Chapter 3
Wedding
We had been registered for our wedding in the registry office of the same district, where M. has worked. The registrar has been her colleague. We have got the date of half past eleven. My sister-in-law – who had been married for six years and whose home we were to get – took us to the office by taxi. The driver tried on us his tasteless jokes about marriage, but when he was told to keep his humour to himself, he shut up, only he did not do so very keen. However, we have quickly forgot the unintelligent young man.
We had to wait for our parents and the witnesses. M. has asked her brother-in-law for her witness and I mine. Time for the march-in has come, but my parents and my witness have not. It was getting awful, when at last they arrived.
Of the ceremony I cannot remember too much. There are some minor details coming fore. The rings from my witness: he was searching through all the pockets of his suit, as he forgot where he had put them. Their putting on: I accidentally gave my left hand to my wife to receive the ring. The signing: the registrar laid the registry before us in an upside-down position as always, but I wanted to turn it to my side to sign it. My wife’s face: she was repressing, with difficulty, her wish to laugh. The pictures taken at our wedding ceremony help us to recall the event, whenever we want it.
After the ceremony and the numerous congratulations we wanted to say good-bye and catch a tram to the railway station with our bags. It had been agreed – with some grumbling from the part of the parents – that there would be no wedding party.
My aunt H. unexpectedly came fore with a proposal for a lunch together with the closest relatives. We agreed. Also, she asked me about my financial state, and on my answers she gave us a sum for our costs during the first weeks. With this small modification of our program, we arrived in the village on the lake before sunset. My aunt’s house has been about one and a half miles from the station, my wife could hardly keep up with me, as the heavy suitcases have driven me to reach our goal as soon as possible.
In the eight years of my absence the village has changed little. From here and there, there were familiar faces looking out on us and recognizing me. My aunt was waiting for us. She said to my wife:
"Welcome in my house, my little.” She saw her first time, but they became good friends, and she has always trusted her as herself.
My aunt had lost her son at his age of 12 with leukaemia. They would not have more children, and she has always been the double of my mother with her grief. I have never seen her in other cloths than black. She has been at her late sixties. She was healthy, but as a year before she lost her husband, uncle Steve, she was very lonely.
Some years before, their lack of an heir drove them into a support agreement with uncle S’s nephew. For the perspective inheritance, he paid a monthly sum. In their life he had access to
one of their rooms during his holiday. The same room has been given to her relatives, when they came to the lake for recreation. It has been the same for us.
Aunt E. had prepared a tasty dinner for us, and we in three have been talking for a long time. At about 10 p.m. she has shown us into our room, and we decided to take a common bed for both of us. Since the time, we were at the hut of Z., we have not been together. It has been a long time. Now, newly married, we have had a lot to catch up with.
In the morning I showed my wife the house and its garden. The site has been stretching from one street, called Rose Street, to another, Forget-me-not Street. The latter has followed the spine of a long hill and so, the site was sloping from the back of the garden to the entrance. As an ordinary stuffed adobe house, it had been built in the pit created by the excavation of earth for the walls. The original house had been turned into a stable, but, after the sale of their cow, it had become a store-room. The kitchen remained there, but aunt E. used it only in the summer. In earlier years, when we with my family were living in the village, a new brick house was built as a supplement to the old one on the street side of it. Actually the new house became their home after it. A couple of years later, a veranda has been added to the new house. That time few homes in the village have been so comfortably built.
However, it retained the traditional standard. For some years after completion, there was no light in it – as in the street, either – and, when we with my wife were staying there, still no running water. Drinking water has been gained from a turning well dug at the turn of the century, together with all other wells in the village. Its sixty-foot depth provided high quality water.
A few days we have spent discovering the lakeshore and visiting my father’s relatives. My wife had never before been at the lake and, although the first morning she found water unattractive because of the deposit drifted by wind to the southern shore, she would like it later at any time. She also liked the village itself.
There was a regular boat service across the lake from different places to the other shore. Our village the boat line connected to the place of Badacsony on the opposite shore having got its name from the 1,400-foot-high hill. It is the mightiest sight from our side with its coffin-like formation – three extinct volcanoes had been connected by molten lava – and fine vineyards on its slopes. Seen from the southern shore the opposite side is wonderful with its line of conical hills.
We crossed the lake and ascended to the top. It had been the regular excursion route for us, when we were elementary school pupils. My camera has constantly been in use and to this day I like to revue my pictures from there. Following the ridge of the coffin-hill we came to the quarries put out of work that year. It was time stopping the destruction of the unique basalt formations just for railway track support. The overhead buckets for transporting the stone were hanging high, but all was calm.
At the foot of the hill in one of the wine cellars, we tasted the wine advised by an old man and bought another bottle to take with us. It would come to the GDR the next year as a gift.
We have enjoyed ourselves so much that we forgot to keep an eye on the calendar. It would make us concerns.
Having seen my relatives all, and with the weather turning rainy, we have decided to go on a trip by boat and trains to visit my wife’s relatives in the north-western part of the country. They have been my father-in-law’s relatives.
He had had three brothers and a sister, all his juniors. Of the five, only he had become married. His parents had been traditional peasant people, always to get more land. Even his brothers went on that way and stayed home, but two of them beside him had got trades: one had been a cooper, the other a shoemaker. My father-in-law had left them young – my father did the same, almost at the same time – and learned to become a locksmith, which he had changed for the trade of a driver.
At the time of our wedding the grandparents have not been alive, and one of her uncles had also died. In the parents’ home an uncle and the aunt have been living. The house have been a backward one, resembling the one, we with my family had taken first in the village. No light and a well not very deep for drinking water. There was even an old type built-in oven for baking bread.
There was no great cleanliness, as it is customary in houses with women not married. We have spent only one night there and continued our trip. We travelled by train to the seat of the county and back to the village to my aunt. We have not been very kind to aunt E., it was late night when we arrived and she had to come out to let us in.
About twenty years later together with our son we would go to the place again and that time take a visit at the hill Sag, a natural park, a small volcanic mound and home of rare plants, as well as rock formations.
The fair weather has returned for some days, and we have spent the remaining days by swimming, sun-bathing and rowing. One morning in the harbour we spotted a passenger boat at the pier. It was not on schedule and looked deserted. Suddenly from the bridge a young man said my name. Astonished at first, I found, he was one of my class-mates during the year I had spent in the secondary school in Siofok. This encounter I preserved on a picture as my wife was standing on the bridge in a mariners’ cap.
The two weeks we considered as our honeymoon has been over. We had something to settle. Z. and his fiancée M. had planned their wedding in July, after our return. Two years before Z. was with me for one week-end in the house of my aunt. Before our departure he had asked me to get her permission for their honeymoon to be spent in her house, which she has agreed with pleasure.
The time-bomb exploded at their wedding. Z’s mother, a very ordinary person with the manner of a market-woman, shouted at me before the whole audience:
"You have well bungled this thing!”
I did not know what she was talking about.
"Aunt E. sent a letter yesterday that she cannot accept us”, tried Z. to help me. He also tried to calm his mother.
I tried to save the situation.
"But just the day we left she said it was all right”, I said. My wife backed me up. She disliked Z. enough before that time already. Z. showed me the letter and I understood all. My mother and especially my sister Eve had always disliked Z. Getting a letter from aunt E. that mentioned that the newly-weds were to spend two weeks at her, they decided to take their regular holiday in her house earlier than usually. They decided to leave soon after we have returned, instead of the usual August days. Poor aunt E., she has been forced into a situation, where she has had to prefer her relatives to other people. She has been forced to belie herself.
People with low intelligence – sometimes even with high education – are never keen to confess their fault. Z’s mother would never change her mind about my having bungled his son’s honeymoon. Z. insisted, we should take his invitation to their wedding party – not an unimportant event, folk music would be provided by a Gipsy band well known all over the country –, but we would not. Even so, we had been indebted to him for lending us his hut.
We went to sleep there that night. That activity could have been named anything but sleeping. The hut has been on a large site of an orchard. The main building – deserted – has been 300 feet from us. There was no light, we had to use candles before going to bed. The roof has been of sheet metal not isolated by any ceiling and all night birds have been walking on it. When dawn came at last, we got up and without washing or shaving we went to her maiden home. We decided to spend the two days (or rather nights) in our former homes separately, until the room of my parents (that was mine, too) would become empty, when they would go on their holiday to aunt E. My wife has returned to her work and a couple of days later I would also have to take my job.
As the family has left, only we have remained in the apartment. We could have lived a real married life, had other troubles not emerged. In the first place our attention has concentrated on the lack of menses. As we did not have hope to have proper conditions for a time, we would not want to have children yet. My wife has heard from a colleague, a woman, with whom she had to discuss the topic, as she had guessed it, that regular sex during conception can destabilize the embryo and start an abort. With us it would not work. I have to confess, there were problems with regularity, too, and it has been originated by the first days of my new job.