Chapter 2
Childhood
For a short time that part of our family living in the village consisted of four members. My sister lived separately with my mother’s relatives in the capital. Soon there happened a tragedy to us that my parents could not overcome till death. At that time, three years after the end of the war, life in our country altered as it had been predestined by the Yalta agreement. We lived east of the Elbe and it meant being under Soviet influence. When I went to school one year before, the school belonged to Catholic nuns and they were giving a proper education. Religion has not been overwhelming, twice a week we studied Catholicism. However, the government took all the schools into national hands and the nuns were thrown out. Following it there were no religious lessons. My parents could not bear giving no Christianity to their children and once a week they organized us a lesson at the priest’s house. After school hours we took lunch and then went to the priest’s every Tuesday.
On February 20, 1948 weather was as it should be, below freezing after a long thaw, and foggy. As we left the priest’s at about 4 p.m. we met a classmate of my brother who was amusing himself there with his sled. He invited us for a glide and it was my brother’s last one. On glossy ice we crashed into a newly erected power-line pole, my brother has been injured in the head fatally. In one hour he has been dead. My injuries did not bother anyone, it was my brother, whom everyone missed.
And it has not been accidental that he was missed so much. He has not been born for this world, as the title of one of my favourite novels from James Hilton suggests, Knight Without Armour. He has never hurt anybody, because he was so good at heart. And he has always been, everywhere during his short life, the best pupil in the school. His interest has been technology, his favourite toy a building set of Märklin. His dream has been to become a mechanical engineer. He has had a true talent for everything technical.
He had kept everything that belonged to him clean, intact, and put everything always on place when not used. For a time after his passing his property, even the smallest things, has been kept by my mother as exhibits in a museum for later events, stored in drawers, boxes or shelves. Some years later mother gave me them one by one. So I got his Maerklin set and his books. Many years after, when I was almost fifteen, I was given his toy car, too. It had been long before his death that two identical toy cars had been given to us for Christmas, a green and a red one. The fight for who was to get the red one had been short: my brother took the other car. It goes without saying that the red one quickly became a past image, but his green car survived and many years later I got it. I passed it to my son and he still keeps it within his collection of toy cars.
After the burial we had to move. My parents could not bear living in the same house where he has breathed last. We had no house, it was not very hard to get a new place to rent.
And this is the instant when my sporadic memories begin to assemble and I can recall almost everything that has happened to me since that time. From that moment the story of my parents is common with mine.
The house we have rented after the big loss was within the neighbouring yard. We have lived there two years. Then moved to another one that stood in the main street of the village and over the street there was a small private shop mysteriously not nationalized throughout the whole era of so-called socialism. Originally an old shoemaker had been selling miscellaneous goods during day – and repairing shoes early mornings and late evenings –, but later, as his only son had grown up, he gave responsibility of the shop to him and for himself remained shoe repair. About the shop and its keeper I may tell some more later, now I feel it better to recollect some memories about my parents.
Father had been living in a world of his own created by his brain on his readings. He loved books and till death this activity of his has never stopped. This might have been the reason why he had the look to know everything. Alas, it was superficial knowledge and the only topic he truly knew was the Bible. It was his bad luck that he lived in an era when this knowledge has been considered more a guilt than a virtue.
As a boy he tried to acquire the art of playing the violin. He bought the instrument and took a couple of lessons. Probably his teacher told him he was no talent and he made his exercises by himself after that. He might not be a talent, but anyway he played his violin very well. I got to know the works of Brahms, Liszt and other composers through his play. I have heard that, when they were freshly married and had had more time as there had been no children yet, he played, mother sang and all the neighbours had been listening to their musical performance.
The village is situated on the southern shore of the lake Balaton and it is within the county of Somogy, whose people are called the men of knife. A hundred years ago there, on every gathering, there was at least one dead or wounded because of fights over girls or other hot topics. Father grew up at this place, so he always used his pocket knife well. Not against other people, but on wood. As a boy I carved also a lot and even now I remember how to make a whistle from twigs in the spring.
I inherited my love to animals from him. He was patient with them and it was a great pain to him when the day of pig-kill arrived during winter. He has never been present at the kill and did everything to see his favourites only in the state of sausage or steak.
Mother liked animals likewise, but has been a matter-of-fact person and she had no scruples to power-feed her ducks to have a better, bigger liver and prepare them for a Sunday lunch. I have always wondered how well they both became accustomed to a poor peasant’s lifestyle, even to poverty and kept their educated view, after many decades as government employee being considered a family of the upper middle class. They even hoped for a change for better. They were persons with ideals of their own, they could not accept being robbed of all properties and forced to accept completely foreign ideas for all of their future existence.
That time the ordinary man in our place could not see the very complicated connections between the last war, the winners and losers, and under-the-table agreements among them, that destined hundreds of millions of people to become switched from one country to another, from one religious authority to another, to be stripped of their rights to use their own native language, even to be forced to leave the place where their ancestors had lived and lay buried, because a far away agreement created new states hostile to their nationality. My parents could not understand that their life was too short to live up to the fulfilment of their dreams.
When my father had got news about his untimely retirement and we had moved to the village where his relatives lived, we had been living for a few months in a very small house with thatched roof and no power, running water or flooring. As an ordinary peasant house it had been built of dirt in a way called stuffing. Dirt had been mixed with straw and water and, between planks, it had been stuffed to become hard. The planks were moved then upwards and the process continued, until the walls stood. This is the reason, why the old country houses are situated on a level about three feet lower than the other part of the site: dirt for the walls is produced from their environment. These houses are well insulated and, if whitewashed regularly, last forever.
The floor was smeared with clay and it had to be maintained to keep its hard surface.
To build such a house had not been very expensive, if the site had already been ready. It was only the planks that had to be bought and after the walls were finished, doors and windows were fabricated of the same planks.
The house had not been very well heated. It consisted of three compartments in line, the middle one was the kitchen and it was at the same time the entrance. The other two were rooms or one room and the other a store. We used it the latter way. In the kitchen there was a fix fireplace built, half of it a hearth, the other half an oven. It was the central heating of the house, the rooms were as cold as if we had lain outside.
The owner of this house had had a small dog named Sajo (pronounce shayyow) – after a small river in our country – and as she was not very fond of him she gave him to us. He was at most 3 months old and not inoculated so, when staying with us, he got a serious sickness that generally kills half of all dogs not protected. Mother saved him by taking care of him as if he had been a child. Until his disappearance, that was a riddle to be solved only years after, this created a relationship between my mother and the pet that was not unlike that of mother and child.
He has been an ordinary mixed-race dog and, as usually they are more intelligent than pedigreed pets, he has had high intelligence indeed. And besides he has been number one anywhere his territory has reached, except one big beast of a warrior dog covered with patches like a Swiss cow. When I was 9 a late autumn evening there was a terrible noise in front of our entrance to the yard. That beast decided to beat our dog at his own place. I went out and in the darkness soon felt a sudden pain in my right leg, went in again and sat silently in the kitchen on a low stool. My mother noticed my sad look and she almost fainted to discover the big bite. My leg has been destroyed, the flesh has been almost torn off. My father has not been home, my mother laid me down and begged not to move. She ran to the post office. It had been closed, but was opened on emergency. The doctor soon arrived on his 100 cc motorcycle and he decided to give me an inoculation against rabies and tetanus and he has sewn my flesh back to place. In 1950, in this small village there was no pain-killer, during the operation my mother and a woman from the neighbourhood have kept me down. Miraculously my wound has healed quickly, even the numbness for the damage of nerves passed away, in two weeks I could go to school again.
That beast of a dog has always been in danger as long as I lived in the village. I wanted to kill him somehow, but my general fondness of animals always turned me away from that. When we moved from the village six years later he was still at large. My dog has been cleverer than me, he always avoided close fight with that beast.
His end has come by the help of one of my aunts. Once on the road with another dog, fighting each other, the dogs did not notice a car and it hit two of them: one died on the spot, the other was ours, he has become lame on his right front leg. Even in that condition he went everywhere, only my mother had to prepare a glove for the paw of the lame leg, as it has been drawn on the ground and has been hurt constantly.
Some months after the accident I arrived home from school finding my mother sitting in the kitchen, weeping. She spoke to me about a man who came to us and said Mr K. (my father) had said him to take away the sick dog. He was a dog-catcher. I became sad as well, but it has been nothing compared to what we experienced when father arrived. Of course, it had been a lie. We found out only years after what had happened. One of my aunts, my father’s sister K., had not liked our dog and it has been she who organized in a sly way to get rid of him.
But that happened much later, let’s return to the line of my story. The small adobe house was built at the southern end of the village and, as in two months after arrival I began my first grade in the village school, it was a long walk mornings and afternoons. By my small feet it took forty minutes there and the same back. The walk had not been very dull as two girls, my classmates, lived in the same street not far from us and we usually made the way together.
That is the oldest part of the village because of its location. The lake Balaton is supposed to be not much older than 20 thousand years. The northern shore is lined with volcanoes and the time of appearance of the lake was their last active period. At that ancient time a part of their neighbouring land sank suddenly – perhaps lava coming up had made place – and soon rivers and creeks filled it with water. The present form of the lake is almost a long parallelogram lying in a southwest-northeast line. At the beginning it had two long bays on the south perpendicularly to the shore. Waves from the ordinary north-western wind has closed these bays and the isolated waters had become swamps with vast stretches of reed. The first settlers of the village had found their place there. When I was a third grader my teacher tried to brief us about the history of our living place and, as history has always attracted me, I caught some of it.
The first villagers had been fishermen. It dates back to about the 12th century and life was not very easy as the country had had some serious raids from Mongols to Turks to Austrians. It was against the Turks in the 16th century that a small fortress was built with planks and stockade. It did not alter history much, but its remains have been excavated and are exhibited these days.
The swamps have been dried out, first only by one canal, but later completely. When I was a small child the canal was the best place to fish for small perch. It connected the closed swamps to the lake and if other attempts had not been made to get more land for agriculture it could have been stabilized at the same state.
There was a large activity with peat. Below the soil of half a foot there lay a treasure of peat more than six feet thick. Large quantities have been produced for fuel. After production there remained vast stretches of water so black that, although it was as clear as water in a well it was impossible to see through it. And acidic, of course. Later, when all the water has been drained to the lake, land was taken into cultivation. Until now the state farm that has been established there is famous for the fine produces and its herds.
My life in the village involves total poverty. My family had been living almost only on my father’s small pension and the produce he was getting out of the garden. Of that about 50 percent had been left wild to grow grass. The right to mow it was given to a man who owned horses and cows. Twice a year he got the hay of the meadow and in exchange he ploughed the other half in the spring and took home by cart all of the produce we had in the autumn. There were some fruit trees on the grassy half and my mother spared every bit of the fruit as jam or canned fruit. There were frequent uninvited guests on the meadow as it was called in the village "sorrel plain”, sorrel grew wild and it was a popular kind of vegetable there.
During that time there has been no way to buy meat anywhere in the village. The government had wanted to secure food supply for the capital and, in order to achieve this goal, Parliament had passed an act that made it compulsory for all private peasants to offer their surplus for the government on pre-decided prices. Even the quantity of surplus produce had been decided by the ministries. It goes without saying, those who have been members of cooperatives have been exempt of that kind of official theft.
In case somebody produced vegetables only on house sites, as my father did, it was another situation.
To solve the supply of protein for the family my mother has had hens and every year we have kept two pigs. But it has not been enough. Many times my mother has taken me to the place where the village’s fishing cooperative has sold its catch from the lake or at least a part of it. The small and the spiky has always been sold on low price and so my taste for fish has been aroused in those years of poverty.
Our building site was on a different end of the village and, after we found our permanent house in the village centre, it was more than a mile by foot across other people’s lanes, dirt roads and a stretch of forest on one of the village’s hills called Fortress Hill (but no fortress has ever been there) from home. At least twice a week we went to do the necessary work and, from the middle of the summer to the arrival of snow, to carry home as much food as it was possible.
The dwellers of the village, especially of the older generation, have been Catholics and religious almost to bigotry. I have not seen anything like that before and since. Every house had a holy corner in the clean room equipped with a house altar and statuettes or portraits of saints. They had their praying beads with them all the time and, like the Knights of the Round Table, almost everyone has been on oath to this or that saint for something he had succeeded to do or vice versa. Even during break time on work, when they laid down the hoe, lying in the shade, they took their beads and did their duty.
When I first saw a line of praying beads I thought it was a necklace. But necklaces women have not carried. Even their wedding rings they have kept hidden under layers of bed-sheets.
Later, when I have already been married and we visited my father’s relatives with my wife, I found them completely unchanged – the only change was the disappearing of someone from time to time, as he or she had passed.