It is my first memory. I see his body and it smells and my mother is holding me and I’m crying.
I remember my grandmother holding me as she was crying. I wasn’t crying, but everybody else was. My grandmother and my aunts were leaving the camp and going back to Hungary. They were rejoining my grandfather. My father was begging them not to go.
I heard the words Kommunista and Komchi for the first time. My grandmother and my aunts walked away from us and got into the back of a truck. They waved as the truck pulled away until I couldn’t see them. My mother picked me up and held me. Her cheeks were wet. My father put his arm around me and held both of us.
I said, “Papa, what are Komchis?”
Komchis are Communists. They were bad guys. They were the worst bad guys. They took kids away from their parents. They killed and executed people. They didn’t let people pray. They were the enemy. They were trying to take over the world. They were trying to take good people back to Hungary. Right here in this camp. The Komchis had spies and agents.
I was scared. “Are they worse than the Krampusz?” I asked my father.
He said they were.
The Krampusz came to the camp the week before Christmas, dressed as a devil. The Krampusz asked if you’d been a good little boy or girl. He laughed like a witch and howled like a demon.
If you were a good little boy or girl the Krampusz promised St. Nicholas would come for Christmas. But if you were bad, the Krampusz said you’d burn in hell. If you didn’t eat your puliszka, if you cried all the time …
I was afraid of the Krampusz, the Komchis, the uniforms, the sirens, the outhouse, and of the thing they called TB.
All the children had to line up and stand in front of a machine which would tell you if you had TB. I didn’t really know what TB was, but I was afraid of it anyway and I cried. I was already crying when I stepped in front of the machine. But I didn’t have TB—I was the only child in the camp who didn’t have it.
To try to protect me from getting it, my father took me for long walks every day so we would be away from the camp. We walked the roads outside. There were hills of snow everywhere. It was so cold I felt ice on my eyelids.
My feet froze. We couldn’t walk anymore. I couldn’t even get my feet off the bed. Now I was crying because my feet hurt.
But I didn’t have TB!
Because of the scarlet fever in his hip, my father couldn’t do the physical labor most of the men did. He traded some of the cigarette packs we had for a violin, which he had played as a child. He found other violins and other Hungarians who could play them and formed the camp’s own Gypsy band. They hired themselves out on weekends to play at nearby Austrian taverns.
My parents were overjoyed. With the few schillings my father made playing the violin, they could buy food in the camp’s prospering black market.
Then my father fell on the ice and he broke his wrist. No more Gypsy music. No more violin. No more money.
When we’d had nothing to eat but puliszka for a long time, my father opened the suitcase and brought out a pack of cigarettes to trade for meat. The pack felt light to him. He opened it. It was empty. He opened others. They were empty, too.
My mother had smoked all the cigarettes and had carefully resealed all the packs. My father yelled at my mother, who yelled back at him. I, naturally, started to cry.
Every day from then on, my mother took me for a walk in the countryside. We hunted dry tree leaves together. She rolled the leaves up in a newspaper and sat down on the grass with me and she smoked them. She was happy. Me too.
The Komchis were coming to the camp and my father had to leave. That happened several times. The Komchis had a list with people’s names on it and they’d find the people in the camp, drag them to a truck, and take them back to Hungary. My father’s name was on the list. So he left.
Somehow he always found out when they were coming. He’d go to one of the other nearby camps and blend in with those refugees until the Komchis were gone from our camp.
Once the Komchis came to our barrack and demanded to see István Eszterhás but my mother said he had left her and she didn’t know where he was. The Komchis were very angry and when they got back into their trucks all the Hungarians in the barrack cheered.
Sometimes I heard one of the Hungarians, but never my mother, say “Büdös Zsidok” when the Komchis left … which means “Stinking Jews.”
I asked my father if the Zsidos were bad like the Komchis and the Krampusz. I could tell he didn’t like me asking that.
He said, “No, Zsidos are people like other people.”
“How do they look?” I asked.
“Like everybody else,” he said.
“Are there any here in the camp?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “there aren’t.”
I asked him why not. There were Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Romanians, and Greeks here. Why no Zsidos?
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Are the Zsidos Komchis?” I asked.
“There are some who are and some who aren’t,” he said. “Just like there are some Hungarians who aren’t Komchis and some who are.”
“Do they stink?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “who told you that?”
I told him some of the Hungarians in the barrack had said it.
“They’re crazy,” my father said.
“Why do they say they stink?” I asked.
He sighed. “Because they eat a lot of garlic,” he said. “It’s good for you.”
“What’s garlic?” I asked.
He laughed and held me in his arms and said, “One day you’ll know. One day you’ll taste garlic.”
As I grew older in the camps, the older Hungarian boys taught me things. Watching a Hungarian woman walk out of a barrack, a small group of us followed her as she walked along a fence and ducked into the back of a garage filled with jeeps. There were American soldiers waiting for her, laughing. There was a mattress on the floor and she got down on it as the soldiers laughed. She took her clothes off. We crept from jeep to jeep, trying to get closer.
After her clothes were off, she twirled around on the mattress, smiling, licking her lips. One after another, the Americans approached her, naked now, their pimplis bigger than any I’d ever seen. They moved around individually on top of her.
When each soldier was done, he dropped something on the mattress that one of the older boys said later was a nylon stocking. Then she got dressed quickly and ducked back out. The soldiers laughed some more, got dressed, and left.
A few days later, as we were playing with a soccer ball, the same woman walked by us on the way to the milk line. The older boys started laughing and yelling “Kurva néni! Kurva néni!”—“Whore lady, whore lady!”
She put her head down, covered her ears, and ran away.
I asked my mother what a kurva was and she slapped me.
I played outside with the other Hungarian kids. I liked the soccer ball that we were always kicking over the barbed wire fence—but the soldiers never minded getting it for us.
One American soldier showed us a strange ball one day we had never seen before. It wasn’t round, it was odd-shaped and hard to throw. The soldier kept calling it a football, but we knew it wasn’t a football since our soccer ball was the football.
I heard the phrase “Lofasz A Seggedbe!” all the time from the Hungarians around me, but never from my father or mother.
It seemed to be the Hungarian way of expressing anger or displeasure or even mild disagreement. It was used casually, almost as casually as “Hogy Vagy?”—How are you?—and “Isten Hozott!”—God has brought you.
Even though it was used so casually, I was forbidden to say it. I didn’t say it, but the older boys said it constantly.
They’d say, “Lofasz A Seggedbe, Jozsi, what are you crying about?” Or, if I wanted to play with their ball, they’d say, “Lofasz A Seggedbe, Jozsi, go home!”
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It means: May a horse’s cock enter your behind.
And an English war correspondent covering a Hungarian cavalry charge in World War I wrote: “The Hungarians rode down the hill yelling their ancient tribal battle cry—“Lofasz A Seggedbe!”
This is something else the older boys taught me:
Half a mile from the camp at the edge of the pine forest was a train track. The train came by at dusk each day. There were people, the older boys said, who would wait for the train each day. Then they’d “catch it,” the older boys said and laughed. They would lie down in front of the train as it came and let it go over them.
Did I want to see it?
No, I didn’t want to see it.
“You’re a big baby,” they said. “All you can do is cry all the time. All you can do with your pimpli is piss with it.”
I agreed to go down to the tracks with them. It was winter and there was snow on the ground. Dusk was fast approaching. We waited, hidden behind some trees. We saw no one.
“It doesn’t happen every day,” one of the older boys said.
“Jozsi is going to shit his pants,” another said.
And then we saw her. A very old, birdlike woman, dressed in black. A crowlike apparition against the harsh whiteness of the snow. Her head was down. She wore a black babushka. A rosary was twisting in her hands.
The older boys were excited. My knees felt weak. I felt like I was going to throw up.
“Hold him,” one of the older boys said, “don’t let him run away.”
The old woman went up to the train track and knelt down in the snow, shaking, holding on to her rosary. She was crying. Her lips were moving. It was getting darker. I heard a train whistle.
Some of the older boys hooted. I heard the sound of the train now.
She got up, took a few steps, and fell over into the middle of the track. I could see her body shaking. Her head was down, she was on her knees, crumpled over. A black lump. She faced not the train but the trees where we were hiding.
There was hardly a thud when the train hit her. It sounded more like a squish. Blood sprayed onto the snow.
I smelled vomit. It was mine. I was running, crying. I heard the older boys laughing as they ran after me.
I met my first girlfriend in the camp, the eight-year-old blond Mari Toth, whose father was a Hungarian shoemaker. Her brother, Jozsi, was my first best friend.
We ran from the Krampusz together and played ball together and stood in the milk line together, running home to the barrack with the steaming hot milk which we would share with our parents. I was five and Jozsi was six.
At Christmas, my father made me a toy rifle out of an umbrella and Mari, Jozsi, and I would pretend to go out and hunt Komchis with it. One of the GIs thought we were funny. He’d see us with our umbrella-rifle and grin and shout “Boom! Boom! Boom!” Sometimes he’d even hide from us or sneak up on us and say “Okay!”
“Okay” was the first English word I learned. “Vell” was the second. Americans used it for everything, but no Hungarian knew exactly what it meant.
Then my father taught me—“Hallo! Hov arr yu?” and “Yez, zir, I lak Amerika very mooch.” I learned to say those things in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, because we were trying to emigrate from the camps to those countries, too.
The relief organizations would send their representatives from those countries and my mother, my father, and I would appear before them. I would show off what my father had taught me: “Okay! Hallo! Hov arr yu? Yez zir!” Then we would go back to the barrack and hear nothing from them again.
Except once. A relief organizer summoned us to say he had found my father a job as a handyman and janitor in Seattle, Washington. Our sponsor in America would be the judge whom my father would work for. We were overjoyed. We were going to America! The land of the free! Where the streets were paved with gold!
But no. The judge in Seattle changed his mind. He wrote a letter saying he had thought about it and wouldn’t feel right about employing a man as a janitor who was … a successful novelist, a former lawyer, and who had graduated with honors from the respected Pázmány Péter University in Budapest.
My parents were heartbroken.
I said, “Vell, okay!”
And then, in answer to my mother’s constant prayers, novenas, Rosaries—appeals to St. Jude, to St. Anthony of Padua, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sts. Elizabeth and Margaret of Hungary—a miracle!
We were informed we had another American sponsor. A man who had written that he would personally guarantee our livelihood in America. He was an American citizen but Hungarian-born, a Hungarian actor working in American films, playing mostly American Indians in John Wayne westerns.
His name was Jenö Máté. He lived in New York and Hollywood.
My father didn’t know him. He’d never heard of him. He was afraid it was some kind of mistake. Why would a complete stranger guarantee the livelihood of a forty-three-year-old man who couldn’t do physical labor? How could he guarantee the livelihood of a Hungarian writer who couldn’t speak English?
But there was no mistake. Jenö Máté had written to the authorities specifically about sponsoring István Eszterhás, his wife, and his son.
Plans were made. Dates scheduled. We would be transported by truck from Austria to Bremen, Germany. We would board the American refugee ship, formerly a troop carrier, the SS Hentselman, for an eleven-day journey to New York City. There we would be met by a representative of Caritas, a Roman Catholic relief organization. We were even given a five-dollar bill so that we would have some money when we arrived.
All three of us kept looking at and feeling the five-dollar bill. American money. From the land where the streets were paved with gold.
The date arrived. We had our one suitcase with the clothes in it we’d always had. I had my umbrella-rifle in my hands.
It was a rainy summer day. The military truck pulled up in front of the barrack. A GI called our name. We barely recognized it the way he pronounced it. We climbed into the back of the truck.
There were a few Hungarians watching us, my friend Jozsi Toth among them. I threw my umbrella-rifle out of the back of the truck and Jozsi caught it. He was jumping up and down, holding the rifle high.
The truck started to move. We sat down in the back as it rattled and shook our suitcase next to us. I looked out the back. Jozsi was still jumping up and down, his umbrella-rifle raised high.
The camp was smaller … and smaller … and smaller … and then it was gone.
I had never seen a ship before. It was bigger than the steep-cliff mountain I had once seen in Salzburg. My parents taught me another American phrase—“Zank yu.”
I spoke English all the time to the soldiers as we stood in the long lines. Vell, okay, hov arr yu, zank yu. Some of the soldiers gave me chewing gum and candy. I had never tasted chewing gum before. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to swallow it.
My stomach hurt. I threw up. I cried.
Children my age—I was five and a half in June of 1950—stayed with their mothers on board. The women slept on cots in the biggest room I had ever seen. Thousands of women and their children. The men were sleeping in another endless room.
I slept on a cot next to my mother. When the women went to bed, they took their clothes off. Thousands and thousands of naked women of different shapes and sizes. I studied them.
I was happy studying them. I looked forward each night to my studies.
As a Hungarian boy and then as an American man, I diligently continued the study I began on the ship, a lifelong exploration of the bodies of women.
I dream still about waking early and waiting for the women on the ship to slowly put their clothes on. Sometimes my mother, seeing the intensity of my study, told me to look away.
I looked away, but wherever I looked I saw only more naked women.
During the day, the men and women mingled on deck and the children played. My father was ill. He had the flu and we never saw him.
We visited him in a room where he was lying down. We had to put masks on our faces when we saw him. I didn’t know why but I didn’t ask any questions.
I thought it was another oddity among people whose streets were paved with gold.
I didn’t know what gold was until they showed me it was teeth. An old Hungarian woman in the barrack had heard me ask what it was. So she opened her mouth wide and told me to look deep into it.
In the back, among black teeth, something gleamed. It was the gold. I understood it then.
In America, the streets would be full of these special gleaming teeth.
· · ·
A soldier saw my mother on the deck of the ship light up her newspaper filled with tree leaves. He came over and asked to smell what she was smoking. She gave it to him.
He took a drag and started to cough. He threw it over the side, looked at her angrily, and walked away. My mother held on to me. I knew she was frightened.
The soldier came back. He handed her three packs of American cigarettes in a shiny-paper covering. She told him no in Hungarian, but he said Yez, Yez.
He opened one of the packs and handed her a cigarette. She put it into her mouth. Her hands were shaking. He lit it for her with a match. She took a deep drag and looked away from him.
I saw she was crying. I looked at him and he was crying, too, but smiling at the same time. Then the American walked away.
A soldier saw me on deck looking at the sea. There were big fish in it, my mother told me, which ate you if you fell into the water. I was trying to see the fish that ate you but I couldn’t.
The soldier brought me a rocking horse and a flute. I said, “Vell, okay, hov arr yu, zank yu.” He laughed and ruffled my hair.
I loved my rocking horse and my flute. I had the flute in my mouth all day and blew it as hard as I could. My mother said, “Stop. You’re all out of breath.”
But I blew it and blew it.
It began to rain. The wind howled. The ship pitched forward and back and leaned to the side. We had to stay all day in the room where the women slept. Many of them were throwing up. Needless to say, I was throwing up, too.
Hollywood Animal Page 8
