The next day, the fear was gone. The main feeling left was emptiness. I lay in bed sobbing, thinking I must get up and start packing my belongings and the clothes I had bought for the baby. But where would I go?
When it got dark again, I couldn’t stand not knowing any longer. I had to have confirmation. I found the number Douglas had left and rang. It wasn’t easy to track him down amidst the hundreds at the conference. When he came to the phone at last, I asked him why he wasn’t coming back.
‘Eva, what’s the matter?’ he said.
Distraught, I repeated the question.
‘Don’t be silly. You’re getting hysterical.’
‘Why aren’t you coming back?’
‘I can come home a bit earlier if you like,’ he offered. ‘On the late flight tomorrow.’
After I put the phone down, I heated some milk in a saucepan. While I drank the warm milk, I made myself think about nothing, only the milk I was swallowing. I went back to bed then, wanting only to bury myself in sleep. When at last I woke, Douglas was by my bed.
My grandmother had a stroke just after Janet was born. She never recovered fully and, housebound, she lived for the visits of friends and family.
‘Ah, Eva, how happy it makes me to see you with your family,’ she said when Douglas and I walked in with baby Janet. ‘Its not good to be alone, you know. How I miss my darling Imre. We have a saying “to be one is to be none”.’
As Douglas helped her into the armchair by the window, I noticed how small, dry and bent she had become in the months since her illness. Her bed/sitting-room was cluttered with souvenirs and photographs in silver frames. Among them was one of the Queen and another of the Queen Mother, for in recent years Judit had come to divide her affection between Emperor Franz Joseph and select members of the British Royal Family.
‘You sit here, Douglas, next to me,’ she said pointing to the only other comfortable chair in the room.
Douglas had to have not only the most comfortable chair, but also the best coffee mug and the biggest slice of cake.
Only when Douglas was settled, did she turn to Janet. She gently pinched the baby’s cheeks and was about to pop a cube of sugar soaked in coffee into her mouth.
‘No you don’t,’ I told her, holding out my hand for the cube.
‘What a mean mother you are, Eva, spoiling our fun.’
She waved aside my explanation about preventive dental health and squeezed Douglas’s hand.
‘Tell me, you are a clever man. Do you think there is a God?’
There was a long pause as Douglas considered the question. Before he had a chance to say anything, she said, ‘How can one believe after Hitler?’
‘What have you got to tell me today about Franz Joseph?’ Douglas said, diverting her from the topic neither of us wanted her to talk about. The tactic worked and, as on other occasions, she told a story hinting at intimate knowledge of what had really happened during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Douglas had brought her a present; he had made it in his lab. Slowly she unwrapped the many layers of tissue paper. Inside was a small crystal. He found a place to hang it up by the window where Judit would be able to see it from her bed, glinting in the sun.
‘Ah, Douglas,’ she said. ‘So many years now I have been without Imre. But it is always possible to go on living, to enjoy life again, even after terrible things happen; even after losing everything precious, everything that you believe makes life worth living. You can still enjoy the chicken soup with matzo balls that you struggle to make on Friday afternoon and put in the freezer to parcel out into one person portions for the rest of the week. You can still get a peaceful feeling when the birds chirrup in the garden on those rare days when the gales are not blowing so loudly that you can hardly hear yourself think.’
I doubted that Douglas understood more than a smattering of the heavily accented words. But he nodded and held her hand until she fell silent.
Douglas and I were on sabbatical leave in Philadelphia when my grandmother had the second stroke, which killed her. I thought of her fragile old body being carried in the coffin to be buried in the alien soil of the Wellington cemetery, buffeted by the unhealthy gales she had always hated. So I was relieved when my mother wrote that she and my father planned to take Judit’s ashes back to the old cemetery in Hungary, to be scattered among the graves of her parents, brothers and sister. She suggested Douglas and I and Janet (almost two years old by this time) meet her and Gyuri in Budapest.
BUDAPEST, 1975
At the border, reincarnations of Arrow Cross thugs boarded our train. Stomping through the carriages, they examined our passports. I saw them looking at the page on mine that said ‘Place of birth: Hungary’ and felt a sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach. When, grim faced, they ordered us off the train, I grabbed Douglas’s hand in panic.
‘Don’t get hysterical,’ he said. ‘Just do as they say.’
And I had supposed him to be the one who knew how to act in a crisis! We sat, helpless, in the sweltering heat and dust of the station, attempting to calm grizzling Janet.
‘They are detaining us for failing to obtain visas to enter Hungary before leaving Austria,’ I explained to Douglas. I wasn’t in the least hysterical about the way no one would explain to us what we needed to do to obtain the necessary papers.
‘What infernal bureaucracy your country has. What an incomprehensible language your Hungarian is. I would’ve expected some of your people to speak English, or at least French,’ Douglas fumed. The ‘barbarian’ border police spoke only Hungarian and a bit of German. As Douglas’s Hungarian had not as yet progressed beyond ‘picike’, which he murmured during our increasingly rare moments of tenderness, the better option was German. He tried shouting at one of them in his School Certificate-level German, but to no avail.
‘You’ve messed up again,’ I said, taking the chance to get my own back. ‘I left it all to you and look what happened!’
‘How come you didn’t find out about the visas? Douglas said, lighting his pipe. ‘My job was the tickets, not the visas.’
‘This cock-up reminds me…’
‘Shut up, Eva, just shut up.’
‘Typical, clam up and expect the problem to go away.’
‘Did you hear me say shut up?’
The train, without us, drew away with a hiss. A female guard with teeth like a goat told us the next was not due until five the following morning. When I asked her where we were supposed to spend the night, she shrugged and pointed to the bench. Douglas was sitting on it, shrouded in smoke, holding Janet. When the police left, he spread out the sheepskin rug and we covered her with both our jackets. As the dark set in it became cool in the barrack-like building, even though it was summer. My anger gone, I thought how good Douglas was with Janet, patient and calm, always knowing what to do to soothe her. How lucky I was that his experience of looking after his brothers and sisters had helped to turn him into such a capable father.
Some time later, first Janet, then Douglas, fell asleep. I began to doze off too, despite the hardness of the bench. I dreamed that I saw Tomi on the balcony of our Budapest apartment. His blue shirt was grimy with blood; his hair stuck in greasy tangles around his pale face.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked. ‘It’s the wrong war.’
He continued to stand there without moving, his eyes glittering as though with a fever. I prepared myself to let him in, thinking that now, perhaps, was my opportunity. I would tie back my long fair hair with the red, white and green ribbon; I would step out into the street filled with the rattle of machine gun fire and the screams of the wounded; I would… But my hopes were dashed – all he wanted was the loan of my new winter coat.
As my friend marched away towards the snow-covered bank of the Danube, I shivered and woke up. Douglas was shaking me. It was early morning and we were allowed to board the train. A sullen silence still hung between us.
I phoned my parents from Keleti Station. They
were extremely relieved to hear from us, having expected a call since the day before. While we waited for their arrival, I went outside for a first glimpse of Budapest. The streets in the vicinity of the station were crowded with shuffling, badly dressed people. I was soon driven back inside by the screeching tyres, scraping metal and the choking, poisonous fumes. When my excited parents finally arrived, they were full of their plans to show us everything, and there were a few remaining relatives and some old friends to meet as well. The memorial service for my grandmother was arranged for the following day.
Douglas, mumbling something about a conference he was supposed to be at soon in Frankfurt, looked exhausted. ‘Could someone please tell me where I can get some more tobacco,’ he said.
How hot and dusty it was in Budapest that summer. The stairway of the dingy Pest apartment, sublet to us by my mother’s cousin, smelled of garbage, fumes and sweating bodies. In the stifling apartment, Janet’s nappies went drip, drip onto the parquet floor – travel had disrupted earlier toilet training. Douglas had hung them from rafters on the ceiling, for there was nowhere else in the tiny, grimy apartment to dry washing.
Everything was grey – the dirty buildings pitted with bullet holes, the people, the few scrawny trees wilting on the pavement, the milk, which had to be boiled before it was safe to drink. I retched as I skimmed the skin off for Janet’s cereal, remembering the cool whiteness of wholesome New Zealand milk, with Weetbix and sugar. I breathed deeply to quell my nausea as I washed the nappies in the bucket, averting my eyes from the cockroaches scurrying by; I held my nose to avoid the stink of pork fat, liver and onions from neighbouring kitchens drifting in the window. No matter how hard I tried to block it out, the odours of dankness, urine, fat and decay were inescapable.
When Janet got sick, the smells of vomit and diarrhoea were added to the other odours in the apartment.
‘It’s a nightmare, an ill baby in a strange place,’ I said to Douglas.
‘Just calm down, control yourself, you’re getting hysterical again,’ he replied. ‘And I thought this was supposed to be your beloved homeland, not some strange place.’
When Janet was no better after two days, I asked my mother to find a doctor. The paediatrician at the clinic who eventually agreed to examine Janet snorted with derision at my weirdly accented, fractured Hungarian.
‘Where do you come from?’ he asked, upbraiding me for taking a sick baby out with bare feet. Nearly fainting in the stifling heat, I wondered at first if he was serious.
‘Of course he is serious,’ my mother assured me. ‘Look at the other babies.’ And indeed they were all wearing booties or shoes; only Janet’s feet were uncovered.
When Janet started to cry in the surgery, the doctor looked askance as I offered her my breast.
‘How old is that child?’ he asked, writing a prescription.
‘Eighteen months,’ I replied, hoping to reduce the offence.
‘You should think about weaning,’ he pronounced as we left the room. ‘It is in her interest.’
I stopped buying the grey Hungarian milk. It smelled sour even after it was boiled. Janet, who had been just about weaned before we came to Budapest, sucked greedily on my breasts on and off during the day and frequently also at night.
When Janet was a bit better, we had a day sightseeing and doing the things that tourists do. Budapest was big and bewildering, like any foreign city. St Matthew Church on Castle Hill was a haven of cool and quiet. That night I felt ill and exhausted by the heat and the effort of having a good time.
Early the next morning, while Douglas went for a walk with Janet in Váci utca, which was crowded with tourists, my parents and I set out to look for the Jewish parts of Budapest: remnants of the ghetto, the old Synagogue, and a monument to Wallenberg. Not much was left to find of that extinguished world. We left Óbuda till last.
‘And this is where the waste ground was,’ said my father, pointing to a nine storey concrete block of flats. Surrounding it was a narrow strip of ground. Lilac – thick white shrubs and various shades of purple – covered the area. Their sweet smell drifted in our direction.
‘They bring good luck,’ my mother said.
‘My first memory as a child is of the lilacs; they were deep, deep purple then,’ my father said. ‘My mother was holding my hand. We were on holiday near Sopron and my father was still alive.’
‘Let’s go now,’ my mother said, putting her arm around him. ‘Time for lunch.’
‘All that is left of my family is buried here,’ my father said. Shaking off her arm, he found a dusty stick with a bit of tattered red flag still attached and stuck it into the ground to mark the spot. ‘This is where I must start to dig.’
‘Probably from a May Day parade,’ my mother said, removing it. ‘Let’s go eat.’
Douglas, with Janet in her pushchair, was already waiting for us at the restaurant, which he had picked as the most promising from the guidebook.
‘According to the book, this is one of the most famous restaurants in Budapest,’ said my mother. While we waited for the waiter to take some notice of us, she read out the rest of the description: ‘It has an excellent kitchen and an interior with a special atmosphere. The kitchen is separated from the restaurant by a grape press from the eighteenth century.’
‘It also says that the menu is available in sixteen languages,’ said Douglas.
‘What is the date on the book?’ asked my father.
‘1938,’ said my mother.
‘Where is the waiter?’ asked Douglas.
A surly man in a dirty apron eventually responded to Douglas’s clicking fingers and my father’s waves. He brought menus, which were written in Hungarian only.
‘Salad, please,’ I said to him, sickened by the fatty meat, rich, spiced sauces and overcooked vegetables we had been eating since arriving in Budapest.
‘No salad comes with menu.’ The waiter did not speak, he shouted.
We settled down to wait. My father read his New Life, Douglas smoked the new pipe he had picked up in Váci utca, I played a tickling game with Janet and my mother went off to try to find the grape press. When at last the waiter brought our meals, he stood beside our table, holding a cigarette between his fingers and scowling as Janet spilled the paprikás and carefully picked out the peas on her plate with her fingers, eating them slowly, one by one. When my father said, ‘Thank you, you can leave us now,’ he went to stand on the other side of the room, looking sullen.
‘I want some more bread,’ my mother said when all she had left on her plate was a sea of sauce.
But the waiter looked determinedly in the other direction when my father or Douglas clicked their fingers or called him.
‘Kitchen closed,’ he bellowed, eventually. He lit his cigarette and blew smoke in our direction while we finished our meals.
‘They are all state employees. They get the same pay whether they serve us properly or not. So they don’t bother,’ explained my father to Douglas, who was scowling at me. Even the offensive waiter was my fault.
‘No sign of a grape press,’ said my mother as we left the restaurant.
I had said to Zsuzsi that, while in Budapest, I would try to find out what had become of Petö. She and I had a long-standing bet about him. Zsuzsi believed that he would have turned his back on his own ideals and memories of his father’s martyrdom and, in order to survive, would have supported the regime, at least nominally, in the post-Revolution years. I thought that he would have stood by his beliefs and either suffered years in re-education camps and prisons or, if he were lucky, succeeded eventually in escaping to the West.
The morning following our experience with the insolent waiter, I decided to phone people who might be able to give me some information about Petö. As there was no phone in the apartment, I went to the booth on the corner. It stank of urine, and the phone book hung in shreds from a chain. I found another booth further away, but it too showed signs of occupation by the drunks that congregated in the a
rea. Defeated, I returned to the apartment; soon we were expected at a gathering of the relatives and friends who were curious to meet us. They were all relatives on my mother’s side of the family; for there was no one left on my father’s side whom he could stomach getting in touch with.
‘You will be sorry you haven’t done as I told you and brought gifts to distribute,’ my mother warned when we were on our way to a part of Buda with small houses and gardens. Leafy trees lined the street. Lilac was everywhere.
Over coffee and cherry Strudel at my mother’s cousin Miklos’s house, we met an excited, arm-waving throng of strangers.
‘I have myself experienced the full range of Jewish tragedy,’ said Miklos to Douglas in English, by way of an introduction.
‘Yes,’ said Douglas not understanding a word of his thickly accented speech.
After that the conversation reverted to Hungarian.
‘They want to hear all about New Zealand,’ my father said.
‘So tell me, how much do you earn, Gyuri, and how much does Eva’s husband make, say each month?’ Miklos said.
‘And how much costs an apartment?’ his wife Ilonka wanted to know.
‘How much for half a kilo of meat?’ their son Gabi asked.
As the questions continued, I was thankful Douglas knew no Hungarian.
‘How much a loaf of bread?’ Ilonka again.
‘How much costs a man’s watch?’ Gabi’s brother Dezsö was eyeing the one Douglas wore.
‘And a transistor?’
‘A tram ticket?’
Replacement Girl Page 14
