Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 8

  My mother wasn't much inspiration. Every once in a while when friends came over, they would sing songs and she would accompany them. I marveled at her effortless skill. But she never played for her own pleasure, nor did she work with me.

  When I wasn't in school or taking English or piano lessons, I read quite a bit. My favorite books were by Karl May, a German who had written a popular series of novels that took place in the Sierra Nevada mountains of the American West. The key characters in all of his books were the noble Indian chief Win-netou and an equally good-hearted cowboy, Old Shatterhand. Old Shatterhand and Winnetou always, always let the bad guys go even when they should have known they would come back to haunt them in the next chapter. I didn't care. For me, the books were full of suspense. Some of my friends told me that Karl May had never visited America, in fact had never left Germany and had written these books while in prison. I didn't care about that, either. Karl May's America was a world where wrongs were always righted and justice always prevailed. I liked that.

  While my ordinary routine of school and after-school lessons was being established, Budapest, too, was returning to a routine existence. Some of the damaged buildings were being repaired. Others were demolished and turned into empty lots. The first bridge across the Danube was restored. It was a makeshift affair of wooden beams, but it reestablished the link between Buda and Pest. There was a parade to celebrate the event.

  In the summer of 1946, I went to Kiskoros to stay with my aunt Manci. Kiskoros was my father's hometown. My father had been part of a big family. His father had died around the time that I was hospitalized with scarlet fever. Family legend had it that he lingered between death and life while I was lingering between life and death. He hung on to life just until I turned the corner, then he died. But there had been others: my father's elderly mother, two brothers, a half sister, and various cousins, including Manci. (Manci was really a cousin but because of the age difference I always thought of her as my aunt.) All of them were taken away to Auschwitz. Manci was the only one who came back. She had a sister, Lenke, who, with her husband, Lajos, had immigrated to America in the 1930s; and my father had an older sister, Iren, who, with her non-Jewish husband, Sanyi, lived in Budapest and survived. They were all that remained of his family.

  By the summer of 1946, Manci was settled back in her own house in Kiskoros. Her husband, Miklos, was rumored to be alive but still in a Russian prison camp. My father was lucky to have gotten out so quickly.

  Manci supported herself as a seamstress. She had acquired a puppy. I had never had any pets in Budapest, so the puppy was a major attraction in my agreeing to stay with Manci for the summer.

  Kiskoros was south of Budapest, in the same direction as Bacsalmas, but not as far. At nine, I was very proud of being old enough to take the train by myself. My parents put me on the train in Budapest, and Manci was to meet me at the Kiskoros station. By the time the train arrived, it was dark. I couldn't find Manci. The train pulled away, leaving me alone on the platform with my bags. I panicked and yelled at the top of my lungs, “Manci, you stupid ass, where are you?” Manci heard this and burst out laughing. She had, in fact, been there waiting; she just hadn't seen me in the dark. She retold this story many times, deeply embarrassing me each time.

  Life in Kiskoros was very different from life at home. Like Bacsalmas, Kiskoros was a small provincial town, tiny and backward by Budapest standards. The houses were all small, one-story structures, many of them with thatched roofs and outer walls plastered with clay. In the more prosperous houses, the plaster was whitewashed, while elsewhere the walls were left their original muddy color. The houses were crowded together on the narrow, unpaved streets, where the dust turned to slick clay when it rained. There were no streetcars or buses. Instead, there were horse-drawn carriages and loaded-down bicycles that people pushed through the rutted streets. There was a small town square with a drugstore and a movie theater. Once a week, the square was the site of a market to which peasants brought their horse-drawn wooden carts piled high with cabbages, onions, potatoes, and other food.

  Manci's house had a yard and a little one-room shed, which was empty and became a kind of playhouse for me and a few neighborhood kids whom I befriended. We turned the yard into a playground and sculpted the black earth into moats and castles. In the process, we would get utterly muddy, much to Manci's chagrin. She was obsessed with cleanliness.

  Another boy and I decided to build a balcony on top of the shed. To do that, we had to take some of the tiles off the roof. We were very efficient about it—we loosened the reddish clay tiles and dropped them to the ground, watching in fascination as each tile crashed and shattered, scattering sharp-edged pieces of glazed ceramic over the black earth. Manci did not appreciate our efforts and yelled at us.

  My quick pass through second and third grades had left me wobbly in my multiplication tables—at least in my father's eyes. As a child, my father had been something of a math wizard, and he measured my skills by his own standards. He arranged with a friend of his who lived in Kiskoros to tutor me in math during the summer. I liked the man a lot. He was friendly and a lot of fun. He would sit me down a couple of times a week and practice math problems with me. In the warm summer weather, he often rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had strong forearms, one of which showed a tattooed number. He, too, had been in Auschwitz.

  I had plenty of opportunities to practice my math. Inflation was raging in Hungary, and the value of the pengo, the unit of currency, shriveled daily. On market days, I was amazed to notice that the price of vegetables changed in the course of the few hours that the market was open. Inflation introduced new bills with incredible denominations—thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of pengo. Prices were so astronomical that people carried piles of bills in baskets to pay for goods.

  The little cinema in town showed films once a week. Most of the features were prewar American cowboy movies. Manci usually took me to see whatever movie was playing. The price of the tickets, along with everything else, escalated as the summer progressed. By the end of the summer, people were paying for the movie tickets with produce. Like most people in Kiskoros, Manci kept a few chickens. We set aside some of their eggs for admission to the movies. While the price of the ticket in pengos changed from one week to the next, once we switched to paying in eggs, the price stabilized. It was my job to carry the eggs in a little basket and hand them to the man in the ticket booth. It cost us one egg apiece to sit on rickety seats with ripped upholstery and see a scratched version of Tom Mix.

  Manci also taught me photography. She had an elaborate camera, made in Germany before the war. You aimed it by opening the top and looking down at a screen that showed the scene in front of you. Putting in the film was a tricky matter, and something Manci would never let me do.

  Manci also had a boxy old Kodak camera. Taking pictures with this one wasn't difficult at all; you pointed it and pushed a button, and it clicked. Manci gave me this camera and the two of us took pictures often, she with her camera, I with mine. We took pictures of the fortresses I built in her yard, of the puppy, and of each other. Then we developed them and I sent them home to my parents.

  Kiskoros was the birthplace of Sandor Petofi, perhaps the most prominent poet in Hungarian history. He was prominent not only because of his poetry, but also because he was killed as a young man in the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1848. The house where he was born was on a little side street; it was a tiny house with dirt floors, very small windows, and a thatched roof. It was just like every other house in town, only older. It was the most distinguished site in Kiskoros.

  We visited Petofi's house several times. I had read his poetry in school and liked it. I found it awe-inspiring to step inside the room where Hungary's greatest poet was born. One time when Manci and I visited Petofi's house, we were stunned to see in front of it a figure familiar from hundreds of photos in the newspapers and posters plastered on buildings. Matyas Rakosi, the head of the Hungarian Co
mmunist Party, was visiting with his wife. Rakosi was well-known. He had been imprisoned for Communist activities by the Hungarian government before the war and was later exchanged for some high-ranking Hungarian prisoners of the Russians. He lived out the war in Moscow and came back to Hungary with the Russian troops. Since he was the head of the political party backed by the troops that now occupied Hungary, he was unofficially the most important politician in the country.

  I almost stumbled over my own feet when I saw him. I stared at him with my mouth open, watching him through the viewfinder on my box camera, until Rakosi noticed me. He said in a friendly way, “Would you like to take a picture of me?” I said yes, and he and his wife posed for me. But much as it was a simple matter to take a picture with this camera, I was so nervous that my hands shook and I ended up taking a picture of the sky above their heads. Manci was watching from the side and found the incident very amusing; she couldn't wait to write to my parents about it.

  Late in the summer, I returned to Budapest. There were still some weeks before fourth grade began. Manci had let me keep the Kodak camera. With it and my newly acquired expertise, Gabi and another friend, Ungar, and I went into the photography business. Ungar knew how to develop black-and-white film and make contact prints. The prints were not very good. Not only were they gray all over, but we didn't know how to flatten them, so they dried curled up. Still, we formed a firm named Unfleigro, a contraction of our three last names: Ungar, Fleiner, and Grof. We went around to all of our friends and relatives and offered to take pictures of them. We had a few takers, but even we were embarrassed about the product.

  Ungar was a very handy boy. He had a movie projector and a few strips of 35mm black-and-white movie film that someone had managed to salvage from a cutting room floor. The three of us would darken a room and project these movies onto a wall. The strips were short, so the segments were only a few seconds long, but we rewound the strips and watched them over and over again in fascination.

  Fourth grade was very similar to third grade, even a little easier because the school routines were well established and I didn't have to make up any lost years. I was with the same group of kids, and I had plenty of friends to talk to. I talked to them so often in class that I was frequently reprimanded for being a chatterbox. Once again, I got good grades without having to work hard. The only subject in which I was marked down was “Behavior.” The teacher's commentary that accompanied me throughout school was, “Andris is too lively.”

  At first, my parents didn't react. They might even have been a little amused by these comments. But as the comments kept coming, the amusement gave way to serious disapproval. I dreaded the occasions when my mother would go to school and talk with my teachers. Once I ran into her in the school hallway after such a meeting. I was surprised to see her and greeted her with a big smile. She glared back at me in such a way that I seriously considered not going home after school. But I didn't know where else to go, so I dragged myself home.

  The inevitable lecture followed: I wasn't taking life seriously and would pay for my casual attitude later and so on. I'd heard this lecture many times before. I would quiet down for a while, then inevitably drift back to being “too lively” in class again. But if I was immune to the lecture's message, I was not immune to the unpleasant atmosphere that its delivery generated.

  I didn't generally have a lot of run-ins with my parents, but when I did misbehave, my parents were a united pair: My mother lectured and my father yelled. My mother never beat me again after the stairwell incident. My father never beat me at all. He used a different method of keeping me in line. He had a favorite pair of leather slippers that he kept by his bed. The slippers were there even when the bed was folded into a sofa during the daytime. Whenever I didn't mind him, he would wave one of his slippers at me in a threatening manner. If I still didn't respond, he actually threw his slipper at me, although he never hit me with it. I never knew if he purposefully avoided me or if his aim was bad.

  They also expressed their approval in their own different ways. When my mother liked something I did, she would hug me and look at me with a warm expression in her eyes. My father would come behind me and gently whack the back of my head three times, saying, “Good, son,” while patting my head.

  As I got pudgier, kids at school started to call me Pufi (“Fatso”).

  Summer vacation at Kiskoros. From left, Kehl bacsi , my aunt Iren; my mother is the second after Iren.

  Chapter Seven

  GYMNASIUM

  FOURTH GRADE was the end of grammar school. Now it was time to decide how and where I would continue my education. Those children who wanted to go on to university typically attended gymnasium, a traditional institution that taught an eight-year curriculum of liberal arts and sciences. About half the kids at the Fasori school went on to gymnasium; the other half went to technical schools that trained them for more specific job-related employment.

  People said that gymnasiums affiliated with a religious order were the better ones. My parents decided to send me to the Evangelikus gymnasium, an institution run by the second largest Protestant branch in Hungary. (Hungary was an overwhelmingly Catholic country, so even a large Protestant branch represented a small minority.) Evangelikus had a very good academic reputation and had the added benefit of being located just a couple of blocks from the Fasori elementary school, within easy walking distance of our home.

  This would be my first experience going to school with non-Jewish kids, but Evangelikus had a reputation for keeping reli- gion to the religious instruction courses and not forcing its beliefs down students' throats. When the Protestant kids attended their religion classes, I would attend Jewish religious instruction along with the other Jewish boys. Other than that, no distinctions were made among the student body.

  I started at Evangelikus in September 1947, shortly after my eleventh birthday. There were a few significant differences between grammar school and gymnasium. For one thing, the student body was all boys. Consequently, I lost all contact with girls my age. I didn't really miss them and soon forgot all about them. The teachers also were all men. There was a seriousness to the classes that distinguished gymnasium from grammar school. Evangelikus was all business.

  All students going to gymnasium wore a special cap. Every gymnasium had its own particular design. The Evangelikus cap was dark blue, peaked at the front and back like a soldier's cap, with a special school badge on it. I was very proud to attend the school and proud of my cap. I wore it all the time.

  One day, I was chasing around on my way home from school with a couple of friends. We were cutting up on the sidewalk near our house when an older boy came by. He was wearing the Evangelikus cap and must have been an upperclassman. He stopped me and, in a very serious tone, told me that as a student at Evangelikus I represented the school wherever I went and that I gave people the wrong impression of the school by behaving like a wild man on the street. I was quite humiliated by this comment and quieted down, at least for the rest of the afternoon.

  Once again, my ears gave me a front-row seat in my classes. My ears still drained and I didn't hear very well, but if I sat in the front row and the teacher stood right in front of me and spoke loudly enough for the whole class to hear, he was loud enough for me to hear him as well. My schoolmates, my par- ents, and my parents' friends already knew to speak louder than normal to me. And according to a theory put forward by Jani, I may even have benefited from my bad hearing. Jani hypothesized that I compensated for my deafness, just as a blind man compensates for the loss of sight, by developing other senses. I had to be quicker at processing nonverbal signs and more attentive to signals, and most important, because I often understood only parts of sentences, I had to exercise my mind constantly. I took it to mean that Jani thought my bad hearing made me smarter. I liked this theory.

  I was a good student. I liked my teachers, I liked my classes, and I liked most of the subjects. We studied Hungarian literature, geography, history, math, and one
foreign language. I chose to study English. I particularly liked my English teacher, Mr. Endrodi. He was an elegant man, always well dressed and neat, with a pleasant, round face. He spoke with great confidence but always had a gentle manner. He impressed me tremendously.

  Even though I had been taking English lessons privately for a couple of years now, I was lackadaisical about studying. But enough had rubbed off so that I made a good start in Mr. En-drodi's class. Because I liked him, I wanted to impress him. That inspired me to do even better, and my performance in English picked up.

  Mr. Endrodi became my ideal. With great disappointment, I realized that I couldn't emulate him in looks, diction, or dress. But I noticed that he signed his name with a special curlicue on the E, so I adapted that curlicue to the G when I signed my name.

  Mr. Endrodi was my favorite teacher, but the others were good, too. They weren't particularly formal, but they expected discipline in class and they usually got it—although not always. Good student though I was, much to my mother's chagrin I remained, as they put it in parent-teacher conferences, “lively.”

  In my mind, I didn't deserve such criticism. I just exchanged an occasional comment with my deskmate—two boys shared a bench and a double desk—or with the boys behind me. My mother thought differently. She thought that I should have left my rambunctious behavior behind in elementary school. Parent-teacher conferences continued to be the same tense events that they had been in elementary school. My grades continued to be the same, too: straight 1s (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being a failing grade) in all the academic classes and 2s in behavior, with the ever-present comment about my lively nature.

  The only class I disliked was religion. I never took to it. It struck me as a bunch of fairy tales, and I resented having to listen to and believe in them. I started pushing back. One time, the teacher was telling us how Joshua stopped the sun during the siege of Jericho. I raised my hand. “Yes, Grof?” (Our teachers always called us by our last names, and for the most part, we called each other by our last names.) As was proper etiquette, I slid out from behind my desk and stood in the aisle to respond.