The Book of Fathers (53 page)

He had a feeling that his cries for help would not be answered; at most he would attract the attention of figures like his attackers, if anyone. He crawled forward, in pain, on all fours, towards lights that shone more intensely. He saw jagged stars jumping around before his eyes.

Those lights came nearer only very, very slowly.

He did not notice that he had reached one of the open spaces near La Guardia, in the opposite direction to where he was originally headed. Large notices warning NO TRESPASSING indicated that strangers were not permitted here. Despite this, the local boys played baseball and football here on Sunday mornings, until the security guards chased them off. Vilmos Csillag himself had once played softball here with his fellow employees.

He reached a bushy patch and could only zigzag ahead. He was shivering with cold, though the first rays of the sun had begun to light up the land. I’ll have a little rest, he thought, and sank to the ground. He lay on his side, in the position of the embryo in the womb; this was the way his vertebrae were least painful.

What will my son say if I turn up looking like this?

This was his final, his very final thought. He sank into a sleep from which he was never to awaken. Above his head blossomed the American version of the laburnum. It slowly let fall its blazing yellow blossom on Vilmos Csillag.

Two weeks later his body was found by three children who ran into the bush to pick up their frisbee. The sheriff of Great Neck visited the scene. At the end of the year the file was placed in a drawer marked “Unsolved.”

No prospect of further evidence coming to light
.

Perpetrator or perpetrators unknown, victim unknown
.

File closed
.

XII

THE LONGER WINTER TAKES A-DYING, THE MORE
spectacular will be the spring. On the last of the days of bitter cold, the land awakens to the morning chorus of the songbirds, and from the bottom of its heart yearns for the rebirth now approaching. There is not long to wait; soon we shall be welcoming the purest of colors, smells, tastes, forms, and combinations, which may yet, in spite of everything, make the world a better place. At times like this it almost seems that nature is trespassing on the territory of art.

In Budapest everyone had a more favorable opinion of Henryk than he had of himself. His lanky form could have been quite manly if he had not been so hunched up and obviously lacking in self-confidence. When he spoke, a few uncertain
errrm
or
hhhhh
noises came out first, hopefully harbingers of more meaningful words. If he was excited he chewed his lips incessantly and tore the skin from the surface of his thumb until it bled, and sometimes beyond. Though he strove to speak his father-tongue flawlessly, he often, almost unconsciously, used English expressions in his Hungarian. Most of his statements ended up curling into
questions, even if he was 100 percent sure of what he was saying, which was rare.

In company he would sit in the corner, with an offended expression, eyeing those who managed to relax. Very common, that sort of behavior, he said, or rather thought, though not very secretly he envied them. On his Macintosh Classic computer he opened a file in which he wrote diarylike notes, quite unsystematically, whenever the spirit seized him. In Hungary he did this in a Hungarian that was at first strewn with errors. He clung fiercely to his out-of-date computer, and if anyone suggested that he replace it, he would be shocked: “But this is an industrial classic!” pointing out that one of the prototypes had been placed in the Museum of Science and Technology in Washington, D.C.; he had seen it with his very own eyes. He had read three books about the rise of the Macintosh empire: he imagined the two teenagers as, in the garage of the parents of one of them, they put together the user-friendly computer, whose success had laid the foundations of the worldwide megacorporation.

This miraculous tale reminded him of the tales he had been told as a child. At night his father would sit by his bed and, eyes half shut, launch into “once upon a time,” and the littlest boy would set off into the wide, wide world to seek his fortune, a trusty stick in his hand and a satchel on his shoulder, always filled with the ash-baked scone. After exciting adventures he would be rewarded with half the kingdom and the hand of the princess, just as the Macintosh boys won fame and billions of dollars. So—it seems miracles can, and do, still happen.

Henryk was educated at undistinguished public schools. Flatbush Community School and Lee High School had barely any white students apart from himself. In the lower school, black was the typical skin color; in the upper school, it was yellow. He was well versed in their talk, as
fluent in black slang as in the nasal drone of the yellow-skinned population. The teachers were glad if they managed to survive the classes without fighting breaking out. Most of them carried weapons or defensive sprays in their pocket or bag.

It was thought that Henryk was a little weak in the head. When asked to solve a problem at the whiteboard he could often only croak; in vain did the teachers chain the felt-tip marker to the board, someone always stole it. The more discerning teachers brought their own, the less discerning gave up using the whiteboard altogether. But the number of discerning teachers in those schools was few. Henryk had three times to endure the disgrace of repeating a year, but somehow, over twelve years, he managed to overcome the tribulations of compulsory school attendance. None of his teachers noticed that he was basically a lad with a good brain and it was only his memory that failed him. Even material he had crammed with utmost attention simply did not stick: by the time his turn came, the numbers and names had become hopelessly confused in his head, though he could remember with crystal clarity on which page of the book the text in question occurred and in what type, color, and layout. He could see it; he just couldn’t read it. At the age of ten he had been given spectacles that he had hoped would help, but they merely enlarged the lines of letters and figures—he still could not read them.

His absent-mindedness was already legend when he was very small. If his grandmother—whom he called Grammy, because of the award—sent him down to the Chinese grocery, where their purchases were put on their account, Henryk nearly always forgot what he was supposed to be buying. His requests to Mr. Shi Chung, whose grandchildren were often his fellow students, were pure guesswork. If Grammy gave him a list, he would leave it at home or lose it. Once in school he had to fill in a form and he left both
parents’ names blank, as he could not recall them. His excuse—that they were long dead—was not accepted by Mrs. Marber: “A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant lad should always know of which family he is the scion!”

Henryk would have been glad if he had understood even the word
scion
, a Middle English word that his teacher had first encountered in Shakespeare. He blinked desperately behind his glasses, as he always did when an answer was expected of him. The unreliability of his memory did not improve with time; in fact, it worsened. He was too scared to utter the names of close acquaintances, lest he get them wrong. He was right; he often did. Even more insurmountable were the barriers presented by numbers. If he had to go to 82 Harvey Avenue, he was bound to wind up at No. 28. In vain did he want to write everything down, because as soon as the figure 82 was uttered in his head it turned into 28 (or 39, or 173), and this was what came to the tip of his pen. He hated to make phone calls, because the integers he read out of his address book disintegrated the moment he lifted the receiver. He would look up the number again, but his memory, like a magnet without strength, dropped the number well before he had to dial. He had to prop the book open and lean it against the phone to ensure that he scanned the right line all the way to the number’s end.

But he could remember images and tunes flawlessly; so he became the pillar of the mezzo section of the school choir. Grammy would have liked him to study music, but there was no money for tuition. The singing teacher at Lee High, Mr. Mustin, sometimes took him in hand, and taught him to play the flute, but Henryk lacked the patience to read music. At the age of ten he scored quite a hit with his freehand drawings and in the pottery class of the high school his jugs and jars made a mark, but he gave up pottery quite soon after Miss Lobello remarked on his thick glasses. There was no denying that by the end of primary school he
had reached pebble-glass stage: in the huge lenses his pupils looked like restless fish.

Despite Grammy’s efforts, Henryk did not apply to college upon graduating from high school. He was sure his results would not get him into any but the most mediocre state universities, whose degrees were worth little more than toilet paper. He had two plans of action: 1. He would apply to join the Navy, where they take everyone who can take the strain; a career in the military is not so bad in peacetime. 2. He would apply to work in the lawyer’s office on Roosevelt Avenue (47, or was it 74?), where he liked the look of the well-endowed secretary. In summer he delivered pizzas for Domino’s Pizza, where the basic rule was that if they failed to deliver within thirty minutes of the order being placed, the customer got his pizza free. In the lawyer’s office the secretary nearly always welcomed him with the words “The thirty minutes are up!”—but she was usually joking. Henryk, however, invariably responded: “In that case, your pizza is free … Enjoy your meal, ma’am.” And backed out of the premises, not for a moment lifting his gaze from the woman’s ample cleavage. In his wet dreams he would nuzzle those warm peaks.

Plan A fell through quickly, his pebble glasses causing his rejection. Plan B seemed to be working, however: the secretary passed on his offer to her employer and the firm’s owner called him in for a job interview. “And why have you picked on us to apply to for work?”

“I am attracted by the truth.”

The square-built lawyer gave a nod and offered him the post of bicycle messenger, taking effect on September 15, with two months’ trial, absurd weekly wages, and support of a very low order: “Then we’ll see.”

Henryk accepted. Grammy will be pleased that I’ve got a job, he thought. Anyway, there’s a whole long exciting summer ahead.

He made friends with two boys at school: Koreans of small build, they barely came up to his chin. The two Koreans were planning a backpacking tour of Europe. Henryk worked on Grammy until she agreed to him taking out his savings from the bank, savings built up over several pizza summers, so that he could go with his friends. They crossed the pond on a charter run by a low-cost airline, a student-only flight on which was served neither food nor drink. The Koreans had brought large supplies of food, which they gladly shared with Henryk, though the over-spiced dumplings gave him stomach cramps and he had to line up every half-hour for the toilet in the tail of the plane.

Their route was largely determined by the Youth Hostel Guide: they tried to visit towns where, on the basis of the youth hostel’s price, location, and cleanliness, the editors of the guide gave a high number of points. Not a single hostel in Eastern Europe earned the maximum ten points. The one in Prague was awarded eight, Budapest seven; the latter was available only in the summer, as the rest of the year it was a residence hall. The two Koreans were not interested in Eastern Europe. “Now that there is no Iron Curtain, it must be like Western Europe, only poorer,” said one of them.

Henryk told them that he was of Hungarian origin and would like to see the old country. When the other Korean heard this, he backed off, but in the end he saw that South Tyrol and Italy were also attractive. At this point they were still in Vienna and agreed to meet ten days later in Venice, which, though it lacked a good youth hostel, could not be missed.

Henryk crossed the border from Austria into Hungary in the cab of a German lorry. He thought that he would feel a surge of emotion—but nothing happened. Undistinguished customs buildings, indifferent uniformed guards, similar to other crossing points in Europe; only the lines were longer.

He had mixed fortunes hitchhiking to Budapest. This form of transport, which had been unknown to him, he had read about in the Brooklyn Public Library, in a publication entitled
Europe on $25 a Day
. In the Netherlands he experienced for the first time how complete strangers would stop and actually give a lift to hitchhikers. He loved it. He could not understand why aging hippies, who were there alongside him thumbing, moaned that the golden days of hitchhiking were over, that drivers were now afraid of hitchhikers. It wasn’t like that in the Seventies! The final leg he did in a car shaped rather like a brick, oddly rounded at the front and back, which gave off a terrible smell. The driver, T-shirted, perhaps only a little older than himself, could manage a few words of English. When Henryk asked about the car, he began to explain it was a Warburg. “East German make.”

“But there is no East Germany now. Or is there?”

“Iz nat. Bat ven dis one made, still wars. Iz two … rhythm.”

“Rhythm?”

“Togeder cam benzin end oil.”

Henryk smiled and nodded vaguely, as if he understood.

When the sign for Budapest first appeared on the motorway, the driver asked him where he was headed. Henryk pointed to the address of the youth hostel in his book.

“Lucky. Heer vee are bifore it.”

The cement block of the hostel in Budaörs reminded Henryk of the public hospital at Queens. The same day in the downstairs café he met a couple of dozen Americans. They took him to the brand-new pubs of the capital, where the punters spoke almost only English. “This is the gold-rush time here,” explained Jeff McPherson, in a strong Irish accent. “Pay a bit of attention and you can make your fortune here!”

Henryk paid a bit of attention. A week later he wrote to Grammy to say he would be staying in Hungary until the
end of the summer. He asked her to send him his Macintosh Classic by UPS, which had opened an office in Budapest.