The Book of Fathers (31 page)

In the light of this, it is striking that his vision of the future is exactly right: his child, Sigmund Berda-Stern, will arrive on November 14, not by chance but in compliance with this mysterious rule, for the sign of Scorpio was the next one, which the astrologers of olden times still called Eagle. A Scorpio is a man of extremes, either very good or very bad, but at all events passionate, unreflecting, at war with his instincts—we shall have our hands full with him.
At the same time, accepting the above, it is beyond question that his ascendant is Sagittarius, which can exercise a great deal of moderation on the qualities of a Scorpio.

He could scarcely wait to bring all this to the attention of the assembled males. His convoluted explanation of the unpropitious angles of light was not received as he had expected. He did not get even as far as the horoscope of the ancestors. Dumbfounded faces verging on the hostile stared back at him. Lipót Stern was the least impressed: “Are you seriously suggesting that instead of our ancient faith we should believe in the patterns that the stars form into in the sky?”

“It is not my suggestion, but astrology has for millennia looked on matters this way.”

“Do you not think that the matters of the sky are also moved by the Everlasting, and His will is not so easily divined?”

Mendel Berda-Stern had no answer to this.

“Our topic is different just now,” said Móricz Stern in a conciliatory tone. “Let us discuss what we should do!”

Mendel Berda-Stern was not prepared to say another word, so offended was he. I told them the truth and they have sealed up my lips with mud, he thought. When the Rabbi again brought up the issue of family participation in the conference, he volunteered to join him. He had firmly decided that independently of the gathering of Hungary’s reform Jewry, he would certainly pack his bags and take the cart to Nagyvárad with his wife. No harm can come of that. He thought it natural that Hami would go with them. It was the end of October when they finally departed for Nagyvárad.

In Nagyvárad it was rain and shine together. The languid rays of the sun were bathed in heavy sleet.

Despite strenuous efforts by Lipót Stern, the conference came to no significant conclusion. The majority of the representatives of the Jewish communities feared that
whatever organization they established, they would bring down upon themselves the wrath of the authorities and of the monarch. Better to keep quiet and lie low.

“Shall we just resign ourselves,” said Lipót Stern, “to the fact that from time to time we shall be struck by those who hate us? To the fact that despite the clear import of the letter of the law we shall never feel we have equal status in our homeland? To the fact that we shall have to be afraid forever because of our origins?”

“Better reined in than rained on!” shouted Simon Schwab, the Rabbi of the Jews of Pécs, who had long had it in for Lipót Stern. He suspected that for Stern his position at Beremend was merely a stepping-stone to his own, much better-paid post.

Mendel Berda-Stern sat through the conference patiently. He had time; they were still four days short of the 11th of November. He had ordered for that day to their corner suite in the Three Roses Hotel not just the town’s most highly reputed midwife, but also a professor of medicine. Hami was also present at the birth—it was she who swaddled the baby and held it up to the mother, with bloodshot eyes, swimming in sweat.

My son, Sigmund Berda-Stern, was born after three and a half hours of labor and left the womb in a caul, which I took to be a more propitious sign than any of the astrological ones, though the professor of medicine and the midwife, perhaps getting in each other’s way, had difficulty in divesting the child of it. I beg all the higher powers, honored by all religions, and even those not nameable, who are the rulers of the Universe, who have created heaven and earth, to bless and protect my son, give him and all of us health, plenty, and peace
.

Nagyvárad, which means approximately “Great Castle,” proved worthy of its name; Homonna by comparison was a
dusty little one-horse town. Mendel Berda-Stern greatly enjoyed strolling in the main square, drinking beer and coffee in the cafés, imagining how pleasant might be the spring and the summer here, when the round tables are moved out onto the pavements and gardens, and striped awnings are unrolled above the public’s head, shielding them from the strength of the sun’s rays. It took him no great effort to find the secret cardplaying halls, of which he at once became a regular. Thanks to the stars and his own skill, he lightened substantially the pockets of those who tried their luck with him over the green baize tables.

He felt little inclination to return home, sending evasive replies to the letters of Leopold Pohl urging him to return. His father-in-law, however, grew tired of writing and turned up in town. He reproached them before he greeted them: “Why are you wasting time and money here instead of packing? What are you waiting for?”

“Calm down. Obviously you have been raring for a fight!” Mendel Berda-Stern kept pouring the kosher plum brandy.

Leopold Pohl downed the drink. “Has something happened?”

“Everything is absolutely fine. Little Sigmund is hale and hearty, just like his mother. The only thing is … we feel so good in this town.”

These words did nothing to dispel the suspicions of Leopold Pohl. Like a bloodhound on the trail he sniffed around, interrogating his daughter, the servants, examining his grandson, and searching every nook and cranny in the three interconnecting rooms that they occupied. “Will you please tell me how long you intend to stay here?”

“Until little Sigmund builds up his strength!” said Eleonora.

That afternoon Mendel Berda-Stern revealed to his father-in-law all that he had come to understand in
connection with his ancestors’ horoscopes. Leopold Pohl became feverishly excited: “Perhaps it is like this in every family. That is, if I am Aquarius, my daughter … no, no, it doesn’t work, Eleonora’s sign is Gemini … and as far as the ascend ant is concerned … it progressed in this double series only in your family …”

Why fate determined that we should come to Nagyvárad I have never understood to this day. In that town I played with a lucky hand and won a large amount of money. I don’t know how I might take it away with me safely: the forests are crawling with thieves who regularly pounce on carriages and caravans of carts. I have sworn that if I am attacked I shall resist to the last drop of my blood. I have carefully obtained the revolvers and the ammunition I need for this purpose. In one of the clearings in the Old Forest I have trained suitably both of my man-servants in the arts of warfare and tactics. While the stars foretell no danger to us in the present period, there is never harm in being careful
.

Leopold Pohl soon traveled back to Homonna, together with Hami. Mendel Berda-Stern and his wife stayed in Nagyvárad. Eleonora found herself once more expecting a child.

Soon came news from Tokay, that the Stern family’s properties had been ravaged by hooligans and part of their vineyards also burned down, as a result of arson. Móricz Stern’s weak heart found the stress too much and gave out.

Mendel Berda-Stern set off for the funeral in a fringed surrey accompanied by a manservant. The first ravages of the bleak winter swept floes of ice down the River Tisza; the ferrymen would not cross the troubled river that day and like it or not Mendel Berda-Stern was obliged to send the surrey back to Nagyvárad. In the company of a few
lambskin-coated merchants he tried to pay five suitably inebriated lads to take them over on the big boat which in suitable weather plied to and fro between the banks as an auxiliary means of transport. They were Swabians from the Slovak Highlands and spoke poor Hungarian.

“Out of the question, just look at the water and the floes!” said one boatman.

“We can wait till it calms down and then cross quickly!” said Mendel Berda-Stern. He switched to German: “I really must cross.”

“What did he say, what did he say?” the merchants asked.

“
Wartnbisschen!
” Mendel Berda-Stern turned to the boatman he thought keenest on the money. He offered the sum as he was accustomed to doing at the green baize table, on behalf of the merchants too. The sum on offer eventually grew so that three of the Swabians were now willing to make the trip. The travelers had difficulty stepping from the wooden planks of the shore onto the creaking and groaning wave-tossed boat. Two lads tried as best they could to keep it level somehow and the third grabbed and pulled them on. “Lie on your back if you value your lives!”

Pressed to the footboard, the backs of their necks kept bumping against planking wet with spray. As soon as the lads cast off and the boat was left at the mercy of the waves, it stood up almost vertical. They all rolled to one end. Mendel Berda-Stern ended up at the bottom of the heap, in a close intimacy with his manservant that he wittingly permitted only to his wife. He was now regretting that he had undertaken the crossing, though he was the only one who suspected that it was bound to succeed, as quite a long period of life awaited him—at least, that is how he saw his own prospects. But at that moment he found it difficult to believe: he was soaked to his bones in the freezing water, the cold wind stabbing him in the eye.

The Swabian boatmen wrestled with the stormy river and the ice floes, which arrived pell-mell. At this point the Tisza took a wide turn, and the locals knew that the most treacherous eddies were on this side of the water; once the craft survived the halfway mark, it was virtually certain that the far bank could be safely managed. This time, too, the waters were stilled as if by command, once they had got to the imaginary halfway line. At the same time, the ice floes appeared to come thicker and faster; one of the boatmen was no longer rowing but spent his time fending them off with his oar. The roar of the river grew more and more painful to the ear, and despite every effort some of the blocks of ice thumped into the sides of the boat. The lads shouted warnings at each other to try to avoid disaster, but so many floes were adrift in the stormy waves that the boat could scarcely get through them unscathed. One rather weighty triangular slab of ice hit the boat so loudly that pea-sized particles of the caulking strayed onto the footboard. Two of the merchants gabbled prayers in their mother tongue, from which Mendel Berda-Stern realized that these were not Magyars after all, but Ruthenians.

By then the boat lay in the tight embrace of the ice floes, and in vain did the lads try to prize them loose with oars and boathooks: they would not move an inch. The mournful creaking of the timbers rose higher, as did the Swabian cries of the boatmen—the entire wooden structure could be snapped in two by the power of the floes.

“
Lullei, Lullei! Nochinmal! Lullei!
” cried the Swabians.

Mendel Berda-Stern did not understand what they wanted, but the merchants did, and linking arms, in the rhythm of the Lullei! swung their hips to the left and then to the right, thus making the boat rock from side to side and thus—to the great surprise of them all—the boat slid out from the ice floes’ murderous grip.

Whereupon the Swabian lads managed to use their oars to get them to the shore. Despite the stinging cold they were all bathed in sweat. Mendel Berda-Stern at once headed for the post station, but at this late hour could secure neither a horse nor a carriage. He spent the night in the lodge opposite the post station. The following morning he woke to find the countryside knee-deep in snow and it was neither advisable nor possible to set off. He was quite certain that by no stretch of the imagination could he be in time for the funeral. From the lumpy sack of straw he rose only to attend to the call of nature; otherwise he lay staring at the ceiling, ordering boiling hot coffee with butterfroth. He even ate his meals in bed. His window looked out on the swollen Tisza, its caravan of ice-floes relentlessly drifting south.

“My dear good sir, should we not be going back?” asked his manservant.

Mendel Berda-Stern did not bat an eyelid. His murderous glance froze the words on his servant’s lips. On the third day he sent the boy for paper, pen, and inkhorn. He doodled and did calculations, sighing ever more loudly. Later he recalled this thus in The Book of Fathers.

For six days and six nights I was slumped in the rundown lodge, where they did not hesitate, because of the vileness of the weather, to put strangers together in the same room. It cost me a tidy sum to be given my own room. In the hours of doing nothing, which felt as if they would never end, I had an opportunity to think everything through. In the course of my life hitherto, I do not detect any mistakes: my lucky star has protected me faithfully, and never left me in the lurch. I have secured sufficient funds at the card and roulette tables to ensure that neither I nor my descendants will suffer want of anything. But true wealth does not manifest itself in financial terms
.

Woe is me! According to my astrological calculations and even more the future according to the tarot, my cloudless sky
will soon cloud over. I received the prognostication of the stars with dread: I shall have two more sons, Bendegúz and József, but both will be stillborn. Even more horrendous: József ’s death will entail that of his mother. All this will happen within the next two years. If only I could doubt! If only I could make our fate do otherwise! If only the heavenly bodies could err just this once!

Somehow or other liberated from the prison of the weather, as soon as he could he reached Nagyvárad. There he checked his diagrams and calculations again, with great care. The result remained the same. He wondered how he was to bear the burden of this dreadful secret. “My dear! We are off on a journey!” he said to his wife.

“When? Where to?”

“Now, straightaway, home to Homonna.”

“Is there something wrong?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but did not have the strength to utter the heavy words. He mumbled something about business.