Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

The memorable days of his life he was wont to recall with particular pleasure in the bosom of his family and friends. His acquisitions, his marriage, the birth of his children, the setting up of the glassworks, his successful career and growing wealth, his election as town councillor-these were the tales he told most gladly. What preceded these glories, it was best to forget. But with the ability to forget he had not, alas, been blessed. He had once read an Italian canticle that said that at the boundary of the Lower World there flowed not only the waters of oblivion, the river Lethe, but also its twin, Eunoe, rising from the same source, the waters of good remembrance. As an infant it must have been of Eunoe that he had been given to drink, though this is the one thing that he cannot recall.

His strength continued to ebb away and soon he could no longer even sit up. Yet how gladly he would have entered in his folio all that went through his head in these dread times. It would have served to guide his wife and three children in the days ahead. In adulthood it had been rare indeed for him to end the day without writing copiously on the large pages of the thick album he had brought from Italy for this purpose. It was said to have been made in a famous bible scriptorium and originally intended to bear the Holy Writ. Kornél always wrote in this folio with due respect for its distinguished history. If his descendants desired to know how he had spent the time allotted to him on this earth, they could read all about it in there.

He had no means of giving an account of the last few hours of his life. He could not write at the top of the page: Chapter the Last: My Decease. Fortunately, he had made his last will and testament the previous year, and in a leaden casket sealed with three seals it awaited the attention of the appropriate authorities. And he had copied the will into his folio.

Though he had gone over it in his head a hundred, a thousand times, still he was assailed by doubt. Was he right to leave the glassworks to Bálint? Perhaps the lad is not adult enough to manage twenty men, to meet the weekly, monthly totals, to haggle with the tradesmen, to tug his forelock at the nobles most likely to place substantial orders. But he was still young, he had time to grow up.

Bálint did not take after him. Kornél Sternovszky (Csillag) was of very small build, his limbs thinner and weaker than they should be. Though his legs had remained crooked, so skilled was he at using them that the untrained eye would not have detected that he was lame. No amount of meat and drink would give him a potbelly, and his face had preserved to this day its pleasant, oval shape. Physically he was more or less hale, only the hair over his unusually arched brow had begun to thin, though still only tinged with gray. His moustache and beard had never thickened into a grown man’s, and to his eternal regret resembled more the sprouting hairs of an adolescent.

How he would have loved to go on living! If only he could hear, just once more, the three smelting ovens bellowed up, the carefully dried wooden logs catching fire with a sudden zizz; then the heat would start its work, the wondrous heat that produced the especially hard-wearing yet splendidly pellucid glassware. Even in the windows of his own house he had fitted lead-framed panes of glass produced in his own works, and would proudly point them out to visitors. Now he saw sadly how the light of the sun beat down through them. Born in the heat of the fire, they loyally continued in the service of warmth: during winter they sealed it in, but let it in during summer, all the while keeping the winds without.

Turning these thoughts over in his head, he did not notice that Bálint had entered the room and knelt down on the ground by the bed, his face radiant with pious concern. He, too, was aware that soon… The dying man’s eyes filled with tears. God will surely provide. The image of Grandpa Czuczor came into his mind, the person whom outwardly Bálint most closely resembled: though still growing, he was already big and strong, a veritable colossus. The only respect in which his first-born son resembled him, his father, was his phenomenal powers of recall. Any text he heard or read, even casually, he was able to repeat exactly and without error, and never ever forgot. Yet the boy did not think this an unmixed blessing as had his father in his own younger days. Bálint reveled more in other talents he possessed, above all his ability to sing and dance like none among his school peers. All he needed was the sound of music and his muscular feet would set to tapping. What a splendid night it would be, the night of the wedding feast, when he would dance till dawn with his betrothed, holding her delicate body again and again to his brawny one. How infinitely sad that he, Kornél, would never see that girl, would never be her father-in-law. It could not be far off, a few years at most, as Bálint was a mere two months short of his seventeenth birthday.

My last will and testament

I have done all that I was able to do; more or better I could not have done.

Let my wife, Mrs. Sternovszky, born Janka Windisch, take care to ensure that the glassworks, the Sternovszky lands and estates, including the horses, the town house in Felvincz, and the woodlands registered under my name, remain together in the manner hereunder described. Let her take care that they do not become run down and as far as possible let them be maintained and expanded, and let her look after my earthly assets as if I were still by her side.

My first-born, Bálint Sternovszky, will come into his inheritance when he reaches the age of one-and-twenty. He will take over the glassworks and those woodlands marked one to seven in the register. At this time also he will come into possession of my folio and sundry other writings.

My second-born, Zoltán Sternovszky, will at the age of one-and-twenty come into ownership of the family estates together with the horses, provided he undertakes to take good care of them and manage them.

Should he fail to undertake this, the ownership of the family estates will devolve upon my youngest son, Kálmán Sternovszky, who additionally inherits the woodlands marked eight to twelve in the register, as well as my share of the ore mine in Tordas.

In the event that the estates and the horses devolve upon Kálmán, however, the share of the ore mine and the woodlands marked eight to twelve in the register will become the property of his elder brother Zoltán.

The house in Felvincz and all chattels appertaining thereto, including its gold and silver plate, jewelry, and the sum of 12,000 florins, of the whereabouts of which she is fully cognizant, remain the sole and unconditional property of my wife.

Written while of sound mind, of my own free will, and in full possession of all my faculties.

I should have married younger, then I would have grandchildren around my deathbed. His difficult and troubled childhood and youth had prevented this. His childhood was a dance between life and death. Three times at the least only divine providence had saved him from certain death. The third time he had had cholera: given up for dead, he was carted out to the far end of the cemetery and thrown in the communal pit. It was midwinter and by dawn he was frozen stiff, but somehow the pulse of life began to pound again in his veins. He had to escape, to a place where they did not know that he had the plague; back home he would surely have been beaten to death.

He came from nothing and nowhere; until the age of fourteen his life was not worth the price of a bottle of wine. He was found by Gypsies, spent some time with them, then helped out men wandering the forest, or charcoal burners, in return for food and lodging. In his heart of hearts he knew he was worth more than this and that the time would come when he would prove it. All this while he was lower than a footstool, his fate to endure humiliation and suffering. And, with his astonishing memory, he forgot not a whit of this when later, with God’s help, his fate took a turn for the better.