Best European Fiction 2013 (18 page)

When the money ran out, she told me, they presented the violin to a poor, blind child genius. In view of that, it’s surprising that she never showed the least interest in music later. Might she have taken offence at the hand fate had dealt her? Not one concert, not one visit to the Opera. The program of classical selections on the radio at lunchtime on Sunday—it was always on while we were eating—represented the entire musical diet of the family. Maybe that was because my father had absolutely no interest in music. From childhood on I would pick at the keys of my godmother’s wonderful Steinway grand—a present from the Regent Horthy—and was strongly drawn to music, but year after year they kept rejecting my plea for lessons, dismissing it as a passing, infantile fancy. It was the only thing they ever refused me. Even today I can’t forgive them for it.

But what I chiefly desire is to have her tell me stories: I want her to answer my questions, to annoy her by making provocative remarks, to correct her, instruct her, occasionally to cause her overt pain, to punish her, to let her know that she is my intellectual inferior, to confuse her and mock her and, immediately after having done so, somehow to convey to her how helplessly mortified I feel, to show that I know I have hurt her; but I can’t quite say it, cannot quite bring myself to apologize, not even to mention the thing that continues mournfully to rattle around inside me like a sheet of newspaper caught on the railings. Not even when she appears to have put it all behind her. Even today when I dream of those things as have passed between us, I experience such a sharp pang of conscience that it feels like a pain in my chest and I wake up in a sweat. But she is capable of retaliating, not out of revenge, but in self-defence, and she can upset me too as when, for example, I ask some question about the family and she retorts: fat lot you cared about the family back then! What did her aristocratic ancestry—which is mine too, by the way—the aristocracy of which at a certain time in my life I was so deeply and genuinely ashamed, those historical names, matter to me then.

I wasn’t even interested in the legendary patriotic general who was executed by the Habsburgs with twelve others at Arad in 1849. And grandmother, who was a baroness, she couldn’t help it, what was my problem with her? Today, grandfather’s ornate family tree, hand-painted in bright colors on parchment with all the coats of arms going back six generations, hangs on the wall of my flat along with pictures of other famous ancestors.

Right now she happens to be cooking, cooking for me in that kitchen, and as she does so, she is half turned to me, in a slightly demonstrative pose as I see it, while merrily chattering on, a pose in which there is no little pride. Her tall slender figure is an elegant exclamation mark in the humble kitchen: see! I can cook! She wants to prove—she is always trying to prove something—that she has learned to cook, and not just any old way. Before, she could manage—when she had to—a soup or two, semolina pudding, an omelette, a slice of veal, a bit of French toast, and not much more. She tied a green-and-white checked apron over her cream-colored silk blouse, her string of pearls (a cheap yet pretty piece of bijouterie, the real thing having vanished into the Soviet Union), her smart beige herringbone skirt, her stockings, her elegant, narrow but, by now, not-too-high-heeled shoes.

She wore these things until it was time for bed (having discarded the apron of course), wearing the same clothes she wore to the office, not even removing her shoes, which is the first thing I do as soon as I get in, here, as I do at home. Or rather there, as at my home. She can’t understand why the shoes bother me.

Slippers are for wearing only at night before bed, or on waking up. During the day it’s so
non-soigné
, she says, Hungaricising the words to sound:
unszoányírt
. I hate this verbal monstrosity with its German prefix and French descriptor domesticated for home use: it looks even worse written down, something like a mole cricket.

I had heard it in childhood from her sisters and my cousins. It must have originated in Arad, presumably inherited from a series of German and French governesses. Naturally, I tick her off, not for the first time, gently but with an obviously annoying superiority, and tell her how many different ways there might be of conveying the same idea in Hungarian, so there is no reason to use a foreign word, especially not one so horrible. She is offended, of course, but does not show it; I am sorry, of course, but I don’t show it. We fall silent. We often find conversation difficult in any case or stick to small talk. We are not particularly talkative people, either of us. Not with each other, at least.

The veal with caper sauce turns out to be perfect. I had never tasted it before. Back home whole generations had grown up never having heard of capers. I must have eaten one last when I was a child, when it shimmered in the middle of a ring of anchovy, like the eye of some sea creature: that’s how I remember it. The flavor is familiar and yet entirely new. She is watching me to see how I react to her cooking. Do I like the capers, she asks. I don’t let her take pleasure in it: so what if you can get capers in America, you can get anything here we can’t get at home.

Occasionally you can get bananas at home now, I answer on the spur of the moment with Lilliputian self-importance, and there were oranges too just before Christmas. One had to queue up for them, of course, I add for the sake of objectivity. Really? she asks in a slightly disappointed voice. In my opinion she should feel cheered by this. Could she have forgotten what a banana or orange means to us there? We carry on eating. I sense that the caper sauce, the grilled veal, and the whole baked potato in aluminium foil was a long planned-for surprise, one of many, intended for me. It’s a real American thing. Later she lists all the other dishes she can cook, just you see. And it turns out that in her free time she sometimes bakes cakes too, for Hungarian acquaintances, and acquaintances of acquaintances, bakes them to order, for money. So far I had known only—and that was because she told me in a letter—that she occasionally babysat, chiefly for Hungarians but also for some American families, and that she’d had some amusing evenings with naughty children who did not speak Hungarian, who might, for example, lock her into the bathroom for hours. Most recently she made ten dollars baking a huge Sacher torte, she proudly tells me. She buys the ingredients and calculates her fee, which, it seems, is the going rate in Hungarian circles, makes up the bill according to the cost of raw materials and often delivers the cake directly to the house. It sometimes happens, she tells me, giggling, that strangers offer her tips. Does she accept them? Of course, why not? I have to take a deep breath. These earnings, taken together with the modest income she has scraped together, have paid for the parcels of clothes, chosen with exquisite taste, that would arrive at my home on the Groza Embankment, and later for children’s toys and clothes at the flat in Vércse Street. And clearly my airfare too, as well as the ample pocket money she has been giving me while here in New York, come from the delicious torte as well as the soiled diapers. The People’s Republic had, somewhat unwillingly, allowed me five dollars of hard currency for my three-month visit. It is my mother who keeps me; a rather disturbing feeling at age thirty-four. She bakes four or five different sorts of cake, following the recipe in the book of course, and all eminently successful bar the caramel-topped Dobos layer-cake, she tells me.

Caramel is hard to handle. She pronounces it
kaahraahmell
, with wide open “aahs,” not long, in the regional Palóc mode, but quite short, like the German “a.” This irritates me no end, I don’t know why. It has been aah, aah, aah all the way—
aahkaahdémia, aahgresszív, aahttitúd,
right down to
kaahpri
(capers) and
kaahraahmell
—ever since I can remember. And
maahszek
too, the colloquial word for semi-private undertakings. This time I don’t stop myself pointing out that this is not a foreign word, but a Hungarian portmanteau, combining “ma,” pronounced “muh,” from
magán
(private) and szek from
szektor
(sector). It is a form of what we call an acronym, I add; adds the conceited, repulsive litterateur, her son. She does not answer. She has no counter-argument. She carries on saying
maahszek
and
aahkaahdémia
.

We eat. As a child I used to enjoy watching her as she adjusted the food on her plate with great topographic precision, shifting it here and there with careful, tiny, sweeping movements of knife and fork, like the director on the set of a film, arranging the shots and instructing the cast before rolling the camera. She pushes the meat to the right side of the plate, the garnish being neatly separated and ranged on the left. Turning the plate one way or the other is common, an unspoken taboo. She cuts and spears a small piece from the meat, loads the appropriate amount of garnish on the round back of the fork, and so carries it to her mouth. This is a far from simple operation, as may be demonstrated now, since the caper seeds would drop from the fork were they not perfectly balanced there and flattened together a little, if the speared piece of meat or potato did not block their escape route, and if she did not lean progressively closer and lower over her plate with every bite so that they might find their way into her mouth all the sooner. When the garnish includes peas, which means that only a few peas succeed in remaining on the curve of the fork behind the meat, that is to say leaving a surfeit of peas on the plate, she is forced to consume extra forkfuls of peas only. But she has a strategy for coping with that too. Using the knife she spears a few peas that will support a few slightly squashed ones behind them.

I have seen others deploy this technique but while they shift and prod the peas about, creating a mess on the plate, she manages to eat them in an undeniably elegant and distinguished manner. It is all done with great skill and grace. She divides the meat, the garnish, and the salad so that everything disappears from the plate at precisely the same time, every piece of meat with its due portion of garnish and vice versa. She never leaves any food on the plate. Nor do I. She has lived through the meager rationing and starvation of two world wars, I only one.

Any sauce or juice left on the flat dish, however runny, is conveyed to her mouth with the fork. One simply can’t imagine her using a spoon. She leans forward and makes rapid spooning movements with the fork, turning it up a little so there’s still a moment before dripping and thus she can safely steer it into her mouth. This spectacular technique requires close attention and speed: it demands a lot of time and energy, but it works. She turns the obvious pointlessness of it into a display of elegance. I eat the same way myself, ever since being allowed to dine with the adults, as did the German
Fräulein
, the whole act having made a great impression on her. But to the two of us it is like a private second language, and while we often make mistakes, it is the equivalent of a mother tongue to her, it is what she grew up doing, quite possibly never seeing any other way of eating, only this. My father, whose education had been under quite different circumstances, ate differently. That which could not be speared, he swept into the hollow of the fork and stuffed into his mouth. If sauce remained on the plate and he liked it he was quite happy to spoon it up, if he didn’t like it he simply left it. If there were no guests he would dip his bread in, sometimes on the end of the fork but sometimes with his hands! He was allowed to. He was the only one. In my first days at the university canteen I was laughed out of countenance as I was unmasked as a trueblooded bourgeois leftover from the old regime when, out of habit, I started employing my mother’s technique. The class-alien aspect of the art must have been painfully obvious, a blind man could see it, you didn’t have to be a Marxist-Leninist to recognize it. Ever since then, when it comes to eating, my strategies are somewhat eclectic, though lately, since I have been dining alone, I have fallen into decadent ways; she out there, on the other hand, alone, is almost certain to have continued using her fork to spoon the sauce till the day she died.

Silence. She clears the table. She starts on the washing-up while I watch, she having refused my help. Her hair still looks chestnut brown and though this is merely a matter of appearances, there is no gray there. Her face is animated, refined, gentle, very beautiful, her eyes warm though she will soon be sixty.

I understand why in the thirties the Budapest tabloid press referred to her as “one of the most beautiful women in town.” The ritual of the nightly removal of makeup—though, of course, I am not watching this from bed now as I used to but walking up and down behind her, chatting to her, recounting what I did with my day in New York—is quite unchanged right down to the “shaking lotion” and the same old movements, it’s only the lovely antique mirrors that are missing.

The face that looks back at her from the cheap mirror now is still a feminine face, all attention: she can still take delight in life, is still curious, still wants to see everything. There is no trace in her of the expression you catch on other déclassé immigrants, the cynical hanger-on’s don’t-blame-me look. She has not walled herself in, become a solitary, she has not been distorted by the enormity and the harsh bustle of the alien world that now surrounds her. She is just the same as she had been in prison when sharing a cell with eight others. Having made subtle enquiries and going by what is around her, I know she is alone, though I had hoped she might have a man in her life. There is no way of asking her this directly, as it is something we never speak about. Grandmother brought up her three girls, she being the youngest of them, to avoid even the most harmless romantic literature, even that in which the attractive, and in every respect impeccable, young suitor makes so bold as merely to touch the innocent maiden’s hand in the long awaited last chapter, at the point of engagement. She would glue the last pages together or simply cut them out with scissors, believing such episodes to be unseemly. My mother addressed the issue in less radical fashion, in the way that best suited her: it simply didn’t exist. My sexual education at home consisted of a single short sentence that I first heard at the age of about four or five when the words first issued from her lips at a time when I lay in bed with some infection, possibly influenza: You are not to play with your pee-pee. That was it. My father said even less. He said nothing. So I became an autodidact in the subject.