Exodus: A memoir (9 page)

“What is it?” I asked again, more curious this time.

“It’s a loganberry tree,” she said. “I don’t know how I missed it. I was surrounded by them as a child. I should have recognized it instantly.”

Immediately I understood her consternation. It was too late to do anything about it now—she might have been able to tear it out when it had still been a shoot, but a tree that gave fruit could not be cut or pruned. It is against Jewish law to hinder a fruit tree’s growth in any way.

She had to let it take over her garden, and as the years went by, it did so, growing so big and tall that it towered over our second-story porch and dropped purple splats of berries for three years, until it became permissible to pick and eat them. As the tree grew, it stole nutrients from the soil and light from the sky, becoming the hungriest, greediest thing in the garden. Year by year, the other plants began to die. The tulips grew fewer and fewer in number; the irises disappeared completely. My grandmother saw this, and although she never said anything, I watched her make fewer and fewer trips to that garden she had once cherished. Eventually, the ivy became so neglected it grew over those carefully laid paths, and weeds began to crowd the borders and infiltrate the center of the garden. These were no mild breed either, they were the thick, broad-leafed stalks indigenous to Brooklyn, hardy plants that hardly needed any time at all, it seemed, to grow as tall as trees and drown the garden completely in darkness. When I saw that the weeds would not be addressed, I went downstairs to rip them out myself. I had no knowledge of gardening; my grandmother had taught me only to love flowers, not how to take care of them. With bare fingers I pulled and tugged on each insidious weed, feeling with every success that there were already new ones
growing to replace those that had been excised. My grandmother came out onto the porch and watched me work, thinking I was doing it to please her.

“You don’t have do that for me, little lamb,” she said, using her traditional term of endearment. But I wasn’t doing it for her. I was desperately trying to rescue the only realized fantasy of my childhood, the one beautiful thing that had marked my upbringing in this otherwise godforsaken corner of Brooklyn. I pulled furiously, my vision blurred by pollen irritation, my nose stinging from the pungent odor of weed juice spilling onto the earth. I finished the whole backyard, and when I was done, the garden looked as if a massacre had taken place there; the weeds had left gaping holes and depressions in the ground. Never mind, I thought, those would fill. I would buy weed killer. I would keep pulling them out if it killed me. I was older by then, making money of my own from babysitting; I could plant new things in the holes to replace the weeds. Hydrangeas would be nice, perhaps some bleeding heart.

I made my way over to some young climbing roses, shriveled and drooping sadly where the twine had come loose. I found the rusted edge of metal tie used to affix the bush to the fence and tried to force the stems back into their original upright position, to no avail. The tie snapped back, its jagged edge tearing into the skin of my palm. Blood sprang from the gash, but I bit back my instinctual scream so that my grandmother wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t thought to ask for gardening gloves.

How I wanted her to come down then and work alongside me, just as we had always done. They seemed gone forever, those times. No matter how hard I worked to fix it all, I knew my grandmother had given up on the garden, and my grandmother did not change her mind about things she had given up on. She had learned to
detach from the things she loved because she had experienced so much loss in her life already.

It was from her that I must have inherited that deep-rooted ability to detach. It hurt to love things now, I discovered, even though I wanted to love without being afraid of disappointment. I wanted to be able to invest my energies over and over again but what was easy, what was familiar, was the act of cutting—cutting off, cutting out, cutting away. When would I be able to stop trimming at the edges of my life, gnawing it down to the bone, and start building on it?

I had already begun to miss my grandmother then. Even as I stood next to her while she cooked and scrubbed and sang tremulous tunes I longed desperately for the woman she had been before loss and tragedy had sanded her down. After I left, it felt as if she had already died, and her spirit hovered over me like a guardian angel.

I finally had permission to dredge up her past. She was the ultimate model of displacement for me. Her story of exile and wandering was more real to me than the story of how she had settled into her new life in America, the only life I had known her in. As I experienced my own exile, and as I wandered around the world looking for a new identity, there was no one I could feel closer to than the memory of her young self, traversing rivers and oceans in search of a place to call home.

I was here now, in the world she had come from. These were her childhood smells and sounds.

These trees had been witnesses, and this sun had warmed her
on summer days like this one. I hadn’t thought about how it would feel to be walking on ground she might have walked on, under a sky so distinctly different from the one that had seemed so far away in dusty, honking Brooklyn. My eyes filled at the realization, but the sun dried my tears before they could roll down my cheeks. Somewhere, a lawn mower started, and the sound of it made me open my eyes. A magpie strutted by, a starling pecked at a crevice between the paving stones.

This might have been me.
That thought now formed itself like a sentence on a blackboard in my mind.

Of course, not the me I was now, but the hypothetical me, two generations descended from my grandmother. If she’d never had her world turned upside down by war, but had stayed here, tending her garden, feeding the birds, baking her strudels and pies, I’d have been some young peasant woman working on a farm perhaps, speaking only Hungarian and Yiddish, the rest of the world an abstract idea I’d never encounter in reality.

Although American culture had reached the rest of Western Europe and certainly parts of Budapest, Nyíregyháza had no billboards for American films and no American music playing on its radio stations. The fashions here did not seem influenced by the French, the Germans, or the Russians, but more so by the unself-consciousness of a culture that didn’t have to suffer the burden of comparison.

Students had started to arrive on campus, clutching worn leather book bags to their chests, dressed in faded jeans and cotton tees. They glanced at me curiously, and I knew there was something
about me that screamed
different
to them, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that might be. Was it my hair, with its layered cut from a salon in New York, or my shorts, with their American logo on the back pockets? I was inclined to think it was something they could smell as they walked by, a sort of perfume of foreignness.

Back at the guesthouse I saw a petite young woman in high-heeled slingbacks knocking on my door. She reached down to smooth her red pencil skirt over impossibly slender thighs, then straightened up nervously to wait for the door to open.

“I’m here!” I called out from the other end of the corridor.

She turned and squinted, then smiled and proceeded to clack her heels down the hall toward me. I indicated I would come to her.

Angelika had the kind of distinct Transylvanian looks that would be very popular in an American TV show about vampires. Her hair was pitch-black and curled around her shoulders in long waves. Her eyes were the color of liquid amber and framed by long dark lashes and defined brows. She had a pert upturned nose and a smile that revealed two rows of braces encased in red rubbers. She was my age, with two children from a previous marriage. It was the first time I had met another woman of my age who was also a mom. This was the Old World, I reminded myself.

“I will take you to Zoltán’s office, okay?”

“Do you know what the plan is for today?” I asked.

“No, Zoltán is the one in charge,” she said, laughing. “I just follow instructions.”

“Thank you for doing this for me,” I said. “I’m sure you have more important work you could be doing.”

“Are you kidding?” she said. “This is probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done for my job. It’s such a refreshing change from sitting behind my computer all day.”

Zoltán suggested that I put on something more professional than shorts, as we were set to meet the mayor of Kántorjánosi, who had already been informed about our visit.

“You have to impress these people,” Angelika said, “if you want them to get anything done for you. They have to feel that this important New York writer is coming to visit their small town, with a whole entourage. You will give them a story they will be telling for years!”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“I’ll meet you at the car,” I said, and raced back to my room to put on a skirt and heels.

“Much better,” Zoltán said when I teetered into the parking lot.

“
Nagyon szép
?” I asked, recalling a bit of Hungarian from my childhood.

“Yes, very pretty.”

On the way to Kántorjánosi, a blink-and-you-miss-it village twenty-five miles from Nyíregyháza, I was largely silent as Angelika and Zoltán conversed. In my hand I held an old photograph of my grandmother’s childhood home, which had been taken by one of my uncles on a 1988 visit. I had scavenged it during a childhood treasure hunt. Of course, I did not know the exact address, so my plan had been to drive through the village and see if any of the houses matched the picture taken twenty-five years earlier.

Not the most ironclad plan, I realized, as we drove past
cornfields, apple orchards, and carefully tended vineyards. The land here was very flat, and stretched for miles around us. Every field was full of enormous, healthy crops, seemingly impervious to the unforgiving heat of summer. Had I been crazy to think I could just show up with a few photographs and my grandmother’s past would magically materialize before me? Now that I had actually made it, something I never really believed would happen, it seemed silly, and I was scared to fail after having come all this way.