The County of Birches (10 page)

*   *   *

We were in a little car, hurtling past windbreaks on a highway. I was sandwiched between my sister and my father, conveyed into the countryside away from everything familiar. The sensation of being propelled against my will was as strange to me and as wild as I would find the ride, in years to come, in a Canadian amusement park, blasting around and around so fast my teeth were ground together. My mother's food packets were tucked inside my father's pockets. My mother had stood in her apron on the street, waving good-bye.

Apu liked to tell Lili stories about his life before the war on his family's country estate. Sometimes I caught references to the tobacco plantation and the horse-drawn carriages. When I heard him mention crop rotation, I imagined the fields spinning like the arms of the windmill in one of my picture books—one year up, one year down. Lili and I grew to imagine all that was good and beautiful to have risen out of his family's turf. The metre-long braided loaves of
challah
from my grandmother's kitchen, and tables set for twelve, sometimes twenty. Apu said his family had grown as rich and bountifully as the yields that fed and clothed them. They had lived on the land and nurtured it as lovingly as their offspring for three generations. These stories were part of the climate of our Budapest flat. Lili and I were accustomed to them. They had filtered into us like rain soaks a plant, and we understood that just as the seasons bloom and fade, so had my father's rural past.

Now he was taking us to the country. My father's fabled world was lost, but he was taking us nonetheless to see something he said was very special. Spring. Animal babies. Whizzing along in the little car, far from my mother and from Budapest, I wasn't sure what to expect.

Spring, ushered in by the rankness of wet winter rot, assailed us on arrival. The ground was mushy under our feet as though it would suck us in. The sodden fetid air we could only marvel at when our father said with relish, “Smell it? That is the earth blowing out its winter breath.” Our offended urban nostrils flared in distaste. Feeling chilly in the damp air, we tramped along the muddy furrows. I looked to my sister for some cue, something to help me interpret the unpleasant sensations made more confusing by my father's obviously happy stride. Her boots seemed to sink into the furrows. Each step, as she pulled it up stickily, was laborious. She was ahead of me by six years. She was my measure, my yardstick. Hers the first impression.

“There was a calf born just this week,” my father told us. “Isn't that lucky?” His voice sounded full with the pleasure of giving. But we weren't prepared for the dense stench of the barn and the rows of enormous beasts with their hot vaporous breaths. Lili had to be urged forward as Apu went down the row, patting the sides of the animals and pulling up their eyelids. I scrambled like a puppy beneath his feet. I was afraid to take a step away from him. I clung to his trousers until he had to pick me up. When he did, when I was up, oh, it was too late to look away. Something I wanted to hide from, but too riveting. One after the other he had pried open their eyes, checking for health. He had seen nothing to suggest disease. Not anything like what accosted us as a beast swung around presenting a back end that was red, so rawly red, every possible shade of red and plum unfolding like the layered petals of a giant bloom, all blood and flesh and tissue. A festering bovine backside from whose centre a black vermin seeped and crawled. I couldn't scream, lest putrid gore fill my mouth. Apu sucked back his breath in disbelief and turned, too late, to divert my gaze. My sister was already retching, a loud, raspy choke and surge.

As Apu held us in his arms outside the barn, trying to comfort us, he whispered into our hair and wept. He held us close, then wiped my sister's streaming nose with his monogrammed handkerchief. He stroked our soft hair, cradled our delicate bones, and whispered over our heads what sounded like a prayer, but was just the name of his other little daughter, the first one, our half-sister—lost in an Auschwitz oven. “Clárika,” he kept reminding us. He remembered her in each caress he ever gave us; in each kiss on our foreheads and flip of a storybook page, she was always beside us, loved just the same. We were everything to him, I felt, but also we were never enough. As my father prayed over our heads his lost daughter's name, I imagined he saw the gulf between them stretch wider and wider.

Going home in the car, we didn't talk about the newborn calf we'd seen, or the baby chicks and new lambs. I played back the red gore of disease, and saw it mirrored in my poor father's dismay. He who had grown from the earth, who loved the smell of horseshit and fodder. I believed he could have grown a forest in a bed of salt, and in our Canadian garden he would grow a veritable arbour of fruit trees and flowering shrubs and beds that never wilted. How it broke him to see his children repelled so virulently by the living earth, and severed from the generations who had cultivated this land, loved it and nourished it and built from it a dynasty.

*   *   *

My family left Hungary in 1957. My mother retold the scene so often over the years, it acquired the quality of something tangible, like a family icon. My mother's hands had locked over those of her daughters, me on one side and Lili on the other. Her head turned to look over her shoulder at our father, who stood framed against the tenement. “With or without you,” she said, putting argument and persuasion behind her. She led us down the front walk of the building, and said with finality, “We're going.” My father stood rooted at the entrance. He was a man of European height, to become small only by North American proportions. His arms hung by his sides, and his face was carved in loss over loss. As he watched us, his face began to break down along these creases until it was the face I recognized later in galleries of modern art: the face of our century, its features skewed and misaligned. When he left the portal of that building his figure diminished with each step. By the time he reached us his shoulders had rounded, his chest sunk into his belly. He turned into the father of my childhood, the one I really knew. The man who never again trudged through fields of corn or patted the flanks of horses, who from that moment was always close by our sides, our Apu. A man for whom borders opened, but whose world shrank around the shoulders of his family.

T
HE
G
REY
W
ORLD

C
HANNEL
C
ROSSING

A small person in a kerchief on a jostling train, I hold fast to the windowsill as the train rocks me with its rhythm. I've absorbed the motion, so that after hours of gazing out the blurry window my own body sways and clacks at a mechanical rate. We're going. I don't dwell on the departure so much as our passage. Moving, going, on our way.

My father, beside me, has sunk into himself since we boarded in Budapest's Keleti Pályaudvar. I sense inertia gathering like a mass in his warm bulk. Occasionally a hand reaches out automatically to steady me, but my father doesn't seem to be moving like the rest of us; he's given himself over to conveyance.

Seated with us in the compartment, my mother rapidly reviews the names of those who came to see us off, remarking archly on absences. Where was Apu's colleague Mátyás? He couldn't wait to step into Apu's job with the ministry of agriculture, not even long enough to see him to the station? Old Agi's arthritic knees hadn't held her back from getting a good look at our relatives, although she had liked to complain piteously when she was mopping our floors. Poor thing, look at these biscuits Agi brought, dry as dust. My mother prattles while sorting the packets of foodstuffs that were pressed on her with embraces. She passes them along to Lili, who recites their labels in the fluting oratory style she learned at school. Lili's voice trills over cherry-filled bonbons. Apu lifts a hand, distractedly waving off my mother's chatter as though she misses the point entirely.

“Look, Apu, see the moo-cows?” I ask. But, although he pats my shoulder, I can tell he doesn't notice. Otherwise he'd identify their breed for me, sum up their condition in a glance.

The platform of the Keleti Pályaudvar had swarmed with our relatives and friends, most of them the post-war remains of Apu's large extended family. Blowing into his monogrammed handkerchief, he wouldn't look through the glass. His round face, at the best of times doleful, was shadowed under the brim of his fedora. His fleshy palm, my domain, failed to respond to my tugs: “Apu, A-
pu,
when will the train start?”

It vexes me when he drifts off into that other place from before the war, but he usually makes up for it, returning to me and Lili and placating us with a story he found there. I remember one of my favourites, starting like a once-upon-a-time:

“When I was a very little boy, just about your age, Danuska, not even four, I was taken for the first time to my beloved Great-Uncle Itzák's, to commemorate the
Yahrzeit
of his late father, your ancestor Hermann Grószmann. This was a grand occasion. Every year there came hundreds: relations, friends, rabbis, beggars from far and wide, for it was considered a blessing to give, especially to the poor. The more you would give in this world, the closer you would be to God in the next. And Great-Uncle Itzák was both a rich and a pious man.

“I was hardly more than a babe in arms, still with ringlets to my shoulders, but old enough to know that if I made a commotion my mother would not leave me behind. So, after a shameful display of willfulness that, I'm sorry to say, made my poor beloved father throw up his hands, he had the coachman put an extra fur rug into the
szánkó,
where, bundled in the back between my dear mother and father, I excitedly awaited the flick of the reins that would begin my first journey from the Rákóczi Tanya.”

Who can resist the charm of horse-drawn sleighs and a father's childhood misbehaviour? But I resent it when he stays locked in that place and won't come out, assailed by other kinds of memories that make him feel no good can come of our endeavours.

I have no patience with Apu when he doesn't see that the bad things are over. Especially when it is daytime and he is with me and Lili. Things are good now, his children safe beside him. Not like the time when he was made to enlist in the labour battalion, board the train at their private platform on the Rákóczi Tanya, and be borne away from his family estate. Each labour service Apu went through, he's said, he thought would be the end of him. Yet it was he who survived, those he left at home lost. Vicious joke of fate, he has spat into the night. What kind of joke is that, I wondered. Wife, daughter, niece; parents, brothers; cousins, aunts, uncles. One night, in a fit of remorseless self-punishment, I heard him count off the kinfolk lost. All hauled away by the rails he now presumes to ride into a better world.

Apu won't look at what he's leaving. The betraying grind of the wheels holds him fast. He can't accept he is abandoning all that remains of what he knew and loved. He is leaving yet again but—
by choice
—the dear familiar faces. He wouldn't look at them in the station despite my insistence on what was plain: “Apu, see. See! Blanka-néni's waving.”

Apu does not glance out the train window as we pass the flat fields of the Hungarian countryside. He says no good-bye. From the first jolt of the train as it prepared to groan out of the Keleti Pályaudvar, Apu let go the reins. As the train jerked to a start, he disengaged.

Despite my father's withdrawal, I let myself be mesmerized by the flow of images on the window's changing screen. That Apu is gloomy does not really matter. Parents
are
gloomy. Gloomy and anxious and often irritable. It doesn't trouble me. I know I'm central—Lili and I. We're a force that wrenches my father from the past he cherishes. We little girls, me trained to the window, Lili older but still charmed by store-bought packages, we small priestesses of motion are his transport. We were invoked by my mother for months. She wanted a future for her children. How was she to provide it when every penny he made he spent on his aunts and cousins? Did he not see while he fretted over the petty quarrels of the great-aunties that all his reaching into his pockets wouldn't recover their losses? She wasn't about to be sacrificed! Not she, nor anything of hers. His first wife and child went up in smoke. Enough sacrificed. Not her. Not hers.

Lili and me. Hers. Her children. It is spring of 1957. Gunfire in Budapest during the fall revolution made her call up our names in the same breath as the future. We are going to a place where the future resides.

Apu pulls me down abruptly and holds me tight. He presses his face to mine, and his warm tears make our cheeks stick. It feels as though he's hanging on to me. Taken aback, I wonder with dawning alarm how I will manage to hold him up. My little arms wriggle and struggle free. They circle his neck like a life buoy, for I feel light and floatable and he is adrift.

*   *   *

Once we cross the Hungarian border there's no turning back. The passports, just exit visas really, only let us out. I deduce this from the way Apu concedes authority to my mother. In Hungary he was a patriarch to his family. He had a position of repute in his field. He was at home and in command of his milieu. On the train he can't even speak. Some internal inflexibility keeps him from testing new sounds. Apu lacks my mother's fluidity with language. She tries out foreign words on any train official who passes us. When she gets a response, however incomprehensible, her mouth sets in a satisfied line.

Lili's head rocks in my mother's lap. When I tear my eyes from the window, I glimpse Lili's big hair bow drooping atop her head like a giant butterfly with folded wings. I wish I could wear my hair like Lili's, but it is too fine to hold such an ornament.

Unlike Lili, I resist sleep and try to keep my eyes open. I think that by staying watchful I can prevent anything bad from taking place. Really I trust the worst is over, but it's smart to be prepared. If need be, Lili and I can benefit from the tragic mistakes of the past.
We
will know who to call, when to get out, where to run to, how to live.