MOTHER

“I remember darkness, and flickering, dim light... darkness and fear occupied the cellar where we lived during the siege. It was large, two stories deep underground. All the buildings in the city built around the turn of the century had a cellar like that, and during the war these musty, windowless, underground spaces were turned into air-raid shelters… they were safer than the apartments in the buildings, protected by their depth from bombs, shrapnel and air pressure damage. We used candles and an oil lamp as lighting… looking at the flickering circle cast by the flames, a yellowish slice of world, the one surrounding the light, became visible. The rest of the cellar remained distant, hidden in permanent twilight. The city around us seemed like another world to me, governed by its own laws and events, and the sealed reality of this underground isolation allowed me a sense of protection, one which turned out to be mistaken, in light of later events.”

Papi and I are sitting in my parents’ kitchen, surrounded by the soft, yellow light of the ceiling lamp. We are drinking mulled wine from small mugs, a routine in winter-dark Europe, where wine is not a marker of sophistication or elegance but a mundane accessory to conversation and company. I pour the hot, spice-filled liquid in the mugs while I am listening to my father telling me stories about his childhood. I ask him, as I had many times before, to take me back to the weeks during the siege of Budapest when the Soviet Army arrived at the city. It was mid-winter, 1944. Having heard the story and its various versions, I greeted the Soviet soldiers coming to life through my father’s words as acquaintances. They were marching towards us, victoriously in their disorganized exhaustion, as the physical representatives of their government’s slogan-filled quest to liberate Eastern Europe from Nazi occupation. After they arrived, they stayed and occupied our part of the world and laid foundation to a different sort of terror, backed by a different ideology. Through my father’s stories, the protagonists of history classes appeared in our kitchen and became people: victims, perpetrators, liberators, collaborators, soldiers, civilians were now human beings forging a path they could call their own lives in the chaos of the moment, shaped by larger social forces. It was an endless march of people labeled as ‘us’ or ‘them’, as ‘supporters’, ‘victims’, ‘heroes’ and ‘enemies’. People trying to survive.

In 1944 my father was seven years old, too young to grasp the political significance of the events surrounding him. He recounted the events to me as he remembered, as he allowed them to flow, to seep through the protective filter of his memory, like the taste of meat from horses frozen to death in the cold, or killed by the inhabitants of the city as there was nothing else left to eat … the soldiers, Russian or German, who cyclically appeared in the basement shelter, wielded machine guns, barked orders in foreign, undecipherable languages to terrorize the civilian population and each other… whoever tried to resist them was shot. Papi said he remembered seeing more Russian soldiers than Germans during the siege. He described them as young men, some of them almost boys, wearing shabby, thick, cotton-filled winter coats that reached down to their knees, drunk on victory and death, trying to conceal the words in their frightened eyes behind crude, loudly pronounced words and small-time plunder. Papi remembered that the soldiers were searching for alcohol, women, and jewelry, searching for solace and the promise of power in the midst of fear and desolation; an army of exhausted, brutalized young men far away from home, grown tough by killing and hunger. They took what they could and raped the women they could find.

My father was born in Budapest, the capital city of Hungary. When he was two years old, his parents divorced and he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Transylvania, a region that has become part of Romania after World War I, but has been home to a sizable Hungarian population up until the present day. His grandparents loved and treated my father as their own child, but he knew that somewhere far away there was a mother, there was a woman who was supposed to love him, but who only appeared a few times a year, stayed for a couple of days, had a picture of the two of them taken at the photographer’s, and then left, leaving only the deceptive memory of her smile. “I did not know why she had to leave, why she didn’t stay with me, I didn’t know who she went to stay with” – my father told me – “Nobody explained anything to me at the time and it didn’t even occur to me that I should ask, that I could ask. I was living with my grandparents because that was where I was sent to, and it all seemed very natural to me back then. I remember wandering in the meadows holding grandpa’s hand, hiking in the nearby forests, playing some games and generally feeling very good. That is what I remember.

When the Second World War broke out, my mother’s visits became more scattered, and after a while she wasn’t able to come at all. The border between Hungary and Romania was shut and we remained on two different sides of a line that divided people and nations. In 1944, when the progressing Soviet Army fighting the forces allied with Nazi Germany reached Transylvania from the East, my grandparents decided that I would be safer on the Hungarian side and should be reunited with my mother. Taking advantage of the chaos which made the border porous, I was sent to Budapest. I traveled alone, by train, with a hand-written note in my pocket, listing all the information that my grandparents thought were important. My name, our address in Transylvania, my destination, and the name of the person who was supposed to meet me at the train station in Budapest. They made me memorize the contents of the note, in case I lost it somehow.”

Papi is caught up in the flow of the events, so I interrupt him to ask: ’How did all that make you feel?’ He flashes a half-smile at me and says, in full sincerity, that he does not remember that.

I let some silence linger in the kitchen, allowing space for the unspoken to take form. Papi is about to wade deeper into the rough terrain of mid-twentieth century Eastern Europe: to years of dark, long and brutally cold winters, where much snow could fall; enough to crush a small child as it piles slowly up on him. I do not want to pain Papi with these memories, still, I wish his seven-year-old, little self could peek out from behind the heaps of snow and talk to me. I prod the little boy gently, hoping to catch a glimpse of his shy, cautious smile I know from photographs, but I am hesitant to send my father back to the cold, to make him feel scared again. Scared to lose his way in the endless whiteness where he might end up with no one finding him.

“I was not scared of the war, at least I do not remember being scared. The fighting, as long as it was distant, did not bring dramatic changes in my life. We had less food to eat and the adults seemed to be wary and fearful at times, and they talked in hushed voices so that I would not hear them. But I was too young to understand the danger, and the first years of the war did not seem very different from the years that I had lived through before. Then the frontline approached our town in Romania, and when it was close to reaching us, my grandparents decided to send me to Hungary, away from the center of armed struggle. Looking back now, they must have known that the frontline would reach Budapest as well, that their decision would only grant me a temporary escape from danger. But they sent me anyway. Perhaps they thought that under such circumstances it should be my parents’ responsibility to make sure I would stay alive. Either way, they packed a few of my clothes in a small suitcase and put me on a train headed to Budapest. I was traveling alone, for long hours, maybe a day. During air-raid attacks, if the planes flew close, the train stopped, people got off and ran to find shelter, or hide among the trees if there was a nearby forest. I ran with them. When the planes were gone, we got back on the train and continued our way.

I can’t remember who came to pick me up from the train station in Budapest, but if it was my mother, she did not come there to take me home with her. I was taken to a boarding institute for children whose parents had died in the war or were unable to care for them for other reasons. I was confused that I should be one of them; I knew that my mother was well and alive in that same city, although I also knew that she was not living with my father but with another man. I missed my grandparents and I remember having the sensation that something was constantly holding my stomach in a grip. Each time I ate, the food soon came all the way back up, I vomited every day... I don’t know what could have been wrong with me… when I was sent to the doctor, he examined me and said that I was fine, and that I should go back to play with the others. I guess I must have been scared, but I don’t know of what.”

I am looking at Papi with a neutral expression, trying, without words, to encourage him, to tell him that all this is in the past, it is gone now, and hoping that the distance will prove to be large enough so he can continue to tell me. I stop asking questions. I wonder whether it is fair to entice him back to a time in his life when he was afraid, although he says he doesn’t remember what it was that he was afraid of. I am not sure that I want him to start remembering the reasons, whether I even have the right. I hope for further details, whether hesitantly or confidently told, and I am grateful for every word that brings me closer to the boy he used to be, so I can know him fully before he dies.

“It must have been around mid-November, that they closed the orphanage” Papi continued, “The Russians were closing in on the city and the orphanage personnel could not take responsibility for us, children, anymore. Everybody was let go, whether they had parents or not. I remember my mother and my father coming to pick me up. My mother, elegant in spite of the circumstances, with red lipstick, her hair recently made, wearing a small, fashionable hat in the biting cold. My father, less carefully crafted, was wearing a coat that had seen better days. Heavily balding, he looked much older than his age, affected by his innate anxiety and, I guess, also by the events of the previous years. According to the laws in effect at the time he counted as Jewish, although he was born and raised as a Protestant. His mother came from an orthodox Jewish family and she converted to Christianity when she married my grandfather. Her family refused to see her after that, she died young, far from her native village, when my father was two years old. My grandfather kept my grandmother’s Jewish origins a secret from the children as long as it was possible; in those days, that was not something to brag about. When my parents met, my father apparently did not know that he was half-Jewish, so he could not tell my mother, your grandmother. When he learned about it and told her, she divorced him, although not for that sole reason.

I remember a picture from 1938, when my parents spent a week in Berlin on vacation, my mother flashing her enchanting smile, posing in front of my father’s camera, while in the background red flags with swastikas were blowing in the wind. Sometimes I wondered whether she would have smiled the same if she had known...

But I was not aware of any of that at the time’ Papi continues. ’All I knew was that the war, the real one that the adults around me were all terrified of, was unmistakably at the city’s doorstep, so I would finally be handed over to them, my parents, to whom I belonged. I hoped to stay with my mother. I knew that it was not possible to live with the two of them, that they were divorced.

The three of us stepped out the institute’s door. My father took my small suitcase and was carrying it for me, so I was able to hold their hands, one on each side of me, as we walked towards the old part of the city. I was walking with easy strides, happy in my oversize, rigid, dark brown winter coat made out of baize, and I was looking up at my mother with a smile because I had no doubt that she would take me home with her now, that she would protect me from the war and from being alone all the time. I knew that she would proudly introduce me to her new husband and tell him that if he didn’t like the idea of her little boy living with them then he is free to leave, as she and I would never be parted again…

But that is not what my mother did. When we got to the opposite side of the old city, she theatrically hugged and kissed me, and let me know that I would be staying with my father. She did not tell me why and I did not dare to ask. I wasn’t aware of the kind of danger this arrangement really meant for me, considering that my father was listed as Jewish; the only thing I knew was confusion and disappointment over seeing her leave me again. Even if I had understood the danger, I wouldn’t have felt that I could ask questions. My eyes followed my mother moving away, then I felt a gentle tug on my hand and I continued walking, holding my father’s hand.

It was neither my mother nor my father who saved me from the war, in the end. Of course, nobody could really be saved from it, but when the war ended, I was alive. Soon after I moved in with my father, he was taken away by the Germans to serve in a unit of Hungarian Jews deployed to escort explosive-filled trucks across the city, to supply the German positions on the other side. If the convoy was hit by Russian bombs or caught in heavy machine gun fire it exploded, and the escorting men died. The German Army did not want to waste their already heavily reduced manpower, so they used the locals to do this job. My father was held there for weeks, not able to return home at night. By this time, the siege of the city was under way, there were shelling and bomb raids practically every day. After my father was taken away, I was left to stay with a woman who had been living with me and my father in the apartment. Her name was Julia”.

II.

“Miss Julia is the one caring for me because Papa is not here anymore, the Germans took him away. Miss Julia tells me not to be scared, he will come back home when he can. I am not scared but I would prefer him to be here, even though I had to sleep alone in the living room when he was at home because he and Miss Julia slept together in the bedroom. Now I can sleep in the bedroom with Miss Julia. When I wake up at night and I can’t go back to sleep, I go to her bed and she lets me snuggle with her in a hazy-warm reality between sleep and wakefulness. I don’t hug her much because she has a strange, unfamiliar smell, but her closeness makes me feel good.

It has been a few weeks since we moved down to this cellar. There are bomb raids every day and Julia and the other adults in the house say that it’s safer down here than staying in the apartments. We spent Christmas Day in darkness. By now, it must be January but it is hard to keep track of the days. I don’t mind being down here except for the cold and the darkness. All the people from the different apartments who were living in the building are here with us now, mostly women and older men. They managed to get a few iron-framed bunk beds from someplace and we sleep on those. There is a heavy, cast-iron stove in the middle, so we have all that we need to live down here, which is a good thing because we have been staying in this basement day and night. It is better not to go outside, that is what they say. Two of Miss Julia’s relatives are staying here with us, two men, but they are young, one of them told me he was seventeen. They got caught by the shelling and the bombing of the city and were not able to go home to their village anymore, so they came here. Miss Julia cooks for all four of us, if you can call it cooking when she tries to make some gooey soup out of flour and water. There is nothing else to eat. We even ran out of cooking oil so she said she could not fry the flour for us before cooking it, which would have made it taste a bit better. I ate some of her soup, but it was very bad, you need to eat it slowly, and then you don’t feel hungry all the time. Julia is good, she keeps me from going hungry.

Sometimes I think about Mama. I don’t actually like to have her in my mind because if I do then I have to ask myself why it is that she did not take me with her. I wonder why it was that she didn’t have the strength to face her new husband, to tell him that her son needed her because there was a war raging, that she wanted to take me from that institute and care for me, hold me tight when I felt scared at night. When I have Mama in my mind, I start to wonder why it is that she let Miss Julia do all that, instead of her. It is better not to think about Mama at all, and also not to think about Papa who has to work outside, on the icy-covered street, with all that bombing and machine gun fire. It is better not to think about any of that at all, but to lie quietly on my stomach on the bed and stare at the light of the oil lamp. It gives me peace. Sometimes I play a bit with some other kids who are down here in the shelter, or just close my eyes and imagine that it is summertime, and I am walking in the woods again with grandpa. It helps me not to be afraid.

Miss Julia is not as beautiful as Mama and she doesn’t talk or behave like her. I think she must be from the countryside, but she says that she had been living in Budapest and working in a factory before the war broke out. She has no children, if I don’t count myself as such. I don’t. Still, if something is wrong, I can always go to her.

I am sort of getting used to the darkness of the shelter, but it has started to bother me that we cannot go outside. At least not us, children. There is a dog in here, I don’t know who he belongs to, but I sometimes play with him. He is allowed to go out to the courtyard when he needs to do his business. Up until now, he has always come back. I think I started to like him. Last night he slept at the foot of our bed and during the day I let him come up with me on the top bunk, but Miss Julia said that she doesn’t like me letting him come to our bed. He might have fleas. His name is Spotty. I like to sink my fingers in his fur. As far as I’m concerned, he could stay up here with me day and night. Not that you can tell the two apart anyway, down here we never see the sun.

Another week has passed. The days do not seem to be in a hurry to end, but this morning something happened that quickly changed the pace of events. Two Russian soldiers burst through the metal door of the shelter and told us that the Soviet Army is going to turn the whole building into military barracks, and that everybody needs to leave. Any person they find here when they come back in the afternoon, will be shot. They didn’t say all this in Hungarian, so we did not understand them at first, but there are some adults in the basement who understand a few words of Russian, so they translated for us. Since then, Miss Julia has been packing. She managed to find an old, iron sled, and she has been trying to fit our few clothes and some pots into two large linen sacks. I overheard her talking with one of the adults, a woman with two children and a husband who only has one arm. They have no relatives or acquaintances living close to the capital who could put them up, so Julia told the woman that they could come with us. Miss Julia has family living close to Budapest. She tells me that if we put whatever we can on the sled and pull it as we walk, we could get to her relatives before it gets dark.

The woman and her husband decided to come with us. Miss Julia tells me that I am a big boy now so I will not get to sit on the sled, but I will help her pull it. She also has been saying that it is a good thing that there is so much snow, because we can put all we have on this sled instead of having to carry it on our backs while we walk. I listen to her and I am happy about all the snow but deep down I think that she only told me that so I would not think about the wind and the cold. I sit on our bunk and I do whatever she asks me to do. I try my best not to keep crying, but I am sad, because this morning, when the soldiers burst in, one of them killed the dog who was living with us in the basement. The dog went running up to them, barking, just to see who came in, but the soldier must have thought that Spotty wanted to bite him, so he shot him dead. He was scared of Spotty… Miss Julia keeps packing and then she looks at me, strokes my hair in her rough, country-woman way and tells me to stop wasting my tears, there will be other dogs at the place where we go to.

’And Papa?’ I ask her. ’How is he going to know where we are?’

’He will know, don’t worry. Come on, let’s go. We need to get out of here’.

III.

Silence descends on the kitchen, our mugs are empty. I am looking at Papi. Tears flutter by the side of his eyes. I turn my face a bit so he wouldn’t notice that I can’t hold my tears back either. I am not feeling sorry for him, I am proud of him. After a brief silence he smiles and continues:

“You already know the rest. Julia and I were walking, pulling the sled behind us along the snowy streets, heading towards the edge of the city, with the other woman and her family in tow. It was very cold, and the streets were deserted, but it felt good to be outside, to see daylight, to look at the gray, hanging clouds. I remember seeing dead bodies in the snow, burnt out tanks along the way, but none of this seemed unnatural or frightening to me, it was a war, it seemed normal that all this would be there. In any case, we did not have the time to contemplate any of this, we had to keep walking, we had a long way to go and the sled was heavy.

I don’t remember being afraid, I had no time to feel anything, we were all weak from weeks of hunger, exhausted in the cold. After a few hours, at the outskirts of the city, we arrived at a long, steep slope with stone stairs leading to the top. The only way to continue would have been to pick up the iron sleds with the sacks, and to carry them up the stairs. It felt like an impossible task. We were standing at the bottom, our hands frozen from the cold wind, and when I looked at Julia I knew that neither we, nor the couple coming with us were going to make it up there with the sleds. Julia put the heavy sacks down in the snow and sat on the sled, trying to summon her strength to either carry the bags and the sled up one by one, or to admit defeat and accept that if we made it up the stairs without our clothes and pots, that in itself would count as victory. I was sitting next to Julia, staring at the ground, and I heard the woman’s baby cry on the other sled. We stayed like that for a while, resting, when I suddenly felt Julia raise herself from the sled and slowly stand in front of me, her arms deliberately kept by her side, as if trying to make herself look bigger than she was. Her red, gloveless, frozen fingers were at the level of my eyes. When I looked up, I saw a Russian soldier with a machine gun in his hand, facing Julia, pointing the barrel of his gun at her stomach, measuring us up with his eyes. He asked something, but it was in Russian, we could not understand him. He was a young soldier, maybe around 20 or so, and he kept repeating the same question. Julia kept waiting, she didn’t move. After a few minutes the soldier appeared to feel more at ease. Letting his guard down, he probably allowed himself to see who we really were: a miserable woman frozen to her bones with a thin, hungry little boy, next to them a family with a baby and a one-armed man, a helpless group in search of refuge. Perhaps Julia reminded the soldier of his own mother. He lowered his gun.

Julia made a hesitant gesture towards the stone steps, trying to make the soldier understand that we were heading up there, all the while she never moved from in front of me, and never let the gun out of her sight. The soldier stood there for a while, perhaps thinking about what to do with us, then nodded and picked up the sacks, put them back on our sled and carried them easily up the stairs. To me it seemed they were like feather in his hands. For a few minutes I thought that he would take off with our sacks, as did all the others who came to the basement and took whatever they found, but he put the sled down at the top of the stairs, and came back for the rest of our things, all the while saying a few words here and there in Russian. When all our belongings were on top of the stairs he returned one more time, smiled at us, nodded his head, and left. We climbed the stairs and continued our way, pulling the sleds behind us. About an hour later we got to the house where Julia’s family lived. I survived the rest of the siege there’.

I look at my dad. He sits in the yellow light, almost peaceful, almost smiling. He wasn’t bothered that I nudged him to tell me, he didn’t actually mind reliving all that, from a distance. He liked it that I wanted to know the past.

’Do you have any more wine at home?’ I ask him, to break the silence. ‘I can warm up some before we talk more’.