A Guest In My Own Country Part 5

Born under the sign of Aries like myself, he saw adversity as adventure and was unable to stay angry for long. He merely moved on to the next item on his to-do list, earning the money for a new car and accepting from the outset that it would turn out a losing proposition like the last. In those days luck was an ephemeral guest if it came at all, glittering in one spot for a spell, then evaporating just as quickly. He had two good years after the war, then four more after emigrating, but the last time I saw him-we were walking along Fifth Avenue looking for a certain tobacconist's where he had seen a cherrywood pipe in the window that had caught his fancy-I realized he had resigned himself to the pensioner's view of the world: he spoke highly of walks by the sea and had stopped making plans.

My father was unsuited to prosecutorial statements. Instead he would reflect, "What is this fellow trying to pull out of himself?" as if everyone had a few extra characters lurking inside, like suits in a closet. I imagined him saying to me, "And you, my boy, what do you want to pull out of yourself?" "Nothing, Father. I'm just waiting for the bell to ring in the front hall. Maybe I'll go down to the garden with Kati, but I'll always be where I can see you in case you come home."

One day Laci phoned from Nagyvarad to say that our parents were alive. They were at home in Berettyoujfalu, and we would be seeing them soon. How soon? Soon Soon. He refused to go beyond the essentials. Our parents were probably as thin and sickly as other returnees. I didn't relish imagining what their fate had been given what I had heard of concentration camps.

In the meantime I hunkered down in that apartment so little like home. Everything exuded normalcy, yet things could have worked out much less favorably. In the last year of the war two English pilots had hidden out in the room where I was staying. Their plane had been shot down, and the resistance network brought them here. One evening during dinner the concierge rang the bell and asked who was living there besides the immediate family. "No one," said Laci. The concierge wanted proof, but Laci would not let him in. When the concierge tried to push his way in, Laci gave him a punch in the face that sent him tumbling down the stairs. "You won't regret keeping quiet about this," said Laci, helping him to his feet.

Even as we spooned our soup from Rosenthal porcelain bowls, the image of our parents taken from Nagyvarad and Kolozsvar to the gas chambers had floated in the air above the chrome-plated silverware and the covered soup tureen. Whenever they were mentioned, a silence would fall over the room and Iboly and Laci's faces strained to hold back the spasms tightening their throats.

With a nod from Hitler and Mussolini Hungarian troops reoccupied Northern Transylvania-and hence Nagyvarad and Kolozsvar-from Romania in 1940. In 1944 the Jews in Northern Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz, while the Jews in Southern Transylvania remained under Romanian rule. Thus my uncle from Bra.s.so and cousin from Bucharest survived that critical year, while my relatives from Nagyvarad, Kolozsvar, and Berettyoujfalu, except those few young men drafted into forced-labor service units alongside the army, perished. Some of the men in the labor units were eventually shot into ma.s.s graves anyway, but others were left to live-the decision being determined at their commander's whim-and made their way back home. In other words, the fate of the Jews sent to forced labor depended on whether their company commander happened to feel like killing or rescuing them at the time. If he was a hardened fascist who stuck to his guns or if such a one replaced the softer and more feeling reservist, the Jewish men's days were numbered. Although I avoided imagining where my parents might have ended up, I had heard enough at the Office of Deportee Aid in Nagyvarad about what happened to those who managed to pull themselves off the train on the platform at Birkenau, where prisoners were divided into groups depending on their usefulness. If they had gone to work in the fields, they would occasionally find something edible.

We had no idea when Laci would arrive with our parents. Each day could be the day. The excitement of antic.i.p.ation was great.

Suddenly I was no longer able to give my full attention to little Kati's meanderings in the garden. Yes, even Kati, to whom I owed a new fairy tale, could wait. The tailor in the ground-floor shop-he was supposed to measure me for a new suit, though I was perfectly content with the old one-could wait too. Indeed, I was glad I wouldn't have to hear him ask on which side, right or left, I put my "tool." I needed time for the most important thing of all: retiring to an elevated spot in the garden that let me keep track of all who arrived.

Finally the rumble of the familiar car, the slam of its doors, and the voices of several people, most prominently Laci's. Then a woman's voice: my mother's. I ran out to take my mother's bag from her hand. eva too appeared, eager to take my father's rucksack. Bickering about who would take what was a restraining influence on the excitement of falling into one another's embrace. It would give the kisses time to dry. Walking into the garden, my father squinted in the bright June suns.h.i.+ne and dropped behind; my mother held out her arms. I had to gulp back my tears. Yes, these were my parents.

They were smaller, thinner, and older than the image I had been carrying in my mind. The eyes of both held the same probing question: Who are you, you who have been in my thoughts for so long? Laci left us to ourselves. There was a long silence during which we held one another's hands. I looked at them and nodded, then said the words Mother, Father Mother, Father. Then we did all sorts of things: we walked to a park my sister and I now knew inside out; we treated my parents at the Italian ice-cream vendor's. Gazing at a girl with black curls drinking from her palm at the fountain, then sprinkling the water over her hair, I felt a bittersweet peacefulness settle over me: how nice that the people around us had no desire to stake us out, turn us in, have us dragged off and exterminated. You can relax when no one around you wants you dead.

After dinner, in our pajamas, we squatted on our parents' bed and listened to one another's adventure novels. My mother told their story, my father commenting with an occasional grimace. On the forced march from Vienna to Mauthausen a dozen of them had dashed into the woods at a bend in the road at my mother's instigation. They were so quick that the guards failed to notice. It was early spring and survival in the woods was difficult. They encountered an SS unit and pa.s.sed themselves off as Hungarian refugees. The soldiers were glad the group spoke German and was willing to cook the hares and deer they had found in the forest, so they all sat around the roast in a friendly mood. A pretty young girl among the escapees rather caught the fancy of the young and handsome unit commander, who engaged in some coy flirtatiousness in the interest of good relations.

This sylvan idyll, which lasted two weeks, turned out to have saved their lives, since none of those who reached Mauthausen-those who had not dared to escape at the time-remained alive. My father's role in the adventure was to keep his mouth shut, as his acting would not have got him far: he was incapable of cheating or lying and had always kept his books a.s.siduously, always paid his taxes, and never bought on credit (though he also enjoyed the minute discount he received from paying in cash). He would repeat ad nauseam the German saying Ein Mann, ein Wort Ein Mann, ein Wort-a man is as good as his word-but such simple-minded piety was dangerous. He would never have survived the war had he not yielded to Mother, who in the face of authority and laws was stronger-willed, more tenacious, impulsive. The commander, ever more frustrated by the forcefulness with which the young woman rebuffed him, eventually reported a band of escaped Jews hiding in the forest.

So in April 1945 they were packed into a wagon by Austrian gendarmes and traveled for days to reach a multipurpose camp located amidst cherry trees in bloom and housing people of every origin, a great many prisoners of war included. It was not an extermination camp, though, and it was there, in Krems, that my parents were liberated.

Mother's quiet yet determined resistance predated their ordeal. Take, for example, the case of the broiled sausage. The market square in Berettyoujfalu had an open kitchen stand from which the aroma of pork sausage wafted far and wide, enticing not so much mother as son, who had fallen into temptation. From whatever angle I sniffed, the sausage would win out.

Not that it had no compet.i.tion: I was particularly partial to the smell of sunflower rolls-leftover sunflower seeds pressed into a disc and used as fodder-that filtered through that olfactory cavalcade. I was also drawn by the gentle whiteness of the tables where old ladies sold sour cream, b.u.t.ter, farmer's cheese, and ewe-cheeses big as a child's head. Ultimately my mother ceded to the pressure and bought a twist of sausage. Daringly we sneaked bites before lunch, sitting on the pinewood chairs in the kitchen and using my pocketknife. We ate quickly, like conspirators, hoping to conceal our a.s.sault on Jewish dietary proscriptions from my father, ever the good son, who though resigned to the fact that my mother bought rump of beef along with the shoulder, would have found the appearance of pork in the house unconscionable. In any case, our attempts at concealment failed: my father happened to come upstairs in search of my mother and got an eyeful of the sausage champers. And yet he pretended to have seen nothing.

My mother was willing to lie, to break the law if necessary. She had led the eager Gestapo officers and Hungarian gendarmes around the house and denied what needed to be denied. Women are better at that sort of thing. When my mother was arrested with my father in May 1944, they were first held for two days at the fire station in Berettyoujfalu. I thank my stars that my mother had the nerve to get herself locked up, leaving us children on our own. One of the gendarmes accepted a bribe to let my father into the room where my mother was being held and she told him in no uncertain terms to demand an audience with Chief Constable Gyorgy Fenyes at the local police headquarters, which was well disposed towards them. She thereby saved both Father and herself, since the train they were packed into went by mistake to Austria instead of Auschwitz, and in Austria chances of survival were sixty percent. She also saved us, because had she been at our side the gas chamber would have been our lot-mine for certain, and most likely eva's as well. I never held her leaving us against her: a woman's place is at her husband's side.

At noon on the third day we took them lunch. Even food was now a political statement, an expression of solidarity and protest. But there was no longer anyone to deliver the food to. At first we were glad to see that the doors to the holding area were open, but it turned out to be empty. One of the gendarmes told us they had been taken to a place near Debrecen, and next day we learned from the Chief Constable that they were on a farm that had been converted into an internment camp. He advised us not to go there, however, as we would not be allowed in. We took the roast home and nibbled at it, then put the rest away for dinner and played ping-pong all afternoon. At the camp the gendarmes questioned my father about the location of our valuables. He said that he had none, that all his capital was in the business. I don't know what they did to him, but by sticking to his story he saved our chances for starting over, at least in part. That gold, which he would trade for nails, wire, and pots when peace came, was for him what a last ma.n.u.script is to a novelist. They did manage to get information out of Uncle Bela, however, so they came to the garden and pulled the steel box out of the well. I remember hearing the water they pumped out gurgling into the street.

They were packed eighty at a time into cattle cars. My mother got hold of some Ultraseptil for my father, who was weakened by a fever, and whenever the train stopped she would help him off. They did the work they were required to do on the property of the Dreher brewing family in Schwechat under guards who were strict but not particularly cruel. They were lodged in a long barn. Nearly all the local day-laborers had been conscripted, so the group hoed the fields for potatoes, sugar beets, onions, and beans, occasionally slipping some under their s.h.i.+rts or into their pockets. They worked until winter, huddling together in the cold and keeping each other's spirits up.

In December they were taken to Vienna to clear rubble. They lived in a school building in Floridsdorf on the left bank of the Danube, but worked in the center of the city, climbing over mounds of bombed-out houses to set the rubble into piles. Most of the Viennese pretended not to notice them, though a music publisher gave them b.u.t.tered bread wrapped in paper and invited them in the evening for hot tea amidst carved mahogany music stands.

Laci encouraged my parents to stay in Bucharest for a while and rest. My father could eventually join his firm, Laci said, but first they had to sh.o.r.e themselves up physically and mentally. He probably made a few disparaging remarks about Berettyoujfalu: Why would my father want to go back after all that had happened? What was left for him there? As long as he was starting over, why not go into a more serious line of business? My father nodded, though to himself he must have been saying something along the lines of "Just keep talking, cabbage head." To his mind Laci was a megalomaniac.

So my father would return to his hardware business, for this was his trade and there was no one better at it in all Bihar. All he wanted was to be the person he had always been and greet the first customer who came into the store that summer. Things would have to be put in order. He would start with a few goods on a shelf or two over in the right-hand corner. Then he would expand gradually until ultimately the entire store, bas.e.m.e.nt included, was stocked. The authorities would leave him alone. He still had a few friends in the village.

As for Mother, she had her heart set on Budapest, where the children had managed to stay alive. She rejected the notion that Berettyoujfalu was the place to start over. Everything had been split into separate nationalities. What had been was no more, nor would ever be again. Better to forget what cannot be restored.

But her Jozsika was too stubborn to be dissuaded. He went on about his father and his grandfather and the fact that he knew virtually everyone in town by name. The madness had pa.s.sed, and it was time to get to work. He took possession of his house, had it cleaned out, had new locks put on the doors. All he wanted was to be at home in his own house, to live where he had made his reputation. The fact that everything had been taken from him, that he himself had been taken off, was a pa.s.sing insanity and could not happen again. No question about it. He would be stocking the finest English merchandise.

My mother kissed him on the forehead. "Oh, Jozsika!"

I put my hand on his. He squeezed it and said, "That's how it will be, won't it, son?"

"Of course, Father, if that's what you've decided." ujfalu, naturally, yes.

But ujfalu proved a less than feasible option. First of all because only four years later my father ended up having everything taken from him again, this time in the name of the proletarian dictators.h.i.+p, but also because retreating into the familiar little nest and longing for days of peace in the village-days that had never existed or existed only in Father's imagination-was little more than an obstinate, sentimental dream. Yet I have no trouble understanding my father's naive attachment to the village where he was born, the home of his parents and grandparents.

Laci was a bit annoyed at us for not accepting his offer. He had come to like us and regard us as his own; he had prepared for the day when we would become his children, and knew that to give us back to our parents was to lose us. Why shouldn't we all stay in the same city? In those days it was still possible to imagine Romania turning into a good country, and it was no fault of his that it did not. Neither did Hungary for that matter.

As a department head in the Ministry of Foreign Trade he negotiated with German and English clients who came to Bucharest, but since his colleagues did not understand the conversations they were in no position to write the requisite reports to their superiors. They suspected Laci of making secret deals with his visitors. The moment he received the slightest gift or sign of attention from them, they had him hauled before the political police for interrogation. He was trailed on the street; his house was searched. When he took sick leave, they moved a woman into the apartment as a cotenant, a woman who irritated Iboly no end with her transparently insincere coquettishness. Later, when Laci escaped from it all into a sanatorium, they moved an informer into the room's other bed. Posing as a patient, he would go through Laci's pockets as soon as he left for the toilet. Once Laci scribbled something on a slip of paper, then tore it up and tossed the shreds into the waste-paper basket. He came in from the corridor to find his roommate bent over the trash, retrieving the bits of paper to fit them together. They wanted wanted him to know that he was surrounded, that the authorities needed more than a loyal expert who remained a political outsider. They needed all of him. him to know that he was surrounded, that the authorities needed more than a loyal expert who remained a political outsider. They needed all of him.

He became a truck driver instead: he had the physical strength to carry huge baskets of bread on his back. One day while he was making a delivery, a shopkeeper happened to hear him whistling "Yankee Doodle." Before the scandal got out of hand, Laci moved back to the sanatorium, grew a beard, and spent his days standing around the garden in pajamas or dishabille watching the leaves falling, silent for long stretches of time. Thanks to the intervention of a kind doctor he had access to recordings of cla.s.sical music. Once they allowed him and his family to emigrate, he left everything behind. He would have done anything to remove his loved ones from that insane country.

Everyone could see that my father with his humble smile was the mainstay of the family. Though the fifth of the six siblings, he was the only son. The financial situation of his sisters was more precarious, and the younger generation disparaged his bourgeois decency, sense of proportion, and self-knowledge. I could sense my cousins' arrogance, the arrogance the intelligentsia feels in the face of middle-cla.s.s stability.

My father was not at all receptive to communist slogans, always returning to the principle of free elections and rejecting the revolutions taking place all over the globe. "In an election you have many choices, son. That is all I know." He listened to the BBC during the war and after. He would also spend hours with Radio Free Europe, delicately turning the k.n.o.b to minimize the jamming.

The trip back from Bucharest was a long one and mostly in trucks. Anyone with any kind of vehicle set up benches on it and became a chauffeur. There were about twenty of us seated in a very old contraption. Speed was out of the question, but limping along in a group made the trip easy to bear. I was interested to know who was sitting next to me and across from me. Who were these people with whom I got off occasionally to stretch? Opposite me was a Romanian girl about my age who ran down from the embankment at the edge of a wood and gave a shout of joy: Vai, ce frumos! Vai, ce frumos! (Oh, how beautiful!), though there was still plenty to worry about and many dead to mourn. (Oh, how beautiful!), though there was still plenty to worry about and many dead to mourn.

In Bra.s.so we again visited Uncle Ern?, the hotel manager, stocky, polite, relaxed, though sometimes reticent. Before the war I had spent long summers with him in the woods belonging to my grandfather's family. He lived then in a large, wooden house in the snowcapped mountains of Maramaros, where he had been delegated by his family to plant trees and produce lumber. The company had a sawmill and a train of its own chuffing merrily up and down the mountainside. I felt on top of the world at five or six riding that little train hauling stripped tree trunks over the wide mountain tracks. My grandfather traveled all the way to and from the mill in his own upholstered pa.s.senger car.

I can see them now-st.u.r.dily built men, broad-shouldered, tight-bellied, and mustachioed: Uncle Ern?, my mother's older brother, and one of her brothers-in-law Pista, a misanthrope who, once the pa.s.sion for cursing Jews had seized him, could be calmed only by the application of leeches to his back. Whenever I was a guest at their house, he heckled me after lunch, mocked me by saying I attended a cheder cheder, a Talmudic school, which I did not-we simply lived near it-but old Pista was not one for fine distinctions. He was angry because his attempt at settling in Palestine had failed, and he was tired of constantly being a Jew. He loved the woods and fis.h.i.+ng for trout in icy creeks. He loved feeding the pigs growing fat in their sties, and giving them a friendly kick in the rump, sprinkling groats for the chickens and decapitating them with a swing of the axe. Once he took me up to a part of the mountain where they burned wood for charcoal. He bought wild strawberries in glazed pots from the Gypsies. That rascally girl was there, the one who would frighten me by laughing and rolling her eyeb.a.l.l.s so only the whites showed. I wanted to touch her, but lacked the courage. No one could top Pista at lighting campfires or roasting meat, and no one knew the creva.s.ses and waterfalls better than he. It was a joy to help him skewer the bacon, chicken legs, onions, and peppers. And we had a good laugh wolfing down all traces of bacon as soon as we heard the chuff-chuff of the locomotive, which at this hour of the evening could only be carrying grandfather in his personal car.

The old gentleman liked to sit out on the porch of the wooden forest house, where his papers would be delivered to him, always a bit late. He would leave it only to accompany us to a small town in the Carpathians, where next to a lovely square stood the local prison. On Sunday afternoons the inmates would reach through the bars to sell their handiwork: wooden whistles and pipes, clacking roosters, birdcages. Their cells were their workshops. We would stroll along the tree-lined gravel path, watching them whittle. One of them had killed a man, we were told. He made slippers.

Grandfather, a cousin of the head rabbis of Trier and Manchester, read the masters of modern Jewish scholars.h.i.+p. He had been president of the Nagyvarad congregation at one time. He did not much bother himself with the details of the lumber industry.

When imaginary bats fluttered too thickly around Uncle Pista in the dining room, his head would grow so red that my great aunt Ilona had no choice but to bring out the pickle jars holding the thin, balled-up, wriggling leeches. Aunt Ilona would have her husband straddle the chair backwards and take off his s.h.i.+rt. Then she would set the leeches on the vast expanse of Uncle Pista's back-it was almost as wide as the dining table-one by one, in rows. They would set to work-pumping a.s.siduously, growing thick and fat-and suck the red right out of Uncle Pista's head. Within a quarter of an hour Uncle Pista would reach the point where he lost all interest in the Jewish question: it was nonsense either way.

If I was in the mood, the two of us would cross the creek on a narrow plank, then proceed stone by stone across its other branch and arrive at a clearing where we could watch the deer walking along the path. When they caught sight of Uncle Pista, they would flinch and give a start, but he would just blink his eyes innocently and they would go back to their grazing or have a drink from the stream and move on along the path in a group. I very much enjoyed having Uncle Pista take me along on these excursions. He even forgave me for wetting the bed after a big lunch. Since I was already five, my mother would have punished me for such slovenly behavior by canceling all afternoon entertainments, but Pista would sneak me out of the house to the ice-cold creek, where, standing still as a statue he would reach into the water and in a flash grab a silver trout. Then we would settle down on a mossy outcrop, where Pista checked the brandy flask to see whether there was still some marc left, for what else can one do at dusk if one's feet are cold but have another pull from the flask.

In May 1944 Pista tied three trunks to his landau, took his seat on the driver's box in front of his wife and son, and like the other patriotic Jews in the region drove to the Nagyvarad ghetto. A freight train took them northward. Uncle Pista and Aunt Ilonka, my mother's favorite sister, were soon turned to ashes. Their son Gyuri Frank, my most kind cousin, died of typhus a year later in Mauthausen. He had taught me how to make world-champion soccer players out of overcoat b.u.t.tons using a file and some pitch.

My uncles did not do a good job of a.n.a.lyzing future prospects when they conferred in the Golden Eagle Cafe in Nagyvarad. My mother's oldest brother Imre had held various jobs: he had been a croupier and a maitre d', going from table to table with a friendly word to everyone. He always kept a table for his current girlfriend, a strawberry blonde, like all the previous ones. Imre had broad shoulders, a dark-brown tan, and a pin-stripe mustache, but he was bald and short. Sometimes he mounted the orchestra platform and took the leader's violin from him. Grandfather was less than enthusiastic about all this and steered clear of the cafe where his son Imre wasted his time with such madness.

Uncle Pista and my two Uncle Erns would go there to see Uncle Imre, and the four of them would put their heads together and take counsel about how to survive the war. The most successful solution was the one Uncle Ern? Schwartz came up with: a coronary. No more did he hop into his smooth-riding Citroen and have his chauffeur take him on one of those sometimes mysterious trips of his. Whenever he was ferried to the kind of woman who made demands on him-the kind that gossiped to her girlfriends about who gave her the new ring or fur-Uncle Ern? had no choice but to stand in the doorway of Aunt Margit's room, rest his brow against the doorjamb, and complain to her about how low the human race had sunk: "Just imagine, my dear, they're going on about me again! This time about X and me!"

"Poor dear. Don't they have anything better to do? Maybe it's because you're such a big, handsome, strapping man and they're jealous of me and the children."

The children-Uncle Ern? took good care of them. He gave eva's hand in marriage to a highly reputed pharmacist and arranged for Bandi to study in England and become an architectural engineer. His son Pal, though, whose triumphs at Exeter were more on the tennis courts than in the medical labs, he brought home and installed in his company: he, at least, would not organize a strike against his father as son Bandi had done after marrying a robust, red-haired woman active in the left wing of the Workers' Party, an lifelong advocate for the poor in Parliament.

Uncle Imre was killed in Budapest by the leader of an Arrow Cross patrol who refused to recognize his exceptional status. Detecting an inappropriate tone of voice in the officer, Uncle Imre informed him that he was speaking with a reserve lieutenant, whereupon the officer unceremoniously shot Uncle Imre in the head. My cousin, the architect Bandi Schwartz (later Andy Short) survived the war as an English doughboy. The beautiful wife and daughter of his easygoing younger brother Pal were sent together to the gas chamber because the mother would not let go of the girl's hand. Pali escaped from his forced-labor unit and organized a group of partisans of various nationalities and religions in the mountains of Maramaros. They lacked the weapons to conduct major operations but did manage to disperse the smaller units sent to pursue them.

eva, the youngest of the three siblings, ended up at Birkenau, but a Polish prisoner pulled her daughter Kati's hand from eva's and put it in the hand of Aunt Margit, the girl's grandmother, and although the two of them went to the gas chamber eva remained alive. She worked in a factory, growing weaker and weaker and moving from camp to camp, until finally she received word in a hospital barracks that her husband Pal Farkas, a pharmacist and perfumer, was alive. Word of her got back to him as well, and taking heart at the prospect of meeting again they recovered and returned home.

In our family the older generations were generally bourgeois liberals and, if forced to choose a party affiliation, identified with the Social Democrats. As for the younger generations, they were radicals, Communists for the most part. Perhaps that is why I felt uncomfortable when my father, returning from the deportation camps, thought of nothing but reopening the hardware business in Berettyoujfalu and taking up the life he had once had. They might have known that nothing could be as before. But even though the young felt that radical change would affect everything in life and I might well have taken my place at my cousin Istvan's side in that sneering communist chorus, I identified with my parents. When I asked Istvan who could better manage our fathers' businesses in Berettyoujfalu (Ferenc Dobo's books, Bela Zador's textiles, Jozsef Konrad's hardware) than they themselves, who had done it over a lifetime, he dismissed the question as insubstantial. "One of the a.s.sistants will take over," he said.

My father still believed in the return to what he thought of as normalcy: he would reopen his business in the ransacked house with a fraction of what he had once had and the customers would come and greet him and hold profound discussions on questions both timely and eternal, sitting in upholstered armchairs and eating food they had brought from home in their wagons-garlic sausage or paprika bacon or plain old salted bacon with bread and red onions-and drinking the fresh artesian water he provided. The staff, my father, and his regular customers, all on familiar terms, had so much to talk about in winter as they warmed themselves around the enormous iron stove or in summer as they enjoyed the cool, s.p.a.cious room.

The younger family members, who had professional or humanities degrees and whose parents had been killed, wanted a radical break with the old order. "Why do you want things to be as they were?" they asked, seeing us move home-or at least to what we imagined to be home-with all our chattels. We should be happy to be alive, the sole surviving Jewish family in Berettyoujfalu, parents and children reunited. When our friends and relatives brought up their ga.s.sed wives and children, my parents maintained a somber silence.

People did not stop telling me I was living for the others as well as for myself. That frightened me. If it had been a mere bombastic phrase, I would not have minded the rebuke implicit in it, but I knew there was more involved: now I had to act as they would have acted had they still been alive or at least act in a way calculated to win the approval of my murdered childhood friends. Even with relatives I felt a mixture of tribute and antipathy in their response to my having survived and being able to return to the nest and live happily ever after.

Another issue soon insinuated its way into our talk: Were we bourgeois or communist? "Had my father lived, he might well be my enemy," Istvan had told me. I was no enemy of my father, nor did he harbor ill will against us. It was only natural for him to take Istvan and Pal Zador, the sons of his late sister Mariska and cousin Bela, into his house. He did the same for my cousin Zsofi Klein. Istvan and Pali spent a year in school in Kolozsvar, skiing down to the main square in winter, but by the summer of 1946 it was clear that Transylvania would revert to Romania and they came home to Berettyoujfalu.

The new age began for me in the summer of 1945. The family was together and out of mortal danger. Our old life had resumed its course, after a fas.h.i.+on, in the house at Berettyoujfalu, the hardware business having reopened on the ground floor. My sister was soon attending the gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium in Debrecen, taking room and board with the family of a retired officer. As for me, it was the dawn of freedom: I was now being privately tutored-meaning that every once in a while I went to see a teacher-and working in my father's shop, where three shelves were now filled with goods brought in from Budapest, Salgotarjan, and Bonyhad. (They came in Studebaker trucks, now in Russian hands, which were used in civilian commerce and sometimes escorted by the Soviet military on roads not yet free of danger. Everything of course had its price.) in Debrecen, taking room and board with the family of a retired officer. As for me, it was the dawn of freedom: I was now being privately tutored-meaning that every once in a while I went to see a teacher-and working in my father's shop, where three shelves were now filled with goods brought in from Budapest, Salgotarjan, and Bonyhad. (They came in Studebaker trucks, now in Russian hands, which were used in civilian commerce and sometimes escorted by the Soviet military on roads not yet free of danger. Everything of course had its price.) In December a second cousin of mine arrived on the scene. His name was Ern? Steiner, and he was a good-looking, active young man who refused to acknowledge the border separating Berettyoujfalu from Nagyvarad. He and his friends would race their jalopy of a truck across it through frozen fields carrying goods. "I always take two or three shots in the air to get the border guards to look back." Ern? had been liberated by the French in May. He could converse with them and had developed a taste for Calvados and Gauloises. Arriving home in the summer, he learned that his parents and younger sister had not survived, and although other families were living in their former house Ern? reoccupied his old room, telling the new residents to behave themselves and showing them the pistol he carried under his jacket. Ern? did not want to stay long and soon began carrying people, not just goods, westward. Many young Jews of his ilk had been sailing from Ma.r.s.eille to Haifa after returning from labor service to learn they were without families.

"I'm ready," said Ern? one day.

I gave him a questioning look.

"Ready for anything," he said dryly. His knapsack held everything he owned.

"Why not take over your father's business?" I asked.

Ern? gave my arm a stroke. "That chapter is over." But to acknowledge that I too had a point, he added, "Your father's still alive. You're helping him."

From the wheel of the truck he reached down to shake my hand one last time. I stood in front of our house and waved as he pulled away, en route to the Holy Land. Holy, he said, because they had given their blood for it. The next year in Haifa he would be active in disabling or sinking English patrol boats so the pa.s.sengers on immigrant s.h.i.+ps could maneuver their rowboats to the sh.o.r.eline.

I wanted my own s.p.a.ce and took over my old room so as to escape the wheezing and snoring of others and have the freedom to turn on the light whenever I pleased. I needed a room where guests could sit and talk, but where no one could just come traipsing in. My craving for privacy came from a desire to know the terrain: if the dogs reacted to late-night pa.s.sersby, I wanted to know what courtyard they were barking from.

Although the churchyard adjacent to the garden had once provided many playmates, I currently had only my cousins Istvan and Pali and Zsofi Klein. Zsofi had returned from Bergen-Belsen thin but tenacious and with no other place to go. There were now five children in the house. It was never quiet. We cooked in enormous pots. Leftovers were unknown.

My father took it for granted that he should support us all. He enjoyed being back in the saddle, watching the stock gradually spread from one wall to the next and rehiring his shop a.s.sistants. Some of the old customers hugged him and squeezed his hand seeing him there again by the door. "My Jozsika," they called him, a form of address dating back to his childhood. He well recalled that there had been no hugs the previous year, but never mentioned it.

By the tile stove, which was still beechwood-burning in the winter of 194546, I listened to the conversations of the people who came to visit. A girl named Kati and I would cut holes in apples to remove the core and fill them cinnamon and mola.s.ses, sugar not yet having returned to the market. I was particularly interested in the opinions of Laci Nyul, Kati's broad-shouldered and obstinate cousin. He had returned from labor service a tough customer and later barely escaped imprisonment by the Soviets. He wore a short leather jacket and high laced boots. His family had owned the local slaughterhouse, and he helped out at the butcher shop, where kosher and non-kosher products now coexisted. Immersed in blood to the elbows, he sliced pork legs and chops all day long. On the way to our house he would rub cologne into his chin. He had dreams of sties housing hundreds of pigs and a thoroughly modern meat-packing plant, a dream he would punctuate with endless views of the great figures of Hungarian literature. He held Mihaly Babits in the highest esteem, knew the poems of Attila Jozsef, and brought a number of living authors-Milan Fust, Lajos Nagy, Lajos Ka.s.sak, Tibor Dery-to my attention. My sister would see him to the door; I humbly retired. Their parting words seemed to take longer than absolutely necessary.

On other evenings I would listen to the admonitions of the blacksmith's son, who provided me with s.e.xological advice-for example, which notorious women in the village were best avoided. He had plans of becoming a mechanical engineer in Budapest. Laci Nyul wanted to stay in the village and made us swear to vote for the Smallholders' Party, because if the Communists won he'd have to, as he put it, kiss his meat-packing plant goodbye, and my father his house and business. The Russians, not the Americans, would be giving the orders then. On dark winter afternoons he brought along a book of poetry. We had managed to trade up from a petroleum lamp to a gasoline one with a pump of its own, the white mantle growing taut and burning with a crackle when the flame caught it.

I would cut tobacco and stuff it into cigarette papers (I no longer remember who paid for it, though I'm afraid it was my father); I had fas.h.i.+oned a spinning wheel out of a bicycle wheel and would spin the long, white fur of angora rabbits for my mother to knit sweaters with; or I would move off somewhere to read. My time was my own. I spent summers on my bike, riding with my cousins to the swimming area or down to the Berettyo, where we would climb the pylon of the railroad bridge.

One day I found myself next to Marika on its sun-drenched concrete surface. Because she was four years older than I, it was an honor for me to lie next to her. Soon thereafter the activity repeated itself on the sofa of a cool room whose blinds had been lowered. Leaning on my elbows as she lay there on her back, I tried to reach under her skirt and stroke her thigh. Her resistance was mild, and as I touched her skin I had the impression she was not entirely lacking in interest. We both held our breath. Marika's aunt would leave us alone together for long stretches.

On days like these I should have been reeling off Latin declensions and conjugations for my blonde yet dull private tutor. When she phoned my father, he took me aside and asked whether I was going to my Latin lessons. "Of course I am," I said. "Most of the time." My father's gaze darkened, and he walked away. I wanted to spare my tutor, but I can't deny that I always took pleasure in skipping cla.s.ses.

Inflation brought chaos. My father was not good at riding such waves or, rather, he could not do it at all. After the billions came the unfathomable trillions and then the period of barter, when customers brought wheat and bacon in exchange for his merchandise. My father having no use for wheat and bacon, they went moldy in the cellar. It was beginning to look as if commerce were utter nonsense, but my father kept at it, and once reliable money was minted in 1946 it began to acc.u.mulate. Whether he could keep his business, however, was unclear. The rea.s.suring announcements being made could be interpreted in many ways. But then the Communist Party in its pa.s.sion for state appropriation was moving from large companies to small businesses, with the result that after five years of a second flowering my father's hardware business was taken over by the state, which then turned him out of house and home with no reparations. Such was the law. The Smallholders' victory meant nothing: the Communists took over anyway. But he had reckoned with losing everything again. At least now they did not want to kill him.

Laci Nyul's dreams remained just that. He enrolled at the Technical University in Budapest and went to work at a slaughterhouse to earn his keep. One day he fell asleep in the bathtub and the gas flame in the water heater went out. The gas poured noiselessly over him, and the exhausted Laci Nyul slept on, forever.

In August 1947, when the last parliamentary elections were being held, I would ride my bicycle to the town hall in Berettyoujfalu, where they posted the results on a large board the moment they were phoned in. During the preceding weeks I had attended the campaign a.s.semblies of every party and found something stimulating about each. I was fourteen and had completed a year at the Debrecen Calvinist Gimn.a.z.ium with highest honors.

The previous September my parents had taken my cousin Pal and me to the four-hundred-year-old inst.i.tution in a cart, together with our fees in the form of a chest full of food-because over and above the fees for room and board payment was required in staple goods: flour, sugar, bacon, smoked meat, beans, eggs, and preserves.

Debrecen was a big city in my eyes, unfamiliar and inscrutable. After lurching along the wide Market Street, the cart arrived at the entrance to the student dormitory, where bronze heads commanding respect stared out at us. An inscription on the interior facade admonished all that this was a place for prayer and study.

On the third floor a bleak, pave-stoned hallway led to sleeping quarters packed with iron beds. This room also served as the study area. The daily schedule specified that silentium silentium was to be observed from three until five in the afternoon, during which time we were all to sit studying at the common table. The wake-up bell rang at six in the morning, when we ran laps around the courtyard. At the filthy sinks we could wash only down to the waist. A cowbell would summon us down to the cellar dining room, where a rouxthickened soup with c.u.min awaited us every morning. was to be observed from three until five in the afternoon, during which time we were all to sit studying at the common table. The wake-up bell rang at six in the morning, when we ran laps around the courtyard. At the filthy sinks we could wash only down to the waist. A cowbell would summon us down to the cellar dining room, where a rouxthickened soup with c.u.min awaited us every morning.

We stood behind our chairs in silence while the others mumbled grace: "Dear Jesus, be our guest today, and bless what Thou hast granted us...He who food and drink hath given, let His name be blessed in heaven." I could have said the Jewish blessing "Blessed art Thou, Eternal G.o.d, King of the Universe, who bringeth forth bread from the earth," but I was not the praying type in those days.

The serving spoon would make the rounds from room monitor (whom we were bound to obey) down, according to age. The prayer did little to dampen the abuse of rank. The serving order went by cla.s.s, the oldest cla.s.s going first, the youngest last. If there was a big steaming bowl of goulash in a big porcelain tureen, it was only natural that the highest cla.s.s should spoon out the most meat for themselves and all that was left for the "little b.u.g.g.e.rs," those of us under fourteen, were the potatoes at the bottom. As a member of the fourth cla.s.s I was in the lower school and therefore subject to commands like, "b.u.g.g.e.r, bring me a gla.s.s of water!" A raw sense of fun made the vulgarity of it all seem natural. Endless jokes about farts filled the dormitory.

Pali was in the first cla.s.s, at the bottom of the pecking order, while I, in the fourth, belonged at the top of the lower school and was thus ripe for rebellion. I put up with the hazing as long as I could. I even put up with the prank they called the star-kick, which consisted of sneaking up to a new boy at night and sticking strips of twisted paper between his toes, then lighting them. When the flame reached the skin, the victim would make huge kicks in the air and bolt up in alarm to see the flaming paper wafting through the room. Something to snicker at. (Even the little b.u.g.g.e.rs had their established order, whereby one might end up sn.i.g.g.e.ring at one's best buddies' misfortunes-or one's own.) I put up with the fact that packages coming to me from home were opened with the room monitor's approval and devoured without consulting me. (I was familiar with his type-a "cackler"-and as I will relate I eventually put my foot down.) Otherwise we got on well enough. I was good at my studies and let them play with my four-grooved Cossack dagger, which they would throw at the doorpost. My cla.s.smates, sons of village schoolteachers, priests, choirmasters, artisans, and farmers, wavered between intimations of justice, lording it over newcomers, and submitting to the authority of older boys. After lights out a Psalm was read. It was followed by witticisms about jacking off. I didn't know what that was.

One cla.s.smate shared the homesickness that came over me each evening, and we counted the days together. He told me that to get to his village from the station he had to cross a forest. There were wolves in the forest, he said, so occasionally he needed to sling a huge cudgel over his head. During the previous Christmas break he had set a whole pack running. I would have liked to believe my new friend.

Our house was thirty kilometers from the dormitory, which was doable by bicycle, though occasionally a friendly Russian sergeant, the polyglot who had accompanied us to Nagyvarad, would come and ask if I felt like going home: my mother was willing to certify a made-up illness for a few days. He was an interpreter at the headquarters in Berettyoujfalu and knew his way around the markets and the world of exchange in general. I traded him our kitchen alarm clock for a Cossack hat and that four-grooved dagger. We rode in his jeep, with me in back, my legs hanging over the side. He worried that I would bounce out: his driver drove at a hundred kilometers an hour. I was thrilled by the speed.

But it was also a pleasure to climb onto an ox-drawn cart with my mother, the driver perched listlessly on his plank and the two oxen taking their time, letting me have a good close look at every house and tree along the road. The familiar, thirty-kilometer trip between Debrecen and ujfalu would take a good six hours.

In my simplicity I was happy with any pace: all that mattered was that I was going home. And it was with a heart of stone that I watched the truck that served as the bus to ujfalu pull away from the Golden Bull Hotel in Debrecen with my mother aboard after three days in Debrecen, time mostly wasted in a group shopping tour to buy shoes for my sister eva and cousin Zsofi. They would try on pair after pair, first in shops that seemed to hold promise, then in ever-more disappointing establishments. My mother was patiently respectful of the process, but I was bored and did not pa.s.s up the opportunity to express my scorn when the girls ended up with the shoes they had tried on in the first shop. My remarks were received with cool disparagement and labeled barbarian. My original inclination, to go into the first shop and buy the first thing that more or less appealed to me, remained unshaken.

This philosophy of random choice guided me in other areas as well: "G.o.d is good, and what he gives is good." My life has been shaped by chance meetings and telephone calls: the best dinner is always at the nearest restaurant; my first woman-I was fifteen at the time-was the nearest one in the raft of women lining up before me in the salon of the old-fas.h.i.+oned house of a.s.signation. The approach probably had something to do with hunger: I barely grew at all that year. You had to take what there was.

Like Debrecen, for example. It was the closest of cities (with good schools) to my parents' house. The dormitory destroyed a few illusions perhaps, but I had excellent teachers.

My favorite place was the library. Whenever school got me down, I would go straight there. No one would ask me whether I had permission to be there or was just skipping cla.s.s. Good as the cla.s.ses were, I enjoyed reading more, so I often found myself at its entrance, a flight of wide, sloping wooden stairs worn down by many thousands of feet. I had to stretch to reach the handle on the door and was immediately captivated by the smell of floor wax and old books.

One day, while reading a light novel whose spine I had seen earlier on my mother's bedside table, I felt a tactful hand land on my shoulder. I turned to see our cla.s.s advisor, Dr. Jozsef Salanky, who taught Latin and History and inspired both respect and fear.

"If my suspicions are correct, you, young man, should be in cla.s.s right now. Is that not so?"

"Yes, it is."

We were face to face. I could deny nothing.

"I hope you are reading something worthy at least."

He had a look at the book by lamplight in the November darkness.

"This one is hardly worth missing cla.s.s for," he said disparagingly.

I felt reduced to near nothingness but had to respond somehow.

"And what would would be worth missing cla.s.s for, sir?" be worth missing cla.s.s for, sir?"

It was a cheeky question, but by saying "this one" he had given me a lead-in. He looked at me and said, "Wait!" He had access to the library's inner sanctum, forbidden territory to students. While he was on his mission there, I found it hard to return to my novel. He reappeared with a stack of books, set them down on the librarian's desk, and said to him, "If this boy comes back, give him these to read in the building." He winked at me and left. The librarian called me over with a glance and set the top book before me. It was Crime and Punishment Crime and Punishment. Later, in the school corridor, Dr. Salanky remarked to me that it didn't matter if I understood only a little of what was in those books. Whatever I did understand would be worth more than all of a bad book that was easy for me.

Eventually I had to leave the dormitory. What led to my expulsion was the practice of our being allowed out into the city after lunch (though we had to be back by three, which was the beginning of silentium silentium, when we were expected to do our lessons, not play with jigsaw puzzles or tops or that wooden figure whose little red peanut would pop out when you pulled on a string). On one sunny November day I was on duty, which meant I was responsible for taking the key to the common room when we left for lunch and being there to open it for those who preferred the dormitory to town, perhaps because they felt insecure and needed to stick to their nests or because they wanted to study or simply because they were lazy. After a less than glorious lunch I forayed into town. I may have bought a jam roll from one of the gla.s.sed-in stands or a cl.u.s.ter of the grapes sold on corners. At any rate, I completely forgot about the d.a.m.ned key. In thrall to the pleasures of sights and tastes I got to the door of our common room to find ten pairs of eyes glowering at me. I arrived in a lighthearted mood, giving the boys a warm h.e.l.lo and making a casual apology. No one said a word, but I got a good slap in the face from the room monitor. Taking a step back, I charged into his belly with my head, which landed him on his behind. When they pulled us apart, he said I would regret what I had done.

The regulated life was no longer for me. I asked my cousin Zsofi whether Pali and I could move into her rented room, and she said yes. The next day the three of us were living in Zsofi's room in the Bishop's Palace. It had a fine view of the Great Church together with Market Street and the Golden Bull Hotel, where the Munic.i.p.al Philharmonic Orchestra played Mozart and Liszt in the Blue Salon under the inspired direction of Dr. Bela Pukansky, director of the Academy of Music.

In the fall of 1947 I moved from the ponderous Debrecen Calvinist Gimn.a.z.ium to the lively Madach Gimn.a.z.ium in Budapest. I rented a room in the flat of an elderly couple. I was a village boy, unsophisticated and starry-eyed, but Budapest was much to my liking. And this time I could wander the city as I chose, with no yellow star on my coat and no worries about danger lurking everywhere.

The school was nearly as interesting as the city. It had its own parliament and government, two newspapers, and a court with a judge and jury, prosecutors and defense counsels, and all sorts of cases, serious and otherwise, awaiting adjudication. There was a student representative at all grading sessions, and if he disagreed with the mark the faculty wanted to give to one or another of his cla.s.smates he had the right to veto it.

Politics was in the air, and there were Communists among the student body, although the boys generally preferred to play historical roles: Danton would observe that Robespierre, sitting at one of the desks in the back of the cla.s.sroom, had a glowering countenance. Chenier was a kind, light-haired Jewish boy. We used to walk together on Margaret Island, reading Dante in the Babits translation. He would soon escape over the border, which in 1949 was no longer easy, and emigrate to the newly founded state of Israel to become general of a tank division. There was a good deal of role-playing in our cla.s.s and a tremendous number of debates. I defended Mallarme against the great Romantic Victor Hugo and the aforementioned Danton, who later became director of the Opera. (His fondness for spectacular effects was already in evidence.) We read a lot in those days: the second or third time I admitted to my friends that I hadn't read this or I hadn't ever heard that name, one of my friends called me an ignorant country b.u.mpkin.

Yes, this was an age of politics, even at school. When was it permissible to kill? That was a burning question. Or should boys like us, fifteen or sixteen years old, go to a brothel (and if so, which one?) or go out go out with a girl? A girl? From a girls' school? What would you talk about? Your homework? One opinion was that you were better off talking to your Latin master. Ours was a wise man, though anarchy held sway in his cla.s.sroom. (A translator of Plato does not get bogged down in discipline.) Mr. Kovendy would sit in the last row, and whoever gathered round him could drink in what he had to say while the rest went on with their racket. with a girl? A girl? From a girls' school? What would you talk about? Your homework? One opinion was that you were better off talking to your Latin master. Ours was a wise man, though anarchy held sway in his cla.s.sroom. (A translator of Plato does not get bogged down in discipline.) Mr. Kovendy would sit in the last row, and whoever gathered round him could drink in what he had to say while the rest went on with their racket.

The couple I boarded with was Arnold Konta-a former wine wholesaler and rowing and walking champion, then past eighty-and his wife. They could not afford to heat their large apartment, which was crammed with carved mahogany furniture, Shakespeare in English, Goethe and Schiller in German, Flaubert in French, plaques in black gla.s.s cases, ponderous paintings all over the walls, and bronze statuettes in every spot not taken up by something else. I found it all very depressing. At fifteen I detested the fin-de-siecle style and its eclecticism, and even the Jugendstil (or Secession, as we called it); I loved the cubism of modern architecture.

Mr. Konta was a short man; his wife Elza was quite tall. Every Sunday morning the natty old gentleman reached up and took his wife's arm (her shoulders were higher than his head), and they walked to the Museum of Fine Arts in Heroes' Square. He used to say you could look at a good painting a hundred times. He read some Faust Faust every evening. Before sitting down to his desk, he murmured a short Hebrew prayer. His face was pink and jowly and fragrant from shaving. He took his meals in a housecoat redolent of tobacco and tied with a rope. every evening. Before sitting down to his desk, he murmured a short Hebrew prayer. His face was pink and jowly and fragrant from shaving. He took his meals in a housecoat redolent of tobacco and tied with a rope.