“You’re not even their brother, that’s what they say behind your back.”
“How could I not be their brother?” my father defends himself.
“The Jew made you, that’s what they say,” my mother continues her rebuke.
“Fine. What am I supposed to do? Hang myself?” He pulls a pillow over his head so he doesn’t have to hear my mother.
I IMAGINE THAT I’M DEAD. MY MOTHER ALWAYS WANTS TO die. I was feeding the geese in the back of the garden. I lie down in the fresh grass. I think that it would be a good feeling to be dead. I imagine my bier. My mother cries, my older sister is crying, too. My father just stands there, maybe he’s a little tipsy. I imagine that if I’m dead already, my mother will love me. She’ll cry then. My father will cry, too, although men are not allowed to. I’ve gotten used to that. But if I’m ever big, then I’ll never cry again. When my father beats me with his belt, I cry. Then my mother cries, and I try to cheer her up. My mother always cries, and my father goes to the tavern.
“Why did I come here? To this squalid village,” she says again and again.
“We’re going to die here,” she says. “May God strike us down. And your father’s stupid head,” she says, weeping; in vain do we try to cheer her up. She’s stirring something in the pot. She snivels.
“WE ARE PEASANTS,” SAYS MÁLI. “DON’T GIVE YOURSELF airs.”
“No, I’m not,” I say, just to annoy her.
“Of course you are. You’re one, too,” she retorts.
I can hear in her voice that she just wants to annoy me. She likes to annoy everyone. My sister, too. And then she laughs at us.
When she really gets on my nerves, I kick her leg. Then she laughs even more, but she tries to grab me. She squeezes me to herself so I can’t get any swing into my kick. Then I usually bite her hand. I bite her wrist with all my strength. Then her grip slackens. She yells at me, cursing.
“Your mother’s cunt, what an idiot you are,” she says.
She lets me go and looks for a cane to thrash me with. I run away. Down to the end of our land, down by the plum trees. In vain does she run after me. I climb across the hedgerow and disappear into the gardens. I hide. I wait until she gets sick of looking for me and goes back.
Peasants don’t like to have to look for things. They have no perseverance.
I BROKE A PLATE. MY MOTHER’S FAVORITE PLATE. ONCE, IT was part of a set. A tiny flowered pattern runs in a circle all around the edge. This was the last piece. My mother was very careful with it. We weren’t allowed to even touch it. I count the ceramic shards. It broke into twenty-nine pieces. Twenty-nine cannot be divided. My mother kept it in a vitrine in the kitchen cabinet. I took it out because there were no more clean plates. I dunk bread into milk. Lately my mother hasn’t been cooking. I make myself bread with lard. I sprinkle a thick coat of sugar on it. If there’s no bread, then I just eat sugar. Or I eat lard with a spoon and drink water. That, too, relieves hunger. If there’s neither lunch nor dinner, then my sister and I dunk bread into milk. If my mother notices, she beats us. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt as much as when she cries and I can’t console her.
I kneel down and pray. I’m terrified because of the broken plate. I ask God to please heal my mother. For half a year now, she’s just been staring into space. Ever since the Little One left us. Since then, she hasn’t spoken. When we come home, we sit in silence, as well.
I imagine that an angel has come and time has stopped. Everything freezes, motionless. I know that this can’t really happen. But I like to imagine it.
Just as I like to imagine that I’m dead. That my mother is dead. Because at least then there would be an end. I’m always terrified of something. But I don’t know what. My teeth are chattering. If I close my eyes, I see the angel as it descends. Its bare feet hardly touch the ground. It moves along, hardly touching the earth. Just a thin, fine footprint remains in the dust, with five small dots. Five cannot be divided. It descends along the path from the Count’s Forest along the Gypsy settlement, and then it comes toward the village. It goes by Aranka’s house. Along the circular-shaped shanty pieced together from dry sunflower stalks. As it goes, it runs its finger all along the side of the hut. The plaster falls off in places and cracks open, where you can see inside. It’s more like a hovel. You just need to lean close to it. It has a thatched roof.
The angel comes farther along our street, toward the village. Toward us. Up Gypsy Row, in the direction of the Ramp. I see it approaching our house. Now the angel is at the Kotvászes’ gate. Now it’s gone beyond the Liglers’ house. I see the angel reaching our balk. It goes on. It stops before our little door. Its hand is already on the small garden gate.
Then I am filled with fear. My heart beats wildly. Something must have frightened me. The dream always ends here.
MY FATHER IS GOING TO PLAY SOCCER. HE PUT ON THE SHIRT of the local team. It’s too big for him. Now he looks skinnier than when he’s wearing his work clothes. My father is shorter than the others.
“A fart in the dust,” my mother mocks him.
When they line up on the soccer field, he stands at the end of the line. Next to the goalkeeper, but that’s where he’s supposed to stand. My father stands there because he’s the smallest. The soccer uniform is too big for him. It hangs off him. It makes him look even scrawnier. He hardly weighs fifty kilos.
“Food is wasted on you. I feed you in vain. They’re going to think I don’t even cook for you,” my mother keeps saying.
My father doesn’t answer. He eats raw onions. Because somebody told him that they would make his stomach stronger. Supposedly his stomach is weak. My mother often provokes my father, who has a quick temper. He flares up like a turkey. But he never knows what to say, because he can never think of anything.
“I’m not short,” he says.
“I didn’t say that,” my mother shoots back. “You’re scrawny, not a runt. Well, isn’t he little? Tell me honestly,” she says, turning toward us.
“Don’t make fun of me,” says my father.
“Daddy isn’t little,” I say with my sister.
“Not at all, it’s just that your mother likes to make fun of me,” my father defends himself.
“You fart in the dust,” my mother says with laughing eyes. Her eyes are blue. Sky blue. Cornflower blue. And when she laughs, her eyes are like an unclouded sky. My father’s eyes are brown and always sad. My mother is tall, a few centimeters taller than my father.
Our neighbor Uncle Ligler, who lives four houses down, said that it’s good if the wife is taller and stronger than her husband.
He always tells how he picked out a wife for himself.
“I went to visit the house of the prospective bride, because she had been recommended to me as a young lady worthy of marriage. Before that, I had never even seen her. As I turned into their courtyard, I saw that there was a girl driving a stake into the ground with a five-kilogram hammer. She’s pummeling it like she’s beating the washing. Then I knew that she would be my wife,” he relates. “Because that’s the kind of woman I need, I thought, who knows how to drive a plow and can finish the job if she needs to,” he says and laughs.
Everyone laughs, because when he says “finish the job” he reaches between his legs with his right hand and lifts up his member.
“If you know what I mean,” he adds. The women squeal with laughter.
IN THE SCHOOL’S LONG LAVATORY, THE BOYS ARE PLAYING at seeing who can pee out through the ventilation window. The openings are vertical and brick-shaped. The damp streaks flowing down are visible on the whitewashed walls. They pinch together the skin at the end of their willies. They let out the pee, which makes the skin around the testicles swollen. They pee out just as much as they can. The skin becomes distended, the hair-thin pink-colored web can be easily distinguished on the thin wall of the skin. Then you have to squeeze not quite as tightly and press your bladder with the other hand, and the pee sprays out in a thin stream. It sprays high.
It can be directed, so the stream will go in one direction or another. Whoever can urinate through the ventilation window wins.
The girls are hiding on the other side of the toilet wall. They like to play there, amid the bushes. Then they run away, screeching. The boys in the outhouse laugh loudly, so the girls can hear them. They want to spoil the girls’ game.
Girls play really ridiculous games. They sweep up the soil beneath the bushes. They play at being housewives. They clean, they cook, they bake, they wash. And they don’t let the boys in.
“Don’t make a mess here!”
“Come back when you’re sober!”
“Go sleep in the shed or the pigsty,” they keep saying.
You can’t play with them. They pee in their pants and they’re stupid. Crybabies.
“Crybaby, whiny, too little to go to school!” That’s how we mock them.
They play with dolls, they bake, they cook, they clean, and they gossip together. The boys play at being partisans. The Soviets against the Fritzes. There are no girls in games like this. After a while the boys get bored, with no girls it’s not interesting. They want to annoy them. That’s why they came up with peeing into the target. When the girls run squealing from the bushes, the boys run out so they can trample their tidied rooms. They kick apart the hearths. But first they shake the pee out of their willies. The elastic waistbands of their flannel trousers snap against their stomachs. Their hands reach into their trousers near their bottoms. They run away. When I’m alone, I try it, too.
During the long recess, the big boys from the upper classes always come in here. They pull on their foreskins. They compete to see who can finish first. They moan and sigh while they’re doing it. They say that they do it until they reach a climax.
“Look, you pip-squeaks, this is how you have to do it,” one of the Gypsy boys shows them. His is already hairy. He grabs it in his palm, and the foreskin jerks back and forth.
“Beat it like this, it feels good,” he says and smiles.
MY FATHER STILL GOES TO THE FOREST. HE GATHERS things. He’s been doing this ever since he was kicked out of the collective last fall. That is, he wasn’t kicked out, he just doesn’t get any work. He was there in the morning by seven. The foreman didn’t say anything to him during the work allotment. Nor did the others. He kept going in like this every morning for one week, but nobody ever said anything to him. Then they informed him that since he wasn’t doing any work, he wouldn’t get any pay. So there was no reason for him to keep coming in. No point in wearing himself out. Better that he stay home or go somewhere else. Take the high road, take the low road.
But they say that everyone has to work. If someone doesn’t go to work, then the police take him away. People who shirk work are put in prison. Ottó says that my father will be imprisoned, too. There’s no room for loafing in socialism. My father wants to work, though.
“If someone doesn’t work, they don’t have to eat,” my grandfather always says. “Horthy never allowed the Gypsies to be so brazen. The gendarmes struck them to the ground. Things were orderly back then.”
He doesn’t like Gypsies because they’re not good soldiers. And because they don’t work.
My mother feels sorry for them. They argue about this. My mother gives Aranka and her family things that are not for Gypsies.
“If you were a Party member, they would certainly give you work,” says my mother.
All the things my father talks about are in his confidential political file. That’s why he can’t get hired, even though he was a member of the Union of Working Youth. But he didn’t agitate against the kulaks enough. That’s why the leadership didn’t like him: because they can’t stand kulak bastards, as they call them.
Then my father couldn’t even show himself in the machine shop.
My father sought out the head of the collective. But he wouldn’t talk to him. One time they bumped into each other behind the tavern, as he was stepping out of the outhouse. At that very moment, he was doing up the buttons on his fly.
“There’s no work for you, and that’s the end of the story. You can go to hell,” he said. He slipped the last button through the buttonhole. He straightened his belt, and with his right hand he reached beneath his testicles. He raised them so as to more comfortably place them next to the seam of the trousers, so that his balls wouldn’t be squeezed too tightly.
“But why isn’t there any work for me?” asked my father.
This is why he had sat here on the lookout in one of the outhouses with the wooden-planked doors lined up next to each other. The outhouses are in the back, next to the skittle grounds.
“Don’t do this, Pista,” my father said to him, because they had gotten on well in the Union of Working Youth. They were born in the same year. They grew up together, had gone to the Reformed Church school together.
“Got two kids, the wife is hysterical, what am I supposed to feed them?” he asked.
“I’m no Pista to you! As far as you’re concerned, I am comrade director of the collective,” Pista said severely. “You good-for-nothing.”
My father swallowed once and turned red, and even his ears were splotched with red.
“So, Comrade Director, please give me work. I have a driving certificate, I can drive anything. I have a mechanic’s certificate, I can repair anything—you know that well. Even if there’s only work in the dairy, or if I can only be a day laborer, I can do that, too, nothing is too low for me,” he said, but by then he was pleading rather than asking.
“Since when did we pick each other’s nits for you to address me informally like this?” the director asked in reply. “You can’t even take a shit in this village anymore for the likes of these,” he said indignantly.
“If we got rid of all those reeking kulaks, then how the hell did you get left here?” he asked in a threatening voice. “I’m going to have a word about this at the district, obviously there’s been a mistake. You remained here as a troublemaker,” he said and with that ended the conversation. But my father grabbed his arm.
“Comrade Director, I’m begging you, please give me some work,” he said in a voice choking from nervousness.
“For you, you would-be kulak, there’s nothing. You’ve skinned the people enough already. Get out of this village,” he said. “Stop groping at me. You want problems?”
My father’s hand slipped from his arm.
And the director, whistling to himself, went back into the tavern, the door to which could be approached only by a staircase; it had been like this ever since the square, which everyone called the Ramp, was covered in cement.
Above the open door to the tavern, the yellow light of a bare lightbulb flickered. Before, there had been a forty-watt bulb, but it was always stolen by the next morning.
EVER SINCE MY FATHER HASN’T BEEN AT HOME, MY MOTHER works as a day laborer. Sometimes she helps Máli so she will have enough work units for the brigade. I stay with my mother’s grandmother Mama Juszti until my older sister gets out of school. Jusztinia Harbula lies in bed the entire day. It stinks in her room. The scent of old age. The chamber pot is underneath the bed. There’s a smell of urine. A thick kerchief is tied around her head. She’s a very strict woman. According to her daughter-in-law, she is mean. She’s nice to me. When I’m at her house, she reaches underneath her pillow and brings out a lozenge. She sucks on them because her mouth is dry, that’s why she always has some. Old people dry out like thistles.
“Do you want some candy?” she asks and shakes the transparent plastic bag in my direction. She never smiles. Inside the bag, there are pale-colored candies shaped like almonds. I really like them, but still I take one from Mama Juszti’s hand with queasiness. But I want the candy so much that despite my repulsion, I pop it into my mouth.
“Thank you, but I’d rather not have any.” My mother says that if I’m offered something, I always have to answer with this. “Say thank you very much, but you don’t want any.” I’m never allowed to accept anything.
When my mother isn’t here with me, that’s not what I say. I say thank you, and I take it. Mama Juszti talks about old things.
“We’re Hutsuls,” she says.
“But last time you said that we’re Ruthenians,” I answer.
“There are different kinds of Ruthenians. We’re Hutsuls,” she says.
“Me, too?” I ask.
“Well, of course. You, too. Your great-great-grandfather came here from Szlatina. Not from Aknaszlatina. Everyone knows where that is. No, he came from Szlatina in the mountains, to the north of Munkács. Only Hutsuls live there. It’s a tiny village. Even smaller than this one. The ancestors were mountain people. Shepherds. They were so poor, they had to come here to work as servants. Then they got stuck here. But szlatina means ‘gold.’ In the old days, they were rich. They had money, they had heaps of everything. They panned for gold. Then one day that ran out, too, since everything runs out at some point. Just like goodwill. Well, so they came here,” she says.
WHEN ACCOUNTS ARE MADE, MY FATHER GETS NOTHING. But the others do get something.
“You’re always sticking out, like dog shit in the snow,” says my mother.
My father is only left owing something. Because they said he broke the tractor. He has to pay for it. My mother argues with him about this at home while she is polishing the oven plate.
“You didn’t break it. It was already a mess when they gave it to you. That’s why they gave it to you. Stop being so helpless! You go there and you tell them that you also have to feed your family. They have families, too, they know what that means. You should get regular pay like the others. You’re always left out of everything, like dog shit in the snow,” she says. “Pista doesn’t want you to be there. Because you have a trade. He is afraid that the teat will fall out of his mouth because of you.”
The Dispossessed Page 21