The Book of Fathers (59 page)

“What is this?” asked Henryk.

“Fortwess.”

“What?”

“Fortwess. Wot owd people wivd in.”

“Where did you see such a thing?”

Konrád put his index finger to his brow.

Jeff and Doug are right, thought Henryk, he’s going to be an architect.

That summer, as he entered his fourth year, Konrád learned the shapes of the capital letters all by himself. From his mother he got a little notebook with a tiny lock. On the first page he wrote, in red, green, and blue crayon:

PAPA MEIK HOUS.
MAMA MEIK KAPET.
END I REIT.

These three lines were endlessly quoted by his parents to each other and to their friends.

On the cover he later wrote in drunken letters:

BOOK OFFTEIRS

“What do you mean, Book of Tears?”

“Book of Fathers!” Konrád corrected him and what he had written on the book: BOOK OFFATEIRS.

“But why?”

“I want. Like you have ‘Papa et cetera.’”

Henryk blanched. “How do you know that?”

“In the machine.”

“You’ve read it?!”

“Oh, Papa, donno no small letters!”

It did not occur to Henryk that at the touch of a key, every text in the computer can be made all-capitals.

This was a time when Mária’s life was totally dominated by the approaching solar eclipse. She read everything she could about it. She was determined to travel to Siófok on the Balaton, because the astronomers had worked out that there would be the best view. “If we miss it, the next opportunity won’t be until 2081, and we shan’t live to see that.”

Konrád might, thought Henryk, and the thought somehow dampened his spirits.

Mária felt that great things were in the making. She quoted Nostradamus, who had foretold this event, too. Henryk could not understand how the eclipse could be what was foretold in the quatrain that Mária translated as follows:

In the sixth month of 1999,
The Great Mongol king will descend from the sky.
This Terrible Ruler will have his say,
Afore power comes under Mars’s sway.

But he too had been gripped by the thrill of the mystical: what will happen if strange events should indeed be set in train on the 14th of August? He bought the special tinted glasses recommended by the Radiation Physics Institute and rented a house in Siofók for a week.

On the night before the eclipse there was gridlock on the Balaton highway, the cars inching along painfully slowly. The dogs were uncomfortable and whined and dribbled, but as they had not been given supper had nothing to throw up. Konrád was sitting between them in the back, tirelessly stroking them and wiping their jaws with a wet rag.

“If it’s cloudy tomorrow, I am going to have a heart attack,” grumbled Henryk.

But the dawn woke them with a translucent light. They had a hearty breakfast and sat out on the veranda, so as not to miss anything. Henryk had a notepad and pen, Konrád his notebook and colored pencils. The dogs chased each other around the garden.

Konrád was doodling. Henryk sneaked a look. There was a fantastic scene of steep hillsides, a battlefield, and five or six suns in the sky, though they could have been exploding shots from a cannon.

Below were three words in red.

“Why did you write that?” asked Henryk.

Konrád shrugged.

Mária looked at the sun with concern. “Isn’t it time to put the glasses on?”

“It’s too soon.”

The dogs became increasingly agitated. They can sense that something extraordinary is happening, all three of them thought.

The spectacle in the sky lasted from 11:24 until 12:46.

Henryk tried to write down everything as accurately as possible. He did not suspect that his ancestor Kornél Csillag had, too, though it is true he had done so from memory, in old age, recalling what he had witnessed as a child. Those sentences can no longer be read by anyone, ever. They have vanished into thin air.

The Gypsies working on my land told the story that when the Sun darkens over, it is the giant Gryphon that embraces the Sun. Its urine falls as a harmful dew that brings plague and pestilence; that be the reason for covering over the wells at the eclipse. Merely superstition for the simple folk? Or is it really so? Were I to know the answer, verily would I inscribe it below
.

I was myself but simple in those days, suspecting nought of the miracle to come. To me the darkness was but the evening falling sooner. Then I beheld the change in the color of the clouds, they and the land turned a deep shade of green. The air did cool apace. As the darkness thickened, so did the fright of the birds and the insects grow. They flew hither and yon and some fell dead on the ground. The dog with me howled a piteous howl. I was frighted unto death
.

As the final sliver of the Sun darkened over, the stars of the night were seen of a sudden in the firmament. Thus far do I recall, then I lost hold of my mind. Meseemed my end was nigh, and that of the world also. Yet my story had hardly begun
.

Later I heard from others what a magical sight I had missed: a diamond flame inwrapt the Sun, like unto a halo. They can rejoice, in whose sky the Lord has conjured such glory
.

When this too had passed, it was said there came quickly a dawn, for the second time on that day. The affrighted beasts and folk rejoiced and bid welcome to the light reborn
.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The publisher has asked me to write a few words about the historical background to the novel. Though I don’t really think it is essential to know anything about Hungary or its history to make sense of the novel, some readers may want to know a little of the broader context.

Some personal history first. The Hungarian original of this book was my twentieth publication in Hungary and my ninth novel. An earlier novel was about my mother, whose character, for me, was similar to that of the socialism that dominated our country for four decades. She was tyrannical, unfair, cruel, and unpredictable—but at the same time rather amusing. (I was born in 1950 and so grew up in a “softer” kind of socialism, which was not without its humorous side.) Some years later, I felt as though I owed it to my father to write a novel about him, too. Unfortunately, he was a man of few, if any, words. He had died when I was nineteen, and I didn’t know much about him.

So I decided to do some research. I went down to Pécs, in the south of Hungary, where my father had been born and his family lived. The archives revealed some enigmatic facts: my father had had two brothers, and his father had also been called Miklós Vámos. That Miklós, my grandfather, came from Nagyvárad (now Oradea, just inside Romania). He had owned a substantial shoe-shop in Pécs. His father, Mendel Weissberger, had owned a distillery in Budapest, but had himself been born in Homonna
(now Humenné in the Slovak Republic). How had my greatgrandfather come to own a distillery in Budapest, while his son had been born in Nagyvárad? And how had my grandfather ended up with a shoe shop in Pécs? And what became of the distillery? I found no answers to these questions.

My father spent longer fighting in the Second World War than it actually lasted. He had been called up for maneuvers even before the war, targeting former territories of the Hungarian kingdom that had been swallowed up by neighboring countries after the First World War. During the war itself, he was a regular soldier until the enforcement of the Jewish Laws, when he became a member of one of the unarmed Jewish forced-labor brigades, sent ahead of German troops to sweep the minefields clean for them as they advanced on Moscow. He was one of the very few to survive. When the front collapsed, he fled with some others and was captured by Soviet troops, becoming a prisoner of war. He escaped with a friend, and it took him several months to walk home to Pécs. He arrived to find that his whole family had been killed by the Nazis.

I had not even known that I was a Jew. When in elementary school my classmates expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, I followed their example, believing “Jew” to be no worse than any other rude word. In high school, a girlfriend asked me if I was a Jew. I answered that I was not. I mentioned this to my father, adding that I knew we had nothing to do with the Jews. My father adjusted his glasses, and then said, “Well, I’m not so sure.” There was no further explanation. And that was how I learned I was a Jew. (I do not speak Hebrew or Yiddish; I don’t know the customs, the rules, the prayers. Nevertheless, whenever I hear of anti-Semitism, I
know
I am a Jew.)

Back to my father. Somehow he became a secretary to a minister, László Rajk, who was the victim of a showcase trial and executed. My father was fortunate to escape prosecution. He worked for seven years in a factory before he fell ill and, after a long period during which he was in and out of the hospital, died. That’s all I could find out about him—hardly enough for a novel.

What was I going to do? If I couldn’t write a novel about my father, why didn’t I write one about every Hungarian father? I picked one hundred of them, famous and unknown men, and started to collect their biographies. But that seemed a little boring. I decided to choose twelve of them who would represent the twelve astrological signs—they would stand in for every Hungarian male. In the original text, in each chapter the first name of the central character starts with the same letter as his sign. The “vignettes” that introduce the chapters try to create the mood of the relevant sign: the sentences were collected from old Hungarian calendars and yearbooks.

The novel describes the lives of twelve first-born sons in a single family, each the father of the next. This provided a solid and straightforward structure, and I sincerely hope the reader has no problem following the story, even if it is complicated in places. Please note that the Jewish name of the family is Stern and the Hungarian is Csillag—both mean “star.” I knew the final scene would have to be the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, since that was about the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. I tried to discover if there had been one roughly three centuries earlier and when I found that there had, the time frame of the novel was in place, and that is how it became a Hungarian family saga.

Many readers in Hungary, and some in Germany, have written to say how envious they are that I know the story of my ancestors so well. I wish that were true. As must be clear by now, I know virtually nothing. I have made up a family because I lost my real one. But I am not unhappy if readers think they are getting the story of my forebears.

It may also help the reader to know that the Hungarian nobility and those who counted as the intellectuals of Hungary spoke French and German until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only the poor used Hungarian, and the Hungarian language of the time lacked a great deal of vocabulary. One of the happiest chapters in the history of Hungarian culture is the period of intense language renewal towards the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Writers, poets, and
linguists came together to create a modern Hungarian language and did so primarily by creating a large number of new words. I thought it would be interesting if in each chapter I used the words and grammar of the period in question. In the first three chapters, which take the story up to about 1800, I tried to use only words that existed at this time. I am aware that this is not something that can be easily re-created in translations into Indo-European languages, but I hope it is apparent that the language of the novel gradually becomes “younger” as we approach the present.

A Few Notes on Hungarian History

One well-known fact is that Hungary and the Hungarians have lost every important war and revolution since the time of the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus. He occupied Vienna and became Prince of Austria. He died in 1490. Since then, the nation and its heroes can be found only on the losing side.

A famous, if hoary, joke is instructive.

A Hungarian enters a small shop in New York and wants to buy a hat. But he doesn’t have enough dollars on him, so he asks whether he could pay in forints, the Hungarian currency.

“I’ve never seen any forints,” the owner of the shop says. “Show me some.”

So the Hungarian shows him a ten-forint note.

“Who’s this guy here?” asks the owner.

“This is Sándor Petöfi, the brightest star of Hungarian poetry. He lived in the nineteenth century. He was one of the March Youth who launched the 1848–49 War of Independence. He was killed in a battle at Segesvár when the war was crushed by the Austrians and the Russians.”

“Oh my God, what an awful story … And who is this guy on the twenty-forint bill?”

“This is György Dózsa, who led a peasant uprising in the sixteenth century. It was crushed and he was executed—actually, he was burned on a throne of fire—”

“OK, OK. And who is that, on the fifty?”

“That’s Ferenc Rákóczi II, leader of another war of independence, crushed by the Habsburgs. He was forced to spend his life in exile in Turkey.”

“I should have guessed. And on the one hundred?”

“That’s Lajos Kossuth, leader of the 1848–49 War of Independence, you know. After it was crushed, he had to flee—”

The owner stops him again. “OK, you poor man, just go—you can have the hat for free.”