The Book of Fathers (20 page)

In due course their first child was born, a son, hale and healthy. He was christened Otto. He was followed, at intervals of approximately two years, by Ferenc, Ignác, Mihály, József, and János.

Richard Stern lived to a ripe old age in the bosom of his family.

Perhaps now at long last the seven lean years have passed. My ancestors and I have had our share of suffering; from this day forward let years of happiness beckon. If we had a star, it would last for eternity, or even longer
.

V

DESPITE THE RISING WAVES OF WHITE HEAT NOT A LEAF
stirs; time seems to slow to a halt. Like shimmering aspic the heat dribbles down even into the depths of the cellars. The wine is on the turn, viscous, its fire and its bouquet slowly evaporate. Languid bees lazily loop the sweet malvasia grapes. In the fields are ever-widening fissures in the ground, which the oldest mavens think it unwise to inspect lest their faces be singed by a blast from hell. The song of the whitethroat, the crested lark, and the titmouse is heard rarely in the land. Only the cry of the cuckoo breaks the silence now and then, and the persistent tap-tap of the woodpecker on the desiccated trunks.

The gentry regularly visited the Nagyfalu hostelry to seek, and find, amusement. Benedek Bordás had started out as a common tapster in Varjúlapos, but as the years went by he realized that the more moneyed the class of customer, the better he fared. He sold his wayside alehouse and had a hostelry built in Nagyfalu, close by the lock-keeper’s cottage. Here the best of Gypsy bands played for all they were worth, the finest cooks from Transylvania bustled about the kitchens, and eye-catching wenches from Ruthenia served
the oaken tables. The full-bellied gentlemen were able to take their ease and recover from the orgy of culinary delights in the hostelry’s spacious guest rooms. Benedek Bordás took care always to keep freshly filled the china lavoirs of the mirrored washing table, with a crisp napkin on the side; and on the bedside tables a bowl of fruit, with knotted rolls fresh baked that dawn.

Keen young wenches frequented the hostelry by the dozen, some without the knowledge of their families, others—particularly from the wrong end of Basahalom and Kazárbocor—with their heads held high. A particularly dissolute group of regulars liberated Benedek Bordás’s heavy bunch of keys and took off with it to the Lesser Tisza, intending to throw it in the river, declaring that “Henceforth the Nagyfalu hostelry will never shut its doors!”

And it never did. The finest wine drained unceasing from the barrels into the wineglasses, while in the fire they grilled and roasted vast quantities of game and fowl, in the belly of which the Transylvanian cooks always liked to conceal some surprise: perhaps a smaller bird roasted whole, or a pierced apple stuffed with heart and liver. But the gentlemen did not always demand such masterpieces of the cook’s art; simpler, homemade delicacies regularly featured on Benedek Bordás’s bill of fare and enjoyed great popularity: pork crackling served lukewarm, for example, or fried dough with bacon.

In the entrance hall a wooden board proclaimed: “Any dish prepared on request, if ingredients available.” Visitors sometimes put Benedek Bordás’s claim to the most severe of tests, but he almost always managed to keep his promise. The only guests who shrank his stomach to a walnut-sized dumpling were the Vandal Band. These rough fellows were the terror of the neighborhood. The Vandal Band feared nothing and no one and rarely did a week pass without stories of their duels or revels or other adventures
reverberating round the barstools. One August, after a night of drinking and carousing, they painted the Nagyfalu calvary red and—God forgive them their sin—stuffed a lemon in the mouth of the Christ on the cross. Another time they forced the Gypsy band to strip and hung them upside down from the branches of the oak tree by the hostelry entrance and ordered the mortified musicians to play their favorite tunes as they hung. The mirrored great saloon they smashed up almost every month. Though their moneyed parents invariably paid for the damage, Benedek Bordás could not abide them. Every time he heard their horses’ hoofs thundering in the puszta—his ears were keenly attuned to it by now—he prayed: “The pox consume you all!”

But the pox had other matters to attend to, and never did consume the Vandal Band. They rode in every week; sometimes, to the owner’s chagrin, every day. Those who had already had the pleasure avoided them at all costs; in the barroom no one ever sat at their table. Their cordovan knee-boots redound roughly on the floor as they enter, and the last one slams the door behind them. Reaching the corner table, they slap down their riding crops and Otto Stern, the senior Vandal, with mane of reddish hair like a lion, immediately bellows: “Wine! White! The roughest!” His powerful voice commands respect: the barflies fall silent, and only the hum of the fat kitchen flies can be heard.

Old Örzse, whose job it is to keep the tables clean, rushes over with the dishcloth, but without turning her back on them, else she is bound to get slapped on the rump. The six goblets are empty in a flash and Benedek Bordás can bring over the second round. And very soon the third. The Vandals know how to drink, no two ways about it. Little János, the youngest, constantly wants to dance with all the waitresses, sometimes even dragging Örzse
round the tables. The other visitors dare not laugh; they have learned the unwisdom of getting involved with this lot; bloodshed is never far away. Following these visits, Benedek Bordás nearly always found it necessary to take to his cart and seek out their parents with the handwritten bill, often several pages long, which offered a history, indeed a blow-by-blow account, of the particular night’s revels. Their father, Richard Stern, was a keen historian of these accounts. “It completely passes my understanding what they find so amusing about smashing up an inn,” he grumbled to himself as he rummaged in his leather pouch.

“They are but young and giddy-pated!” Yanna purred.

Benedek Bordás reflected that if these Vandals were his own, he would break them in two, but he kept his views to himself. Richard Stern was a bookish man held in great esteem in the locality and was therefore forgiven the antics of his six sons. The Sterns managed the region’s most highly respected firm of vintners and retailers of wine, though it seemed that it was mostly the women who did the work to enable their menfolk to spend the money on their whims. The office with its solid, weathered floor was in the hands of Nanna Eszter, a bent old lady nearing eighty. With her pebble glasses she had to peer so closely at the folded sheets of the accounts that she often had ink on the tip of her nose.

It was said among the traveling wine merchants that until you have tried to make a deal with Nanna Eszter, you do not know what haggling is. Behind her back Nanna Eszter was known as
Jew ultimo
, this being the term at the time for the Pagát, the first card in the Hungarian tarot pack. No one dared cast her ancestry in the face of this sharp-visaged old woman or her family since she had all but blinded a Romanian trader with a whip for insulting her. She had been only about seventy at the time but her strength had diminished little since. Her gray, waist-length hair was always carefully coiled into a severe chignon; whenever her temper
rose, a lock of hair would break free and begin a life of its own, fluttering like a miniature pennant.

Yanna, Richard Stern’s wife, now close to completing her fifth decade, retained her original colors, the complexion and hair for which her husband would have walked all the way to Pest-Buda; neither the honey of her skin nor the silky ebony of her hair had faded, only little crow’s feet around her eyes suggested the passing of the years. Yanna became the right hand of Nanna Eszter. She picked up the mysteries of viticulture with such natural ease it was as if she had been born a Stern. These two women understood each other without recourse to words. There was no man that Richard Stern was jealous of, save Nanna Eszter, who seemed to require Yanna’s services for very considerable periods of time. If he protested, Nanna Eszter would stop him short with the words: “Not a word, Richard. Someone has to mind the shop while you bury yourself in your books in the ivory tower.”

Yanna was responsible, in Richard Stern’s name, for the formulation of the rules of conduct for the vineyards on the entire hill, which subsequently gained the acceptance of all the producers. The charter, affirmed by the initials or marks of all, hung in the office of the Master of the Guild of the Hill’s Vineyards and its text was drummed out once a month. The Vandal Band would even sing it, accompanied by the Gypsy band, at the climax of a night out, to the tune of the subversive Kurucz song “
Csínom Palkó
.”

Since the creation of too many paths is damaging to the vines, it is hereby ordered that everyone will keep to their traditional paths. If a stranger walks the paths, the Master of the Guild shall arrest him and whatever is taken from the stranger is his to keep.

If anyone steals of the grapes and takes them to his cellars, upon proof of theft he will lose those grapes. If it be a child stealing but without the father consenting, the above punishment may be excused.

Affray on this hill will result in a fine of eighteen florins, five to accrue to the municipality, the rest to the owner. If there be damage in consequence, it will be assessed and a further fine levied.

If swords or flintlocks be carried in a hostile manner, the Master of the Guild will arrest the party and lock him in his house. Those with fences who fail to maintain them and in consequence let cattle stray shall pay due compensation.

No one may sell their grapes directly, nor transfer his lease, except with the knowledge of the Master of the Guild. Those who do so nonetheless will pay a fine of twenty florins …

Yanna felt proud to have her words sung. Richard Stern, however, was beside himself: “Wretched curs! You hold nothing sacred!”

It was generally every two months that he completely lost his temper with his sons. He would line them up in the dining hall filled with heavy, dark furniture and give them more or less the same dressing down each time. Well now, what on earth do you think you are doing? Why did they think they could do as they like? That they owned everything including the walnut trees? How many more times would the family have to pay for their frolics? Would they ever grow up?

The boys listened to the speech with eyes firmly fixed on the ground. When their father had unburdened himself, Otto acted as spokesman for them all. “Father dear, may it please you not to be too upset; we were just amusing ourselves!”

By then they had drawn the sting of Richard Stern’s words and he excused them with a shaking head. “For
Heaven’s sake, do something useful!” he said and disappeared into his study. That year he was translating some Hebrew prayers into Hungarian, so that those without knowledge of the Old Testament language could also pray when they would. (He was also the first to produce a Hebrew-to-Hungarian glossary, of which the printing house of Izidor Berg printed 150 copies almost nine years later. As he surveyed the clarity of the printed page and the quality of the binding, Richard Stern could not help thinking that this would have gained the approval of his ancestor, Grandpa Czuczor.)

The six Vandals were back in the Nagyfalu hostelry that night. Otto Stern demanded a virgin and when he was offered one, chased her out of his room at the point of his sword, bellowing that if this whore was a virgin, he was Pegasus. Eventually his brothers managed to calm him down. Little János suggested a game of cards. Otto Stern was reluctant: “Why should I take the shirt off my own brothers’ backs? Let’s play with others!” But no one really wanted to share the green baize table with the six Vandals. “I am bored!” boomed Otto Stern. “Let’s ride down to the Greater Tisza and have a swimming race!”

“We’ve done that twice already this week … and you always win!” said Mihály.

“A fencing competition then!”

“You always win that as well.”

“Then tell me a story!”

But his brothers were not as skilled at the storyteller’s craft as he. They could guffaw, and guzzle wine and spirits, but in the end it was Otto Stern who told a story to the others, about all that he saw in his visionary moments about the past and the future. His brothers were unsure whether to believe him or not. The most inclined to believe him was the fourth-born, Mihály, who was still in short pants when he declared that he was going to be a famous general or
statesman. His hero was Alexander the Great. He hoped that in his career he would encounter a knot like that of Gordius, which he would be able to cut with his saber at a single stroke. He was taken aback when Otto Stern informed him: “You will not be a general, but you will be elected a senator in Parliament … next century there will be a street named after you in Pest-Buda … that is to say in Budapest.”

“Budapest?” All five young men burst out laughing. In fact all six, as the word had an amusing ring for Otto Stern as well.

The prophecy was the cause of endless banter from the other four brothers, who thenceforth called him Nobby Nobody. Otto’s claims were not taken seriously. The only thing he himself could not understand was why it was his eyes that had been chosen by the heavenly powers to be opened to the flow of time. In his childhood he had thought that the past and the present were visible to all, at least sometimes. He wanted to convince especially his brothers that this was no laughing matter. If only he could have offered to prophesy something in the near future that would soon have come to pass! But no such opportunity arose.

Of the six, Nobby Nobody was the most serious, the most industrious, and the most intelligent. The two lads who were his elders, Ferenc and Ignác, were in the same league as Otto as regards physical strength, but not in respect of their mental power. They rarely spoke, and if they wanted something they simply took it by force. The girls went in fear of them, even the humblest. With Mihály, however, it seemed as if some other kind of blood had transfused into the family, and little Józsi and János, who followed him, were more in his image than in Otto’s. Though the three youngest lads joined in the amusements of the brothers, the destruction and violence was nearly always wrought by the others.