Chapter 5
Country School
I have promised to tell the story of the shopkeeper over the street. It happened during the first year when we were living in our permanent home, in 1951. He was about thirty, a bachelor and has not been living in the house with his parents, instead he had built a small hut for himself in the garden and has slept there.
In a summer night everyone in the neighbourhood was raised by a terrible sound, the cry of a man and his call for help. He was lying on the ground beside the road and was unconscious. His head has been hit by something and was bleeding hard. In an hour the ambulance took him to the nearest hospital, it was in the third village, about 13 km from us.
Nobody could sleep well that night and for me it took many months until the nightmares left me.
The next day everything became known. The man had helped a sportsman, a member of the village football team, during his illness. His leg had been injured and laid into a plaster cast and he had spent his time with the shopkeeper bouncing with him on crutches. He had learned everything about his helper, even the location of his money. As soon as his leg had healed he tried to help him to that money during night, but the shopkeeper woke up. Anyway, the money has been taken after the owner has got some hits with a baton improved by lead. The criminal took the money and ran. To mislead the crowd agitated by the deadly shouts he hid for a time and then behind the crowd he ran again shouting: ”Catch him, catch him!” When he considered it proper he hid again beside the road. To his bad luck when he left the hiding place people were returning without success. They spotted him and tried to know what he was doing. The money has been soon found. Not a bad trick he did, but that time it did not work.
The shop was closed for many months. It was terrible to see the healed wound on the forehead of the man when he returned. His skull had been fractured and for a long time there was no hope for his survival.
My education has begun in the village and there I finished my elementary school. In the first grade as I have mentioned my teachers were nuns. They did their work excellently and their textbook had been prepared on a high level. The next school year saw the nationalization of schools in the country. All the nuns had to leave and even their orders have been dissolved. Our new teachers came from the capital, freshly released "six week” specialists. That time not only teachers were released after such a short graduation time. There is a popular joke about the era’s speedy graduation system.
An old man goes to the local doctor, but in his village there is no proper one, only a "six week” doctor. The reason of his visit is a painful boil on the bottom of the patient.
"O.K. uncle”, says the doctor. "Here is your prescription.”
The patient goes to the chemist’s, first to the old proper one, but he cannot read the paper.
"Where did you get it?”
"At the ,six week’ doctor.”
"Well, then go to the ,six week’ chemist’s.”
At last there, the "six week” chemist looks on the prescription and prepares an ointment.
"How do you know what is needed when your colleague could not even understand it?”
"Very simple. Look: PHBH 3X. It means Peasant Has Boil on his Hind, 3 times a day ointment is needed. Oh, those overeducated specialists!”
Our second grade teacher has been an 18 year old town girl. She has almost thought coffee was buffalo milk, but she has been kind and her job of teaching us, how to get along in a small society and how to read and write, has been done well.
My third grade deserves more to say about. There had been some legendary teachers in the village from the time my father had used the same benches. One of them had survived. His wife had died long ago and his two extremely ugly grown-up daughters have kept the two most important secretary’s jobs in the village. The teacher himself has been a beekeeper in his leisure time. When there remained a short time during lessons he has always told us stories about his kind pets. He had begun his work in the village when the school had been still undivided.
That man has had a strong sense of honesty and to those who have been dishonest and tried to cheat him he has always been merciless. He has been almost the same kind as Tom Sawyer’s Mr So-and-so in Mark Twain’s immortal novel.
It was 1949 and poverty has already been not only our family’s privilege, our whole nation tried to survive the devastation of war. While Germany – at least the western part – has been provided with aid within the Marshall Plan, our country, as "last ally of the fascist dictator”, paid reparation to the Soviets. All the surplus food has been taken from the peasants, it has been the time of "sweeping up the attic”. I have not felt too much of that poverty as my mother has had an odd talent: the less funds she had the better she economized it. Bread and pork fat, it has long been the staple food of peasants in our country. Pupils called it planks and pork fat. Spiced with red pepper or during spring accompanied by young onions, it has become my favourite snack, even today I eat it with pleasure.
Soon even bread and fat has become rare as fat has been the ordinary means of cooking. That time vegetable oil has been an item from tales.
Anyway, some international organization have sent some food for us, too, and once there were sprats to be eaten for breakfast in the school. At present I like sprats, but that time I preferred bread and fat. There was another item from international aid. It has not been food, but as our country has been short in construction materials we have got a load of aluminium nails. Alas, there were no rubber hammers included. As these nails were hard to drive into any wood, people guessed the right solution: to hold the hammer by both hands, so as not to hit on your thumb.
I have had a relatively good relationship with my third grade teacher, he has punished me only once. I have had enough intelligence to avoid any further troubles by being honest.
I think that man has been one of the forces that have driven me onto a path of behaving honestly with other people. Without my inheritance from my father it could have been less important, but an 8 year old boy is still like wet clay and can be formed either this or that way. And there is something more: he could help me to conquer my laziness once and for all and strive to become always the best in the group where my fate threw me. This characteristic has also predestined my being hated by classmates who could not overcome their own laziness. Physically I have always been weak. I could do well in skills as running, jumping, even rope climbing, but I have been very bad at fight. From those classmates I have had to take a lot of insults without having been able to retort. Is it possible that I still enjoy my being able to hold my temper because of them? Then they have only been one of the means to make another human being getting better.
Our country has an elementary school system of 8 grades. In the lower section of four grades there is only one teacher for a class and all the subjects are taught by him or her. The upper section does not differ from a secondary school, there are specialists to teach every subject. My fourth grade I cannot remember very well, it should mean I did well and there was no problem with me. What I remember is that my teacher has been a young woman and she has had a good relationship with my parents.
There were not many children in the village that time. The grades have not been divided as the number of pupils in one grade has never exceeded 25. Within our greater family there were only a few children beside me. Only one of the sisters of my father had a daughter and the youngest brother of his had a son. They were my seniors by 5 years, they went to the same class. I did little with them, only some decades later I met my cousin, but I think I can tell it later.
In 1951 I began my fifth grade. In that year there have been in the village other changes caused by the situation in the country.
The old building in the main street called "Village Hall” became "Council House”. But that word council means something different from that in English speaking countries. The councils have been the same as "soviets” in the Soviet Union: elected bodies with a "special” election system. Also the councils have consisted only of members who have been either members of the ruling Party of the Hungarian Workers or at least completely loyal to it. As it could have been very hard to find the proper people in the village a multitude of cadres has arrived. Our permanent home in the centre of the village became endangered as there were not enough accommodations. Somehow we hadn’t have to move out and stayed there.
The current spirit in that time has not allowed being religious. My parents have not accepted it, but the only possibility to remain true their ideas has been the Sunday mass where it has been compulsory also for me to be present.
With the cadres have come our new classmates. Until we have left the village for the capital I could not avoid these conceited boys and girls brought up mainly in the Soviet Union.
These changes in our village have not been accidental. Between us and the neighbouring settlement there has always been a rivalry for importance that goes on still. That year a system of administration has been created that divided counties into districts. It has long been liquidated since. To seat of our district has been named our village. The centre of the new administration became the neighbourhood of the port and railway station near the shore. That started a tendency of shuffling the cultural centre of the village from the original place on the hills to the lakeshore near the recreational territory.
The changes brought some new teachers for us and they have already been better educated specialists. There is one exception. The man has been a cadre and with the introduction of compulsory Russian learning instead of the former German he has become our first Russian language teacher.
During the war he has been a prisoner of war and he took advantage of being in a Russian camp by learning their language. By his general behaviour he must have been a full time officer and his specialization did not exceed Russian. He has come to the village with his family: wife and two daughters. His daughters have inherited plumpness from their mother. The younger one has been a class-mate of mine and, as I have mentioned, we became good friends. She had a talent of memorizing everything that could be later important for a good score. She has become the best-of-the-class, that place taken from me. She has just been the opposite character as me, because I hate memorizing and had got my best-of-the-class rating by remembering everything I had heard in the school and never swotting up anything. Well, it needs understanding the essence of topics and is not unimportant to think it over. I had a lot of opportunity to do it as teachers revised everything a dozen times before the last pupil understood it. Even so there have been some misunderstandings. I remember one paper about electricity. Our teacher wanted to plant the origin of the word "electron” into our minds. He has told the story when the ancient Greek man Thales found a piece of amber – electron in Greek – and saw an insect enclosed within. He scrubbed it to clean the surface and tried to smell it. He was surprised to find that his moustache has been drawn to the amber. One of our classmates answered the question, what electricity is, by "Thales took a piece of amber and his moustache was erected”.
Just to come back to my Russian teacher I can say that our teachers of that language have not understood the vastness of their duty. Years later when it was necessary for me to speak Russian and I learned it, I found that complete chapters of the Russian grammar were unknown to me. Now I understand why: a teacher has to know a foreign people before learning their language. This has not been so with our Russian teachers. The Russian spirit is extremely different from that of a European person. I am speaking Russian quite well, but cannot avoid misunderstandings because of cultural differences.
He has spoken a lot about Russia, although he has known it only by books, as he has been closed into a P.O.W. camp. I have got more ideas from another man whose house on their invitation we frequently visited. He has recounted his adventures in Russian Uzbekistan during his military service in World War I. Four decades later I found the country not very different from his stories.
During the 5th to 8th grades my teachers have not changed too much and knowledge acquired from them, together with that in the many books I have read, enabled me to see the world as clear as the limits of the political system in our country has allowed.
The system itself has changed for the better. After the death of the Russian dictator people have been released from camps and returned home starting a favourable thaw. There were tendencies not governed directly by forces of the party. It was making books more available to people or helping them to get access to the national radio broadcasts by installing wired radio systems in the villages. It meant a loud-speaker system lined to the houses all over the village. The receiver itself has been situated in the post office.
In the publishing of books there were two separate lines: one for making the classics available by establishing a low-cost series, the other of spreading Russian literature as wide as possible.
Low-cost books have cost one kilo of bread each volume and all the classics from America to France to Russia have been included. As for the Russian literature I found a big part of them digestible and even liked some. For instance the story of Dersu Uzala from Arsenev is one of my favourite to this day.
The Arsenev book has come into an odd connection with that of an American author, William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. Our old Calvinist priest had left the place when the anti-religion changes had started. A young man had come as his successor. He has been extremely kind and intelligent, soon found a girl to marry and they have quickly left our village for a better job.
His successor has not deserved to get opportunity of dealing with people. He has been a paedophile and his fate has taken him not long after into jail. He tried it with me, too, but somehow I had an original wisdom and he has not succeeded. My parents have not known him well enough and I could not communicate with them in such a topic. Many times my mother invited him to our table, he took our (and especially my) books to read and, as he was leaving his job for another one, he has forgot to return the two books I mentioned. I have always tried to get them from second-hand shops, but Saroyan’s book I have not seen since and Dersu Uzala I bought much later in a Russian language edition.
After the war the old boy-scout movement, that have been part of an international organization, has been prohibited as traces from the capitalist civilization. Instead something has been launched that has been new with us, but in the Soviet Union it has already had thirty years of tradition. It was the pioneer movement.
Unlike the boy-scout movement it has only included children of 10 to 14 years. Those in secondary schools have been collected by the party’s youth organization and it has been a true political movement. As a member of World Youth Organization it has always been represented on World Youth Festivals.
To become a pioneer has been almost compulsory. Besides, it was launched when I went to the upper section of elementary school – the 5th grade – where enlisting began, I have joined it at once. For my scores and character I have soon been named a patrol head. As time went on and I became older I have been promoted to squadron head for younger boys’ patrols.
When my father was sent to retirement in 1946 and the family had to decide what to do to ensure ordinary education for the children – still 3 at that time – my parents chose to take the two boys, 9 and 5, with them to the lake Balaton to father’s relatives and send my sister, 13, to her uncle in the capital to go to school with her cousin, a girl of the same age.
My story that I have told above went without mentioning many times my sister Eve. Both she and my brother have always been excellent at school, my sister best-of-the-class and my brother, George, best-of-the-school ever. How G. would have done had he not passed from us so soon, I do not know. E. has always had excellent school reports, never to have any mark other than maximum. It went on to her state examination. Her diploma with red cover has been filled in. And then she made a small mistake and she has got an ordinary blue diploma. It must have been the result of long preparation for the exam and stress. She took that loss with a good spirit, but it must have been painful to her.
I myself have had the same genes as my seniors have, but still, I am not so diligent. I do not like to memorize anything, it is a great stress for me to do so. In my elementary school years it worked, but in the secondary school at first my score hit a near-bottom low, until I realized I had had better spend much more time preparing for the next day’s lessons.
As a result of the multitude of novels I read through around that time, I began to write a novel myself. It has been a counterfeit of the Count of Monte Christo, but my characters were our compatriots. I completed it by hand and all my schoolmates, who read it, liked it.
There would be a competition for a novel on sci-fi a year later called for by our national authors’ association and I would start to write it by great energy, but a secondary school pupil would not have enough time to complete it to deadline. It has remained unfinished.
In the years I have been staying in the upper section of elementary school, I had teachers worth remembering. The best of them was a middle aged man, whose place of origin has once again been Transylvania, lost for us after World War I. His wife has also been a teacher and they have had a big family. His subjects were geography and natural sciences. We have got lectures from him in geography. Besides he was a man of vast knowledge, both in his fields and in linguistics. He spoke at least four European languages. He was a man to be admired and followed.
Years later in the capital I have got a letter from him inviting me to visit him during his short stay in the capital. I did and he returned me the books that I have left with him at our departure. It is really pleasant to remember him after so many years.
Following our "little graduation exam” at the end of the 8th grade our class has made a two-day excursion – a great encircling of the lake Balaton – with our form-master.
That man had come to us 3 years before as a freshly graduated teacher. His specialty has been music, he taught us vocal music for three years. He became our master, when the Russian teacher had a scandal for leaving his family for a woman colleague of his at the beginning of our 7th grade and left us.
He was a born leader. In a short time a wide scale of social activities went over into his hands and he was popular for his masculine, but intelligent ways.
The route consisted of the crossing of the lake by boat, then the tour of the coffin-hill of Badacsony – its form was characteristic – and taking a railway trip to the Tihany peninsula reaching far into the lake and, after an overnight stay there, back to the southern side by ferry and by train home.
It has been a success. May be, some of our girls felt it otherwise, if there were any consequences of those connections made in the night.