“But there is no East Germany now. Or is there?”
“Iz nat. Bat ven dis one made, still wars. Iz two… rhythm.”
“Rhythm?”
“Togeder cam benzin end oil.”
Henryk smiled and nodded vaguely, as if he understood.
When the sign for Budapest first appeared on the motorway, the driver asked him where he was headed. Henryk pointed to the address of the youth hostel in his book.
“Lucky. Heer vee are bifore it.”
The cement block of the hostel in Budaörs reminded Henryk of the public hospital at Queens. The same day in the downstairs café he met a couple of dozen Americans. They took him to the brand-new pubs of the capital, where the punters spoke almost only English. “This is the gold-rush time here,” explained Jeff McPherson, in a strong Irish accent. “Pay a bit of attention and you can make your fortune here!”
Henryk paid a bit of attention. A week later he wrote to Grammy to say he would be staying in Hungary until the end of the summer. He asked her to send him his Macintosh Classic by UPS, which had opened an office in Budapest.
It is fascinating for me to visit the land of my ancestors. I am sorry you are not here with me. Don’t you feel like coming over now? I can send you a plane ticket.
It turns out my Hungarian is a lot better than I thought. Grammy, why don’t we speak Hungarian together? After all, you’re Hungarian too, aren’t you?
Mama and Papa would be open-mouthed: now you can get almost anything here. In places they will even accept my credit card. It’s a shame they never lived to see this.
He often thought of the two little Koreans, wondering how long they had waited for him in St. Mark’s Square by the arcades. He hoped it was not too long.
Grammy’s long reply arrived with unusual speed.
My dear Henryk,
I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself in Budapest. To me, you know, it’s almost a foreign city, for as you know we hail from Szekszárd, in the south of the country, as I told you.
Szekszárd? He could have sworn that he had never heard this before. Is that still inside Hungary? He checked the map.
Szekszárd…
From somewhere in the dust-covered years of his early childhood a little ditty rose to the surface of his consciousness. Szekszárd’s my birthplace, a stage-star’s my lovegrace!-Papa used to say it to Mama when things were still OK. They would laugh at this appropriation of a line from the poet Mihály Babits. He, Henryk, the toddler, tried to repeat after them: Sixard! Sixard!-which Papa liked so much that he would grab him and toss him in the air, with Henryk squealing, Mama squealing, even Grandma squealing. Papa would toss him up again and again, higher and higher as he rhythmically roared: Szek-szárd’s my birth place, a stage-star’s my lovegrace!
Only once did my parents take me up to Budapest, when I was ten, as they were trying to arrange my emigration papers. We stayed in the Hotel Hungária, by the Danube. Go and take a look, and think of me.
Henryk could not fulfill this request. He found no Hotel Hungária on the Danube: its place had been taken by the Forum Hotel and the Intercontinental.
My crazy husband always planned to take us on a grand tour of Europe, the high point of which would have been a trip to Hungary, taking in Szekszárd, which he pronounced Sixard, just as you did when you were small. But he was never able to realize his plan. Like most Indians, he lived in a dream world, not on the ground. I think you don’t even know what he was called. Although I have told you before, you never pay attention. Am I right? You don’t know, do you? Ganesh Kupar. That was his name-may the soil lie light upon him-when I met him in an eatery on Lee Avenue, Brooklyn. I was a dishwasher there and he a waiter. Yes, my dear little Henryk, that’s how our life began. He was a restless man, continually driven by his hot blood, and I could not hold him back from doing anything he wanted to. Before I knew it we were in Delhi, flat broke, in a filthy alleyway, where 70 percent of the inhabitants used the street both as toilet and bedroom. I had to get away from the danger that he signified, back to the U.S. and to my parents. I never married again.
Henryk had a feeling that he had heard his grandfather was from India, but he had never put two and two together and thus realized that this meant he had Indian blood coursing in his veins and that was why his skin was so dark. Most of the cabbies in New York are Indian. Sikh, to be more precise: that is to say, from the military caste. Some even wear their turbans while driving. They are like… at the end of this train of thought the penny finally dropped: So, that’s why… Some days before in a restaurant in Buda the fiddler had asked him: “Are you a Rom?”
“I beg your pardon?”
The bulky fellow nodded significantly as he returned to his band: “The bugger denies it.”
Henryk didn’t know this word.
It’s very kind of you to invite me to come, but I have no wish to stir up in my soul everything that I put the seal on long ago. I doubt if I could speak Hungarian. If Magyar words come into my head, each has some painful memory attached, so I would rather not force the issue. You wouldn’t really understand. Have a good time over there, enjoy life, then come home!
By then Henryk was a salesman in the newly opened showroom of Macintosh Hungary. By August he had advanced to journalist, writing reports for the first English-language weekly, in the “Scenes from the Life of the Capital” column. Of the seven-man team, four were Americans, and of these he spoke the best Hungarian. The cultural column was in the hands of Ann, a blonde with legs reaching up to her armpits, who wrote nearly all the articles. She had two hobbyhorses. She insisted on spelling her name without a final e, unlike most bearers of it; and she insisted with the same intensity on her American colleagues not behaving like dumb assholes in Hungary, but taking an interest in the art, literature, and customs of this small population. As soon as it became clear that Henryk was basically Magyar, she immediately regarded him as a fellow spirit and took him under her wing.
Since I have been living in Budapest, I have every reason to feel satisfied. Everything that did not succeed at home is working out here, better than I could have imagined. Here my shyness and unusual behavior is accepted, including my less than perfect knowledge of the language. My finances are also in order. Without my having to make a particular effort, things are working out by themselves.
Ann crafted his application for a work permit, attaching the recommendation of the chief editor. She also got him a room to rent, though this soon proved superfluous, as he moved in with her. Ann lived out in the Csillaghegy area, renting the loft of a large detached house with a garden. The loft had been converted into a single large space with a gallery kitchen, with only the tiny bathroom hived off in one corner. When Henryk first climbed up the narrow hen-run-like ladder, he could not believe his eyes. While the lower two levels of the building looked very much like those of detached houses in the outer suburbs, in the loft space part of a Scottish castle had been constructed. In the generously sized fireplace, the U-shaped iron arms holding the logs, the bellows, the poker, and the fire tongs could all have come straight from the time of Shakespeare. The oak-paneled, uneven walls were decorated with old firearms and country scenes. There was furniture to match, notably the dining table for twelve with ramrod-straight chairs.
The family whose hospitality Ann enjoyed had built their home by themselves, with their own bare hands, one might say, and when she rented their summer kitchen, there was as yet no roof on the house. The man had been broken down by the many years’ effort he had put into the house, and had retired on health grounds. “That is, he was forced to take early retirement.” Seeing their sad plight, Ann proposed that she would finish off the house, including the loft, in return for living there rent-free until she recouped her costs.