Chapter 7
More about the Family
That summer has brought us a change, but to tell more about it I have to return to my sister.
When we moved to the village she did not accompany us. She was 13 then. She was to finish her elementary education and go on learning in a secondary school. My mother’s relatives were living in the capital then. My elder uncle moved soon after to the country to relatives of his wife, but my uncle Stephen and aunt Helen, both married, stayed on. Uncle Steve has a daughter of the same age as my sister and it has been decided that the two girls were to live and learn together.
They both started their secondary education in a school of economics, both had good scores, but my sister has always been much ahead. During her education I have not seen much of her, only once in a while she visited us in the week-end. She completed her graduation when I left the 4th grade of the elementary school. She applied to the University of Medical Sciences as it has long been her desire to become a doctor. She has got the rejection soon as there had been a shadow on her life: my father’s forced retirement by B-list. The circles governing the country had made it a discipline not to let unreliable people’s children into key professions.
Then she let her application come to the hands of a committee that decided, the best occupation would be for her to become a teacher for the education of backward children. She went to that high school. She did well, but during her first semester she met the man, who married her not long after. My father had lived in a dream-world as I mentioned so, he was raging when he learned that his educated daughter had found a mechanic with a proletarian background. As my sister had been out of his reach for a time, his opinion did not alter anything. Before her 19th birthday they went to the registrar and for two dollars bought two witnesses. They completed their marriage there and then.
Their life together has not started well. They wanted to arrange their wedding so quickly to stay together. The man had been a mechanic on a small military airport near the living place of uncle Steve and, as an officer, he has got another assignment at a newly established airport near the county seat of Szolnok, in the middle of the country. There he has been given a small comfortable flat. In due time, as nature decided arrived their first daughter, Maria.
My sister Eve has not been able to continue her education, when they left the capital, she applied for a delay. For a 20 year old girl it has not been an easy task to take care of the small baby. They soon applied for the transfer of my brother-in-law to the capital, where the relatives of both of them lived. Alas, he could not get an assignment backed by accommodation, but he was offered his former job. They accepted it and he went back to his officer’s quarter and she to uncle Steve. As she wanted to carry on her study, the small child became a member of our group in the village. My mother has been a good nurse and I loved Maria as my little sister.
It has lasted only one winter and a few months more, as my sister did all to convince the bosses of her husband that he deserved a flat in the new houses built for the crew of the airport. She was also working then in the airport office, having applied for another delay at the high school.
Life became simpler, but not easier for them. They both went on work on the airport, but before that their daughter was shuttled daily to the nursery in the nearby village by suburban train and back in the evening. Not long after their move into the new apartment, their second daughter, Eve jr., was born. As their children grew, Eve wanted to take up once more the line of her study. As I have been shuttling daily to school and back, my parents have been looking for ways to make things easier for all of us at the one hand and to bring us all together again on the other. The evident solution has been reached. As that year, 1956, the government lifted the ban of immigration to the capital from the country for those moving to relatives living already there, we would take our things and move all three of us to live with the family of my sister and brother-in-law. Everything has been done for our move. We handed our site where my father has grown vegetables back to the village council. In my school I acquired the needed documents, my sister settled my coming to the new school. She started to continue her study. She began her second year of high-school study, as I stepped into my second grade in secondary school.
About one month before our move there opened the national agricultural exhibition in the capital due every fifth year. My mother took me with her, when she visited the site of our would-be living. I had caught a cold and have been feeling terribly with it. The weather was fine as in a summer day. Because of my cold I could not concentrate wholly on the exhibition, as my brother-in-law took me with him. It was first time that I saw the municipal park in the capital established sixty years earlier to remember the millennium since the arrival of our nation into our present country. To ease my inconvenience my brother-in-law, Steve, offered a cup of boiled sweetened wine.
We have found that it would not be a great pleasure to live together, all seven of us in a small flat of two rooms. There was also a kitchen, a bathroom with flushed toilet and a small hall. But, as it could enable us to go on our education, we accepted it. My father organized our move, he ordered transport for our furniture and people to do loading.
On the day of our move I went to school as ever and, at the station in Siofok in the evening I did not catch the ordinary train home, but the opposite one, from which my parents were waving to me.