Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

Szilárd Berda-Stern protested and when Mariska Zalay still refused to utter “yes” to his proposal of marriage, he moodily withdrew into himself. He felt he had been betrayed. He had quit the Lyceum in the belief that he had now found his better half. How long was he to live in such uncertainty? He thought with increasing sorrow of the Lyceum. Of his daily life there what he missed most was the time spent among the stars, and he decided that as soon as he had the time and the wherewithal he would make himself a telescope, so that he could continue his wandering among the night sky’s wonders. When he stared into the light of distant stars he had the same feelings as when he was able to look into times gone by.

Mariska Zalay insisted that wherever they lodged in a new town, she was accommodated in a room of her own, claiming that if she had to share with another she would be unable to prepare for her performance. Szilárd Berda-Stern was always obliged to share with one of the coachmen, though he was nauseated by the latter’s powerful smell of sweat. Some nights he would slip into Mariska Zalay’s room: they had agreed that if a candle or lamp was lit in the window, he could come; otherwise he was to keep out. As time went by, there was a gradual diminution in the number of nights that the flickering light appeared on a range of window ledges. Szilárd Berda-Stern suffered in silence. His agony was noticed only by Kálmán Jávorffy, and on one occasion he offered the lad what was intended to be a consolatory lecture on the inconstancy of women who worked on the stage. “You can better trust a viper than one of them!”

Szilárd Berda-Stern strove not to show how shattered he was by what he had heard. But the more he thought about it, the clearer it became to him that the manager was right. After all, he should have known from his mother what sort of a woman she was before she married. Nonetheless it took him the better part of a year to build up the courage to break with Mariska Zalay; moreover, he had to quit Kálmán Jávorffy’s troupe to do it. He joined the Hungarian Theater of Pozsony, in a role similar to his position hitherto, though the recompense was half as much again.

In this town, where there is a permanent Hungarian theatrical company, I found what I was seeking. Beside my theatrical work, I secured some income from teaching the Latin language by the hour. In a curious twist of fate I met a lady, Margit Galántay, a fanatical devotee of the theater, and when I had made clear the seriousness of my intentions, she told me that her father Márton Galántay was the town’s clerk. Appealing to this chance congruity, I sought the consent of my mother and stepfather to my marriage, which subsequently I did indeed obtain.

His wife presented him with a boy and a girl. Their names Mendel and Hannah were taken by their parents from the heroes of plays fashionable at the time, but this was not something they made a great deal of fuss about. The Berda-Sterns’ doors were open to all, and many of the town’s most distinguished citizens passed through their gate. On Thursday afternoons they organized five o’clock tea, where gifted amateurs read from their poetry. Particular success was enjoyed by Bendegúz Tolnai, the teacher of Hungarian language and literature at the gymnasium, whose work, The Silence Before the Storm, saw print in the Anthology. The Berda-Sterns subscribed to numerous literary and scientific periodicals, which Szilárd felt could not be missing from the educated person’s bookshelves. He gladly spent money on these. Though, it must be said, not at all gladly on other things. Their family bliss was frequently punctuated by rows that were invariably to do with financial matters. Margit often accused her husband of being a tight-fisted Harpagon. Szilárd Berda-Stern countered by accusing his wife of profligacy and even wanton squandering of their money.

Disturbing news came from Pest-Buda, where the young writers were constantly at odds with the censor’s office. In the salon of the Berda-Sterns the names of the novelist Jókai and the poet Petöfi were mentioned in awed tones. The evening after the latest Pictures of Life arrived bearing the headline “The Press Is Free!” they held an extraordinary meeting at the home of Bendegúz Tolnai. The poet, trembling with an intensity of emotion that appeared truly life-threatening, wanted to read out the journal in its entirety to the gathering, but as he could nowhere find his eyeglasses, he devolved this honor onto Szilárd Berda-Stern. The editorial opened thus: The revolution has begun. Magyarland begins to live its days of glory. Our correspondents in the regions will know what they must henceforth write about. These words were received with joy unconfined. The company did not disperse until midnight or perhaps later, the March Youth were repeatedly toasted, along with the revolution and the breaking of the new Hungarian dawn.

The public reading of Szilárd Berda-Stern was to have the strangest consequences. When the Emperor’s troops occupied the town, the first task of Géza Ráth, county commissioner plenipotentiary, was to have the leading rebels rounded up. On this list next to the name Szilárd Berda-Stern was written the word conspirator.

It surpasses my comprehension still that I should be in prison, writing my farewell letter. What offense have I committed against the emperor? It must be such a small thing that he can hardly have felt it. But the commissioner wants to make an example of me at any cost. Now it has at last dawned on me that I did indeed see the future, for I stared many times down gun-barrels aimed at my chest, only I, misguided fellow that I am, believed I was reliving the last moments of Grandpa Czuczor.

He wrote separately to his son, daughter, wife, mother, and the Sterns, though what he had to say was by and large the same.

At first light, the duty guard looked in and gave a salute. “Last requests?”

“See that these are delivered to the addressees.”

“It will be done.”

“My last wish is that my gravestone should bear no word but Star.”

“Star? What for?”

“It was the fine Hungarian name of my earliest forebears.”

The guard nodded. Misguided fellow, he thought, imagining that the executed get some sort of tombstone rather than ending up in a ditch at the end of the cemetery. “You have an hour remaining!” he said with a click of his heels, and left Szilárd Berda-Stern to his thoughts.

The life of Szilárd Berda-Stern was extinguished on January 18, 1849 at six of the clock in the morning by a firing squad of four. Two aimed at his heart, two at his head. One bullet landed in an eye and drenched in red the kerchief with which his executioners had sought to save his sight. His body was rolled up in canvas and tossed into the ditch at the far end of the cemetery, bearing only a few spadefuls of earth and disinfecting lime.

Unfathomably, some hundred years later in the damp heart of the ditch a dozen or more potato plants began to sprout. Their tubers were caressed by the winds of the west. This, too, Szilárd Berda-Stern had sensed somehow. By no means rare in his visions were the pale sad flowers of the potato plant.

COOLING STREAMS OF AIR COME TO CLEAR THE LAND. The smell of burned leaf mold mingles with the more oppressive fumes from the fumigation of the wine casks and the raffish smell of mulled wine. The fermenting juice of the grape is quaffed all around, keenly watched for its head, an index of its quality. In the cellars the water in the glass piping on the back of the barrels bubbles up as the gases promoting the ferment gurgle their way through the slender tubes. Those who have finished the wine harvest can already hammer into this year’s vintage barrels the taps with their maize-husk seals. The landscape grows more barren by the day. The autumn paints pale, dull colors, steadily emptying the nests.