by Endre Farkas
The lobby door of Naomi’s apartment was solid oak with brass doorknobs. The hall floor was marble. Once a classy place, it was now run-down. The door was dried out, the marble had cracks in it and the brass mailboxes were dangling from the wall. He rang the bell and waited. When no one answered, he felt both disappointed and relieved.
10
“Since when have you known him?”
Tommy didn’t know how long he had been answering questions. His ankle hurt. He wanted to sit. He was thirsty and wanted to sleep. The man in the black suit was relentless.
“I asked you a question. Are you deaf as well as stupid?”
Tommy took a deep breath. “We were babies together. His mother…” Tommy searched for the words, “gave us milk together.”
“Officer Szeles’s mother worked for your family?”
“No. Frog’s.”
“I’m not asking you about that damned Gypsy.”
“Oh.”
“Well?” He spat the question at him.
Tommy took a deep breath. He wanted to wake up and leave but he wasn’t dreaming. “I had heard of Imre Szeles before I met him. He was in grade two for the second time. He was in Gabi’s class. Gabi and I were sitting at the dinner table telling our parents about our first day of school. I had had a great day. We started with the ABC, which I knew because Gabi had taught it to me the year before. I recited the alphabet without fault. Mrs. Gombás patted me on the head and praised me in front of the class.
“Gabi told me that his teacher had already whacked Szeles with the ruler. He got caught carving his desk with his knife. Gabi took great pleasure describing the whacking. Szeles had to go to the front of the class, hold out his hand with his fingertips pressed together like this. Gabi took my fingers and showed me what he meant. And then… Gabi raised his ruler in mid-air. It scared me. Whack! Gabi shouted as he brought it down. I yanked my hand away. Gabi laughed and said if you move your hand you get it twice. ‘Szeles,’ he said, ‘didn’t even wince.”’
11
“You’re not going.”
“What?”
“You’re not going and that’s final!”
“Why not?”
His mother’s eyes blazed, her body tensed and the hand holding a kitchen knife trembled like a volcano about to erupt.
“Because I hate them!”
Tommy took a step back.
“Hannah!” his father cried out. She looked at him as if in a trance. “Hannah,” he said softly. She sat and put the knife down.
His father, who had been making tea, brought her a cup. She held it between her hands. In silence they watched the steam rise.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.
In his room, pressing down on the scar, Tommy tried to push back the oncoming migraine.
His mother’s powerful pills kicked in and he drifted off.
He was eight years old, standing in a clearing with his hands up. His father and mother were on either side of him. It was the middle of the night, but the full moon illuminated them and the soldier, a stout young man with a round face, who was aiming a rifle at them. “Hands up!” he kept repeating. Tommy’s father was edging away from him. He didn’t want his father to leave him. He wanted to reach out to hold his hand. His father was talking to the soldier and reaching into his pocket. He was offering him a bottle. The soldier stepped closer to take it but tripped and fell. There was a flash and Tommy felt a burning sear across his temple. Then, just before everything went black, he saw an animal leap.
His father’s call for supper woke him. His headache had subsided, but he knew it was more masked than gone.
“I agree with your mother,” his father said as he slurped his soup. “You know what they’ve done. You know what they’re capable of. We escaped so that you could be free and never have to live among them.”
He didn’t need to be told why his parents hated them. He’d heard it often enough. The same stories were retold every Passover and every time they got together with their lanzmen. Each of their friends had their anti-Semitic neighbour stories, about those who had stood in their doorways watching them being rounded up and taken away. The ghetto stories of starvation, the labour camp stories of humiliation and beatings and the concentration camp stories of death. He himself had experienced the ’56 mob-night stories.
“I’m not going to live among them. I’m going to play soccer against them.”
“It’s not safe yet. They could arrest you,” his father said.
“They can’t arrest me. I’m a Canadian citizen.”
“Yes, they can. Those rotten lice can do anything they want! I don’t trust them,” his mother hissed.
Tommy tried a different tack. “We don’t have to pay a cent. The plane and hotel are paid for.”
“No!” his mother snapped.
“Apu, I’d be playing soccer in Hungary. Our final game will be on the Golden Green.”
“What? The Golden Green?”
Tommy sensed a crack in his father’s resistance. He could see that he was torn between not wanting him to go, being afraid for him, hating them and having him play in the People’s Stadium in Budapest. “It would be sweet revenge.”
“You’re going to play on the same pitch as Puskás?”
Tommy nodded. His father got a faraway look in his eyes. Tommy knew he had him.
He turned to his mother. “I could visit Grandfather, Aunt Magda, Emma-mama, and Gabi,” he said softly. His mother was on the verge of tears.
“No!” She slammed her fist on the kitchen table.
“I want to!” Tommy shouted back, surprising himself. He grabbed his jacket and left.
Park Ex, the neighbourhood north of Park Avenue, was a step up from the immigrant ghetto they had lived in when they first arrived in Montreal. There were no cockroaches in the duplexes of these tree-lined streets. At least not in theirs. And the Town of Mount Royal, the ultimate final step on the ladder for hardworking immigrants, was just a four-lane throughway and a chain-link fence away.
He stopped at Pete the Greek’s corner store. Pete, a soccer fanatic, had known Tommy since his high school soccer days and always greeted him with a loud Greek hello. “Tsikanis.”
“Kala.” Tommy always answered using one of the few non-curse Greek words Kostas had taught him. Pete had cut out the Gazette picture of the team and had it pinned up behind the cash. Since their championship victory Pete gave him a free Pepsi every time he dropped by. Tommy felt awkward but secretly pleased at this star treatment.
“Efcharisto. Adio,” Tommy said using up his two other non-curse words as he left and headed down Bloomfield Avenue. At Lester Park, he sat and watched young kids running up and down the mounds, between the trees playing Cowboys and Indians like he used to with his friends when he was in elementary school. He had started as an Indian but became a Cowboy when he found a broken cap gun in a garbage can. Though small, the park had enough green space for pickup soccer games. When they had first moved to Park Ex five years ago, his mother sent him out to meet other kids and he ended up here. A group of boys his age was playing and after watching for a bit he asked if he could play. They made him wait until one left. After he scored three goals, he was always the first one picked.
Tommy had never yelled at his parents. They had never had a fight. Not even when they didn’t allow him to do something he really wanted to do. He couldn’t imagine himself going against their wishes or answering back. A good Jewish boy didn’t do that to his parents, his father told him, when they heard shouting and screaming coming from the neighbours’ house. Because they always told him how much they sacrificed for him and what they had gone through, he could never bring himself to hurt them. They were Holocaust survivors. How could he do anything to hurt them? But now he had, and he couldn’t take it back. And in a strange way, it made him feel good.
They were still in the kitchen when he returned. He sat down and his mother put a fresh bowl of chicken soup in front of him. “Mmmm, it’s good and hot,” he said slurping it down.
“Before we set off to the train station to be taken to Auschwitz, my mother, may she rest in peace, asked our neighbour if she would take care of our hope chest. Magda and I were reaching marriageable age and my mother had started to fill it with bolts of cloth and dresses as part of our trousseau. There was a beautiful polka-dotted dress that was to be mine. I loved polka dots.” Tommy’s mother teared up. “My mother told the neighbour that if we didn’t come back, she could have it.
“When we got back, Magda and I went over to get it. The neighbour said the Russians had ransacked the house and taken everything from the chest. A few days later I was walking on the street and saw our neighbour’s niece wearing my polka-dot dress. She smiled and said she was glad to see me back. I nodded and walked on. But I wanted to rip it off her! I wanted to gouge out her eyes! That’s the kind of people they are. Liars and thieves. It’s why I don’t want you to go back there.”
Tommy’s stomach churned. He didn’t know what to say. He took another spoonful of soup to give himself time to calm down. “I won’t be alone. We’re going as a team and the coach will be there.”
“I don’t like it,” his mother muttered.
But he sensed that his mother was weakening. Maybe his father had worked on her. He had a way with her. Though she wore the pants in the family, his father knew how to charm her.
“How do you know you won’t get arrested and conscripted into their lousy army?”
“Why would they arrest me? For scoring a goal? And if they conscript me, I’ll end up being a colonel and playing for Hungary.”
“Don’t joke. This is not funny,” his mother snapped and disappeared into her sewing room.
12
“Hi.”
“She’s not here,” Naomi said when she opened the door.
“Huh? Oh, I didn’t think she would be.”
“You came to see me?”
“Sort of.”
“Okay. Come in.”
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“But you said you came to see me. Sort of.”
He followed her into the living room. Naomi intimidated him. She was so sure of herself. She always spoke with conviction. And, she lived on her own. He didn’t know a single guy his age who lived on his own, let alone a girl.
The living room looked bigger than he remembered. The mismatched old couch and armchair with tufts of stuffing sticking through worn armrests looked less exotic than they had the other night but they blended with the rest of the secondhand furniture and improvised décor. His parents would be shocked to see this. For them old and worn were reminders of their old-country poverty.
A bookshelf of plywood and bricks filled with dog-eared books ran along one wall. The top shelf was cluttered with wine bottles, candles stuck in them and melted wax down their sides. The record player, which looked to be the newest and most expensive thing in the place, sat on a beat-up old chest. A voice was singing about seeing clouds from both sides.
Instead of paintings in fancy frames, the walls were decorated with posters. The one on the bathroom door, a simple black-and-white of a skinny old bald man wrapped in a bed sheet with wire-rimmed glasses, caught his attention. Underneath him was written Be the change you want to see in the world.
“Gandhi.”
“What?”
“Mahatma Gandhi.”
“Oh.”
“The guy who defeated the British Empire peacefully.”
“Yeah, I remember reading about him in high-school history.”
“Sit,” she said. She disappeared and returned with a joint. She lit it. She took a deep drag before offering it to him.
“No thanks. I have practice.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I hoped that Marianne would be here.”
“But you said that you didn’t think she would be here.”
“Yeah. No. Well, I didn’t, but I sort of hoped.” His fingers began to drum on the armrest.
“I sort of figured.” She smiled and toked.
“Yeah, well, when she asked me to come to your party last week, she asked me not to tell her brother Speedy, but she never told me why. After the party I figured it might be because of the marijuana and the kind of people who might be there.”
“What do you mean, ‘kind of people’?”
“You know, hippies.”
“Oh. Those kind,” she exhaled.
“Anyway, I wanted to find out why.”
“Why don’t you call and ask her?”
“I called,” he lied, “but Speedy answered and he got suspicious when I asked to speak to her.”
“What would he be suspicious about?” Naomi kept pushing him. Tommy wondered why. “Do you want to know if she likes you?”
“Uh, no, I mean, I wanted to know why she didn’t want me to tell him, so I’ll know.”
“Oh. Do you like her?”
“She’s nice.”
Naomi made him nervous. Girls made him nervous. Though he’ occasionally asked girls to go to sock hops in high school, he had never really had a girlfriend. He didn’t know how to be comfortable around them. He was always second-guessing how he should act, so he was never really himself. He wished he could be at ease with girls like some of the guys on the team. They could joke with them like they were guys, although the jokes tended to be different. Some of them were even going steady and boasted that they had gotten to second base.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
“Would you ask her to call me? I mean, I know girls shouldn’t call guys but….”
“Why not?”
“I, well, girls aren’t supposed to.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because guys are supposed to.”
“That doesn’t answer the why. Is it because nice girls don’t?”
“Marianne’s nice.”
Naomi laughed. “She’s coming for supper. Do you want to stay?”
“I can’t. I have practice.”
“Right. What time do you finish?”
“About eight.”
“We’re not eating till around then, so why don’t you come over after practice? You’ll be hungry and she’ll be here. We’re making spaghetti.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“You want a toke?”
“I shouldn’t.”
13
“Hustle! Hustle, you prima donnas!”
Tommy didn’t like warm-ups. He liked to start playing right away. But today, with the late afternoon sun shining on his face and the slight breeze cooling him, he didn’t mind. It helped him think. He still hadn’t convinced his mother and he hadn’t told Coach Hus that he might not be going. He tried to think of arguments to sway his mother but he couldn’t. After the laps, the team formed a circle at centre field for some stretching. He thought of going to Hungary without his parents’ permission but the consequences would be huge. He couldn’t imagine doing it. But he was thinking about it.
With every bend he was reaching down to the other side of the world. With every stretch upward he was a fingertip away from the lazy clouds. During the sprints he felt like he was floating. His body had a mind of its own. Or was it that his mind had a body of its own? It was hard to figure it out.
“Hustle! Hustle!”
The coach’s words brought him back to the practice.
“Hustle! Hustle!” His words sounded profound.
“What are you smiling about?” Speedy asked as he bent over to catch his breath after the sprints.
“He’s so right.”
“Who? About what?”
The coach, about hustling,” he said giggling.<
br />
“What’s so funny?”
“Just the sound of Coach Hustle and hustling.”
Speedy looked at him warily. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You know those Hungarians are probably much better than us. They grew up living and breathing soccer. You remember you once said we were breast-fed on soccer? It’s true, but they never let go of the teat. If we’re ever going to have a chance to win a game, it will depend on us outhustling them.”
He heard a voice inside his head repeat “hustle, hustle.” He was riding alongside the Hussars. No, the Hajdus, he corrected himself. He loved his childhood tales of the Hajdus. They were like the Hussars and for their bravery against the Turks were given land which was named after them. Tommy’s hometown of Békes was in the province of the Hajdus. The Hajdus weren’t as well known as the Hussars, but for Tommy they were as great. Hussars, Hajdus, hustle, the voice kept repeating as he took shots on Derek.
The coach blew his whistle and called them in. “You need to hustle more. Understand? Without it you’re just a bunch of immigrants playing pickup.” The guys nodded. “Okay, now I’ve got news for you. The university has agreed to enter the team into the Major Soccer League and the League has agreed to let us in for this season so you can get top competition before we go to Hungary. Therefore, none of you can play for another team.”
A few of the guys groaned. “I know some of you wanted to play for your communities, for the pride and some cash, which I forbade. Remember? For this season your community is the Internationals. Got it?”
“Yeah,” they answered in their usual ragtag manner.
“I didn’t hear you!”
Coach Hustle’s intensity surprised him. He certainly yelled at them, mainly, “Hustle, you prima donnas,” but not in the rah-rah sense. They had never been a rah-rah bunch like the football or hockey guys, who screamed, hollered and beat their chests before every game. They sounded like they were off to war. Soccer didn’t invite the same ferocious approach. Not that they didn’t play hard or that the games didn’t sometimes get brutal, but soccer had a different ebb and flow that didn’t bring out the tribal in them. Maybe because they were such a diverse bunch from all over. They weren’t a tribe. They were international.
