The Book of Fathers (36 page)

With the embrace of your partner, your traveling-partner, your work partner, and your parent-partner,

Ilona

He rubbed his eyes. Does this mean that …? Surely not … He read it over and over again. A heavy weight began to press on his chest. What a piece of dross I am … and of what noble clay my wife was cast!

Shackled by lethargy, he found it hard to rise and go over to the salon, where the table was already being laid for twelve in honor of his birthday.

“Sándor!” His wife’s head popped round the door. “Time to put on evening dress.”

“Ilona—”

“Later,” and she was gone.

There proved to be no later in which to discuss the painful topic. Sándor Csillag kept putting it off, and Ilona acted as if she had not a care in the world. He showed the letter to Antonia, who was also smitten by the heavy burden of her sins and wanted to pack her bags at once so that she would not for a moment longer pollute the atmosphere of her younger sister’s house. But before she could fill even one suitcase, Ilona told her in no uncertain terms to pick up Nándor from school. Nor did she later have an opportunity to clear the air with her sister. When she finally plucked up the courage, Ilona cut her short: “No need.”

So Antonia stayed. She and Sándor Csillag avoided each other in the house and even tried to avoid exchanging glances. Sándor Csillag spent less and less time in the house in Apácza Street. He joined the Townsmen’s Bowling Club and then the Pécs Male Voice Choir, enjoying in both a measure of success. In the Male Voice Choir he was on occasion assigned a solo, and his burnished baritone would cleave the air.

Years later he realized (saw in the time that had become the past) that one night Ilona had lifted from his waistcoat pocket the key to the third volume of The Book of Fathers and had carefully read everything in it. So that was how she knew. But not even the pain of this realization could rouse him to anger with his wife. He knew it was a case of motes and beams. Rather, what drove him to fury was The Book of Fathers and the accursed ability of the Csillags to
remember. Happy are they who do not know that of which they have no need.

Of an evening the couple would try to heal their wounds by performing private spiritual exercises. Ilona was gnawed by jealousy but knew she could truly not afford to let it show. She consoled herself with the thought that there was no such thing as a good marriage, only a bad one and even worse one—in this light she could lay claim to a reasonably successful marriage. What has happened, has happened; at least it was all within the family. Do not be petty, she kept telling herself silently a thousand, a hundred thousand times; do not be jealous of such a petty thing; one is your husband, the other your sister.

Sándor Csillag made only two further entries in The Book of Fathers.

I give thanks to Heaven that

1. I have Ilona’s understanding
   .
   

2. My children are growing up fine
   .
   

3. Every member of the family is hale and healthy
   .
   

4. Our material advancement gives no cause for concern
   .
   

5. Heaven has not smitten me for my faults and the error of my ways
   .
   

Can a man reasonably hope for any more than this?

That very week he was able to read in the newspaper that war had broken out, though Pécs felt few consequences of this for a long time. Those who had been called up were bidden farewell by the brass band of the Town Fire Brigade and ladies who threw bouquets of flowers. Sándor Csillag knew that he was himself too old, and his sons too young, to be called up for the army.

“You’ll see, the war will drag on for years!” he would repeat in the
Wild Man
. More quietly, he would add: “And we shall lose it.”

His assertion was received with much mocking laughter. It was then that they began to whisper behind his back that he was no longer entirely compos mentis.

Visions of horror assail me. I sense that the thread of my life will not soon be rent. I think there will be another world conflagration, well after the first. Most horrifying of all: I foresee that I shall die of hunger. How can this be? Will some business disaster force me into bankruptcy? I strive to avoid every risky step, my prudence
—
my cowardliness?
—
is almost rabbitlike
.

This was to be Sándor Csillag’s last contribution to The Book of Fathers for, following tradition, he passed the Book to his first-born. With a heavy heart. He was deeply concerned. It was possible that this family heirloom did not bring with it good fortune.

The years passed. The 70,000th inhabitant of Pécs came into the world, in the person of one of the grandchildren of old Straub. The mayor of Pécs presented the parents with a memorial plaque and diploma; among those invited to the event were Sándor Csillag and his wife.

Alas, Sándor Csillag did not foresee the coming of the Jewish Laws. When he was rounded up, with the rest of them, at the railway station, to be pushed onto the cattle-truck at bayonet-point, together with Ilona and Antonia and his two sons, who had been hiding out at home, his diabetes was already well advanced. He was seventy-six years old, grown very old indeed, and withdrawn deep into himself. On the second day of the journey his body was thrown off the moving train into the bushes. Stray dogs and foxes had their share of the corpse. His remains were identified only at the end of the war, and were buried together with those of the German and Russian victims of the tank battle that had been fought nearby.

IX

NO ONE WHO NEED NOT WOULD BE OUT IN WEATHER LIKE
this. Those who are unfortunate enough to have no choice encounter the rage of winter: entrance doors blocked by snow and rarely any light penetrating the darkness of the clouds. The snow clots into lumps of ice, stiffening resistance to the work of the wooden shovels dedicated to scraping them off the pavements. The sky blinks in innocent incomprehension of how it could have emptied so much whiteness onto the world. Soon it grows dark, and the heavens’ bottomless sacks of fresh snow open up again.

Before taking the stage he needed at least three hours to get himself into proper shape. He would begin with diaphragm exercises, placing his palm in the small of his back and pacing up and down, inhaling the life-giving element and sending it coursing into the deepest chambers of his lungs. At such times he could feel in his fingers the pressure that he always needed to ground his voice. Then, with a snake-like hiss he would let out the column of air, evenly, like an invisible length of string.

There followed meditation, in the course of which he strove to think over the period from the previous performance
to today. However powerful the discipline he applied to the workings of his brain, it always ended with his mind wandering away into the furthest recesses of the past. The week that he spent in Budapest with his father, his younger brothers, and his aunt Tonchi quite often came to mind. These were the most wonderful days of his childhood, perhaps of his entire youth. It was 1913 and he was sixteen. His nose tingled with the spicy smells of the metropolis, his ears rang with ceaseless noise of carriages and cars and the wheels of the electric trams’ unique squeal on the metal rails. Even snow was incapable of bringing to a halt this form of transport for more than a few hours or so, unlike the horse-drawn carriages of the Omnibus Company, which—to his infinite regret—suspended their services in both directions. They rode on the electric tram four times, sometimes in the direction of Lajos Kossuth Street, sometimes towards the Elizabeth Bridge. They also tried out the carriages of the underground railway. Nándor alighted and hopped back at each stop, with the conductor’s encouraging comment: “No extra charge!”

“You’re grown up!” Aunt Tonchi kept repeating to him. He thought she was making fun of him; after all, when they lined up at school for PE he was always last but one. He knew that his looks and build were reminiscent of his ancestor Kornél Csillag. His fellow students dubbed him Pumpkin Seed, which he resented deeply, and fought the ascription tooth and nail.

Never had he seen his father as relaxed as on that trip to Budapest. Business matters had kept his mother in Pécs and it seemed as if the absence of Mama, who almost always wore black and for some reason radiated an atmosphere of permanent mourning, had an uplifting effect on Papa. He was like a child, wanting to see everything. Aunt Tonchi followed laughing in his wake, without for a moment releasing her hold on the shoulders of the two
actual children. “Károly, Andor, you are both in Aunt Tonchi’s care and mustn’t take a single step without me, do I make myself clear?”—but her eyes twinkled with laughter, so that her exhortations were not taken entirely seriously. He, Nándor Csillag, regarded himself as being one of the adults, though he romped around happily with his younger brothers.

Aunt Tonchi and his father took quite a number of steps without them. Though Nándor Csillag did not notice this at the time, now, as the heir to the family’s visions, he knew.

The beginning of the trip in 1913 did not augur well; contrary to plans, they did not stay at the Queen of England, as his father took offense when he did not manage to secure the suites that he considered practically his own. They took rooms in the Hungária, on the bank of the Danube. Nándor Csillag spent hours just staring out of his window at the view of the castle in Buda, the snow-covered hills, and the ice floes sweeping downriver on the gray surface of the river. He especially liked to sit there in the hours of darkness and touch his cheeks against the cold of the plate glass. He breathed out steam. He counted the lights twinkling on the opposite side of the Danube several times, but by the time he reached the end, some had gone out while a few new ones had come on; he lost count generally somewhere between sixty and eighty.

They went out to the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, which the boys were even more enthusiastic about than he had hoped. His father informed them that their renovation had been completed the previous year, when the municipality had decided to rescue them from their miserable and run-down condition, and spent some five million crowns on their restoration. Papa could hardly recognize the place and lavished praise on it as if he were personally responsible for the transformation: “What a wonderful stock of animals! What fine buildings built with devoted skill! The cliffs and mountains are so true to life that you would think they
were real! And the promenades and paths furnished with comfortable places to rest! The facilities for summer and winter sports! The playgrounds and the free mobile library!”

Papa had a bit of a lisp, which meant that his speech was an endless source of amusement for the boys. Sándor Csillag was aged forty-five by this time, but his youthful enthusiasm for all things progressive had not diminished one jot. He planned to encourage a similar zoological and botanical garden back home in Pécs (a plan of which, however, nothing came). He also thought it desirable to follow in Pécs the example of Budapest in establishing public conveniences, in the capital maintained by the Ferenc László Company. These were an object of his admiration even if he felt no need to make use of them.

They spent a memorable morning in the Rudas Spa Baths, where Papa explained that it owed its name to the “flying” bridge across the Danube, that is to say, the ferry with its huge pine mast (in Hungarian
rúd
) berthed at the entrance to the baths. The municipality had rebuilt the old Turkish baths as steam baths in 1883, creating a roof for the main pool and the four smaller pools around it, and opening two large public baths, one for each of the sexes. Papa showed them the effervescent tubs, the various baths lined with pottery, marble, and stone, and the boys had to take a dip in every single one. They listened to the list of the many different ailments that could be successfully treated here in the medicinal baths, whose temperature—Papa knew even this by heart—was maintained at a steady forty-four degrees centigrade, summer and winter. The visit continued in the newly opened sweating and slimming dry-air rooms, the tepidarium, the sudatorium, and the calidarium.

Nándor Csillag was not as keen on the animals and the baths as were either his father or his younger brothers, but was more thrilled than any of them by the theaters
screening motion pictures. They paid two visits to the Metropolitan Mighty Movie House in 70 Rákóczi Street, where the company’s advertising promised
a nonstop program of outstanding films
for the discriminating moviegoer. The hotel porter ordered them tickets by telephone, itself an event so sensational at the time that he recalled the number to this day: 53-27. The screenings were accompanied by highly professional tunes from the piano of a round man with a Kossuth-style beard, who doffed his bowler whenever the audience showed its appreciation.

There were five or six short films per program. It was in one of these that Nándor Csillag saw an opera singer for the first time. The face of the man, in a dark waistcoat, was quite frightening to behold; he sang his arias with a wide, gaping mouth and would stab at the sky with his right hand, at least when he did not do so with his left, too. He rolled his eyes the while, as if he were in his final death throes. Nándor Csillag had been taking piano and violin lessons for some years from Mr. Ibrányi, who would come to their house in Apácza Street. Their father had intended that all three boys would take lessons, but neither Károly nor Andor had an ear for music. Nándor Csillag showed little ability at the piano, but was able to whistle or hum any melody he had heard just the once, at any time and with little effort.