“Why not, my dear Willie? A lot of bad things can be said of your dear father, but he was all his life a model husband and father.”
“Really? You think that a model father is one who practically never speaks to his son?”
“Yes, well, perhaps he was a bit taciturn, that’s true.”
Vilmos Csillag’s dander was up. “Model husband, eh? Who when he was seriously ill was thinking that he would move out?”
His mother was thunderstruck: “Where did you get that from?”
“From him! That’s what he said!”
“You’ve made that up. To annoy me.”
He knew that for the rest of his life he would regret it but he had no mercy on his mother. He told her the whole story, sparing no detail.
His mother just listened, hooting frequently into her handkerchief. Vilmos Csillag’s aggressive mood evaporated. Well now, what good did that do? he asked himself.
His mother said to him the following evening: “You’re angry with me for… losing Papa like this?”
He shook his head. We’ve lost everything else already anyway, he thought.
He felt he could not just sit at home all day and began to look for temporary work. He found some in the big covered market, where a schoolmate had a business dealing in live fish. Vilmos Csillag used a net to lift carp, catfish, and zander from the glass aquaria; for a tip he would clean them and slice them up. He was constantly planning his return to the U.S., and constantly postponing his departure. At first he exchanged letters weekly with Shea and his mother-in-law in Brooklyn; then the exchanges grew less frequent. His son in the photographs grew by leaps and bounds. He had begun to write a few childish lines himself. The forms of address and the closing formula would be in beginner’s Magyar, the rest of the letter in English. He signed himself HENRYK.
Mischung, thought Vilmos Csillag.
The months went by. He longed to see his son again, though perhaps not strongly enough to take the necessary steps to do so. The illness that struck his mother out of the blue again wiped out the possibility of making the trip in the short term.
In the period of almost a year that it took for his mother to make the journey from the Kékgolyó Street clinic to the cemetery, Vilmos Csillag’s hair had begun to turn gray. He hoped Henryk would turn up for the burial, but he sent only a telegram of sympathy, in which there was only one word of Hungarian, the family name of Vilmos Csillag. Shea and her mother are no doubt bringing the kid up to hate me.
Now he found it truly difficult to say why he was in Hungary. He sold the flat in Márvány Street and deposited the money in the Trade Bank, in an account from which, according to the current regulations, he could withdraw it in stipulated amounts when traveling abroad. No problem. I’ll fetch Henryk and we’ll have a holiday by the Balaton.
His plane landed at Kennedy Airport. He was not met, which did not surprise him. He was reluctant to spend money on a taxi and took the inter-airport shuttle bus. While he worked in Newark, the drivers had been prepared to stop for him on the corner of Northern Boulevard, only fifteen minutes’ walk from Shea’s mother. This time, however, the Sikh-turbaned driver would not make this illegal stop, so he had a walk of at least half an hour ahead of him when he dropped his two suitcases on the traffic island.
He remembered the area and knew that if he could get over Grand Central Parkway, he could make his walk much shorter. But the multilane expressway teemed and roared with vehicles, searing into his brain with the howl of wounded wild animals. Without bags maybe he could have zigzagged across, but with two suitcases he had no chance. So it had to be the long way.
He walked along the ramp that led to the pedestrian bridge along an auto scrapyard. It was lighting-up time, at least in theory, but in this part of the world it was the exception to find a working bulb in the streetlights-the street kids liked knocking them out with catapults.
Beyond the scrapyard, the road, made of imperfect concrete blocks, turned down towards an oily garage entrance. In the building, half sunk into the ground, there were windows like those of the workshops in Vilmos Csillag’s secondary school. In two places the broken panes had been replaced by ones that did not fit. This plot must have long ago gone bankrupt: the doors hung open and the name of the firm, KLINE & FOX, THE WIZARDS OF FORD, had broken off at one end and hung down in the wind, making a slight creaking noise. It was witty. He was pleased he understood the word play on The Wizard of Oz. Abracadabra, just watch my hands, one, two, a Ford for you, air-conditioning, leather seats, power steering… He knew how to say “power steering” only in Hungarian; it never needs to be said in English, because every car has it.
KLINE & FOX
He tried to get closer to the English pronunciation. Kline must have been Klein, the Fox perhaps Fuchs and then… more Jews… oh yeah. He imagined them. Béla Klein, no, Albert Klein, no, better: Miklós Klein, piano maker. They fled here during the Great War from Kispest. Miklós Klein, starting out as a hawker, then vacuum-cleaner salesman, later office worker at Ford, meets Ödön Fuchs… Jenö Fuchs… Richárd Fuchs… Aha, these Baradlays from Jókai’s masterpiece, The Sons of the Man with the Heart of Stone. So it’s Rezsö Fuchs that Miklós Klein meets, and by then they’ve become Ray Fox and Mike Kline, and deciding to open a car showroom with a garage for servicing, they win Ford’s approval, the business prospers, they go from strength to strength, right until the Crash, when…
No, they must have been flourishing here even last year, as the oil marks are quite fresh. He had left the scrapyard behind and was wheezing, so he put down his suitcases and sat down on them. When he continued on his way, he felt pitifully weak.
Is it possible that some grandfather or great-great-grandfather of mine also came to America?
He had to pause more and more often, his jacket and trousers were drenched; fat slugs of sweat lodged at the roots of his hair, stinging his scalp.
He was quite close to the Project, as the bleak housing estate where Shea’s mother lived was known, built at the end of the Fifties as part of the comprehensive urban-renewal plan to help the poorer families of New York. Every inch of concrete surface had been painted some garish color by hippies? addicts? the homeless? God knows who.
He could still hear the roar of Grand Central Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway-it was the latter that made Shea’s mother’s life hell. The noise now reminded Vilmos Csillag of Niagara Falls. Like a million other Americans, that was where they had gone on their honeymoon. He would never forget the moment in the mountainous seas of the bay when the motorboat took them beneath the foaming torrent. Enhancing the visuals was the sound of a thousand billion drops of water cascading onto the agitated surface of the bay. Niagara Falls, Vilmos Csillag said, imitating his wife’s accent not entirely successfully.
“Whassup?”
Two colored men were kneeling on the concrete, by some burning rubbish, the acrid whiff of which just at that moment stung Vilmos Csillag’s nostrils. He couldn’t reply; he had first to clear his throat. “Just a minute,” he said in a whisper.
“Is this jug talkin’ to us?” said one of them, in a worn-out black leather jacket, and trousers of similar stuff, which allowed strips of his knee to be seen.
Vilmos Csillag didn’t understand the word “jug”: “Whassup?”
“You mockin’ me, shithead?” The other guy was somewhat younger, twenty to twenty-two, jeans but stripped to the waist. His chest, shoulders, and arms were a riot of colored tattoos.
Vilmos Csillag didn’t understand this either. He was amazed at the way the designs on the man’s skin merged into each other. He was still coughing.
“Git yo ass out of here fast!” said the leather jacket.
“Yo kin leave the stuff!” said the younger one.