Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 3

  Smoking was a constant in our house. The smell of cigarettes was pervasive throughout the apartment, but especially in the bathroom, where people always lit up to mask other smells. I disliked the smell of cigarettes, but I was fascinated by the ritual of smoking. One day, as I watched my mother chat and smoke with Jani, I sidled up to them and asked to be allowed to try it. They laughed at me, which just made me dig in my heels and insist that I really, really wanted to. The two of them discussed it for a while, then my mother said, “Okay, An-dris, you can try. Let's see if you like it.”

  I reached victoriously for her cigarette and pulled in one puff. Immediately my stomach got queasy. I dropped the cigarette and dashed to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. When I came out, my mother and Jani with straight faces offered me another smoke. I shook my head. I couldn't even look at them.

  When there were no visitors, the Big Room was my playground. With my interest in jungles piqued by The Jungle Book, I imagined that each of the area rugs represented a different exotic island. An older boy in our apartment house frequently came to play with me. With the help of a map of Southeast Asia that he had studied, the two of us would go island hopping. We would start on the rug designated as Borneo. We would put Lion bacsi on the rug designated as Sumatra, and we would hop over the South China Sea of the polished hardwood floor from Borneo to Sumatra to kowtow to Lion bacsi and ask for his friendship. Then we would hop over to Java and all the other far-off islands that my friend culled from his map. We would spend the afternoon doing this until Gizi started cooking dinner and it was time for him to go home.

  In the mornings, I went to a kindergarten in our neighborhood. There were maybe ten or fifteen kids in my class. We were all Jewish, as was our teacher. We often played with wooden blocks that fit together, but I rarely made them fit the way they were intended to. Instead, I preferred to build contraptions of my own.

  I made up my own games, too. Once, when my mother was talking with the other war wives, I overheard a phrase that intrigued me. The phrase was, “They will put the Jews in a ghetto.” I had no idea what a ghetto was, but for some reason the phrase stayed with me.

  One day, I dragged some of the kindergarten tables and chairs over to the wall to make an enclosure. I declared that that was the ghetto and we would put all the Jews inside it. A few of my playmates and I started chanting, “They will put the Jews in the ghetto, they will put the Jews in the ghetto.” We grabbed some of the other kids and dragged them, slipping and sliding on their behinds, inside the enclosure. Pretty soon we were all chanting in unison, “They will put the Jews in the ghetto, they will put the Jews in the ghetto.” When my kindergarten teacher heard us, she sharply told us to stop saying that. But by then the entire class had picked up on the phrase, and the more she protested, the stronger the chanting got. She looked at us helplessly, then shrugged silently and let us be. We played the ghetto game over and over again for weeks.

  Once in a while, my mother and Jani would take me on a picnic to one of the outlying parts of Buda. They would settle down to talk, and I would run around and play. I had a little metal drinking cup made of rings that telescoped down to a flat circle. I was very proud of it and loved to fill it with water from the fountain.

  One time, I went to the fountain, opened my cup, and filled it with water. When I turned to run back to my mother and Jani, I couldn't see them. I turned and ran in a different direction. I kept running around until I realized that I was lost. I was terrified. All of a sudden, the woods around me seemed cold and menacing now that I couldn't see my mother. I ran faster and faster looking for her until I lost my breath and started to cry. Some strangers knelt down and tried to console me. Nothing worked until my mother and Jani emerged from the woods, looking for me. I ran to my mother and clung to her legs, sobbing. It was a long time before I calmed down.

  Across the street from our apartment house was a pastry shop that served ice cream during the summer. When I was good, my mother took me down for a scoop. During the winter, instead of ice cream, my treat consisted of puree of chestnut with whipped cream both inside and on top.

  I loved ice cream, but my love was seriously tested in the summer of 1943 when Dr. Rothbart decided that my tonsils needed to come out. My mother took me to a hospital, which didn't alarm me particularly, because she promised that I would get to eat a lot of ice cream. In the examining room, I was put in a big leather chair and covered with a heavy rubber sheet from my neck to my knees. A doctor who was wearing a round mirror with a hole in it over his eye told me to open my mouth really wide. When I did, he and a nurse propped it open even farther with a metal bracket. It strained my jaw and I tried to complain, but my words came out “Ah, ah, ah.” The doctor nodded in reply, made some reassuring sounds, and reached deep into my mouth with a long metal instrument. I didn't feel any pain, but after a while blood started spurting from my mouth all over my chest and onto the floor. It was very scary.

  After that, I was kept in the hospital for a few days. My mother slept next to my bed on a mattress on the floor. The promised ice cream did, in fact, materialize. I was given as much ice cream as I wanted to eat, but it didn't taste so good.

  That was not my only experience with doctors. Although the wounds behind my ears had healed, I was left with holes in my eardrums, and my ears drained fluid more or less all the time. We went to see a doctor who lived outside of Budapest. We took one tram and then another tram and yet another tram to get there. The house didn't look like any of the doctors' offices I'd been to before. Those had been in hospitals or big apartment buildings. This house was surrounded by a big, fancy garden, like a castle in a picture book.

  Inside, the office was full of strange boxes, with knobs and wires sticking out. The doctor didn't do much to my ears; instead, he made me listen to all kinds of sounds that he made by twisting the knobs. I was to signal when I heard them.

  At first, I was curious about these contraptions and participated in the tests as if they were some kind of a game. After a while, the game became tedious, but I soldiered on, pushing the button when I heard the sounds. Every once in a while, I daydreamed and missed my moment to push the button. Then I hurried up to push it later, hoping that it still counted.

  The doctor told my mother that I had lost about 50 percent of my hearing and that the draining needed to be looked after. The doctor who had operated on me had since died, so my mother found a very highly regarded expert in Budapest to replace him. He was called Dr. German.

  Dr. German had a fancy office on the banks of the Danube in an especially ornate building in a neighborhood of many ornate buildings. It was much more elegant than where we lived. We visited Dr. German every week, and we always had to wait. The waiting room and the examining room were both painted a deep green color. Everything, wherever I looked, was the same deep green. I was told it was meant to soothe people's nerves while they waited to be treated. When I heard that, instead of being soothed, I got worried. I didn't want to be hurt.

  I needn't have worried. Dr. German had a collection of metal instruments, but all he did during each visit was look inside my ear, wrap an instrument with cotton swabs, and dry the discharge. Then he patted me on the head and told us to come back in a week. As we left, my mother would mutter about Dr. German driving us to the poorhouse with his high fees.

  Dr. German was married to a famous actress. That was the first thing everyone mentioned when they talked about Dr. German, even before they mentioned his fees. She acted only in grown-up plays, so I had never seen her. But I was impressed by the way her reputation seemed to enhance his. Once Dr. German asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be just like him. He laughed and asked why. I said, “Because I want to marry an actress, too.”

  Starting in 1943, from time to time we had air raids. They always happened in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. My mother would reach into my bed and drag me to my feet and dress me while I was still half-asleep. I would hear the howling o
f the sirens as I came awake. If I stood in bed and looked out the window, I could see a streetlight hanging from the wires that were strung across the street. I thought the siren sound came out of the streetlight.

  My mother had already thrown on her clothes and had her overcoat on. We hurried down the long, dark hallway and ran down the stairs to the air raid shelter. The shelter was in the cellar that ran under the apartments. Other people streamed out of their apartments, hurrying downstairs to the cellar, too. Before the war, each apartment had its own designated section in the cellar to store coal or wood for the stoves. The air raid shelter was a walled-off section. It was painted a drab color, with naked light bulbs suspended from the ceiling. There were rows of wooden benches with no backs.

  Everyone filed into the room and took their places on the benches. People would be wrapped in their overcoats, whether it was warm or cold. They sat side by side, hunched over on the benches, sleepily staring ahead or occasionally looking up nervously at the cellar ceiling. Most raids lasted about half an hour, sometimes an hour. Nobody talked much. I huddled against my mother, drifting back to sleep for little bits of time, jerking awake on the hard bench, then drifting back to sleep again. We waited—either for the bombs to hit us or for the steady siren sound that signaled the end of the air raid.

  We never did get hit, but an apartment house maybe half a dozen blocks from us did. It looked like a big knife had sliced off the front half of every floor. You could see into the apartments on all four stories, like a doll's house. In the back part of each room, the furniture was still in place and the pictures were still on the walls. The front part had fallen into a big heap of bricks, stones, and unidentifiable rubble.

  Rumors abounded. Some people said the planes that caused the destruction were English. Someone told my mother that the air pressure from the bomb blew goose down from a storage area into the air raid shelter next to it and it suffocated a lot of the people hiding there.

  My mother and I passed the ruined building every time we went to the City Park. The sight made me very uneasy, but by the time we got to the park, I usually had forgotten all about it.

  My favorite place to play was near a statue of George Washington. The statue was a big bronze figure of a soldier on a rearing horse. I thought this statue was made of iron because the Hungarian word for “iron” is vas, pronounced “vash.” So I assumed that the soldier's name was “Vashington” and he was named for the material his statue was made from.

  There was a sandy area near the statue. One day, a little girl was playing there. We had never seen each other before, but I had sand toys and she had a doll, so we started to play together. We were busily building sand castles and putting the doll next to them when she suddenly turned to me and said, very seriously, “Jesus Christ was killed by the Jews, and because of that, all the Jews will be thrown into the Danube.”

  My mother was sitting on a bench nearby. I jumped up and ran to her, bawling my head off. I told her what the little girl had just said. My mother put her arm around me and said it was time for us to go home. We picked up the sand toys and left. That was the last time I played in this park. In the fall, I turned seven and started going to elementary school. Most of my schoolmates were only six, but since I was born in September, I hadn't been allowed to start real school until now.

  My elementary school was affiliated with a Jewish orphanage. Some of the children were orphans and wore a uniform. Others like myself were day students. We did not wear a uniform. Everybody at this school was Jewish. After my encounter with the little girl in the park, I found this reassuring.

  My teacher was called Magda neni. She was a redhead. Because of my bad ears, I was placed in the first row so I could hear her better. I liked sitting there; it felt as though she was talking mainly to me, and I loved the attention. When we weren't participating, we were supposed to sit upright with our hands crossed on the small of our backs. We leaned back against the bench, our hands cushioning us against the hard wood.

  I was usually the first one to have my hand in the air when she asked a question, and she called on me often. I frequently had the right answer and enjoyed the praise and further attention I got for doing so well. It also allowed me to break out of the uncomfortable sitting position.

  There were girls in the class, too. I particularly liked a girl named Aniko. Another girl, Eva, liked me. But I was so intrigued with Aniko that I didn't pay much attention to Eva. We always raced to help each other into our overcoats. I was usually the first to get Aniko's overcoat. Meanwhile, Eva was usually the first to get mine. But I would wait until Aniko took the overcoat from Eva so that she could help me into it.

  One time, Aniko didn't come to school for a few days. I found out that she was ill. My mother took me to her house so I could visit her. When I walked into her room, she jumped out of bed and hugged me, wrapping her legs and arms around me like a monkey. I was very excited and pleased.

  In March 1944, the German army occupied Hungary. There were no announcements and there was no fighting—they just came in. My mother and I stood on the sidewalk of the Ring Road, watching as the cars and troop carriers filled with soldiers drove by. The German soldiers didn't look anything like the soldiers who had guarded my father's labor unit. Those soldiers slouched a bit, and their uniforms were wrinkled. The German soldiers were neat and wore shiny boots and had a self-confident air about them. They reminded me of my toy soldiers; they had the same kind of helmet, the same color uniform, and the same type of machine gun. I was impressed.

  The sidewalk was lined with passersby, all watching the procession of soldiers, all looking very serious. My mother was also very serious. I looked up at her. Her face showed no expression at all, but she squeezed my hand tightly. There was no sound, except for the engine and tire noise from the cars and troop carriers. My mother started pulling me away. The procession hadn't ended, and I didn't want to go. I was fascinated by what I saw.

  German soldiers became a regular sight all over the city. Some were in big groups marching in unison, some in small groups walking in single file with machine guns strapped across their chests. Trucks and troop carriers moved around the city, particularly on the Ring Road. They set up a headquarters a few blocks from our house. Soldiers and officers came and went in our neighborhood streets all the time. Like the soldiers in the procession, they were always neat, their boots were always shiny, and they always acted self-confident.

  Once I encountered an officer on Kiraly Street near our house. I was coming home from school by myself. He was walking in the opposite direction. He moved deliberately, his steps firm. There was something overwhelming about him. I averted my eyes and flattened myself against the wall to try to make myself invisible.

  That spring we had many thunderstorms. There's a feeling before a storm breaks that the weather is about to change. You know something is going to happen. The wind stops, the temperature drops, the air gets more humid. Something is going to burst out. That's the kind of feeling there was in the air that spring, even on clear days. I didn't know what was different, I just knew that something was.

  That June, my first year of school came to a close. Magda meni handed out our report cards and we ran down the stairs to our waiting mothers. I had the highest grades in all of my class. I happily showed my grades to my mother. She was pleased, too.

  My mother, in 1944. By fall, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes.

  Chapter Four

  LIFE GETS STRANGE

  THE SUMMER OF 1 9 4 4 started out in a strange way. Soon after first grade ended, with very little preparation, my mother shipped me off to Bacsalmas. She explained that Budapest was not a good place to be that summer.

  In addition to being the location of the main branch of my father's dairy, Bacsalmas was also the hometown of my father's friend Jani. I stayed with Jani's parents, who lived in a peasant house with earthen floors. There was no running water; you got water by pumping it out of a well with a long-handl
ed iron pump. There was a dog, a cat, and chickens. But Jani's parents were old and quiet, and I had no other children to play with. Life was dull after Budapest, and the days moved very slowly. I was lonely and missed my mother.

  I didn't have to miss my mother very long. Early one evening, less than a week after I had arrived, Romacz unexpectedly showed up. He, too, was from Bacsalmas and was friendly with Jani's parents. I was happy to see him, but I was told to go and play while he and Jani's parents had a long and serious discussion. Afterward Romacz told me to go to sleep but added, “During the night, I'm going to take you home to your mother.” I was delighted.

  Sometime in the night, Romacz woke me up and helped me dress, then we got on the train to Budapest. He wrapped me in a blanket and I fell asleep and didn't wake up until the next morning, when I woke up in my own bed in the Big Room. I was very happy to be home with my mother. She was a little embarrassed about my sudden trip to—and even more sudden departure from—Bacsalmas. She explained that Romacz found out that Jewish people were going to be taken away from Bac-salmas. That's why he went down there to bring me back.

  This was only one of the strange things that happened that summer.

  Before that summer, listening to the radio was an ordinary thing. Now it became a complicated ceremony. The radio sat on a table in a prominent position in the Little Room. It was a large wooden box with shiny black knobs on it. The sound came through a cloth that was stretched over the front. By turning the knobs, you could listen to all kinds of foreign-language programs mixed with mysterious squeaks and whistles. I knew that these strange languages and the noises signified that the programs were coming from far away, so I always was a little awestruck when I listened to the sounds emanating from the box.