Hollywood Animal (26 page)

At noon every Monday, thousands of sirens all around the city began to wail. More sirens than I’d ever heard. I started to wail, too. I shook so badly I couldn’t get into the closet to which I was assigned to hide from the atomic bombs. I screamed and shook until the sirens stopped.

The nuns at St. Emeric’s tried to calm me, but couldn’t. My father told me to stop acting like a hysterical girl.

My mother started coming to my school five minutes before noon every Monday. She held me as I screamed, and when the sirens stopped, she left.

There was a famous American man, my father excitedly told my mother and me, who understood about the Komchis.

He was a
zenator
. And a Catholic like us. Mekarti. Zenator Jozsef Mekarti from a place called Viskonzin. Mekarti was a hero. Not afraid to speak out. Not afraid of the Komchis. He knew there were Komchi spies everywhere.

My father wrote about Mekarti in his newspaper. All his friends talked about him too.

Mekarti! Mekarti! Mekarti!

As a young American man, I learned about Senator Joe McCarthy. The hero. Tail gunner Joe. The opportunist. The liar. Who had varying lists of innocent men he slandered as Communists. Who had no decency. Who was condemned by the Senate. Who died a drunk and a broken, humiliated man. Joe McCarthy, my father’s hero
.

My day began at 5:30, when I dressed quickly and walked the block to Timar’s Bakery to pick up a fresh loaf of rye bread with caraway seeds.

Mrs. Timar, a second-generation Hungarian, had an agreement with the Hungarians in the neighborhood. If we bought the bread before six in the morning, we could have it for half price.

I raced home with the hot bread and my mother made the two of us strong black coffee. My father drank tea. She put a load of sugar into the cups and we dunked the bread into the sugary coffee.

I heard the word
Nyilas
often as my father spoke to his friends.

What is a
Nyilas
? I asked him.

They were Hungarian Nazis, he said, the Arrow Cross. Their symbol was an arrow and a cross. They were crazy like Hitler. They wanted to kill the Zsidos.

There were many of them in Hungary, he said, and many of them had come to America. He didn’t like the Nyilas, my father said, and they didn’t like him either. He said he was proud that when millions in Hungary were joining the Arrow Cross Party, he had never joined.

“Tell me about Hitler,” I said to my father.

My father told me this: Hitler ate chocolate bars for breakfast and vegetables the rest of the day. Hitler hated cigarettes and loved his dog, who was named Blondie. Hitler farted so much that they had to open all of the windows after he had a long meeting. His
pimpli
was so small, it barely stuck out between his legs.

Hitler vacationed all the time when he was a boy at Spital, the location of our last refugee camp. When we were walking around outside the camp avoiding TB, we were probably walking in Hitler’s footsteps!

There was a Hungarian printer and linotype operator named Oszkár Moldován, younger than the priests in the printing shop.

He always had a radio on near his machine with the sound of a man talking and sometimes yelling in English. The word that I heard yelled from his radio, as I ran about the print shop in my kovboy hat and with my guns was,
“Horun! Horun!”

“Bazball?” I asked Oszkár in Hungarian. “Do you like bazball?”

Oszkár smiled. “Do you, Jozsi?”

I told him yes, I loved bazball.

He asked me if I liked the Indians.

“No,” I said. “I am a kovboy—I shoot Indians.”

“The Klevland Indians.” Oszkár smiled.

“There are Indians in Klevland?” I asked.

“Al Rosen,” he said. “Bobby Avila. Bob Feller. Larry Doby. Dale Mitchell. Don Mossi.”

I saw Father John Mundweil on the way to school. He was with the bums in the alley by the market. He was wearing a white T-shirt over a pair of black pants. He was yelling at the bums.

“You leave these kids alone!” he yelled. He had a slight Hungarian accent. “If you bother these kids, I’m going to come back here with the police! You hear me?” His face was red. The bums nodded and mumbled.

“Get out of here!” Father John yelled. “Now! Get the hell out!” The bums started walking away from the market.

Father John stood there, and then he lit up a cigarette. He saw me watching him.

“Do you want to be late for school?” he growled in Hungarian.

“No, Father.”

“Then go!” he said.

I ran.

“Who knows who invented the telephone?” Sister Rose asked.

“Tivadar Puskás,” I said.

Everyone in class laughed.

“Thomas Edison,” Carol Ann Hill said.

“Alexander Graham Bell,” Joey Kish said.

“No,” I insisted. “Tivadar Puskás! My father told me.”

Everyone in class laughed again.

When I got home, I told my father what had happened.

“You are right,” he said. “Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone. We will prove it.”

We went down to the Carnegie West Library at Lorain Avenue and Fulton Road. The book said Tivadar Puskás had been Thomas Edison’s assistant.

“But it doesn’t say he invented the telephone,” I said.

“If he was his assistant,” my father said, “they worked on it together. If they worked on it together, he invented it, too.”

He looked at the book again.

“Puskás,” he read, “also invented the
telefon hirmondo
,” the speaking newspaper—which sent news to subscribers.

“You see?” my father said. “The telephone—that is nothing. Tivadar Puskás also invented the speaking newspaper.
That
is something!”

Edward Teller, a Hungarian, my father said, had invented both the atomic and the hydrogen bombs. All Hungarians, he said, were proud of Edward Teller.

Before I told anyone in class, I went down to the library and read about Edward Teller in an American book. It said Edward Teller had worked with a man named Einstein and had persuaded Einstein to make the atomic bomb.

But then it said Edward Teller
was
“the father of the hydrogen bomb” which could kill “ten million people with one flash.”

I wasn’t sure whether I was proud of Edward Teller or not. Ten million people!

One flash!

I learned about Klevland in school. It was founded by a man named Moses Cleaveland, an investor in the Connecticut Land Company. The company had bought the area called the Western Reserve west of Pennsylvania. Moses led an expedition to survey the land. The principal settlement, it had already been determined, would be where a big lake (Erie) met a little river (the Cuyahoga).

Moses arrived at the site and found an old and crooked river, its banks
marshy
and boggy. Silt stuffed its mouth. Sandbars made passage nearly impossible. The flatland around the river was nightmarish. Side pools smelled like rotten eggs. Foot-long snakes slithered on the shore. Clouds of ravenous mosquitoes obscured the sun.

Moses Cleaveland finished his survey in one day, named the place after himself, and went back to Connecticut. He never returned.

George Washington, Sister Margaret told us, was not only the father of America, but he was also the man who looked at a map and told Moses Cleaveland to build a city there.

So George Washington was not only the father of America, but the father of Klevland, too.

My father gave me a lesson about America.

“Everybody says ‘
Hov arr yu?
’” he said. “But they don’t mean it. If you tell them how you are, if you say—‘So-so, I have a headache, I think I’m getting a cold, I’m worried about money, my wife and I had an argument,’ they look at you like you’re crazy.

“What they want to hear is
fein. Hov arr yu? Fein
.

“If you are dying, if you have nothing to eat, if your best friend has betrayed you, if you are about to kill yourself, and if they say
Hov arr yu? Fein fein fein
.”

On those summer nights when the windows were open and the drunks left Papp’s Bar, I received Hungarian lessons, enriching my vocabulary with words my parents never used:

AZ ANYÁD PICSÁJÁT—Your mother’s pussy!

LE VAGY SZARVA—You are shit upon!

SZARHÁZI KURVA—You’re a whore from a house of shit!

SZAROK RÁD—I shit on you!

BASZD MEG—Fuck you!

BASZD MEG AZ ANYÁD PICSÁJÁT—Motherfucker!

One of the men who came to my father’s office was Dénes Kacso, a Hungarian poet. He was a short, overweight, but fierce-looking man with blazing black eyes. He cleaned toilets at an old-age home.

“I clean
their
shit,” he said, “and I write
my
shit.”

He lived in a shack on a little street not far from us. The shack had no electricity or heating. Dénes filled the shack’s fireplace with limbs he sawed off the trees on neighborhood streets. He had bought a saw at the Sam Finesilver hardware store and he lurked around in the predawn dark collecting his firewood.

He ate mostly dog food. He came to my father’s office with his pockets full of different cans and explained that America was such a rich land that even dogs ate the finest meals.

I was on the linoleum floor in the kitchen, watching the ants, and I listened to my father yelling at two of the Franciscans. He was yelling about a priest named Father Galambos, who wrote a column for the newspaper. My father was saying he was the editor and he wouldn’t run a column this priest had written because it was
“Zsido ellenes”
—against the Jews.

“Stop it! Stop this madness!” my father yelled at the priests. “You can’t say these things here! Didn’t you learn any lesson?”

When the Franciscans left, he turned to me and said, “Remember this, Jozsi. Jews are people like any other people, some good, some not so good. Just like Hungarians. Some good, some not so good. Never judge a man by his nationality or his color or his religion. Judge him by his character. Whether he is a good man or a not so good man.”

My mother said, “Politics. Always politics. Always yesterday.”

“No!” my father said angrily. “Not yesterday! Today! This is about America.”

He pointed to me. “This is about his life. This is about him!”

And as an American man studying the Holocaust, I discovered that many of the Nazi butchers who got away—Mengele, Eichmann, Bormann—got away thanks to an underground which shuttled them from one monastery to another and then smuggled them onto boats which took them to South America
.

It was an underground operated by Franciscan priests and monks
.

I overheard my mother reading to my father from a book containing the now-being-tortured Cardinal Mindszenty’s words:

“Dearly beloved faithful, my brethren. We Hungarians are frequently reminded of the sins of the past. Sometimes it seemed that other peoples considered us Hungarians the dregs of European society, the scum of the earth, and a cursed race living among a choir of angels. Other nations have openly reviled us. In fact, there is no end to the sins others lay at our door. The whole world has acquired a distorted view of Hungary’s role in the war. My conscience will not allow me to believe that Hungary is truly responsible for all the crimes she is accused of.”

I got up off the linoleum floor and walked into my father’s office and asked, “What are we accused of? What’s a ‘crime’?”

“Nothing,” my mother said. She seemed angry that I had overheard them.

“You are too young, Jozsi,” my father said. “When you are old enough, I will tell you.”

“Is it true?” I asked.

“Is what true?” my mother said.

“What we are accused of.”

“No, Jozsi,” my father said. “Go play. It is not true.”

Oszkár Moldován took me out into the alley behind the printing shop and handed me a stick he had found on the floor. He threw me a red rubber ball.

And when I hit the red rubber ball over the cyclone fence of the Num Num Potato Chip factory, the American drivers standing around their trucks threw it back and cheered.

One of them yelled, “Attaboy, kid! Horun! Horun!”

Dénes Kacso, the Hungarian poet, smelled of wine every time he came to my father’s office. Every time he came, he brought my mother and me a piece of strudel from Timar’s Bakery.

As I was playing ball by myself in the concrete yard, I heard shouts from the circulation office. Then the door from the office burst open and one priest after another ran out and fled into the printing shop. Father Gottfried was last and behind him, screaming and swearing, was Dénes Kacso, who had a pocketknife held high in his hand.

Father Gottfried got away—Dénes said he had insulted one of his poems.

Sometimes I went out into the alley alone when Oszkár was working or when he had his days off. And I hit the red ball against the brick wall of the Pep Up soda bottling company, which faced the cyclone fence of the Num Num Potato Chip factory.

And sometimes one of the drivers from Num Num or one of the American men working at Pep Up would come into the alley and throw me the red ball so the others could yell “Horun! Horun!” and “Attaboy, Joee!”

We got the
Plain Dealer
, the morning newspaper, early each morning and I read it after my father was finished with it. I used the Hungarian-English dictionary to translate it for myself.

I read about the Cleveland Indians and the player named Al Rosen. I read about a man named Lou Teller, who was of Hungarian descent and robbed banks with his girlfriend, Tina Mae Ritenour, who had big breasts. I read about a man named Papa Joe Cremati who ran what I translated in the dictionary as
kurva
houses.

I was very excited about all these things and hoped Lou Teller would rob the Cleveland Trust Bank two blocks down at the corner of Lorain and Fulton.

I kept an eye on passing cars in case Al Rosen drove by.

I wondered if Papa Joe Cremati knew the
kurvas
at Papp’s Bar.

· · ·

When we got our report cards, Father John handed them out to us in class. He looked at each card carefully and made comments in front of the rest of the class. When he looked at my report card he said, “Do you want to be a dummy?”