A Book of Memories (112 page)

I said I had another idea. But for that I had to know whether he insisted on staying in the city.

No, he didn't insist on anything. But really, I shouldn't worry about it.

I should just drop him off somewhere. Anywhere. On the boulevard. He'll get on a streetcar there.

I said I wouldn't hear of it. That streetcar idea sounded rather fishy to me, anyway. But if he didn't mind staying with me for a little while longer, we could go for a ride.

He couldn't answer.

Later, however, I had the impression that something vaguely resembling a feeling drifted back into that empty shell. It got very warm in the car. Maybe it was this heat that deceived me; still, I felt my solution was wonderful, if only because it couldn't have been simpler.

My paternal grandfather was a very wealthy man. He was a mill owner, a grain merchant, and he also dabbled in real estate. The brief period of unparalleled growth and prosperity around the turn of the century seems to us almost too fabulous to be true. It was a time when great fortunes could be made almost overnight. It's all the more incredible since the economic history of Hungary, starting from the last days of the Middle Ages, has been the history of crises, depressions, and emergencies of one sort or another. Yet, we know that there was such a period because most of the schools where we study, the edifices where decisions affecting our lives are made, the hospitals we go to to be cured, and even the sewers where we empty our waste were all built around that time. Maybe not too many people like the ponderous style of these structures, but everybody appreciates their made-to-last sturdiness. During this period, not too long after the turn of the century, my grandfather had two houses built for himself: a fully winterized summer home on Swabian Hill, where Mother and I had lived until her death, and a spacious and romantic-looking two-story hunting lodge. He liked to hunt small game and chose a spot not too far from the city where he could indulge his passion. In a flat region along the Danube he could shoot ducks and coots in the tideland willows, and pheasants and rabbits in the open fields.

I can't divulge the name of the village itself. It will presently become clear why not. Actually, I should adopt the ingenious method used by authors of the great Russian novels and note places with asterisks. The human settlements they identified this way had unique, unmistakable characteristics and could therefore be found on the map, although they could also be anywhere in that vast land. It is the painful consequences of possible recognition that prevent me from naming the place. If I wanted to be coy about it, I could say that starting at the zero marking of the main highway and traveling at a good clip, one could reach the place where we were heading that late afternoon in about sixty minutes.

I should also add here that in January 1945 my mother's two sisters, Aunt Ella and Aunt Ilma, were bombed out of their apartment in Damjanich Street. The house remained in ruins for a long time. Even in the 1950s I remember seeing piles of the uncleared rubble on the street. As soon as the war was over, my two aunts moved into this country house. None too soon, as it turned out. The house had been broken into and vandalized, though strangely enough, few things were taken. Garden tools from the shed and two huge handwoven tapestries that used to hang in the trophy room. Years later, my aunts came upon some pieces of these wall hangings
—many of their neighbors insulated their doghouses with them. Neither the Germans nor the Russians ever occupied this village; they only passed through it. The vandals were most likely local people, and the reason they had no time for a more thorough job was that about the time of my aunts' arrival the village was going through some terrible days.

A few days before they arrived, three Russian soldiers, separated from their unit, had rowed across the icy river. They helped themselves to some wine, brandy, a couple of ducks and chickens. They also discovered that in one of the houses there lived three marriageable daughters with their widowed mother. Neither the girls nor their mother minded throwing a wild party and enjoying the commandeered booty. They baked and cooked, they feasted and danced, had such a good time they even fired shots in the air. The house stood at the edge of the village in a waterlogged hollow at the foot of cemetery hill. To this day villagers talk about the incident with the utmost circumspection. The way they tell it, the party went on for two days and two nights, and the women didn't even bother to close the curtains over their windows. Through it all, the village played possum. No one ventured outside. Nevertheless, on the second night, bullets were fired through the windows. The bullets, fired from a pistol and a hunting rifle, came from the top of cemetery hill. The first rounds wounded one of the girls and hit one of the Russians in the stomach, who then bled to death. The other two returned the fire. Bullet marks can still be seen on some of the old gravestones. But the battle was uneven, because in their earlier merrymaking the soldiers had almost emptied their submachine guns. The few rounds they had left they used to cover each other as they retreated to the riverbank. The mother immediately hanged herself in the attic of her house. She got the message, it seemed. The next day, a large contingent of Russian military police arrived. The wounded girl was taken away. My two aunts walked into the village that afternoon. All the interrogations, lineups, and house searches, even the hauling away of some people, failed to produce any results. There were few clues to follow, and they found no weapon. In a small village like this everybody is somehow related. The Russians had to press a few men into service to bury the mother. To this day the village does not want to know who fired those shots. One thing is certain: if my grandfather's house had stayed vacant, nothing would have saved it from destruction. Not to mention the fact that only because of my aunts' foresight and cunning has the house remained in my family's possession.

Two old warhorses
—that is how the more outspoken members of my family refer to my aunts. Not a very flattering description. But they are indeed exceptional creatures. Whenever I read some agonizing essay about our nation's slow demise, I immediately think of them. Because it's hard to decide what sustains them: their infinite adaptability or their uncompromising resourcefulness. They eat little, talk a lot, and their hands and feet never stop moving. In recent years, having aged visibly, they keep saying that constant activity wears you out, and if the body is worn out it's easier to die. The year and a half age difference between them doesn't show. They are so much alike they could be twins. Both of them are tall and large-framed; they cut each other's hair, which they keep very short. They may have been attractive in their youth, the way a plowhorse can be said to be attractive. They must wear size 12 shoes; when they walk, everything shakes and rattles around them. If they were not moved to tears so easily by compassion, or if they didn't show an almost exaggerated understanding of the most varied and peculiar ways of the world, one could say there was nothing feminine about them. But their gentleness is so refined, so discreet, so very caring, they surely meet all the spiritual requirements of the most traditional female ideal.

At the age of eighteen, my Aunt Ilma had a child out of wedlock. For the family this was no less an outrage than Grandfather's threat to become a dancer if he wasn't allowed to join the army. Ella very decisively defused the impending scandal by having her sister move away from home. The baby died when it was only a few days old. The two of them have been living together ever since. They must have made some final arrangement among themselves. No man has entered their lives since then. Or at least it appears that way. And that's when time must also have stopped for them. They do not subscribe to newspapers, do not listen to the radio; only a few weeks ago did they buy their first television set. They are believers, but do not attach much importance to either church attendance or prayer. They talk about God in the same tone of voice as about the expected yield of their plentiful vegetable garden. As far as they are concerned, battling evil requires no greater passion than does the struggle with, say, plant lice or potato bugs. They sprinkle wood ashes on the former and hunt for the latter, on all fours, in the flowering potato plants, squashing the bugs with their fingers.

They start the day in the garden. From late May to mid-September they go swimming in the Danube every day, come rain, come shine. They put on their ridiculous, tight-in-the-bust-stretched-out-in-the-buttocks bathing suits made of rubberized cotton whose onetime wildflower patterns have completely faded. They put on white bathing caps and white rubber shoes. That's how they go trekking up the shore, squelching in the silt or crunching on the gravel. Ella leads, Ilma follows. Then comes a charmingly girlish interlude. They wade in waist-deep and with skittish delight let their skin get used to the cold; before long they are squealing and splashing each other. Then suddenly they stretch out in the water, abandoning themselves to the current. On their buttocks, the bathing suits balloon up like rubber tires.

The two-acre property, a park in which every cultivated plant ever planted as well as weeds of all kinds bloom and perish at will, is separated from the village by a high brick wall, and on the shore another high red retaining wall protects it from flooding. This is how far they swim with the current, then march up the steep, moss-covered stone steps, put on their bathing robes, and go back to the house. It was along this stretch, right by the stone wall, where my friend was killed. It had been a dry summer, and by autumn the river receded to where it was normally the deepest; its water turned a dark brown.

In the evening, while one of them was busy sewing and mending or perhaps knitting a sweater for me, or crocheting one of her endless lace runners, the other would read out loud. Their friend Vince Fitos, the Protestant minister, lends them books of inspirational literature. They both assume an appropriately serious and solemn expression, but that wouldn't stop them from sniggering at a particularly inane passage.

I don't know what signals they use to make their judgments, but their ability to see through things is as unerring as if they were the most well-informed people in the world. They pump me regularly about exchange rates on the international financial markets, and from the boys in the village they find out the latest soccer results. Their personal needs are very modest. When I bring them a present, they look around, bewildered: where will they put it, they don't really need it. If, therefore, they want or do not want something, their action will be motivated not by personal interest but by family need or moral consideration. That is how they acted when we were notified of my father's death. We all expected him to return, of course, but they insisted that Mother sign the house over to them. We shouldn't own two houses. In other families such a questionable proposition might open old wounds and sow suspicion and discord. But Mother was cut from the same cloth as her two sisters. She welcomed their suggestion. As a first step, they rented their own house to the village council. Ella is a licensed kindergarten teacher, Ilma an experienced schoolmistress. And the village had neither a suitable building nor a properly trained staff to start a pre-school program, though the need was clearly there. And that's how the two of them opened a nursery school right in their own home. Along with the richly paneled trophy room, they lost the use of all the other rooms on the main floor, but now they had a regular income, received a nominal rent for the premises, the four upstairs rooms remained theirs, and maintenance of the building was also taken over by the village. In the early 1960s, when the threat of nationalization no longer hung over their heads, they began their quiet little scheming. Ostensibly, they were cutting off the branch they were standing on. But in the end the health authorities ruled that the old house was unfit to be used as a school, and when a few years later a new schoolhouse was completed, my aunts announced their retirement. The enemy surrendered unconditionally and left the battlefield with the pleasant feeling of victory.

After all this, I need not say too much about my two hardy aunts' feeling about me. To them I am perfection incarnate. In my student days I had to give them detailed reports of my progress, and now they are just as interested in my job and the advancement of my career. They are so delighted with my successes, they accept blindly all my decisions as correct. They never voice approval or criticism openly but follow me with glances that tell me that in a similar situation they would have acted exactly the same way. To be sure, I usually regale them with stories I know will please them. Ever since my mother passed away, their doting fondness has become almost too much to bear. I don't have to announce my visits in advance, because in my reckless youth, when I never knew where I would spend the night and therefore roamed the world with a toothbrush in my pocket, they got used to my showing up at the oddest hours, and not always alone. Later on, when I was married, they learned to accept that it wasn't always the wife and the children I brought along to their house. This was the only sensitive area in our otherwise cloudless relationship. They let it be known that they did have reservations about my love life
—on moral grounds. For example, they'd always find old girlfriends more charming than the current one. Or they'd list the physical attributes and personality traits of my casual companions and, with an innocent air, present me with their devastating conclusions. It was their way of telling me that, though somewhat proud of my numerous conquests, they didn't think this was right, that more was not necessarily better.

They still occupy only the upstairs rooms. Except for the kitchen, the ground floor is unused and in the winter unheated. I can come almost unnoticed, I don't have to bother them. In fact, I can stay in the house without letting them know I'm there. We keep a key in the back porch, on a beam under the eaves. And in a small room downstairs the strike of a match can kindle a cozy fire in the tile stove.