A Guest In My Own Country Part 1

A guest in my own country : a Hungarian life.

by George Konrad.

I.

Departure and Return

FEBRUARY 1945. WE ARE SITTING ON a bench in a motionless cattle car. I can't pull myself away from the open door and the wind whipping in off the snowy plains. I didn't want to be a constant guest in Budapest; I wanted to go home-a weeklong trip-to Berettyoujfalu, the town our parents had been abducted from, the town we had managed to leave a day before the deportations. Had we stayed one more day we would have ended up in Auschwitz. My sister, who was fourteen, might have survived, but I was eleven, and Dr. Mengele sent all my cla.s.smates, every last one, to the gas chambers. a bench in a motionless cattle car. I can't pull myself away from the open door and the wind whipping in off the snowy plains. I didn't want to be a constant guest in Budapest; I wanted to go home-a weeklong trip-to Berettyoujfalu, the town our parents had been abducted from, the town we had managed to leave a day before the deportations. Had we stayed one more day we would have ended up in Auschwitz. My sister, who was fourteen, might have survived, but I was eleven, and Dr. Mengele sent all my cla.s.smates, every last one, to the gas chambers.

Of our parents we knew nothing. I had given up on the idea of going from the staircase to the vestibule to the light-blue living room and finding everything as it had been. I had a feeling I would find nothing there at all. But if I closed my eyes, I could go through the old motions: walk downstairs, step through the iron gate, painted yellow, and see my father next to the tile oven, rubbing his hands, smiling, chatting, turning his blue eyes to everyone with a trusting but impish gaze, as if to ask, "We understand each other, don't we?" In a postprandial mood he would have gone onto the balcony and stretched out on his deck chair, lighting up a long Memphis cigarette in its gold mouthpiece, looking over the papers, then nodding off.

For as long as I can remember, I had a secret suspicion that everyone around me acted like children. I realized it applied to my parents as well when, not suspecting us of eavesdropping, they would banter playfully in the family bed: they were exactly like my sister and me.

From the age of five I knew I would be killed if Hitler won. One morning in my mother's lap I asked who Hitler was and why he said so many terrible things about the Jews. She replied that she herself didn't know. Maybe he was insane, maybe just cruel. Here was a man who said the Jews should disappear. But why should we disappear from our own house, and even if we did, where would we go? Just because this. .h.i.tler, whom my nanny followed with such enthusiasm, came up with crazy ideas like packing us off to somewhere else.

And how did Hilda feel about all this? How could she possibly be happy about my disappearing, yet go on bathing me with such kindness every morning, playing with me, letting me snuggle up to her, and even occasionally slipping into the tub with me? How could Hilda, who was so good to me, wish me ill? She was pretty, Hilda was, but obviously stupid. I decided quite early that anything threatening me was idiotic, since I was a threat to no one. I was unwilling to allow that anything bad for me could possibly be an intelligent idea.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt like the five-year-old who ventured all the way out to the Berettyo Bridge on his bicycle and stared into the river, a mere eight or ten meters wide in summer, twisting yellow and muddy through its gra.s.sy channel, pretending to be docile but in fact riddled with whirlpools. That boy was no different, no more or less a child than I am today. In spring I watched from the bridge as the swollen river swept away entire houses and uprooted large trees, watched it was.h.i.+ng over the dike, watched animal carca.s.ses floating by. You could row a boat between the houses: all the streets near the bank were under water.

I felt that you could not count on anything entirely, that danger was lurking everywhere. The air inside the Broken Tower was cool, moldy, bat-infested. I was frightened by the rats. The Turks had once laid siege to it and finally taken it. This is a wild region, a region of occupations: myriad armies have pa.s.sed through it; myriad outlaws, marauders, haiduks, and bounty hunters have galloped over its plains. The townspeople take refuge in the swamps.

My childhood recollection is that people had a slow way of talking that was expansive and quite cordial. They took their time about communicating and expected no haste in return. The herdsmen cracked the whip every afternoon as they brought the cows home. Then there were the Bihar knifemen: cutting in on a Sat.u.r.day-night dance could mean a stabbing.

With my long hair curling at the sides and suspenders holding up my trousers, I step into the living room. The upholstery is blue, blue the tablecloth. The living room opens onto a sunlit balcony, where cheese pastries and hot cocoa stand waiting. I am well disposed to everyone and aware of the many who have been working for me that day, making my entrance possible. The bathroom heater and the living-room tile stove have been lit, the cleaning done. Sounds of food being prepared travel in from the kitchen.

I c.o.c.k an ear: it might be the diminutive Mr. Toth, bringing buffalo milk and buffalo b.u.t.ter. On my way to Varad in summer I would see his herd from the train window lolling in a big puddle, barely lifting their heads above water. Mr. Toth wasn't much larger than I. He was very graceful when he unrolled the bordered handkerchief he used for carrying money, including our monthly payment for the milk, curd cheese, and sour cream he brought, all as white as the buffalo were black.

I would have liked to be big and strong and gave our driver's biceps a hopeful squeeze. They had a nice bulge to them, and I wanted mine to be just as tan and thick. Andras and his horse Gyurka would bring water from the artesian well in the gray tank-cart. Women waited their turn with two pitchers apiece. I remember Andras and Gyula, and Vilma, Irma, Juliska, and Regina from the kitchen, and Annie, Hilda, and Livia from the nursery.

The fire is still crackling in the tile oven. There is no need to close the oven door until the embers start crumbling. I rub its side and take my seat at the table, where a booster pillow rests on the chair. It is nine o'clock. My father went down to the store at eight; his a.s.sistants and errand boys awaited him at the door. I will have to eat breakfast without him in the company of my sister eva and my nanny. Mother will join us later if she can spare the time. She will set her keys down on the blue tablecloth. Opening and closing the various doors and drawers takes a long time.

This is perhaps my third birthday, a Sat.u.r.day. The play of bright light off the synagogue's yellow wall behind our house is dazzling. The chestnut and sour cherry trees in the garden are already in bud. The living room is quiet, but I hear rustlings coming from the dining room. I'm not looking forward to the door opening, because as soon as it does I will have to express my happiness openly. Once you have your gifts, you must play with them. How long can you sit on a rocking horse?

The big news is that the storks have taken their place on the tower next to the Tablets of the Covenant on the synagogue: the winter has not destroyed their nest. One tower is the family home, the other the sanctum of the paterfamilias, where, towards evening, having supplied his charges with treasures from the hunt, he would retire for meditation, leg up, bill tucked in.

A special smell emanates from the chest where the logs for the fire are kept. It mingles with the aroma of burning oak. From here we may proceed to my parents' bedroom, where the scent of Mother's dresser predominates, the ever-present scent of lavender, a moth repellent. Another exciting symphony of scents calls me to the kitchen, but can't we put off eating for the moment (well, maybe just a cheese pastry to go with my cafe au lait): the smell of onions and b.l.o.o.d.y meat is just too much, nor am I ready for the sight of a fowl lying on a stone, the blood spurting from its neck onto a white enameled plate. (The servants let it coagulate, then cook it with fried onions for their morning snack.) The breakfast is splendid. Now let's make some serious plans for the day. We'll go down to my father's hardware store, a s.p.a.ce ten meters by twenty, with a cellar below that serves as a warehouse. If it was made of iron, you could find it there-anything the people of Csonka-Bihar County could need. The reason it was called Csonka-Bihar, "Rum Bihar," was that neighboring Transylvania, including its capital Nagyvarad (together with most of my family, Hungarian-speaking middle-cla.s.s Jews), had been uncoupled from Hungary after the First World War and Berettyoujfalu had become the seat of what was left of Bihar County. Everyone came here to do the weekly shopping on market Thursdays, even from outlying villages.

On that day things would bustle starting early in the morning: bells chiming on horses' necks, carts on runners in winter. Even closed windows in the children's room could not seal out the beating of hoofs, the whinnying, the rumble of carts, the mooing. My father's hardware store was filled with customers bargaining for goods, punctuated by bouts of hearty conviviality. His a.s.sistants, who knew most of them, followed suit, and old Aunt Mari and Uncle Janos held up their end as well. My father's employees had all started out with him; they were trained by him from the age of thirteen. Before opening they would sweep the greasy floor and sprinkle it down in figure-eights. The a.s.sistants wore blue smocks, the bookkeeper a black silk jacket, my father a dark gray suit. The smell of iron and wood shavings wafted over me, then the oil used to grease the cart axles, then the oily paper used to wrap hunting arms. I could have told nails from wire with my eyes shut, by smell alone. The room smelled of men, of boots, of the mid-morning snack: bread, raw bacon, and chunks of onion inserted under mustaches on the tip of a knife.

Lajos uveges can wait on three customers at a time, tossing pleasantries and encouragement this way and that, yet find time to ask me "How's tricks?" He knows exactly what you need for your cart; there is no artisan in Berettyoujfalu whose craft is a mystery to Lajos uveges. "Just watch how it's done," is his advice to me in life. I watch him rolling a cigarette with one hand, building a seesaw, repairing a bicycle. So that's how you do it. He loves to work: smelting iron, fixing circuits, extracting honey from a beehive-for Lajos it is all sheer entertainment. He jokes with the old peasants in a way that does not exclude respect. His mustache exudes a pleasant smell of pomade, like my grandfather's, the old man having given him some of his. If there is such a thing as an ideal mustache wax scent, this is it.

When my father's business was taken over by the state in 1950, Lajos uveges was named manager. By then it had twenty-two employees, had expanded into the second-floor apartment, and used the neighboring synagogue as a warehouse. Among the a.s.sistants he was the best man for the job, though not quite so good as my father.

The town crier shouts out public announcements to the festive sound of a drumbeat. A military band marches past. The drum major, generally fat, swings his long, striped staff in the ritual manner. Bringing up the rear, a diminutive Gypsy boy pounds his drum. The lyrics grow ever more unpleasant: "Jew, Jew, dirty Jew!" is how one begins. My father simply closes the door.

The smell of horse and cow manure fills the streets. No matter how much the main street is swept, the horse- and ox-carts leave their muck clinging to the cobblestones. Herds too file by, morning and evening, resourcefully splitting up to fill the small side streets. Cows and geese find their way home as skillfully as people.

To this day I can smell the pool, filled by slow bubblings from the artesian spring. Every Sunday night it was drained; only after it had been cleaned did the refilling, which lasted until Wednesday evening, begin. The well-water, with its aroma of iron and sulfur, surged up several hundred meters to lend the walls of the pool a rust-brown hue. It was our drinking water, arriving at the house in an enameled can and at the table in a gla.s.s pitcher. Water for was.h.i.+ng was hauled from the well on a horse-drawn tank cart, poured into the cellar, then pumped to the attic. From there it came through the tap to the bathtub. It took the work of many to keep a middle-cla.s.s household going. I can still hear the servant girls singing. We had an old woman cook, Regina, a gentle soul. When she lost her temper, her curse was, "May a quiet rain fall on him!"

I can hear the congregation singing "The Lord Is One." The synagogue had a sour smell from the prayer shawls, and voices at prayer sometimes melted into a background of rumbling and muttering. I might have a scuffle with a goat in the temple courtyard, grabbing it by the horns and trying to push it back. It would yield to a point, then b.u.t.t, and down I would fall on my behind.

My family was rural, mainly from Bihar County; some came from Nagyvarad, others from Berettyoujfalu, Debrecen, Miskolc, Bra.s.so, and Kolozsvar. They were Hungarian-speaking Jews. Almost all are dead today. Five of my cousins were killed at Auschwitz and Mauthausen. My father's three older sisters and both of my mother's met the same end. One of my maternal uncles was shot in the head in the street by the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascist party.

My father's generation had a gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium education, while my own-including a textile engineer, a biologist, a chemist, an economist, a mathematician, and a writer-graduated from the university. The previous generation had been businessmen, factory owners, a doctor, a banker, a pharmacist, and an optician, all respectable members of the middle cla.s.s until they were deported; my generation became intellectuals and critical spirits: a leftist engineer who organized a strike against his father, a medic expelled from school who organized a group of partisans, and rebellious humanists. education, while my own-including a textile engineer, a biologist, a chemist, an economist, a mathematician, and a writer-graduated from the university. The previous generation had been businessmen, factory owners, a doctor, a banker, a pharmacist, and an optician, all respectable members of the middle cla.s.s until they were deported; my generation became intellectuals and critical spirits: a leftist engineer who organized a strike against his father, a medic expelled from school who organized a group of partisans, and rebellious humanists.

My mother's family was more well-to-do, a result of the practicality and business sense not so much of my grandfather as of my grandmother. My maternal grandfather was more reader than businessman, but he had a son-in-law with a great flair for commerce, and through him the family was involved in a furniture factory, a bitumen and lime plant, and logging tracts. He was a religious man, if not strictly Orthodox, and read widely in Judaica. He belonged to the boards of both the Reform and Orthodox congregations in Nagyvarad. He had a taste for elaborate rituals, but also for the good life: working from nine to twelve was enough for him. Then came the family lunch, the afternoon cafe session, and, after dinner, reading-this in his own separate apartment, since by then he had had enough of the children and the commotion of family life.

For the Pa.s.sover Seder dinner he would come to Berettyoujfalu from Nagyvarad. He was the one who read the answers to the Haggadah questions that I, as the youngest present, asked. Our Haggadah-the book containing the readings for the holiday, the memorial of exile-was bound in cedar and ornamented with mosaics. It had drawings as well, four in particular: the wise son, the wicked son, the merchant son, and the son so simple he does not know how to ask. I was particularly delighted by the one who does not know how to ask, but my grandfather said the role did not suit me as I was constantly pestering him with questions.

During the evening ceremony a gla.s.s of wine was set out between the two windows for the prophet Elijah. By morning it was gone. I was intrigued by the prospect of the prophet Elijah's visit. Once, in the nursery, I heard rustlings from the adjoining dining room. I darted from my bed and peeped out through the door. I saw my grandfather in a full-length white nights.h.i.+rt take the gla.s.s and drink it. He remarried ten years after my grandmother's death. He was eighty.

We also had a Christmas tree with gifts beneath it, and my sister would play "Silent Night," which we knew as "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht," on the piano. My parents did not mention Jesus, but my nanny said he came bringing gifts and even decorating the tree. I pictured him as a flying, birdlike creature in contrast to Elijah, who thundered across the sky in a chariot of fire. But in the end I suspected that neither came at all.

My great-grandfather Salamon Gottfried was the first Jew to settle in Berettyoujfalu. He arrived at the end of the eighteenth century and opened a pub, which he left to his son Samuel. Samuel, who eventually held seventy acres, was a strong man who commanded respect and kept order, brooking neither crude speech nor boisterousness in an establishment whose clientele included the local toughs. His photograph shows a man with focused and probably blue eyes wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a white s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned to the neck-a determined, strong-boned man, browned by the sun, full of endurance, and sporting a bifurcated beard. He too remarried as a widower, at seventy-seven. The only letters on their waist-high marble tombstones in the Jewish cemetery at Berettyoujfalu are Hebrew.

My paternal grandmother Karolina Gottfried was by all reports a kindly, good-humored, plump old woman. She had three girls, then a boy, my father Jozsef. She spoiled her only son, and when she looked in on her father in the pub at Szentmarton across the river, she would dress little Jozsi up in a sailor suit and patent leather shoes and take him in a fiacre, which inspired sarcastic remarks. It was the same when Karolina took Jozsi in a hired carriage to his grandfather. She wore the trousers in that house, at least at table, where the helpers and servants ate together with the master.

The master, my grandfather Ignac Kohn, was a tinsmith, and he and his men produced the buckets, cans, tubs, and other goods of galvanized sheet-iron for the local artisans. He was not happy when factory-produced goods swamped the market, and had no choice but to switch to retailing. By the turn of the century his hardware business, established in 1878, was the largest in the region.

My grandmother was somewhat embarra.s.sed to find herself pregnant again at the age of forty-three. (Apparently in those days it would have been fitting to conceal the fact that Karolina and Ignac were still making love at such an advanced age.) The outcome was my father's youngest and favorite sister, the pretty Mariska, the most spoiled of all the siblings.

Both of their black-granite, life-size gravestones are still standing in the abandoned, weed-infested Jewish cemetery at Berettyoujfalu, where no one has been interred for decades, that is, since the entire Jewish community, some one thousand people, disappeared from the village, which has since become a small city. Ignac, who outlived his wife Karolina, had the following carved on her gravestone: "You were my happiness, my pride." Despite heavy battles in the cemetery at the end of the Second World War their granite pillars were not so much as scratched by the bullets, and they will long continue to stand-if no one sees fit to knock them down, that is.

When I read out my father's particulars to the officials in charge of granting gravesites at the Sip Street congregation in Budapest, the old gentleman who kept the enormous register slapped his forehead and said, "I remember him. Fine reputation. Solid, solvent." Apparently he had once visited us as a traveling salesman. My father tended to buy from factories and had reservations about these wanderers with samples in their bags, but he also had a feeling for people and a sense of humor that made his company quite pleasant. He was a guileless man who never thought his debtors might run off on him, as they generally did not. To his poorer customers he granted credit if they could not pay, certain as he was that sooner or later they would come up with what they owed him. He never bought or sold wares that were less than reliable. Everything a.s.sociated with him was thoroughly st.u.r.dy, be it a kettle, a bicycle, or his word.

My father read several newspapers and started listening to the BBC's Hungarian-language broadcasts at the beginning of the war. I was intimately familiar with the BBC's four knocks, since I would crouch behind my father as he tried to hear the news amidst all the jamming. From the middle of the war he listened to Moscow as well. We had to close the doors and windows: by turning the k.n.o.b this way and that with great concentration over the forty-nine, forty-one, thirty-one, and twenty-five meter bands of the shortwave we were committing a subversive act.

An old photo from the family alb.u.m (lost at the end of the war) comes to mind: my grandfather, my aunts, and my father are leaning over a white-enameled basin, their heads c.o.c.ked to one side, which would be rather odd were it not for the wire hanging out of the basin: it signaled they were gathered around a single headphone to hear the first radio broadcast in the twenties. An uncomfortable setup, yet worth the trouble.

I was not yet in a position to take part in the scene, but by the time of the war I would perch behind my father on the couch every day at a quarter to two listening to the news, the real news, amidst the static. The sound would come and go; you really had to keep your ears p.r.i.c.ked. My nine-year-old ears filled the intermittent gaps in my father's hearing. I became so attached to "This Is London" that when the Gestapo arrested my father in May 1944 on the charge of sending news to the BBC from his secret radio transmitter in the attic I was proud he was the object of such a n.o.ble accusation. Not a word of it was true.

My Bavarian nanny, the beautiful blonde Hilda, left us for Hitler: her father forbade her to work for Jews no matter how comfortable she felt with us. Then came the warm-hearted Hungarian Livia, who not only spoke German and French well but played the piano. She wore her waist-length blonde hair braided; I never tired of watching her comb it. The Catholic Livia fell in love with my father's accountant, Ern? Vashegyi, a quiet, lanky, well-read man, and center on the local soccer team. Ern? Vashegyi was handsome, but a Jew, which gave Livia some pause. We often went to the soccer field with our nanny and sat in the small, wooden riser; everyone else either stood on the hill or perched on the fence. Whenever Ern? Vashegyi kicked a goal, Livia and I would squeeze hands. Once in a while the earnest fellow would join us at the family table for lunch, but before long he was called up for forced labor and never returned.

Every Monday the local tradesmen would gather in my father's store to evaluate the previous day's performance of our team, the county champions. Other topics of long conversations included rain (precious), drought (worrisome), the price of wheat, and what that lunatic was after anyway. Politics was a theme to be discussed mainly with other Jews; otherwise it was prudent to hold one's tongue: fascism had crept into the heads of some intelligent people, for whom regaining the Hungarian-speaking territories lost after World War I at the Trianon Conference was conceivable only with Hitler's support.

My ancestors lived out their lives as Jewish middle-cla.s.s Hungarians. My father was the primary taxpayer in the town's ambit of some twelve thousand people. As such, he was given members.h.i.+p at the gentleman's club, the "casino," though he never went there. Nailed to the right side of the street entrance to his business was a mezuzah, a parchment roll in a mother-of-pearl case containing a handwritten text of the "Sh'ma," the central Sabbath prayer: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our G.o.d, the Lord is one." Only He, and no other: no pagan G.o.dhead in animal or human form.

On the doorpost below the mezuzah was a small metal plaque showing the outline of the historical borders of Hungary in 1914 and within it, painted in solid black, the 1920 territory, chopped to thirty percent of its original size and the slogan "No, no, never!"-meaning that we would never accept the loss. The members of my family thought of themselves as good Hungarians and good Jews. The two did not come to be viewed as separate until World War II.

The Hungarian government took up arms on the German side with the aim of recovering part of the lost territories, and it was willing to send half a million Jews to German camps in exchange. It was a bad bargain, because in the end they lost not only the Jews but the territory as well, and were left with the shame of it all. True, not everyone feels this way: there are those who feel that while many Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz the number was too small.

The Hungarian flag in the middle of the village flew at half mast, and as one piece of territory or another rejoined Hungary it was raised a bit higher. On 15 March, the holiday of the 1848 War of Independence, the children of the Jewish elementary school would march before it in ceremonial step sporting white s.h.i.+rts and dark blue shorts.

My father took part in the reoccupation of Ruthenia and its princ.i.p.al cities, Ungvar and Munkacs. He had an artilleryman's uniform with a single white star on it, signifying the rank of private first cla.s.s, but with the red arm braid that marked those who had graduated from the gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium. On weekends he would don his uniform and boots and meet my mother at the hotel in Ungvar.

I advanced one rank higher in the military order, becoming a corporal. (My son Miklos did not carry on the tradition, never advancing past private in the French Army; in fact, they tossed him in the clink for talking back to his commander.) I was interested in military events from the age of seven and prayed for General Montgomery to defeat General Rommel in Africa and for the Allies to take Tunis and Bizerta. I was a patriot who could be moved to tears for Hungary, but at the same time I was for an Allied victory. Based on what I heard and saw in the newsreels, I tried to imagine the battles of Stalingrad, Smolensk, and Kursk as well. Lying p.r.o.ne in the dark under the net of my bra.s.s bed, I would press my thumbs lightly to my eyes and on would come the newsreels, my own versions of the Hungarian and German products, all tanks and heavy artillery and air battles fading into the starry night.

The sky is bigger beyond the Tisza, the roads muddier than west of the Danube. This is the eastern end of the country, where you would once have found the highest concentration of people going barefoot and old men standing before their house doors in dark blue burlap ap.r.o.ns. It was a picture as constant as the buffaloes grazing in their lake.

Coming to Berettyoujfalu by train, I make my way over red slag between the tracks, then pa.s.s the green iron-tube railing onto the platform with its yellow-brick paving. The red-hatted signalman salutes me with his signal disk, the telegraph machine jingling away behind him. It is some time in the seventies, and I am lying in a room at the Bihar Hotel, a few steps from my childhood home. There is no hot water, and the door to the W.C. does not close: you have to hold the handle. Even though the flies land all over me, I do not swipe at them. I have drunk a lot of palinka palinka in the heat. The bus motors at the station produce a constant rumble. In the cinema across the road the Gypsy kids make the same smacking sound when kissing as they did before the war, but nowadays it is no longer permitted to spit pumpkin and sunflower husks onto the floor. in the heat. The bus motors at the station produce a constant rumble. In the cinema across the road the Gypsy kids make the same smacking sound when kissing as they did before the war, but nowadays it is no longer permitted to spit pumpkin and sunflower husks onto the floor.

I take a close look at our house, ambling over the cracked sidewalk by the hapless shacks that seem to survive all events. A couple emerges from the courtyard that was one of my old haunts. The little girls who used to play with dolls are old now; they look like their mothers, the boys like their fathers. Faces peering through the fence. The indifference of the stares.

I go to the marketplace too. Nearly everything is different there now: trucks and tractors stirring up dust, the young scooting around on motorcycles. What has not changed is the rumpus of the women, the clamor of geese and ducks, the long baying of the oxen, the fresh scent of horse manure, the mounds of apricots and new potatoes. The merry-go-round is still there, as are the cotton-candy vendor and the table covered with jackknives. You can still get a little wooden rooster that clacks its wings. All but gone by now, though, is the bench in front of a house where one or two old men would pa.s.s the hours smoking a pipe, and the bright light unwrapping all the objects to reveal their slow decay.

I think I wanted to make up my mind about something. One hot afternoon, after lolling for a while on a sweaty bed in a hotel room the size of a coffin, I wandered down the main street and through the soccer field. No one said a word to me. Sometimes I had the feeling I was being watched. In a side-street bar, smelly and raucous, a drunkard launched into a song, then gave up and stared out of the window.

An old man, wearing nothing but a jacket over his bronze, tattooed torso, told me of a time when I liked to sit with him on the coach-box and he would pa.s.s me the whip. It was Andras, our former coachman, he of the large, reverie-inspiring biceps. Andras was the one who polished the linoleum in my room by skating on waxed brushes, the one who brought the firewood upstairs, who lit the fire in the cast-iron stove in the bathroom so I could have warm water for my bath when I got up. His horse Gyurka pulled the water tank, and Andras filled it, bucket by bucket, at the slow-gurgling artesian well in front of the post office and behind the national flag in the park. As likely as not, Andras had never had the experience of lounging in a bathtub. The servants bathed once a week in the galvanized tin tub in the laundry room. Just so I could step in the tub, the servant girl would have to keep the fire going while my nanny set out my ironed whites. The was.h.i.+ng-soap smell was part of a larger picture: the servant girl had a servant smell, the valet a valet smell.

The servant girl would not simply take her pay from my mother's hand; she would seize her hand and kiss it. My father would shake hands with his employees when handing them their pay envelopes. I don't remember the coachman or the woman who was our cook ever sitting down in any of our rooms-in the kitchen, yes: Andras would sit there on the stool, stirring the thick soup the cook ladled straight from the kettle into his bowl with an enameled spoon. No kettle was ever put on the dining table, only a porcelain soup server and a silver spoon for serving. The servants would spend whole afternoons polis.h.i.+ng the silverware.

Was I religious? Since I prayed, I was religious. But children are hedonists and enjoy some aspects of a religion while rejecting those that deprive them of pleasure. The wine I enjoyed, though I got it only on Seder evening, when I was allowed to dip my little finger into the winegla.s.s and lick it. The horseradish on the table represented bitterness, the bread dipped in honey good fortune. After presiding over the ritual, my grandfather would listen to my doubts and say that there are many images of G.o.d, but that He is greater than any image, for G.o.d always transcends what is portrayed.

We were Cohanites, Cohens, that is, descendants of Aaron and the priests who guarded the Ark of the Covenant. My maternal grandfather was also a Cohen, though the designation pa.s.sed from father to son. Only Cohanites are ent.i.tled to remove the Torah scrolls from the tabernacle and carry them around the temple, blessing the congregation. Special regulations of cleanliness forbid them to marry a divorced woman or enter a cemetery: whoever touches Holy Scripture may have no contact with the dead. For my part, I have married two divorcees and enjoy strolling through cemeteries.

My father was comfortable with the positions of responsibility he held, and had no desire to take a leading role in either the town or the congregation. He was who he was. My parents were no more a.s.similated than other Jews; they simply went a little further into the world at large, where all religions and nationalities learn new ways of life, with mixed feelings perhaps, but slowly and surely, where Jews and Christians alike are a.s.similants, adapting to the age and to life beyond national borders. But my cousin Istvan and I were the only ones at the Jewish school who did not attend afternoon Talmud lessons in the whitewashed one-story building where one day half a brick tumbled through the dusty courtyard's fence and landed on my head. The others would arrive home from school at one, but had to go to the cheder cheder, the religious school, at three, where they would immerse themselves in the study of Jewish law and its interpretation. Since they stayed in the cla.s.sroom until six, they tended to be sickly. I was stronger. Ugly fights were the fas.h.i.+on. All the kids would stand around the enemies and spur them on. We fought on a floor regularly sprinkled with oil. The winner was the one who pinned the other's shoulders to the ground and held him there. Success was sweeter if a little blood flowed from the loser's nose and mouth.

Even in childhood the pen was my favorite tool, though I also a.s.sembled model airplanes and even soldered one from steel wire. Fixing the hubs on my bike or patching an inner tube was no trickier for me than scratching the tip of my nose. The screwdriver and the saw took gladly to my hand. There was nothing I enjoyed more than observing master craftsmen: I loved watching the locksmith, the blacksmith, the radio repairman at work-my father's customers all. Nagy, the hospital's chief engineer, I considered a superior being, and the fact that he never could wash the oil entirely from his hands met with my reverential approval.

Actually I was preparing an enterprise similar to his, an airplane factory, which was to be located just behind the lake where we skated (and bathed the geese in the summertime). All it would take was a little land from the pasture. Obviously I would first have to study at the English gimn.a.z.ium gimn.a.z.ium in Sarospatak, then at Oxford or Cambridge. Having returned with my diploma, I would inherit-or simply run-my father's hardware business and thence take the step into production. Though why not manufacture planes from the outset? Start small but quickly move on to pa.s.senger planes, so one day all of Berettyoujfalu would ride out to the airport in their oxcarts and take a pleasure flight free of charge, experience Derecske, Mikepercs, Zsaka, Furta, Csokm?, and maybe even Bakonszeg from the air. Such was the plan. in Sarospatak, then at Oxford or Cambridge. Having returned with my diploma, I would inherit-or simply run-my father's hardware business and thence take the step into production. Though why not manufacture planes from the outset? Start small but quickly move on to pa.s.senger planes, so one day all of Berettyoujfalu would ride out to the airport in their oxcarts and take a pleasure flight free of charge, experience Derecske, Mikepercs, Zsaka, Furta, Csokm?, and maybe even Bakonszeg from the air. Such was the plan.

My cousin Istvan Zador was a month younger then I: He was a Taurus, I an Aries. We entered the world in the same birthing room. He was a nice pink color and quiet, while I (a breech birth, with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck) came out red, bald, and in agony. My mother, ashamed of my pointed head, kept it a secret by covering it with a crocheted cap before my father came to visit. To this day I have to laugh when I think of my father's face as I plagued him with questions about our first meeting. "You were quite an ugly little runt," he would say, and then add rea.s.suringly, "but you managed to outgrow it."

Both Istvan and I were born at the university clinic in Debrecen, though we lived in Berettyoujfalu. Ours were the two most affluent Jewish families in the Alfold region. Jozsef Konrad, my father, was generally considered wealthier, since he had a multistory house on the main street, but actually his cousin Bela Zador had more money and a college degree to boot.

My father had only a commercial high school education, which he received in Kesmark, an ancient town in the Tatra Mountains, home to a significant Saxon-that is, German-community. Although our family's native tongue was Hungarian, it made sense at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to board the boys with a family where German was spoken at table. My father ended up in the house of a mathematics teacher. He would take the young lady of the family walking on the castle walls or skating in the Dobsina ice cave, where the snow lingered into summer. This cave occupied my imagination intensely. Several times I asked my father about it as he reclined on a chaise longue on the balcony after dinner and his words flowed freely. All I learned was that the young lady had a red skating outfit and that my father also turned a few figures with the girl on his arm.

Istvan and I took our first steps with a walker while our mothers chatted. They were sisters-in-law and friends. Istvan's mother was my father's younger sister, his father my father's cousin. Mariska, the young beauty, was noticed early by Bela Zador, her cousin.

During my first days at school my governess Livia sat with me at my desk. Whenever she stood, I sobbed at the thought of her leaving me there alone. On the fourth day she managed to tear herself from my side. I cried, and the others made fun of me, so I got angry and beat up every single one of them. At home I announced that I did not want to go to school, and repeated this regularly over the course of a month. My parents finally accepted the situation, and I became a home student. So did Istvan. As our instructor did not come until the afternoon, we were free all morning out in their large garden among the sour-cherry trees on the banks of Kallo Creek. We would finish the lesson quickly and go back to playing soccer or cutting cattails or catching frogs.

When Aunt Mariska allowed it, little Istvan would watch his mother stretch out in the tub. He would feel her clothes and smell her colognes. The governess, who answered to the name of Nene, would shout for him to come out immediately and stop bothering his mother, but Istvan would just stand there, watching through fogged-up gla.s.ses as his mother turned her beautiful legs.

We sat together in school and were reluctant to part company. Istvan would walk me home and come up the stairs. "You understand, Gyuri, don't you?" he would ask at intervals, standing in the front doorway. "I understand, I understand," I would answer after a considered pause. No one was as good to talk to as Istvan, and I never talked to anyone else as much. With our arms on each other's shoulders we would walk round and round the courtyard at school. Having failed to shut us up, they tried to separate us, but ended up leaving us in the same row. Istvan was not beyond a few pranks, but was bored by childish rowdiness. I know a number of people who admit that Istvan was smarter than they; I am one.

Istvan Zador's brother Pal was three years younger than he and followed in his footsteps. A mathematician, he has been living in Was.h.i.+ngton for about forty years now. Pali could beat both of us in ping-pong: he was bent on making up for those three years. He had no tolerance for an affront. If a salesman happened to say anything out of line, Pali would answer with a single compound noun: "Curcowstupidpig!" In the time it would have taken for his father to come out of the house and set him straight, we were all down on the bank of the creek amid the sour-cherry trees and raspberry bushes.

They lived in a s.p.a.cious house just opposite ours. It incorporated a large clothing and shoe store. The salesmen cut fine figures in well-tailored suits of English cloth and liked to wave fabrics in the air with a flourish. They had a pleasant way about them, complimenting the women as they pivoted in front of the mirror.

Stepping into my father's hardware store, you inhaled the reliable iron smell of nails, wire, cart-axles, ploughs, harrows, stoves, pots, bicycles, and hunting weapons. You could check the sharpness of a scythe with the tip of a finger, and should you wish to verify whether it was made of well-tempered steel, you would use a twenty-kilo iron weight that had done service since the beginning of human memory: you would knock the head of the scythe (without the handle) hard against the weight a few times and raise it to your ear to hear it ring.

It was an event for me whenever a load of goods arrived at the Berettyoujfalu station, the fruit of one of Father's Budapest trips. Andras and Gyurka would cart the crates home, and I would sit up on the box, where I had permission to give Gyurka the commands to go (Ne!) and stop (Ho!). It was exciting to help unload the large crates of flame-red enameled pots nested amid thick beds of fragrant wood shavings.

These pleasures were alien to Istvan, who paid little attention to his father's business and rarely set foot in the store. He was none too comfortable playing the little son, hearing how much he had grown, suffering a pinch on the cheek. After one or two h.e.l.los he would retire to the innards of the house. Aunt Mariska, too, observed the store's activity from a distance, leaving things to Aunt Etelka, her untiring mother-in-law, who-small, thin, and deeply wrinkled-kept an eye on everything from the most natural place, her perch at the cash register.

Uncle Bela would pace the store, dealing personally with a few preferred customers, but bilious and impatient as he was he soon retreated into the apartment, which opened onto the garden, and settled into his heavy leather armchair in the half-darkness of the study next to Aunt Mariska's room. There he would read the ever-worsening news, later to discuss it with my father in our living room with concern, though not without hope.

Most ladies from the town's upper stratum found items to their liking in Uncle Bela's store. Aunt Mariska, though, did not-meaning that my mother, her friend, was under no obligation to buy her wardrobe from him either. The two would occasionally travel to Budapest.

Such a trip was inconceivable without a trunk and a hatbox, and they would be dutifully installed in a first-cla.s.s compartment by Andras and the fiacre driver and the red-capped railway porter. At the Nyugati Station in Budapest the process was repeated in reverse, except that a taxi took my mother and Aunt Mariska to the Hotel Hungaria on the Danube. They spent mornings at the finest tailors and evenings at the theater. When they returned, I would interrogate my mother about the best places to buy fabrics, whites, and shoes, just as I interrogated my father about the strengths and weaknesses of Budapest ironworks and Budapest wholesalers: everything in life had its place.

We all knew who the prettiest girl in the cla.s.sroom was, who the biggest shrew. I will take this occasion to reveal that it was a true pleasure to grab the thick braids of Baba Blau, who sat in front of me, and give them a tug. Baba would laugh in a deep voice, then squeal on me. I would have to leave the room with the lid to my pen-case, which the teacher would use to slap my hand a few times. Once I had come back, Baba would stroke my hand and gaze up at the ceiling with a little sneer on her large, dark mouth. Then she would position her braids back within reach.

Aunt Mariska prepared all her life for something that never came. She loved clothes and dressed with originality and at great cost. She bought a great many books: modern novels for herself, Indian stories for the boys. But one day she went into the garden to rest under a camel-hair blanket in the whitewashed, rose-covered arbor and emerged all yellow, and yellow she remained. Only her gravestone is white, white marble.

Istvan was left on his own at the age of five: after his mother died, his father grew melancholic. When Aunt Etelka died as well, Nene took over the household. Nene was unshakable in her knowledge of what const.i.tuted a proper diet: she was committed to whole-grain bread, creamed spinach, and boiled breast of chicken. Anyone who so much as cleared his throat at this fare was put to bed on the spot. She was a conscientious woman and a devout Catholic, but neither pretty nor happy. There were few signs of joy in Istvan's house.

We would walk up and down the main street wearing jackets, caps, and gloves. We needed to ask permission to take off our gloves or open the top b.u.t.ton of the jacket. We were watched by peasant boys wearing poor-quality boots.

When we cranked the arm of the telephone, a young lady answered, "Operator." "Give me 11," I would say. "Give me 60," said Istvan. We did this many times a day. "Why don't you just walk across the street?" the girl would ask. "Just connect me, please," we said coolly, even at the age of seven.

Our fathers would hold onto our shoulders at the edge of the sidewalk until they felt we were old enough to cross the street on our own. An automobile was a rare and wondrous event, but there was no end of horse-drawn carriages.

We received one another in jackets, shook hands, showed our guests to their seats, and proceeded to speak of important issues. If we didn't want others to hear us, we left the house for the autumn garden. It was a pleasure to feel the leaf-bed crunching under our feet.

Istvan never uttered a word lightly, and his face would show irritation at any idle remark; I was interested in all sorts of things that seemed to bore the often distant Istvan, and I tried to amuse him with my clowning. Coming from him, a yes yes or or no no had a real edge to it. He liked to draw the most extreme conclusions from his observations; I followed the path of his logic guardedly: I might see it differently tomorrow, by which time the now devastating train of his thought would have lost some of its force. had a real edge to it. He liked to draw the most extreme conclusions from his observations; I followed the path of his logic guardedly: I might see it differently tomorrow, by which time the now devastating train of his thought would have lost some of its force.

When the Germans occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, I was eleven years old. What around the table we had merely feared had now come to pa.s.s: our island of exception was no more; something new was afoot. How simple it had all been! How comical everything that had happened now seemed! I thought back on the evenings I had spent listening to the men's dinner-table strategizing about how the English would move in from Italy and Greece and initiate the western invasion, thereby giving our leader, Admiral Horthy, more room to maneuver and enabling him to jump s.h.i.+p and Hungary to begin its evolution into a neutral, Anglo-Saxon form of democracy. Until then our fathers could still run their businesses, medical practices, and law offices in peace. Jewish children could attend school in that sad, little one-story building with its dusty courtyard and beautiful prayer room without being humiliated by their teacher for being Jewish. On Friday evenings we could hear the shuffle of footsteps on the walkway by our house, where men dressed in black would make their way to temple under their broad-brimmed black hats accompanied by my wide-eyed schoolmates holding their fathers' hands.

On the day of the occupation I sat with my father at the radio in his bedroom. There was no news of resistance: the Hungarian troops did not put up a fight. The regent, the government, and the country as a whole simply lay down before the mighty Germans. I did not much trust Horthy. I had had a lead soldier of him from my earliest boyhood. I surrounded him with officers and an entire leaden infantry. They were all in green, while Horthy sported a cornflower-blue admiral's coat with gold ta.s.sels. I had a cannon as well. It could shoot miniature cannonb.a.l.l.s a meter or so. The battlefield was the large, brown linoleum surface, where I would divide the armies and materiel in two. In the early days the winning army was always the one led by His Excellency the Regent. After we entered the war, cannonb.a.l.l.s started knocking His Highness over, and from that point on, Horthy's army was the loser. I would shoot him with the cannon; he would fall on his back.

That evening all my uncles and cousins sat around the radio. According to a piece of stray news a local garrison commander had exhibited displeasure at the German invasion, and I immediately decided it would be the ujfalu regiment, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Egyed, that would push the Germans back. After all, we had a large barracks on the edge of town, a powerful garrison with cannons drawn by giant artillery horses. If the Regent called on the people to fight for their freedom, he would find a foothold here in Bihar County.

"Him, of all people? Here?" Istvan's smile was more than acerbic. Yes, the Lieutenant Colonel was a good man and no friend to the Germans. For years I had been formulating political prayers in bed after the lights were out. At school I discussed the war only with Istvan, between cla.s.ses, out in the corridors. We looked around to make sure others could not hear us. We soon learned we were individuals to be avoided. On the very eve of the occupation we had to concede that not only Horthy but also the commander of the local garrison had offered no resistance. The next day German tanks stood before the town hall and the Calvinist church manned by soldiers in pike-gray uniforms. Civilians avoided contact with them, avoided even looking in their direction. To the strains of a vigorous march, in rows so tight they practically touched, the Germans demonstrated how a military review was meant to look. They put our c.o.c.keyed Hungarian sad sacks to shame.

Before long there were patrols moving through the town commandeering living quarters. As my uncle's house was occupied in its entirety, my cousins moved in with us. Friends and relatives visited my parents to exchange news and share their bewilderment. My father sat out in the suns.h.i.+ne of the balcony with his eyes shut. He had had to close down the business, it being no longer his: there was a lock with a seal on the door. All valuables had to be turned in, the radio included. We three boys slept in the living room or, rather, pretended to sleep, then turned on a low lamp and availed ourselves of the walnut brandy in the sideboard to keep us awake through a night of talking politics.

New decrees appeared daily, so we knew that each day would be worse than the one before. We played ping-pong until dusk and fortunately did not have to part in the evening. Lacking the patience for board games, we discussed the chaotic current events. Istvan thought the Russians would get here first and we would have communism. We did not know much about that. People returning from Ukraine said it was quite poor: goats slept in houses in the countryside; many families shared one apartment in the city. In our high-backed leather chairs we opined that poverty was tolerable as long as there was justice.

Ukraine held dark a.s.sociations for the Jews of Berettyoujfalu. The younger men had been taken off to forced labor there in 1942. They had been forced to run naked through the halls of a Ukrainian school strewn with boot-nails. Hungarian police standing along the walls would hit them with the b.u.t.ts of their rifles. Something had got them worked up: they must have been drinking rum. Once the men's bundles had been inspected, they were allowed to dress outside in the snow. Watches, rings, and other valuables were confiscated. If they had concealed something, they were sent back to dance in the hall.

As the army retreated, they were moved westward. The sick were delivered to infirmary barracks; those who could not walk were carried on their comrades' backs. One night tongues of flame shot into the sky beyond the field of snow: soldiers had doused the infirmary in gasoline and set it afire, burning the sick Jews of the forced-labor patrol to death. Bandi Sved rushed back through the snow, hallucinating that his brother at the barracks was walking towards him. His comrades ran after him and brought him back before the guards could shoot. The survivors were released in 1943, went back to ujfalu, and took up their previous lives. Everything was as in the old days, except they didn't talk much.

Our cla.s.smates were not particularly hostile to us, nor did they rejoice in our situation. They were uninformed and indifferent. They would look at the tanks and say nothing. "Now you're gonna have a peck of trouble," scornfully remarked a scraggly little boy, the poorest of us all and the worst pupil. His father had joined the Arrow Cross as a road worker. There were only two Jews at the school: Istvan and myself. The poorer ones were not accepted.

Istvan liked to establish bitter truths, the kind that got you absolutely nowhere. "We are the richest in our cla.s.s and the best pupils: of course they don't like us. How many people are free of envy? Some like one or two Jews but not the rest. There are few good people and few truly bad ones; the rest are neither one nor the other. If they let the Jews live, all well and good; if they kill them, that's fine too. Everyone agrees to everything."

We were still heating the living room, and the atmosphere was familial: my mother was sewing yellow stars onto everyone's coats and jackets. Homemade stars were acceptable, though private industry was flexible in responding to the new needs. Everyone knew the specifications: canary yellow, machine-hemmed, six-by-six centimeters. You had to sew it on tightly enough to keep a pencil from going under the threads: those clever Jews were capable of putting it on just for show and taking it off whenever they felt like it. The Jewish newspaper encouraged its readers to follow the authorities' instructions to the letter.