The Book of Fathers (28 page)

The life of Szilárd Berda-Stern was extinguished on January 18, 1849 at six of the clock in the morning by a firing squad of four. Two aimed at his heart, two at his head.
One bullet landed in an eye and drenched in red the kerchief with which his executioners had sought to save his sight. His body was rolled up in canvas and tossed into the ditch at the far end of the cemetery, bearing only a few spadefuls of earth and disinfecting lime.

Unfathomably, some hundred years later in the damp heart of the ditch a dozen or more potato plants began to sprout. Their tubers were caressed by the winds of the west. This, too, Szilárd Berda-Stern had sensed somehow. By no means rare in his visions were the pale sad flowers of the potato plant.

VII

COOLING STREAMS OF AIR COME TO CLEAR THE LAND
. The smell of burned leaf mold mingles with the more oppressive fumes from the fumigation of the wine casks and the raffish smell of mulled wine. The fermenting juice of the grape is quaffed all around, keenly watched for its head, an index of its quality. In the cellars the water in the glass piping on the back of the barrels bubbles up as the gases promoting the ferment gurgle their way through the slender tubes. Those who have finished the wine harvest can already hammer into this year’s vintage barrels the taps with their maize-husk seals. The landscape grows more barren by the day. The autumn paints pale, dull colors, steadily emptying the nests.

From his earliest childhood when he woke from a deep, restful sleep he could taste freshly picked, dew-dappled raspberries in his mouth, and his tongue retained the imprint of the cool fruit until morning coffee, which it had been his habit since he had grown to manhood to ask to be brought to his bedside. There was nothing he desired more than strong Turkish coffee, with plenty of sugar and that soft top of the milk which, like his mother, he called butterfroth.
His servants and chambermaids, none of whom found his service congenial—they followed on one another’s heels almost monthly—brought the coffee into the bedroom at a fair gallop, as their master liked it boiling hot. But far worse than a cool cup was the spilling of its contents onto the silver salver, which was not an infrequent occurrence amid such haste; if this happened he sent it back with righteous indignation. He also noticed without fail if the amount of coffee used was incorrect and insisted that it be portioned out using the little copper kitchen scales: precisely one-tenth of a Viennese
Pfund
per cup. It often took three attempts to provide his morning beverage exactly as he desired. His servants got goosepimples down their backs from his monosyllabic interrogatives: “Napkin? Clean? Boiled? Fwoth? Stwong?”—he had trouble with his
r’
s.

There was only one person from whom Mendel Berda-Stern was prepared to accept his coffee irrespective of how it turned out: this was his younger sister Hanna, whom he addressed as Hami after a very early childhood attempt to say her name. After the death of their mother, Hami became the most important person in his life, the Ace of Trumps in his parlance.

His thirst for cards became evident while he was still a toddler. In his parents’ house they regularly leafed through the Devil’s Bible, the gentlemen playing Klaberjass or Mariage, the ladies gin rummy, though never for money. He was not yet four when—shortly before his father’s imprisonment—he made himself his own deck of cards, cutting out the 24 cards from a cardboard box; half had figures on them, the drawings having some resemblance to the members of the family.

“And what’s this?” his father asked kneeling on the floor beside him.

“Cawds! Show you how I play cawds!”

The little Mendel Berda-Stern shuffled the cards with some expertise and cut them, explaining the while, his father listening with his mouth open. The child had invented a brand-new game, distantly resembling Hungarian Tarokk, in which the rules were based on pure logic. The top trump was Mother, a kind of all-conquering Joker.

Mendel Berda-Stern drew his mother wearing a hat that looked like a fruit-basket, with the house and larder keys hanging from her neck. Among the cards with figures there also appeared his sister and the dog Morzsa, and the Sterns from Hegyhát, József and János, both with beards down to the ground. His father was assigned a value somewhat higher than the guard dog: he was recognizable only by the shape of his legs, just a little more X-shaped than in real life. At all events, his son’s deck of cards made him reflect whether he had been right to let his wife wear the trousers quite so much in the house. He had, however, little opportunity to reconsider this policy, as within a few weeks he had been arrested.

At first his mother insisted that the Daddy had gone away. Mendel Berda-Stern realized later, having discovered the truth and read the farewell letter intended in part also for him, that at about the time that Szilárd Berda-Stern was staring down the barrels of the guns, he had had a very strange dream. A well-built, rather rotund man, in the shadows of a tent, with a brown-skinned woman whispering in his ear. On the table, cards and a mysterious, crystalline ball. Mendel Berda-Stern could clearly make out the words of the woman: “Snow-white birds plunge into the fire and burn to death.”

The same man, in the company of other men, colorful cards in hand, crumpled banknotes before him in a huge pile.

A more substantial man, rolling around on the grass under God’s heaven, singing for all he was worth, his resonant voice echoing far and wide.

A child-sized man, on horseback, in a uniform of black and white, galloping alongside other gentlemen riders. The finishing-line marked by a line of white dust, he is the first to cross, the clatter of hoofs becomes hurrahs from the spectators.

Mendel Berda-Stern woke with aching limbs, as if he had been riding the horse. For years these dreams, which made no sense, kept haunting him.

That autumn, when his voice began to break, they moved to Homonna, because his mother was taking over the direction of the lace-making factory hitherto managed by her much older and long sickly sister. She had distinguished herself at fillet-work while preparing her bottom drawer, having picked up the skills from her grandmother, who had died relatively young. The factory made light lace, suitable for collars and trimmings, and heavier lace for the table or for furniture, both using designs from abroad. Mendel Berda-Stern reveled in the permanently damp atmosphere of the workshop and the rich variety of spider’s webs produced by the white strands of lace on the wooden frames. He liked especially to spend time playing with the giant set of scales used to weigh the yarns.

In school there was a card-players’ circle for both students and staff. Mendel Berda-Stern could beat his fellows with his eyes closed. On the day of the school’s patron saint, St. Anthony, students and staff competed in mixed teams pitting their wits against each other. Whomever Mendel Berda-Stern had as partner would come out on top at the end of the game. His success was based on three factors. The first was his memory, which unerringly remembered which cards had gone, and so he knew exactly which ones were left in the players’ hands. The second was his psychological insight. Not the slightest tremor of an eyelid, nor a barely perceptible touch of fingers, escaped his attention. The third was his sense of smell. The cilia of his nose
had learned to detect the unmistakable odor of excitement, fear, or risk. He could even identify their synesthetic colors: he sensed fear as deep green, risk was blood-red, excitement a golden yellow. These skills made it possible for him to tell at once if someone was lying or wanted to cheat him.

His mother had hoped that Mendel would help with the lace factory, but he showed neither the inclination nor the ability to follow her into the business. For a while it seemed that he might succeed in his father’s footsteps, when he managed to assemble Szilárd Berda-Stern’s telescope and other equipment with which to spy out the secrets of the heavens. On starlit nights he would climb up to the house’s loft, pull aside a couple of tiles from the roof, and stick the telescope out. For hours he would but stare, listening to the delicate sound of silence and the occasional mouse. At such times, with the endless expanse of black sky before his eyes, the gates of the past would open in his mind. But the further back into the past he delved, the more he longed to espy the events to come, as some of his ancestors had.

By the age of seventeen he considered himself a professional gambler, though the life-and-death battles with fortune had to wait until he reached the age of majority. Then he decided to see the world. He traveled wherever he was able to do battle, all night long, for money at tables both square and round. He traveled the length of the French resorts, where English aristocrats and Russian magnates would lose everything with heads held high. He visited Swiss gambling halls, whose croupiers maintained stricter order than their colleagues in other countries. But mostly he preferred to spend his time in the casinos of the towns along the Rhine, haunted by money-hungry gamblers from all over Europe. He met miserable pointeurs who carefully portioned out their money so that they could earn risk-free the cost of their room and one hot meal a day. But at least as intimate were his connections with the select
few who had access to limitless funds. One of his closest friends was Prince Rochemouille, the uninhibited noble who in a good mood might fling louis d’or to the poor in the street, or Ali Ibrahim Pasha, heir of an Eastern potentate rich beyond imagination.

Now that The Book of Fathers begun by Otto Stern has come into my possession on my most important birthday, it seems to me appropriate to record here the lessons of my life, continuing the tradition of my ancestors and for the edification of my descendants
.

Its contents are terrifying, said my mother as she handed it to me. I know not what she meant; for my part I received what I expected. My father and grandfather wrote relatively little in this book. The only innovation for me was my father’s farewell letter, which he sent to my mother and inserted in here, for it was word-for-word the same as the one he sent me. It is noteworthy that he wanted all of us to know exactly the same thing. That he loves us, that he is proud of us, that we should be sensible and careful, that we should look after ourselves, and each other
.

I am not ashamed to admit that I have dedicated my life to the service of Fortuna. My better days are those when it is not I serving her, but she serving me. But this does not happen often enough. I have still much to learn, to reflect on, and to experience
.

For me the espying of the future is necessary not out of passion, but rather to make me more assured in my craft. At the roulette and card tables it is inevitable that one will lose unless one has some inkling of what will happen in the next blink of the eye. This is why I am so intensively concerned with every aspect of telling the future
.

In The Book of Fathers, too, he kept a tally of his losses and gains. These were to prove useful chiefly later for his wife, whose trustees were able to collect sizable sums from
the money-changers and money-lenders in various towns where Mendel Berda-Stern had deposited amounts of differing size, following the accepted practice of gamblers, in case he found himself in financial straits. Tight-fisted as he was with his wife until then, his generosity after his disappearance was all the more surprising. But before that happened, much water had to flow under the bridges of the Rhine, the Seine, and the other great rivers that Mendel Berda-Stern was so fond of being able to view from his hotel window upon waking around noon with the taste of dew-dappled raspberries in his mouth. He would ring for his servant and demand his coffee, boiling, with butterfroth. However expensive the hotel, he insisted on bringing his own servants.

After coffee he rose, taking a hot and a cold bath, and over his underwear donned a peasant shirt and the wide, pleated culottes favored by the market traders in Homonna, who called them
muszuj
. The next few hours were spent in meditation upon his reading and writing, and only then would he summon the barber to shave him and deal with his hair. His best ideas came to him when he was relaxed in the armchair, eyes closed, under the white napkin of the barber with the razor crisscrossing his face.

The lunch brought to his room was substantial. For choice he would eat the fat-marbled flesh of wild animals. He also enjoyed it if, as in the town where he was born, each course concluded with a spicy black soup based on blood and flavored with prunes. In consequence, he was beginning to acquire something of a paunch, which, however, was disguised by the expertly tailored cut of his clothes. Not a few serving wenches lingered on his chestnut-brown eyes.

He married young: his bride was Hami’s best friend, Eleonora Pohl. He was immediately drawn to this slim girl, partly because she set as much store by silence as he, and
partly because her father, Leopold Pohl, had also been arrested in 1849 as instrumental in establishing the town’s Free National Guard. Leopold Pohl thought that it was his Jewish origins that had determined his fate at the court-martial: he was sentenced to eight years in prison, though set free after six. His assets were confiscated. Withdrawing to his wife’s estate, apart from helping to run it he did nothing useful. His son-in-law was the first person in a long time that he conversed with at any length. They found a topic of which neither of them ever became bored: Leopold Pohl was also trying to peer into the future from the garden lodge that he had originally built as a toy house for Eleonora.

It was during the endless enforced idleness of imprisonment that Leopold Pohl realized he would have been able to predict some of the stations of his life had he devoted the attention necessary to those minute signs that fate had granted him. His childhood fear of water should have warned him to prevent his parents’ traveling on water; then they would not have suffered their unconscionably early death in a tragicomic accident on the River Bodrog in full spate. Whenever he touched a metal object—especially iron and lead—his skin would erupt in ugly welts: this should have warned him that for calling the youth of the town to arms he would be severely punished.