Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

Further aid may consist in harnessing the support of a subscribing audience for twenty-one performances of the Hungarian Theater Company over a period of five years. In addition, there should be established a Fund, of which the standing capital would assist the Company’s goals and endeavors. Finally, in every district of the land all chief and deputy constables are to call upon all owners of land, men of the cloth, and nobles of quality and quantity, to contribute to the advancement of the National Theater Company.

One night Szilárd had the sudden and absurd notion that if he were to climb up into the dovecote again, he would be able to imbibe some of the opium of the worlds long past. He pulled a gown over his nightshirt and stole out into the yard. Streaks boding ill lined the sky, veiling the full moon. From somewhere the desperate barking of a dog unable to sleep could be heard. Szilárd was shivering, the cool of the evening grass made his bare feet tingle. The dovecotes loomed huge in the dark, seeming much bigger than in the light of day. With considerable difficulty, he managed to shin up. He had grown recently and was heavier than in those days; the pole bowed under his weight. A few birds startled awake, cooing in righteous indignation.

“Only me,” he reassured them. He drew his palm along the feathers of the closely packed birds. It felt like the fur of the black cat they had left behind; goodness, how long it has been since he thought of her. Or of Babka; it was almost more difficult to summon up her face than those of the Sterns, whom he had encountered only in his visions.

He stood out on the edge of the dovecote, closed his eyes, and, using his right hand, inserted his fingers in the gash on his skull. And there, on the creaking plank, swaying this way and that like a reed in the night wind, a hair’s breadth short of plunging into the deep, he finally got what he wanted.

The onset of his antipathy towards his mother began on this night. His unrelenting questions more than once convulsed Matushka with tears that only potent medicaments could stanch. Béla Berda categorically ordered Szilárd to cease this torturing of his mother, but he was no longer prepared to be ignored. In vain did they beat him, threaten to send him away to board, lock him in the cellars, make him kneel on maize cobs-nothing helped. As soon as he was within earshot of his mother, he would begin his litany: “My father was called Otto Stern, was he not, and he had a heart attack in prison? My grandfather was a writer, was he not, who completed The Book of Fathers? You were a strumpet in hostelries, were you not, and allowed men to have their way with you for money? I could have had two brothers or sisters, had the angel-maker not freed you of your burden? Is that not so?”

Answers came there none. Béla Berda used a horsewhip or a riding crop to harry him from the house if he discovered that Szilárd had been harassing his mother again. The woman began to lose weight, coming to resemble her son in stature.

“Do you not see that you are killing her? You will be the death of your mother, you idiot!”

Szilárd nodded in sympathy: “Of course, it is I who will be her death, not she who will be mine, by denying me any information about myself!”

“Very well! Ask me; I will answer your every question!”

Except that town clerk Béla Berda knew almost nothing about his wedded wife’s past. Szilárd’s appalling accusation, that Fatimeh was some kind of strumpet, he had no hesitation in rejecting. Completely out of the question. But the seed of suspicion had been sown in his heart. When he had first gotten to know her she was already in the troupe of actors, living with them in the Golden Lamb’s seediest garret rooms. Even him she was not prepared to enlighten about her past: “What has been is gone; if you want me, your desire must be for what there is now!”

But of course it is well known what women in the acting profession are like, mused Béla Berda now, staring deep into Szilárd’s eyes, which were like those of an exhausted hound. And now both of them were pained by the past. But while Béla Berda was gnawed by a growing jealousy, in Szilárd Berda-he had adopted him officially-it was what he knew for certain that throbbed as an open wound.

On the sixteenth anniversary of the day of his birth, Szilárd Berda slipped away from the house of his mother and stepfather. Apart from the clothes he stood up in, he carried a change of underwear and a few personal items that he tucked into the leather satchel that had been sewn for him by Babka. The egg-shaped timepiece, he knew, was inherited on his father’s side. Likewise, he thought, the broken gold necklace with the medallion-for it contained a picture of his father. He counted out for himself half of the gold coins wrapped in linen in his mother’s secret drawer-he thought that, having reached the age of majority, this was his due. It was but a venial sin to take an advance. He wrote every detail on a card that he placed in the drawer.

He traveled over fields and forests, sometimes on foot, sometimes hunched on jolting carts. There were decent folk in the country at whose tables he would be offered food and drink; if asked about himself, he replied he was a wandering scholar, looking for his father. He had no particular goal; he just followed his nose along roads virgin to him. Along many byways, by twists and turns, he reached the countryside that he recognized from his visions, where the shoots of the vine curl upwards hungrily on the vine-stocks.

He had no need to seek the sharp bend in the stream-all of a sudden he was there at the edge of the water, his ears caressed by the soft murmur of the stream. Small fish flung themselves out of the water, plunging back with a little plop.

“Well, this looks like it,” sighed Szilárd.

He had no need to ask after the house of Richard Stern, his legs carried him there on their own. He stood for a while before the door, waiting for someone to come out or go in, but no one did. Then he wandered over to the other side of the street, to the building that housed the Stern & Stern Wine Emporium, which had had an attractive pavement laid in front of it since he could last have seen it, if that is indeed the right verb to express the way he had learned about this landscape.

Brand-new wine barrels were being loaded onto an oxcart by the laborers, under the direction of a gray-haired old lady whom Szilárd recognized as Yanna, his father’s mother. He dared not say anything to her; he just watched, with the mournful eyes of a dog, his shoulders drooping, his lips curled downwards. The old woman soon noticed him and with furrowed brows repeatedly glanced up in his direction. In the end she went over to him and said somewhat aggressively: “What would you be wanting, then?”

Szilárd could not reply. Moved, he surveyed the family resemblances in the old woman’s face. Yanna cleared her throat (recently she had secretly started to smoke a pipe) and could not herself understand why she said more gently: “Would you like a spot of hot soup? There will be a flask of wine after.”

She led him through the ground floor of the house, where a dozen men were writing away at desks facing each other. At the far end of the three interconnected rooms they came to an elongated granary, used for storing the many different tools needed for viticulture. A substantial table, used in the grape assessment process, dominated the center of the room, and there was a flat-fronted oven with a fire blazing in it. Yanna gave a little push to the pot with the lunch in it. There was plenty of food for the scribes; there would be enough for this spindly, clearly finicky eater. “May I ask who you are?”

“Szilárd Berda, at your service. But truly… I don’t dare.”