The Dispossessed

by Szilard Borbely

  You can’t see the spokes when they are turning. One time, my uncle had to put a patch on the inner tire. When it was time for him to put the wheel back on, he turned the bicycle upside down. It was standing on the handles and the saddle. He spun the pedal well. The back wheel turns with a fine whistling sound.

  “What a great sound,” says my uncle. “Don’t you see?”

  I lean in closer, I look at the wheel from up close. I don’t see the spokes. I don’t want to believe that they’re not there. Because a moment ago, they were there. My nose is almost touching the wheel.

  “Be careful, you,” says my sister.

  “There are no spokes,” says my uncle. And really, when the wheel is turning you can’t see the spokes. I point at it with my finger.

  “You see, there’s nothing there.”

  I want to poke my finger in between the wheel hub and the rim, into the air. But I can’t.

  MY MOTHER WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD WHEN SHE GAVE birth to my older sister. The first child came with difficulty. She was eighteen years old when she got married on the seventeenth of May in 1959. She was twenty-one when she gave birth to me. My father was twenty-seven. My mother was twenty-three years old when she brought my little brother into the world. When I think of my mother, I always feel her scent. The scent of blood. I also sense the scent of my father. A sweaty man smell. The smell of the tavern. The smell of cigarettes. The smell of diesel and machine oil. Bad smells.

  My mother’s smell is good, the fragrance of food. The smell of home. Seven years divided them. Seven can be divided only by itself. And by one. Indivisible years. Like the memories, too. A vanished world that finally faded away.

  My mother was a chubby little girl, so they say. She never spoke to us about herself, she just told a few stories about her childhood. Meaningless stories. As if she never even had a childhood. The stories spoke of how she was never a child. Sometimes she tells stories in which she laughs. But as I heard it, she was crying, instead.

  “Why are you crying, M’my?” I asked.

  “I’m not crying,” she said. She said she was laughing.

  “You see, I’m laughing. Because thanks be to God, that also passed. Everything passes, touch wood,” she said. “It passes, it’s just that in the meantime it takes so long that you think there will never be an end,” she said.

  “In the meantime, it’s really bad. Like rubber boots with holes in freezing water. And that hunger that doesn’t let you sleep because your stomach is grumbling so much. In vain do you recite one prayer after another. Then you feel that there will never be an end. Morning will never come. And you can’t eat anything until morning. Then everything seems so never-endingly long. Especially if you’re a child. A little kid is always terrified, because they’re helpless and defenseless,” she said.

  But she spoke of these things only rarely, because we were always working. When we were doing light work, then we could talk. Then, usually we laughed. When she beat us, then we cried.

  THE LITTLE ONE’S FUNERAL WENT QUICKLY. THE CEMETERY is at the edge of the village. Right next to the pastures. On both sides of the road leading to Gacsály. On the right side are the cow pastures, on the left side the pig grounds. The herds of cattle and pigs come here. Here, the stone path is the most covered in shit. In the new cemetery, people of varying faiths lie next to each other. Across from the cemetery are the premises of the collective farm. On the other side is the old Reformed church cemetery. Next to it is the smaller Greek Catholic cemetery.

  Just walking all the way over there took a long time. It took so long as we walked next to each other, my mother, my father, and my older sister. And the Little One, the fifth. The number five cannot be divided, only by itself. We were dragging so much solitude all across the village, across Hajnalvég, all the way to the cemetery.

  That year, my mother spent the autumn and winter on the terrace. Two years earlier, we’d made a closed terrace from the open veranda. Her hair was undone and matted. A pallet is on the terrace, a short, narrow bed. For weeks now my mother hasn’t cooked, hasn’t cleaned, hasn’t washed. She doesn’t do anything.

  Mariska Botos was the only one in the village who tried to help my mother. She never had a husband, but she had a daughter and a son. She lived beyond Kepec Meadow, on the other side of Gypsy Row. She made arrangements with the Council for discounted day care. I was there with my older sister the entire day. They gave us food, and we were able to play. At home, we had to be quiet. There were games at the day care, too. Building blocks, bristle blocks. And it was heated. You didn’t have to freeze, like at home. At home there’s hardly any firewood. My mother is saving. That’s what she says. When we’re not at home, she doesn’t heat the house at all. Maybe during that winter she didn’t leave the house even once.

  A year and a half passed that way. Last spring, my mother didn’t even read aloud to us. She didn’t do anything. We got something to eat at my grandfather’s. Easter came round again, but this time she didn’t clean or wash. She lay on the terrace. Now, though, she’s a little better, she prepared matzoh. Then she sits down and takes out the book with the blue cover. She puts it on the table and reads.

  “You don’t have to be afraid, because your father isn’t coming home,” she says. He’s already living in the other village, where we are going to move in the fall.

  He doesn’t dare come home, because he was told that if he so much as puts his foot in the village, he’ll be killed. Once again, we will celebrate without him. And now we are only three. We don’t talk about the Little One. My mother puts on clean clothes, gathers up her hair, and puts her best kerchief on her head. The candle is already burning on the table. She’s anxious as she reads. She’s afraid she’ll get stuck.

  “You see, this is the bread of destitution . . .” my mother begins to read.

  It is the passage about the Eternal Father.

  “God is called the Eternal,” she says. “Who never passes. He was like infinity. The only one.”

  Infinity cannot be divided by anything. Because it is the Only One.

  “God is lonely, because he cannot share anything with anyone else. He must bear His burdens all alone. The entire universe,” says my mother.

  WINTER HAS ENDED. WE’VE HARDLY SEEN MY FATHER FOR two years now. I’m lying on the bank of the ditch, looking at the sky. I’m imagining that I died, and I’m already down there, below the green grass, in the earth. I see swallows zigzagging high in the sky. The storks have come, as well. They circle around up there. They find a warm current of air on which they rise even higher. I don’t know what they’re looking for up there. I would like to see what they can see. It could be good to be a stork. Or a swallow, I think.

  It’s definitely not good to be a dog. We have a black mongrel dog, we call it Gypsy. In the village, everyone calls their dogs Gypsy. It’s on a chain so it doesn’t go roaming all over the gardens. The kitchen garden and the flower garden. We only let it off the chain at night. My mother doesn’t like dogs, but we need one for the house.

  Dogs are always hungry, then they go mad. They tear at their chain. They want to be free. They want to be free of it. They strain against it with all their strength, but the chain keeps jerking them back. The chain is wrapped around their neck. From all the yanking at the chain and the jumping, they emit a death rattle instead of barking. Some people like to annoy them. They enjoy it. They stand by the edge of the yard, where the dog has already trampled all the grass down. There, they are safe. They hit the dog’s nose with a little twig. Some dogs can withstand the impotent rage for a long time. They pull at the chain, they bark hoarsely, they vomit from choking. Then suddenly there comes a point where every dog collapses. They realize too late that they can’t budge even a millimeter from where they are. In vain is the torturer right there in front of the dog, he is still unreachable.

  The strikes of the tiny twig, measured out in small doses, suddenly add up all together. In vain does the dog bare its teeth, in vain its rage,
its strength. At some point, even the bravest dog runs away and wants to hide somewhere. It seeks refuge. Whimpering, it skulks away to the apple box off to one side, which, with the rags tossed within, is its house. Or it seeks out a woodpile and tries to climb beneath it. Whimpering, it hides its head somewhere. Its overheated body trembles like gelatin.

  If the dog can’t find anywhere else, then it hides its head between its paws. Because it has collapsed. Never again will it be free. In vain is it let out. It only jumps in fear. But it trembles. I’m afraid of it. That’s why I imagine that I’m free, and I’m flying like a stork or a swallow.

  MY FATHER IS SITTING ON THE KITCHEN STOOL. HE HASN’T spoken for days now. When he comes home from work, he sits down on the stool next to the bed. At times like this he crouches, the stool is so little. He doesn’t sit at the table. When he sits there on the little stool, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t grumble. At times like this, he is silent.

  His hands are clasped together, he turns his thumbs. He turns his two thumbs around each other. He stares into space. He’s mumbling something to himself, he’s praying. His upper body inclines: forward and backward. We move around him in silence. We close the door cautiously. We go outside. Leave him to himself. We can’t help him. We treat him the way we treat the sick.

  “Let it be, it’s not worth it . . .” my mother tries to console him.

  Then there’s a pause. In the meantime, she washes a glass.

  “What does this change?” she asks and turns to my father, who has been sitting with his back to her. My father doesn’t answer. He doesn’t say anything, he just sighs. He pokes at the sleeves of his work jacket with his little knife. The stitches come undone. His head is bent. We don’t see his face.

  HE SITS ON THE SMALL STOOL. HIS BACK IS TURNED TO THE chest. He’s muttering something. He rocks himself, swaying back and forth. Today the inheritance proceedings took place, and his siblings disowned him.

  “You’re not our brother,” they said.

  “What do you mean, I’m not your brother?” my father asked.

  “’Cause you’re not,” they said.

  And they stood there like peasants, their mouths clamped together stubbornly.

  “But why not?” my father insisted.

  “’Cause you don’t have a father,” they said.

  “Of course I do. We have the same father.”

  “He’s only our father,” they said.

  “How is that?” my father asked.

  “You know how,” they answered.

  They were silent. They stood there for a while, like children. Sullenly. Nobody making any concessions. They never learned how to concede anything. According to the laws of the village, the time had come to cast him out. Because they were no longer children, and because they had no father. Because now there was no mercy. After death, there is no forgiveness.

  “Are you not my siblings?” my father mumbled the question.

  “No,” they said.

  “You yourself know why.”

  “You’re not our brother,” they said.

  And then something in my father broke.

  He sits on the footstool. He stares into space. He looks at the battered linoleum with the parquet-like pattern. In his trouble, he keeps fidgeting with the sleeves of his shirt. He pulls from beneath the cuffs, so the fabric rips. Something tears. The fabric next to the seam rips open a few centimeters. He rends his right-hand sleeve.

  Something has broken. We go out.

  MY MOTHER IS FEEDING THE HENS. I’M HELPING HER. I GET fresh water from the well, I pour the old putrid water out of the feeders. I rinse them out and fill them up again. The rooster crows. The dog whimpers. We work slowly, taking our time.

  We look for some other work to do. We pack things up. We put things in order. We sweep up. We feed the pigs. I prepare fodder for the cows. I cut up apples. On the top, I sprinkle a trowel’s worth of groats. I cover it so the flies won’t be able to get at it.

  Only at dusk do we go back inside. After we’ve finished all the work.

  We’ll close the pen later, after dark, if the hens have calmed down by then. But that’s further on. There’s still time.

  When we go back inside, my father is still sitting on the footstool. His upper body is rocking back and forth. He doesn’t notice us. My mother puts the best tablecloth on the table. She puts two candlesticks on it. She puts the plates there, as well, setting the table for dinner. A flask of wine. She fills the glasses.

  “We’re having dinner,” she says to my father. My father doesn’t answer.

  “It’s time to come to the table,” she says again. “Come.”

  My father drags himself over to the table with difficulty. My mother knows already what has happened.

  “It doesn’t matter. We always knew this,” she says to console him. “We haven’t lost anything and we haven’t learned anything new.” But she gets no answer. “Is there something that was surprising to you?” she asks.

  My mother is quiet. She’s calm and bitter. Without pausing or taking a breath, she continues.

  “Fine. You went to the inheritance proceedings. We slapped the shit,” she says. And she puts away the knives.

  “It’s time to come to the table,” she says again. She lights the candles. My mother leans above the candle flames. She covers her face. She closes her eyes. Tears flow from her eyes. She doesn’t wipe them away; she recites the blessing.

  My father takes the hat down from the top of the cupboard. He puts it on his head. He stands up, and, spreading his hands apart, he recites the blessing. He doesn’t know it well, because no one ever taught him. It’s just how he heard it as a child, misunderstanding the words, that’s how he says it. So that we may eat that of which the earth has given, and that the words have blessed. We observe the tastes. The strongest taste is bitterness.

  “Never will I go back there again,” he says to himself. “Never again will I pronounce the name of that village. I have no siblings. I refute them,” he says. “I have forgotten my life. May our memories no longer be our memories,” he says.

  We look at our plates.

  There are times when a person is smarter and sees more clearly than at any time before. Or at any time after. Smarter than they would be at any other time. Suddenly the ear opens, and the eye opens as if cataracts were falling off, and the enigma of fate is revealed. One sees but does not comprehend. One only suspects something about which one only knows that it is certain. That was all.

  WHEN WE MOVED AWAY IN SEVENTY-THREE, WE DIDN’T bring the plastic fruit that we had kept in the glass-fronted cabinet. The relatives who had remained on the other side of the Romanian border had become a part of our lives again, twenty years after the end of the war, toward the end of the sixties, when people living within a twenty-kilometer radius on either side of the border were again able to visit each other. This was called the little border. A small border crossing was opened. We went across to Pete, Szatmár, Dara, Lázári. New objects appeared, new customs.

  In the meantime, on both sides, children were born and grew up. The adults had become harder, more bitter. Sometimes we rode our bikes there. We encountered the scent of a different country. On the border, there was fear. Both my mother and father were happy. Then in Romania, everything suddenly ran out. And you couldn’t take anything from there, only bring things there from here.

  On every table there stood a glass plate. And on the glass plate, magnificent fruits were displayed. Bananas, pineapples, grapes with improbably huge seeds, in green and purple, blue and pink colors. But none of them were real. You couldn’t get anything real. So these were substitutes.

  We also brought back these plastic fruits. And the cheap crystal plates. My mother put the artificial fruit on them. They became dusty, and we had to wipe them off. In time, the plastic fruits were removed from the table and ended up in the glass-fronted cabinet. Then the color of the plastic fruits slowly faded. In exchange for the fruits, we had given them shampoo
, eau de cologne, and condoms. In those days, you could exchange anything for condoms. There was trade by bartering until, under Ceaușescu, socialism grew much harsher. Then the relatives didn’t come to visit. We didn’t go there, either. Before we moved out, my mother threw away the plastic fruits.

  “Well, that’s the end of that,” she said.

  YEARS LATER, MÁLI CAME TO VISIT US. WE WERE ALREADY living in the other village. She was older and more hunched than the last time I had seen her. Her head almost completely disappeared in the kerchief tied beneath her chin. Her toothless face was like a dried plum. Her eyes were red from weeping and so tiny, as if the tears were flowing out of her eyeballs. Her face was nothing but wrinkles.

  “They want to put me in an old-age home, but I’d rather move in with you,” she says, pleading in a maudlin voice.

  My mother is reserved. She doesn’t answer. She is silent. Then she talks of something else. She wants to gain time.

  “You didn’t get my letter,” asks Máli.

  “Of course I did,” my mother says. Then she is quiet again for a long time. Máli waits for an answer.

  “We got it,” says my mother, and she doesn’t say anything else.

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “There was nothing to answer.”

  “You don’t want to take me in, is that it?” she asks.

  “You know it’s impossible,” says my mother.

  Máli wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand. She once again raises her cast-down eyes to my mother. She’s servile, like a dog. Hope has died in her now. She must have known, though, that it was impossible. It had been impossible for years now. But maybe from the beginning, when she met with my mother, the matter had already been decided. It was not my mother who decided, it was my father’s choice. And my mother’s imagination.

  Máli gets up without a word. She straightens her kerchief. She pulls the knot beneath her chin tighter.

  “We shall never meet again,” she says, and she turns out of the summer kitchen. I watch as her tiny, crooked form passes in front of the window.