The Physics of Sorrow (3 page)

T
HE
B
READ OF
S
ORROW

I see him clearly. A three-year-old boy. He has fallen asleep on an empty flour sack, in the mill yard. A heavy bee buzzes close above him, making off with his sleep.

The boy opens his eyes just a crack, he’s still sleepy, he doesn’t know where he is.

I open my eyes just a crack, I’m still sleepy, I don’t know where I am. Somewhere in the no-man’s-land between dream and day. It’s afternoon, precisely that timelessness of late afternoon. The steady rumbling of the mill. The air is full of tiny specks of flour, a slight itching of the skin, a yawn, a stretch. The sound of people talking
can be heard, calm, monotone, lulling. Several carts stand unyoked, half-filled with sacks, everything is sprinkled with that white dust. A donkey grazes nearby, his leg fettered with a chain.

Sleep gradually recedes completely. That morning in the darkness they had come to the mill with his mother and three sisters. He had wanted to help with the sacks, but they wouldn’t let him. Then he had fallen asleep. They’re surely ready to go by now, they’ve finished everything without him. He gets up and looks around. They are nowhere to be seen. Now here come the first steps of fear, still imperceptible, quiet, merely a suspicion that is rejected immediately. They’re not here, but they must be inside or on the other side of the mill, or they’re sleeping in the shade under the cart.

The cart isn’t there, either. That light-blue cart with a rooster painted on the back.

And then the fear wells up, filling him, just like when they fill the little pitcher at the well, the water surges, pushing the air out and overflowing. The stream of fear is too strong for his three-year-old body and it fills up quickly, soon he will have no air left. He cannot even burst into tears. Crying requires air, crying is a long, audible exhalation of fear. But there is still hope. I run inside the mill, here the noise is very loud, the movements hasty, two white giants pour grain into the mill’s mouth, everything is swathed in a white fog, the enormous spider webs in the corners are heavy with flour, a ray of sunlight passes through the high, broken windows, and in the length of that beam the titanic dust battle can be seen. His mother isn’t here. Nor any of his sisters. A hulking man stooped under a sack almost knocks him over. They holler at him to go outside, he’s in the way.

Mommy?

The first cry, it’s not even a cry, it ends in a question mark.

Moommy?

The “o” lengthens, since the desperation is growing as well.

Mooommy . . . Mooooooommy . . .

The question has disappeared. Hopelessness and rage, a crumb of rage. What else is inside? Bewilderment. How could this be? Mothers don’t abandon their children. It’s not fair. This just doesn’t happen. “Abandon” is a word he doesn’t yet know. I don’t yet know. The absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary, it heaps up ever higher, making it even more intolerable, crushing. The tears begin, now it’s their turn, the only consolers. At least he can cry, the fear has uncorked them, the pitcher of fear has run over. The tears stream down his face, down my face, they mix with the flour dust on the face, water, salt, and flour, and knead the first bread of grief. The bread that never runs out. The bread of sorrow, which will feed us through all the coming years. Its salty taste on the lips. My grandfather swallows. I swallow, too. We are three years old.

At the same time, a light-blue cart with a rooster on the back raises a cloud of dust, getting farther and farther away from the mill.

The year is 1917. The woman driving the cart is twenty-eight years old. She has eight children. Everyone says that she was a large, fair, and handsome woman. Her name also confirms this. Calla. Although in those days it’s unlikely that anyone had deduced its meaning from the Greek—beautiful. Calla and that was that. A name. It’s wartime. The Great War, as they call it, is nearing its end. And as always, we’re on the losing side. The father of my three-year-old grandfather is somewhere on the front. He’s been fighting since 1912. There’s been no news of him for several months. He comes back for a few days, makes a child, and leaves. Could they have been following orders during those home leaves? The war is dragging on, they’re going to need more soldiers. He didn’t have much luck with future soldiers, he kept having girls—seven in all.
Surely when he returned to his regiment they would arrest him for every one of them.

Several pieces of silver hidden away for a rainy day have already been spent, the barn has been emptied, the woman has sold everything she could possibly sell—the bed with the springs and metal headboard, a rarity in those days, her two long braids, the string of gold coins from her wedding. The children are crying from hunger. All she has left is an ox and a donkey, which is now pulling the cart. With the ox, she struggles to plow. Autumn is getting on into winter. She has managed to beg off a few sacks of grain and is now on her way back from the mill with three bags of flour. Her daughters are sleeping in the cart amid the sacks. Halfway home they stop to let the donkey rest.

“Mom, we forgot Georgi.”

A frightened voice comes from behind her back—Dana, the eldest. Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Thick and heavy silence. Silence and a secret, which will later be passed on year after year. What is the mother doing, why is she silent, why does she not turn the cart around immediately and race back to the mill?

It’s wartime, they’re human, they won’t leave a three-year-old child all alone. He’s a boy, someone will take him in, look after him, there are barren women hungry for children, he’ll have better luck. Words that I try to find in her thoughts. But there is only silence there.

We forgot him, we forgot him, the daughter chants behind her back through tears. Never mind that the word is different—we’ve abandoned him.

Yet another long minute goes by. I imagine how in that minute the faces of the unborn look on, holding their breath. There
they are, craning their necks through the fence of time, my father, my aunt, my other aunt, there’s my brother, there’s me, there’s my daughter, standing on tiptoes. Their, our appearance over the years depends on that minute and on the young woman’s silence. I wonder whether she suspects how many things are being decided now? She finally raises her head, as if waking up, turns in her seat and looks around. The endless plains of Thrace, the scorched stubble fields, the changing light of the sunset, the donkey that is chewing some burned grass, indifferent to everything, the three sacks of flour which will run out right in the middle of winter, three of her seven daughters, who wait to see what she will say.

The sin has already been committed, she has hesitated.

She considered, if only for a minute, abandoning him. Her voice is dry. If you want, you can go back. Said to Dana, the eldest, thirteen. The decision is shoved off onto another. She doesn’t say “we’ll go back,” she doesn’t say “go back,” she doesn’t move. And yet, my three-year-old grandfather still has a chance. Dana leaps from the cart and dashes back down the dirt road.

We, the as-of-yet unborn, craning our necks through the fence of that minute, draw our heads back and breathe a sigh of relief.

Dusk is falling, the mill is miles away. A girl of thirteen is running down a dirt road, barefoot, the evening breeze flutters her dress. Everything around is empty, she runs to tire her own fear, to take its breath away. She doesn’t glance aside, every bush resembles a lurking man, all the frightening stories she has listened to in the evenings about brigands, bogeymen, dragons, ghosts, and wolves run in a pack at her heels. If she dares turn around, they will hurl themselves on her. I run, run, run in the still-warm September evening, alone amid the fields, on the baked mud of the road, which I sense more intensely with every step, my heart is pounding in my chest, someone is there crouching along the road, but why is his arm twisted up
like that so strangely, oh it’s just a bush . . . There in the distance the first lights of the mill . . . There I should find my three-year-old brother . . . my grandfather . . . myself.

The mother, my great-grandmother, lived to be ninety-three, passing from one end of the century to the other, she was part of my childhood, too. Her children grew up and scattered, they left her, grew old. Only one of them never left her and took care of her until her death. The forgotten boy. The story of the mill had entered the secret family chronicle, everyone whispered it, some with sympathy for Granny Calla and as proof of how hard the times had been, others as a joke, yet others, such as my grandmother, with undisguised reproach. But no one ever told it in front of my grandfather. And he never once told it. And he never parted from his mother.

A tragic irony of the kind we usually discover in myths. When the story reached me on that afternoon, the main heroine was no longer with us. I remember how at first I felt anger and bewilderment, as if I myself had been abandoned. I experienced yet another pang of doubt in the justness of the universe. That woman lived to a ripe old age under the care of that once-abandoned three-year-old boy. And perhaps that was precisely her punishment. To live so long and to see that child before her every day. The abandoned one.

I H
ATE
Y
OU
, A
RIADNE

I never forgave Ariadne for betraying her brother. How could you give a ball of string to the one who would kill your unfortunate, abandoned brother, driven beastly by the darkness? Some heartthrob from Athens shows up, turns her head—how hard could that be, some provincial, big-city girl, that’s exactly what she is, a hayseed and a city girl at the same time, she’s never left the rooms of
her father’s palace, which is simply a more luxurious labyrinth.

Dana returns to the mill all alone in the darkness and rescues her brother, while Ariadne makes sure that her own brother’s murderer doesn’t lose his way. I hate you, Ariadne.

In the children’s edition of
Ancient Greek Myths
, I drew two bull’s horns on Ariadne’s head in pen.

C
ONSOLATION

Grandma, am I going to die?

I’m three, I’m standing next to the bed in the middle of the small room, with one hand I’m clutching my ear, it hurts, with the other I’m tugging on my grandmother’s hand and crying as only a scared-to-death three-year-old child can cry. Inconsolably. My great-grandmother, that very same Granny Calla, now over ninety, having seen plenty of death, having buried more than one loved one, an austere woman, is sitting up in bed with tousled hair, no less frightened than I am. It’s midnight, the witching hour, as she called it. Grandmaaaa, I’m dying, Grandmaaa, I howl, holding on to my ear.

You’re not going to die, my child. Good God, the poor little thing, so he knows about dying, too . . .

My mother runs in and catches sight of us like that, embracing and crying in the dark. I can imagine that composition clearly—a boy of three, barefoot, in short pajamas and a desiccated ninety-year-old woman in her nightgown, who, incidentally, will pass away in only a few days. Crying and talking about death. Perhaps death was hovering nearby, perhaps children can sense it? Hush now, child, you’re not going to die, my great-grandmother repeated then, to console me. There’s an order to things, my child, first I’ll die, then your grandma and your grandpa, then . . . And this made me bawl all the harder. A consolation built on a chain of deaths.

My great-grandmother died exactly one week later. Just like that, out of nowhere, she lay in bed for a day or two and passed away on New Year’s Eve. That was the first death I remember, even though they didn’t let me watch. She was lying on the bed in the room, small and waxen, like an old woman-doll, I thought to myself then, even though dolls never get old. In the middle of the room, reaching almost to the ceiling, stood the Christmas tree, decorated with cotton, silver tin-foil garlands, and those fragile ornaments from the ’70s, which lay all year carefully wrapped in a box in the wardrobe. Each of those shiny colored orbs during that unforgettable New Year’s Eve reflected my dead great-grandmother.

I was more worried about my grandfather, who was sitting at her feet, crying quietly. This time abandoned for good.

Much later my grandfather would lie in that same bed one January night and take his leave of us, since he had a long road ahead of him. Mom is calling me to help her with the sacks . . .

T
ROPHY
W
ORDS

Szervusz, kenyér, bor, víz, köszönöm, szép, isten veled
. . .

I will never forget that strange rosary of words. My grandfather strung them out on the long winter evenings we spent together during my childhood vacations. Hello, bread, wine, water, thank you, beautiful, farewell . . . Immediately following my grandmother’s quick and semi-conspiratorially whispered prayer would come his
szervusz
,
kenyér
,
bor
. . .

He always said that he used to be able to speak Hungarian for hours, but now in his old age all he had left was this handful of words. His trophy from the front. My grandfather’s seven Hungarian words, which he guarded like silver spoons. My grandmother was
certainly jealous of them. Because why would a soldier need to know the word for “beautiful”? And she simply could not accept calling “bread” by such a strange and distorted name. God Almighty, Blessed Virgin, what an ugly word! Those folks have committed a terrible sin. How can you call bread “
kenyér
,” she fumed, in dead seriousness.