The carob tree ripens in the autumn. Its fruit is a long, brown capsule. It looks like the husk of a pea or a bean, only larger. The seeds spread out within. The coiling husks of the carob tree are the color of chocolate. Dark brown. Some of them are as long as a grown-up’s forearm. While still fresh, not yet dried out, the flesh is sweet and fragrant. In the village, they call it Jewish shit. Máli calls it that, too. This is also the name of the tree. “The Jewish shit has ripened,” they call out to each other on the Ramp. “Tell the kids!”
Then they laugh.
They always laugh when they use ugly words. When they say cock or cunt. They like to get the children who are still learning how to talk to repeat after them: cunt, cock, together fuck.
“Say ‘Your mother’s cunt!’”
“Your father’s bloody cock!”
“May God shove his cock into you,” they repeat.
Everyone has his favorite. When the children repeat the words, which are meaningless to them, they burst out in laughter.
“Again, one more time!” They can’t get enough of it.
“Jewish shit, Jewish shit,” they repeat. “The Jewish shit has ripened!” They like to say this. They like to hear this.
I am afraid of this word that everyone repeats with such joy. I gasp for air. I can’t laugh with them. Everyone else, though, is laughing.
I’m thinking of Old Mózsi. About the piece of paper, the one he wrote the debts on.
“He can wipe his ass with it,” they said.
“SAY ‘I’M SITTING,’” THE NEIGHBORS TELL ME.
I don’t want to say it, because then they’ll laugh at me.
My sister is also goading me on. My mother is also smiling. She doesn’t tell them to leave me alone already. I’m ashamed, they will jeer at me.
“So say it already, don’t make excuses,” says my mother. My sister is laughing already.
“Well, say it, then: ‘I’m sitting.’”
“I won’t say it,” I resist.
“Say it already,” she goads me on.
“You’ll get a lozenge,” says my mother.
“I’m shitting,” I say softly, because they often dupe me. But if I don’t say it, I might get in trouble. And I would like this to be over with already. For them to leave me alone. They won’t leave me alone until I say it.
“I’m shitting, shitting,” they repeat, guffawing with laughter.
“Say the word chitlins.”
“Shitlins,” I say, now obediently. They laugh at this, too.
“Say the word thread,” says my older sister, leading. Now they grow quiet. They want to hear this, too.
“Tread,” I say. In vain do I try to force it. I cannot pronounce the sound at the beginning of the word.
“Spazzy, spazzy, spaz attack,” my older sister mocks me.
“But I was almost able to say it,” I say in my own defense.
“Just like shitting on a cane,” says one of the neighbors. They laugh at that, too.
IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, MY GRANDMOTHER IS SITTING ALONE in the courtyard of the old house. In front of the veranda, where my grandfather planted grapevines below the eaves, from which water would flow. He planted Othello grapes all along the two inner courtyards of the E-shaped veranda. The veranda wrapped around the L-shaped house with its four windows facing the street. The wide middle veranda was where my grandfather spent every summer. He slept at noon on a narrow pallet. When my father was still a bachelor, his place was also here, from early spring until late autumn.
“In the winter, the men slept in the stables next to the horses,” my father used to say. When they still had horses, he also slept there. And when the weather was good, they slept outside in the pastures, next to the horses. Or on pallets. The kitchen opens out onto the veranda. From there you can see the entire yard, from the gate to the grain shed. This is where the autumn work takes place when it’s raining. In the photograph, my grandmother is standing here. The picture was taken a few years before her death.
“Why is she digging her hands into her apron?” I ask my mother while we look at the picture.
“She must’ve been freezing,” says my mother. “She was always freezing.”
Her kerchief is pulled down onto her forehead. It is a black-and-white photograph. Her clothes are black, her blouse is black. It couldn’t have been otherwise, for everyone wears black clothes at such an age. Her face is hard like a man’s. Her mouth is thin like a blade. Her nose is aquiline.
“Was she strict?” I ask my mother.
“Harsh. She was harsh,” she answers. “She loved only two of her children. She gave them everything.”
“Did she love my father?” I ask.
“She loved him. But in another way. In her own way. She never gave him anything,” she says.
Past the age of forty, women are considered to be old. Then they may only wear black clothes. In the beginning, they soften the severity of the black with tiny white dots. But only on holidays, to mark the difference from ordinary days. Then, instead of white, tiny blue petals mitigate mourning and the farewell to desire, the black of cessation. They smuggle a tiny bit of joy into sorrow. A little bit of hope into renunciation.
Only young women may wear fabrics with big polka dots. The girls who are to be married. An older woman would be mocked.
My grandmother stands in the sunlight in the photograph and looks toward Hajnalvég. It could’ve been morning. The light is sharp. Mari Pop is squinting. You can’t see her gaze. Her face is dominated by her severe, bony jaw, which sticks out. The wrinkles are deep in her flaccid skin. The bony, crooked nose casts a shadow on the left side of her face.
“She was the one who forced your first name on us. She was best at that,” says my mother, “making things happen the way she wanted them to happen.”
From the folds of the ironed apron, you can tell that it was used for holidays. There are still no leaves on the grape vines running up the eaves. It could have been early spring. Or a glittering winter day.
“She left nothing behind, just her children,” says my mother. “But what else could a woman want?” she asks.
MY MOTHER SAYS THAT WE ARE JEWISH. WHEN SHE IS angry, she always says this. If my grandfather makes her angry, or somebody, or one of the villagers. Máli always makes fun of this, but only when they are joking. Then both of them are in a good mood.
“The Jew made your husband for a sack of unsheathed beans,” Máli says. “Tell him to stop lecturing me.”
It is only to my mother that she can speak so courageously. She doesn’t dare say it to our father’s face, only behind his back. Our mother evades the mockery. She doesn’t answer, or just bats it away with a joke. She changes the subject. She starts talking about some gossip, which Máli really loves. At home, however, she speaks seriously.
“Don’t forget that you are Jewish,” she says enigmatically. “Even if you are mocked for it.”
When our father is angry, he is silent. The more offended he is, the more silent he becomes. He comes home, he sits down at the table, and he says nothing. Without a word, my mother takes the bottle from the top of the kitchen cabinet and puts the shot glass next to it. My father pours and knocks it back. He goes outside and doesn’t come back until late that evening.
According to our mother, what eats him up is that people say he’s Jewish.
“But that’s just our secret,” says my mother conspiratorially.
“Don’t tell your father,” she adds. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Take off your cap!” our parents cry out if we go inside somewhere.
A cap on the head means a Jew. If you don’t take off your cap inside, you’re a Jew. Just like the earlocks and the caftan. Everyone is always mentioning the Jew. The Jew is the one who is nowhere. The Jew is the one who conjectures. Who isn’t happy with what he has. All the things that we have gotten used to already. The way we do things isn’t good enough for him. He always wants something else. The old people k
now, and my father’s people, too, that the Jew is the one who cannot be understood. The Jew is a bad conscience, and the Jew is remorse that can only be alleviated by contempt. We feel sorry for Mózsi. But not for the Jews. The Jews haunt us even now, even though they are nowhere to be seen.
“Who is the Jew?” asks my sister.
“The Jew is the one whom everyone hates. The one whom everyone casts out just because he is Jewish,” says my mother.
“The one whose help is taken and who cannot be forgiven, because he helped. The one with a star on his forehead. The one who is not accepted. As we are not accepted.”
“Why are we different?” I ask.
“Because we are not from here,” says my mother.
“So does that mean we, too, are Jews?” my sister asks.
“That we will be,” answers my mother.
“They spit on me and call me Little Monkey,” says my older sister.
“You run away. Try to figure out what they are thinking,” says my mother. In the meantime, she places two candles on the table. She lights them, because hardly any light filters in through the window now. Outside, the dog jumps. It runs next to the fence when someone walks along the sidewalk.
If we look outside, we can see the morning star. My older sister peeked outside already. But it had not come out yet. Until then, we cannot eat. This is how we remember our father, who is not with us. We are keeping his vow, in case he forgot it. There is hardly anything to eat. My mother cooked corn porridge; we will have that with plum preserves.
“They mock me, they call me Goga, and they hit me. When I am alone, they chase me,” I say. My mother does not speak, she watches the dancing flame. She stands up and leans over the candles. With two hands, she draws the flames toward herself. She closes her eyes. There are tears on her face. When she opens her eyes and looks at us, the flames of the candles are reflected in her eyes.
“We shall leave here. God will lead us,” she says.
I HAVE HARDLY SEEN MY FATHER FOR TWO YEARS NOW.
The collective told him not to set foot in this village.
“There’s no place for someone like him here. Those kulak bastards can croak from hunger together with their brats. We have no need for instigators who bring no good to anyone and who don’t respect our leadership. We are building Communism here, there is no place for the reactionaries of the old order.” My father has been in a lawsuit with the collective for three years now. He does not dare come home.
Ever since my father has not been home, I have mostly stayed with my grandfather. Every week, we go out to the cattle herd. We carry salt to Manci. The herd is in the Berek Forest. It’s a forest in name only: in reality, it’s just a pasture. The trees there were cut down a long time ago. In the summer, we go across the shallows. At times like that, we don’t have to take the detour by the Berek bridge. We wade across the Kövicses’, where the water is only as high as our ankles. We hang our shoes or sandals around our necks. Tiny pebbles glitter beneath the water. The cool water feels good in the oppressive heat.
Ever since he had a nervous breakdown, my mother’s father has been running the small shop. After his breakdown, he was dismissed from his job and got his pension. Before, he had been the bookkeeper for the General Collective for Sales and Consumption. He doesn’t say what made him have a nervous breakdown. After he got better, he got a job in the little grocery shop in the neighboring village. He always loses money on it. He has to make up the difference from his own pension. The suppliers cheat him. His soul won’t let him cheat the customers. That, however, would be the only gain in it. Because everyone cheats, everyone steals. That’s what gave him the nervous breakdown at the General Collective.
“He realized that the comrades steal. And that he was going to be shut away in prison, because he is a class enemy. Then he had a nervous breakdown,” says my mother.
“The young people believe everything they are told. People have no idea what the Jewish shop was like. What the peasant was like, who was his own boss. What it was like when everything had an owner. Young people don’t know anything anymore, only what is parroted to them, and they chew it in their mouths,” says my grandfather.
His Hitler mustache is freshly cropped. He always uses eau de cologne. But now you can only get Moskovskaya. He doesn’t like it.
“The Russians even drink eau de cologne. We never saw anything like that before.”
ONCE, WE WANTED TO EMIGRATE. TO RELOCATE TO CANADA. But nothing came of it. In the evenings my mother and father whispered excitedly around the kitchen table. They didn’t talk about it in front of us. Just when they thought we were asleep. In those times, it wasn’t easy; it was only possible for reasons of family unification. We spent one or two years like that. We first wanted to go in ’71. Frici invited my father to Canada. Then it came up again in 1973, when Papa Dollars came back home to visit. Seventy-three cannot be divided. Only by itself.
I haven’t fallen asleep yet. I’m listening to my parents talk. Frici, my father’s big brother, lives in Canada. He left before I was born. People say in whispers that he defected. He was a D-officer. He got frightened during the time of the revolution. He was serving in Miskolc. He saw through the regime. He was in captivity in Russia, too, he learned Russian there. He joined the party, then he became a D-officer. This word is dark; for some reason one must be ashamed of it. At the time of the revolution, he left with his wife. My grandfather always mutters when we walk somewhere. He speaks to me by muttering to himself.
“What was the point of Frici and his wife leaving? They buried their first child in Miskolc. The poor thing lived only three weeks. They couldn’t stay there any longer. They left everything there. Maybe they were right,” he says and comes to a stop.
He unbuttons his fly and, groaning, he pees. He leans forward so he can keep his balance, extending the crooked staff to me so I can hold it.
“Revolution . . . What’s the point of it? They gave a slap to the shit,” he says. He squeezes out the last drop after urinating. He shakes it for a long time. But he always ends up with yellow urine stains on his trousers. You can smell it, too. That’s what the smell of old people is like.
“THE STORK BRINGS CHILDREN,” THAT’S WHAT THE GROWN-UPS say. But we see how animals give birth. The mother’s stomach grows fat, and then at some point it just slides out. It’s bloody, and there’s a rainbow-colored membrane sticking to it. Like the eggshells stick to the little chicks. The hair on the calves is all mangled when the mother brings them out. Then she licks their hair clean. This disgusts my mother. Not my father. Nor my grandfather. Nothing disgusts men, only I can’t watch.
The boys are all braggarts. All the same, they throw up when we watch the dogs fighting. One dog pulls out another’s innards. The loser drags itself along, but its innards are hanging out. The braggarts also retch when we find a carcass in the empty lot next to ours. I poke at the distended stomach with a stick. I’m curious as to what made it so big. The skin, grown thin, falls off easily. In the swollen stomach, maggots swarm all over each other. The stink spreads all around the carcass. I watch the maggots from up close. They are eating.
There are maggots like that in the pigs’ wounds.
In the summer, one of the pigs always gets some kind of wound. The skin bursts, but it continues to lie in the muck. Flies swarm all around the wound. They crawl onto it. Sometimes the pig lazily twitches, but it can’t chase the flies away. After a few days, tiny worms appear in the wound. The maggots wriggle away from the light. They try to burrow deeper into the wound.
When this happens, my grandfather picks into the wound with a flat stick and scratches out the pus with the maggots. They scramble as best they can. They try to climb back. I help trample on them. At the end, he sprinkles brandy into the wound.
But first, he spits once. Then he pulls out his flask. He’s sorry to have to pour it onto the pig, but the wound has to be disinfected. The sow convulses once, as if it had been pierced. It endured the poking ar
ound.
Pigs like it when they are scratched. Dirt always gets stuck in their curly bristles. We scratch the skin behind their ears. Then they stand with their legs spread out and they groan. They enjoy the scratching. When the trickle begins beneath their stomach, they are quiet. They piss beneath themselves. Then they don’t even grunt. They are silent like idiots.
“As quiet as a pissing pig,” goes the saying.
When my grandfather has finished cleansing the wound, he spits again. His big mustache convulses once. He grimaces. He pulls up his upper lip like he is grimacing. He isn’t grimacing, however, just paying close attention to make sure he pours the brandy onto the right place. His hand trembles a lot. When he urinates, as well. That’s why he urinates all over his clothes. Lately, we stop ever more frequently when we are going somewhere.
“Wait, I’m taking a piss,” he says. He emphasizes the s sound.
I don’t like this word. At home I say, “I’m peeing.” Our mother forbids us to say ugly words. The other boys say nasty curse words.
“Your mother puts on airs. Holds up her nose. She’s particular. But her shit stinks all the same,” says my grandfather.
I don’t like it when he talks about my mother that way.
“If you have to piss, then you have to piss. There’s nothing wrong with it,” he says. “In the First War in the winter, we were happy if we were able to piss. We weren’t choosy. You wouldn’t be, either,” he said. In the First World War, my father’s father was taken away to the Italian front.
“There was no medicine there. We drank each other’s urine,” he said.
The Dispossessed Page 17