Exodus: A memoir (8 page)

When we got back on the road, light rain was starting to fall. It became torrents as we raced along the flat, unchanging territory. Disheveled myrtles swayed precariously in the onslaught. Here and there the sun would streak through a tear in the clouds.
Finally, we emerged into a sun-dappled mist, and an enormous, perfectly formed rainbow arced over the road in front of us.

“Look, a rainbow,” I exclaimed in German.

“Ah! A good sign, no?”

“When I was a child, I was taught that the rainbow was a gift from God to Noah. He promised never to unleash his rage onto the world again like he had in the great flood, but instead would send a warning sign for the people to repent. The rainbow is supposed to be a warning—if you see one, you’re supposed to take it as a sign to repent for your sins.”

Zoltán seemed perplexed. “But doesn’t it make more sense for the rainbow to be a symbol for hope?”

“I guess we’ll see,” I said to myself in English, wondering if I’d look back at this moment as portentous.

We entered the Szatmár-Bereg region, an area that had once been part of Transylvania, now a poor and rural place. By the time we arrived in Nyíregyháza, whatever cooling-off the rain had provided was gone. Only a few damp spots remained on concrete structures, and steam rose from the asphalt. Once upon a time, gracious town houses and courtyard apartments had lined these orderly boulevards, but no sign remained of the former elegance that my grandmother had described. Nyíregyháza seemed economically depressed, barely recovered from the communist regime that had fallen more than twenty years past. There had been no revolution here, no revival—the city seemed to have satisfied itself with a few new coats of paint.

“For the young people who grow up in this region, Nyíregyháza’s college is the only opportunity to broaden one’s horizons, to learn a field or skill that can expand the number of possibilities in their future,” Zoltán said.

The center of Nyíregyháza featured a smattering of stucco houses with clay-pot roofs, but mostly there were the ever-present communist apartment blocks, their cracked concrete facades now done up in cheerful Mediterranean colors as if in rebellion.

Zoltán told me that the college campus had been awarded a prize for excellence from a global architectural foundation in 2009. And yet, its buildings, although new, had been erected in a similar Spartan style. It was as if the aesthetic here had been permanently altered by the communist regime; the buildings were squat, functional squares around a voluminous courtyard.

“So, do many people come through here?” I asked as we pulled up alongside the campus.

“Not as many as we would like. And even the ones who do, they don’t all graduate. Perhaps it’s a problem with laziness”—and then he corrected his vocabulary—“no, I mean, motivation.”

“But why would they not be motivated?” I asked. “Especially if this is the only way to something better.”

“A lot of the students who do very well here don’t know what to do with their education once they’ve finished. Some of them are lucky and get jobs, but there aren’t enough jobs for everyone, and they are competing with students from bigger cities. It’s even harder to get work outside of Hungary, unless they’re brought into the factories in Austria and Slovakia to provide cheap labor, as they work for forints. Those employers take advantage of the poor exchange rate and pay Hungarians according to the income scale here, whereas the other employees make three or four times as much.”

We stopped in front of the college guesthouse, and then I checked in with the receptionist in the lobby.

“If you get hungry or thirsty, there are vending machines
through that corridor,” Zoltán said, pointing. “Otherwise, Angelika, the interpreter, will come get you from your room first thing in the morning.”

I wrote my name and passport number on the sheet the receptionist handed to me, and she gave me a key card. I entered my room and appraised the two twin beds and their standard hospital sheeting with relief. I hadn’t been sure what to expect. The air conditioner failed to circulate anything other than hot air, but a shower room complete with multiple jets and spouts that had to be manipulated with a remote control surprised me. I might have preferred a working air conditioner, and managed even with a French bathtub arrangement—the one where you shower by using a trickling hose extension from the tub’s faucet. I threw open the large windows that looked out into the main courtyard of the campus. Tall, sturdy-looking trees with thick boughs obscured my view of the ground, but I could hear the idle chatter of students floating up toward me. The air seemed to enter the room almost reluctantly, bringing with it the faint odor of cigarette smoke and damp concrete.

I slept the sleep of the dead, regardless of the heat. I was awakened by a mourning dove burbling outside my window. For a moment before I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in Brooklyn. I recalled waking up early on July mornings in my grandparents’ house to that same sound of mourning doves cooing in the tree limbs level to my window, the last refreshing breeze of the night wafting into my room. Then I squinted into the bright early light, remembering where I was. I sat up immediately, walking over to the open
windows to glimpse the foreign world in which I’d arrived and confirm it was still real.

The quad was empty except for a gardener who was trimming grass that had grown into the walkways. I could hear the faint buzzing sound of his electric cutter. I decided to explore the grounds while it was still quiet, before Angelika came to get me, so I took a shower and put on shorts and a T-shirt. In the antiseptic lobby I found a vending machine that served up every kind of Italian coffee drink for ninety forints, the approximate equivalent of forty cents. I could control the amount of sugar, the ratio of milk, and the potency of the espresso shot. My cappuccino dispensed itself in an individual plastic cup that popped out of a spout, followed by a plastic stirrer that dropped down into the hot foaming liquid. I lifted the cup to my nose and inhaled deeply. Coffee did not smell like this in the States, with that faint underlying note of almost-burnt caramel.

“
Jó reggelt
,” I said to the guards as I passed them in the corridor. They smiled and replied with “Good morning,” nodding their heads in an old-fashioned gesture of respect. I could feel their curious gaze follow me out the door. I had gathered by now that American visitors were rare in this part of the country. Before I left, I had tried to find a travel guide, but the one book I’d found that covered all of Hungary and not just Budapest had skimmed over this region, implying that it was impoverished and seamy, unsafe for the average tourist. I was lucky to be the recipient of the college’s hospitality; now I was keenly aware of how lost I would have been here on my own.

It was a humid morning, the kind that started out just bearable and turned positively ovenlike by 8 a.m. The sky reminded me of the clouds in classical paintings; it was as if someone had taken a
paintbrush and dipped it into the fresh white paint on the canvas, blurring the edges of the clouds into off-white and pale gray smears. They were not like American clouds, which was the first thing I had noticed about Hungary. It had an old, classical sky.

We had humid summers in Brooklyn, too, although it usually didn’t get quite so bad in June. My grandmother had always been particularly good at handling the heat, refusing to turn on our air-conditioning units until it became positively unbearable. It was not until I reached Nyíregyháza that I understood why she was so unfazed. It felt like the muggy haze of a thousand summers had been trapped here on the plains, the mist collecting in layers.

Outside, two ancient gingko trees flanked the entrance to the building. Up close, their leaves weighed tremulously under drops of dew the size of nickels. Every so often, a branch would shake in the breeze, and the dewdrops would quiver and slide along the surface of the leaves, righting themselves eventually when the breeze died. Along the paths carved out between the lush gardens and lawns were the acacia trees my grandmother had spoken of to me so fondly, their dainty, fernlike leaves gently filtering the sun so that it dappled the grass beneath in lacy patterns.

Here were all the plants of her childhood, some of which she had tried to cultivate in our little backyard garden, and as I walked around the campus, I began to recognize some shrubs and flowers with joy. These were no English gardens at the college. These were the kind of gardens you might imagine had grown wild here and only been tamed, just barely, as an afterthought. Bushes and plants grew riotously into one another’s territory, and the grass in between was twice as tall as grass was usually allowed to grow in America. Willows and poplars competed for space, fat lavender shrubs lined the pathway, and tendrils of creeping fig wound their
way around them. I heard a mourning dove gurgle throatily on the branch above me. The atmosphere was lush and fragrant, the sun was already hot on my skin; I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to preserve the moment into an individually packaged memory, complete with vivid sensory details. It seems funny now, how we are never really in control of the moments that do stand out later, with their smells and sounds so immediate and evocative. I recalled another moment then, instead—one that I had made no effort to retain.

My grandmother may have grown the only real garden in pre-hipster Brooklyn. It was the early 1990s, and most people had cemented over their backyards to keep away the weeds. She had made an agreement with the neighbors on either side of us: she would take care of the little plots of land behind their houses if they, the owners, allowed her to plant whatever she desired there. And so she did, growing strawberries in the damp, rich soil that lay just under the thick refuge of ivy filtering all that wonderful light that hit the back of our brownstone in the afternoons. She planted fat pink climbing roses so that they used the chain-link fence marking the perimeter of the yard as a trellis; the thorny stems climbed higher each year, inextricably intertwined with the metal. Crocuses and daffodils came up in late winter, and gorgeously colored tulips popped up in clusters in early spring, followed closely by brilliant blue irises and delicate lilies of the valley.

She had a real eye for landscaping—it wasn’t just haphazard with her. The garden was divided into three rectangular sections, each delineated by carefully trimmed white-edged Swedish ivy
and bordered on the corners with broad-leafed hostas. Slabs of rock were laid in between the sections and at the borders to create a walking path, and little tufts of moss grew between the rocks. It was a magical place, so well cared for that it gave back generously and graciously each year. I had read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic by then, and begun to pretend that it was my own secret garden. When I stood among the rustling leaves and smelled the delicate fragrance of the flowers, the incongruent urban cacophony was muted and remote, the sounds of honking cars and droning airplanes softened by wind-tossed stems and whispering petals. The ivy beds were like cushions that absorbed and suffocated the ugly sound of the city. In my imagination, it was as if invisible walls had gone up around the garden, and I had fallen, like Alice in Wonderland, into another plane of existence.

Every year, catalogs would arrive from Holland, offering nothing but tulip bulbs, and my grandmother and I would pore over the varieties and talk about which ones we might like to try. We’d survey the potted African violets on the windowsill to see if they were ready to be transplanted, but we’d leave the geranium cuttings until summer. There were always exciting plans to be made in the spring, and a summer of surprise growth to look forward to.

One morning in 1999, my grandmother and I went downstairs to check on the plants, and I watched as she fingered a strong-looking sapling that had sprung from the middle of the garden, just past the line of shade cast by the porch overhead.

“What is it?” I asked, thinking it was something she had planted last year, wondering if perhaps we could expect another rosebush.

“I made a mistake,” she said, looking crestfallen. “I thought it was just a weed.”