The Book of Fathers (49 page)

It’s a pity that you can’t now any longer by then

It would be so good to talk to you Papa
.

FATHER

PAPA

FATHER DEAR

We should have talked.

It would have been good to have talked more
.

Or ever

Never

Vilmos Csillag’s visits to the cemetery were rare. In his view his father was not to be found there: if he existed anywhere at all, then it was in his, Vilmos’s, memory, and it therefore followed that it made not a whit of difference whether he visited the area demarcated by others for mourning him. He argued this view defiantly to his circle of friends and generally won them over.

“My dear little Willie, even the lowest peasant visits his loved ones in the cemetery. You are the only person who comes out with this pretentious guff!”

“Get off my back, Mama.”

“Well, you might at least drive me there. You don’t have to come in, you can walk up and down outside. I need no more than ten minutes, or even less, five!”

This was the trap. You can’t turn down your mother’s desperate plea, but it would be absurd if, having reached the arched wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, he were to just hang around, obstinately clinging to his ideas, while Mama placed a bouquet in the little marble vase affixed to Papa’s small marble plaque. If I’m going there … I’ll go in with her and do the honors.

Since the visit to the cemetery was unavoidable, he kept putting it off, with the wiliest tricks. By the time they got around to it, it was again February, windy and bitterly cold. Vilmos Csillag grumbled: “We might as well wait for spring!”

His mother launched into a tirade: “Have you any idea how long I have been begging you to take me? If it’s too much of an effort for you, I’ll go by tram, like the other peasants!”

This was Mama’s trump card, the other peasants, down to whose level it is piteous yet sometimes inevitable to sink. Vilmos Csillag never understood where his mother got her invincible
hauteur
, which decreed that there are us, the cultured ones, all of us potential doctoral students of morality, manners, and superiority, and there are, by contrast, other peasants, who have been vouchsafed little or nothing of this. His mother’s father—and grandfather—were in all likelihood either unpretentious carpenters in the community of Beremend or perhaps tillers of the soil, in which light the “the other peasants” tag seemed even more ludicrous. There was not an aristocrat or even an intellectual in genealogical sight, who might have had some genuine grounds for differentiating themselves from the uncouth plebs and country bumpkins.

Vilmos Csillag had no memory of his grandfather and only the very faintest of his grandmother, as if the negative of a photograph; by the time he was five they were both dead. Mama wanted to see their graves also. About the place of rest of the remaining relatives she told her son an unbelievable horror story. The village cemetery that had been the final resting place of the Porubszkys as far back as anyone could remember had been eliminated under socialism—“sir-shelism,” as she pronounced it—the gravestones that could be moved were transferred to Pécs, the bones remained in the ground, and some factory or power station had been built over the site. It sounded
insane. Why would anybody want to build a factory right where there was a cemetery? Vilmos Csillag added this story to the catalogue of his mother’s mad tales. There were many of these, one more (or less) made little difference.

Sometimes his mother would come out with astonishing stories, and not always in connection with her late husband. The carpenter of Beremend rose to become the proprietor of a factory employing fifty, then a hundred, people. By the time Vilmos Csillag grew up, the family home at Beremend had expanded from three rooms to twenty-two. The sand buggy soon acquired an elder brother, a six-horse carriage, which resembled the garish phaeton in Vilmos Csillag’s favorite storybook,
77 Hungarian Folk Tales
—though that had belonged to the King of Prussia, not the Porubszkys of Beremend. Their original two-hectare holding increased fivefold, to twenty Hungarian acres. Dashing hussars turned up, claiming to be related at the great-grandfather level or beyond. Vilmos Csillag had only his own, unreliable memory to draw on when he protested: “Mama, in the old days you never told me this!”

“Come, come, what do you know about it, my dear Willie? You don’t know anything, so it’s better if you keep as quiet …”

“… as shit in the grass!” he completed another of his mother’s favorite phrases.

“Exactly.”

Similar transformations were effected in Dr. Balázs Csillag’s career, in the level of affluence of his relatives in Pécs, and indeed in everything on which Mama gave little lectures. Her parents left Beremend for the capital in 1953, already burdened with serious illnesses. They died here so soon after their move, it seemed as if they had been destroyed by the sins of the metropolis. Vilmos Csillag occasionally felt the desire to find out something about the
past, but if he asked his mother, he set off an inflation of the
temps perdu
, the exaggeration of the people who lived in the past, and he felt that he ended up knowing even less than before he put his questions. He could not understand what joy Mama could find in making such notorious over-statements—the most polite term that might be used for this activity.

The mustard-yellow Dacia came to a stop by the flower sellers’ stands and he immediately took charge: choosing the flowers, paying for them, and gripping his mother’s arm as if she were too frail to walk by herself.

The grave of the grandparents was covered by a modest slab itself covered in greenish lichen. Under it the text: DEUS MUNDUM GUVERNAT.

Once Vilmos Csillag asked: “But weren’t they Jewish?”

“Not very.”

“How can someone be not very Jewish?”

“You can if you don’t want to be. They became practicing Catholics after the war and paid regular visits to the Basilica. And I pay my tithe to the Church to this day.”

“Tithe? I had no idea there was such a thing.”

“There are many things of which you have no idea, my dear Willie.”

Vilmos Csillag had a sneaking suspicion that GUVER-NAT should really have been written GUBERNAT. He wasn’t sure. He never took Latin. He had studied Russian for eight years, but he did not consider himself competent to correct a Cyrillic notice. He had no talent for languages. What
did
he have a talent for? Good question.

In his own judgment he had not gone very far in life. In his mother’s judgment, he had got nowhere at all. The Sputniks, a band that spent the summers doing gigs around Lake Balaton and in winter performed at shows organized by the state-managed National Organizing Office (ORI),
was difficult to take seriously, even though they had a single released on the state label Qualiton, and the radio had recorded four of their own compositions, three of which were approved for broadcasting. Of these numbers “The Pier at Szántód” reached the semifinals of the 1972 Pop Festival, which is to say that television viewers had the opportunity to see and hear the Sputniks on two occasions. This was his tally at the age of twenty-six. He had composed the music for “The Pier at Szántód.” The first line of the chorus—“What we lose on the swings, we get back on the roundabouts, yeh, yeh”—was, for a few months, on every teenager’s lips. Mama was rather proud of her little Willie at this time, laughing as she received the congratulations of her friends. But in private she was nonetheless advising her son: “Quit while you’re at the top … I’m sure now you’d get into university—apply!”

“For what?”

“Arts, law, economics, does it matter which? The important thing is that you have a degree.”

“Why? Have you got one?”

“Oh, my dear Willie … First of all, I’m a woman, and anyway we were at war when I might have gone to university, and then, on top of that, there were the restrictions, don’t you know?”

“You mean the Jewish laws?”

“Come, come, why do you have to put everything so stridently?”

“I’m not putting it stridently, the matter is already strident. Were you Jewish, or weren’t you?”

“You can’t really put it like that.”

“Yes or no?” Vilmos Csillag had lost his patience.

“Why are you yelling now? Is this what I deserve?” She was already in tears. The elaboration of the topic was again postponed. Vilmos Csillag didn’t force the issue. He would have got no nearer to the truth if he had found his mother
in one of her loquacious moods. When the kosher butcher in Beremend happened to come up, he discovered that he was Mama’s first cousin and had an exceptional singing voice. If, however, Vilmos Csillag pressed her on whether he sang in the synagogue, he got only small change: “He sang wherever they let him.”

Once it turned out that, when things got very bad, Mama had taken shelter at her girlfriend Viki’s.

“You went into hiding?”

“Oh, my dear Willie, everyone was in hiding then! There were already air-raids!” and Mama would quote at length the radio announcer of the time and his announcements of the air-raids.

From the many tiny crumbs, Vilmos Csillag eventually pieced together that old Porubszky must have been Slav (Serbian?) or some kind of
Mischung
, but his wife was perhaps entirely Jewish; her maiden name, Helen Ganzer, is suspect but not 100 percent proof of Jewishness. How do we know she wasn’t one of the Swabian German minority in Hungary? Either way, we can surmise that under the terms of the Nuremberg Laws, Mama might just as well have been deported in the same way as the whole of Papa’s family. Including me, if … Of course, in real life there is no “if.”

His mother speeded up when she saw the gray blocks of columbarium. From the back of an old phone book, she read out his father’s numerical address. Vilmos Csillag remembered only that the vast number of identical faux-marble blocks formed a square and his father’s grave was somewhere in the top row.

And so it proved.

DR. BALÁZS CSILLAG
(1921–1966)              
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
*

The two dates were obscured by the small vase, the size of a man’s fist, which Mama had paid for a year after the interment, though it took the unreliable monument mason three months to attach it to the stone. Mama had fumed continually: “Why in the name of the Virgin Mary does he keep promising if he’s not going to do it! Why in the name of the Virgin Mary does he take my money if he can’t manage to spit out when it will be ready? Does he think I can give him money in advance until doomsday? What does he think I am, the State Bank? What in the name of the Virgin Mary does he think he’s doing!”

“Mother, can we leave the poor Virgin Mary out of this!”

“You have no say in the matter!” His mother was in one of her aggressive moods.

At such times, Vilmos Csillag kept well clear of his mother, like a frightened dog of a bullying one. My mother is a dog that bites as well as barks, he thought. And how! When Mama was in a fighting mood, her mouth would not stop. Most often she spoke only to herself, but quite loud, her eyes half-closed and gesticulating wildly. “If you think you can get the better of me, you have another thing coming! You can’t get the better of me, everyone who knows me knows that, no? I couldn’t care less how long he has been manager in the Benczúr Street supermarket, I have been a customer there just as long, and that’s what really matters. Don’t you think?”

To those “don’t you think”s only those who did not know Mama would have the temerity to reply. The pause for breath was too brief for a response and the torrent of words would resume without flagging, with a “Do you think so?” inserted all too rarely. Vilmos Csillag, when a callow youth, was infuriated by these monologues of his mother’s. He asked her once: “Is this a conversation, or are you doing a solo?”

“I’ll give you what for, young man! As if I didn’t have enough problems, all I need is that my son should sharpen
his tongue on me! What do you mean you’ve run out of milk? You should order as much as is needed! Milk and bread are basics that it is your duty to guarantee to every citizen! Don’t you think? Even if you’re left with some over, that curdles or rots! Of course I have put it in writing in the complaints book—you shan’t be sticking
that
in your shop window! I filled the page and more! It’s an outrage! The customer has rights! Don’t you think?”

Even at Papa’s grave Mama began one of her rants when she noticed that someone—probably relatives of the man who rested below Papa—had stuck their three stems of roses
onto our vase
, the petals hung over Geyza Bányavári, born 1917, died 1966, mourned by his wife, son, daughter, and the others. This was fat in the fire for Mama, her eyes rotated in their sockets and with fingers splayed she stabbed the air: “
And the others
! Incredible! I’m surprised it doesn’t say
Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all
! But why don’t
the others
buy themselves a vase, or his daughter, or son, or his wife? Why do they have to violate ours? Don’t you think? What right have they? What grounds have they?” The wilting rose of Geyza Bányavári flew off, together with its wire clip, far away onto other slabs.