The County of Birches Read online

  The brown river parted for doorways, some always closed to me. “Karcsi’s room. Stay out,” said my mother, then to my sister: “Close Karcsi’s door, before the baby finds his fiddle.” And doors I wouldn’t want to open, ever. The one with the great roaring thing that shook and rattled while it regurgitated water with a terrible rushing force.

  On weekends Apu came home. His tread on the landing was our mother’s cue to pull off her apron and tug her sweater smooth. There would be sweets if I foraged deep enough into the big coat’s pockets. And the coarse rub of thick arms around me. Skin loose and tender as he held my face to his. I thought I smelled the animals on his coat. He talked about cattle, pigs, but it was just the soft musky fur of the coat’s lining, sweetened by the smell of him. Karcsi would come out of his room to shake hands and would be asked to join us for dinner, although he ate with us most nights as part of his lodging, and his place was always set on the dining-room table.

  We celebrated Christmas because everyone else did, and so we wouldn’t seem too different being Jews. The big flat was surprisingly close with warm aromas and flickering lights. Evening lamps glowed. Up on the deep ledge above the dining-room door frame three small fir trees glistened with pink marzipan bells. I was allowed to finger them lightly when someone held me up. If it was a visitor, we were given a taste. The rough sugar coating grazed before it melted on my tongue. Pink, soundless bells, though their sugar, hard like crystal, made me imagine a little tinkling. I would gaze up from the floor, feeling sated.

  The clapping made me startle. Who was this? Who was coming? The grown-up voices knowing and festive. Mikulás. Look. Look. Like a big brown bear. His great coat turned inside out to show the furry lining, and a white pillowcase over his shoulder. What? Who is it? Mikulás. Your Apuka. Look, silly, what is there in his sack?

  * * *

  My first memory was heat. I saw it. Waves of heat dancing. Later I imagined a small room with a black stove. I put red flames into the picture, flickering behind a grill. But I knew the image first through my pores. A pulsing reddish glow I ingested with each breath and sigh of my tiny, gorging body. The long rambling flat was difficult to heat during the coal shortage in 1954. Karcsi the boarder had a separate stove in his room, so that was the room my mother took for the new baby. Karcsi moved out onto the divan. At dawn he met the coal cars pulling into the freightyard and paid the black market prices my father had left him the money for, his fine musician’s fingers gripping a sack of coal that by breakfast he let slide against the nursery furnace.

  My sister came in to warm up. She stood first by the stove, and looked into the cradle at me. When my mother lay down to nurse me on the bed, my sister nestled her brief length along the curve of our mother’s spine and took strands of our mother’s long hair, twisting them around her finger. I felt heat, indistinguishable from the dance of gold shadows.

  Out in the country on the state farms, my father trudged over crusty fields to inspect livestock. Wide hands thrust into the deep pockets of his heavy fur-lined coat, he spun dreams of spring crops and fall yields. Trusting implicitly that his family was safe and warm and unbeholden. How did he do that? Assume decency. My father anticipated decency in others before he would suspect anything else. Decency in others, even though he had had to leave his first wife and their child for a final labour service in 1944, and they disappeared with every other member of his family, in smoke. When I was born, Karcsi the lodger gave up his bed, and my father entrusted him with all that he had.

  * * *

  The shattering of glass behind us was a sound like day, clear and explosive. In the halls, apartment doors swung open, and from all of them people ran, spilling into the stairwell. My heart thrilled hopefully. Such excitement. With trembling fingers my mother buttoned up my little blue double-breasted coat, then I was swept up by Apu and tucked like a loaf under his arm. But I could walk as well as Lili, I protested, squirming. No time. My sister’s able legs were a flick of white ankle socks in leather lace-ups as they flew away below me. I was bounced down the stairs urgently. My mother wore her warmest coat although we were inside. It flapped open as she hurried, suitcases in both hands. Sun poured down with us right to the basement.

  Inside the basement was a camp. All the families from our apartment house were together. This was new and interesting. Bundles. Families spread on blankets. Food unwrapped, passed from hand to hand. From outside a deep rumble and vibration, distant and stirring. “Boom-boom!” I clapped gleefully. But my sister’s hands covered her ears, and her face froze yellow as she hissed, “Shut up, idiot.”

  I learned a name for the camp-out in the basement. It was the Revolution. I tried the word in my head as my parents reassured Lili. Rev-o-lu-tion. There was fighting, but a revolution wasn’t war, they explained. This revolution wasn’t about Jews. War, Lili told me while our parents exchanged courtesies with the adults on the neighbouring mat, was when Jews were pulled from their homes and burned in ovens. This was only a revolution. Everyone in the tenement—Catholics, Jews, regular Hungarians called Communists—all of us there were equally at risk.

  I took in the dim, densely bodied basement, learning and absorbing it like any new situation. It became part of me, the hours stretching into a predictable pattern of rhythms that I turned into the rituals of daytime and nighttime. The walk with my sister to the improvised bathroom. Threading our way past, and sometimes through, the personal effects of strangers. Habitual distrust in the glances cast at us, before they noticed we were children. Faces swerving at each unexpected noise, apprehension their common feature. I learned not to thrill so gladly to the drone of guns.

  In the midmorning hush of a city that for days had been punctuated by bursts of shellfire and shattering glass, my father slipped away from us, out through a slice of light admitted by the basement entrance. They went out that day for the first time, men mostly, escaping tentatively through the fragment of light to forage a few facts that might let us know what was going on. No one was certain of the enemy. Hungarian troops were familiar but—Apu lowered his voice thinking Lili and I weren’t listening—the Hungarians had in their ranks some of the old Arrow Cross members who had murdered Jews in the war. And the Russians were so touchy they might mistake anyone for an insurgent. Russians were generally feared, it seemed. But that day it was quiet, and the basement residents seemed to tacitly agree that it might be safe enough to go out to investigate. One after another, the men broke from their family groups.

  It felt strange, the grown-up men gone. Almost like before, when the men used to go to work. We were left as of old, the children with the women, but my mother didn’t appear her customary certain self. She had held Apu back for a moment before he left, as though changing her mind about letting him go. After he was gone, she tried to pull herself together. “Come, Lili. Let’s make up the sleeping mats, then we will have a hand or two of rummy if you still want to play cards.” Lili dropped her book in surprise at our mother’s unusual proposal, for, even here in the packed basement, our mother found countless chores to do.

  When the door flung inwards throwing in the harsh daylight, when the light burst in on us, it was as much an assault, that brilliant flare, as the bereted silhouette that followed. He had booted in the door, brandishing his rifle. The severe light seemed to radiate from his khaki-clad figure. He waved his gun at us as though we meant to hurt him. A sudden stillness seized all of us in that basement. Lili’s hand was a small sculpture with cards fanned around it. We were still, as though not to alarm him. Don’t move. Careful. Don’t scare the strange doggy. See his sharp teeth.

  “Minden rendben van?” Hungarian. Someone dared to answer, so perhaps a Hungarian soldier was not so bad. “Yes,” a woman close to the door whispered, “yes, all right. Everything here is fine.” He tipped his beret, a peacetime courtesy, and, relieved to withdraw without incident, backed out the door, his pointing rifle our last glimpse of him as it had been our first.

  My mother’s voice didn’t
lose its shrill fear, not even months later when she drew on this incident during my parents’ arguments and endless speculations. “When that soldier burst in and we didn’t know who or what he was, which would be better, Hungarian or Russian, all we were aware of was the weapon he carried, and our own pitiful dread.” She wasn’t going to cringe like that again. Enough! “I saw Auschwitz, now this!” She wasn’t going to raise her children in fear. “I’ve had enough cringing and hiding and hoping against the worst that always happens. I want something better to hope for. Milk the children can swallow without gagging.” Voice rising: “I’m already thirty-seven years old…!”

  When we finally emerged from the basement it was like blinking at a miracle. In my father’s arms, ascending the stairs slowly, squinting into the light with every footfall. I entered our flat with the two men, my father and our tenant violinist. The windows splayed open. Before leaving the men had released the latches to minimize the impact of explosions. My father held me to keep me away from shards of broken glass. Wind gusted through the open windows. It seemed to me that the wind was sweeping in the very sky, there was so much cold light. It brought an emptiness into the unlived rooms. A purity. As if all had been wiped clean, sterilized by the light and blue air. Rooms that had lived something we had been spared—or denied; a life of their own. No longer the same rooms we had lived in. The men’s voices boomed. The flat felt so empty. There were our things, the horsehair recamier and sturdy credenza, the framed photographs and fringed lampshades, even the throw rugs Apu stepped over as he hurried eagerly down the hall, checking everything. But they seemed insubstantial, almost transparent to me in that windy light. They had lost their solidity. Everything was light and airy as though even the thick oak table could be blown away in a breath of wind. The men’s shoes resounded on the hardwood that skirted the carpets. It was as if we’d never lived there. As though in our absence someone had cleared out our personal claim to these belongings. Now there was only the idea of a sofa, the shadow of an armchair. All had filled with a light that was blue, clear, and so jagged it might slice you if you dared move. I flinched when my father laughed and our violinist put his head outside and waved. Human gestures seemed out of place to me, and risky, in that rare ether.

  * * *

  We were in a little car, hurtling past windbreaks on a highway. I was sandwiched between my sister and my father, conveyed into the countryside away from everything familiar. The sensation of being propelled against my will was as strange to me and as wild as I would find the ride, in years to come, in a Canadian amusement park, blasting around and around so fast my teeth were ground together. My mother’s food packets were tucked inside my father’s pockets. My mother had stood in her apron on the street, waving good-bye.

  Apu liked to tell Lili stories about his life before the war on his family’s country estate. Sometimes I caught references to the tobacco plantation and the horse-drawn carriages. When I heard him mention crop rotation, I imagined the fields spinning like the arms of the windmill in one of my picture books—one year up, one year down. Lili and I grew to imagine all that was good and beautiful to have risen out of his family’s turf. The metre-long braided loaves of challah from my grandmother’s kitchen, and tables set for twelve, sometimes twenty. Apu said his family had grown as rich and bountifully as the yields that fed and clothed them. They had lived on the land and nurtured it as lovingly as their offspring for three generations. These stories were part of the climate of our Budapest flat. Lili and I were accustomed to them. They had filtered into us like rain soaks a plant, and we understood that just as the seasons bloom and fade, so had my father’s rural past.

  Now he was taking us to the country. My father’s fabled world was lost, but he was taking us nonetheless to see something he said was very special. Spring. Animal babies. Whizzing along in the little car, far from my mother and from Budapest, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

  Spring, ushered in by the rankness of wet winter rot, assailed us on arrival. The ground was mushy under our feet as though it would suck us in. The sodden fetid air we could only marvel at when our father said with relish, “Smell it? That is the earth blowing out its winter breath.” Our offended urban nostrils flared in distaste. Feeling chilly in the damp air, we tramped along the muddy furrows. I looked to my sister for some cue, something to help me interpret the unpleasant sensations made more confusing by my father’s obviously happy stride. Her boots seemed to sink into the furrows. Each step, as she pulled it up stickily, was laborious. She was ahead of me by six years. She was my measure, my yardstick. Hers the first impression.

  “There was a calf born just this week,” my father told us. “Isn’t that lucky?” His voice sounded full with the pleasure of giving. But we weren’t prepared for the dense stench of the barn and the rows of enormous beasts with their hot vaporous breaths. Lili had to be urged forward as Apu went down the row, patting the sides of the animals and pulling up their eyelids. I scrambled like a puppy beneath his feet. I was afraid to take a step away from him. I clung to his trousers until he had to pick me up. When he did, when I was up, oh, it was too late to look away. Something I wanted to hide from, but too riveting. One after the other he had pried open their eyes, checking for health. He had seen nothing to suggest disease. Not anything like what accosted us as a beast swung around presenting a back end that was red, so rawly red, every possible shade of red and plum unfolding like the layered petals of a giant bloom, all blood and flesh and tissue. A festering bovine backside from whose centre a black vermin seeped and crawled. I couldn’t scream, lest putrid gore fill my mouth. Apu sucked back his breath in disbelief and turned, too late, to divert my gaze. My sister was already retching, a loud, raspy choke and surge.

  As Apu held us in his arms outside the barn, trying to comfort us, he whispered into our hair and wept. He held us close, then wiped my sister’s streaming nose with his monogrammed handkerchief. He stroked our soft hair, cradled our delicate bones, and whispered over our heads what sounded like a prayer, but was just the name of his other little daughter, the first one, our half-sister—lost in an Auschwitz oven. “Clárika,” he kept reminding us. He remembered her in each caress he ever gave us; in each kiss on our foreheads and flip of a storybook page, she was always beside us, loved just the same. We were everything to him, I felt, but also we were never enough. As my father prayed over our heads his lost daughter’s name, I imagined he saw the gulf between them stretch wider and wider.

  Going home in the car, we didn’t talk about the newborn calf we’d seen, or the baby chicks and new lambs. I played back the red gore of disease, and saw it mirrored in my poor father’s dismay. He who had grown from the earth, who loved the smell of horseshit and fodder. I believed he could have grown a forest in a bed of salt, and in our Canadian garden he would grow a veritable arbour of fruit trees and flowering shrubs and beds that never wilted. How it broke him to see his children repelled so virulently by the living earth, and severed from the generations who had cultivated this land, loved it and nourished it and built from it a dynasty.

  * * *

  My family left Hungary in 1957. My mother retold the scene so often over the years, it acquired the quality of something tangible, like a family icon. My mother’s hands had locked over those of her daughters, me on one side and Lili on the other. Her head turned to look over her shoulder at our father, who stood framed against the tenement. “With or without you,” she said, putting argument and persuasion behind her. She led us down the front walk of the building, and said with finality, “We’re going.” My father stood rooted at the entrance. He was a man of European height, to become small only by North American proportions. His arms hung by his sides, and his face was carved in loss over loss. As he watched us, his face began to break down along these creases until it was the face I recognized later in galleries of modern art: the face of our century, its features skewed and misaligned. When he left the portal of that building his figure diminished with each step. By the time
he reached us his shoulders had rounded, his chest sunk into his belly. He turned into the father of my childhood, the one I really knew. The man who never again trudged through fields of corn or patted the flanks of horses, who from that moment was always close by our sides, our Apu. A man for whom borders opened, but whose world shrank around the shoulders of his family.

  THE GREY WORLD

  CHANNEL CROSSING

  A small person in a kerchief on a jostling train, I hold fast to the windowsill as the train rocks me with its rhythm. I’ve absorbed the motion, so that after hours of gazing out the blurry window my own body sways and clacks at a mechanical rate. We’re going. I don’t dwell on the departure so much as our passage. Moving, going, on our way.

  My father, beside me, has sunk into himself since we boarded in Budapest’s Keleti Pályaudvar. I sense inertia gathering like a mass in his warm bulk. Occasionally a hand reaches out automatically to steady me, but my father doesn’t seem to be moving like the rest of us; he’s given himself over to conveyance.

  Seated with us in the compartment, my mother rapidly reviews the names of those who came to see us off, remarking archly on absences. Where was Apu’s colleague Mátyás? He couldn’t wait to step into Apu’s job with the ministry of agriculture, not even long enough to see him to the station? Old Agi’s arthritic knees hadn’t held her back from getting a good look at our relatives, although she had liked to complain piteously when she was mopping our floors. Poor thing, look at these biscuits Agi brought, dry as dust. My mother prattles while sorting the packets of foodstuffs that were pressed on her with embraces. She passes them along to Lili, who recites their labels in the fluting oratory style she learned at school. Lili’s voice trills over cherry-filled bonbons. Apu lifts a hand, distractedly waving off my mother’s chatter as though she misses the point entirely.