Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

The Minister of the Interior paid a surprise visit to the Pécs Police HQ. Balázs Csillag had the honor of being introduced: “He will soon have his doctorate!”

The minister asked a few questions and inquired after his family circumstances. Balázs Csillag stood at (what his superiors considered not stiff enough) attention. “Married, no children as yet.”

“Parents?”

“None.”

“Hm?”

“I have no wish to speak about this. May I be excused?” and he left without waiting for the answer.

Subsequently he heard that the minister had continued to express interest in him, believing he was concealing an Arrow Cross or a Horthyite father. A few weeks later he was summoned to Budapest to work at the Ministry. “What happens if I refuse?” he asked his immediate superior.

“What happens is that that doesn’t happen.”

He thought Marchilla would be devastated, but he was wrong. The woman clapped with joy. “That’s fantastic, Balázs dear, and you’ll take me to the theater? And to the movies? And to the opera?”

His final task in Pécs was to relocate the cemetery at Beremend. When the chief constable gave him the instructions, he thought he had not heard right. “Relocate? A cemetery? What in God’s name for?”

“Because it is to become the site of a power station. Industrialization is more important than the dead, that must be obvious.”

“And why does this require the use of police staff?”

“Because the cemetery is a Jewish one, Comrade Csillag. You get my meaning?” and the chief constable winked knowingly.

He’s sending me because… someone’s branded me a Jew, thought Balázs Csillag. He read the relevant file. The wrangling had been going on for a while. The Jewish community of Beremend and the Chief Rabbi of Pécs had launched an offensive, in their protests the mildest expression used being “defiling the dead.” The Chief Rabbi had managed to secure the council’s permission to transfer all the gravestones that remained intact to the Jewish Cemetery of Pécs. But as soon as two laborers arrived on the spot, half a dozen Jews from Beremend chased them off. According to the books, the police station at Beremend had a complement of four, but in the event only two men were available and they had requested reinforcements.

Balázs Csillag ordered the mounted police to Beremend, and this time he led them personally. By the time they reached the village, the gendarme saddle that he had polished to a shine had worn the trousers and the skin on his rear to shreds. The gates to the cemetery still gave shelter to a few unpeaceful descendants of those at peace within it. An old woman in a black headscarf, who somewhat resembled Ilse, shook her fist in front of Balázs Csillag’s nose, whereupon he dismounted with great difficulty. “What do you think you lot are doing, eh? Haven’t you hounded us enough? No respect even for the dead, eh?”

The situation was complicated by the fact that Marchi’s father and mother were both calling out the names of all the dead of the family who lay here. “What sort of eternal rest is this?” Then they suddenly noticed their son-in-law. They hesitated for a second, then decided to ignore him.

“So even they…” thought Balázs Csillag. I should have known. He tried to raise his hand to indicate he wanted to say something. It took a long time for them to calm down. Then he said: “People, listen. Orders are orders. With your help, we can save every gravestone. Without it, we can save only as many as we can shift by the end of the day. The tractors are due tomorrow.”

“Of course,” shrieked the old crone reminiscent of Ilse, “the stones yes, the dead bodies no?”

“Look, my good woman, what are we to do with the bodies? It’s better for them where they are,” replied Balázs Csillag, quietly but firmly. He had witnessed enough scenes like this at the Front; he knew these people would give in.

“You’re not a Jew, right? No idea what one is, eh?” the crone shrieked, stabbing the air with her gnarled fingers.

As the slabs left the ground one by one, each felt like a dull thud on his heart. He told himself off: it’s all the same. Your loved ones don’t even have a grave! He sauntered out of the cemetery, feeling that a cigarette would help him relax.

I shouldn’t have smoked so much, he thought now, in his hospital bed. How many people had warned him, and how often! He had just waved them aside: “You have to die of something sometime anyway.”

“True, my dear,” said Marchi, “but it is not all the same when.”

There is a strong likelihood that it will be soon. Though Dr. Salgó is quite upbeat: “Now that we’re controlling the embolism, we have every hope of positive developments.”

I would be happy with the positive development of getting up, he thought. He had difficulty in using the bedpan; he felt awkward that women slid it under his buttocks, while they could glimpse his dried-up naked body as they lifted up the blanket, his manhood too, which, against his will, would curl out of the pajama bottoms. He was ashamed all his life, not only of the ridges and craters of his burned skin; in his youth he had been ashamed because he was so sickly, after the war because he had put on a lot of weight, and in recent years because he had become so shriveled and shrunken. Only when he was in the upper years of secondary school had he had any success with women. Since then he had at most dared to stare at them, and if one happened to return his gaze, he would look away in confusion.

Now, sunken, incapable, and unworthy on a hospital bed, he was troubled by the thought that he had not had enough female attention. There had been only three women in his life, not counting stolen kisses in school. The second he had married. The third-a silly affair at work-developed on a work outing and reached its climax in a clearing at Szilvásvárad. The reason he had so much enjoyed being with Iduska, who worked in accounts, was that he did not have to divest himself of his clothing and so had fewer inhibitions. There, in the grass, he realized that he had been quite seriously in error regarding the variety of ways in which a man and a woman may gratify each other. The thought of divorce flashed through his head, but Iduska poured cold water on it at once: “You must be joking, my dear Balázs; we are both married with a raft of kids!”

“I have only one.”

“Well, I have three.”

The memories of Szilvásvárad again and again came to the fore, like a postcard that had lost none of its glossy sheen. Since he had vowed to rid himself of the family tradition of looking into the past, this was perhaps the first time that he allowed his thoughts to gambol about among the peaks of time, like giddy little goats. Initially, no further back than the years after the war.

When they moved up to the capital, they did not avail themselves of the tiny, two-room service flat on the newly built Ministry of the Interior estate in Kispest, because they were able to set themselves up in the family house in Terézváros, where the lower floors were occupied by Marchi’s eighty-two-year-old widowed aunt; the upper floor was empty because this aunt’s brother, a retired doctor, had received extraordinary permission to emigrate to Canada, where another sister lived. The Porubszkys were secretly hoping that if Captain Balázs Csillag moved in, the authorities would leave their property in peace. Marchi’s aunt, Dr. Lujza Harmath, always referred to the house as “the villa” and to Hungary as “The Balkans! My dear girl, these are the deepest Balkans!”

Balázs Csillag was irritated by the old lady’s airs and graces and he took not one step to save the villa-in fact, a very modestly constructed and, after the 1944 bombing, rather poorly restored building; so it was, in due course, nationalized and Dr. Lujza Harmath, as well as they themselves, became tenants.