zoltan. He was from Budapest and, like me, had attended one of the gymnasiums rather than the Chemistry Technikum. In the breaks between filling out forms, I started talking with him. He had a sardonic sense of humor and was quite ready to show it in pointed comments about the various administrators who paraded in front of us over the course of the day. He intrigued me. I also suspected he wasn't Jewish.

  Classes started for real the next day. The way the university worked was that we would all have the same schedule of classes, so the twenty of us would spend our time traipsing from one lecture to another as a group.

  The focus of the first year of study was inorganic chemistry. The lectures took place every day and were given by the senior professor, a tall, elegant figure whose name was Professor Lengyel. His entrance into the lecture hall was always preceded by a parade of assistant professors. After they had taken their places, Professor Lengyel swept in, his spotless white lab coat swirling behind him. We all stood to greet him. He stacked his papers on the table in front of the blackboard with dignified precision. Only after he was settled did we sit down.

  The textbook for the first year was two huge volumes written by Professor Lengyel himself. I had never known anyone who was the author of a book. The combination of his name on our textbook, which we had to buy, the deference his assistants gave him, and his royal bearing filled me with awe. He lectured in a deep, booming voice, which was wonderful because I had no trouble hearing him.

  The lecture hall was a semicircular auditorium with rows of worn, wooden benches rising steeply toward the back. It could have easily held one hundred people. Our small class was scattered among the first few rows in the center, while the assistant professors took their positions off to one side. Otherwise, the room was empty. During the break, Zoltan and I speculated on why our class was so small relative to the size of the hall. Zoltan let his green-tinted glasses slip down his nose, shot me a look over the rims, and in a deadpan voice remarked, “The Central Planning Department figured that four years from now the country will need exactly twenty chemists.” I quickly looked around, swallowed hard, and did not answer. But I began to like him.

  We also had classes in math, physics, and political education. Math was fairly straightforward, and it helped that again the professor spoke in a loud, firm voice. Physics was another story. This professor was Professor Lengyel's complete opposite. He dressed casually, leaned against the blackboard throughout most of his lecture, and spoke in an extremely soft voice. The room was another large lecture hall, and even though I sat in the front row, my seat was a fair distance from the blackboard. I couldn't understand a word he said. I was panic-stricken. To make my terror more complete, there was no official textbook.

  After class, I caught up with the professor and explained my predicament. He smiled and assured me that he would try to remember to raise his voice in the future. His assurance didn't reassure me at all. I had long ago discovered that people speak at their own particular sound level, and even when they sincerely try to accommodate you by raising their voice, within minutes their voice settles back into its natural level.

  This was not good. Here I was on the first day of class with a nightmare situation: a tough subject, no textbook, and a lecture where I literally could not understand a word. I had to find other solutions.

  I described my problem to Zoltan and asked if he could help out. He readily agreed to share his notes with me. So did several other students. I arranged to borrow two or three sets of notes after each lecture and started to compile my own notes from the different points of view. I didn't know if it would work, but at least it gave me a plan of action.

  I had no such problem in political education. Our textbook was the History of the Soviet Communist Party, which was used as the Bible in political education courses. While I had never read it, my parents had had to study it as part of mandatory seminars held at their workplaces, so I'd seen it around the house and was familiar with it. The book described who did what to whom between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the years leading up to World War II. With phrases like “The Mensheviks trembled when they found out that Lenin had come to town,” the book read more like a child's story than a serious history book.

  The instructor led us through it, chapter by chapter, page by page, sticking so closely to the text that he might as well have read it aloud. People said that this book got reissued from time to time and that depending on the latest Party dogma, new characters appeared or, more important, some characters present in earlier editions disappeared. I supposed that not sticking precisely to the current edition would have been a bad idea and adding extraneous material would have been dangerous. In any case, my hearing was not an issue here.

  It was also not an issue in labwork. Analytical chemistry lab was the centerpiece of our schedule. It was held every day and took up most of each afternoon. The experiments underscored what we studied in Professor Lengyel's class. The idea was that by doing the experiments, we would get an in-depth and firsthand understanding of the lecture material. It was also our first exposure to practical chemistry.

  The lab was supervised by one of the assistant professors, a youngish woman whose bouncy, jovial demeanor was altogether different from Professor Lengyel's formality. We called her by her first name, Hilda. She assigned each of us a bench space but encouraged us to move around freely and ask each other for chemicals, help, or equipment. Fairly soon, we were all comfortable with each other.

  Before the autumn was over, I felt more at home with this class than I ever had at Madach gymnasium even after four years. Part of the difference was that I no longer had to be embarrassed about being a good student. At university, we were all there to learn and we all wanted to do well.

  In addition to Zoltan, I became particul
arly friendly with two other students. One was a boy called Jancsi Lanyi. Like me, he was very interested in chemistry, liked opera, and was Jewish. We got on quite well; nevertheless, unlike with Zoltan, I was always extremely careful when making political comments or jokes.

  As in gymnasium, boys called each other by their last names. Sometimes we never even knew each other's first names. Girls, however, we called by their first names.

  One was a pretty, lively girl from Budapest named Marianne. She was not a particularly strong student because she was forever distracted by the ups and downs of her relationship with her boyfriend. None of us had ever met this boyfriend, but Marianne was quite clearly more in love with him, according to her stories, then he was with her. We often walked part of the way home together after class, and to my surprise, I found myself becoming her confidant. Being friends with a girl with no romantic involvement was something I'd never experienced before. I enjoyed it.

  Zoltan continued to intrigue me. I had never had a close friend who was not Jewish before, and Zoltan had never had a close Jewish friend. Although about one-third of our class was Jewish and the group as a whole mixed very well, as far as I could see, no other close friendships developed across the Jewish/non-Jewish boundary. Zoltan's caustic wit and his sharp insights impressed me, as did his interest in Western literature and music—he was an accomplished jazz pianist. His attempt to look Western, I soon realized, wasn't an act at all but was completely consistent with his interests. I found all of this fascinating, and as he openly made cynical political comments to me, I found myself opening up to him more and more, too. From time to time, we got together outside of school. Sometimes he came to visit at my apartment, but more often we went for long walks through the streets of Budapest.

  There was still this business of Jew versus non-Jew that hung between us. On one of our long walks, I took a deep breath and asked him if it bothered him to be friends with a Jew. He sent me one of his characteristic glances over his green glasses and said with a straight face, “Why would it bother me that you are a stinking Jew?” This was the epithet that rabid anti-Semites hurled at Jews, and his use of it stunned me. Then I collected myself and shot back, “Yes, and why should it bother me that I hang out with a dumb goy?” That was an epithet I had never used, but I perceived it to be equally nasty. Without flinching, Zoltan replied, “That's it, then. You are a stinking Jew and I am a dumb goy. So what's the problem?” With that, the uneasiness disappeared. It even got to be a sort of joke. In keeping with our increasing familiarity with the periodic table of elements, we realized that the initials of the words stinking Jew in Hungarian almost matched the chemical symbol of the element bismuth, while the initials for dumb goy precisely matched the initials for the element mercury. So whenever we were traveling together on the tram and one of us felt like poking fun at the other in public, we would mutter the words bismuth and mercury at each other until we started laughing.