Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

Since the visit to the cemetery was unavoidable, he kept putting it off, with the wiliest tricks. By the time they got around to it, it was again February, windy and bitterly cold. Vilmos Csillag grumbled: “We might as well wait for spring!”

His mother launched into a tirade: “Have you any idea how long I have been begging you to take me? If it’s too much of an effort for you, I’ll go by tram, like the other peasants!”

This was Mama’s trump card, the other peasants, down to whose level it is piteous yet sometimes inevitable to sink. Vilmos Csillag never understood where his mother got her invincible hauteur, which decreed that there are us, the cultured ones, all of us potential doctoral students of morality, manners, and superiority, and there are, by contrast, other peasants, who have been vouchsafed little or nothing of this. His mother’s father-and grandfather-were in all likelihood either unpretentious carpenters in the community of Beremend or perhaps tillers of the soil, in which light the “the other peasants” tag seemed even more ludicrous. There was not an aristocrat or even an intellectual in genealogical sight, who might have had some genuine grounds for differentiating themselves from the uncouth plebs and country bumpkins.

Vilmos Csillag had no memory of his grandfather and only the very faintest of his grandmother, as if the negative of a photograph; by the time he was five they were both dead. Mama wanted to see their graves also. About the place of rest of the remaining relatives she told her son an unbelievable horror story. The village cemetery that had been the final resting place of the Porubszkys as far back as anyone could remember had been eliminated under socialism-“sir-shelism,” as she pronounced it-the gravestones that could be moved were transferred to Pécs, the bones remained in the ground, and some factory or power station had been built over the site. It sounded insane. Why would anybody want to build a factory right where there was a cemetery? Vilmos Csillag added this story to the catalogue of his mother’s mad tales. There were many of these, one more (or less) made little difference.

Sometimes his mother would come out with astonishing stories, and not always in connection with her late husband. The carpenter of Beremend rose to become the proprietor of a factory employing fifty, then a hundred, people. By the time Vilmos Csillag grew up, the family home at Beremend had expanded from three rooms to twenty-two. The sand buggy soon acquired an elder brother, a six-horse carriage, which resembled the garish phaeton in Vilmos Csillag’s favorite storybook, 77 Hungarian Folk Tales-though that had belonged to the King of Prussia, not the Porubszkys of Beremend. Their original two-hectare holding increased fivefold, to twenty Hungarian acres. Dashing hussars turned up, claiming to be related at the great-grandfather level or beyond. Vilmos Csillag had only his own, unreliable memory to draw on when he protested: “Mama, in the old days you never told me this!”

“Come, come, what do you know about it, my dear Willie? You don’t know anything, so it’s better if you keep as quiet…”

“… as shit in the grass!” he completed another of his mother’s favorite phrases.

“Exactly.”

Similar transformations were effected in Dr. Balázs Csillag’s career, in the level of affluence of his relatives in Pécs, and indeed in everything on which Mama gave little lectures. Her parents left Beremend for the capital in 1953, already burdened with serious illnesses. They died here so soon after their move, it seemed as if they had been destroyed by the sins of the metropolis. Vilmos Csillag occasionally felt the desire to find out something about the past, but if he asked his mother, he set off an inflation of the temps perdu, the exaggeration of the people who lived in the past, and he felt that he ended up knowing even less than before he put his questions. He could not understand what joy Mama could find in making such notorious over-statements-the most polite term that might be used for this activity.

The mustard-yellow Dacia came to a stop by the flower sellers’ stands and he immediately took charge: choosing the flowers, paying for them, and gripping his mother’s arm as if she were too frail to walk by herself.

The grave of the grandparents was covered by a modest slab itself covered in greenish lichen. Under it the text: DEUS MUNDUM GUVERNAT.

Once Vilmos Csillag asked: “But weren’t they Jewish?”

“Not very.”

“How can someone be not very Jewish?”

“You can if you don’t want to be. They became practicing Catholics after the war and paid regular visits to the Basilica. And I pay my tithe to the Church to this day.”

“Tithe? I had no idea there was such a thing.”

“There are many things of which you have no idea, my dear Willie.”

Vilmos Csillag had a sneaking suspicion that GUVER-NAT should really have been written GUBERNAT. He wasn’t sure. He never took Latin. He had studied Russian for eight years, but he did not consider himself competent to correct a Cyrillic notice. He had no talent for languages. What did he have a talent for? Good question.

In his own judgment he had not gone very far in life. In his mother’s judgment, he had got nowhere at all. The Sputniks, a band that spent the summers doing gigs around Lake Balaton and in winter performed at shows organized by the state-managed National Organizing Office (ORI), was difficult to take seriously, even though they had a single released on the state label Qualiton, and the radio had recorded four of their own compositions, three of which were approved for broadcasting. Of these numbers “The Pier at Szántód” reached the semifinals of the 1972 Pop Festival, which is to say that television viewers had the opportunity to see and hear the Sputniks on two occasions. This was his tally at the age of twenty-six. He had composed the music for “The Pier at Szántód.” The first line of the chorus-“What we lose on the swings, we get back on the roundabouts, yeh, yeh”-was, for a few months, on every teenager’s lips. Mama was rather proud of her little Willie at this time, laughing as she received the congratulations of her friends. But in private she was nonetheless advising her son: “Quit while you’re at the top… I’m sure now you’d get into university-apply!”

“For what?”

“Arts, law, economics, does it matter which? The important thing is that you have a degree.”

“Why? Have you got one?”

“Oh, my dear Willie… First of all, I’m a woman, and anyway we were at war when I might have gone to university, and then, on top of that, there were the restrictions, don’t you know?”

“You mean the Jewish laws?”

“Come, come, why do you have to put everything so stridently?”

“I’m not putting it stridently, the matter is already strident. Were you Jewish, or weren’t you?”

“You can’t really put it like that.”

“Yes or no?” Vilmos Csillag had lost his patience.

“Why are you yelling now? Is this what I deserve?” She was already in tears. The elaboration of the topic was again postponed. Vilmos Csillag didn’t force the issue. He would have got no nearer to the truth if he had found his mother in one of her loquacious moods. When the kosher butcher in Beremend happened to come up, he discovered that he was Mama’s first cousin and had an exceptional singing voice. If, however, Vilmos Csillag pressed her on whether he sang in the synagogue, he got only small change: “He sang wherever they let him.”

Once it turned out that, when things got very bad, Mama had taken shelter at her girlfriend Viki’s.

“You went into hiding?”

“Oh, my dear Willie, everyone was in hiding then! There were already air-raids!” and Mama would quote at length the radio announcer of the time and his announcements of the air-raids.