“Please could you tell me what is Beremend?”
“Beremend?” The old woman blinked fiercely as if caught out doing something naughty.
Henryk pointed to the metal sign.
“Ah, Beremend! That’s a village, not far from Pécs, further down.”
“What’s the sign doing here?”
“Dunno really. I was doing them a favor… They left the key with me while they all went off to a wedding in Baja.”
“Well, thank you,” said Henryk and went out into the street.
The old woman followed him and immediately locked the iron gate from outside. “Farewell.”
He hurried back to the archives but there was no trace in the parish registers of Dr. Antal Csillag, or of Dr. Bencze Csillag, or of Dr. Ervin Csillag.
“Doesn’t prove anything,” said the archivist. “There are always documents gone astray. If I were you, I’d believe the gravestones.”
From Pécs Henryk drove to a little village in County Somogy, where Jeff and Doug were waiting for him in a camper van, with a celebratory meal. They ate in the open air. Henryk gave a detailed account of how far he had got.
The HEJED Co. had bought two run-down properties in County Somogy. Jeff had already secured firm buyers for them. In Somogyvámos it seemed virtually impossible to imagine that in place of the ruins heavily used by the cooperative there could arise a country house similar to that of the original owners, the Windisch family, in the eighteenth century. This family of Austrian nobles had put down roots in several areas of Hungary; in Somogyvámos there lived one of the more impoverished branches. What remained of their shrinking lands had been taken over in 1950 by the Red Star Agricultural Cooperative: the grander rooms were used as offices, while the outhouses became grain stores. Since the dissolution of the cooperative it had stood derelict, the weeds waist-high in almost every room.
Henryk had not lost any of the impetus he had gained in Pécs and early in the evening he walked to the village cemetery. He passed under the rusting curlicues of the sign RESURREXIT! and began to examine the crosses and the gravestones. The better-off families had had monuments raised to them here that he thought were large enough to live in. Mechanically, his ran his eyes over the names. The most monumental crypt, almost a mausoleum, housed the dead of the Counts Windisch and the family Illés.
As the sun disappeared behind the hills, the air turned gradually colder. Henryk had the curious notion that he would lie down on one of the bed-shaped crypts to see if he could sense the presence of the dead at rest beneath him, or the presence of death itself. Newly planted trees lined the path, their branches arching over him. As the evening breeze brushed through the trees their leaves touched and sighed. Woolly clouds flitted across the sky. Henryk closed his eyes and not for the first time felt how the majesty and beauty of nature could actually hurt. He imagined what it might be like when you could not experience even this. If you cease to exist in this world. What becomes of you? Where do you go? If anywhere…
“Bíró?” queried a woman’s voice, obviously pleased.
Henryk opened his eyes. A blonde though graying woman with a broad face was staring down at him, a metal watering-can in her hand. She smiled as if he were an old acquaintance.
“Excuse me, but…” Henryk sat up.
“Bíró?” the woman repeated, with a beatific smile. “Jóska Bíró!”
Henryk cleared his throat. He noticed, now, that the grave on which he lay was the resting place of Mihály Bíró and his wife, mourned eternally by their adoring sons and daughters. He stood up and shamefacedly dusted himself down.
“Oh, it’s such a long time since we’ve seen you in these parts!” the woman said, shaking him vigorously by the hand.
“Actually…”
“Yes, I know how busy it must be in Pécel too.”
“In Pécel?”
“Or have you moved on?”
Henryk found it more and more difficult to own up. But he was spared this, as the woman unexpectedly gave a shriek:
“Oh no, what am I saying? You’re not Jóska Bíró at all, you’re the other one, his friend, who stayed just for the summer,… little Vilmos… Vilmos Csillag! What brings you to these parts?”
“You knew my dad? Vilmos Csillag was my dad…”
“Heaven preserve us!” The woman clapped her hand to her face, which bore many signs of having worked in the fields. “Of course… How could I have… it’s been so long! But it feels like it was yesterday.”
Art is rarely able to surpass life. It was sheer chance that I lay down on a grave in Somogyvár Cemetery that turned out to be the final resting place of Mihály Bíró. Who would believe that just then there appears old Mrs. Palóznaki, maiden name Ági Mandell, who was a childhood friend of Mihály Bíró’s son. It was with these Bírós that Papa stayed in the Fifties, because they offered country holidays to city children for payment, taking in as many as three or four at a time. Ági Mandell said Papa was the only one to come back year after year.
Absolutely incredible!
I asked her to describe what sort of a child Papa was. She said delicate. He was reclusive, not as loud-mouthed as the village kids. She also recalls that the color of his eyes changed all the time, depending on his mood: sometimes it was gray, at others green, or even light brown. I thought I could detect that Ági Mandell had a soft spot for Papa, but she denied it-she had fallen for Jóska Bíró (“head over heels,” as she put it).
I discovered that the Arrow Cross had taken Mihály Bíró because he was Jewish; he returned from one of the German Lagers and became a corn exchanger. Since their village did not have a mill of its own, the peasants would take the corn to Mihály Bíró, who would exchange it for flour using a complicated formula that factored in weight and quality; he would then take the corn to the nearest mill himself. That was how he made his living. Until serious illness (cancer) forced him to give up. After his death the children sold his house, which became the agricultural cooperative’s nursery. Now it stands empty. Jóska Bíró became a stonemason and to the best of Ági Mandell’s knowledge he moved to Pécel.
My grandfather was supposedly in the Ministry of the Interior as a “backroom boy” (Ági Mandell’s phrase). The minister was László Rajk, who was hanged. What happened to my grandfather she does not know. I wrote down her address and the phone number of the bakery where she works in the office, and I gave her my details too.
Henryk spent several weeks in the village, during which Ági Mandell invited him over for dinner more than once. Her roast pork was so succulent that Henryk had thirds, not just seconds. He was under the weather for days afterwards, but still considered that he had never in his life eaten anything so delicious.
The Somogyvámos estate had been sold to a distant kinsman of the Windisches, a Viennese business lady called Frau Rosa Windisch. She was approaching forty, but the turkey-like wattle under her chin made her seem much older. This not especially attractive part of her body she assiduously tried to conceal with chains of silver and gold and rows of pearls, which therefore constantly drew attention to it. Frau Rose Windisch spoke English with a dog-like bark and was never happy with anything. She strode up and down the half-ready building with eyebrows arched and head continually shaking: “I can’t believe this!” Her intonation was a tribute to the meticulousness of the Berlitz method.
“What is it now that she can’t believe?” Jeff asked Henryk, quietly.
“She’ll let you know, don’t worry.”
Frau Rosa Windisch wanted to establish a stud-farm here, with a Gasthof for Austrian and German visitors, the main attraction to be daily horse-riding. She thought that the quality represented by the HEJED Co. did not come up to Western standards. But it soon turned out that hers did not either: her taste was that of the petty bourgeois Austrian, and she would have much preferred brand-new garden gnomes to the nineteenth-century reliefs that Jeff and his team were restoring with such care.