Chapter 11
Friendships and Love
This time at the housing estate, where I lived, I had good relationships with two boys, they have been my friends. One of them has been very simple, our friendship has never ceased, but there was nothing common in us.
The other boy, Zoltan, was my junior by one year, he was living with his mother, stepfather and two baby half-brothers. His father has been of Jewish origin and, although his parents divorced soon after his birth, he remained under the influence of his father’s family, and they made him take a school of good fame very far from his living place. Also, he has had to take a course of gymnastics in one of the capital’s best sports clubs. He was a very good boy and clever, too, but the overloading made him do worse in the school, and for this reason he has never had a good score. I am sure that in a place fit for him and without extra load he would have been an excellent performer.
Having a lot of common interests we became good friends. Even I can say I have had only one friend in the first 50 years of my life and it was he. Only my wife will have been able to achieve many years later that I will have left him alone. A great moral: the love in women is rather a desire to own something, they can even be jealous on our friends or hobbies.
Fortunately, we had some years to go on our friendship and it had been a great satisfaction to have somebody to share thoughts and experiences.
We have been walking a lot. He was a great admirer of women and the driving force of our walks has mainly been to see a certain girl somewhere. But it is true that we became acquainted with our environment very well.
During the early days of our friendship we have met two sisters. The younger has been an ugly child too short even for her age that was 13 then. The elder has also been small, but her figure has been perfect for her age of 15 and her face was beautiful. They have been staying with their brother, an officer and pilot, for some days on holiday. They have lived with their parents and smaller brother in the second largest town of the country in the north, called Miskolc.
It was a summer evening getting dark, we were walking with my friend on the road near the office building of the airport, as suddenly a girl’s voice called to us. They said they had seen us before and wanted to keep in touch with us by correspondence when they returned home.
Something started for me that will have lasted two years.
My friend have not found anything interesting in the younger girl and they soon forgot each other. But Ildiko and me, we have stayed in contact sending letters to each other once a week and, when we met later in the capital and in her home-town, we have fallen in love with each other.
We have really become acquainted by our letters. I have learned that she had been born with two faulty hip-joints. It could have been overlooked by her walking, but she have become tired very quickly because of them. Doctors had advised her to undergo an operation to correct it. She did it the next year and she was still in hospital, when I visited her. May be, I could have given her more attention that time. That way our story could have taken another course. But I have not. I have even not noticed the fall of her interest in poetry. She had been writing poems since her early childhood. In her letters she has sometimes written a couple of lines, they have always been melancholic. It is possible that the operation has not come out successfully and she has been sensing it. It is very hard to guess what it has been really, as we have not discussed her doubts, I have even known nothing about them.
The visit of mine has been the last time I have seen her. I feel now as I have always felt afterwards, that it has been my fault having been insensitive to her change of spirit. Our correspondence went on as before, but I have been too busy with my final examination and preparation for my further education. In my letters I have tried to encourage her to continue her schooling stopped for the operation and sketched my plans to establish our common future. She has not been so enthusiastic as before. She has tried to make me see the possible hitches and has asked me to be of more common sense. We have still been in love, but it began to take the course of a dialogue between the deaf. The end came when I have finished my exams at the end of my first year at the university.
I have received a telegram calling me to her burial. I have not been prepared for it, and all I could do was to take my bicycle and riding all day. At the end of the day I cannot recall where I had been.
One of my bitterest experiences, it has been her funeral. It has made me become a man a good pair of months earlier.
A month after the funeral I visited the aunt of I. and she told me how she had met her fate.
The ten months following her short stay in hospital after her operation she had spent home, but her condition did not improve. She had tried to know exactly what her prospects were and found a final report signed by her doctor. Her case had been closed, as by the operation it became clear her hips could never become better. Under strong pressure by her desire to leave her illness behind forever – and may be, by my neglect to listen to her doubts properly – she had searched the house for her father’s official weapon and had turned it against herself.
I think, I have come too quickly now, and there is a lot more to tell about our friendship with Z. We became inseparable, people called us "the airport twins”. We went together to the cinema, to the amusement park, and made long walks without notice, if there was good weather or it rained. Once it was below freezing and a strong wind blew. We were talking about something and walked. Only when I arrived home, I discovered that one of my ear-flaps had frozen. It has made me hard to sleep on that side for some days. Sometimes we went on excursions. He had a bicycle and borrowed one also me. A military conical tent served us for accommodation, and a lot of bread and bacon kept us from getting hungry. We have discovered the lake in 30 miles from the capital.
When I finished the 2nd grade in the secondary school I wanted to get a similar job on a construction as a year before. Z. and his schoolmate argued that it could have been better to take a job on the state farm opposite our house, and we tried it. Alas, we could not bear this kind of job more than one day, and I went to look for an unskilled job on a construction. Z. came after me in two days and we worked together shovelling gravel, carrying mortar and bricks up for the masons and, although it has driven us from that site, drawing nails out of used boards.
Z. has had a class-mate, whose dream had always been to buy an electric Hawaiian guitar. That boy has found an unskilled job on a construction, where a house has been built with the capital’s first privately owned apartments. It was called Lottery House, as the apartments were to be won in the state lottery. We have joined him there. About workers on the former place there is nothing to write, but here we met some really special people. One man had been a lawyer, but for about 15 years he could not work in his profession for his "record” and, when this prohibition became out-of-date, he stayed on manual work by sheer custom. His wit has always been ready and he had a kind heart.
There were two girls from a village I do not remember where. One was beautiful and a hard worker and every mason has been ready to marry her, but she has had someone home. The other has been a clown and only once did she make fight with everyone, later I learned, one of the masons had made a fool of her.
On the first day on that building the lawyer said: "It is very important to note cleanliness on the toilet. Do not throw away even a straw there.” Well, it has been the first example of his sharp wit. I would see such a mess as the toilet was only in Ukraine decades later.
During that summer I have worked for two months, and it could have been enough to buy a bicycle for myself. However, it has become no bicycle, it has been given to my mother to contribute to the family expenses. Just as before, when we wanted to ride bicycles, it was the task of Z. to borrow me one.
The next year, in 1958, during holiday I have been again working for two months on similar jobs, but then only without Z. His father took him that year with him and he could not come with me. At the end I could buy my bicycle and for 3 years I enjoyed it.
My job the next summer has been a much better one. That year I have made my final examination and have been waiting to get news about my admission – or rejection – to the Technical University. A former officer, a lady and an engineer, has given me a hand to get the job in the Optical Works. It was an unskilled mechanic’s job at the assembly room. Various optical units, lenses for microscopes and projectors, binoculars, etc. have been put together. I had always been interested in lenses, prisms and, as I was twelve, I have made a small motion picture projector out of some primitive lenses and sheet metals, when I got a piece of film of about 10 feet from the cinema (like the popular saying goes: to make the coat for the button).
At this place I could do my hobby. We have made an agreement with my boss, if I was not to get admission to the university, I remained there and learned for a mechanic’s certificate. At last I have been admitted and it has solved the question.
We have been planning with Z. to go for a week to Fonyod, the village, from where I had come, and still I have not got any notice on my university application. All the other boys and girls in my class and neighbourhood have got some kind of answer. My brother-in-law, Steve, had also been doing his secondary school in an evening course and, as we have got our final examination certificate at the same time, he, too, wanted to continue his study at the Technical University. My aunt, the chemist, could not have left her malicious character as she said: "Steve will be admitted, but you will not.” Fortunately, it has turned out the opposite.
Z. and me just finished our preparation for the trip, we took our backpacks and were walking to the suburban train, when I heard my father calling after me. It has been a surprise to see him run after us, we stopped and waited him to come near. He was waving the notice about my admission to university.
My friend Z. had never been on the lake Balaton before. Both the lake and the village he liked very much. I took him to my relatives and to my former neighbours. Also we have visited A. at the orphanage keeper’s house. Somehow the place was deserted without the usual noise of the children. She might have told me why, but I do not remember. By that time I have shaken off her magic. I saw a girl before me, a sex-bomb, I can say, but the pretty she was, she did not attract me. For two reasons, I think. She was aware of her beauty, in her eyes there was no trace of the innocence I liked so much in her before. She was a woman, rather a female, to attract as many males as possible to choose from them the best one. And also, when I came the next day as we had agreed, she was late and soon there came a boy of her age, but broad shouldered and taller than me and I saw sheer admiration in her eyes for him as I looked upon her. It meant, she had grown up and had joined the group of girls I have always avoided if I could.
Z. has seen her by his own eyes and could not be immune from the attraction of her. Many times he urged me to force some common program with A. and her cousin M. But the girls avoided any such attempts.
The beauty of the surrounding country at the village and the fine sight of the opposite shore with the extinct volcanoes has caught Z., and any time afterwards, when I asked him to come with me there, he was ready to do so.