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| Prologue: Forgetting Budapest | 1 | (16) | |||
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| Acknowledgments | 231 |
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Chapter One
In the taxi to our hotel, all I could think about was that I was in a city where even the cabdrivers spoke Hungarian. Once he found out I spoke the language and had lived in Budapest, our driver started firing questions: Where had I lived, when had I left, how old was I then, did I still have relatives here, how long were we staying? It made me uncomfortable, as if he were grilling me--I couldn't decide whether he was unusually nosy or merely observing some rule of hospitality unknown to me. I answered him in brief phrases, trying at the same time to look at the road we were traveling and to translate his questions for Michael and Daniel. The road from the airport, a stretch of ugly gray asphalt, could have been anywhere were it not for the occasional billboards in Hungarian. Michael and Daniel looked out the window, indifferent. What were they thinking? I wondered. Two weeks in Mom's old country--what a bore? Or what an adventure? I desperately wanted these sons of mine, to whom I had said so little about my childhood, to be interested in the city of my birth. Yet my own feelings were a jumble: excitement to be here, yes, but what else? I tried to muster up a feeling of nostalgia, without success.
As we got closer to the city, I could feel my heart beat faster. What would I remember? I had just turned ten when we left, a chubby little girl with thick braids who read a lot and felt awkward at ballet lessons. It was a whole world I had left behind, sights and sounds and smells that had blended long ago into a single multicolored block. Now I was back, a professor of French literature who could interpret intricate texts by Proust or Balzac but could not tell the difference, in Budapest, between friendly curiosity and invasive nosiness. It was as if a door had shut behind me when I left, sealing the first ten years of my life in an airtight room. For thirty-five years I had managed not to give much thought to the room. What would happen now that I had turned the knob on the door?
"Would you like me to stop at Akácfa utca, so you can see the house where you lived?" It was the driver again, friendly, offering his contribution to my nostalgia. We had reached the city center, strangely quiet since it was a Sunday afternoon and all the stores were closed. There were almost no cars in the streets, and hardly any people on the sidewalks. I saw dark, ornate buildings and trolley tracks: a turn-of-the-century European capital with claims to greatness.
"It's not far out of our way," the driver said. All right, I told him, please drive by Akácfa utca; I'll show it to my kids. He turned onto a broad avenue, reached a corner with a yellow church, and pointed to the right. "There it is, Akácfa utca." Utca means street, fa means tree: Acacia Street. I looked down the street; it seemed anonymous, unfamiliar. I had lived there for ten years, the first decade of my life, and I didn't recognize a thing. The church surprised me, because I had always associated that neighborhood with Jewish things. "I lived at number 59," I told the boys.
The driver swung the car around and headed toward the river.
I have always loved cities with rivers running through them. Budapest is like Rome or Paris, a great city defined by its river and bridges. We crossed a bridge above the grayish-green Danube. On both sides of us we could see other bridges in the distance. "They were all bombed during the war," the driver said. The one we were on was called Freedom Bridge; it had trolley tracks down the middle.
The Gellért Hotel rose before us, its stone terraces and tall windows facing the river. A grand hotel, the Gellért, from another day. My mother had told me about its swimming pools, a place to go on fancy dates before the war. Now, like the whole city, it was slightly the worse for wear, but you couldn't tell that from the outside. "Tip generously," my uncle Lester had told me before we left. "When you get to the hotel, give something to the man at the desk." My uncle knew the Gellért well--he had returned to Budapest almost every summer for more than thirty years. "You'll never see better theater than in Budapest," he told me each time I saw him. Feeling awkward and self-conscious, I slipped two bills into the registration clerk's hand. He took them with a practiced gesture, acknowledging the gift with a slight smile. Whether for that or some other reason, we ended up in a huge room with a large balcony directly facing the Freedom Bridge. Stepping out onto the balcony, I noticed a grassy knoll next to the riverbank, with a statue on it: a monument to the Soviet army, a heroic soldier with arms upraised.
The next morning we took a formal tour of the city, complete with tourist bus and bilingual guide. This was highly unusual, since I never take such tours anywhere. Thinking back on it, I speculate about why I chose the most impersonal, most ritualized way to introduce my sons to the city of my birth. Did I want to affirm my own estrangement, confirm my feeling that I didn't remember anything? Or was it a native pride that pushed me, as if I wanted my sons to learn from an objective source the greatness of this capital, the beauty and variety of its sights? We trudged dutifully after our guide, an attractive woman in a red sundress, as she led us through the Church of King Mátyás, one of Hungary's great monarchs who reigned in the fifteenth century; after that she took us to the Basilica of Saint Stephen (too big and new for my taste) on the other side of the river. From the basilica we drove up People's Republic Avenue to Heroes' Square, in whose center is a procession of immense sculptures of men on horseback. Built in 1896 in honor of Hungary's thousandth birthday, our guide told us. Now the square was used for all the big parades; off to one side, barely visible, stood a massive statue of Lenin.
Our guide pointed out other sights from the bus, instructing us to be sure to go on the tour of the Parliament buildings and to visit the museum up in the castle, from whose terrace one could get an excellent view of the Parliament and the river and its bridges. The Chain Bridge in particular, the very first bridge built between Pest and Buda in the mid-nineteenth century, looked splendid from up there, she assured us. But Michael and Daniel said categorically, No more tour buses.
In the afternoon we discovered the Gellért's open-air pools, set in terraced grounds on the hillside. That's where my mother must have gone on her fancy dates, amid the inlaid colored tiles and smiling statues and stone vases. The main terrace was covered with deck chairs, almost all occupied by people talking loudly to their neighbors in Hungarian. Looking at those voluble, gesticulating men and women enjoying themselves in the sun, I recalled the lazy afternoons of my last summer in Hungary. We spent July and most of August of that year at my aunt's summer house near Budapest, on the shore of the Danube. The house was set in a large garden full of fruit trees and berry bushes: sour cherries that made your mouth pucker, thick clusters of gooseberries and red currants, sweet, fat apricots whose pits I broke open to reveal an edible almondlike center--all those riches reminded me of the fairy tales I loved, in which children in a magic forest find gingerbread and candy on the trees.
Every afternoon that summer, we went to the baths in a nearby village whose name means Star Mountain. The baths were a fancy establishment boasting three swimming pools and terraced lawns. Next to one of the pools was a café shaded by tall trees and sun umbrellas, serving cold drinks and sandwiches. There my parents sat with their friends, discussing the day's news and playing gin rummy while we children swam and jumped off the diving board feet first, noisily, over and over. Every once in a while I would run and peek at my father's cards, draping a wet arm around his neck and whispering to him self-importantly about the game. I loved hugging him. He was the handsomest man in that whole crowd, I told myself, with his high forehead and soft brown eyes, his rugged face transformed by a smile.
"Attention! The waves will start in three minutes. Attention, please! The waves will start in three minutes." The voice on the loudspeaker, imperious, broke into my thoughts and the conversations around us. Michael and Daniel immediately perked up, wanting to know what was going on. I realized the large pool in front of us was a wave pool, something I had never seen outside Hungary. Working in mysterious ways, a machine built into the pool churns up artificial waves for several minutes at a time. One of the pools at Star Mountain had been a wave pool--they would turn it on for fifteen minutes every hour, announcing it on the loudspeaker. No sooner had I explained this system to the boys than they were in the pool, delighted, standing immobile, waiting for the first wave to hit them. They jumped into it as if it were the ocean in Wellfleet, then came up sputtering, their mouths full of chlorinated water. Another try, successful this time, and they were launched: in they jumped, up they bobbed, over and over. "Hey, Mom! Come on in!" Watching their faces as they called to me, I had the feeling that this was their first truly impressive experience since we arrived in Budapest. I went into the pool and let them drag me under the next wave.
After that we had our routine: mornings doing what Mom wanted, afternoons at the wave pool, preferably for three or four sessions. One afternoon I left the boys by the pool and went shopping on my own. We had seen stores selling embroidered tablecloths and peasant blouses, but they were not what I wanted. I headed for a bookstore near Petöfi Sándor Street, named after the romantic poet who lost his life in the 1848 revolution. I bought a two-volume edition of Petöfi's complete works ("On your feet, Magyar, the homeland is calling you!" was the only line of Hungarian poetry I remembered); but the book I was really looking for was a children's novel by Ferenc Molnár, The Boys from Paul Street . When I first read that novel in Budapest, Molnár was a famous playwright living in New York, the author of the play the musical Carousel was based on. But I knew nothing about him other than his name on the cover of a book that made me cry and dream and imagine myself a heroic young boy fighting battles over a playground near a pond. The boys from Paul Street are a gang of adolescents warring with another gang over their turf. The story takes place around the turn of the century; the boys are not modern hoodlums with guns or knives, just old-fashioned schoolboys who fight with "bombs" made of sand (no rocks allowed). Still, theirs is a true war in the passions it arouses, and one of them even dies in heroic self-sacrifice: he spies on the opposing gang, jumps into the pond to avoid being seen, and stays in the cold water for several hours to help his friends--then dies of pneumonia.
Maybe because it was one of the last books I read before leaving Hungary, maybe also because its story had so much to do with home, and war, and death and loss, this novel stayed in my mind long after I had forgotten almost everything else I had read in Hungarian. Never mind that all the main characters were boys, I identified with them more memorably than I had ever done with a heroine. I had sometimes wondered, over the years, whether that book could still be bought in Budapest. Or was it no more than a fragment of the past, unreachable? Now I held it in my hand, a cheap paperback edition with a colorful cover, a children's classic. On the back of the title page, the original copyright date: 1907.
Over the next few afternoons by the wave pool, I succeeded in reading the book. It felt strange struggling over pages I had read with ease as a child. Curious existence, I told myself--professor in Boston, fourth-grader in Budapest. I tried to relive the emotions I had felt as a nine-year-old. It didn't work; no Time Recaptured here. But I did make one discovery: although I had cried over the death of the young sacrificial hero, it was not him I had identified with as a child. He was small and frail and caught cold easily. I took pride in being sturdy, in excellent health. I had identified with the leader of the gang, a tall, intelligent boy who survives.
As I was growing up, I often heard about my uncle Izsó, one of my mother's two bachelor brothers who were sent into forced labor in Ukraine around 1943. They had lived with us, and were both very fond of me. The younger one, Lester, showed up on the doorstep one morning in the spring of 1945 after our own return home, wearing a tattered army jacket and a week's beard, smiling broadly. Izsó, the older one, never came back. For years afterward my grandmother cried over her lost son. The one who had survived would shake his head and sigh: "Poor Izsó, he probably starved to death. He was too good. If only he had been with me, I could have saved him." Before, I had had three uncles (one in America). Now I had only two. What was the connection, I wondered, between goodness and survival?
After a few days of sightseeing, I decided it was time to visit my old neighborhood. The boys loaded their cameras. We got on the streetcar in front of the Gellért, crossed the Freedom Bridge, and stayed on until the last stop. Walking for a while up People's Republic Avenue, we reached a busy intersection next to a leafy square named in honor of the composer Franz Liszt (Liszt Ferenc to Hungarians--last name first is the rule). A large, ornate building at the other end of the square turned out to be the Music Academy. It pleased me to have lived near music and greenery.
A short block away, we found Acacia Street and started our walk toward number 59. Everything looked alien on that gray, narrow, painfully run-down street. When we reached the house, we crossed to the other side to get a better view of it. The street level looked terrible: a heavy cement facing marred the facade, clashing with the stucco blocks above it. A large photography business occupied the whole width of the building and part of the next building as well. Above the front door, a large black-and-white sign proclaimed FOTO OPTIKA.
"This is not how it used to be," I told the boys, though I couldn't say just what had been there before. Looking up, I recognized the balcony next to our dining room, with its wrought iron railings. The house had only three balconies, arranged in a triangle; they stood out on the facade like signs of privilege. I had always felt a bit smug about our balcony. I pointed it out to my sons: that's where I had often played, looking down through the spaces between the railings at the people on the sidewalk. That's where we had set up the sukkah every year, the wooden hut used on Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, hanging homemade garlands of shiny colored paper and dried fruits and flowers on its walls in honor of the harvest.
Inside the building, the oblong courtyard looked familiar. How many games of tag I had played there after school! Its ground was cobblestoned, and there were bits of grass growing in the cracks. Standing in the center, surrounded by the wrought iron railings of the floors above, I had the feeling of being in an intricate cage. The wide stone staircase near the entrance also evoked memories. When I was in first grade, coming home from school I once saw a man on the landing who waited for me to approach, then quick as a flash opened his pants and pulled out something fleshy and pink. I ran past him, suffocating. By the time my mother and I returned to look for him, he was gone.
"No flasher here today," said Michael as we climbed up the three flights. We took a moment to catch our breath, and then I knocked on the door of the corner apartment. The door looked strangely out of place, but this was the right apartment. My heart was beating fast as we waited; after a few minutes, an elderly couple appeared. I explained who I was and asked if they would let me show the apartment to my children. "Come in," they said. We stepped into what used to be a large vestibule, with the kitchen off to the right. Now it was smaller, and to the right there was a wall. They had divided the apartment, the couple explained, giving part of it to their married daughter. That accounted for the strange shift in the front door--there were now two front doors, one to their apartment and one to hers.
We crossed the vestibule and entered the dining room, with its french doors leading to the balcony. There had been a large, heavy square table in the middle, which could seat more than twelve people for a seder. Now that space was empty. The grand piano had stood off to the right, and in the corner had been the green ceramic fireplace rising to the ceiling. Now there was a metal stove there. I asked about the green fireplace. "Yes, it was there at one time, but we had it replaced. This one heats better." They had been living in the apartment about twenty-five years. I thought of asking them to let us step out on the balcony but decided against it. Somehow, despite their friendliness, I felt we were intruders. Besides, there was nothing there of the home I had known. I thanked them with all the polite phrases I could muster as we left. Then my sons took pictures of me leaning over the railing opposite the front door, looking down into the courtyard.
Should I say I felt disappointed by this visit? No, I felt detached, like a tourist. I could not connect, in that moment, with the person I had been or with the meaning that home had once possessed for me.
Outside, we continued our walk. I tried to orient myself among that web of streets, where most of my daily life for ten years had unfolded: Dob Street, Klauzal Street, Kis Diófa Street, Kazinczy Street. The names sounded familiar, like a song learned in childhood, but the visual memory was gone. I remembered the synagogue on Kazinczy Street, in whose courtyard stood the chupah , the prescribed wedding canopy for Orthodox weddings that I had passed on my way to school every day. On ordinary days the framework of wrought iron remained uncovered, but for weddings it was covered with a roof of some silky material. In 1946 my second-grade teacher, a tall young woman with long brown hair, got married, and I was one of the pupils she chose as bridesmaids. I recently found a picture of the wedding in a box of old photos from my mother. I'm wrapped in a white fur coat that's too big for me, obviously borrowed. My hair is loose, as on festive occasions, with a large sausage curl on top and a white ribbon. The bride is also wearing a fur coat, open over her dark dress. She stands next to the groom under the canopy, surrounded by a crowd of men in black hats. The scene now strikes me as forlorn and poor, marked by the aftermath of war. Yet in the photo I look proud and happy, like someone starring in a grand event.
I turned six the summer after the war, just in time to start first grade at the normal age--as if all that had happened the previous year had been no more than a vivid nightmare, or one of the scary movies I loved and dreaded. My grandmother--small, round, vain, meddlesome, hovering--watched me leave for school every morning from the balcony above the street and waited there for my return at 1:00. If I was late, dawdling with the other girls, she would get anxious, then angry. One day when I had dawdled longer than usual (we were talking about sex), she scolded me loudly: she had been about to call the police when I showed up. I, big mouth, told her to stop acting like a policeman herself. Did she punish me for that freshness? No, she told the story of my clever repartee for years, to friends and family, anyone who would listen. "Clearly the child's a genius." That's how legends are born. That's why I forgave her all her meddling, because she loved me so much.
Each day after lunch, I would retire to the small desk in my room and open my primer. Learning to read was even better than noodles with plum jam, the most exciting, most deeply satisfying food I had ever tasted. The primer had a shiny hard cover. Inside, every page featured a particular letter or combination, in alphabetical order. The "star" letter was centered at the top of the page, very big, in color; below it a line of syllables, then a few lines of short words, then increasingly longer words down to the bottom. Throughout, the star letter was printed in color, so you always knew what you were learning. C (like the ts in "fits"), a big purple letter: ci, ca; cica, cat. Cs (like the ch in "macho"), in bright yellow: csi, csa; csak , only, kicsi , small, csillag , star. Sz (like the s in "sing"), a fiery red: szó , word, szólni , to speak to, szótár , dictionary. S (like sh ), apple green: sok , much, soha , never, mese , story. Zs (like the j in French "je"), royal blue: zsu, zsa, zsi ; Zsuzsi, my name, Zsuzsika, its diminutive, a term of endearment, what my mother and grandmother called me.
I would spend hours at my desk, feeling happy as the afternoon wore on and I had to light the lamp. I've often heard people say Hungarian is an impossible language, too difficult for anyone to master who was not born into it. True, I was born into it, but Hungarian seemed to me the most wonderful, logical tongue in the world. Every consonant, alone or in combination with another, every vowel with or without an accent, has one sound only, no matter where it occurs. To learn to read, all you have to do is learn the sounds and put them together; after that you can read anything. But English, oh, English! Bough, ought, rough, though. So, sow, sew . Same letters, different sounds, same sound, different letters. How does any child here learn to read?
From the synagogue we went to visit Zsazsa Néni, my mother's aunt by marriage, who lived in the neighborhood. I had never heard of her until I began preparing for our trip--she was the widow of my mother's uncle, my grandfather's brother. My uncle Lester had given me some money to take to her; I had called her in the morning to say we were coming.
The woman who opened the door for us was tiny, spry, neatly dressed in a skirt and blouse, her dyed brown hair carefully combed. She was eighty-three but looked twenty years younger. "Zsuzsika! I've heard so much about you and your boys. Welcome!" she exclaimed. Only family called me Zsuzsika. I hugged her thin body, and so did the boys. We had wondered to ourselves how we should greet her, but now it seemed obvious. She led us into her living room, small and dark but very clean, furnished in what looked like art deco furniture from the time of her marriage. We sat on stiff chairs while she served us cold drinks and cookies. "Tell the boys to eat more," she urged me. I translated; the boys ate more.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BUDAPEST DIARY by SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN. Copyright © 1996 by Susan Rubin Suleiman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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