Days later when I returned to the house, all the pictures were deleted.
“What happened?”
“I have to scan them again. The order was all wrong.”
“Dad, remember what I showed you, that you can just cut and paste them? You don’t need to delete them, you can just move them around.”
“I don’t remember. Can you show me again, please?”
Month after month, the same situation repeated. He couldn’t remember how to cut and paste, so he deleted all the photos, and we started from scratch.
“Technology is such a miraculous invention. In my own life I have seen so much progress, so much change. The evolution of the soul is a miraculous thing. God loves all his children, and we show him our reverence with keen minds and loving hearts.”
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I had also continued secretly reading from his book when he was away from his office.
One evening soon after the hearse took my mommy away, Aunty Elizabeth dressed me in my nightgown, as usual, knelt beside me as I said my evening prayers, tucked me in, read me a story, and kissed me on both cheeks. I loved my Aunty Elizabeth, almost as much as I had loved my own mommy.
The next morning my sister, Manci, not Aunty Elizabeth, was in the kitchen, cooking my cream of wheat. And then Manci, not Aunty Elizabeth, walked me to school. In my confusion and my eagerness I forgot my school bag with a sandwich, my drawing paper and crayons, my one possession in the whole world. I told Manci that we had to turn back. We could not, she insisted, and on we walked: through the forest, around the lake, over the bridge, into the convent, where the Franciscan Sisters took me by the hand to kindergarten. At noon, when it was time to return home for lunch, no one came for me. Not my sister, or my daddy, no Aunty Elizabeth. Again, I started to cry. The Sisters tried their best to console me, but it was no use.
Later that same day a strange woman appeared at the convent and she took me by train to the orphanage in Budapest, which was nothing more than a junction place for children-in-waiting for adoption, like myself. My mommy had never been my mother, I soon learned, and my daddy had not been my real father. I had no father. Other children like me were in the orphanage and had no mothers or fathers either, only men and women that were paid by the State to house a child who could help clean their homes, tend to their farms, care for their animals.
Over the next several years I was moved from house to house, from family to family. For a bed I always slept under a horse blanket in the barns. Because I could never stop crying, I always became a nuisance to my latest “parents” and so the woman from the State eventually reappeared months or a year later and returned me by train to the orphanage.
Sometimes I thought to myself, How can I dream a bigger dream? I knew I wanted more out of life, but at the same time my life felt like a big bad dream. The anxiety was relentless, I was forever nauseated and my stomach growled with pain. I was sure that something was growing inside of me, that my heart was out of place inside his my own body.
With no family “stories” to share with anyone, I just listened and did not say much of anything as others went on about their own mothers and fathers, their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. Simple words like my mother said this , or, my mother did that, or the rest of my family told me so-and-so would have enriched my life, maybe given me some self-confidence. But I had nothing.
Well into my teenage years, if I saw a mother with her child, even a mother pig feeding her piglets, my heart ached for what I knew was missing and I’d burst into tears. I could not speak about my deep inner sadness to anyone. I was emotionally mute, cut off from others, isolated and alone, always in search of the mother I never knew.
I was fifteen years old in 1945 when news of my birth mother’s death reached me one day by letter carrier where I was living with my latest parents in Slovakia. I knew what I had to do. Early the next morning I said goodbye to my foster parents, and I travelled by train to the Köbánya alsó railway station in Budapest. I walked along the west side of the Danube, from the bombed-out Horthy Miklós Bridge. At some point my body could no longer move, so I sat near the murky waters of the river, overpowered by sadness. I had no money or friends, no real family. I yearned for tears. Instead, I saw the river, black and dirty. I regained my composure, stood and spat into the water. Then I walked back to the streetcar and I waited. Finally, the number fifty arrived. With my last precious change I paid my way and I travelled to Vecsés.
It was noontime and windy when I arrived at the cemetery. The big trees were shedding their yellow leaves. I walked to where I’d been told was my mother’s grave, second to last at the end of a long dirt path near the rear of the grounds. I read the inscription on the stone headpiece, touched the soil that blanketed her final resting place. This was the end of the line; my life-long search to know my biological mother was over. All my childhood dreams were lying six feet under. More than anything else I wanted to lie down beside her.
I knelt down on the left-hand side of the grave and I began to pray, repeating the same words till I was faint with exhaustion. “Oh my heavenly Father…” I had not eaten or slept in days. There was a long wooden bench at the foot of the grave. My eyes were already half-closing when I stretched out on it. Dogs barked in the distance. The sounds reassured; they told me I was alive.
When I opened my eyes again it was morning, sunlight and the promise of life. I had slept through the night on the wooden bench at the foot of my mother’s grave. Blackbirds were talking on all the poplar trees. I looked around but saw no one. Once again, I knelt by her grave and I began to pray, or at least I tried. Ravens screeched and swooned.
An elderly man with a heavy moustache was opening one wing of the iron-gate for the day as I approached the entrance from inside. Each man, old and young, looked at the other but said nothing. People trickled in as I left. I sat down on the gravel road by a chain-link fence. My throat was dry and parched. All I wanted was to bark or howl, for someone to listen to me, to hear my pain. My eyes fell shut. I began to cry.
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The next time I saw my father, all I wanted to do was hug him. He was typing away in his office when I arrived at the house.
“Come in,” he said from his seat at his laptop. “Sit down and talk with me…”
“What are you working on?” I said, clearing away some of the photographs on the single bed to sit across from him.
“I was rereading different passages that I wrote.”
“Such as?”
“An incident with my father.”
“You met your father?”
“I think so, once.”
“What do you mean, you think so?”
“You have to understand, I did not have a childhood like you had a childhood, a home, two parents that loved you, brothers and sisters, school and friends. Even a country where you were free to think your own thoughts. What I have are stories handed down to me through relatives. For years I did not even know what was real from what was imagined. But there is this one story…”
“Can you tell me?”
“You would like to hear?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well…okay. It was a Sunday. I know it was a Sunday because we ate chicken soup, potatoes, and vegetables for supper, which we ate only on Sundays after church. I was tired after our big meal, so I slept in the bed with my mommy.”
I could never interrupt my father and share with him my own stories of “mommy” from the Styx. My father’s “mommy,” I understood by now, was also not his biological mother. As an orphan, he had never lived with his biological mother, but his adoptive “mommy” had still mothered him as if she were his own. He’d loved her like a mother.
“Anyway, every Sunday afternoon my mommy and I went out for a stroll in the park, and so we did on this day, as well. Just the two of us.”
“You remember all of this?”
“Of course.”
“It’s just, you’ve never talked about it before.”
&n
bsp; “So on this Sunday, instead of the park, my mommy took a different route. I said something about wanting to go to our special place in the park, but my mommy put her index finger up to her lips and I knew not to act mischievous. We walked for a long time, and then we arrived at a big garden restaurant with round tables and colorful umbrellas. We sat at one of the tables. My mommy opened her handbag. It was black. She took out a mirror. I remember, she powdered her face. To me it was just so funny, like she was patting her cheeks with—what’s it called? The dust from a writing board? On the wall?
“Chalk?”
“Yes, chalk dust. And I could hear a man’s voice inside the restaurant; he was singing in Hungarian. Sárbogár, dombbogár, gyógyizsd meg a lelkem. I can still hear the music like it was yesterday.”
“Can you translate it?”
“No, it would lose its zest.”
Then he told me the story of the one and only time he met his biological father.
First another woman appeared from the building. She hugged his “mommy,” and sat down at the table. She was dressed all in black—black hat, black net hanging down over her face, black dress, black handbag—with her lips “painted bright red.” She talked to his mommy in a strange language that he later realized must have been German. He had no idea who this other woman was, but he knew he liked her. Occasionally, she’d look at him and smile, her face still shrouded by the black net.
A soldier arrived at the table, clicked his heels, tipped his head, and said something to the women in German. He was tall, my father said—“very tall, and he had a black moustache. He was dressed in high black hoots with shiny spurs on each heel, and he had a sword hanging from his left side.” The soldier also had more than one gold star on each side under his chin on his uniform, my father explained. Listening to him recount this singular event from what was almost eighty years earlier, I honestly did not know what to think. How could he have “remembered” so much detail—remembered it all and never spoken a word about it? What sort of turmoil must this have caused him?
The soldier signaled to another man with a white cloth hanging from his arms, the waiter, who brought my father a dish of ice cream. “Oh it was so good, chocolate and vanilla, I just munched down on it.” Then the soldier gave him “a little ‘peach’” on the top of his head. I remembered this expression from his book, so I asked him what he meant.
“A ‘peach’—it was a sign of affection.”
After that the solider tipped his hat toward the black-dressed woman, clicked his heels again, and left through the same gate from where he’d arrived. The woman stroked his cheek, lovingly. Soon after that, she also left. He was alone again with his mommy.
The whole way home she didn’t say a word to him, but he could tell that she was sad. “I never liked it when my mommy was sad,” my father said. “Her sadness made me sad too.”
Later, much later, in his life, my father said he “came to understand” that the woman in black had been his biological mother and that the soldier had been his father.
“Do you mention the name of your father in your book?” I asked.
“Yes, because of Emma’s help. Before my mother died, she asked her sister—Emma’s mother—to make sure my whole history was passed on to me one day. From the dying wish of my mother, and then my aunt, now Emma is helping me piece this all back together.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Can you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“The name of your father.”
“Why are you so interested in my father?”
“Why wouldn’t I be interested? Our name could have been his name.”
I waited for my father to answer; he said nothing. This quest to learn the identity of my grandfather had been a recurring theme throughout my life, at least since I had learned, as a teenager, that our family name, Gajdics, was not my paternal grandfather’s name but my paternal grandmother’s maiden name.
In 1992, while still in the Styx, I had contacted a private investigator through the Hungarian Embassy and asked questions about my father’s past, to which I received a poorly written letter, months later, stating that there was no record in the Hungarian archives of anyone by my father’s name. Even while in Budapest I had hired a retired Hungarian diplomat, specializing in genealogy, to conduct research into my father’s past and, hopefully, unveil my grandfather’s identity. However, after meeting the elderly diplomat in a local pub, where I handed over a considerable sum of American dollars (his request) in a brown paper bag, he told me that his wife needed surgery—my eyes on his hands now lying flat on the bag of cash—that the money would “help,” and then he picked up his cane and hobbled off. For months afterward he sent me cryptic emails, all containing nothing of value about my lineage, and then I never heard from him again.
“Well?” I said to my father, still waiting for his response.
“Why don’t you just wait till I’m dead? Then you can read the whole thing for yourself.”
28
IF AFTER EUROPE MY heart had opened even more to my parents, my relationship with my sister, Kriska, hemorrhaged. When we spoke on the phone, she was cold and withdrawn.
“I guess you’ve moved over to the other side now.”
“What side?”
“Mom and Dad’s side.”
“That’s ridiculous, I’m not on anyone’s side. I just want peace.”
“But you go to the house now all the time.”
“So?”
“What are you expecting from them? They’ll never accept you, never. Only I accept you in this family.”
“That’s a cruel thing to say. Besides, you don’t know what will happen in the future. Do you even try to talk to them?”
“Why would I talk to them? They’ve never talked to me.”
“Do you even know what they went through in Europe?”
“They’ve never told me.”
“That’s a child’s response. Why don’t you ask them?”
“Do what you want. I don’t care.”
“Yes, you care.”
“Whatever.”
Each time we argued, month after month, the memory of her eyes, the night she ran away from home, and my sense of abandonment as a child once she was gone from my life, flooded back. That pain was still raw—and so was her anger. Wounds picked open but not, apparently, healed. Or maybe they’d healed, but the scars still remained.
Either way I stopped calling her.
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After brunch one Sunday, my mother turned to face me while I was cleaning the dishes. “I’d like to read your writing.”
It took me a moment to orient myself to her request, and then to respond. “What?”
“Your book. I’d like to read what you’ve written.”
“Why?”
“Well you said you were including stories about my life. I don’t want my life experiences associated with anything to do with your ‘gay’ lifestyle. Do you understand me?”
“But I asked you. You gave me your permission.”
“I did not give you permission to use any of the stories I gave you when you were nineteen.”
“But—”
“You just want to write about that time in your bedroom when I told you I was raped, but I was never raped, I was never raped. You tricked me into saying that, you tricked me.”
I was now the accused. She continued staring at me, fear streaked across her face. Stunned, I stood in the doorway, unable to speak. Defend myself against—what? Moments later she turned and left the room.
I turned back to the kitchen, sat down, stood, was numb.
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The following week, my father, sitting in his regular spot at one end of the kitchen table, would not look me in the face. “Mother says you’re writing a book.”
“That’s right.”
“About what?”
I glanced at my mother.
“I hope you’re
not dragging your mother’s and my good name through the dirt.”
“Pardon me?”
“Our good name, your mother’s and my good name. I don’t want your mother and I associated with your homosexuality.” He spit the word out like a sleepwalker, staring back at me through the hatred of his dream.
“Your ‘good name,’” I said, “is also my ‘good name.’ Besides, this book is about me—what I went through with the doctor. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Just think about what I’m saying.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You must know how I feel about your lifestyle.”
I glanced again at my mother, who sat silent in her seat.
“It’s filthy, it’s immoral. I don’t agree with it, I’ve never agreed with it, and I never will agree with it. I don’t want to be blamed for how you turned out.”
“I’ve never blamed you.”
I ended the conversation when I told both my parents that I was through, as a middle-aged man, defending who I was. I left their house in a storm.
Days later I received an email from my brother Frank. A stock broker-cum-businessman by trade, my brother and I had little in common. If Kriska had run away physically when I was a child, Frank had left emotionally soon thereafter. I could hardly even recall him from my childhood, let alone a time when we had a single conversation together as adults.
Though Frank didn’t wish to read any part of my book, he said he was writing now in order to impress upon me that my “actions could bring about hardship and sadness to others.” He urged me to make sure that my book’s content “would not cause sadness to anyone, was factual, not proprietary to others,” and that if it was, I had the “expressed permission to use it. But the consequence for using unauthorized information was punitive,” he wrote. “Everyone knows that slander is a nasty and distasteful word. I do not say these things as a threat, nor do I say them without knowing the meaning of them myself.”
The email left me panicked. I was definitely only writing fact, and yet I did not want to “cause sadness to anyone.” The two, it seemed to me, were not mutually exclusive.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 34
