Triptych (6 page)

“What are you doing mother?” Évike asked.

“Dóra has been creating a stencil. Come look.”

Évike hesitated. Her mother would surely notice the sour smell and want to know what happened, and she was bursting to tell her. However, this was not a good time to describe the showdown with Gombóc
.
She and Dóra were involved in something important. Urgent. Her mother's concentration would be broken, which always annoyed her. Évike's chin jutted out. Yes, later. Probably best. A twinge of unease over the counter-punch she'd thrown at Gombóc had begun nagging her. Had she overlooked something?

“I must go change…” she began. A whisper of cool air streamed past her. Curious, she turned toward its source. None of the apartments in the building had exterior windows, but the barred, courtyard-facing window was open a crack. Why invite the cold? The building was already unheated.

Her mother pounded the typewriter keys, her back to her daughter. Évike's gaze lingered a moment. Compared to Dóra's unruly flaming hair, her mother's medium-length dark locks were neatly styled. The precision cut ends brushed the collar of her quilted jacket, her head pivoting side to side, from paper to carriage, as she worked.

“Mother, why are you wearing a jacket indoors?”

“What? Oh, the baby threw up. Dóra opened the window. The smell, you know.”

The clacking continued and Évike inched closer until she could see over her mother's shoulder.

Her mother sensed her presence. Cheeks rosy with excitement, she paused and gestured to the waxed purple stencil paper. “See,
édesem
, there is hope for Hungary.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, there was a meeting this afternoon, at the huge hall in the central building. It had been reserved, and we posted notices of the location. Word must have spread we would be discussing a course of action. The crowd was enormous, some say four thousand. Not just students, workers too. I wish you had been there.”

Évike wished so too.

Her mother began proofing the letters cut into the upper portion of the stencil while she continued talking. “The usual reforms were debated, but this day…well, it was incredible. Someone scribbled down the main points. The idea was raised that the list—sixteen demands in the end—be presented to the Party.”

Her mother looked up. Évike saw the zeal in her eyes. She was unable to remember a moment when she had sparked such a reaction from her mother.

“The atmosphere, it was electric. A delegate is going to the radio building this evening to present the list, insist that the points be broadcast. Copies are being submitted to the press also.” Her mother sighed. “We are hopeful, but it is not likely they will publish the demands in full. We are preparing stenciled copies.

“No bakery shift for me tonight. When Dóra and I are finished, we will go back to the university duplicating room, create flyers.”

“And Father? Where is he? Does he know?” Évike could not hide the anxiety in her voice. She may have deflected the AVO's attention from her mother for the time being, but they were sure to come. If not tomorrow, one day soon. Why did she have to risk everything? Risk being taken from her home. Her daughter.

Her mother turned the roller, dabbed a white letter with corrective fluid, saying, “He is in Buda helping to run off flyers at a location there—” and blew on the wet dot. She fanned it with her hand, adding, “Then, throughout the night, they will be pasted on walls, distributed on the streets, delivered to Budapest factories. Tomorrow, the demonstration.”

Évike was at the door. “Mother, I should go. Do you have the key?”

“What? Oh, the apartment is open,” her mother said vaguely over her shoulder. “I will be late. Your father, too. I do not like to leave you alone but this…tonight, tomorrow…this is it. The moment for change. You will be okay, yes?”

She thought of Gombóc and felt sick inside. Then of the caring neighbor's words: “You are brave. You will be fine.”

“Yes, Mother. I am not a baby like little Dórika. I will be okay.”
An eerie flash of Major Gombóc's face in shadowy light
. “Our neighbor arrived home when I did, let me in the front door. Maybe I can visit with her later.”

A quiet descended. Her mother turned. Her gaze was penetrating, and it struck Évike that her mother was seeing her for the first time since she entered the room. For a moment, Évike thought she would change her mind, not go, or forbid her daughter to mingle with a perhaps untrustworthy neighbor.

Instead: “Of course, this is a good idea. You will not be alone. I will not worry about rushing back.” She thought a moment. “Maybe our neighbor won't mind helping you take of care of the baby. I will see what Dóra has arranged.”

Near the doorway, a large placard on a wooden stick leaned against the door jamb. RUSZKIK MENJETEK HAZA, RUSSIANS GO HOME. How had she missed it, coming in?

“Mother, this sign, the flag on the table. What are they for?”

“The march tomorrow. Dóra will carry the sign, me the flag.”

“B-but the flag…” Évike stumbled over her words. “It is dangerous.”

“Of course. Revolutions
are
dangerous and they begin with symbolic acts.”

***

Budapest, 23 October 1956

The following day Évike's fears and worries for her mother, for the outcome of the charade she'd pulled on Gombóc, for facing her classmates, evaporated. Her parents declared a holiday. No school, no work. Mid-afternoon, hand in hand, the threesome set off from their apartment in Pest to join with other marchers on their side of the Danube. On the Buda side, another throng marched simultaneously, the multitudes on both sides increasing rapidly in numbers, their chants demanding reforms growing stronger and sharper as they marched, urged on by the strident shouts of approval and encouragement from windows and the bystanders they passed.

Not even the organizers or the Petöfi Circle, which had undertaken to lead the demonstrators, were expecting such a crowd. They were unprepared for the task of controlling it, and the Circle's one loudspeaker-van soon became lost in the throng. Eventually, the two-pronged show of force met in Bem tér, the Buda Square on the opposite bank of the Danube from Parliament. There, Évike, her tall handsome father on one side, her flag-
waving mother on the other, listened as the sixteen demands were read to the assembly, which they later would learn was estimated at over 100,000 people.

It was getting dark when demonstrators, comprised of both university students and workers, began marching back across the Margit Bridge in the direction of the Parliament Building. Upon reaching Kossuth tér, a large square in front of the Parliament, the swollen crowd began shouting and agitating for the appearance of the movement's chosen new leader, Imre Nagy. Évike, nestling close to her father for warmth and protection, pressed a cheek to his dark wool coat.

“Franciska,” her father said, projecting his voice so he could be heard over the chaos all around them. “It's getting late. Cold. Maybe Évike should be taken home.”

Évike's head snapped up, coarse wool chafing her cheek.

Breath smoked out of her father's mouth in a long thin trail. Her mother playfully tugged his fur hat, pulling it down lower on his forehead. A stray lock of dark hair escaped. “It's your night, Miklós. You take her.” The excitement of the day, the sense that change was in the air, had buoyed her mother such that her playful mood continued. She pinched the tip of Évike's nose. “You're a big girl now, right,
édesem
? What do you wish to do? Would you like to stay with us while Prime Minister Nagy announces the concession to our demands, or go back to the apartment?”

Évike's demand, that she be allowed to stay, was overridden by loud cries from the crowd. Imre Nagy had appeared on the parliament building balcony.

“He looks as if he has a gun to his back,” Évike's mother said under her breath.

Évike stared expectantly. It was her first glimpse of Nagy and she agreed, he looked stiff, uncomfortable. Then she noticed a slight paunch, obvious even under his well-cut suit—and with his bespectacled round face, receding hairline, and dark walrus mustache, to Évike, he looked more bourgeois peasant than premier.

He adjusted his glasses and—could it be?—his hand shook.

“Comrades,” Nagy began, using the traditional Soviet greeting. The incensed crowd booed and whistled. “We are not comrades!” they roared. “Fellow Hungarians,” he corrected himself.

And then Nagy spoke. He talked of resolving matters within the ruling Party, of returning to the popular, but short-lived, more lenient reform program of 1953. That was it, just two minutes—and he had not addressed directly any of the sixteen Points.

Évike had been holding her parents' hands during the address. An awkward silence followed, and she could almost feel their stunned disappointment coursing through her mittens and up through her arms.

Then Nagy invited the crowd to join him in singing the national anthem. Her parents hesitated, but then their voices united with the others. Moved by the stirring melody and patriotic words, Évike felt a tear trickling down her cheek.

Nagy then asked the demonstrators to go home. With few exceptions, they did not.

***

Budapest, 24 October 1956

The morning after the demonstration, school was officially called off, and Évike lingered in bed. Her father had gone out early. Hearing him call out, “I'm back,” she bolted upright, straining to hear what was being said on the other side of the paper-thin wall that divided her bedroom from the living room on the other side.

Her parents spoke in low excited voices.

“What is happening?” her mother asked.

Her father unleashed the news from the street.

Last night, at Kossuth tér, as Nagy's disappointing speech was ending, on the other side of town at the Radio building, the group agitating for an on-air reading of the 16 Points had run out of patience. A van reversed against the wooden entrance gates like a battering ram; insurgents began hurling bricks from a nearby building site through the windows. AVO men stationed inside the building volleyed back with tear gas and water jets from fire hoses. Then shots were fired. Some students were cut down. Incited compatriots using primitive weapons, mostly petrol bombs, sought revenge and, by early morning, they had managed to take over the building.

The conversation grew more hushed. Évike crept from her bed and stood against the wall to hear better.

After Nagy's speech, her father was saying, an immense crowd had also assembled near Heroes' Square at the most hated symbol of the Stalinist era, the giant twenty-six-foot bronze statue of the tyrannical leader. Évike had walked past it many times and tried to imagine the scene as her father described factory workers, working with ropes and the acetylene torches they'd brought, struggling to bring it down. Then her father's voice increased in volume and Évike sensed he was smiling, saying, “Hours later, with the crowd roaring, Stalin toppled from the pedestal in the square that had been renamed for him. All that is left…two enormous boots standing upright.” At this, her mother shouted with joy.

Her father's tone grew quiet and serious again, repeating what he'd heard about freedom fighters, as they were now being called, attacking telephone exchanges, printing presses and several arms factories in various parts of the city. They'd removed posters of Stalin, portraits of General Secretary Rakosi, and books from shops selling Russian literature, and tossed them into the streets before burning them. They'd stormed the offices of
Szabad Nép
, the Communist daily newspaper carrying “official” news, and overtaken the presses.

Her mother had been right, Évike concluded. The symbolic act of cutting the hammer and sickle from the Hungarian tricolor had become a revolutionary act. In less than forty-eight hours, two hundred insurgents had lost their lives in the fighting in Budapest, the majority at the radio building.

A demonstration had been fueled into the Uprising.

Chapter Five

Chicago, 1986

Today: Discuss the article of clothing or native costume you brought with you to America. Next Meeting: Bring a favorite ‘old country' recipe!

I like to model the assignments that I give to the women in the English conversation group I lead twice a month. So I am wearing Auntie Mariska's fringed silk shawl draped over my shoulders. The shawl is black and splashed with colorful flowers embroidered in a traditional Hungarian pattern. The flowers form a wide meandering border cascading to a large bouquet at the “V” of the triangular shawl's tip. A free-floating cluster in a circular design rests festively upon each of my shoulders.

I have sketched a dress next to today's assignment. Now, the bit of flair. I begin filling in a ribbony swath over the bodice. The chalk squeaks. My body convulses in an involuntary shiver and the billowing piece gets an extra squiggle. I return the chalk to the grooved tray at the base of the blackboard. The shawl slips. I am rearranging it, centering the clusters on my shoulders, as the door opens and the excited, high-pitched cacophony of several women speaking at once spills into the library meeting room.

Called Circle of World Women, or COWWs, as we jokingly refer to ourselves, the conversation group—part cultural orientation, part English practice, part emotional support—is one of several community outreach programs I run for the Willow Grove County Library System.

“To really succeed in America, immigrants need to be both bicultural and bilingual,” the library director told me at the ten-minute briefing at which I was handed the experimental project, in skeleton form, three years ago. “Ildikó, you'll be their cultural bridge.”

I was thrilled to be entrusted with such a humanitarian venture. I had an approach up my sleeve. Simply apply the technique that got my mother to open up. Put a swath of linen into her hands and when she started sewing, ask questions. But for COWWs, instead of using embroidery, as I had with her, I select an activity or assignment that will evoke some aspect of the cultural heritage of the women. I might bring a drawing or photograph, a poem, magazine article, fairy tale, or even music. For recent immigrants who have only been together a few times, like today's group, I've found using an article of clothing is like introducing a universal language. What woman can resist talking about the dress she is wearing, where she got it, how much it cost, why it makes her feel good?

“
Troi oi
! A beauteous cloth,” Hoa says, walking toward me in slacks and a blouse.

Hoa is older than the other women in the group, and she looks it. Bossy, funny, and filled with newcomer zest, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago she left Vietnam in a leaky boat filled with passengers packed so tightly for four days and four nights that they could not even get up to relieve themselves. Now she works the night shift at the horse-meat processing factory on the outskirts of town, a different sort of nightmare.

“Many colors,” Meena says softly. A shy, pretty young woman with huge dark eyes, Meena was originally from Kurdistan. A pastel blue and white scarf covers her head and shoulders, and only her face, framed by the cloth, is visible as she stands behind Hoa, peering over Hoa's shoulder, her eyes slightly downcast

Ioana is eyeing my shoulder. “What happen here?” she asks. A barrel-chested, big-boned woman originally from Romania, Ioana is wearing tight jeans and a baby doll top. Her unkempt bottle-blond hair is parted down the middle and hangs like curtains along the sides of her face. The curtains close as she leans in for a closer look. “Blunder?”

I can smell the cigarette smoke embedded in her clothes. I inch away. “No, it is not a
mistake
,” I say. “It's my creation.”

Like my mother, I enjoy needlework, but with a different twist. I transform secondhand embroidered linens by removing the original pattern, counting the stitching by color, then re-embroidering a modern abstract design. In the shoulder cluster motif, threads in bright primary hues of yellow, red, blue, and orange had once composed a floral pattern, but I had reworked the threads to form a series of irregular rings. Circles within circles, with the dominant threads forming the outer ring, and the inner circles descending to a center dot of the most negligible color.

“But you are from Hungary,” Ioana says. “This, it look more like a creation of Kandinsky from Odessa than work of a Magyar.”

Talk about Auntie Mariska's shawl was supposed to lead into the story I had planned to share about her escape from the Hungarian Revolution, thirty years ago. The challenges she met on her journey to the States. How she had come with nothing, but now was co-owner of a business. She had even managed to hire me during summers while I was in college. Yet now the ladies only want to know my intent for unstitching and re-stitching the design.

“I look at it as building a relationship between the artist's earlier work and modern work,” I tell them. “Bringing the past into the present.” The women look unconvinced. “Or a way to connect to the past,” I say, paring the concept to its core.

It is an uphill battle, with several women in the group sure that what I am doing is sacrilegious. Even my explanation that the shawl had been mass-produced, not hand sewn, does not placate them.

“You are unpicking a woman's history,” Hoa protests. “Stripping bare the love, talent, time…soul…she put into creating.”

“
Stealing
. In my country, for this you lose a hand.” Meena's voice trembles, and her comments are barely audible, but I feel their sting.

I remind them that in America, there is freedom of expression. Re-stiching is more of a craft, but also an art form. Art is meant to move the viewer, and it often moves two people differently. This prompts discussion. Welcome to America.

Willow Grove's identity for the better part of the last 150 years has been mainly European. Expansion of the local university's curriculum in recent years has attracted a more diverse faculty and student base. Because Willow Grove has almost no unemployment and a relatively low cost of living, three years ago it was selected by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement as a preferred community for newly arrived refugees.

My emigration to Willow Grove involved just twenty miles, a move from one Chicago suburb to the next, to attend college. Morning coffee and a muffin at Kat's Kafe once meant poring over my daily planner while eavesdropping on the local gossip. Now, when sipping coffee at Kat's, the chatter at surrounding tables is unintelligible. It's like I'm in the cafeteria at the International House at the Sorbonne. While the women's conversation group is intended to benefit the immigrants, I sometimes wonder if I'm not the real beneficiary—experiencing cultures of so many different countries.

The early arrivers solicit opinions from the newcomers on my shawl. The vote is evenly divided between admirers and critics.

To get us back on track, I ask Ioana to describe something new that's happened since our last meeting. It's what we usually do to kick off our meetings, with each woman in the circle taking a turn. The slices of life prompt lessons and practical tips relating to acculturation.

Ioana says she took her daughter to the emergency room because she had a sore throat and fever.

Hoa is surprised. “But emergency rooms they are expensive.”

“I call Ask a Nurse, and she tell me I should go.”

“
Called
Ask a Nurse. She
told
me I should go. Then you did the right thing,” I say. “Is your daughter better?”

Ioana nods proudly. “I buy her medicine.” She catches my frown. “I
bought
her medicine.”

The open-ended dialogue continues for another twenty minutes. Meena wants to know if the other women allow their children to drink Coke and watch cartoons. Hoa wonders if it is best to try to speak English or to stick with Vietnamese in the home. Several of the women trade names of doctors who specialize in female problems.

We have covered a lot of ground on adapting to life in America. The other part of our meeting is reserved for helping the women to hold onto the good from the old culture while taking advantage of the new. “Engage them,” the library director had said in my briefing. “Talk about where they come from, the things they cared about, things they ought to hold onto going forward here in Willow Grove.”

I turn the focus back to Mariska's shawl and share an abbreviated version of her odyssey. “Now your turn. Tell us why the item you brought is special,” I say. “What it tells about the world you lived in, and how the article relates to the world you live in now. Who'd like to go first?”

Hoa volunteers. She is wearing clothes she found at a Goodwill store. The only clothing she had taken with her from Vietnam was what she'd worn as she left. The items had to be burned after they landed, she explains. She holds up a jade bracelet. “This was my mother's. I hide it in my body, keep it safe through all my long journey.” Someone sniffles, and I am aware of my eyes pooling with tears. In the manner of an experienced show woman, Hoa brings her audience back up again. “In America, I have learned the tricks of wise shopper. These slacks and blouse,” she adds proudly, making a sweeping gesture along her outfit, “Very cheap.”

She is smiling and looks so happy I cannot bring myself to nitpick her grammar.

Wai-Ling is next. She is wearing a lovely fitted red silk blouse with a mandarin collar and tiny covered buttons running, top to bottom, on a diagonal. Wai-Ling chooses not to talk about her journey, instead she shows a picture and talks about her mother and sister, both wearing full dark pants and mandarin-style shirts, still living at home in China. “My body it is here in America,” Wai-Ling says in a small voice. “But my heart remains with them, in my homeland.”

I am only too familiar with this stage in a refugee's adjustment. Or as in my mother's case, non-adjustment. “It is impossible to truly appreciate an adopted land, if you do not hold onto some memories of your native land,” I say gently. “Is there something good you have discovered since settling in Sycamore that relates to what you have brought today…the picture?”

Wai-Ling looks thoughtful for a moment. She smiles shyly. “With help of our kindly neighbor, I have learned how to mail letters at the post office to my mother and sister.”

Divina, originally from the Philippines, removes a long elegant salmon pink dress from a garment bag. “A traditional costume,” she says, explaining that she'd brought it to wear in a beauty contest she'd come to America, at age seventeen, to attend. Entering the contest was the idea of her sister who was already here, married to an American. After swearing us to secrecy, she shows us the seam that had been re stitched after her sister had removed the currency their parents, unbeknownst to Divina, had hidden in the dress' lining. “Part of a bigger plan my family work out to allow me to stay here,” she says, the color in her full cheeks rising.

Ioana shows off a small purse embellished with felt cutouts forming a traditional Russian pattern. Vita from Sicily has brought a lacy black headscarf. Abeba from Eritrea brought the long, roomy robe she'd worn crossing Sudan on camel at night, pregnant with two young children in tow.

The final few women share their symbols and their stories. As is normal, I close with some words of encouragement, drawing from the many heartfelt memories and remarks expressed during the session.

I am still basking in the women's response to their COWWs' assignment when I reach the vestibule at the entrance to the main room of the library. My soul feels richer, more at peace.
You're making a difference
, my heart sings.
Helping worlds mesh. Building community
.

Consumed with the swelling notion that what I am doing in my small way might actually have a positive rippling effect, I think of Peter in the
Twelve Dancing Princesses
.

The story centers on the mysterious enchantment to which the king's twelve daughters have fallen prey. Although locked in their bedchamber at night, each morning they emerge pale and tired, with their satin dancing slippers worn through. The king pleads with his daughters for an explanation, but to no avail. Where once they had been open and warmhearted, they now had grown cold and haughty.

Dismayed, the king makes a proclamation: Whoever discovers how the princesses wear out their shoes can choose one of them for his wife.

Fairy tales are open to interpretation and many versions have been published since the original by the Brothers Grimm. In my childhood adaptation, it is Peter, a humble gardener, who succeeds after a dozen princes fail the challenge, each one mysteriously disappearing.

Peter is a farmer from a small village, but has always yearned for a life unlike his own. One night a fair lady appears to him in a dream saying, “Go to the castle and solve the riddle of the princesses.” Off he sets. He takes a gardener position then is quickly besotted by the youngest princess, Elise. Unlike her sisters who ignore the gardener, Elise admires Peter's hard work and appreciates the beautiful bouquets he leaves for the princesses each day. Her sisters mock Elise when they overhear her thanking him for her flowers and afterward laugh when she comments on his handsomeness. “He is beneath us,” they say.

Peter admires Elise's beauty but more than that, he appreciates the spirit she shows in acknowledging him. He determines he must win Elise's hand. He remembers the fair woman who had appeared to him in a dream at his farm. “Seek help from what you know best,” she'd said. “Through your own gifts you shall succeed.”

The next day, in his garden, Peter discovers a rare flower that causes him to be invisible when he wears it. At nightfall, with flower in place, he follows the princesses. A secret passageway leads them to three groves of trees; the first having leaves of silver, the second of gold, and the third of diamonds. The procession passes through this enchanted forest until they come upon a lake. Twelve boats with twelve princes wait. Each princess gets into one of the boats, and the invisible Peter steps into the boat with Elise, the added weight causing the prince rowing Elise's boat to struggle, unsuccessfully, to keep up with the others.