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After Munich, Ingrid and I set off on what turned out to be a two-month whirlwind European tour.
From her home back in Austria, we flew into Rhodes, Greece, where for two weeks we sunned on a pebbled beach and ate all meals in Greek resort-style buffets, including daily shots of ouzo, and traveled by foot-passenger ferry across the Aegean for a shopping spree at a Grand Bazaar in Turkey.
From Greece we flew to Paris where we drank vodka martinis for seventeen euros a piece at the Buddha Bar; strolled the Left Bank and Latin Quarter; shopped for funky designer wear along the Champs-Élysées; stood beneath the Arc de Triumph and traveled up the elevator to the top of Eifel Tower; toured Notre Dame de Paris and Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre; and browsed antique shops in the famous St-Ouen flea market.
Gelato, as I soon discovered in Rome, where we landed in a plane the size of a large bus, was an actual food group to most Italians, and we ate more than our fair share while splashing next to the Trevi Fountain or at an outside café in Piazza Navona. After lunch across from the Coliseum for ninety euros, we decided on only coffee and cake in the ruins of Castel Sant’Angelo. We walked the Roman Forum; sat in reverential awe inside the Pantheon; got lost, along with a cast of thousands, inside St. Stephen’s Basilica; toured the Vatican museum; and craned our necks to stare up in the Sistine Chapel at Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment.”
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“Do you know about your Hungary citizenship?” Ingrid asked on the Spanish Steps late one night, the two of us engulfed by a sea of Italians, all laughing, singing, drinking.
She’d asked about my citizenship many times before, hoping that if I received it while still in Europe, I would never leave. However, even in Budapest, I’d tried to visit various offices that were responsible for issuing citizenships such as mine. But with the names of streets and buses and underground metro stations in a language I could not hope to understand or remember, let alone spell or pronounce, all my efforts were of no avail.
“No word yet, I’m afraid.”
“But what are your plans?” she asked. “Will you stay? You know you can live with me in Austria. I would like it if you stayed. I wish you would…”
“That’s very kind of you.”
Then she lowered her voice to a hushed tone. “I want to tell you something now,” she said, “something…I have not told anyone before.”
I turned to face her.
“I’m…like you.”
“What do you mean?” I looked at her angular, masculine features, “butch,” as I might’ve branded her back home. Though I’d told her nothing about the doctor or the lawsuit, she knew, of course, that I was gay. A schwul.
“Haven’t you not wondered why I’m never married at over fifty years old?”
“It occurred to me, yes…”
“Austria is not America, you understand. I could never tell anyone here about my inner life…and so I live behind a wall.”
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Back in Linz and exhausted from all our globetrotting, Ingrid suggested we spend a few days in Bad Ischl, one of the many spa towns in the lake district of Austria.
After driving through the Alpine foreland, with a view toward the east central Alps, we checked into our spa hotel, the EurothermenResort. First and most pressing order of business: change into our thick terry bathrobes and head to the outdoor saltwater pool, around which twenty or thirty lawn chairs reclined in the late-day sun. As Ingrid basked outside, I walked into a separate cavernous passageway, steps from the indoor pool, with more than thirty different steam and sauna rooms, where I lounged and sweated with crowds of naked tourists and Austrians for the next hour.
Dinner, that first night, in the recently refurbished hotel restaurant, was a seven-course bonanza. We paced ourselves and started slowly, with dark European breads and crusty rolls, three different kinds of smoked trout, Gorgonzola muffins, warm and cold pickled salads, and a pear mousse. A cup of consommé with sherry and vegetable cubes followed, and then a plate of tender liver of lamb in red wine balsamic with mashed celery. To cleanse our palates, we were served a sour currant sherbet, then moved onto the main course: saddle of veal in herb crust on ramson gravy, steamed asparagus, and potatoes cakes. Finally, the crowning glory: raspberry-lime parfait on rhubarb ragout and puff pastry.
If Bad Ischl during the day was magical, at night it was pure whimsy. After dinner, Ingrid and I walked the winding cobblestone streets past churches, typical Austrian boutiques, the famous Zauner Café, a movie house plucked from a 1950s Frank Capra film, through manicured parks with statues of the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár, and the Habsburgs, Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife, “Sisi.” Everywhere the scent of fresh flowers and dry leaves wafted through the evening air. Our first day ended with peach schnapps in the hotel lobby while live musicians played a bizarre mix of Austria folk songs with accordions, and cover renditions of seventies American rock music, like Don McLean’s “American Pie” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”
There was only so much of a good thing I could stand, however, and after three days in Bad Ischl, I was ready to return to my far-less luxurious flat in Budapest. At the train station in Linz, Ingrid would not look at me. We drove to the door.
“I don’t need to come in,” she said, the two of us still sitting in her car.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t understand,” she said, facing away.
“What? What don’t I understand?”
“I wish you had more German so I could tell you what was in my heart. I do not have the English for my sadness.”
“Why are you sad?”
She turned to look at me. “Have you heard about your citizenship?”
“Not yet.”
“So you will leave and never come back. I’ll never see you again, I know it…”
“Ingrid, I’m just going to Budapest. I’ll see you later.”
“And then you’ll be home to Canada.”
“Or not. I don’t know. You really won’t come in and wave goodbye?”
“I’ll wave and then you’ll be missing, and I’ll have to cry to myself all the way back to my flat in my car alone. We can say goodbye here.”
I reached over and hugged her.
She hugged me back, and then I stepped out of the car. Seconds later, outside the doors of the train station, I glanced back, but she had driven away.
Since Hungary had joined the European Union only in May, all trains between Vienna’s Westbahnhof and Keleti Pu were still from the communist era, an old and dank relic, smelling of grit and stale smoke. The entire trip lasted close to five hours. I didn’t mind. I smoked my Camels when I wanted, sat in the restaurant car with white linen tablecloths, and ate goulash and cold cucumber salad. No one spoke English, and all currency on the menu cards was in forints. I kept a cheat sheet in my wallet (forints = euros = dollars). Calculations occupied me mentally.
As the train rattled along, snaking past towns with strange names like Hegyeshalom and Győr, my thoughts drifted again to my mother: shipped between camps by cattle car; and my father, orphaned, lying flat on his stomach on top of trains in the frigid winter nights through Hungary and Czechoslovakia because he had no money for a ticket. Like my parents before me I was a foreigner. I felt as I always had back home: displaced. Only now there was right reason to explain my isolation: I was not at home. I had no home. I was an outsider, and free. Homeless in the birthplace of my father.
27
THE STORY, AS I heard it recounted months later when I returned to Canada in September 2004, was that my parents were checking out of Safeway, their neighborhood grocery store, when my mother, who was paying the cashier for their big Tuesday shopping, handed my father a “scratch” lottery ticket. My father, not really understanding how the whole business worked, scratched the ticket with the back of his car key.
“Does this mean something good?” he said, handing the ticket back to my
mother, who was still signing their Visa bill. She looked at the ticket and saw the picture of three laptop computers.
“We won!” she screamed from the lineup of shoppers, holding up the ticket. “We won!”
“Well…I think I won, actually,” my father said, taking the ticket from her hands.
The new, full loaded laptop arrived at the store for pick up ten days later. Wasting no time at all, my seventy-four-year-old father registered in a community center course to learn “how to use the damn contraption.” The course covered all the essentials: how to plug it in, turn it on and off, open and save a Word document, start typing.
He set up shop in his new office, in the basement of the family home, typing every day, two fingers at a time. No one knew what he was writing, and he wouldn’t tell a soul, not even my mother, who worked simultaneously at her own desktop, in my old bedroom on the top floor of the house, which was now her own office.
Mid-afternoons they met in the kitchen for lunch.
“Homemade soup and good Hungarian rye bread,” they said often, “are life’s staples. What else is there?”
When I visited on Sundays, my father would ask that I follow him to his office “to answer all my questions.”
“How do I print?” he’d ask, facing his laptop, eager as a schoolboy. “How do I center text…?” “Can I type Hungarian letters and accents…?” “What if I want to add a red heart at the top of a page, or maybe a picture of a bird or a squirrel; can you show me how to do that?”
For hours I taught him everything he asked, writing down notes on scraps of paper he kept tacked to the wall around his laptop, beneath pictures of the Virgin Mary and a crucifix. A two-volume English-Hungarian/Hungarian-English dictionary that I’d bought for him in Budapest now sat beside him on his desk.
Every few months I’d receive an urgent phone call at my new office job, again with the Ministry of Attorney General in downtown Vancouver.
“SOS!” he once shouted, the moment I picked up the phone at my desk. “SOS! SOS!”
“Dad? What is it? Are you okay? Is Mom okay?”
“Squiggly lines are all over my computer and my cursor’s gone missing. I swear it was here a second ago!”
“Squiggly lines?”
“Under the words. Red, squiggly lines. I can’t get rid of them.”
“That’s just the computer telling you that you misspelled a word, or that your grammar’s wrong.”
“‘Telling’ me? What do you mean my computer is ‘telling’ me? How can my computer ‘tell’ me something? And what about my cursor? It’s dropped off the screen.”
“Dad…you shouldn’t just call me and scream out ‘SOS’ like this—I thought you’d had a heart attack, or worse!”
“When are you coming home again? I have so many questions about my computer that I need you to answer. I need you…”
When he and I did, on rare occasion, start to talk about his new secret writing project, he said he was “piecing” his life back together, “one memory at a time.”
“Can I read it?” I asked him one Sunday when we were down in his office. “Please?”
“Maybe when I’m dead.”
“Oh come on, that’s not fair. I’ve been waiting my whole life to read something like this. Maybe I’ll have questions for you. Besides, you’re going to live for years…”
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I started dating Angelo, a Greek man I met at a local gay dance club one Sunday night. Unencumbered by the shame of past years, our sex, after the third date, was high octane. Primal, even.
We met for coffees, never hesitating to kiss hello in public, held hands on our way to movies, dined in tapas restaurants, lay in bed for hours, awake or asleep, dreaming and waking in each other’s arms, limbs holding limbs, torsos alive with passion. Angelo was in culinary school to become a chef, and I loved to cook and bake, so we spent hours in the kitchen of his condominium, devising elaborate meals. Nothing about our time together called to mind my childhood fears of men, or, for that matter, sex. Everything about our union felt normal, and natural. Necessary even. I was happy.
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One Sunday, I asked my mother if she knew what my father was writing.
“I have always tried to avoid asking your father too many questions about his life before we met. I knew he was suffering, and I didn’t want to make it worse. We accepted each other without too many questions in either direction. I think he now feels compelled to write about all of it. And all because of you.”
“Me?”
“You ripped the lid off this box. Applying for your Hungarian citizenship started him down this road. Visiting his mother’s grave probably sealed it. Now he can’t stop.”
When my father was out of his office, I opened his Word document, what looked like the beginning of a book called From My Memory, and read an early passage:
Every day when I was five or six, my nanny, a Swabian lady called Aunty Elizabeth, walked me to kindergarten with the Franciscan Sisters, dressed in large white wimples and long brown habits, with big wooden crosses dangling from their waists, and then home again in the afternoon. I carried my schoolbooks tied with a string, buttered buns in a lunch pail, and my most prized possession: the crayons my daddy had given to me on Christmas day.
First we passed through the forest full of white birch, weeping willow, acacia and chestnut, and I saw croaking ravens swooping and hopping branch to branch. Then we walked around a lake filled with waterfowl and ducks, geese and swans, both black and white, with long, crooked necks, all chatting and screeching. Socializing, I thought. Gossiping. Finally we walked over a bridge hanging on two chains, and entered the Sisters’ forted convent. My trips to and from school each day were magical.
Sometimes I slept in between my mommy and my daddy in the big bed, and in the morning I ate my favorite breakfast, cream of wheat with brown sugar and a glass of ice-cold milk. In the afternoon I worked in my daddy’s barbershop, in the front room of our house, brushing all the fallen hair from clients’ suits and then sweeping the floor with my broom. My hard work never went unnoticed, because when I finished my daddy handed me a few loose coins, and then he thanked me with a big “peach,” by crossing his index finger with his thumb in a sweeping motion on top of my head. I always gave my earnings to my mommy for safekeeping. “Your future tuition fund,” she’d tell me.
On Sundays, mommy took me to the big house of God with stained glass windows and gold ornaments. People sang and knelt praying on the marble floor. Mommy closed her eyes while she was down on her knees and so I did too, because I loved my mommy so much and I wanted to be just like her.
At home I fed the animals in the barn, all the pigs and the sheep. I harvested fresh herbs and vegetables from the garden for mommy’s homemade chicken soup, or else sometimes I wandered alone outside for hours, smelling all the fruit trees, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, plums. Every year by harvest time the grapes grew up and overhead the length of our outdoor porch, and they turned blue and filled the air with a sweet buttery fragrance. Birds swooped and sang melodies. Yellow and black thrush and fork-tailed swallows nested and delivered sustenance to their young. I’d seen the storks before by the banks of the Zagyva, and so I knew what they were when I watched them standing one-legged atop our red brick chimney, their white wings spread for flight, long beaks pointed up into the breeze. Every day there was so much to see, and smell, to taste. I was a happy little boy.
Then one day my mommy was gone. In the morning, when I woke up, and after school, when I returned home, she was nowhere. Aunty Elizabeth bathed me like usual, she dressed me in my cotton nightgown, knelt beside me as I said my evening prayers, kissed me on my cheeks and tucked me in for the night. Even the next morning, when I opened my eyes, she was bent over me, smiling. But still no mommy.
After school on the second day I approached the house through the back wooden gate holding tightly to Aunty Elizabeth’s hand. I walked through the garden, and the inside laundry r
oom, down a long corridor. Next to the kitchen I smelled an overpowering fragrance. Still holding her hand, we entered the main sitting room, which was full of people, all dressed in black, holding something hanging from their hands. Black drapes covered all the windows. In the center of the room was a tall table. I couldn’t see the top because it was so high and I was so little, but I walked toward it.
The crowd of people all parted. I saw my daddy, dressed in a black suit; he was sobbing. Someone brought me a stool. I stepped up. Lying flat on her back was my mommy. Her eyes were closed. She was asleep. Her countenance was so beautiful. All I wanted was to lie down beside her, to kiss her, like I always did in bed. I bent down and I looked into her face. “Mommy is sleeping,” I said. From the back of the room someone called out, “She is dead.” I bent down again and I looked closer. Someone else giggled. I repeated what I’d said before: “Mommy is sleeping, yes, yes, she is sleeping.” More giggles. And then my lower lip began to dance.
Never before had I heard the words death, or cemetery, but as the procession moved out into the street, toward a long black car, all I wanted was to go with my mommy to the cemetery. The car drove away and I stood staring down the long street.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 32
