I don’t want to go to school. I hide under the bed. Somehow, they get me to come out. My older sister already goes to school, and soon I will have to go, too.
“Is the child toilet-trained?” the teacher asks my mother.
My mother is confused. Her hair is gathered up. She doesn’t answer at once. She put on her best clothes and cleaned up so that we could look respectable somehow. But she doesn’t know what to say to this question. Because she doesn’t understand it.
My mother completed eighth grade. But she couldn’t attend the upper grades. She had to raise her younger siblings at home. She was the oldest girl among eight children.
The teacher does not know any of the villagers. She was sent here to teach. She wants to leave. She doesn’t talk to the peasants. She doesn’t let her children play with the villagers. She looks around the room. It’s clean. She scrutinizes the two candlesticks on top of the cupboard.
“What I mean to say is that the child no longer urinates or defecates in his trousers?” she asks the question again.
“I understand now,” my mother answers, relieved. “No, not anymore.”
And she turns red, because sometimes I still pee in my pants. She looks at me, troubled. I catch her gaze. I feel anxious that somehow I will be shamed. From her gaze and her flushed face, I can see that she is troubled because she had to lie. It’s hard for her to lie.
Sometimes I do still pee in my pants. Because I’m afraid. At night, I can feel that the sheet beneath me is wet. Then I can’t go back to sleep for a long time. I don’t dare say anything to my mother. She can’t help me anyway. In the morning, she rebukes me as usual.
“Once again you’ve soaked the palliasse. Now we have to change the straw again,” she says.
She’s angry. Or she just pretends to be angry. Sometimes I can’t tell.
“The candlesticks are very pretty,” the teacher says.
“If the electricity goes off, we need them,” my mother answers.
The electricity goes off very often. Everyone has matches or candles ready in the evening, so they are close at hand. So they won’t have to search for them.
“Do you live here?” the teacher asks.
“Yes,” my mother answers.
“All of you?”
“Of course. Where else would we live?” says my mother.
“In this one room?”
“Well, this is what we have.”
“How do you all fit in here?”
“Quite well,” my mother answers. In my mother’s family, ten people lived in one kitchen room. It’s enough to heat one room, because there isn’t much firewood.
The teacher writes something down on the paper. My mother is worried.
“Toi-let-trained,” she enunciates the syllables as she writes it down.
WITH MY FATHER, I’VE COME TO MY GRANDFATHER’S HOUSE. My mother is at home with the Little One. We’re helping Máli. We always come if there’s some work to do. They’re expecting us. But it’s better here, too, because their yard is bigger. It’s better for playing hide-and-seek. I can hide in the big shed so that my older sister can’t find me. She doesn’t dare come in. If I make a hooting sound, she runs out. Hedgehogs live in the shed. Everyone likes to have hedgehogs around the house because they eat insects. In the evening they walk along, sniffing at the earth. They eat the caterpillars and beetles in the vegetable beds.
We’ve seen rats in the shed, as well. Máli can’t stand dogs or cats. She chases them out of the house. If the neighbor’s dog or cat comes over, she poisons it. She never gives the cats anything to eat, she would regret wasting the milk on them. She always argues with my father. It is certainly because they’re siblings. I also fight with my older sister.
We’ve husked a few bags of corn. My father husked them and I ground them to make cornmeal. I carried them into the pantry in round wicker baskets, into the large grain store, where wheat used to be kept. When we finish, we get something to eat. Then we go home.
Young Mózsi is always watching from the window. He lives across from Auntie Erzsike. In the old days, Erzsike was a servant for another Jewish family. They went off to the Holy Land. So Auntie Erzsike ended up here. If my father passes this way, then Mózsi always comes out in front of his house. He sits down on the bench. He watches us.
When we come out of the gate, he’s already waiting there. He always walks across the street. Before the war, my grandfather’s family still lived across the street. When we head home, Mózsi comes across the street and greets my father. He holds his hand for a long time. He taps us on the head affectionately. He pinches my sister’s face with his crooked middle and index fingers. He pinches the skin between his two fingers. I don’t know why grown-ups do this. They smile while they cause pain. They do it to me, too. Especially old ladies.
“What fine skin this little pup has. I’ll gobble you up,” they say. Some of them squeeze so tightly that a red spot remains where they pinched me.
“They really would eat us up,” my sister whispers to me. They really are like the iron-nosed crone in the fairy tale.
My father is uncomfortable when he has to speak to Mózsi. He tends to avoid him. But when we’re at my grandfather’s, Mózsi keeps an eye out and waits for us. He asks what’s new, how the children are, how the lady is. “The lady” means my mother.
My father answers briefly and reluctantly. You can sense that he doesn’t want to talk to him. But still, he doesn’t hurry. They always play at this. My father pretends to be in a hurry. And Mózsi pretends to be detaining him.
“I have to hurry,” my father says. He always has to hurry for some reason or another. But he doesn’t even move.
Mózsi’s enormous body obstructs the sidewalk. He always places himself so that he’s in the way. He stands on the side going toward the Ramp, where we have to go. So my father can’t take leave quickly. My father was the Shabbes goy for Old Mózsi and his family. So they’re on good terms.
I’m afraid of Mózsi because he is very fat. When he talks, his enormous double chin trembles. His huge potbelly almost bursts out of his shirt. He wears enormous trousers that are held up with suspenders. He has buttoned suspenders. Dolha sews these trousers for him. You can’t get them in a shop. Dolha also escaped from Transylvania, just like Old Mózsi. That’s why they stick together. Dolha is the only men’s tailor in the district. People say that he’s Jewish, too. And then they wink at each other.
IN THE STREET, PEOPLE JEER AT ME. I TRY TO IMAGINE WHAT Goga would have thought. If I turn the other way, they throw things at me. I count the mud balls. They make them so they’re hollow. They leave a hole in the middle, and they’re covered with mud. First, though, they spit into the hole. They compete to see whose mud ball will whistle the loudest. Before they throw the balls, they shout out, “It pops just like Mózsi’s cock!” And they throw the mud balls to the ground with all their strength. That’s what they hurl.
They smear pig shit on our gatepost.
“Earlocked Jew,” they jeer at me. At night, they knock on our windows. Then they yell in and cackle:
“So, are you afraid? You better be afraid!” they say. My mother is trembling. My grandfather takes a hatchet out from underneath the bed.
“Have you gone insane? Put that down right away,” my grandmother hisses. “If they see that, they’ll kill all of us . . .”
“Stop screeching,” my grandfather answers. “Am I supposed to not say anything?”
“Have you lost your mind? Don’t let me see that again . . .” my grandmother whispers.
Then one evening, they throw a half brick through our window.
I can’t sleep. I imagine that I have earlocks, like Goga. And that my father has been called up for forced labor on the front. I look at the ceiling. The headlights of cars turning off by the Ramp shine in through the window. I watch as the shafts of light sweep across the ceiling. If the cars are going toward Csaholc, they turn to the right. And if they’re going toward Berek, they turn
to the left. First toward the good room, then toward the larder. I hear yelling from the Ramp. A few drunks are still kicking up a fuss there. The tavern is closed already. But they don’t go home.
My father is not with us. They spat on me again yesterday. I don’t want to go to school. I’m afraid.
It’s May now, too. I imagine that May when they took Old Mózsi and his family away. At that time, the air is filled with fragrance. I think of Goga. I think of that May twenty-seven years ago. It was the most beautiful May of his life. And he didn’t know that it was the last one.
On this Wednesday morning, the village is silent.
It’s the third of May. The silence is great. Today we must go.
I imagine that he still doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He’s eleven years old. He doesn’t know that he won’t be coming back. Eleven can’t be divided. His younger sister is seven years old. Seven can’t be divided, either.
I try to go to sleep. I count backward from one hundred. This usually helps me. Then I count with even numbers. Then odd numbers. That’s harder. My mother is asleep already. Or she’s pretending to be. I don’t know.
My little brother’s bed has been put away. We don’t talk about him. At last there is silence. It’s possible to sleep.
“I’M GOING OUT TO PAY THE JEW,” SAYS OTTÓ. HE LOOKS WORRIED. The others burst out laughing. He leaves the classroom, but in the doorway he farts loudly. Teacher Székely throws the book in his hand after him. Ottó closes the door with lightning speed and runs out. You can hear his steps echoing in the corridor. He’ll still have to walk around the building, because at this time the back door isn’t open. It’s only opened up during breaks. The outhouses are behind the school, on the banks of the ditch. And beyond that, there are just fields. We watch from the classroom as he clenches his buttocks together. He runs to the outhouse. Sometimes he looks back toward the classroom window. He smiles.
The teacher hands out an assignment to both classes to keep us occupied, and then he goes out. In the second grade, we got a male teacher. He’s always punishing us. He hits us with his ruler. He hits the Gypsies on the backs of their heads. If he has to, he slaps them. Because there are older grades among us. Still, they don’t answer back. They don’t dare. He pulls on our earlocks. Some kids get a light slap. Some get kicked in the ass. Sometimes he also gives you a “mustache.” With his two thumbs, he pulls your upper lips apart. It can really hurt.
“What are you clowning around at?” he asks.
“It wasn’t me,” I say.
“So maybe it was me, then?” he cuts back.
“It was ’im,” I say. I point at Ottó, who in the meantime has come back. And who has ants in his pants.
“It was him. Pronounce it nicely,” he corrects me. “And otherwise, keep your mouth shut.”
He doesn’t let me speak.
“I’m not interested! No tattling!” he yells at me.
I’m silent. I’m afraid he is going to rap me on the knuckles with his ruler.
“Hands behind your back! Sit up straight! No chatter!” he says.
“And you shut up!” he says, turning to me.
His ruler raps on the desk.
“HE’S LATE! HE’S LATE!” EVERYONE IN THE CLASSROOM chants.
“Good morning to everyone! Strength and health, little comrades!” I greet them.
The classmates have to be greeted loudly and clearly. But I’m so afraid that the sound doesn’t even come out of my throat.
I’m late for school. As I step into the classroom, the others beat on the benches.
“He’s late!”
“What should his punishment be?” teacher Székely asks the class.
“A rap on the knuckles!”
“Make him stand in the corner.”
We’re not allowed to be late. Everyone hates the one who is late. The teacher makes him stand in the corner of the room. And he deserves it. I may not sit down in my place. The class keeps repeating the same words over and over.
“He’s late! He’s late! He has to be punished!”
“What should his punishment be?” the teacher asks again.
“He has to say three times: ‘I am a donkey!’”
“He should stand with his hands held up for ten minutes!”
“Twenty minutes!” others trump this.
If we’re bad, the usual punishment in the classroom is that we have to stand with our hands held up, or we have to crouch.
“Stand in the corner, and the rest of you be quiet!” the teacher silences the classroom.
I feel ashamed. I look at the stenciled patterns on the wall. The base of the wall, painted with green oil-based paint, is separated from the stenciled part of the wall by a brown stripe. That’s where the pattern begins. It was stenciled with a bright-blue tree trunk pattern. I follow the lines of the pattern. I count the number of branches.
EVERYTHING GOT BETTER AFTER THE DEATH OF THE LITTLE One. Our father hasn’t been living with us for two years. But it’s good. He lives twenty kilometers away, and we see him only rarely. They threatened to kill him if he so much as stepped foot in the village. At first he just dared to steal home at night. He came here, below the gardens, from Berek. By dawn he was gone already. Of course nobody would really kill him, they were just saying that. But it was good that he wasn’t coming home drunk anymore. He didn’t beat us with his belt.
In the last summer that we spent in the village, my parents sold our house on Gypsy Row. We spent the summer in the good room of my grandfather’s house. We were left to ourselves, because my mother was working at the construction site of the new house. Finally we were left in peace. Máli was never home. She was restless, like a soul in purgatory. We were always in the street like horse shit, us, too. We slipped out across the garden, out to the fields. We went through the open country. We didn’t listen to Máli. We watched war films on TV. I made a pistol from wood, and a drum-fed machine gun. The drum was a can of preserves. We massacred bales of straw with bayonets. My older sister also likes to play at soldiers. She liked playing partisans the best, because girls can play that, too. Ottó’s dog was the spy. When we took it prisoner, we tied it up. After a while, it began biting during interrogation. Then we had to let the spy go. Its howling brought the adults’ attention to us. Máli was the enemy. Still, though, we didn’t want to kill; only the Fritzes do things like that.
We also played at tanks. There are small mounds around the mud-brick pit. We got hold of a large corrugated cardboard box. There had been a washing machine in it. We put it on the ground, and two or three of us could fit inside the box. On our knees, we pushed to one side, and suddenly we would thrust forward. That’s how we got the cylinder to worm forward. Like a caterpillar. It was harder going up the side of the mound. But our tank made a path for itself among the foxtail and hemlock. It pressed down the weeds like a real tank. On the side of the tank we wrote TIGER with a piece of coal.
“The tanks are coming,” we cried out so the adults wouldn’t hear. We yelled very softly.
EVERYONE SHUNNED THE MUD-BRICK PIT. BEFORE, IT WAS Messiyah and his family who cast the bricks. You had to give them enough chaff for the amount you had ordered. Included in the negotiated wages were sides of bacon, brandy, kidney beans, flour, corn. That’s how my father paid when he had mud bricks made for the pigsty. We call it a piggery. Then he bargained with Messiyah’s family, as well.
In the summer I saw how the Gypsies work. We went down to the Berek Forest, and my grandfather stopped to talk to them. They kneaded the mud with their legs. Then they sprinkled chaff on it with a shovel. They sprinkled water on it from a rusty bucket. Finally, they pressed the mixture into the molds. They smoothed down the tops with a moist piece of wood. My grandfather offered them tobacco. They chatted as they rolled up cigarettes and smoked them. They were wearing loincloths. They’d been working in the scorching sun for a long time already. Somebody had ordered an entire house’s worth of mud bricks. The clay was setting in the
molds. After they turned the bricks out of the molds, they made four or five loose rows from the readied bricks. They left spaces in between for ventilation. The bricks dried quickly in the baking sun. You have to wait one winter, then they are good to use.
“That’s already the customer’s affair,” they said.
“They don’t order mud bricks anymore, because whoever can builds with real bricks,” the Gypsies said.
IN MAY, THICK WEEDS COVER THE MUD-BRICK PIT. NO ONE makes mud bricks anymore. The nettle and millet grow high. The uneven earth is concealed and covered by the enormous branching leaves of the burdock. No one bothers us here, and we can play. If it starts to rain, we put a burdock leaf on our heads. The grown-ups do that, too. The men pull out the penknives from their pockets and trim off the largest leaf. Everyone has a penknife. We still just have smaller knives that don’t fold up.
Insects swarm all around the brick-casting area. Sliders—that is, snakes—also come pouring out from among the weeds. Somebody brings carcasses here. There’s a carrion well, though it’s far away from the village, going toward Gacsály. It’s halfway between the two villages.
“What’s in the middle is the farthest away,” my mother always says.
The ground is alkaline and damp. But wild dill grows high. In the shadow of the willo’wood and the elder bushes, hemlock grows thick. This is the only place where you can play at tanks. Every week, the series Four Tankmen and a Dog is shown on television. We can hardly wait for the next episode. Then we talk about it all week. We like the dog the best, because it’s so smart. Our own dog is stupid, in vain do we try to train it. It can’t do anything like the one on TV. When we get bored, we give the dog an angry kick.
THE CAT WALKS AMONG THE WEEDS. I WATCH IT FROM MY hiding place. It rubs up against a blade of grass. In the meantime, it stretches itself out as if it wasn’t even walking on the earth. The blade of grass softly bends when it rubs up against it. The cat’s body undulates against the grass. I count its protruding ribs. It is scrawny, hungry, careful. Its fur is battered. The grass is poison green. The cat makes graceful movements. It sniffs at the grass. Sometimes it takes a blade in its mouth. Cats have no names.
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