Swimming Across: A Memoir Read online

  My mother and I didn't celebrate in any particular way. It wasn't new news. For us, the war had ended back in January, on the day Haie told us that the last of the Germans had been pushed out of Budapest.

  People began to surface from wherever they had disappeared to. The Russians let Jani go fairly soon after they took him away. He dropped by, not particularly worse for the wear.

  My mother questioned him as she did everyone who came from anywhere else: Had they seen or heard anything about my father? The answer was always, “No.” I was getting impatient with her obsessive questioning; it was obvious to me that she would never get a satisfactory answer. I could barely remember my father, and now his memory, faded as it was, was tarnished by my mother's obsession. It was one more thing to be irritated by. It got so that every time she buttonholed and interrogated yet another person about him, I cringed.

  Then my aunt Manci came home. The last time I had seen her was at Nagykoros, when my father and her husband, Mik-los, left on the troop train to the Russian front. She showed up at our house one afternoon in August. She said she had just arrived on a crowded train from a camp and come to our house before attempting to go back to her own home in Kiskoros.

  Manci looked awful. I hardly recognized her. She'd been a small woman to start with, but now she was reduced to skin and bones. She was tense and strangely distant. She told us that her aunt, my father's mother, and all the other members of my father's and Manci's family who lived in Kiskoros had been taken away with her. They'd ended up in a place in Poland called a concentration camp, a concentration camp called Auschwitz.

  Gizi made a big pot of noodles, and I watched transfixed as Manci finished off almost all of it. Later, she told my mother her story, then my mother told me. She had been separated from the rest of her family. She had protested because she wanted to go with them, but the Germans wouldn't let her. She was a skilled seamstress before the war, so they shipped her off to a factory to sew for the Germans. The rest of the family was sent to the gas chambers. Only Manci survived.

  Manci stayed with us for a while. Trains were coming in almost every day, bringing returning prisoners of war from the Russian front. My mother and Manci established a routine. The trains always seemed to arrive in the afternoon. Manci and my mother, usually with me in tow, would go to the Western Railway Station in the late afternoon, hoping that a train would come in. Hundreds of other people did the same. Most often there was a train. Decrepit, skeletal men in rags would stream out of the cars, their eyes searching for a familiar face in the waiting crowds. We, in turn, were also searching for a familiar face. We were hoping to see Manci's husband, Miklos, and my father.

  They didn't come.

  After a while, Manci went back home to Kiskoros, still not knowing if Miklos would show up. My mother and I continued to meet the trains almost every afternoon. But we never recognized anyone.

  In early September, my mother got word that trains were coming from the prison camp in Russia where she somehow thought my father had been. So we again went out to the railway station to look for my father. The train station was a distance away, and we had to walk both ways. I was getting very impatient. I was tired from the long, fruitless walk and from standing on the hard concrete platform, getting jostled by the crowds, watching the men streaming by, and looking in vain for my father.

  The next day we did it again. I didn't want to go. I didn't think I was much use anyway because I had no recollection of my father. But my mother took me by my hand and pulled me along. Again, we didn't find him.

  We got home tired and thirsty and wearily sat down in the kitchen to have something to drink. All of a sudden, my mother sat bolt upright in her chair and stared at the wall so intently that you would think it had just spoken to her. I asked her, “What's the matter?”

  She hushed me and continued to listen. Then she said, greatly agitated, “I thought I heard your father's whistle.” My parents had a private signal between the two of them; they would whistle the first few bars of a popular song.

  I was annoyed and protested that she was imagining things. She ignored me. She jumped up from the table and ran down the hallway to the Big Room. She leaned out of one of the open windows, bending out over the railing to look up and down the street. I reluctantly followed her and looked out the other window. The street in front of our house was dark and empty. I straightened up and said irritatedly, “I told you you were imagining things.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. My mother turned and ran back down the hall. I followed her. Gizi had just opened the door. An emaciated man, filthy and in a ragged soldier's uniform, was standing at the open door. Gizi was standing to the side, staring at him speechlessly. My mother stopped as if she had turned into a statue, then in a moment took off and leapt on the man, embracing him in an all-encompassing hug. I stood there, alone and forgotten. I thought, This must be my father.

  They were still locked in this desperate embrace in the open door of the apartment when two spinsters who lived on our floor came by on their way out. They glanced through the open door, then stopped and stared. When they realized what was going on, they apologized for intruding and disappeared. Nobody paid them any attention anyway.

  Eventually my father came over to me and patted me on the head. I was bewildered. This was supposed to be my father, but I didn't know him. I was supposed to love him, but I wasn't sure what I felt. All I knew for sure was that after I had been so emphatic about telling my mother that he wasn't coming, he wasn't coming … now here he was. I was embarrassed that I had been wrong.

  He suddenly turned and went into the Big Room. He walked directly over to the wardrobe, opened it, and flipped through his suits. He seemed to be looking for one in particular. When he found it, he pulled it out into the light and examined it carefully, paying close attention to the buttons. He examined a button that had a crack in it, then he broke into tears. Later he explained that as he was recovering from a deadly illness in the prison camp, he would check on his sanity by picturing his own clothes. He specifically remembered the suit with the cracked button. Finding that his recollection was correct was important proof that he hadn't lost his mind.

  By now Gizi was building a fire in the bathroom stove and drew a bath for my father. Soon he was in the tub, covered in soapy water. My mother sat next to him on the side of the bathtub. I peered in from the door, not knowing what to feel or say. His arms and legs were like sticks, with knobs where the joints were. His face was covered by stubble. He looked worse than a beggar.

  After a while, he turned to me and asked me with a slight smile, “Andris, whom do you like best, your mother or me?”

  I swallowed hard. I knew what answer would please him, but I couldn't give it to him. I looked to one side and said, “I know my mother. I don't know you.” He seemed satisfied with the answer. He motioned me over and patted my head again.

  Initially, my father was a stranger around the house, but not for long. As soon as he was nursed back to reasonable energy, he returned to the dairy business. Later, he also moved into a regular job as manager of a government-owned department store. My mother, meanwhile, continued to help out in the dairy business. The routine of the household changed. Jani and Romacz continued to pay frequent visits, but now the rest of my father's friends also dropped by often. The apartment was much more lively. It was almost like before the war.

  But not everything was the same.

  Little by little, news trickled in about people who were still missing. There was never any official notice. It was always someone who had been in a camp with someone else and came back and told the relatives of that person's fate. That's how we got word of my mother's brothers, Miklos and Jozsi. Miklos survived, but Jozsi died.

  A few months after my father got home, something happened to my mother. She seemed to have gotten sick, although she didn't really look sick. My parents had a lot of deep discussions that I couldn't follow. After a while, my mother told me that they would have to visit a d
octor specializing in women's illnesses.

  The trams were not running that day, so they walked to his office. Then they walked back home, my father supporting my mother by her arm. My mother was pale. My father helped her to the sofa in the Big Room. She lay down and closed her eyes.

  Sometime later, I learned that my mother had gotten pregnant but that my parents felt it would be wrong to bring a child into the chaotic world we lived in, so they had decided she would have an abortion.

  I didn't know what an abortion was. I vaguely understood that my mother might have had a baby. Somehow, and for no particular reason, I always assumed that the baby would have been a girl—a sister I was not to have.

  Later in September, after I had turned nine, school started. I was enrolled in third grade at the school attached to the Fasori Jewish boys' orphanage where I had gone for first grade. I had skipped second grade, so every afternoon I went for tutoring in what I should have learned in second grade. My tutor was Mar-git neni, who was also my third-grade teacher. Consequently, she knew what I needed to catch up on.

  The second-grade makeup stuff was boring. It was mainly improvement in reading, which I was already pretty good at, and multiplication tables, which I just had to memorize. Fortunately, my third-grade class didn't know the multiplication tables, either, and a lot of our third-grade classes consisted of chanting in unison, “One times one is one, one times two is two,” and so forth. After a month of tutoring, Margit neni thought I was ready to pass second grade. She told the principal. He sat me down and gave me a test, which I passed. The afternoon tutoring sessions stopped. I was now a full-fledged third-grader.

  The kids in my class were different from the ones I knew in first grade. There were about thirty of us. As in first grade, the class was made up partly of boys who boarded at the orphanage and partly of day students. The orphanage boys all wore uniforms and had their hair cut very short. They were always hungry and frequently mooched lunch from the day students.

  There was a new set of girls in the class, too. I had a crush on one of them. Her name was Jutka. She had blondish brown long hair that she wore in braids. She was very serious and aloof. I never actually talked with her; I just threw her glances from afar. I don't think she had a clue that I had a crush on her.

  School was interesting enough. The principal came into our class every once in a while to deliver lectures about the value of good study habits and good behavior and that sort of thing. One lecture that caught my attention was about different learning aptitudes. There were students who learned quickly and retained what they had learned for a long time, said the principal. There were students who didn't learn quickly but also retained what they had learned for a long time. Then there were students who learned quickly and quickly forgot what they had learned. He urged us to be, if not the first type of student, the second. Without realizing it, he pushed me into a funk, because I had an easy time picking things up, but I forgot them just as easily.

  Going back and forth to school was an adventure in itself. To walk to school, I would head toward City Park on Kiraly Street. Halfway there, Kiraly Street changed its name to Fasor Street. Fasor translates to “A Row of Trees.” My school was halfway to City Park on Fasor Street.

  Fasor Street, as its name suggests, was lined with trees— horse chestnut trees. In the fall, the horse chestnuts grew ripe and fell off the trees onto the pavement. The first chestnuts of autumn represented a much coveted treasure, and all of us raced to pick them up and put them in our bags. We would push and shove each other to get to the precious chestnuts. I hoarded my collection jealously and lined the chestnuts up on my windowsill at home in nice, even rows. I loved to watch the sun shining on their polished red brown shells. But as more and more chestnuts ripened and fell to the ground, they lost their intrigue and currency. I went home and tossed my precious collection of chestnuts into the garbage.

  Sometimes after school, a group of us would head off to City Park, just a few blocks from the school. The closer the street came to City Park, the more palatial the houses got. Some of the very fancy houses were occupied by Russian dignitaries and their families. Although all kinds of political parties were operating in Hungary, there was no question that the Communist Party had Russian backing. Russian soldiers still patrolled the streets. Everyone knew that the Russians called all the shots.

  Once, a group of Russian boys came running out of one of those houses as we passed by. They surrounded us and started taunting us in Russian. We didn't understand a word they said, and we stared at them, bewildered and scared. The Russian kids closed in on us and started pushing us around. The kids were no bigger than we were, but they were Russian. None of us dared to push back. We kept moving, and eventually we broke away from them. After that, every time we went to City Park, I was worried that something like this might happen again.

  That winter, it snowed a lot. Fuel was still scarce, and the classrooms were heated only some of the time or not at all. It wasn't uncommon for us to sit at our desks, fully bundled in winter coats, hats, scarves, and gloves, with our breath visible in the cold air. At times like that, I hated the cold. But on the way home, at least we could play in the snow. Snowball fights were common.

  Once, one of the snowballs went astray. It flew through the open door of a passing streetcar and hit the driver in the face. To our amazement, the streetcar screeched to a halt and a very angry driver came tearing after us. I was the one he caught. He grabbed my hat and yelled at me, then got back on his tram with my hat in his hand and drove off again. It was the only hat I had, and it wasn't easy to get another one. I trudged home, upset and shivering.

  When I got home, I sheepishly reported what had happened. I stressed that I wasn't the one who had thrown the offending snowball. My father nodded matter-of-factly and said, “Let's see if we can get your hat back.” He put on his coat and hat, and the two of us trudged back out into the snow to try to retrieve my hat from the streetcar driver. That particular streetcar line didn't go by our house, so we had to walk to its terminal. It was a long way, and it was getting darker and colder by the minute. When we finally got there, we asked the dispatcher if anyone had brought in my hat. Miraculously, the hat appeared. After getting a lecture from the dispatcher, I was allowed to put it on my head, and my father and I trudged home. I held his hand part of the way; it felt good to have him with me.

  Another time, some of my friends were talking about a whorehouse. I didn't know what it was, so I decided to ask my mother. She was combing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, and I was crouched on the closed toilet. When I asked my question, my mother continued to comb her hair very deliberately and didn't look at me for a while. Then, addressing her response directly to her image in the mirror, she rapped out in a no-nonsense tone that a whorehouse was where men went to put their penises in women and pay them some money, after which they closed their pants and went home. I sat on the toilet seat, dumbfounded. I felt that I had been thwarted somehow, but I didn't even know what other questions to ask.

  A few days later, a couple of school friends and I were hanging out in the doorway to my apartment house on our way home from school. One of them was holding forth about how babies are made. He said, knowingly, that babies were made when a man put his thing into a woman and shot one of his balls into her. I considered this thoughtfully. On the one hand, this matched my mother's description of what people did in a whorehouse. On the other hand, something didn't add up. I knew for a fact that some people had more than two kids, but all of us boys had only two balls. I asked my friend about this inconsistency. He clearly hadn't thought of it and was stunned. These matters remained confusing for some time to come.

  In the spring of 1946, my father decided that it would be good for me to learn English. He quoted a Hungarian saying: “You are worth as many men as the languages you speak.” He told me that one of his big regrets was that as a child he had never learned another language. He believed that this made it difficult for him to learn lan
guages as an adult. During the war, he had tried to pick up German and Russian but had not succeeded. He particularly wanted me to learn English because he figured that since both the English and Americans spoke it, it might in time become the most widely spoken language in the world.

  My mother found a middle-aged spinster who spoke English fluently and taught it as well. She lived by herself in a once grand but now old and decrepit apartment house on the Ring Road. My mother negotiated for a series of lessons; she paid with links from a gold necklace that she broke up for this purpose.

  English was boring, and I didn't like the teacher or her decaying apartment. I thought she was weird and her apartment depressing. I was always eager to escape back to the street. But my parents had their hearts set on my participating in this stupid activity, so there was no alternative but to go along with it. Even though I didn't like it, English lessons became a regular part of my life and continued so for many years to come.

  As if the English lessons weren't bad enough, a bit later, a big black piano appeared in our living room. My parents' sofa bed was moved under the window to accommodate the piano. My mother explained that it was time for me to learn to play. At first, I was intrigued. I picked out a few simple melodies and played them endlessly. But then an old lady piano teacher appeared, carrying an enormous purse big enough to put a loaf of bread in. She sat down at the piano and started to coach me in the mysteries of scales. She made me play the stupid scales over and over; then, after she left, my mother made me practice them again and again. After a lot of scales, I got as far as Beethoven's “Turkish March,” but I never became very good. I detested practicing. I had put up with English without too much resistance, but piano was really too much.