A Guest In My Own Country Part 3

Standing there on one leg in a cattle car with eighty others, shoved in not by guards' rifle stocks but by my own free will, pressed among those bodies, I shut my eyes and conjured up images full of longing: How would I find my sister? How was eva managing in the baggage net? How long would our beans keep or the two rolls we had bought from a young man squatting in a broken, empty shop window for an astronomical price? What would happen if the trip dragged on? Could Zolti Varga give us something to eat? Could he-and would he?

Supposedly the Russians had commandeered our locomotive, but would provide another. The train was still standing at the Nyugati Station in Budapest, but I was a little more comfortable now, because a few people had grown tired of waiting and abandoned their travel plans. From the narrow window I could see the moon s.h.i.+ning through the station hall's now gla.s.sless ribs. The self-appointed big shots who got on and off and shoved their way through the crowd spread the word that we would leave at one in the morning, at five, at ten-yes, certainly by ten.

I slipped down and peed between the wheels. The urine froze instantly. People were still sitting on the roof, back to back, but fewer than before. The more determined cattle-car pa.s.sengers were putting up with each other now, and I managed to squat down behind a fat old woman. Though we had moved not an inch closer to our destination, it felt good to have had one long night on the train now behind us.

Ultimately we set off at about two in the afternoon. It was stop and go all the way. Locomotives came and went (if we had the better locomotive, we would lose it), tracks needed repairing, military trains had right-of-way. After a while eva and I were sitting on benches in the cattle car and getting bread and bacon from Zolti Varga to a.s.suage our hunger. At one point we heard a round of machine-gun fire: stray soldiers frightening civilians. The usual heralds said they were going from car to car seeking women. The women got lumps of coal from somewhere and smeared their faces to make themselves look wrinkled and ugly. Even aging ladies rubbed coal under their eyes my sister and I noticed, smiling to each other. I put eva in a corner and stood in front of her. The other women pulled their kerchiefs down to their eyes and sat hunchbacked. In came the five or six soldiers on their rounds. One of the soldiers must have been attracted to a woman even through the pitch, but when he moistened his finger and rubbed and the black came off he grew angry and spat in the woman's face. The soldiers left the train in a ruckus of dissatisfaction.

We came to a jerry-built bridge spanning the Tisza where the Allies had hit the old bridge with a bomb and what was left had been blown up by the Germans. The temporary stilts between the pylons would not have borne the train, so we crossed on foot to where another train was waiting, though without a locomotive. Eventually we were moving again, and eventually we stopped again, sitting out a February snowstorm at night in the snowed-over bins of an open coal car. The wind off the Great Plain, unimpeded in its mad rush, pounded us mercilessly. We could no longer feel our hands and had ice crystals hanging from our eyelashes. Glued shut, our eyes transported us to a happy place, and the cold came close to rapture. We stood out on the open track surrounded by darkness.

We decided to strike out on a dirt road and ask for shelter at the first house we found. The wind practically knocked us on our backs as we made our way, dragging our clumsy bags, until at last a faint light flickered on the edge of the blue-white plain. I was frozen to an anesthetic purple by the time my legs had taken me there, stumbling through clods of ice. Obediently I stretched out on the straw covering the dirt floor, and my good will was restored when a young servant girl lay down at my side and told me to snuggle up, pulling my hand onto her belly to stave off my s.h.i.+vering. I pressed against her from behind and buried my face in her back to fit her bottom into my lap. We were entirely one. I realized that you can love someone whose face you have never seen and respond to a stranger as you would to your closest loved one. I held onto her as if I had long since chosen her as my one and only. In the morning I thanked the residents of the house for their kindness and expressed special grat.i.tude to my sleeping companion.

Given that the train was still standing the next day, I set out on a reconnaissance foray and came upon a flat, black, cube-shaped solid amid the tire tracks on an icy hillock not far from some horse manure. Detailed inspection revealed it to be a piece of Soviet military-issue bread, albeit hard as a rock. But as long as it was indeed bread, it could soak up the steady stream of lukewarm water from the bronze pipe of an artesian well to become soft enough to eat. My supposition was borne out, and I chewed contentedly on my find.

A woman walked past, briskly tossing lumps of goat manure from a breadbasket over the snow, as if sowing seeds, left and right, making sure to cover the entire width of the street. Watching me paw at that wet bread, she held out her basket and said, laughing hilariously, "Have some meat with it. These last few I won't sow. You'll get a nice bleating in your belly."

"Where am I?" I asked her.

"In Torokszentmiklos."

"What shall I do with the bread?"

"Leave it here for the birds."

On 28 February 1945, the seventh day of our journey, we reached the ujfalu station. It had hardly changed over the year, as there had been no serious battles in the vicinity. We fumbled our way with our bags out of the first car, which had a.s.sumed the n.o.ble rank of pa.s.senger car since Puspokladany. It would have been natural for Father to pick us up, as when we arrived with Mother and after a few words of greeting he hugged us on the yellow-brick platform and we told him our news: Just imagine, we skated on the lake in the park in Pest and fed the baboons apples in that terribly smelly monkey house and then saw a performance of Latyi Matyi Latyi Matyi at the Operetta (Latyi could hardly get a word in edgewise what with all the children laughing) and then touched the very rope the Regent would as he walked through the rooms of the Royal Castle and then there was an air-raid siren when we were still in the Castle district and we went down with everybody else into a deep stone cavern, a cave under the Castle, where a teacher standing next to us explained that there was a lake in the belly of the hill and, just imagine, he said you could row a boat on it. But when we alighted on the platform looking straight ahead, it was clear our father was not waiting for us. Nor was anyone else. at the Operetta (Latyi could hardly get a word in edgewise what with all the children laughing) and then touched the very rope the Regent would as he walked through the rooms of the Royal Castle and then there was an air-raid siren when we were still in the Castle district and we went down with everybody else into a deep stone cavern, a cave under the Castle, where a teacher standing next to us explained that there was a lake in the belly of the hill and, just imagine, he said you could row a boat on it. But when we alighted on the platform looking straight ahead, it was clear our father was not waiting for us. Nor was anyone else.

Where fiacres had once offered their services to travelers coming from Budapest, there were now a few ox-drawn carts. The first acquaintance we saw was my former teacher at the Jewish school, Sandor Kreisler. Everyone in our cla.s.s had been killed, as had all the pupils in our school, so our teacher was naturally deeply moved to see us. There he stood, a short, plucky man with a mustache. Seeing him was almost as unbelievable as it would have been to see my father.

Sandor Kreisler had been a good teacher: reserved, but kind and fair. In addition to primary school science he gave me a few slaps with the cover of my pen-case, generally because of Baba Blau. Mr. Kreisler had been my teacher as early as the first grade, when I still had private instruction: he would come to the house and teach Istvan and me in our living room afternoons from three till four, which was all we needed of book learning. The rest of the time was our own. Sometimes he came down into the garden with us, and once in a while he gave the ball a kick, but he never got involved in the game, being a young man and mindful of his dignity.

His father was a fine tinsmith and went in for politics. He was a friend of my father's. He came into our store every day in his work clothes, and they would stand at the oven and crack jokes. Yet I cannot recall his father ever coming to our living quarters, and where the father was not admitted the son could not feel at home. He told my father to send me to school: it would do me good to be together with other children. I got top marks but, as I have said, not a few raps on the knuckles as well. For rhythmically grabbing the bottom of the girl hopping in front of me when we squatted for the circle-dance that begins "The hare called his son out onto the green meadow." Or for the usual reason: fighting. I gave as well as I got. We were three cla.s.ses in one cla.s.sroom. While the teacher was busy with the first graders, the second and third graders worked on a quiet a.s.signment. I still find it a good idea to avoid focusing constantly on one group activity: we could lose ourselves in reading, drawing, or writing.

Mr. Kreisler had returned from forced labor. His parents and siblings had been taken to Auschwitz, and all his pupils had perished there. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He hugged us and kissed us, which he had never done before. He listened to Zolti Varga's story, thanked him for bringing his two pupils home, and promised to testify to Zolti's valor should he ever need it. Eight months earlier the act of taking us to Budapest had been a political scandal; now the act of bringing us back conferred political credit, which was not particularly pleasant either.

Soon thereafter we encountered a leather-jacketed young man with a holster on his belt. "Sanyi," he said, "make these kids into good communists."

"Fine," said Sandor Kreisler, and the three of us walked on.

After the war he had a distinguished career: he began as a primary school teacher in Debrecen and entered retirement as a commissioner of schools. On the day we arrived, he was primarily concerned with practical questions: where we would sleep that night and who would feed us. We were stubbornly drawn to our house. Our teacher recommended we wait until the next day. But why shouldn't we sleep in our own home, move back in and wait for our parents?

In a little main-street shop we were met by three friendly faces: Imre Szekely, Marton Gluck, and Andras Sved. The first two were my father's cousins. They had returned together from forced labor, each having lost a wife and two children. The three of them had united forces to open a small shop where you could get everything you might need, from brown sugar to a black woolen kerchief. The merchandise-for which they traded flour, smoked sausage, and wine-was brought from Varad and Debrecen by cart. There was jubilation when we entered. Then all three of those muscular men retreated, each to a different corner, and shed tears. When they returned, they did their best to put on smiles. Then they accompanied us to our house.

There was filth everywhere, from the attic to the cellar: trampled books and photographs lay all over the floor; the bathtub, which had served as a latrine for the soldiers who had quartered there, was full of dried excrement. The only furniture left was a large, white rococo wardrobe with three doors, decorated with angels, its mirror still intact. It was probably too heavy for them to have carried off. At my feet lay a story I had written in school about a young fir tree that became the mast of a seagoing s.h.i.+p and engaged in conversation with the wind, an old friend from the mountaintop. There was a photo alb.u.m scattered about in loose pages, the vanished faces, ourselves among them, stained and muddy. I turned to see the three men standing behind me. We were beginning to understand that what had been would never be again.

"Let's go to my place, then," said Uncle Imre. His housekeeper cut thick slices of bread from an enormous round loaf, b.u.t.tered and salted them, and set them down next to cups of tea. I rubbed my eyes. Only then did we realize what had happened. The men already knew, of course, though they themselves had been in forced labor digging entrenchments near the front, not in Auschwitz or the deportation camps. Their commander, a local landowner, had led them home when the Russians pa.s.sed through the village. Most of the Jews left in the town were young men. Before the war approximately one thousand of ujfalu's twelve thousand citizens had been Jews. About two hundred of them survived. They had been lucky in their commander, who had known them all from peacetime, having bought from their businesses and commissioned items from their workshops. He wanted nothing more than to return to peace, to his own house, together with his men and therefore with a clear conscience. The Soviet troops pa.s.sed through after a big tank battle on the edge of the village on 20 October, and by November even the forced laborers had gone home. By the time we arrived, they knew what had become of their families and had read about the gas chambers in the Nagyvarad paper. The only question was whether their wives had been sent to the gas chamber or to work camps: they were strong young women, so their husbands could still hope that only their children had been lost. What they did not consider was that the Germans in charge wanted everything to run as smoothly as possible. Children were less likely to create noisy scenes and more likely to step naked into the showers if their mothers were at their sides. To keep the children from crying, they preferred to gas the young women along with them.

It was not easy to accept the affection of those men, those hundred-odd widowers around us who had lost their children. They were kind to us, glad to see us alive, but I could not help thinking that my survival reminded them of the death of their own. One of them said to me, "You realize, don't you, that you are living for the others, not only for yourself?"

Uncle Imre, who looked after us and was actually my father's second cousin, was a warm-hearted, frank, quiet man, with broad shoulders and a sense of humor. He waited in vain for his wife, Aunt Lenke, his daughter Panni, and his son Gyuri to return from Auschwitz, whereas I still had hope, knowing that my parents had gone to Austria, where the war was not yet over. Imre lived in just two rooms of his former house, sleeping in the old bedroom. I slept in the bed next to his-his wife's.

My sister and the housekeeper occupied the other room. Imre did not sleep much and smoked a lot. His lighter, made from a cartridge sh.e.l.l, would flame up now and again. From the corner of my eye I would look at his face, illuminated by the cigarette's glow. One time he cried, the way men do, the sobs welling up from his chest, through his throat, and he turned onto his stomach and pressed his face into the pillow, his shoulders shuddering, biting the pillow so I would not hear. I pretended to be asleep.

I returned to the public school to which Istvan and I had transferred from the Jewish school the previous autumn. The teachers and pupils were the same, except that Istvan, who had remained in Budapest, was not sitting next to me. There was no military education, from which we had been excluded the previous year, so I was a full-fledged member of the cla.s.s community. Neither the teachers nor the pupils knew quite how to deal with me. The homeroom teacher asked me where I would like to sit. No one was sitting next to little Barczi, so I asked to sit there. He was the one who little less than a year earlier had said that now we Jews would get ours, in spades. Our Hungarian-geography-gymnastics teacher had once pulled his hair while slapping his face to make the slaps more effective. We pitched b.u.t.tons together and shared our larded bread.

"Where's your father?" asked my cla.s.smates, but all I knew was that my parents had been deported. There was a boy in the cla.s.s whose father had fallen at the front and one whose father was a prisoner of war and still missing. Rumor had it that there, abroad, civilians and prisoners alike were starving and the weak had frozen to death. I was not alone in my orphaned state. We came to accept one another again and avoided speaking of our families.

We slid over icy paths on our boot heels and looted tanks that had been shot up. We collected cartridge sh.e.l.ls. Once in a while we found a helmet or a belt or a cartridge bag with dum-dum bullets that explode inside your body, throwing their bra.s.s shrapnel everywhere. We would drill a hole in a plank of wood, force the bra.s.s sh.e.l.ls in, and plant a sharp-tipped bullet in the tapered tube. Then we would hold a nail to the cap and hit it with a hammer to make it explode. A plank with a dozen or so bullets in it looked like a multi-barrel mortar. We used to say we were going out to fire the katyusha katyusha. There was plenty to shoot at, especially ravens, since the harvest had been bountiful in forty-four and there was plenty for them to pick at under the snow. It is a miracle we never hurt ourselves.

A year before, one of our teachers had plied us with anti-Bolshevik admonitions. He no longer did so now, though he said nothing against the Germans either. Privately he let one of his good pupils know that given their miracle weapons they might stage a comeback yet. Once the Russians had occupied Vienna, though, the teacher applied to be admitted into the Hungarian Communist Party. The previous summer the children still fantasized about those German miracle weapons, wailing like German dive bombers. One of the big kids was called Tiger, after the German tank. But by the spring of 1945 Germans had gone out of fas.h.i.+on, and the children's imagination was taken over by the Cossacks and their red cloth caps with fur along the sides and gold crosses on top.

The Cossacks could not sit still for a minute: they were like bad boys. They would burst in with eggs, onions, and a big hunk of bacon and ask us to fry them up. They would gobble it all up, wash it down with a tumbler-full of vodka, and munch on a whole red onion. They would get drunk and cry. We had to smuggle my sister out of the house through a side door.

Once Duci Mozsar, a pretty, buxom girl of barely fifteen, was standing in front of her gate when a motorcycle with a sidecar came screaming by. The Cossack in the sidecar reached out for her, whisked her off the ground, sat her down in front of him, and shot off. They were next seen a year later, when the motorcycle came screaming back into town, and the soldier in the side car set down Duci Mozsar with a baby and a suitcase, then shot off again as if he had never been there.

A whole squad of sharpshooters had their way with a peasant woman while two marksmen held machine guns to her husband on the porch to keep him quiet. There were times when they shot the woman and her husband if they resisted too strongly. They would drive up in trucks, bringing things, taking things. You could trade with them if you could make out what on earth they wanted. One of them just wanted us to look at a photo alb.u.m he had found in the frozen mud. He had carried it with him ever since, gazing at the stranger grandparents in its pages.

I had brought back a wounded patriotism from Budapest. There were things you could not speak of. That one year had become like a bell jar of silence between me and my Christian friends, since they had been normal children even during that year.

"Why I Love My Fatherland." Such was the t.i.tle of a composition we were a.s.signed in March 1945. What was I supposed to write? Things were far from simple. I believed my fatherland wanted to kill me. There have been cases of parents wanting to kill their children. If it wasn't my fatherland that wanted to kill me, if it was only a few of its inhabitants, then what makes my fatherland different from the fatherland of those who ordained the killings and carried them out? They too spoke of their fatherland-all the time. If I am a part of my fatherland, then so is what happened to me since last year's exams. None of this could I discuss in my composition.

I was particularly attached to one image of my fatherland-our fatherland-and the place that gave me birth: the good place good place, the place where you felt safe and from which you could not be uprooted. But once you have been driven from your home and observed your fellow countrymen accepting it (indeed, rejoicing in it) then you will never again feel at home as you once had. Something has been destroyed, and your relations.h.i.+p to the place will never be as naively intimate as it was. My sister and I had wanted to feel at home again in the town after our weeklong return trip, but the house was empty, our parents gone, and there I stood, on the national holiday, 15 March, in the same square where I had once marched in formation to the national flag with my cla.s.s.

There was a stone podium where the speakers stood and behind it a flagpole where the red, white, and green tricolor had flown at half mast before the war to indicate, as I have said, the painful fact that the country was incomplete, three-quarters of it having been truncated after the First World War. The flag would never fly at full mast until the lost territories had been reannexed. We wore dark blue trousers and white s.h.i.+rts. I can even remember some bright spring mornings when shorts and short-sleeved s.h.i.+rts were warm enough. The Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish schools stood side by side.

In my boyhood I was as unhappy as anyone that the flag was at half mast. I considered it unacceptable that the train should stop so long at the border, after Biharkeresztes, whenever we went to Nagyvarad to visit my grandfather and the tangled network of our relatives there, that one uniform should replace another, that we should have to go through pa.s.sport control and customs. Once we crossed the border, we saw cement fortifications, as if war were imminent. From Berettyoujfalu to Nagyvarad is only thirty kilometers; from Berettyoujfalu to Bucharest is seven hundred. So Nagyvarad was more mine than the Romanian king's.

The family's oral tradition embraced a number of cities. In addition to Berettyoujfalu, there was Bra.s.so, Kolozsvar, Debrecen, Miskolc, Budapest, Pressburg, Vienna, Karlsbad, Fiume, Heidelberg, Trier, Manchester, and New York. Rabbi relations may have lived in those great distant cities, but Nagyvarad was the true center of things, Nagyvarad with its cafes and theater, with its riverbank where, from the balcony of one of my great aunts, I would watch events unfold on the surface of the Koros through an opera gla.s.s.

If Nagyvarad was the sun, then the moon was unquestionably Berettyoujfalu, seat of Csonka-Bihar County. We had our county hall, our county prison, and our county satrap; we had b.a.l.l.s and literary evenings at the Military Youth Center, sponsored by either the gentlemen's club or the Jewish women's organization. In elementary school we studied the geography of Berettyoujfalu and then of Bihar County, reciting in wonder how everything was to be found there: plains and snowy mountains, rivers, forests, mines, and-in the very center of it all-the modern city of Nagyvarad with eight hundred years of history behind it. I was a patriot of my region as well as of my fatherland and would jealously defend Berettyoujfalu against Derecske, its neighbor in the district.

Noticeable changes cropped up in the speeches given on the national holiday in 1945. Recalling 15 March 1848, a speaker called it more than a war of independence; he called it a "revolution." My position at school was that of polite outsider, and it continued to be so. The community that sang "Be unshakably faithful to your fatherland, O Magyar, for it is your cradle and some day your grave, nouris.h.i.+ng you and covering you," a community that loved pathos, could not expect my Jewish cla.s.smates, present only as ghosts, to join them, because the fatherland in question had no interest in their graves: they had been turned to ashes in a small town in Poland, those two hundred children whose lives I was living, if I was to accept the mourning father's words.

The townspeople had generally made no comment about the Jews' being carted off. Some had even laughed at the sight of the old people struggling with their bags, and indeed they were laughable, thinking they would have need of their things, their familiar pillows and blankets, when what was awaiting them was the crematorium. The fact that they were loaded onto trains was met with the same indifference as news from the front or draft notices or the appearance of bombers over the town on a sunny morning: they were all so many historical events over which one had no control. It was the indifference that comes of an acceptance of fate mingled with fear and perhaps relief. "The town has become Jew-free," the local newspaper proclaimed. Hungarian had found its equivalent for the German adjective judenfrei judenfrei. Most people probably felt that with husbands and sons at the front they had enough trouble as it was: news of the fallen kept coming, the harvest had to be brought in, the shops they had always frequented were closed. Then there were those who thought that it was their turn to own the shops, that their little girl should play this piano, their little boy sleep in that bra.s.s bed, that they could make good use of the linen cabinet and its contents. There was a place and a new owner for every head of cattle.

I was cold a lot in the early spring of 1945 in Berettyoujfalu. It still got dark early, and I would read by candlelight in the unheated living room, while the fat housekeeper, the wife of a delivery man, peeled potatoes and sorted peas by the light of an oil lamp near the kitchen stove. When her three-year-old son told his mother he was hungry, she unb.u.t.toned an enormous, sagging breast and the child sucked. Either he climbed on the stool or she bent over. Nothing was real. There we were in Berettyoujfalu, though not yet home.

Every day I walked past the lowered blinds of my father's hardware store. Anyone could have gone up to the apartment through the side door and traipsed around in the debris, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Sometimes I went into the courtyard and up the steps to the second floor, where I walked through the empty rooms and looked down at the carts making their way along the main street. A couple sitting straight-backed on a coachbox, each in a lambskin hat.

I walked through my room wearing a heavy overcoat. The cold, dry smell of excrement emanated from the bath. The floor was still strewn with the a.s.signments that had earned me the praise of my teachers and pages from photo alb.u.ms: summers in the Transylvanian Carpathians, the peaks of Maramaros, my great aunts and cousins now ga.s.sed to death. I had not picked anything up off the floor or if I did I put it back. My previous year's coat was not yet tight or short: I hadn't grown an inch in a year; I may have shrunk. Standing in that pile of shame, that mockery of homesickness, I gazed at my astonished face in the surviving mirror and nodded at the little fellow who had found his way home after all.

A woman captured my gaze: a naked woman's body, a display-window mannequin. She was obviously a woman: she had b.r.e.a.s.t.s and inked-in pubic hair. Her eyes had been stabbed out with a dagger, her body riddled with bullet holes. Why did they shoot at her seeing she was a woman? I heard a rustle behind my back: Gypsy children were looking to see what I was after or had found, because there might be something in it for them too.

Walking along the main street on those late-winter mornings. I would be invited into one shop or another. It was a nasty March: muddy, gray, inflexible. We were apprehensive, between destinations, yet found it natural enough to be there and have someone provide for us. This was the place we had longed to be. We had looked forward to taking over as adults, but we were just children after all. The wind blew through the family letters in my old room and the prayer-book pages in the synagogue.

Our weakness was palpable: we could no more begin a new life than remove all the rubble; it was cold in our rooms and noisy in the kitchen, and the town had no library. I dawdled in the thinly stocked shops of the men back from forced labor as I once had in my father's. Two or three of them would team up, one buying, the other selling. Friends from the camp. Having lost their families, they had nothing else to do. For a while money could buy processed sugar or flannel or hoes, but soon the only valid currency was eggs or flour. Still, the door would open and customers come in. The young widowed men began looking at women again, the Jewish women trickling back from the deportation camps and the Christian women of the area, former typists, nannies, and housekeepers. If a wife had been killed, her younger sister might still be alive. A woman would enter house and bed, and children be born by the year's end. The loss of the original family was no longer a nightmare, rather a painful reality. If things worked out, you could mourn the dead in the company of a new wife and new children, though more in silence than in words.

But in 1950, just as returnees were getting on their feet again-gathering goods to sell, furnis.h.i.+ng houses, filling them with families-the People's Government took over all businesses, all workshops, all houses, everything. You could see it coming. This was the second blow, the final blow to the Jewish community in Berettyoujfalu. The first had occurred in 1949, when a number of the men hung "Back Soon" signs on their doors, went out to the edge of town, and climbed into a truck, destination Israel. Janko Kertesz the shoemaker continued telling his juicy stories on a three-legged stool in Naharia in Hungarian: he had no lack of Hungarian-speaking clients. Janko had lost his wife and two children.

In November 1944, after the Soviet troops had pa.s.sed through Berettyoujfalu and set up their headquarters in the district courthouse, Balogh the blacksmith, the strongest man in the village, was elected president of the National Committee. During the few weeks of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, he had been the president of the Directorate. He was a man people trusted in extreme situations, though there was nothing particularly pleasant about him: he was a terrible grumbler, a malcontent. Nor with the black scarred pits in his face where sparks had landed could he have been called handsome. Loose oilcloth trousers, black boots, and shovel-like paws tipped with dark nails completed the picture. He would lug things here and there in anarchic bundles, meting out justice by giving a poor farmer a rich farmer's porker, though not doing himself any damage in the process.

Anyway, one day this Balogh went to headquarters (the former county courthouse) to lodge a complaint with the potbellied colonel against a Soviet soldier who had gone to the woman next door with a goose he wanted cooked, and taken her eiderdown cover to trade for bad moons.h.i.+ne. The commander stood the guilty party in front of the smithy's coal-cellar door. Then taking a running start, he gave the soldier such a kick in the rear that he tumbled down the stairs. There were no witnesses to what followed, but I heard that the soldier got nothing but water for three days, and when he was good and hungry, the colonel sent for him.

"Do you regret your offense?"

And how how!

He would get something to eat then.

The colonel got on fine with the blacksmith, but the powers that be did not. Back in 1919 the gendarmes who took over after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic had beaten Balogh the blacksmith black and blue, but he was still the strongest man in the village. In 1945 he again proved stubborn, and because he could not get along with the authorities he returned to his smithy. It was he in 1956 who led the demonstrations, carrying the national flag and becoming the president of the local Revolutionary Committee. When the old guard Communists came back to power, they, depraved weapon-happy drunkards that they were, dragged him out to the edge of the village and took care of him. He died soon thereafter.

My sister and I remained in Berettyoujfalu for another month. I don't remember how we got word that we would be going to Nagyvarad in a Russian truck, but Laszlo Kun, a cousin of mine who lived in Bucharest (the son of Aunt Sarolta, my father's favorite sister) went there to pick us up. No one asked us if we wanted to go, but my father's friends took it for granted that we needed to go where people would take us in for the long term. My cousin, a textile manufacturer and businessman, arranged for our lodgings in advance. The gray-green truck had a tarpaulin roof and benches in the back for pa.s.sengers and was carrying so many packages of black-market goods that we had no place to put our legs. Behind the driver sat a sergeant who had learned the language of every country that the Soviets had moved through, and instantly found his place in each of their local economies. He sold me a Cossack hat and traded me a dagger for an alarm clock. (Today I still think warmly of that grinning sergeant. More of him later.) That autumn Nagyvarad and Berettyoujfalu had been in the same country, even the same county; by then, early April, they were in different countries. But by then it wasn't Bucharest or Budapest giving the orders; it was the Russians, along with the local authorities that always seem to pop up.

My sister eva and I were taken to an address in Nagyvarad where some plump women were engaged in looking after a baby. My sister was happy to join them, while I gave myself up to pleasant solitude. I lived in an apartment one floor up, home to a forced-labor returnee who had lost his family. He was a prosecutor who traveled a lot on business and did not sleep at home, so the s.p.a.cious apartment was virtually all mine. I would sit on the balcony sampling the liquors I found in the cabinet. It was perfect springtime weather, and I watched the fast-flowing Koros sweep everything away like paper boats. Lounging on the balcony with a book in my hand, I wanted things to stand still; I wanted to hold them as they were and protect them.

There are times during childhood, times of inspiration, when we know what we do not know even though we do not particularly need to know it, because merely existing, walking along the river or a row of shop windows or a peristyle is joy enough.

I make my way by smell in my grandfather's house, seeking a cupboard, an oak tree, a dining cabinet covered by a lace cloth, the porcelain figurines in a gla.s.s case easily penetrated by a bayonet. The inner turns of the garden remind me of dinners under the arbor. To live well you need more than means; you need a certain lightness, but most important, you need to stay alive. You need to give the beef broth and the coffee and the cigar each its proper due. There used to be a life in which everything had its time and place, with tasks to be done that stacked up neatly like ironed s.h.i.+rts in the wardrobe: a time to read and write letters, a time for the Neue Zurcher Zeitung Neue Zurcher Zeitung and the and the Pester Lloyd Pester Lloyd and the government and opposition papers of the capital and provincial cities, a time to nap, a time for the cafe, for a walk, for the theater. There used to be a life in which there was no reason for grandfathers to hang their jackets on any but the same coat rack before changing into a tobacco-colored camel-hair housecoat. and the government and opposition papers of the capital and provincial cities, a time to nap, a time for the cafe, for a walk, for the theater. There used to be a life in which there was no reason for grandfathers to hang their jackets on any but the same coat rack before changing into a tobacco-colored camel-hair housecoat.

In those earlier days of the late thirties there was plenty to talk about at table-once I was old enough to weigh the adults' words, that is. The rebellious sons of the bourgeoisie traveled to Paris and London, not Vienna or Abbazia. They did not go to Moscow. They were leaving Berlin. They would make impatient declarations at supper, eating with silver cutlery whatever the housemaid (or, in more modest households, the cook) served them when the kitchen buzzer rang, its b.u.t.ton built into the table (or, in more modest households, hanging above it) to send the message that she could clear and bring the next course.

A serene permanence seemed to abide in the weekly menu and starched caps worn by the house staff. Even if faces changed from Juliska to Piroska, from Erzsi to Irma, from Regina to Vilma, there was little change in the preparation and serving of food. The younger members of the family were at a loss to explain what intolerable problem lay behind a change in staff, as they were satisfied with all of them, from Juliska to Vilma. They all married properly, with a proper dowry. Nor could the younger generation understand the odd new relations.h.i.+ps being forced not only on themselves, but on everyone around them. More than one of the well-provided for heirs made the case for cohabitation.

Now those days were gone too. I stood on the balcony in an overcoat, watching the spits of foam jostling on the rocks: the Koros was a sweeping ma.s.s of water even when low. I went to see Six Hours After the War Six Hours After the War with its images of camp prisoners and the unforgettable inside-left soccer star: every day an armed policeman in one uniform or another would take them to clear rubble. Once I had spent the requisite amount of time with the baby and the plump women in the warmth of the second floor, I would go up to my room and read or close my eyes and concentrate on the river's thrum, gripping the armrests of my chair and waving my head back and forth until I was dizzy and could no longer think. with its images of camp prisoners and the unforgettable inside-left soccer star: every day an armed policeman in one uniform or another would take them to clear rubble. Once I had spent the requisite amount of time with the baby and the plump women in the warmth of the second floor, I would go up to my room and read or close my eyes and concentrate on the river's thrum, gripping the armrests of my chair and waving my head back and forth until I was dizzy and could no longer think.

My month there pa.s.sed quickly, even though I visited the bureau for returned deportees every morning. Camps began to be liberated at the end of April and the beginning of May. The men and women would arrive in their striped uniforms or various combinations of striped and civilian garments. They were gaunt, and their voices seemed to emerge from the bottom of a well. Their eyes were on constant alert, antic.i.p.ating the next blow. The clients-the deportees-gathered in a large hall. Behind the windows at the counter, clerks would refer to a list that might shed light on who was alive and who dead. They also distributed civilian clothes. Many departed carrying the striped garments; others left the camp uniform there, better forgotten.

I asked the none-too-friendly woman behind the window whether she could tell me anything about my parents, which she could not. Leaving her our present address, I sat down on a chair in the hall and waited for them to come, because here they would receive not only civilian clothing but also a bit of money and information about where we were. And where would they go if not here? My mother, who was from Nagyvarad, would naturally come here: everyone went to the city of their birth. And it was from Nagyvarad that her older sisters and their children and grandchildren had left for the gas chambers. Someone might come back, though not the children. They would most certainly not be coming.

I tried to imagine my parents entering the hall, stepping up to the window, and asking after us, imagine myself das.h.i.+ng over to them and touching them. I wondered whether they had changed much, whether we would spot one another easily. Returnees showed us photographs of faces looking out at the camera with candor. The intervening year had carved the knowledge of death and mourning on one and all, even the most ordinary. One told me my parents' chances of survival would be better if they happened to have ended up in Austria rather than Auschwitz, though nothing was yet certain. So I found myself hoping that my parents were in what was still German-controlled territory-in other words, in constant mortal danger-because it would have been worse to imagine them in liberated Auschwitz.

I had heard about what had happened there. Since no other Jewish children from Nagyvarad and the surrounding region had survived, I was the only child waiting for parents at the bureau. The women sitting on the bench next to me explained that the PolishJewish inmates would take the children from their hands and pa.s.s them to a grandmother or other old woman: they wanted to save the younger women from having to accompany their children to the gas chambers if so directed by Dr. Mengele. The doctor must have particularly hated children if he sent young women and others still capable of working to be ga.s.sed just for holding the hand of a child: the children had to die, immediately, unconditionally. Children and those in physical contact with them were motioned by the doctor to the right the way you snap your hand over a mosquito buzzing around you in summer on the terrace. He saw my coevals as pests, not children. He saw the children's faces, yet did not see them, his eyes cataracted over with words, an officer, intelligent and imperious, carrying out his command to the letter. And since the command was to exterminate every last trace of them, there was no place for individual consideration: each Jewish child was a mere speck in the ma.s.s. It did not matter what sort of children they were; all that mattered was that they were Jewish. People said the doctor was no more than a vain young man with a handsome face, more interested in twins-that is, his scientific career-than in his anthropomorphic guinea pigs. What a nice gift for the Fuhrer if medicine could help Germanic-or preferably just German-mothers to give birth to twins and limit the propagation of others. In a short time Europe would be teeming with fertile Germans.

At any rate, I was a real curiosity at the bureau. Some parents would not look at me; others looked at me and cried. One wanted to give me something I didn't accept; another shook me, then cried like the others. It was too much in the end. They had my address; they could find me. I stopped going.

I recently had a visit from a Berettyoufalu acquaintance, the writer Tibor Tardos, who is now seventy-eight. For me he will always be the legend, the big boy. His father, the lawyer Henrik Tardos, was a friend of my father's who died of diabetes at the age I am now. I remember his bald pate as if it were yesterday. A clear-sighted man, he sent Tibor to Paris, where he preferred chasing women and tennis b.a.l.l.s to studying: he wanted to be a writer. Bored with politics, he would not have thought of leaving on his own, but in 1938, after Munich, his father realized that the Allies would not protect Eastern Europe from Hitler-in other words, that our fate was sealed. He was a tall, affable man. He dressed well and thought straight. Not one to fall for rhetoric, he sensed the interests behind the words. He presented the county health officer with a gold cigarette case, and Tibor was released from military service and allowed to return to Paris. There he wrote surrealist books that his father would proudly show me, though he understood not a word. When he sent his son a telegram, he would ask my mother to translate it, since she was the only one in his circle of acquaintances who more or less knew French. After the war I stood before their bookcase as his father took down Tibor's books like relics. And relics they were.

"It was a good village," said the aged Tibor to me. "People lived side by side in peace until those German insanities started happening." Life had an order to it. In the movie theater owned by the father of our friend Karcsi Makk, the boxes on the left were for Jews, the boxes on the right for Christians. They would tip their hats to one another and nod their ambiguous nods. They were separate, yet together. Young peasants sat in the cheaper seats in front of them, Gypsy children in the first row. On Sunday afternoons the Apollo Theater offered a cross-section of village society.

The generation of our fathers needed no incentive to work. Diligence was in their blood, though there were those who aped aristocratic ways: hunting, playing cards, and taking drink with the gentry. Jews had their own tennis court, right next to the Christians', and the Jewish bourgeoisie engaged German governesses for their children and had them taught French or English if they could afford it. Friends.h.i.+ps were separate from professional interests. Henrik Tardos in his capacity as lawyer for the Berettyoujfalu Jewish community demanded that my father remove one meter from a newly built multistory house. The community held that the house infringed upon the three-meter-wide service road running from the back of our garden to the synagogue behind it, the road I looked down on from the balcony every Friday evening. That is when the men in black hats would walk three abreast, their tallises rolled up under their arms and their prayer books in their hands, deep in conversation and not the least cramped for s.p.a.ce. But the community leaders, friends and former cla.s.smates of my father, proved unmovable. They may have been annoyed at the idea of a multistory house on the main road, the only one at the time besides the community center, because on the Great Plain towns tended to expand horizontally into the distance. Imagination moved horizontally, and my father's vertical vision needed curbing. The proceedings went all the way to the Supreme Court, and although my father won the suit his friends.h.i.+p with Tardos remained intact. Nor was the subject broached at their Sunday-afternoon gatherings over coffee, cake, and liqueur.

I was surprised that Tibor did not know what had happened to his father. He was aware that he had been deported to Austria, but not that the Gestapo had arrested him with my father and one of the Kepes brothers. The other Kepes brother was taken to Auschwitz but came back with a number on his arm. They were robust men, not particularly well-educated but quick to take the initiative, worthy of respect, and full of good will. One was a lumber merchant; the other dealt in wines. They saw to it that their children went to university, but like Tibor's father they never left Berettyoujfalu. Their wives died in Auschwitz with one of their daughters. They were beautiful, educated girls, like Dr. Spernath's daughter. Dr. Spernath's son was a strapping young man. He is alive to this day, having survived the war, thanks to false papers, as a Wehrmacht officer. His parents were killed in Auschwitz.

There was reason enough for the Jews of Berettyoujfalu to be politically active and save their children by sending them away, even if they themselves remained. They were fine where they were: they had built houses, made lives, and earned reputations in plain view of everyone. Be it honor or shame, they had brought it upon themselves. They were known for the quality of the firewood, the wine, the cart-axles they sold. My son Miklos used to make fun of me when I asked him about the shoes he bought. "Are they nice and comfortable?" He may have realized I was quoting my father, but I approved of my father's concern wholeheartedly.

My mother and father came back from their Austrian internment camp at the end of May 1945. They cleaned out the house and started up the business again. They did not give the issue a second thought, as it would never have occurred to my father not to pick up where he had left off. At first there were just four shelves of goods, then six, then twelve. The shelves filled fast, as there were five children to support.

As a survivor, I owe my greatest grat.i.tude to Providence, yet much as I would like to regard it as something other than coincidence, I am uneasy with every case of providential mercy. For if the Lord of the Fates willed my survival, then why not the survival of the other children? They were no more guilty than I, after all. I cannot be so generous as to hand over Vera, Gyuri, Kati, Jutka, Baba, Jancsi, Gabi, or Ica, to say nothing of Aunt Sarolta, Uncle Dolfi, Aunt Giza, Uncle Naci, Aunt Ilonka, Uncle Pista, Aunt Margit, Uncle Bela, Uncle Gyula and the rest to complete oblivion.

In place of a childhood there is an absence, a story that has not been and perhaps cannot be fully told. Two generations after the fact, I feel prompted to preserve the memory of the Jews of Berettyoujfalu. The synagogue is now an iron-goods warehouse. There was some talk of turning it into a concert hall, but nothing came of it. The Jews who return to visit generally go to see Annus Lisztes, a sharp woman in her eighties, one of the original inhabitants, who lives in the house of the former rabbi. "Come more often. It's your home town, isn't it?" she said to me last summer.

In August 1945 we got a phone call from the border crossing at Biharkeresztes informing us that Istvan and Pali, two orphans traveling from their aunt's in Kolozsvar (which had once again become part of Romania) to their uncle's in Berettyoujfalu, were waiting there to be picked up. My parents happened to be taking a summer break in Hajduszoboszlo, and my father had left the business in my hands. I went to a carter who said he was too tired to go anywhere, but his horse and cart would go if I drove them. This was a staggering offer on his part; it was tantamount to entrusting a boy of thirteen with an automobile. Until then I had been allowed to hold the reins only if the coachman sat next to me on the box. Anyway, the carter hitched up the horses, and I climbed onto the box and gave the reins a tug. I could have taken the old road, but chose the new one, so I could drive the length of the town.

The sun had abandoned the stubbled field, leaving the landscape to cool. It was dark by the time I reached Biharkeresztes. I would have liked to hug Istvan, but he just held out his hand. I babbled something about the horses. He had come from a real city where the cream of the Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals were regular visitors at his uncle's villa. Whatever I told him was a mere village anecdote.

"How is stabilization going?" asked Istvan, to raise the level of conversation. He was referring to the monetary reform. I was proud to give him some kind of answer and disappointed he had no interest in my cart, whose progress he called slow and b.u.mpy. This was undoubtedly so. He barely watched while I watered the horses at the sweep. When I mentioned that horses had been stabled at the ujfalu synagogue by the Germans, then the Hungarians, then the Soviets, all he said was "Hm." He was through with Jews now that they had been swept away by history. I mentioned Uncle Bela, but this too irritated him. I still had my parents, whereas he was orphaned and had no reason to love his parents' bourgeois reality. He said that he had become a communist and that his father, had he survived, would be his enemy.

Istvan had read Stalin's The Questions of Leninism The Questions of Leninism several times and had even taken a crack at several times and had even taken a crack at Das Kapital; Das Kapital; I had read nothing of the sort. Istvan had put up communist posters; I had put up nothing of the sort. I had attended various election rallies, drawn by the fact that there were several parties: what I liked about the communists was that they were communists; I liked the smallholders because they were smallholders. Istvan had joined the Hungarian Communist Party at the age of thirteen. By fifteen he was an official Party activist, earning a salary by teaching I had read nothing of the sort. Istvan had put up communist posters; I had put up nothing of the sort. I had attended various election rallies, drawn by the fact that there were several parties: what I liked about the communists was that they were communists; I liked the smallholders because they were smallholders. Istvan had joined the Hungarian Communist Party at the age of thirteen. By fifteen he was an official Party activist, earning a salary by teaching Das Kapital Das Kapital to adults. At twenty he was expelled from the Party and the university for something he had written, and at twenty-three he played a significant role in the Revolution in Gyr, so significant that when the Soviet tanks rolled in, his boss and friend, the elderly Attila Szigethy, told him to leave the country. Szigethy himself waited calmly to be arrested, and a short time later was to fall from the fourth-floor window of political police headquarters onto the cement courtyard below. I never joined the Party and never thought I should leave the country, not even after 1956. to adults. At twenty he was expelled from the Party and the university for something he had written, and at twenty-three he played a significant role in the Revolution in Gyr, so significant that when the Soviet tanks rolled in, his boss and friend, the elderly Attila Szigethy, told him to leave the country. Szigethy himself waited calmly to be arrested, and a short time later was to fall from the fourth-floor window of political police headquarters onto the cement courtyard below. I never joined the Party and never thought I should leave the country, not even after 1956.

Istvan was more theoretical than I and had a more sensitive and radical morality than my own. He was a revolutionary, while I am conservative by nature: I prefer to let things be. My worldview was eclectic, and I did not adhere to any doctrine. Flitting about and refraining from headlong commitment, I could always correct my excesses the next day. Everything Istvan said had an intelligent beginning, middle, and end. If I took a stab at something and he liked it, he would make an approving click with his tongue. He formulated every problem as if speaking to himself.

"This Revolution," he said to me at the end of October 1956, as we stood holding machine guns on the student national guard truck, "is not only against Stalin; it has no use for Lenin either." I was not the least shaken by this statement. By that point Istvan had run through every conceivable issue based on an a.n.a.lysis of data he had smuggled from the State Planning Office and on his experience in the countryside.

"The only benefit of emigration is that I've got hold of a copy of Kierkegaard," he wrote to me from Oxford. What came after the defeat of the Revolution, a slightly less-communistic, more bourgeois communism, was something Istvan did not find particularly tasteful. No one could be homesick for that! that! Had he not emigrated, he might well have hanged. If that kind of thing was to my liking, I was welcome to it. Had he not emigrated, he might well have hanged. If that kind of thing was to my liking, I was welcome to it.

Istvan pretty much knew all three volumes of Das Kapital Das Kapital by heart, but capital itself left him cold. He was found dead in his bed in March 1960, a doctoral student at Trinity College. Gas poisoning, signs of suicide, no note. The previous night he had returned to his rented flat from his brother Pali's birthday party. He had moved out of College lodgings, which he regarded as a rubber-walled sanatorium and where he had had a servant. The housemaid called the police. He was buried in Oxford. The Budapest by heart, but capital itself left him cold. He was found dead in his bed in March 1960, a doctoral student at Trinity College. Gas poisoning, signs of suicide, no note. The previous night he had returned to his rented flat from his brother Pali's birthday party. He had moved out of College lodgings, which he regarded as a rubber-walled sanatorium and where he had had a servant. The housemaid called the police. He was buried in Oxford. The Budapest Esti Hirlap Esti Hirlap printed a small obituary on the last page. Not long ago someone said he had it on reliable authority that Istvan had had "suicide committed on him." He was the best mind of the young post-1956 Hungarian diaspora, which may have given rise to the statement. Pali looked into the matter, but the source had gone silent. printed a small obituary on the last page. Not long ago someone said he had it on reliable authority that Istvan had had "suicide committed on him." He was the best mind of the young post-1956 Hungarian diaspora, which may have given rise to the statement. Pali looked into the matter, but the source had gone silent.

Some time in the seventies I traveled to Berettyoujfalu with my children and our American cousin Tony, Pali's son. We cut a path through the man-tall weeds to the family plot, where Tony cried out, "Jesus Christ! I'm standing on my grandmother!" It was Aunt Mariska's marble grave. My daughter Dorka, tired of the graves, wanted to swim, so we sent her down to the Berettyo. The water smelled like pig manure. One of the cooperative stables was emptying its wastewater into it.

We walked the length of the town. The single-story middle-cla.s.s houses on the main street, the homes of vanished Jews, stood gray and peeling. I drank palinka palinka in the railway bar. Everything was as it had been forty years earlier except that the hansoms were gone and the restaurant had become a bar. On the train an elderly Gypsy had given his son a slap for suspecting his father of stealing his money. The boy put up no defense, only cried and vowed to kill him. "I cannot strike my father, but I can shove a knife into his throat." A policeman with a German shepherd and a truncheon appeared on the scene. "Jesus f.u.c.king Christ! Why don't you respect your father? Put down that knife, and don't you be stabbing anyone on me here in the train. You'll get it back in Budapest." in the railway bar. Everything was as it had been forty years earlier except that the hansoms were gone and the restaurant had become a bar. On the train an elderly Gypsy had given his son a slap for suspecting his father of stealing his money. The boy put up no defense, only cried and vowed to kill him. "I cannot strike my father, but I can shove a knife into his throat." A policeman with a German shepherd and a truncheon appeared on the scene. "Jesus f.u.c.king Christ! Why don't you respect your father? Put down that knife, and don't you be stabbing anyone on me here in the train. You'll get it back in Budapest."

"It's so real real!" enthused Tony. enthused Tony.

"Father feels most at home on trains like this," my son Miklos noted somewhat acridly.

Until 1948, when I was fifteen, I would regularly visit my parents' house in Berettyoujfalu. After that my father's hardware business and house were taken over by the state and my parents moved to Budapest to be with my sister eva and me. From then on only letters came. They came from the local Party secretary to my university, saying that my father was a bourgeois and not merely a pet.i.t-bourgeois, meaning he was a cla.s.s enemy, meaning I was unworthy of a diploma granted by the authority of the people.

Later, in the seventies, I went to the village of my childhood on several occasions to visit my friend Toni Baranyi in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, which was run by a superb doctor, Istvan Samu. Many of us had had great respect for Toni's sharp mind and sardonic sense for the heart of any matter. He had his own room in the hospital, where he could smoke and read as he wished, and he sometimes put on a white robe. He could leave the hospital at will, but still required Dr. Samu's fatherly support and the friends.h.i.+p of a doctor couple. He helped work up patients' case histories through thorough questioning, thus playing the role he had filled in other mental inst.i.tutions, the inmate prince who in intellect and learning towered over patients and doctors alike. His talent as a writer was evident primarily in the musculature of his formulations: his words. .h.i.t their mark the moment he opened his mouth. At home in Pesterzsebet he would mostly just sit in his armchair and stare out of the window into the street at the similar working-cla.s.s house opposite or read the only book in the room. He gave away all books once he'd read them. Having no desire for possessions, he was finicky only about his trousers. Otherwise he was no dandy. He would go down to the garden gate several times an hour to see if anyone had rung. He was ready to deal with any intruders, by force if necessary.

Toni Baranyi always felt better after seeing his doctor friends in Berettyoujfalu, where he would go to the beach and have a swim in the Berettyo. The time I visited him, we had an animated conversation in the former Lisztes Restaurant. I was the only guest in the upstairs hotel, where I found the Gypsy boy who played piano at the restaurant in the evening playing chess with himself. Toni and I sat in high-backed chairs in the restaurant's large main room, digging into wild boar sausage and garlic cabbage, drinking a heavy red wine, and watching a row of identical, well-nourished, self-confident peasant faces engaged in singing. The heavy-set men wore dark jackets, white s.h.i.+rts unb.u.t.toned at the top, and rubber boots for the mud, and gripped their gla.s.ses with dark-skinned, thick-fingered hands. At one time the corner table had been reserved for the town notables; now, in the seventies, it housed detective types, the city and county police department having moved next door. They were telling jokes, jokes that were good if the commanding officer at the head of the table laughed.

Facing me, a young lady with a touch of a mustache brought a forkful of kidney and brains to her lips. Truck drivers waiting for the main course popped pork-crackling buns into their mouths to go with their beer. Some pried them apart with curiosity; others skipped the fuss and bit them in half. Dollops of sour cream glimmered on the stuffed cabbage, which, as it crumbled under the knife, revealed that it contained more rice than meat. The man who looked after the local dam was served a small vat of bean soup in which cubed beef swam in abundance. Soon tiny roses of fat glittered on his droopy, graying mustache.

Then the rectangular bottle of marc brandy came out, and a gla.s.s or two slid down the gullet, leaving not a trace. The flypaper hanging from the lamp had done its job and was completely covered. A double ba.s.s leaned against the wall under a color photo of the Gypsy band's leader, who had been playing here for years, his muttonchops running down to his dewlap in a wave. Now he was grinning, the violist earnestly chewing his mustache, and the cimbalom cimbalom player using the paprika shaker with scientific precision as he polished off his roast beef and fried onions. player using the paprika shaker with scientific precision as he polished off his roast beef and fried onions.

A thin young couple at the next table ordered os...o...b..co, which they knocked against their plates to dislodge every last nugget, concentrating fully on the process to the exclusion of each other and lifting the marrow on toast to their excited mouths.

The long-limbed, slightly tipsy waiter gave the waitress a kiss on the neck. She recoiled. The hostess behind the old-fas.h.i.+oned cash machine drummed her fingers while studying the varicose veins in her legs. A row of cars decked in flowers pulled up, and guests poured in, half-happy, half-drunk, taking their seats around the long tables. The waiter started bringing out the brandy; the music was not far behind. Men in thick furs, leather jackets, and boots breathed in the aroma of the hot stew and cautiously bit into the pickled peppers. The guests discussed the trend to smaller portions. "They're looking out for our figures," said one. An enormous young butcher in a b.l.o.o.d.y ap.r.o.n danced into the kitchen with half a pig over his shoulder and flirted with the cook, while he