“When I’m well again,” his father repeated matter-of-factly.
At that moment they both knew that Dr. Balázs Csillag would never get well.
His father gave a sniff like a sniffer dog, then buried himself in the crossword on his lap. The conversation was over. Vilmos Csillag continued to watch for some time as Papa got into his stride and rapidly filled the grid: whenever he managed to tease out the meaning of a clue, the flicker of a smile played about his lips.
This proved to be the most enduring image. Five years after the death of his father, Vilmos Csillag could summon up his face only with effort, and ten years later, in the man preserved in the black-and-white snapshots, he found it difficult to recognize his father. If he dreamed of him, it was frequently the terrace scene, where he was wrapped in a blanket, his thin hair, pushed skyward by the pillow, tousled gently by the wind, and around his lips that little almost-smile.
His father died before Vilmos Csillag finished secondary school, before he took his final exams-A+, A+, A+, A (French), A (Maths)-before his unsuccessful entrance exams, three years in succession, for the arts faculty, for law, for stage school, and for the teaching diploma, by which time he was resigned to not going to college and had to manage without.
About these things
Of such matters
Of all these matters you were unable to could not know anything. Nor of my other lesser or greater achievements of mine in the university of hard knocks, in which you might have taken pride. Perhaps. With you it’s always difficult to know. When I won the poetry recital competition at secondary school, with “It’s not yet enough,” you said you were ashamed that I had recited such pseudo-patriotic poems. Was it my fault? It was a set text! Why did you never make the stress the effort to tell me that not all the poems in that are found in the textbooks are OK?
I got no guidance from you, nothing to help me think, no framework or
It’s difficult to…
You didn’t hand on even what…
You didn’t bring me up to know about life nor…
You did not spend time…
You did not care…
I did not count…
I am not reproaching you for anything, but what you don’t get in your childhood, you will always miss, and that’s not from me but from Jung. I guess you would never have imagined that I would read such books; as far as you knew I was a middling student in every respect. I wonder what you thought would become of me. Did you think about that at all?
I became a professional rock musician. I think that would surprise you, as in those days such a thing did not exist, there was only Studio 11, Mária Toldy, Kati Sárosi, and Marika Németh, who Mama said people loved soooo much, the way only Mama could say soooo much. Can you believe that four guys go on stage-three guitars and a drum, perhaps an electronic organ-and this band can make ten or a hundred times more noise than a symphony orchestra?
It’s a pity that you can’t now any longer by then
It would be so good to talk to you Papa.
FATHER
PAPA
FATHER DEAR
We should have talked.
It would have been good to have talked more.
Or ever
Never
Vilmos Csillag’s visits to the cemetery were rare. In his view his father was not to be found there: if he existed anywhere at all, then it was in his, Vilmos’s, memory, and it therefore followed that it made not a whit of difference whether he visited the area demarcated by others for mourning him. He argued this view defiantly to his circle of friends and generally won them over.
“My dear little Willie, even the lowest peasant visits his loved ones in the cemetery. You are the only person who comes out with this pretentious guff!”
“Get off my back, Mama.”
“Well, you might at least drive me there. You don’t have to come in, you can walk up and down outside. I need no more than ten minutes, or even less, five!”
This was the trap. You can’t turn down your mother’s desperate plea, but it would be absurd if, having reached the arched wrought-iron gates of the cemetery, he were to just hang around, obstinately clinging to his ideas, while Mama placed a bouquet in the little marble vase affixed to Papa’s small marble plaque. If I’m going there… I’ll go in with her and do the honors.
Since the visit to the cemetery was unavoidable, he kept putting it off, with the wiliest tricks. By the time they got around to it, it was again February, windy and bitterly cold. Vilmos Csillag grumbled: “We might as well wait for spring!”
His mother launched into a tirade: “Have you any idea how long I have been begging you to take me? If it’s too much of an effort for you, I’ll go by tram, like the other peasants!”
This was Mama’s trump card, the other peasants, down to whose level it is piteous yet sometimes inevitable to sink. Vilmos Csillag never understood where his mother got her invincible hauteur, which decreed that there are us, the cultured ones, all of us potential doctoral students of morality, manners, and superiority, and there are, by contrast, other peasants, who have been vouchsafed little or nothing of this. His mother’s father-and grandfather-were in all likelihood either unpretentious carpenters in the community of Beremend or perhaps tillers of the soil, in which light the “the other peasants” tag seemed even more ludicrous. There was not an aristocrat or even an intellectual in genealogical sight, who might have had some genuine grounds for differentiating themselves from the uncouth plebs and country bumpkins.
Vilmos Csillag had no memory of his grandfather and only the very faintest of his grandmother, as if the negative of a photograph; by the time he was five they were both dead. Mama wanted to see their graves also. About the place of rest of the remaining relatives she told her son an unbelievable horror story. The village cemetery that had been the final resting place of the Porubszkys as far back as anyone could remember had been eliminated under socialism-“sir-shelism,” as she pronounced it-the gravestones that could be moved were transferred to Pécs, the bones remained in the ground, and some factory or power station had been built over the site. It sounded insane. Why would anybody want to build a factory right where there was a cemetery? Vilmos Csillag added this story to the catalogue of his mother’s mad tales. There were many of these, one more (or less) made little difference.
Sometimes his mother would come out with astonishing stories, and not always in connection with her late husband. The carpenter of Beremend rose to become the proprietor of a factory employing fifty, then a hundred, people. By the time Vilmos Csillag grew up, the family home at Beremend had expanded from three rooms to twenty-two. The sand buggy soon acquired an elder brother, a six-horse carriage, which resembled the garish phaeton in Vilmos Csillag’s favorite storybook, 77 Hungarian Folk Tales-though that had belonged to the King of Prussia, not the Porubszkys of Beremend. Their original two-hectare holding increased fivefold, to twenty Hungarian acres. Dashing hussars turned up, claiming to be related at the great-grandfather level or beyond. Vilmos Csillag had only his own, unreliable memory to draw on when he protested: “Mama, in the old days you never told me this!”
“Come, come, what do you know about it, my dear Willie? You don’t know anything, so it’s better if you keep as quiet…”
“… as shit in the grass!” he completed another of his mother’s favorite phrases.
“Exactly.”
Similar transformations were effected in Dr. Balázs Csillag’s career, in the level of affluence of his relatives in Pécs, and indeed in everything on which Mama gave little lectures. Her parents left Beremend for the capital in 1953, already burdened with serious illnesses. They died here so soon after their move, it seemed as if they had been destroyed by the sins of the metropolis. Vilmos Csillag occasionally felt the desire to find out something about the past, but if he asked his mother, he set off an inflation of the temps perdu, the exaggeration of the people who lived in the past, and he felt that he ended up knowing even less than before he put his questions. He could not understand what joy Mama could find in making such notorious over-statements-the most polite term that might be used for this activity.