The County of Birches (9 page)

Gábor and Sári were plain people, something belied in the storybook concurrence of their encounter. They worked, raised their children, tended their garden, socialized little. They cared about family, tradition and security. But their story was heroic. This discrepancy irked me. The circumstances of their past imbued them with a grandeur that didn't fit. They were ennobled by tragic events, and elevated further when these events were shaped through telling. Gábor's stories grafted meaning to their lives. There was a point always to his anecdotes, as though history has form we have only to uncover. Caught up in the story, I learned to expect meaning that makes sense of the vicissitudes of time.

Gábor often said that the finger of God pointed him the way out of each brush with death—the finger of God, because he was not an intuitive man, nor one given to notions beyond reason, and because he would never attribute to himself any special good sense that was not shared by other members of his family. Gábor believed in the finger of God, because he had to explain somehow the chance of his survival. And I believed in it too; otherwise why was I here? What I figured was that for some reason or other
I
had to happen. Those people and their world must have been misconceived. God had made a mistake, brushed off the chalkboard, and begun again. Otherwise the tally didn't add up. My father depicted an earlier world that was a golden era of wealth and community and insoluble family bonds. The glory, and most of the happiness, predated me. Only cataclysm could have brought about my parents' union. And whatever for? Why would that have been?

There's a photograph of me before we left Hungary. I am standing in a field, on unsteady legs wrapped in ribbed leggings. I am hatless, and my few wisps of hair have been gathered in a spout on top of my head. My expression wavers between a frown and a smile. I have been crying, says my mother, because I don't want to be photographed. The long grasses of the field bend in the breeze. I still have it in my hand, she says, the gold wedding band she has given me to distract me from my tears. It is there in the picture, although we can't see it clutched in my plump paw. It is our last unglimpsed knowledge of its whereabouts. I know it, feel it pressed into the soft folds of my skin. It brings the tentative smile to my face. The gold in my hand is the sun emerging from my clouded features. I am last to have it, the ring that binds my mother and my father, before I let it slip into the dense wild grasses.

P
ERSONAL
E
FFECTS

The Budapest flat was long and sprawling. For a little one, it was endless. Along the floorboards worn so smooth I had only to watch out for the rugs with rough naps. If I slipped and slid on them, I'd get something red and sore. Some of the rugs were soft, though, and thin with age. They'd turn up and bunch and trip me if I wasn't careful. The rugs were islands with their own landmarks, like the raised bristly whorls at the centre of the one by the kitchen. I liked to sit on it in my warm felt pants and pat the horsehair surface gingerly. See how I could tame it? Along that brown river of a hallway, there were archipelagoes of throw-about worlds. I saw my mother take them and shake them and sometimes hang them out the window. She would try to rearrange them, but I made sure they found their right spots at last, the thick woolly tassels combed neat and flat.

The brown river parted for doorways, some always closed to me. “Karcsi's room. Stay out,” said my mother, then to my sister: “Close Karcsi's door, before the baby finds his fiddle.” And doors I wouldn't want to open, ever. The one with the great roaring thing that shook and rattled while it regurgitated water with a terrible rushing force.

On weekends Apu came home. His tread on the landing was our mother's cue to pull off her apron and tug her sweater smooth. There would be sweets if I foraged deep enough into the big coat's pockets. And the coarse rub of thick arms around me. Skin loose and tender as he held my face to his. I thought I smelled the animals on his coat. He talked about cattle, pigs, but it was just the soft musky fur of the coat's lining, sweetened by the smell of him. Karcsi would come out of his room to shake hands and would be asked to join us for dinner, although he ate with us most nights as part of his lodging, and his place was always set on the dining-room table.

We celebrated Christmas because everyone else did, and so we wouldn't seem too different being Jews. The big flat was surprisingly close with warm aromas and flickering lights. Evening lamps glowed. Up on the deep ledge above the dining-room door frame three small fir trees glistened with pink marzipan bells. I was allowed to finger them lightly when someone held me up. If it was a visitor, we were given a taste. The rough sugar coating grazed before it melted on my tongue. Pink, soundless bells, though their sugar, hard like crystal, made me imagine a little tinkling. I would gaze up from the floor, feeling sated.

The clapping made me startle. Who was this? Who was coming? The grown-up voices knowing and festive. Mikulás. Look. Look. Like a big brown bear. His great coat turned inside out to show the furry lining, and a white pillowcase over his shoulder. What? Who is it? Mikulás. Your Apuka. Look, silly, what is there in his sack?

*   *   *

My first memory was heat. I saw it. Waves of heat dancing. Later I imagined a small room with a black stove. I put red flames into the picture, flickering behind a grill. But I knew the image first through my pores. A pulsing reddish glow I ingested with each breath and sigh of my tiny, gorging body. The long rambling flat was difficult to heat during the coal shortage in 1954. Karcsi the boarder had a separate stove in his room, so that was the room my mother took for the new baby. Karcsi moved out onto the divan. At dawn he met the coal cars pulling into the freightyard and paid the black market prices my father had left him the money for, his fine musician's fingers gripping a sack of coal that by breakfast he let slide against the nursery furnace.

My sister came in to warm up. She stood first by the stove, and looked into the cradle at me. When my mother lay down to nurse me on the bed, my sister nestled her brief length along the curve of our mother's spine and took strands of our mother's long hair, twisting them around her finger. I felt heat, indistinguishable from the dance of gold shadows.

Out in the country on the state farms, my father trudged over crusty fields to inspect livestock. Wide hands thrust into the deep pockets of his heavy fur-lined coat, he spun dreams of spring crops and fall yields. Trusting implicitly that his family was safe and warm and unbeholden. How did he do that? Assume decency. My father anticipated decency in others before he would suspect anything else. Decency in others, even though he had had to leave his first wife and their child for a final labour service in 1944, and they disappeared with every other member of his family, in smoke. When I was born, Karcsi the lodger gave up his bed, and my father entrusted him with all that he had.

*   *   *

The shattering of glass behind us was a sound like day, clear and explosive. In the halls, apartment doors swung open, and from all of them people ran, spilling into the stairwell. My heart thrilled hopefully. Such excitement. With trembling fingers my mother buttoned up my little blue double-breasted coat, then I was swept up by Apu and tucked like a loaf under his arm. But I could walk as well as Lili, I protested, squirming. No time. My sister's able legs were a flick of white ankle socks in leather lace-ups as they flew away below me. I was bounced down the stairs urgently. My mother wore her warmest coat although we were inside. It flapped open as she hurried, suitcases in both hands. Sun poured down with us right to the basement.

Inside the basement was a camp. All the families from our apartment house were together. This was new and interesting. Bundles. Families spread on blankets. Food unwrapped, passed from hand to hand. From outside a deep rumble and vibration, distant and stirring. “Boom-boom!” I clapped gleefully. But my sister's hands covered her ears, and her face froze yellow as she hissed, “Shut up, idiot.”

I learned a name for the camp-out in the basement. It was the Revolution. I tried the word in my head as my parents reassured Lili. Rev-o-lu-tion. There was fighting, but a revolution wasn't war, they explained. This revolution wasn't about Jews. War, Lili told me while our parents exchanged courtesies with the adults on the neighbouring mat, was when Jews were pulled from their homes and burned in ovens. This was only a revolution. Everyone in the tenement—Catholics, Jews, regular Hungarians called Communists—all of us there were equally at risk.

I took in the dim, densely bodied basement, learning and absorbing it like any new situation. It became part of me, the hours stretching into a predictable pattern of rhythms that I turned into the rituals of daytime and nighttime. The walk with my sister to the improvised bathroom. Threading our way past, and sometimes through, the personal effects of strangers. Habitual distrust in the glances cast at us, before they noticed we were children. Faces swerving at each unexpected noise, apprehension their common feature. I learned not to thrill so gladly to the drone of guns.

In the midmorning hush of a city that for days had been punctuated by bursts of shellfire and shattering glass, my father slipped away from us, out through a slice of light admitted by the basement entrance. They went out that day for the first time, men mostly, escaping tentatively through the fragment of light to forage a few facts that might let us know what was going on. No one was certain of the enemy. Hungarian troops were familiar but—Apu lowered his voice thinking Lili and I weren't listening—the Hungarians had in their ranks some of the old Arrow Cross members who had murdered Jews in the war. And the Russians were so touchy they might mistake anyone for an insurgent. Russians were generally feared, it seemed. But that day it was quiet, and the basement residents seemed to tacitly agree that it might be safe enough to go out to investigate. One after another, the men broke from their family groups.

It felt strange, the grown-up men gone. Almost like before, when the men used to go to work. We were left as of old, the children with the women, but my mother didn't appear her customary certain self. She had held Apu back for a moment before he left, as though changing her mind about letting him go. After he was gone, she tried to pull herself together. “Come, Lili. Let's make up the sleeping mats, then we will have a hand or two of rummy if you still want to play cards.” Lili dropped her book in surprise at our mother's unusual proposal, for, even here in the packed basement, our mother found countless chores to do.

When the door flung inwards throwing in the harsh daylight, when the light burst in on us, it was as much an assault, that brilliant flare, as the bereted silhouette that followed. He had booted in the door, brandishing his rifle. The severe light seemed to radiate from his khaki-clad figure. He waved his gun at us as though we meant to hurt him. A sudden stillness seized all of us in that basement. Lili's hand was a small sculpture with cards fanned around it. We were still, as though not to alarm
him.
Don't move. Careful. Don't scare the strange doggy. See his sharp teeth.

“Minden rendben van?”
Hungarian. Someone dared to answer, so perhaps a Hungarian soldier was not so bad. “Yes,” a woman close to the door whispered, “yes, all right. Everything here is fine.” He tipped his beret, a peacetime courtesy, and, relieved to withdraw without incident, backed out the door, his pointing rifle our last glimpse of him as it had been our first.

My mother's voice didn't lose its shrill fear, not even months later when she drew on this incident during my parents' arguments and endless speculations. “When that soldier burst in and we didn't know who or what he was, which would be better, Hungarian or Russian, all we were aware of was the weapon he carried, and our own pitiful dread.” She wasn't going to cringe like that again. Enough! “I saw Auschwitz, now this!” She wasn't going to raise her children in fear. “I've had enough cringing and hiding and hoping against the worst that always happens. I want something better to hope for. Milk the children can swallow without gagging.” Voice rising: “I'm already thirty-seven years old…!”

When we finally emerged from the basement it was like blinking at a miracle. In my father's arms, ascending the stairs slowly, squinting into the light with every footfall. I entered our flat with the two men, my father and our tenant violinist. The windows splayed open. Before leaving the men had released the latches to minimize the impact of explosions. My father held me to keep me away from shards of broken glass. Wind gusted through the open windows. It seemed to me that the wind was sweeping in the very sky, there was so much cold light. It brought an emptiness into the unlived rooms. A purity. As if all had been wiped clean, sterilized by the light and blue air. Rooms that had lived something we had been spared—or denied; a life of their own. No longer the same rooms we had lived in. The men's voices boomed. The flat felt so empty. There were our things, the horsehair recamier and sturdy credenza, the framed photographs and fringed lampshades, even the throw rugs Apu stepped over as he hurried eagerly down the hall, checking everything. But they seemed insubstantial, almost transparent to me in that windy light. They had lost their solidity. Everything was light and airy as though even the thick oak table could be blown away in a breath of wind. The men's shoes resounded on the hardwood that skirted the carpets. It was as if we'd never lived there. As though in our absence someone had cleared out our personal claim to these belongings. Now there was only the idea of a sofa, the shadow of an armchair. All had filled with a light that was blue, clear, and so jagged it might slice you if you dared move. I flinched when my father laughed and our violinist put his head outside and waved. Human gestures seemed out of place to me, and risky, in that rare ether.