Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

Frisky Rabbit failed to stick as a nickname, and the slight twist to the more standard Szilárd by his classmates in the school proved more lasting. He spent the first day there in a state of shock: he could not make out a single word the teachers-there seemed to be quite a number taking classes in turns-were saying. He felt he was forever banished from the cacophonous noise that united the Hungarian children. He did not speak to strangers gladly, even when they spoke his language. Matushka made reassuring noises: “You’ll get the hang of it soon enough, don’t you worry. If I could do it, with my thick skull! You will also hear Hungarian at home.”

The boy sobbed through every night; his pillows traced his tears in veiny blotches. After Babka went back, he felt very much alone. When he could, he spent his time hovering around the yard behind the now-wilted lilac bushes, where Béla Berda had laid out his dovecote, with its hundred or more black birds. Szilárd was much happier learning their language, spending hours billing and cooing with them. Naturally Béla Berda also tagged his birds with sobriquets, his favorite layer being designated Icarus, for example; Szilárd preferred the male called Pilinga, whose unusually long, straight bill did truly resemble the knife-blade that the word denotes in Magyar.

Forbidden it may have been, he nonetheless soon mastered the art of climbing up to the dovecote. His mother would summon him down because of the cold autumn wind, but Béla Berda was more concerned about the exemplary order he maintained up there: “If you foul up the fowl, you will have to clear up yourself!”

Despite these threats the boy happily spent his time in the dovecote. Unsurprisingly Béla Berda in due course dubbed him the Ace of Doves, playing on the name of the highest card in Hungarian tarot, and every time he uttered this sobriquet he would chortle at his own wit. When no one else adopted it, Béla Berda noted yet again how others seemed to be deaf to sophisticated verbal humor.

Szilárd went in fear of his stepfather, never knowing where he stood with him, and kept out of his way as much as possible. He also avoided his mother, as she was invariably on the side of her husband. Szilárd never got close to his mother; he much preferred Babka and her absence pained him greatly. Nor did he find any support among his school friends; he was relentlessly mocked for the way his Hungarian a’ s curled into á’ s and for his splashy s’s. He was racked by a vague memory that this was not the first time this had happened to him. Only in the company of the doves did he find peace of mind and satisfaction. He held their warm little bodies close and was thus no longer cold; he imitated, successfully, the little noises they made with their beaks. If he was sure no one was looking he would stand up quite straight on the steep roof of the dovecote and stretch out his arms, as if flying. At times like this warm little birds of joy fluttered up in his soul.

He must have made a startling sight as he stirred the autumn sky with his spindly arms, eyes closed, head to one side, raising one leg again and again, like a dove. Those in the building paid him no heed, while on the courtyard side he was shielded from view by the tall poplars. He firmly believed that there would come a day when, as a result of all his practice, he would be able to rise into the sky, circle the yard a few times, and then fly off, far away, to the distant village where Babka lived, near the sea, the place where he last remembered being happy. Since he had lived here, he was sure that even the number of stars in the heavens was fewer.

Even rain could not keep him away from the dovecote; he welcomed the little fat drops falling on his face. At such times there pounded in him even more powerfully than usual the desire to fly south, on the trail of the migratory birds. He stood up on tiptoe.

“Get down at once!” his mother shouted at him, when she saw the boy, soaked to the skin, from the kitchen window.

The cry came as a shock to Szilárd and for a moment he lost his balance, the soles of his shoes seeking but failing to find purchase on the wet planks; he slid down to the edge, and although he reached out with his arm, it was in vain, and he plunged head-first into the air. As he fell his knee hooked itself around one of the dovecote’s supporting beams and for a fraction of a second it seemed to hold, only for the rotten wood to snap in two, and down came the bracket as well, right on the boy’s head as he landed on the ground, the doves spraying out as he flew.

The medical orderly who lived nearby came running over in his apron and slippers and promptly gave up on him. “Look, town clerk Berda, the skull has split wide open, the brain’s damaged, I will be bound; what could I do?”

His mother was hysterical and had to be dragged away from the blood-stained ottoman on which he had been laid. There was a gentle smile playing about Szilárd’s lips. Now, at last, he was able to do what he had so long been preparing for: to fly away.

He saw Kornél Csillag being teased and mocked for the German accent of his Hungarian speech.

He saw Bálint Sternovszky as a child and a young man, falling out of a window, twice.

He saw István Stern at the time of the Lemberg catastrophe.

He saw Richard Stern on the wide double bed, struggling in the presence of the congress-of this and of so much else, he understood little.

He saw Otto Stern with a wreath of tiny yellow flowers-buttercups? marigolds? euphorbia?-about his neck. He felt peculiarly drawn to this huge-eyed man with the flowing hair.

He saw Matushka, her hair let down, scantily clad, giving her favors to total strangers. What is this? He felt a sharp, stabbing pain as he saw this and how the men touched his mother.

The living dioramas cascaded and swirled around him. Fragments of present time would surface, too: the honeyed light of the curtains glittering on the windows, his mother’s tear-soaked cheeks, a man with mutton-chop whiskers and hairy hands-the professor of medicine summoned from the hospital who in the end decided, against his professional judgment, to sew up the inches-long gash: “We can but hope.” Szilárd bore the intervention-which the doctor said was particularly painful-without a murmur, so captivated was he by his sojourn in the past. He found out about The Book of Fathers, and was able to observe even its whereabouts: the completed folio was in Richard Stern’s library, hidden in a gap between the floorboards; the one begun by Otto Stern lay in the offices of the Stern & Stern Wine Emporium, on the top shelf, buried under stacks of old bills.

Months passed without the boy regaining consciousness. One day there came through the town Dr. József Koch, who had been elevated to the post of court physician by the Emperor in person, and whose ancestors, going back seven generations, had all been distinguished medical practitioners; three of his brothers, too, had chosen the same career. He lodged in the Golden Lamb. Matushka begged him on bended knee to take a look at her little boy as he hovered between life and death. Town clerk Béla Berda hovered in the background with a servile smile, repeating: “Money no object.”

“But it would be, were I greedy for money,” remarked Dr. Koch. “However, one asks for only as much as is right.”

Dr. József Koch’s fee equaled one month’s emoluments for town clerk Béla Berda, but it was no use; not even he knew the remedy for Szilárd’s condition. “If ever he were to get on his feet again, which I do not think at all likely, he would certainly be feeble-minded.”

“We had managed to reach that conclusion all by ourselves,” commented Béla Berda.

“Silence!” hissed Matushka, livid.

Béla Berda was quite certain his bankess had taken leave of her senses. She temporarily gave up her theatrical activities to devote all her time to her son. Where was that proud artress of old, who was not prepared to give up the stage even for his sake?