The Book of Fathers (26 page)

“Only me,” he reassured them. He drew his palm along the feathers of the closely packed birds. It felt like the fur of the black cat they had left behind; goodness, how long it has been since he thought of her. Or of Babka; it was almost more difficult to summon up her face than those of the Sterns, whom he had encountered only in his visions.

He stood out on the edge of the dovecote, closed his eyes, and, using his right hand, inserted his fingers in the gash on his skull. And there, on the creaking plank, swaying this way and that like a reed in the night wind, a hair’s breadth short of plunging into the deep, he finally got what he wanted.

The onset of his antipathy towards his mother began on this night. His unrelenting questions more than once convulsed Matushka with tears that only potent medicaments could stanch. Béla Berda categorically ordered Szilárd to cease this torturing of his mother, but he was no longer
prepared to be ignored. In vain did they beat him, threaten to send him away to board, lock him in the cellars, make him kneel on maize cobs—nothing helped. As soon as he was within earshot of his mother, he would begin his litany: “My father was called Otto Stern, was he not, and he had a heart attack in prison? My grandfather was a writer, was he not, who completed The Book of Fathers? You were a strumpet in hostelries, were you not, and allowed men to have their way with you for money? I could have had two brothers or sisters, had the angel-maker not freed you of your burden? Is that not so?”

Answers came there none. Béla Berda used a horsewhip or a riding crop to harry him from the house if he discovered that Szilárd had been harassing his mother again. The woman began to lose weight, coming to resemble her son in stature.

“Do you not see that you are killing her? You will be the death of your mother, you idiot!”

Szilárd nodded in sympathy: “Of course, it is I who will be her death, not she who will be mine, by denying me any information about myself!”

“Very well! Ask me; I will answer your every question!”

Except that town clerk Béla Berda knew almost nothing about his wedded wife’s past. Szilárd’s appalling accusation, that Fatimeh was some kind of strumpet, he had no hesitation in rejecting. Completely out of the question. But the seed of suspicion had been sown in his heart. When he had first gotten to know her she was already in the troupe of actors, living with them in the Golden Lamb’s seediest garret rooms. Even him she was not prepared to enlighten about her past: “What has been is gone; if you want me, your desire must be for what there is now!”

But of course it is well known what women in the acting profession are like, mused Béla Berda now, staring deep into Szilárd’s eyes, which were like those of an exhausted hound. And now both of them were pained by the past. But
while Béla Berda was gnawed by a growing jealousy, in Szilárd Berda—he had adopted him officially—it was what he knew for certain that throbbed as an open wound.

On the sixteenth anniversary of the day of his birth, Szilárd Berda slipped away from the house of his mother and stepfather. Apart from the clothes he stood up in, he carried a change of underwear and a few personal items that he tucked into the leather satchel that had been sewn for him by Babka. The egg-shaped timepiece, he knew, was inherited on his father’s side. Likewise, he thought, the broken gold necklace with the medallion—for it contained a picture of his father. He counted out for himself half of the gold coins wrapped in linen in his mother’s secret drawer—he thought that, having reached the age of majority, this was his due. It was but a venial sin to take an advance. He wrote every detail on a card that he placed in the drawer.

He traveled over fields and forests, sometimes on foot, sometimes hunched on jolting carts. There were decent folk in the country at whose tables he would be offered food and drink; if asked about himself, he replied he was a wandering scholar, looking for his father. He had no particular goal; he just followed his nose along roads virgin to him. Along many byways, by twists and turns, he reached the countryside that he recognized from his visions, where the shoots of the vine curl upwards hungrily on the vine-stocks.

He had no need to seek the sharp bend in the stream—all of a sudden he was there at the edge of the water, his ears caressed by the soft murmur of the stream. Small fish flung themselves out of the water, plunging back with a little plop.

“Well, this looks like it,” sighed Szilárd.

He had no need to ask after the house of Richard Stern, his legs carried him there on their own. He stood for a while before the door, waiting for someone to come out or go in, but no one did. Then he wandered over to the other side of the street, to the building that housed the Stern & Stern
Wine Emporium, which had had an attractive pavement laid in front of it since he could last have seen it, if that is indeed the right verb to express the way he had learned about this landscape.

Brand-new wine barrels were being loaded onto an oxcart by the laborers, under the direction of a gray-haired old lady whom Szilárd recognized as Yanna, his father’s mother. He dared not say anything to her; he just watched, with the mournful eyes of a dog, his shoulders drooping, his lips curled downwards. The old woman soon noticed him and with furrowed brows repeatedly glanced up in his direction. In the end she went over to him and said somewhat aggressively: “What would you be wanting, then?”

Szilárd could not reply. Moved, he surveyed the family resemblances in the old woman’s face. Yanna cleared her throat (recently she had secretly started to smoke a pipe) and could not herself understand why she said more gently: “Would you like a spot of hot soup? There will be a flask of wine after.”

She led him through the ground floor of the house, where a dozen men were writing away at desks facing each other. At the far end of the three interconnected rooms they came to an elongated granary, used for storing the many different tools needed for viticulture. A substantial table, used in the grape assessment process, dominated the center of the room, and there was a flat-fronted oven with a fire blazing in it. Yanna gave a little push to the pot with the lunch in it. There was plenty of food for the scribes; there would be enough for this spindly, clearly finicky eater. “May I ask who you are?”

“Szilárd Berda, at your service. But truly … I don’t dare.”

Yanna put her hand on her hips: “What are you afraid of? I don’t eat children. How many summers?”

“My sixteenth.”

“A grown man, then.”

At this Szilárd finally gave a smile, flashing tiny, pearly teeth.

The scribes did all in their power to make him feel unwelcome during the meal, pointedly looking right through him. Each had his own wooden plate and spoon. Yanna gave him a clean plate and a spoon so big that he could only use the edge of it and as a result kept dripping soup on his shirt. He knew this struggle must appear comical and could hardly wait for the meal to end.

When Yanna expressed, in a foreign tongue, the hope that they had enjoyed their meal, Szilárd said, half audibly, thank you in his mother tongue. The scribes returned to their writing desks. A servant girl rinsed the plates with sand.

“Well now, out with it!” said Yanna.

“Well, you see … I know it is something of a surprise … but … I … well, I also belong here … as I am a Stern … a Stern from the wrong side of the blanket.”

“What!”

He told her what he knew. Yanna did not believe a word. Since their star had risen high in the sky, any number of tricksters and con men had striven in various ways to soften her heart so that she would open her purse for them. But Yanna was made of tougher stuff. She interrupted him midstream: “If, and I said if, it turns out that this is all true, what do you want of us?”

“I have no demands. Perhaps I could make the acquaintance of Uncle Richard, may God preserve him …”

Yanna cut in: “You should know that in our faith we are not allowed to utter His name!”

“I truly beg your pardon.”

“The pardon is in His hands,” said Yanna, jerking her thumb towards the sky.

That evening she introduced the newcomer to the family. They listened with suspicion. Could they really be
seeing the offspring of Otto Stern? They all awaited the decision of Uncle Richard. Richard Stern was in his sixty-sixth year, the tremor in his hands and neck meant that he could take liquids only through a straw. He observed the boy, taking his time to study the most minute details. He recalled the day that he had himself arrived here to seek out his long-unseen family and was astonished to detect in the boy’s eyes the very mirror of his feelings at that time. He gave a mollified wheeze. “Can you support your words with some concrete proof?” he asked in a creaky voice.

Szilárd showed him the pocket timepiece and the medallion he guarded with his life. Yanna gave a squeal of joy when the face of her firstborn stared back at her from the gold locket. Richard Stern’s hook of a hand pulled Szilárd towards him and the old man’s wet kisses fell upon the boy in a shower. This is how it is with us, thought Richard Stern, moved: We keep losing members of the family, only to get them back again in the course of time. He embraced his grandson, who could feel on his skin the old man’s tremors. There followed the uncles in turn, whom Szilárd was able to name at once thanks to his voyages back into the past: Ferenc, Ignác, Mihály, József, János. No one was surprised.

“You have aged a lot since … since … you know …” Szilárd stammered. His voice was drowned by the clamor from the thirty-odd members of the clan. Questions rained upon him by the dozen. His mother? His stepfather? Where was he born? Whereabouts did he live? Why had he not made himself known to them before? How did he come to be called Berda?

Szilárd’s answers were full of detail. Then he asked his grandfather to show him the completed Book of Fathers, which he kept under the floorboards. Richard Stern gladly took him into the library where he knelt down and conjured up the dust-covered folio. That evening and night Szilárd did not set foot in the guest room made up for him, but lay
on his stomach in the library, burning candle after candle down to the stump. Greedily he devoured and enacted in his imagination everything that he had hitherto known about only from his visions. He spent ecstatic hours on the worn carpet pockmarked with cigar burns. He was particularly struck by the realization that some of his ancestors were vouchsafed not just the past but, to a lesser degree, also the future. He, to the best of his knowledge, knew nothing of what was to come. Although he could not elucidate certain images he had seen, these could just as easily be the harbingers of things still to come. We shall see, he thought.

The following day he was also able to hold in his hands the folio begun by Otto Stern, since he could inform the family of its exact location. This made him a true celebrity. However, he had to wait his turn to read it, as first of all Richard Stern, then Yanna, and then the five brothers of Otto Stern had priority in trying to decipher this much more challenging script.

“Would it be exceeding the bounds of decency if I asked, most humbly, whether I might be allowed to continue writing the story?”

Richard Stern was so moved that he found it difficult to reply. “What your father began is, it goes without saying, yours!” and with a solemn gesture he handed it to Szilárd. “The Book of Fathers. Volume the Second. Let it be yours—in view of the exceptional situation—now, before it is due. Guard it as you would the light of your eyes!”

By then it was very late. Szilárd thought it was an abuse of their hospitality to stay any longer. Richard Stern kept saying the opposite. “Where are you hurrying to? For years we had no idea that you existed! We have so much to discuss!”

Szilárd Berda basked in the warmth of his grandfather’s house for close on a month. It was a warmth that he had felt neither at Babka’s nor at his mother’s. Yet he was unfamiliar with the prayers, customs, and everyday expressions of
the people here; he did not even understand their language, yet he gladly put the borrowed yarmulke on top of his head when they held a service to their God and he received with rapture the phylacteries that his grandfather placed upon him. He knew that his decision was not unusual in this family; nonetheless he was surprised at the ovation that greeted his announcement at the high day table: “If you have no objection, I should like as soon as possible to adopt the surname Stern.”

When I returned to my legal residence I managed to smuggle the gold coins I had taken back into their hiding place without being noticed. I informed my mother of my decision. There was a more heated response than I had expected: she threatened to disown me, which town clerk Béla Berda heartily endorsed, saying I was an ungrateful puppy. He repeatedly brought up his generosity and his kindness of heart towards me, and the bonds that arise from the fact that he gave me his name. Though I felt that there was some truth in what he said, I could do no other. They who have eyes to see, let them see. Though a citation from the Torah might perhaps be more appropriate, it will be a long time before I shall be in a position to orient myself in the ancient language of the Jews
.

Soon a compromise was reached: I was to attend the Lyceum of Eger town, the costs being borne by my grandfather Richard Stern, who, alas, in the November of that year departed this life. I mourned him greatly then and my sorrow has not diminished since
.

The upper school offers a varied curriculum to the young student, whom the locals here call student gentlemen. To my great joy, I was able to include among my subjects not only the study of the Hebrew language but also astronomy, as the science of stargazing is called. At the top of the Lyceum building is located the Specula, architecturally a fine match for the building. The Specula is an astronomical observatory famed throughout the land, reached by climbing 320 steps. There I was able to spend many
nights exploring the glittering wonders of the heavens by means of the most up-to-date optical machines of English manufacture, while by day I spent a deal of time on the rotating cupola terrace with its camera obscura. In bright sunlight it throws shadows of outside images onto a white surface: scenes of Eger life, people walking, gardens, houses, birds in the air, and so forth. Professor Varágh, the distinguished astronomer, allowed me to make good use of my free evenings by cleaning and polishing the precious instruments
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