“So how long can you live here without having to pay?”
“Seventy or eighty years for sure.”
Ann’s fellow lodger received Henryk with a warning rumble. The mongrel Bond, James Bond, was pitch-black and the size of a sheep.
“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you!” Ann reassured him as the dog planted a heavy foreleg on each of Henryk’s shoulders and panted directly in his face. She was right; the dog wanted only to be loved, its massive tail thumping the floor like a flail.
Henryk became fond of the creature, though he was not best pleased when Bond, James Bond, insisted on joining them in bed when they made love. “I haven’t the heart to chase him off. He was a stray, you know, and strays take everything to heart. He has no one apart from me.”
This sentence struck Henryk like a sharp arrow. I, too, am a stray dog, he thought.
In the company of Ann he set off to find the Hungária. But it turned out that Ann was thinking of the old Hungária Café, which was now called the New York. Henryk was resigned to this, but the tall blonde never gave up. In an English book on the history of Budapest she picked up the trail. She read it out to Henryk. “The Hotel Hungária was one of the jewels on the Danube Corso, a much loved rendezvous for the local young people at the time. At the end of the war the Allies bombed it and the ruins were dismantled.”
Henryk did not want to send this news to his grandmother, with whom he exchanged letters once a week. Grammy inquired when her little grandson was coming home, and he replied that he was planning to stay and it would make more sense for Grammy to come to Budapest.
They took Bond, James Bond, for walks by the Danube, and the enormous dog soon became well known on the Csillaghegy stretch of the river. Despite his intimidating appearance, he never troubled other dogs or animals, and was roused to anger only if he thought Ann was in danger. But then he would attack without further ado.
One evening, as they took three-quarters of an hour for their walk, Ann related the story of her parents’ lightning divorce, since which she saw her father twice a year, at Thanksgiving and at Christmas. Her mother lived in Philadelphia; she was an illustrator of children’s books. The actual stories were written by her father, in Florida. Once they had made a great team. Ann was herself the heroine of some of the stories, in her own name, which she enjoyed as a child but later found irritating and even offensive. Since her university years she had drifted away from her parents. Her mother’s small-mindedness she found just as upsetting as her father’s thick-headed stubbornness. Her mother’s parents were Scots, her father’s of Dutch origin; from her she inherited her freckled skin and maize-stalk hair, from him the surname that broke a thousand lips: Schouflakkee.
“So you’re not really Ann Jagger?”
“Yes, I am now. I changed it.”
“Mick Jagger the inspiration?”
“Of course.”
“I would prefer to be Lennon. Henryk Lennon.”
“Go for it!”
When Ann asked him about his family background, Henryk told her the little he knew.
“Would you be interested in looking for your ancestors?”
“How?”
Ann explained that in Hungary it was now possible to go back through the parish registers up to about the middle of the nineteenth century. If you know when and where your father was born, you can find his birth certificate. That will contain some information about both parents, things like place and date of birth, perhaps their address at the time, maybe even their occupation. If you are sufficiently persistent, you can often find the grandparents’ marriage records (you make a guess about the likely wedding date and rifle through those years), in which you can find information about the father and mother of both husband and wife. And so on. “You only come to grief if you’re stuck for the place, because you must look in the district where they were born or married.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I wrote an article about it. The Hungarians have gone crazy about their past. Hordes of them are having their family trees reconstructed, looking for their noble coat-of-arms and their old property deeds.”
Henryk first took the train to Szekszárd. Having the data about Grammy’s birth to hand, he thought he had a pretty straightforward task. He had managed to make himself understood by the clerk in the office, when it turned out that he did not know Grammy’s maiden name. He decided to phone her. His grandmother gave a whoop of joy on hearing his voice. “Henryk! So you are here!”
“No, not yet. Grammy, what was your maiden name?”
“Pardon?”
“Your maiden name! Can you hear me?”
“Yes. Don’t shout.”
“All right, just tell me quickly, because my phone card is running…” The line went dead. He bought another in the shop. “Grammy, please, before it runs…”
“What do you need it for?”
“Complicated. I’ll tell you in a letter, just tell me what it was!”
“No… I’d rather not.”
“Why? Are you ashamed of it?”
“No… but…” Again they were cut off.
I was a little shocked to hear you asking about my maiden name. I am not a criminal to be hunted down (his grandmother wrote in her next letter). To cap it all, I have told you this, too, many times. I was born Rachel Steuer.
“Your grandmother is either German or Jewish,” Ann opined. “I thought as much.”
“Which did you think she was ‘as much’?”
“Jewish.”
“Why?”
“That’s what they’re like.”
“What are they like?”
The girl did not reply.
“You can’t say that sort of thing! That’s the beginning of fascism!”
“No, it’s the beginning of your unbearable oversensitivity!”
“Even an elephant would be offended by this!”
“The shit it would!”
They had such a row that Henryk almost moved out.
On his next trip to Szekszárd he discovered that there had been no fewer than three Rachel Steuers born in Szekszárd on Grammy’s day of birth. The clerk in the office was surprised: “Three Rachel Steuers on the same day in the same small town!” She had an excess of communicativeness and told how she came from Paks, but her parents’ house, where she had been born, was acquired by the state and razed to the ground. “They needed the space, you know, for the Paks nuclear power station.”
Henryk did not know. He hurried to fax the photocopy of the appropriate page of the register to Grammy in Brooklyn, via the Roosevelt Avenue post office. His grandmother’s reply was not long in coming.
As I’ve already told you, I have no interest in my past-thanks, but no thanks. But you were always as mad as a March hare. Have another look at my letter; what I wrote was Steiner-STEINER-not Steuer!
Henryk was ashamed. In his computer he copied this odd-sounding name a hundred times, one under the other, in New York Bold type, half an inch high. Despite this, he was unable to remember it. “Not Steuer, but Stouer!” he said, when Ann asked what his grandmother had written.
In Hungary it’s always third time lucky. It’s a folk saying, I heard it from the doorman. My third trip to Szekszárd had a resulting outcome. That is to say:
Rachel Steiner was born July 3, 1927, in Szekszárd at 6:30 in the morning. Father: Walter Steiner, farrier; mother Gabriella Duba. Both living at No. 18 Retek Street. Father R.C., mother’s religion not stated.
On the mother’s side this is as far as I have got.
Ann clapped her hands in joy: “Farrier, that’s fantastic! Congratulations! Put it on your CV.”
“What exactly is a farrier?” asked Henryk.
As soon as he was told, the scenario began to unfold before him: Walter Steiner, tall, muscular, bare-chested, the face of Marlon Brando, body like Arnold Schwarzenegger, brings the gigantic iron hammer down on an anvil incandescent with heat, pauses a second to take a breath, wipes the sweat from his brow, lowers the hammer, placing it by his feet, just like that statue Henryk saw on Dózsa György Way.