by Tamas Dobozy
Ákos was banished from the family; the most loyal son of all, the one most true to the past and to my father’s fanaticism, the one who wanted only to please, to make things the way they had been, was cast out into Canada, which to him and my father signified a dead zone where nothing lived, from which nothing emerged—no colours, no forms, no signals of any kind—a rot in the midst of space. Ákos entered my father’s Canada that day in the Volkerplatz, straight into the oblivion of exile, from which he has never fully emerged.
He hung around for several months, trying to work himself back into Father’s favour, even going so far as to buy back all the paintings that were sold, and sending lengthy letters to the editors of the publications that had responded to the exhibit, explaining that the show had proceeded without “György Ferenc’s authorization,” and that it was a “crime against the aesthetic intentions embodied in Ferenc’s work.” But none of it mattered, since my father, despite all of Ákos’s protestations, had now entered the lexicon as a foremost painter of the “acultural,” as a “satirist of nationhood.” I know from my mother that when news of the exhibit finally filtered into Hungary my father began receiving denunciations from the few allies still living there, not to mention the outrage spewed in his direction by a Hungarian immigrant community who were counting, in a sense, on his continued “artistic silence” as a statement on the violation of the “spirit of Hungary” by the Soviets, on their censoring of the “true Hungarian voice.” And, so, during most of those days, both Ákos and my father were engaged in similar letter-writing campaigns, trying to explain away the Volkerplatz incident. I have since seen several letters written by my father during this period and, to his credit, he never blames anything on Ákos. In fact, he never even mentions his son, only saying that the paintings were the “signature of despair,” fragments of a “failed attempt” to “realize Hungary” from a place where such a realization was impossible.
Ákos was not received back into the family. Naturally, Péter and I continued to see him, even putting him up while he went looking for work and a way back into my father’s graces. My mother was equally ineffective in talking her husband out of his decision. She said that he would only look at her when she mentioned Ákos, as one would look at an amnesiac, or at a mole blinded by sunlight struggling across a carpet too thick for its legs, staring at her while she spoke, and then, when she’d finished, shaking his head as if he’d been daydreaming and needed to refocus his attention. When Ákos showed up, my father would disappear into his studio; and if Ákos was still there when he came out, he would move through the room until he could no longer avoid his son, at which point he would stop, stand face to face with the boy and stare not into his eyes but through them, right through the back of Ákos’s head, until my brother emptied himself of every apology he could think of, and left.
Eventually, Ákos simply disappeared. He’d been staying at the house my wife and I owned in Cabbagetown, living rent-free in the basement. One morning I realized I hadn’t seen him the previous day, that he hadn’t, as usual, come up to eat dinner with us, and went downstairs to find that his closet had been cleaned out, that he’d packed up, leaving only a short note: “Dear Gergo, Sorry to leave without saying goodbye, but it didn’t feel right when I practised saying it. I have been wondering, lately, if there isn’t something out there, some gift, that I might bring to Father so that he will forgive me, and have stepped out to look for it.”
I kept this note with me for years, showing it to my father, who acted as if it were an alien hieroglyph, and then perusing it myself, rather obsessively, trying to figure out what “gift” Ákos had gone in search of. It was only after many readings, when the note had become burned into my memory, that I decided the gift was actually a piece of Canada, some fragment that would keep its meaning in the transition from Ákos to my father. He had gone into that whiteness, willingly allowed himself to be swallowed by it, in the hope that he might come across something—a shadow, a glob of colour, a groove of brushstrokes, irony and comedy themselves— that our father could fasten onto, that would help him get a fix on the geography.
In 1967, at the age of eighty, my father died of an aneurysm. In the last few years of his life he had entered the seemingly happiest phase of his artistic career in Canada, leaving the house every morning with easel and paints, off on another excursion into the wilderness, to return home at the end of the day with the canvas still blank, completely untouched, stacking this with the others in his closet as if it were completed, part of a larger body of finished work, then starting off the next morning with a fresh frame and canvas. And we began to see some possibility here, an ultimate statement on the immigrant condition; but when asked about this “work,” my father again insisted that these canvases were for “no one,” and that he would never consent to show them, no matter how strong a “conceptual statement” we thought they made. He would point his finger at each of us in turn, and lay down the law: “Understand: these paintings are never to be exhibited, for one simple reason—” and here he’d smile—”because they are not paintings’”
Whatever his opinion, these were, I think, the only works he produced in Canada that came close to satisfying him. Péter and I have each kept one of these canvases, as mementoes.
The old man lay in state for two or three days while the lawyers and my mother went through the papers, coming upon the evolution of Father’s will in the notebooks and journals kept in the studio. He’d drafted one or two wills a year, as it turned out, always altering what he wanted done with his remains and paintings and possessions, in a way that reflected his growing alienation in Canada. At first he wanted his effects to come to us, and expressed no particular wish regarding his remains; then, gradually, he went over to wanting his effects donated to the Hungarian Cultural Association, and his body buried in the local Hungarian Calvinist cemetery; and, finally, he wanted everything destroyed, including his body, though he did not specify what we should do with the remnants of this destruction. The three of us decided that his body should be cremated and placed in an urn until such time as the Hungarian government granted us amnesty (they had prevented us, on pain of arrest, from ever returning), and his ashes could be removed to our homeland and scattered in the waters of his beloved Tisza.
(At the same time, there was an emphasis to that final version of the will, not only in the many exclamation points, but also in the thick brush and black paint, dark as India ink, he’d used to slap it down, as if fearing that anything but the boldest manifesto would leave his thoughts open to interpretation. And due to this I felt, disquietingly, that my father, by the time of his death, wanted it made clear that he had gone beyond caring about Canada or Hungary or himself, that he’d reconciled with the great emptiness he’d spent the last half of his life hounding, as if the country had finally opened its mouth to him, and, in doing so, deprived him of his own desire to speak, of his need for anything but silence and an empty mirror.)
As this was 1967, a year thick with Cold War paranoia, we made our decision regarding his remains with the same grim uncertainty with which we’d greeted most of his paintings. There was no reason to hope that our family would ever be granted amnesty to return to Hungary, or that the regime there would topple. We argued—my mother, Péter, and myself—for days over how to manage the ashes, all of us uncomfortable with the fact that a man who had based his whole life on a mystical communion with landscape would now find his remains resting in some ceramic urn, on a mantelpiece, distanced from the earth. In the end, I think we were all afraid that the urn would always be there, reminding us of how unhappy father had been, of how his madness had progressed, and, most of all, of the fact that all his misery had resulted from the fact that he’d wanted the best for us, that he would have endured even the chicken coop as long as it meant he could stay in Hungary, except that he had a wife and sons whose individual futures, for as long as they remained under Soviet rule, would be sorely limited. None of us needed to be reminded of
that. And so we dithered.
But by the day of the cremation, it was my mother who’d made the decision to rent a drawer in a crematorium, someplace we could store my father until that day, if it ever came, when he’d return home. It was exactly the kind of compromise my father would have refused, though we put this thought out of our heads because it was convenient, and seemed to accord, however imperfectly, with what we all wanted.
It was on that day, some five years after disappearing, that Ákos turned up. We were standing in the cemetery with the priest, clad in the usual funerary black, when my little brother marched in, interrupted the last rites, and picked up the urn from under our noses. He glared at us—shocked as we were by the return of the one person in our family, other than my father, who insisted that every act should be made in consideration of fidelity—spun on his heels and carried the remains out of the graveyard.
We found him later that day, barricaded behind the door to my father’s studio. Mother was the first to demand that he come out and explain himself. But Ákos only returned a tirade in which he accused all of us of being untrue to Father’s wishes, of being contaminated by a faithlessness that only he, and Father, had had the character to resist, of rejecting our responsibility to the truth for a flimsy compromise. He accused us of being “Canadian.” We begged him to come out. But nothing worked.
And when Péter and I finally reached the point of breaking down the door, we found that most of the paintings and journals had disappeared, that the back window was open, and that Ákos and the urn were gone.
I did not see my brother again until 1975, when the government finally rescinded the arrest warrant issued for our family back in the 1950s, meaning we were now free to return to Hungary. He showed up around dinnertime, a week or so after the announcement, just as I was discussing plans for a visit with my wife and kids.
I’m not sure how I recognized him, given that he’d become thinner than anyone I’d ever seen, and that his hair had, for some reason, gone completely white, and was missing in patches and elsewhere sticking straight up in the air, and that his skin, once deep brown, seemed translucent now. Clutched to his chest was the urn.
“Hello, Gergo,” he said, in an English that was, if anything, even more warped by Hungarian than ever (and Ákos had been a young boy when we’d arrived in Canada, meaning that he, more than anyone in the family, should have by now completely shrugged off the accent). “I’ve come to ask you to take Father back to Hungary. If that’s okay with you.” He sounded sarcastic.
And so Ákos stepped back into our lives. As I guided him to our kitchen table, and pulled over an extra seat, and shovelled a heap of food onto his plate (potatoes and roast and salad that I knew he was too thin to eat but which I offered anyhow to assuage my guilt), I felt that Ákos had in fact gone nowhere in the last few years, that he’d wandered into that blankness my father had always seen and, not finding any sustenance there, had somehow eked out survival on memory alone, on a desire for forgiveness in my father’s eyes, while searching for that particle of truth beside which György Ferenc’s ashes could rest in peace. Now he’d returned, bearing the marks of that impossible quest. He didn’t eat a thing, but merely asked that we boil for him a bit of ero leves, beef soup stock. We watched him sip it carefully, holding the bowl with one hand, and balancing the urn on his hip with the other.
We spent much of that night talking about where he’d been, but I was not able to understand much of what Ákos said because he spoke of his travels not in geographical terms—not with the names of cities, towns, forests, lakes, mountain ranges—but in a lexicon so particular, so personal, that I was soon lost, unable to get past the peculiar trees he described, that had led him to a lake tinted a shade of aqua never before seen, from there to a town where people were boarding up houses and moving away, to a description of a city that had within it a building made entirely of “nonreflective glass,” and on and on, charting his travels in terms so utterly dependent on the fork in the road he’d chosen, on impressions provided by intersections of weather, people, and times of day, that I soon felt as if he was walking far ahead of me, and that the distance between us was growing with every word.
It would have been different if he’d said Vancouver, or Medicine Hat, or Thunder Bay, or Halifax. And I guessed that his reluctance to use proper names in describing his travels was because he was trying to elude Canada, his motions across the country enacting a ritual dance that might call into being an entirely different geography. Ákos had been wandering Canada in search of Hungary— not his actual home but rather the condition of being, the possibility, of home—looking for the law that would somehow, incredibly, let him establish the familiar in the midst of the alien, which would allow him access to the same proportion of awe and reverence and locatedness he had felt in the Puszta, the Kárpáts, or the Felvidék. That he had returned to me suggested how impossible it had been.
He kept the urn, thick with the dirt of his fingerprints, in his hands at all times. And when I asked how he’d lived, he answered vaguely, and I guessed he’d had work here and there, and handouts, and had at other times simply gone without.
It was three in the morning, long after my wife and children had gone to bed, when he asked, “Will you take Father home?”
I looked over at him, refilled his wineglass, and nodded.
Ákos bowed his head and whispered, “Thank you.” And when he looked up again his face was full of the exhaustion of the last years. “I’ve been trying for so long to get him back there.”
And so he was there on the day that the extended family gathered at the airport—Péter and his wife and children, along with my mother—to see us off. Ákos was wearing an old coat that had belonged to my father (he’d come back to Toronto with only what was on his back, and I remember feeling perplexed when I first invited him inside my house, scanning for the suitcase I thought he’d left on the top step), and holding the urn. We were just about to enter the security zone when Ákos paused in the act of handing the urn across to me, and pulled it back. “I just …” he paused, “I just want to say goodbye.” And he wandered off to the far side of the airport terminal, near the large glass windows overlooking the calm of perfectly manicured lawns, and marshes, and smooth, clear runways, where there were few or no passengers. As my wife and children had already gone ahead through security and customs, I was waiting impatiently, and when, after ten minutes of him saying farewell to a pile of ash, Ákos didn’t respond to my call, I quickly walked over to where he stood and asked what the problem was.
He had the strangest look on his face, one I’d seen elsewhere, though I was unable to place it as he handed the urn over to me.
It was empty.
Somewhere along the line, my father’s ashes had either leaked out, or been stolen. I ran a finger inside the urn and couldn’t even come up with a flake. For the last five minutes, Ákos had stared into the dark void past the ceramic rim, and now was smiling in a way I hadn’t seen since before the Volkerplatz incident.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I asked, irritated that my wife and kids were probably waiting for me near the departure gate while I was having this conversation with someone who, I thought, must have completely lost his mind and dumped my father’s ashes into the Humber River or Lake Ontario, and either forgotten about it or set up this situation to irritate us into remembering the dead.
Ákos just smiled, and shook his head.
In a fit of panic and disgust, I left him there, smiling, staring into the urn.
It was only many weeks later, when I’d fully realized what it was to lose a country—after I had gone astray in the streets of a city I thought I knew as well as myself, after I’d seen the growth of apartments on the outskirts of Debrecen, after I’d stepped onto the Hortobágy and been unable to shake the sense of infinite distance between the soles of my shoes and the ground they stood upon— that I remembered where I’d last seen the smile Ákos had worn at the airport. You see, either eve
rything had changed in Hungary, or I had changed, and what was most disquieting about the trip for me was not only that I couldn’t stabilize my sense of being in the country, but that I couldn’t even fix upon the country I was trying to stabilize myself in relation to. The greatest nightmare was that both of us had changed—the country and myself—and that we were constantly changing, which made the possibility of us ever connecting again a matter of complete chance, the intersection of two bodies on random flight patterns, ruled by equations so different there was little chance of us resting, even for a second, on the same co-ordinates.
My father had smiled like that once, too. We had been climbing for a full half-day in the Rockies, trying to find a particular canyon a local hunting guide had told us about. It was high summer then, and all four of us were sweating and covered with dirt by the time we reached the summit of the cliff overlooking the canyon. My father was especially intent that day, though he must have realized by the time we came to our destination that there was no way he would have time to even begin the painting before we’d have to turn back. The panorama was unlike anything we’d ever seen—deep walls of stone, a raging river at the bottom, thick stands of evergreen, dry and hot—which was usually a bad thing, since what my father wanted, more than anything, was to find a place that at least felt like he’d seen it before. But, today, instead of shaking his head in disapproval I saw him look down into the canyon and smile, beatifically, as if everything that passed in front of his eyes was regular and necessary and right, and for a second or two I thought, idiotically, that maybe he’d finally come to some kind of compromise with the landscape, that he was beginning to realize his place in it, or that he was willing to meet this new country halfway.
