A Guest In My Own Country Part 4

This is not at all what the bearded young fellow meant. "We do not love the one who deserves our love, but the one that we in fact love."

Now what was the teacher to make of that?

The young man raised the ante: "G.o.d must needs be a believer, but the G.o.d He believes in cannot be He himself. If G.o.d knows of G.o.d, then he cannot be one with himself, but must then be as divided as I myself. In short, G.o.d must have another G.o.d. And so on, ad infinitum. Better not to think of it."

Toni took a pill that, he claimed, sliced off the cerebral cortex. He washed it down with beer. In a short time he felt a bombing raid approaching and asked to go down to the bomb shelter. He spotted an emergency exit along one wall, but as it was blocked by a table of four corpulent guests he went over to them and said, "Please follow me through the emergency exit to the bomb shelter!"

The four large guests looked at him quizzically. "Where is it?" Toni pointed to the blank wall.

"Leave us in peace, will you, Comrade?"

Toni gave up his evacuation plans. They can bomb us if they want. A few years later he blew up his heart with drugs and vodka.

The next day I continued my solitary walks. My legs knew automatically where to turn. A schoolboy waited in a window.

"Who are you waiting for?"

"My parents."

This is where the domestic would lean on her elbows, waiting for the lady of the house to ring, while over in the next window the daughter leaned on a pillow, taking refuge from her French lesson. As a child, I knew who lived in all these houses, but by now the names were unfamiliar. The only familiar names I found were in the cemetery. A row of children's hats and women's legs in boots filed by, and faces stared through the fence waiting for what was to come.

In 2000 I accepted an invitation to Berettyoujfalu from City Hall (it was a city now, not a town). I was to give a reading to an audience of local citizens in the building that had once housed Horthy's Military Youth Organization. The reading and the discussion that followed were a bit on the somber side, whereas my hosts would have preferred that I be more emotional in my nostalgia: nurture warm memories, express my love for the old Berettyoujfalu. They wanted my heart to beat faster whenever I saw it rise on the horizon, this town that all three of my wives unanimously dubbed a dusty hole, but that made my heart quicken, that I found beautiful, the town of towns with the most intelligent arrangement of s.p.a.ce. Approaching the former community building and national flag on the former Erzsebet Street, with the Calvinist church and school on the right and our house, somewhat higher than the rest, on the left, I had the sense of being at home. How many times had I experienced this sight on sunny afternoons, heading home on my bicycle from the river. I was sad to see the artesian well gone and the cinema disfigured, but at least the post office was its old self. I had a framed picture of the past inside me that overlay what I was now seeing, but even with the best of intentions I was unable to portray it with anything like the sweet reverie my audience expected.

I could not veil the deportation of the Jews or the plunder of the survivors by state appropriation with sentimentality. The town had deported its Jewish citizens and viewed all their possessions as its own, moving strangers into their houses. At the time my father called it highway robbery, and I agreed. Today the town is coming to see that my father and the others did it honor and were model citizens in their way. The vanished Jewish citizens are becoming a venerable tradition.

I found my grandmother's and grandfather's tombstones in the abandoned Jewish cemetery. My great-grandfather's tombstone had probably had another inscription carved on it. The hospital director, an intelligent man, told me the cemetery serves more than a hundred villages in Bihar County. Sometimes elderly visitors come from Israel and walk out to it. These children of emigres are sober, naive, and cordial and take a hand in preserving the monuments, as does the town itself. The black-haired women with prominent cheekbones look familiar. The woman who is deputy mayor, a local and very kind, told me how much the town had looked forward to my coming and mentioned that her parents had known mine and me as a child. I felt my Bihar County roots that day. When something during my visual inventory caught my fancy, I felt the pleasure of one who belongs. True, they have filled in Kallo Creek, and the garden where we played soccer among the cherry trees is gone, as is the walnut tree by my window; indeed, the window itself is gone, filled in. And the synagogue is still an iron-goods warehouse.

II.

Up on the Hill During a Solar Eclipse

ON A DAZZLING SUMMER DAY IN the last year of the twentieth century I had the opportunity to watch the world change colors and sink into gray darkness from the porch stairs of a crumbling wine-press house on Saint George Hill. the last year of the twentieth century I had the opportunity to watch the world change colors and sink into gray darkness from the porch stairs of a crumbling wine-press house on Saint George Hill.

The noontime bells are pealing. I arrived yesterday. The countryside was beautiful, my family even more so. My account of the trip elicited laughter from my most critical audience, and I was pleased by the quant.i.ty and variety of the gifts I received: aron had painted me a rich landscape with a wonderstruck deer that bore a striking resemblance to his father; Jozsi had carved me a walking stick with the inscription To Papa To Papa, a nice long stick that will soon take me up the hill.

I had spent the entire day in travel-first by plane, then by train-but by evening I had reached this place of repose. Now, my back propped against the uneven masonry, I sit on the acacia-wood bench in the garden between lilacs and the walnut tree listening to the rush of the wind and swallows' chirping. I can feel waves beating between my forehead and the hill, which in primeval times seethed with volcanic magma, though for thousands of years now it has exuded nothing but fruit, water, and fragrance.

Most of the houses are inhabited by widows now. They have a better rapport with life than their menfolk had: men tend to pace and fidget, get in the way, wondering what in the world to do with themselves and ending up messing with varieties of afterlife; women potter around in the one we have.

When I sit at my desk with the window open, I can see the village world of Hegymagas: my sons eddying up amidst a horde of friends, the elderly neighbor women, the tractor man, the bulldozer driver, the housepainter, the groom, the vintners, the Gypsy family that always marches in a group, the young mothers pushing their infants up and down in carriages or leading them by the hand, the old ladies bent over their little purses, out for a wholesome stroll, the old men stepping gingerly, leaning on canes.

The locals parading by my window exchange greetings with me. The poorest old man in the village sometimes topples into the flowerbed in front of our house on the way home from the pub or nods off on the bench there under the linden tree, propped on his cane. If he had more money, he would just drink more. The old fellows are on their own now. For a while they can go on without the people who made their lives, and then comes the day when they cannot.

The days grow shorter now that summer's back is broken, though the sun is still well up in the sky. The noontime bells are pealing. A veil of fog covers the ridge of Long Mountain. Wheel marks escort me across the meadow, my legs practically whisking me over the springy ground. Untroubled by ragweed, I take a good whiff of the undergrowth. I run into a shepherd who complains about his right leg; I'm having trouble with my left. The shepherd feels better if he lies on his left side, but since it's bad for you to lie on your heart he spends the night twisting and turning. Clean spring water gurgles from the mouth of a century-old lion carved of wood into a mossy basin where tamarisks are budding. The smartest thing to do is to keep going up the hill.

Zsuzsi kneels beside me on the bench. "I'm going to draw something beautiful, so beautiful you won't believe it, and I'm drawing it for you you." She draws a kind of latticework in red pencil. It is soon done, and she asks for another pencil. "It's so beautiful: droplets falling from branches," she whispers.

I will be eighty when she is twenty, if I live that long. The fun was short-lived, like a holiday. Over before you know it.

Every afternoon we go down to the lakesh.o.r.e, where Jutka rents a kayak for Jozsi, who was paddling away at the age of seven, climbing walls, scampering up ropes, speeding along on his bike in every possible position. Jutka got a new bicycle for her birthday and rode through the neighboring villages in white slacks. She came back flushed and enthusiastic. The other day she said she was despondent at feeling stupid. I attempted with great conviction to argue the contrary, but to no avail.

"So what if you are are stupid? You're smarter than I am." stupid? You're smarter than I am."

Jutka laughed.

"How long is there a point in living, Son?" my mother once asked me.

"Until we die, Mother," said I. "Till then for sure."

The mood at the breakfast table is bright for the moment. Not even Jutka has a headache. True, aron was attacked in his sleep by a venomous snake and upon waking noticed a red spot on his leg right where he had been bitten, but he complains of no pain. Jozsi asks about the plan for the day. Has the Bureau of Parental Services arranged for the proper abundance of entertainments for the People, the Little Ones? A full day's worth?

I give my a.s.surance that we will arrange a trip to the circus in the afternoon. I call to ask whether there will be a show. Yes, they tell me, elephants included. I sit beside my wife in the car, pa.s.sing her crackers to munch and water to swig. She never takes her eyes off the road.

Meanwhile there is no break in the process of enchanting the children and hushing them and taming Zsuzsi and coming up with ideas and encouraging them to shut their eyes and try to catch a few winks. I just stare ahead lazily, pa.s.sing her the water. If Jutka is dissatisfied or (horribile dictu!) starts grumbling, I put up no resistance, because this is the best of all possible worlds. Even the physical decline that awaits me, the series of defeats that is old age, is more interesting than the hereafter. As for resurrection, well, of course I believe in it. It happens every morning until the show gets canceled for technical reasons.

Jutka will be forty-five the day after tomorrow; I will be sixty-six tomorrow. Both of us are Aries. We have been getting to know each other for twenty-some odd years. I sense what she is thinking even when she says nothing. Three children and a husband on her back, and all the practical issues of their daily lives. It takes no small effort to stay on top of it all, to pa.s.s out praise, find refuge in a corner, come up with incredible stories, talk through the day that has pa.s.sed, and preside over the evening's ceremonies from the English lesson to the brushing of teeth to the climbing into bed. Once she emerges from the children's room after nine o'clock (often closer to ten), she too will go to bed soon. She has done her most elemental job.

Everything is so perfect at this moment that I fear something will come along to upset our lives, in which bitter tears and hysterical cries and nightmares and self-enforced exiles and escapes cast their shadows only up to a point. Each member of the family will remember only the happy moments when they think back on the old days.

I feel I have simply turned up here where I am now. The world has fallen into my lap or I into its lap. And some day I will simply be turned out. In a cool room on a hot afternoon I begin a story. I do not yet know where it will go.

In the middle of April 1945 I got a message saying my cousin Laszlo Kun would be arriving at four-thirty. He was thirty-seven at the time; I was twelve. I knew his first stop would be to say h.e.l.lo to the women of various ages in the downstairs apartment, including my sister eva and the little baby (I no longer remember whose). Then he would come upstairs to the floor that at the time was mine alone, with its balcony overlooking the Koros, its library and liquor cabinet. Nothing was forbidden me. I could spend the entire day reading and wandering with no one expecting an account of my time (though I would not have minded being questioned and chided if I proved ignorant). This older presence was a soothing influence, Laci Kun representing the next generation in the family tree, and it had been decided-perhaps by Laci himself-that he would be our guardian, our bread-giving surrogate father until our parents, carried off in May of 1944, came back from the camps once the war managed to end. If If they came. So I expected some direction from him. they came. So I expected some direction from him.

Seated at a large round table, I fixed my eyes on the front door of the Nagyvarad apartment belonging to Gyorgy Pogany. Then city prosecutor, he had started out as a lawyer, but soon had to serve in the forced-labor service units for Jewish men. His entire family had disappeared. When my cousin Laszlo Kun from Bucharest made his entrance, it seemed as if my father had walked in, but a head taller, broader in the shoulders, larger in every dimension, and ten years younger. He was a self-a.s.sured and elegant man in a flawless suit. You could see he had made it his own.

The new arrival was more urbane than the locals and had been spared the humiliation of being sent to a camp. Former prisoners, happy to be alive, could not afford his generosity: all they had was what fit in their knapsacks. "The Swedish Lord" was what I called Laci to my sister, though fully aware no such thing existed. Laci sneered at lack of generosity in others and could sometimes be haughtily, curtly dismissive of people. His parents had been of modest means, and he had no wish to follow suit. It is hard to be small-time when you are over six foot three.

He asked few questions, wishing only to know whether I was satisfied with my circ.u.mstances, and he a.s.sured me that we would not be long in that apartment: he would return in under a month to take us to his family, a wife and two children, in Bucharest. Then we too would be his children whether our parents returned or not. That was the last time we discussed such intimate subjects. When I asked him what I should do until he came, he took a wad of paper money out of his back pocket and set it down before me, saying it was mine and my only task was to spend it. He a.s.signed my sister eva the same task.

After that I ate a lot of cream-filled pastries and went to see the Soviet film Six Hours After the War Six Hours After the War several times. I understood neither the Russian narration nor the Romanian subt.i.tles, but after several viewings I could follow the action. A young woman once flashed me a kind smile from a window. I went back several times, but she was gone. I could deal with loss. several times. I understood neither the Russian narration nor the Romanian subt.i.tles, but after several viewings I could follow the action. A young woman once flashed me a kind smile from a window. I went back several times, but she was gone. I could deal with loss.

I was growing a little wild: I would unb.u.t.ton my shirt, reach under my arm, and scratch. This did not escape the notice of Aunt Zsofi.

"Oh, Gyuri, what has become of you? How you've let yourself go! It's only six weeks since we separated, and you've taken up such crude ways!" True, she smiled and may have been joking, but her words could be taken seriously.

A pair of brothers in transit sat at the dinner table, spilling the black humor they had picked up in the labor camp, where violent death was as common as seeds in a watermelon. They vied to win a smile from Aunt Zsofi, a smile whose unmovable reserve filled me with bliss.

Aunt Zsofi went her way early the next morning, while I walked up and down the Koros watching labor servicemen marching off to clean up rubble under the escort of an armed but shabbily dressed policeman. It would have been easy for them to escape, but apparently no one did. I looked for the house where my grandfather had lived three years before, and found strangers living there. They were not interested in my grandfather. They said they too had been bombed out of house and home. They offered me some rolls and jam, but didn't mind when I declined the offer with thanks. There was a little girl drawing in a corner of the kitchen. During the few minutes I was there she raised her head no more than twice, but even so we had a good look at each other. After that I walked past the house a couple of times hoping to run into her on her way back from school, but those meanderings did not bring the hoped-for encounter, which I had even fleshed out with a bit of dialogue. In my head we had some very serious conversations.

Later I stopped walking down that street or even in that general direction, because I happened to run into my Aunt Gizu there. She gave me a kiss, but I extricated myself from her arms, unable to forgive her for having abandoned us in Budapest without notice at the beginning of the Arrow Cross regime. I made no promises to visit her. She had found her way here to Nagyvarad to take over the house and possessions of her relatives. I left her with a remonstrative smile, without telling her our address.

Our upcoming trip to Bucharest filled me with a powerful curiosity, heightened by a yearning to travel and the excitement of antic.i.p.ation. I had heard there were more Hungarians living there than in the outlying cities of Hungary itself. We had a long road ahead of us in the big, black Chrysler Imperial that Laci had purchased from the Queen of Romania, chauffeur included. Now that he was allowed to work again, he was doing business everywhere between Bucharest and Transylvania, including Kolozsvar and Bra.s.so, and we had family to stay with all along the route.

Looking back, I see that I climbed a few rungs on the cultural ladder that year, moving from rural pet.i.t-bourgeois to urban intellectual circles, the latter calling for an ironical style as opposed to the naive nostalgia of my family background in Berettyoujfalu. People smiled at me when I expressed a desire to return there. I said I belonged in the village and considered everything else a mere way station.

Both our guardians-Aunt Zsofi, a fashion designer and historian of fashion, and Laci, a textile engineer and wholesaler as well as Romania's b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke champion and the a.s.sistant concertmaster of a distinguished amateur orchestra-would gladly have left their parents' origins in obscurity. This I could not accept, since I loved Laci's mother, the tall and robust Aunt Sarolta, who knew just how to make me happy. Whenever we visited them in Nagyvarad, she would sit me out on the terrace overlooking the Koros and, if a wind was blowing off the river, wrap me in a silky blanket. Then she would set down a chocolate pastry with strawberry jelly and an opera gla.s.s so I could watch the water gurgling over the rocks and the fish jumping clear out of it. I could spend hours on end there. Now and then Aunt Sarolta would replenish my supplies from the adults' table and at my request give a brief summary of their conversation, which dealt mostly with the family and Laci's marriage to the tall, blonde, elegant, and n.o.ble-spirited Iboly, who always knew best and may have exceeded even Laci's ideal of perfection.

Iboly was from a good family in Kolozsvar, had attended university, played tennis, did gymnastics, spoke German, French, and a little English, and came with quite a nice dowry. She was unsurpa.s.sed in the theory and practice of manners. A movement at the corner of her mouth would register the faults in others' upbringing. She never said a word, and she was forgiving, but she noticed all the same.

Her father-in-law, Uncle Dolfi, had like my father been in the hardware business, but both his shop and his stature were smaller than my father's. I did not understand why Laci avoided mention of his parents killed at Auschwitz. Out of shame perhaps? Did he not want to look the horror in the face? Or perhaps he saw it all too well and found it unseemly to mention. Should all talk of humiliation and murder be taboo? My father had only the greatest love and respect for his older sister Sarolta, who had treated him with the utmost tenderness from earliest childhood: she always had something to give him-an apple, a spool of thread-and if there was uneasiness at home, if my grandmother got worked up over something (what with five children and a house full of people there could always be reason for pique), Sarolta would go into action and make so amusing a remark that my grandmother would turn red from cackling and her annoyance vanish-together with its perfectly valid basis. What is more, Sarolta had a perfect sense of judgment and proportionality. Witness her choice of the diminutive Uncle Dolfi out of all her suitors: he was the most human of the bunch. Uncle Dolfi looked upon his monumental wife in wonder. It probably never entered his mind to betray her, and Aunt Sarolta was the very embodiment of tranquil satisfaction, her only concern being for the children.

Sarolta's daughter, Laci's sister Magda, was the most beautiful girl I knew as a child. Once she summered with us in Hajduszoboszlo, where my pa.s.sions included nuzzling up to her in the early morning to trade purrs and inhale her scent. For the most part I was the one to wake her, though she was not always in the mood, sometimes whimpering for me to wait and stop squirming under the blanket. But once her eyes were open, she had strange things to say.

She would say, for example, that only bad people amused her and that she would like to meet a pirate some day or at least an adventurer. She wanted to have a look at an honest-to-G.o.d decadent seducer, because the only people she encountered at the Nagyvarad theater or the pastry shop or the women's club ball or in the synagogue garden on Jewish high holidays were well-intentioned young men. The ones who looked interesting to Magda all left town for the big cities. Her own brother Laci had outgrown Nagyvarad and felt at home only in Vienna or Bucharest. He had so many girlfriends he couldn't count them on his fingers and toes combined.

Laci's visits were red-letter days for Magda. Together they would go down to the public bathing area on the Koros and show off their backstroke, b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke, and crawl, sinking their arms deep into the water and gliding gracefully forward. In Nagyvarad Laci generally appeared in the company of Magda, who was not beyond the occasional acerbic remark should any of her friends show conspicuous interest in her brother. Though I did not lay eyes on him until I was twelve, I had heard a lot about Magda's fabulous brother and seen him looking dashing-decked out in a riding jacket or tennis shorts-in photographs. I had also heard that Laci once gave such a slap to a young man for an undignified remark directed at Magda that the fellow tumbled backwards over a bench in a park square.

Magda let me in on her suspicion that her brother was not truly in love with his wife but she would at least give the children an excellent upbringing. I found it odd that Laci would use the familiar p.r.o.noun te te with Iboly while she would address him with the impersonal with Iboly while she would address him with the impersonal maga maga, but they made a fine couple at evening events. In 1942 Magda made the acquaintance of a man twenty years her senior, broad in the shoulders and tanned to a copper hue. He was balding somewhat and working on a paunch. Now here was someone whose state of decay had a certain mystery about it. The interesting thing about bad people, she said, was that they were good anyway, in spite of themselves.

His surname was Flora, and he ran rackets, or at least that is what my governess Livia informed my mother. This Mr. Flora came for Magda at the Gambrinus Hotel in a Steyr Puch sports coupe and took her for long drives. This made both my mother and my governess uneasy. After lunch Magda would disappear, not to return until after dinner. He fancied unusual dishes like breaded chicken shaped into sticks; I was less drawn to such innovations. Once I saved one of the chicken sticks for Magda, but she didn't seem interested. She said she had eaten marrow custard at the Golden Bull Hotel in Debrecen. That turned my stomach.

Once an incandescent Magda and I were sitting on the terrace at the Gambrinus Hotel when Mr. Flora took a seat with us.

"How old are you, sir?" I asked.

I saw that he did not appreciate the question. Magda tried to skewer me with her gaze, but gave up. We sat in silence, letting akos Holeczy's Jazz Band and his singer Stefi akos move us, probably with a song of farewell. I despised that old coot with the woman's name-Flora-and tried to trip him up.

How did he like the Alfold region? If he was less than enchanted, his goose was cooked. And so it was. He came up with the dullest of criticisms: it was flat and empty, there was too much distance between the one-horse towns, the cobblestone roads connecting them were hard on his roadster. I grew more pleased with his every word. If this fellow is so stupid, Magda won't be long in turning him out. But this was not to be. To my silent horror Magda happily concurred, even raising the ante: she understood him completely, this Flora, this ape who lived on Budapest's fashionable Gellert Hill and skied in the Tyrol. She was of mountain stock herself-in spirit anyway-living, as she did, close to the Bihar Range. So it was the two of them against me, the Alfold yahoo. (Can you really be conspiring with him him-you and he a we we, and I just a you you to you now?) This little roly-poly of a Flora will come to regret his little fling, and you'll see what a slug he is! He'll make you retch! That very year proved me right: Magda, pregnant and abandoned, failed to cough up the sleeping pills she swallowed, and closed her eyes forever. Lying on the bedside table next to her, tied with a silk ribbon, were the letters she had written to Flora. He had returned them. to you now?) This little roly-poly of a Flora will come to regret his little fling, and you'll see what a slug he is! He'll make you retch! That very year proved me right: Magda, pregnant and abandoned, failed to cough up the sleeping pills she swallowed, and closed her eyes forever. Lying on the bedside table next to her, tied with a silk ribbon, were the letters she had written to Flora. He had returned them.

Laci's arrival was a real event. He would rise up tall out of the back seat to greet everyone scurrying to meet him, then get a full report from each member of the family and its employees, dispensing praise and a few witticisms to point up our intellectual debility. You could never be sure on what grounds he would disapprove of what he heard. I sensed there was a sensitive instrument, quivering to every stimulus, working inside him, consigning everything clumsy, excessive, or petty to the black zone. I suspected he used his pipe to keep him from answering too quickly, and although the remark would have had more bite had he come right out with it, the contemplative pause carved veritable epigrams out of the smoke. There was no reason to take his words to heart, but if he trained all the power that was in his eyes on you, you were done for.

Laci was nothing if not talented, particularly when it came to starting good-sized businesses. When Austria aligned with Hitler in 1938, he had to make a quick exit from Vienna, where as successful executive and exquisite equestrian he had gained entree into high circles. His quips and sparkling, intelligent smile, his flawless decorum would have sufficed to keep him there, but he also had a dignity, a power that drew others to flock to him: he was the kind of man upon whom people danced attendance, for whom they put their best foot forward. It was not easy to win the boss's approval, but they kept trying.

By the time Laci returned to Nagyvarad just under a month later, we had set our hearts on his becoming our guardian. Perhaps the reason I trusted him was that he so strongly resembled my father. He was a good man even if Mimi, one of his girlfriends, was more often unhappy without him than happy with him.

One day a well-dressed young woman called to me on the street, asking my name with a lilt, suspecting who I was, based on Laci's description and our physical resemblance. I nodded. "Yes, I'm the one." I was amazed at having such a sweetly scented beauty in furs recognize me or even find it worth her while to do so. She removed her hat in the j.a.port Pastry Shop, let her dark golden hair tumble down her back, and ordered a tea. She placed her elbows on the marble table, rested her chin on her fists, and had a close look at me. Then she smiled as if to say, Let's get to it then!

I had been there several times and religiously ordered the cream pastries (scented vanilla, which had been my favorite at Petrik's in Berettyoujfalu as well), but this time, to make my new acquaintance happy, I responded enthusiastically when she pointed to the pastry case and said, "It's all yours!" This led me to conclude that the lady was inclined to excess. Mimi inquired about Laci and the family, wanting to know everything because, according to her, he was so taciturn and irritated by anyone's curiosity. "I will listen to what anyone tells me, but I won't ask anyone a thing," he once told me after I had barraged him with questions.

Mimi had a quick mind and a quick tongue and claimed to have read Les Thibault Les Thibault, a thick, two-volume roman fleuve roman fleuve, in two days. I had had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the book during the Budapest siege in the domineering presence of Aunt Zsofi: she made me hold a volume under each arm to keep my elbows at my sides and prevent me from leaning on the table "like a cow." Though properly trained thanks to the efforts of my mother and governesses, I was nonetheless inclined to recidivism when it came to elbows on the table. "You're not in a bar, you know!" was something I heard a lot. ("More's the pity," I would say to myself.) In any case, my relationship with this ample novel, so filling and always ready to provide further nourishment, continued in Bucharest, because Iboly too had noted my pernicious propensity to rely on my elbows, to say nothing of fingering tumblers, as I had seen men do in the bars in ujfalu whenever I peeked inside. No sooner did I tell her about my grotesque connection to the Thibault family than she reached for the bookshelf and pulled down the very same edition. It had lost none of its heft in Bucharest. She tried to civilize me further by requiring me to lift b.u.t.tered steamed peas to my mouth on the convex bottom of the fork rather than the top. (A decade or so later I wrote a long paper on Roger Martin du Gard out of chivalry perhaps or as a tip of the hat to that reliable master as I sampled proper bourgeois virtues after the intervening turbulence.) The day I mentioned Aunt Zsofi's pedagogical procedure to Mimi, provocatively placing my elbows on the table, she said, "Your family is a bunch of scoundrels!" and tousled my hair. Her nails were long and, of course, painted red, which one month before the end of the Second World War was, I would venture to say, an uncommon spectacle even in the j.a.port Pastry Shop. She asked after our family. Her own was largely gone and had not been all that extensive to begin with. Mimi was the product of a less than regular marriage and had decided as a girl to grow up rich and famous. She later amended this with another wish: to stay alive. She thought she looked like Magda, or vice versa. The two of them had been the prettiest girls at school and were often compared. They got over this by praising each other's beauty. They never became close.

With her too, Laci refrained from speaking of his parents, victims of Auschwitz, but neither did he bring up the beautiful Magda, who never got there. "Thank G.o.d for that," Mimi would have added. Even so, she had not had an easy time of it: she had fled to Southern Transylvania in Romania, where Jews were not being deported to Poland, only shot by the tens of thousands in their own land. Like many others Mimi was taken to an island from which there was no escape: all those who tried were shot, and by spring only their remains were left.

Still, you could slip through the cracks by means of a paper marriage or bribery or indifference on the part of the authorities: Mimi arrived in Nagyvarad not long after the Russians and watched over her mother's apartment there, filling it with furniture of her well-to-do deported aunt, lighting the candles in silver candlesticks. She came to know Laci's tastes and cooked his favorite meals, taking the edge off some and improving on others, getting hold of the ingredients through mysterious, semi-obscure supply chains. "That finicky cousin of yours is quite a gourmand. It's begun to show on him. Have you noticed?" Mimi divulged that she had let Laci's trousers out herself. A seamstress by training, she hoped to open a fashion salon in the center of Pest, Szervita Square, perhaps-yes, she had picked out a spot next to the Rozsavolgyi Music Shop. Laci would find her there after the war, a.s.suming neither of them got shot. Mimi had reckoned with the possibility that Bucharest would not be enough for Laci, that he needed Budapest, Budapest and Vienna, where he had spent some good years. He had even divulged to Mimi what the name of his company would be: Technicomp.

"Like the sound of it?"

"Hmm."

Laci would not have a partner because he liked making all the decisions himself. Maybe he would use her in the clothing factory as a fashion designer, Mimi said, though nowadays it was work clothes that were in demand. Well, they could be attractive too. Laci was supposedly stunned by her productivity: each time she came to Nagyvarad she showed up in a different outfit, designed and executed by her at astonishing speed.

"Your despot of a cousin does love novelty," said Mimi, "but don't worry, he won't trade you in! He's just a bit difficult and won't let himself be loved. He doesn't spoil me either, but you'll be fine," she added with a touch of envy, "because you'll be able to have lunch and dinner with him every day, while he's my eternal fiance." She talked with a dreamy sadness and fretted about having let her hair down, but she had divined that Laci enjoyed talking to me.

And so he did. Laci and I even talked politics. He asked me to pick him up a copy of Scinteia Scinteia, the Romanian Communist Party newspaper. When I asked why he wanted that paper in particular, he told me the same thing I had heard in Budapest from my beautiful dancer friend Magda, a few years before she was shot in the back while trying to escape over the border. She had reasoned then that the Communists were the most determined enemies of the n.a.z.is, the Arrow Cross, and the Iron Guard, so they were the ones she trusted most. I replied that this was only partly true, since I had heard stories in ujfalu about Arrow Cross people turning Communist-once a bigmouth, always a bigmouth. But Laci chose to believe that industry was about to pick up and finally usher in the age of enterprise. I told him stories about the Russians and their drunken shooting sprees, about how I'd pulled one of them back to save him from falling into the well in Uncle Imre's courtyard while he was emptying his bladder.

Oh, of course, he said, he had stories of his own like that, but I should keep in mind that they were the liberators and I owed them my life. I acknowledged this, though I was a debtor on so many fronts simply for making it to twelve that I was growing lazy in matters of grat.i.tude and felt that Laci's optimistic generosity towards the Communists was overly hasty.

As did Bibi, his a.s.sistant manager in Bucharest, who said, "Les idees sont belles, mais le pratique, bon dieu, c'est tristement douteux "Les idees sont belles, mais le pratique, bon dieu, c'est tristement douteux." He would phone early in the morning and announce in his piercing, somewhat impatient voice, "Bibi here!" He was amazed I could not pa.s.s on his messages in French to Laci. When I offered to do it in German, he thanked me and said he'd rather not, German being a language he was steering clear of for the time being. Bibi was not at all impressed that the Russians had commandeered ten thousand automobiles in Bucharest in a single day, and made his feelings known at the table where he often took dinner with Laci and his family and they conversed over cigars and cognac like proper capitalists.

But to return to the despondent Mimi: it became clear during our conversation in the pastry shop that she was not only waiting in vain for her eternal fiance but would go on waiting even if she married another. "And if some day that cousin of yours leaves his clever stick of a wife, and says, 'Come to me, Mimi,' then crazy little Mimi will run as fast as her feet will carry her. She'll dump her husband and family just to feel your precious cousin's heavy hand on her head."

A few lovely teardrops trickled down her nose, and she wiped them away with her scented handkerchief. I never met Mimi again despite her promise to visit me. I did see her once, however, though she did not notice me, or pretended not to. She had just come out of a building when a large, black Morris driven by a man in a crew cut, black gla.s.ses, and leather gloves pulled up. Mimi climbed in next to him and ran her hand through his hair. In light of what I had seen I considered Laci's pa.s.sion for Mimi a reckless investment of his energy, yet despite my moral ruminations I concluded that Laci's putative infidelities did not make him unreliable as far as we were concerned.

Thus my sister and I decided to let Laci in on our secret: the buried gold. There were two kilos of it in a stainless steel box, about half in bracelets and other jewelry, the rest in different forms. The day after we arrived in Berettyoujfalu we made an energetic inspection of our house's grounds, which were nothing but rubble. We also peered into the warehouse that opened onto the courtyard and determined that the crumbly ground in one corner indicated some digging, but that there were no traces of it on the hard-tamped earth floor starting a meter from the doorpost.

We gave each other a nod: any nitwit would have thought to dig in a corner, but a meter out from the doorpost and the wall was an unlikely hiding place. While one box was gone, the other might still be in place, underground. But if we dug it up, it would not be safe with us. So we told Laci our secret and left it to him to work out where the goods could be stored. On the evening of the third day Laci said we would start digging at nine the next morning.

We took three cars and were escorted by five or six young Jewish men with holsters under their short coats, former labor servicemen who had lost their families and thought they were helping the sole surviving pair of Jewish children in the county. They had brought shovels and guarded the gate as they dug. It was a good while before the tip of a shovel struck metal. They lifted the box and placed it in a sack. We headed back immediately so as to meet the same border guards and Russian soldiers who had let us into Hungary that morning at the new crossing, approving our pa.s.sports with a compa.s.sionate glance. They said something I could not understand, and off we went.

If our parents ever returned, they could not accuse us of being careless. We had no intention of letting Uncle Andor in on the secret, though he was very curious about our parents' hidden valuables. We said we had no idea about anything of the sort. We were very good at playing dumb.

We soon left Nagyvarad. I still remember the long goodbyes to the older women who had managed to stay alive. I had been accustomed to such staircase sentimentalities from earliest childhood. I recall the loud, almost paroxysmal greetings of my mother's sisters (Margit and Ilonka, destined for the gas chamber and crematorium) when I would recoil so as to be spared all but the final slightly mustachioed kisses that accompanied those yelps of joy. My mother, now ninety-five, still mentions her long-dead sisters and talks of having visited them recently or of their imminent visit to her. She asks whether I have seen one or the other recently. My attempt to awaken her to the truth feels fatuous and uncalled for even as I say it: "She's been gone for sixty years, Mother. You know that. They killed her at Auschwitz."

"Did they now?" asks my mother in amazement. "Killed her?" She might have been hearing it for the first time. She knows the truth; she just doesn't want to acknowledge it in her mental slumber. She would rather think of the childhood games they shared. She no longer recalls my father. What brings her the greatest happiness is a visit from her grandchildren and great-grandchildren or a certain gray tomcat when it springs into her lap on the balcony. Zsuzsa, the sensitive economist from Munkacs who works as my mother's nurse, calls the cat Bandi; she feeds him and elaborates humorously on his character. My mother will sometimes do a little drawing or reading or walk through the garden on my arm. She eats what is served her, then falls silent, then asks a question, then falls silent again, then starts laughing.

When I visit, she holds her cane in her right hand and takes my arm with her left, and we take a few turns around the garden. Her forgetfulness may help her along the one-way course of years: she is letting go of her burdens, and the tapestries of memory slip from her consciousness layer by layer, leaving a smooth, unfurrowed optimism that asks only to be caressed. I stroke the soft gray hair on the back of her head and praise her, tell her how beautiful I find her latest drawing though a two-year-old might do better, and often feel the same dizzy optimism in myself, a tolerance and aloofness from the world, a mask that says, Any way at all is just fine. I feel my mother's face against my own and my father's smile coming to my mouth. Sometimes I come out with one of the silly things he used to say, the few that I recall. When I do, my sons give an ambiguous smile, not knowing what to make of me and my verbal oddities.

But let me return to my original story. There was silver in one of the boxes we dug up: trays, cutlery, sugar bowls, and candlesticks. My parents meant to sell it if we lost everything else. In fact, some of the rest ended up with relatives, and what little remained was still there a few years ago, at the end of the twentieth century (of glorious memory), in my mother's gla.s.s cabinet. Then one day, when she happened to be alone in her ground-floor flat, two stout old hags rang the bell. "You remember us, don't you, dearie? We shared a room at the hospital." They told her all kinds of stories about herself and their close friendship there, none of which my mother denied, though she had never actually been in a hospital. Why hurt their feelings if they were nice enough to pay her a visit? While one of them talked a blue streak, the other removed my mother's savings book from the drawer and her silver trays from the cabinet. They packed the goods into a bundle and took their leave, expressing their sadness at the prospect of not being able to return for a while. In response to their kind words my mother saw them off with a kind farewell of her own.

Before we approach the eight-hundred kilometer trip from Nagyvarad to Bucharest during the last month of the Second World War, this time under the patronage of my cousin Laci and in his elegant, once-royal, still chauffeured car, stopping on the way to visit my second cousin Ferenc Dobo at his house and garden near the Greek Orthodox Church in Kolozsvar and my uncle Ern? Klein, director of the Hotel Korona in Bra.s.so, a bit of perspective is in order.

In the fifties, after the communist takeover, Laci became a department head at the Romanian Ministry of Industry (then the Ministry of Foreign Trade). Although he had been chief engineer at several factories, a respected expert who oversaw international negotiations, he remained under suspicion because of his bourgeois background: technically speaking, he was a cla.s.s enemy. To determine whether he was a cla.s.s enemy in spirit as well-or to use the parlance of the time, whether was also subjectively subjectively so inclined, the appropriate ent.i.ties were mobilized. so inclined, the appropriate ent.i.ties were mobilized.

One night, lying in bed next to his wife, he awoke to the glare of artificial light: four shapes in trench coats stood over him, each with a flashlight, grilling him about the whereabouts of a missing doc.u.ment. They took him to the Ministry, where he found the doc.u.ment in question, which was in the wrong folder. The whole thing turned out to be a farce, and they let him go, though from then on he no longer slept soundly. Thus the next visit by flashlight did not wake him from a deep slumber; indeed, he had been all but expecting it. He left the Ministry and sought a simple job: all he wanted was to keep his family in modest circ.u.mstances and be left alone. But this was not to be. Laci could not shrink into a small enough package to escape their hara.s.sment and interrogations. Iboly bought a knitting machine and started making sweaters for a cooperative.

In 1956 they filed a request to emigrate to Israel: it was the only way to leave. The entire family was released in 1958. We met briefly in Budapest, whence he was off to Vienna. There a friend asked Laci whether he had officially informed the munic.i.p.al authorities that he was moving away for good when he left in 1938. Laci did not recall having done so. He looked into the matter and found that this was in fact the case. So after twenty years he was still a registered resident of Vienna and could apply for Austrian citizenship. Which he did, successfully. Thereafter he opened an elegant office in the center of town under the name of Technicomp. He particularly enjoyed traveling to Budapest as the representative of German, Dutch, English, and Swedish companies, arranging the purchase of chemical, oil, and food industry equipment for Hungarian enterprises. He sent his daughter Kati and son Stefan to the best schools in Vienna, but Stefan, the light of his life, died suddenly of meningitis.

Once Laci had more or less emerged from mourning, he and Iboly went to the Konzerthalle every week. He read all the major German-language newspapers and lunched in Mr. Kardos' restaurant not far from Technicomp. Every morning he crossed the City Park on the way to the office until one day he collapsed on a bench, having lost all desire to reach the leather armchair behind his enormous desk. Frau Reisner, his aged secretary, did not understand what had put Herr Kun into such a catatonic state, though according to Frau Kun it had happened once before: he had been interned in one of the better mental inst.i.tutions in Bucharest, where he would stare at the puddles in the courtyard and give the tersest of answers to her questions. Here in Vienna it was the brick wall of a stolid public building from the previous century that he saw across the street, though he was not inclined to look out of the window.

In time he managed to pull himself together and make another go of it. The work intoxicated him again. He took up with a woman named Edit, a good match: elegant, intelligent, svelte, tanned at the pool by early spring, now a citizen of South America, originally a Nagyvarad Jewess. He enjoyed her witty, malicious pinp.r.i.c.ks like a good ma.s.sage. With ever-increasing momentum he traveled the world-America, j.a.pan-putting together complicated deals for his clients. He often came to see his cousin Gyuri Gera and me in Budapest, paying amicable court to our young wives, until the secret service called him in and tried to get him to report on his domestic and foreign business a.s.sociates and his burgeoning circle of friends. If he refused, there was not much chance of his doing business, as they could revoke his multiple-entry visa. "What can these people be thinking?" he asked us, as if his own experiences back in Bucharest had not made it perfectly clear to him what these people were thinking. They were thinking that if he did what his character dictated (and what I respected so much) we would not be seeing him in Budapest in the foreseeable future.

We were sad to see the end of our cousin, though thereafter it would have been more disturbing had he been allowed to visit. He wasn't, and our meetings were suspended for a long time. Laci lost his taste for Vienna as well. After seeing to his wife's funeral, he remarried in America and lived near his daughter Kati. Later he moved to Florida and from there to the world of shades.

I have presented these developments to give the reader a sense of the future trajectory of the man who sat to my right in the front seat of the car. In the back sat my sister and two women we knew, whom Laci had taken along as a favor. Behind their heads was the sack containing the heavy strongbox. Coming into Ploieti, the driver swerved off the road and hit a milestone. The box flew into the air and hit the head of the woman who talked the most and loudest. The Chrysler ended up in the ditch below with the milestone on its roof. A Soviet military truck had veered towards us out of the opposite lane-its young driver may have fallen asleep-and the queen's chauffeur had skillfully yanked the wheel to the left. As a result there were no serious injuries-except for a b.u.mp on the head of the talkative lady.

We were picked up by a truck in the pouring rain. Laci sat in the open back, wrapped in a waterproof tarpaulin; we sat in the cab, where it was dry, with our lady guests. The entry into Bucharest was less triumphant than the departure from Nagyvarad.

Crossing rainy boulevards, we arrived at a fin-de-siecle boyar villa. Deep in the garden stood a three-story Bauhaus building completely overrun with woodbine. The garden also boasted a sandbox, a swing, and a small pool. Standing perfectly straight in the doorway of the third-floor apartment, wearing a soft camel-hair robe and exuding a faint scent of lemon, was the broad-shouldered Iboly. We found in her a good surrogate mother, mindful of her obligations, from meals to bathing to clean pajamas. Everything fell into place more or less as at home, before 1944: I had a bed and a desk, we had lunch at lunchtime and dinner at dinnertime, we were to be civilized at table, and we were to toss our underwear daily into the hamper, because a clean change was waiting in the wardrobe. After the morning bath I was allowed to go to the garden or shops with my two-and-a-half-year-old cousin Kati, who served as my interpreter: What I said in Hungarian, she repeated in Romanian. Invigorated by our team spirit and well-matched roles, we dutifully accomplished our appointed tasks, garnering praise from Iboly and Viorica the cook, a loud, amusing, pa.s.sionate woman who called me a Dacian savage when she was dissatisfied with me. Laci's baby son Stefan, tossing and turning in his little bed, was the only other male in the apartment, because Laci left home early and returned late and was often away on long business trips.

While the Queen's Chrysler was being repaired, Laci drove around in a red koda sports coupe that was requisitioned out from under him somewhere between Torda and Kolozsvar by the Soviet soldiers who were always standing around in groups by the side of the road. Laci expressed his outrage, insisting on speaking to the commander and having the case officially recorded. The sound of the word protokol protokol got the soldiers' dander up. They gave Laci a shove in the chest and jumped in the car. Laci, always one to do things by the book, found this an unorthodox procedure, but was still capable of laughing at finding himself once more in the back of a truck in the pouring rain. got the soldiers' dander up. They gave Laci a shove in the chest and jumped in the car. Laci, always one to do things by the book, found this an unorthodox procedure, but was still capable of laughing at finding himself once more in the back of a truck in the pouring rain.