Hollywood Animal (11 page)

Even though it was used so casually, I was forbidden to say it. I didn’t say it, but the older boys said it constantly.

They’d say,
“Lofasz A Seggedbe, Jozsi
, what are you crying about?” Or, if I wanted to play with their ball, they’d say,
“Lofasz A Seggedbe, Jozsi
, go home!”

It means: May a horse’s cock enter your behind.

And an English war correspondent covering a Hungarian cavalry charge in World War I wrote: “The Hungarians rode down the hill yelling their ancient tribal battle cry
—“Lofasz A Seggedbe!”

This is something else the older boys taught me:

Half a mile from the camp at the edge of the pine forest was a train track. The train came by at dusk each day. There were people, the older boys said, who would wait for the train each day. Then they’d “catch it,” the older boys said and laughed. They would lie down in front of the train as it came and let it go over them.

Did I want to see it?

No, I didn’t want to see it.

“You’re a big baby,” they said. “All you can do is cry all the time. All you can do with your
pimpli
is piss with it.”

I agreed to go down to the tracks with them. It was winter and there was
snow
on the ground. Dusk was fast approaching. We waited, hidden behind some trees. We saw no one.

“It doesn’t happen every day,” one of the older boys said.

“Jozsi is going to shit his pants,” another said.

And then we saw her. A very old, birdlike woman, dressed in black. A crowlike apparition against the harsh whiteness of the snow. Her head was down. She wore a black babushka. A rosary was twisting in her hands.

The older boys were excited. My knees felt weak. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Hold him,” one of the older boys said, “don’t let him run away.”

The old woman went up to the train track and knelt down in the snow, shaking, holding on to her rosary. She was crying. Her lips were moving. It was getting darker. I heard a train whistle.

Some of the older boys hooted. I heard the sound of the train now.

She got up, took a few steps, and fell over into the middle of the track. I could see her body shaking. Her head was down, she was on her knees, crumpled over. A black lump. She faced not the train but the trees where we were hiding.

There was hardly a thud when the train hit her. It sounded more like a squish. Blood sprayed onto the snow.

I smelled vomit. It was mine. I was running, crying. I heard the older boys laughing as they ran after me.

I met my first girlfriend in the camp, the eight-year-old blond Mari Toth, whose father was a Hungarian shoemaker. Her brother, Jozsi, was my first best friend.

We ran from the Krampusz together and played ball together and stood in the milk line together, running home to the barrack with the steaming hot milk which we would share with our parents. I was five and Jozsi was six.

At Christmas, my father made me a toy rifle out of an umbrella and Mari, Jozsi, and I would pretend to go out and hunt Komchis with it. One of the GIs thought we were funny. He’d see us with our umbrella-rifle and grin and shout “Boom! Boom! Boom!” Sometimes he’d even hide from us or sneak up on us and say “
Okay!
”

“
Okay
” was the first English word I learned. “
Vell
” was the second. Americans used it for everything, but no Hungarian knew exactly what it meant.

Then my father taught me—“
Hallo! Hov arr yu?
” and “
Yez, zir, I lak Amerika very mooch
.” I learned to say those things in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, because we were trying to emigrate from the camps to those countries, too.

The relief organizations would send their representatives from those countries and my mother, my father, and I would appear before them. I would show off what my father had taught me: “
Okay! Hallo! Hov arr yu? Yez zir!
” Then we would go back to the barrack and hear nothing from them again.

Except once. A relief organizer summoned us to say he had found my father
a
job as a handyman and janitor in Seattle, Washington. Our sponsor in America would be the judge whom my father would work for. We were overjoyed. We were going to America! The land of the free! Where the streets were paved with gold!

But no. The judge in Seattle changed his mind. He wrote a letter saying he had thought about it and wouldn’t feel right about employing a man as a janitor who was … a successful novelist, a former lawyer, and who had graduated with honors from the respected Pázmány Péter University in Budapest.

My parents were heartbroken.

I said, “
Vell, okay!
”

And then, in answer to my mother’s constant prayers, novenas, Rosaries—appeals to St. Jude, to St. Anthony of Padua, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sts. Elizabeth and Margaret of Hungary—a miracle!

We were informed we had another American sponsor. A man who had written that he would personally guarantee our livelihood in America. He was an American citizen but Hungarian-born, a Hungarian actor working in American films, playing mostly American Indians in John Wayne westerns.

His name was Jenö Máté. He lived in New York and Hollywood.

My father didn’t know him. He’d never heard of him. He was afraid it was some kind of mistake. Why would a complete stranger guarantee the livelihood of a forty-three-year-old man who couldn’t do physical labor? How could he guarantee the livelihood of a Hungarian writer who couldn’t speak English?

But there was no mistake. Jenö Máté had written to the authorities specifically about sponsoring István Eszterhás, his wife, and his son.

Plans were made. Dates scheduled. We would be transported by truck from Austria to Bremen, Germany. We would board the American refugee ship, formerly a troop carrier, the SS
Hentselman
, for an eleven-day journey to New York City. There we would be met by a representative of Caritas, a Roman Catholic relief organization. We were even given a five-dollar bill so that we would have some money when we arrived.

All three of us kept looking at and feeling the five-dollar bill. American money. From the land where the streets were paved with gold.

The date arrived. We had our one suitcase with the clothes in it we’d always had. I had my umbrella-rifle in my hands.

It was a rainy summer day. The military truck pulled up in front of the barrack. A GI called our name. We barely recognized it the way he pronounced it. We climbed into the back of the truck.

There were a few Hungarians watching us, my friend Jozsi Toth among them. I threw my umbrella-rifle out of the back of the truck and Jozsi caught it. He was jumping up and down, holding the rifle high.

The truck started to move. We sat down in the back as it rattled and shook
our
suitcase next to us. I looked out the back. Jozsi was still jumping up and down, his umbrella-rifle raised high.

The camp was smaller … and smaller … and smaller … and then it was gone.

I had never seen a ship before. It was bigger than the steep-cliff mountain I had once seen in Salzburg. My parents taught me another American phrase—“
Zank yu
.”

I spoke English all the time to the soldiers as we stood in the long lines.
Vell, okay, hov arr yu, zank yu
. Some of the soldiers gave me chewing gum and candy. I had never tasted chewing gum before. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to swallow it.

My stomach hurt. I threw up. I cried.

Children my age—I was five and a half in June of 1950—stayed with their mothers on board. The women slept on cots in the biggest room I had ever seen. Thousands of women and their children. The men were sleeping in another endless room.

I slept on a cot next to my mother. When the women went to bed, they took their clothes off. Thousands and thousands of naked women of different shapes and sizes. I studied them.

I was happy studying them. I looked forward each night to my studies.

As a Hungarian boy and then as an American man, I diligently continued the study I began on the ship, a lifelong exploration of the bodies of women
.

I dream still about waking early and waiting for the women on the ship to slowly put their clothes on. Sometimes my mother, seeing the intensity of my study, told me to look away
.

I looked away, but wherever I looked I saw only more naked women.

During the day, the men and women mingled on deck and the children played. My father was ill. He had the flu and we never saw him.

We visited him in a room where he was lying down. We had to put masks on our faces when we saw him. I didn’t know why but I didn’t ask any questions.

I thought it was another oddity among people whose streets were paved with gold.

I didn’t know what gold was until they showed me it was teeth. An old Hungarian woman in the barrack had heard me ask what it was. So she opened her mouth wide and told me to look deep into it.

In the back, among black teeth, something gleamed. It was the gold. I understood it then.

In America, the streets would be full of these special gleaming teeth.

· · ·

A soldier saw my mother on the deck of the ship light up her newspaper filled with tree leaves. He came over and asked to smell what she was smoking. She gave it to him.

He took a drag and started to cough. He threw it over the side, looked at her angrily, and walked away. My mother held on to me. I knew she was frightened.

The soldier came back. He handed her three packs of American cigarettes in a shiny-paper covering. She told him no in Hungarian, but he said
Yez, Yez
.

He opened one of the packs and handed her a cigarette. She put it into her mouth. Her hands were shaking. He lit it for her with a match. She took a deep drag and looked away from him.

I saw she was crying. I looked at him and he was crying, too, but smiling at the same time. Then the American walked away.

A soldier saw me on deck looking at the sea. There were big fish in it, my mother told me, which ate you if you fell into the water. I was trying to see the fish that ate you but I couldn’t.

The soldier brought me a rocking horse and a flute. I said,
“Vell, okay, hov arr yu, zank yu.”
He laughed and ruffled my hair.

I loved my rocking horse and my flute. I had the flute in my mouth all day and blew it as hard as I could. My mother said, “Stop. You’re all out of breath.”

But I blew it and blew it.

It began to rain. The wind howled. The ship pitched forward and back and leaned to the side. We had to stay all day in the room where the women slept. Many of them were throwing up. Needless to say, I was throwing up, too.

But I was happy.

I had my rocking horse and my flute and there were some women who were naked now even during the day.

My mother and father were on deck in the sunshine. I was next to them blowing my flute. Up ahead, we could see the tallest buildings I had ever seen—ten times the size of the sheer-cliff mountain in Salzburg.

They hugged me and said, “Look, Jozsi, look at America!”

I stopped blowing my flute and looked. I said, “They have big barracks here, Papa!”

The soldier who had given me the rocking horse and the flute came and took them back.

I screamed. They were
mine!

My parents explained that they were for other little boys, too, who’d also come to America on this ship. I didn’t care about other little boys. I cared about my rocking horse and my flute.

I screamed at the soldier. I screamed—“
Vell, okay, Hov arr yu, Zank yu!
”—at the top of my lungs. I didn’t know any other American words.

He shook his head and walked away with my things. A few minutes later, he came back and said I could keep the flute.

I started screaming at him again, but it didn’t work this time. He kept the rocking horse.

We left the ship in a long line. There were relief people on the dock waiting for us refugees, but when we got to the dock, the Caritas official who was supposed to meet us wasn’t there.

We were sweating and hungry. A man was selling fruit and my father said he would buy me an apple. I had never tasted an apple. It was big and beautifully red.

My father gave the fruit vendor the five-dollar bill we had been touching and feeling since the refugee camp. The vendor gave me the apple and put the five-dollar bill in his pocket and said,
“Zank yu!”

Now we had an apple and no money. Then I ate the apple.

Now we had no money and no apple, either.

The Caritas official was finally there and he put us into a car. I had never been in a car before, only jeeps and trucks. It was like a small, beautiful room that moved.

There was so much noise in America that my mother covered her ears with her hands. Cars honked. People yelled. Policemen whistled. The buildings were so big you couldn’t see the sky. It was so hot it was hard to breathe. Our refugee camp clothes were covered with splotches of sweat.

My father told the relief official that America must be a very expensive place if an apple cost all the money we had. The Caritas man laughed.

I looked out the car window to see if I could see any gold teeth in the streets.

I couldn’t.

I asked the Caritas man to show us where the gold teeth were.

He laughed even more, then he took us to a tall tenement apartment building owned by a florid-faced, friendly Hungarian woman, Mrs. Szánto. Her building was filled with other refugee Hungarians.

She gave us a room and she made us food. She spoke Hungarian in a way I’d never heard. The Hungarian words were mixed with vells and okays and also with “Yu no?” and
“Alrite, mizter?
”

I stood at the window of our room looking far below at all the cars and blew my flute. There were more sirens in the streets of America then I’d ever heard in the camps.

I cried all night and held my mother.

· · ·

I heard my father tell Mrs. Szánto that he wanted to find our sponsor to America and thank him.

Mrs. Szánto asked him who the sponsor was, and when he said it was Jenö Máté, she started to laugh. She told my father that Jenö Máté sponsored anybody and everybody. That he had sponsored more refugee Hungarians all by himself than entire American organizations. That one day America would put Jenö Máté in jail.