Swimming Across: A Memoir Read online

We had frequent visitors to the apartment. Almost no one had a telephone, so instead of people calling up, they would drop in. People would come by, unannounced, and sit and talk for hours. As they were saying good-bye, they would stand in the doorway and talk for what seemed like hours more. My mother's younger brother, my uncle Jozsi, was around a lot. He was strong, muscular, and balding, and he was a lot of fun. I have no idea what he did, although judging from comments that the rest of the family sometimes made, it couldn't have been very much. But that didn't seem to matter. There was always a warm and joyful feeling about Jozsi.

  That wasn't the case with my mother's second brother, Mik-los. Miklos and Jozsi were twins but were very different in appearance and personality. While Jozsi was friendly and fun, Miklos was surly and seemed to carry a dark cloud around him. People didn't like him; their voices changed tone when they talked about him. Miklos didn't get along with anyone in the family, including my grandmother, his own mother. Once he was so nasty to her that my father intervened and the two of them started shouting at each other. I was afraid that they would come to blows. I had never seen my father that way before. After that, we didn't see much of Miklos.

  My father was a sociable guy, and many of our visitors were his friends and business associates. Jani was one of my father's best friends and a partner in the dairy. He was from Bacsalmas, and his parents still lived there. He had his own apartment in Budapest, but he camped out in our apartment all the time.

  Jani had been an officer in the Hungarian army, which impressed me. Tall and ramrod straight, he was a snappy dresser and something of a dandy, which also impressed me. He had a loud voice and a loud laugh and exuded self-confidence and energy. Jani was different in another way. He wasn't Jewish.

  Another friend of both my father and Jani went by his last name only: Romacz. Romacz was as skinny as a stick, and his face was all wrinkled, like a raisin. I liked him a lot because he always talked to me as if we were equals. He, too, was from Bac-salmas and was involved in the dairy business; he managed the Budapest branch. He wasn't Jewish, either.

  My father's friends knew my mother from when they all lived in Bacsalmas. If my father wasn't home, they would hang around anyway. She would serve them something to drink, smoke with them, and talk. None of the men was married, so they would recount stories of their latest romances, confide in her, and ask her advice. She was a kind of sister to them. They were like uncles to me.

  Religious identity played no part in my world then. Some of our visitors were Jews, others were not. Those who were not Jewish seemed no different from us. While many Jewish people had German names, like Fleischer, Schwartz, or Klein, our name was no different from non-Jewish names. The word grof is Hungarian for “count.” Family legend has it that an ancestor was the estate manager for a Hungarian count and somehow people started to refer to him by association as “the Count.” In more recent times, some Jews changed their names to Hungarian-sounding surnames. Our family already had one.

  I was born Andras Grof, but everyone called me by the more familiar form, Andris.

  Left: That's me, at age 3.

  Below: My parents and me, at age 4.

  Above: I had to stay in bed for several months while I was recovering from scarlet fever. My head is bandaged because of my ear operation.

  Right: My father ( top row, second from right ) is leaving for the front. He is with other members of his labor unit and some army guards.

  Chapter Two

  SCARLET FEVER

  IDON'T REMEMBER becoming sick, and I don't remember being taken to the hospital. I don't remember anything about my illness until one day when I was four years old and found myself lying on my back, looking out of the window of a strange room. I looked upward and saw a leaden sky. My first thought was, I must be dead and in my grave, and that gray thing that I'm looking at must be the earth filled with the people who are still alive. This thought didn't exactly depress me, but I was a little sad that I might not see those people up there again. Then I looked away and became aware of my surroundings and realized that I was alive, too.

  I noticed that I couldn't move either my head or my arms. There was a big bandage running around my forehead and my ears and covering the top of my head, like a turban. The turban was heavy, which made it very difficult for me to turn my head. My arms were by my sides, with tubes coming out of the inside of my elbows and running up into some contraption that was hanging on a wooden coat stand. This was the only object that was familiar to me. That coat stand was just like one we had at home. But I could not have been home because everything else looked different.

  After a while, some men and women in white coats came into the room. Most of them were strangers, but one of them was my doctor, Dr. Rothbart. I was happy to see him. I loved Dr. Rothbart. You couldn't help but love him. He had a friendly, roundish face with a pockmark in the middle of his forehead. He once told me that he scratched himself there when he was a kid and that's why he had that pockmark. It always fascinated me that Dr. Rothbart was once a kid, too.

  He told me I had had scarlet fever but that I was now recovering. I couldn't hear him very well. I thought it must have been the turban over my ears. He sat down on my bed, took my wrist in his hand, and counted my pulse. I watched him. His lips moved silently as he counted. I thought that was funny.

  I saw a lot of Dr. Rothbart in the days and weeks after that. After some time, he helped me sit up in bed and I could actually look out the window and see something other than the sky. There was a courtyard with some bushes and trees in it. He took the tubes out of my arms; that hurt, but not as much as when they changed the bandage on my head. When it was time to change the bandage, I always begged him, “Please don't hurt me.” He always promised that he wouldn't, but he always did.

  One nice summer day, the nurses put me in a chair with wheels and wheeled me outside into the courtyard. I sat there in the sunshine and realized that I hadn't been outside for a long time. I was looking around, seeing people come and go on the paths between the bushes, and at one point I noticed a pair of feet in blue-and-white women's shoes under one of the bushes in the garden. I was sure they were my mother's. I called out for her: “Mama, Mama!” The shoes moved away. I called out again and the nurses came running. They told me that I should calm down, it wasn't good for me to get excited. Then they wheeled me back to my room. I couldn't calm down. I kept twisting my head, calling out for my mother: “Mama, come here! Mama, come here!”

  The next day my mother visited me in my room. I reached out to her, but the weight of the turban kept me from turning to her, so she held my hand and stroked the back of it. She told me it was indeed she who had been standing behind the bush. The nurses thought that seeing my mother would get me all worked up and that would be bad for my heart, so she had been told to keep out of my sight.

  After that, she came to visit every day. She brought me a copy of The Jungle Book , by Kipling. She sat by my bed and read me story after story, then read the stories that I liked over and over until I could almost recite them along with her. She also taught me how to tell time. First, she used a big wall clock to explain it. One day, she brought me a little wristwatch. A real wristwatch! Its brand was Marvin, and that became its name. I endlessly practiced telling the time and showing off my newfound knowledge to the doctors and nurses.

  There was a blond nurse with big blue eyes whom I particularly liked. She was lively and paid a lot of attention to me. I felt warm every time she came into my room. My uncle Jozsi also liked her a lot. After he met her in my room, he came to visit very often, but he seemed to spend more time with her than with me.

  One day, two of my nurses came to my room in great excitement. “Andris, you're going home today,” one of them said. I was ecstatic. Then they continued, “But before you go, we have to clean you up.” That part was not fun. First, they put me in a bathtub and scrubbed me from head to toe, except for my turban, with a soap that stung and a hard brush. Then they took me out of that b
athtub and dried me, moved me to another bathroom, and let me take a real bath, all along admonishing me to keep the turban from getting wet. At last they dressed me in my own pajamas and took me to a room where my mother and father were waiting.

  They greeted me with great excitement. I looked at their hands; they were empty. I asked them, “Aren't you supposed to have flowers for a sick kid?” My father turned around, ran out, and came back in a few minutes with a bouquet of white lilies. I took the flowers. They smelled good. Then my father picked me up and carried me to the exit with a whole retinue of nurses trailing behind.

  We got into a taxi to go home. The taxi was boxy, with a glass window separating the passengers from the driver, and it had a leathery smell. I loved taxis, and the ride home was too short for my taste.

  When I got home, a present was waiting for me. It was a little toy car track. You put the car on the top of the track and it would zoom down, twist around, and jump over a break in the track to the other side. My father showed me how it worked and kept playing with it until I complained, “Isn't that mine, Gyurka?” (I had called my father by his nickname ever since I learned how to speak. Nobody ever corrected me, so he became and remained Gyurka to me.)

  After that, my mother put me to bed. As she explained to me, my heart had been damaged during my illness and it had to heal. I also found out that the scarlet fever had led to an infection in my ears and that my ears had had to be operated on. The bones behind my ears had been chiseled away. I shuddered at that description. To make matters worse, during surgery a blood clot started to travel toward my heart, but the surgeons noticed this and interrupted the operation. They cut a vein in my neck and got rid of the clot before it could do any harm. All in all, I was told, I had spent six weeks in the hospital. Now I would have to stay in bed for nine months. I didn't know how long nine months were going to be, but I was so happy to be at home with my family and in familiar surroundings that I didn't care.

  My bed at home was a large crib in the Big Room. In short order, it was equipped with a board that ran from one side to another. If I sat up, the board served as a table. My food was placed on it, but more important, so were my toys.

  Because I liked The Jungle Book so much, my parents gave me little animal figures—tigers, wolves, giraffes, and a wonderful lion that I called Lion bacsi. Children were expected to call adults bacsi, or “uncle,” and neni, or “aunt,” as a sign of respect. Lion bacsi was clearly a figure of great respect. I played with my animals for hours on end. I also had a set of very realistic, modern toy soldiers. I played with them, too, but I liked the animals better. From time to time, I had to endure the torture of my bandage being changed, but otherwise I was comfortable and feeling increasingly frisky.

  During my long confinement in bed, I discovered an activity that made the time go faster. I started playing with myself. I found that it felt good and my mind always roamed when I did that. Little fantasy scenes ran in my mind, usually involving my blond nurse.

  My mother caught me in the middle of one of my reveries one day and asked me rather harshly what I was doing. I was startled but told her, “I was telling myself stories.”

  My mother grabbed my hands, put them by my side on top of the covers, and in a tone of unusual disapproval told me to stop. I was taken aback. After that I told myself stories only at night when it was dark.

  That didn't work all the time, either, because as I moved, the crib moved with me and made a telltale creaking sound. My mother would emerge from nowhere and yell, “Andris, stop that!” So I learned that I could only tell stories to myself very, very quietly.

  Luckily for my mother's peace of mind, I had another playmate—a real one. My grandmother had died before I got sick, but my grandfather was very much alive. He had infinite patience, which made him the perfect playmate. We played the same games over and over, and each time he participated with as much excitement as if it were the first time we'd ever played that game. My favorite game was to play the conductor on a streetcar; he would play the passenger and hand me a ticket, which I'd carefully punch with my toy puncher. We also played barber, and once he actually let me cut his hair.

  After months had passed, I was allowed out of bed for a few hours at a time, but I had to stay home in our apartment or nearby. Then, finally, the day came when Dr. Rothbart cheerfully told me that he would take the turban off one last time and I would not have to deal with it again. This turned out to be only partly true, because while the turban was gone he covered the wounds behind my ears with a sticky bandage that hurt almost as much when it was removed for cleaning. But eventually that, too, went away.

  However, even though my turban and the bandage were gone, I still didn't hear as well as I used to. I could understand people only if they talked directly to me. After a while, people around me learned to speak louder, so I never felt I missed anything. I understood women's voices better than men's.

  Ears and ear troubles preoccupied me for a long time. My mother brought me a hand puppet, a little bear that you slipped over your hand and moved around with your fingers. She used to entertain me by doing makeshift puppet shows for me. When I got my hands on the little bear, I cut a hole in its skull behind its ears, then I bandaged it so that he looked just like me.

  In 1942, when I was five years old, my father was called up into the army. He was not really a soldier; he and other Jewish men were conscripted to serve in labor battalions clearing roads, building fortifications, and the like. He had been called up for short periods of time before, and each time he came home in a few days or, at most, a few weeks.

  This time, though, was going to be different. When he came home with the news, he was trying to smile, but there was something wrong with his smile. His unit was to leave for the Russian front, and he would not come back any time soon.

  My mother and I went down to Nagykoros, the town from which my father's unit was to leave. Nagykoros was about sixty miles from Budapest, and we had to take a train to get there. When we got there, my father's train was being readied for departure.

  Most of the cars in which his unit would travel were open freight cars, without roofs and with sides that were only half as high as those on regular cars. One car was packed with kettles and stoves and cooking equipment; it was the kitchen unit. One of my father's cousins by marriage, who was also named Miklos, was the cook, and my father was helping him out. My father already knew many of the men in his unit. It looked like fun, almost like a bunch of friends going camping.

  There was a crowd around their train. My father and the other workers were wearing their regular clothes, as were the women like my mother who came out to say good-bye. They looked like any normal crowd of people out on a summer day. But there were also soldiers, dressed in ill-fitting uniforms and carrying rifles. These soldiers guarded the workers' unit. The guards and the laborers mixed freely. The soldiers even helped me climb up on the kitchen car and let me hang from it. It did not feel as though the workers were prisoners—in fact, the soldiers looked like a bunch of sloppy workmen, but the uniforms and the rifles were a constant reminder that they were different.

  Then it was time for all the men to get on the train. I held my mother's hand, while my mother talked with my father and my father's friends and we got ready for the final goodbye. After a couple of toots, the train slowly started to move out of the station. My mother's hand tightened on mine. I didn't see her expression because I couldn't take my eyes off my father. He was waving good-bye with a smile that looked a little too cheerful. As they were moving out of our sight, my father gestured to my mother, using his fingers to pull his mouth into an even wider grin to try to cheer her up. Then the train was gone.

  We headed back home to Budapest. It was a couple of hours on the train. My mother was very quiet.

  When we got home, we were greeted by more bad news. My grandfather, my mother's father, was in the hospital. We immediately went to visit him. He was in a room with several beds. He had an ice bag on his forehea
d, and he was mumbling incoherently. On our way home, my mother explained that my grandfather had had a stroke. A few days later, he was dead.

  I was about six years old when this picture was taken. People told me it made me look older but, they shrugged, it didn't matter: I would grow into it.

  Chapter Three

  THE WAR ARRIVES

  AFTER MY FATHER LEFT, Jani and Romacz continued to drop by to chat with my mother, but now we also had a new set of visitors: the wives of the men in my father's labor unit. Their husbands' absence brought the women together, and they visited each other frequently. Often, they came to our house.

  The women would stand around in the Big Room, talking and sipping cognac and smoking cigarettes. After the initial greetings, I was ignored. I felt left out and after a while would slink off to play by myself in a corner of the Little Room. With my grandfather dead, no one lived there anymore, so it was used as a guestroom. Someone was always sleeping over, generally one of my father's friends from the dairy or rug business. One formerly frequent visitor who was now noticeable by his absence was my mother's brother Jozsi. Like my father, he, too, had been conscripted into a labor battalion and sent away to the Russian front.

  The women would stay until late in the afternoon, talking and drinking, talking and drinking, and chain-smoking until the air in the Big Room was hazy from their cigarettes. Visitors had often smoked, but I didn't remember anyone ever drinking at our house before. The mood was different, too. Instead of the laughter and animated conversation I had been used to, everyone seemed preoccupied.

  I noticed that my mother drank more than the other women. After they left, she often continued to smoke and drink by herself as the light dimmed in the Big Room; it seemed as though her thoughts were very far away. I knew she was thinking about my father.

  The letters had stopped coming shortly after he was taken away. Then, in the spring of 1943, my mother got an official notification saying that my father had “disappeared” at the front. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know how people could disappear. I wondered, “Isn't it better to be lost than to be found dead?” But I didn't dare ask my mother. So through those long afternoons, she smoked and drank in the Big Room and I played by myself in the Little Room.