Six

Professional sports had never paid much in Hungary, but under communism at least there were perks: government-approved sportsmen could get out of their military service, and if they were good enough to make the national team (as many of UTE’s players were), they might return from international tournaments with only outpatient injuries and a suitcase stuffed with Levis and Marlboros to sell on the black market. Now, however, if they wanted to make a real buck, they had to find a second job. Pék was trying to make a go of opening a 24-hour convenience store; Bóta attempted to become Europe’s shortest pimp. Some of the players printed T-shirts to sell at a lake; others started driving their cars as cabs.

If most of the team were part of the new lower-middle class of the emerging capitalist caste system, UTE’s Transylvanian trio were lodged somewhere between classless and philistine. Before and after practice, for loose change, they washed and vacuumed their teammates’ cruddy cars, cleaned the apartments where many of them still lived with their parents, and carried things around for them like bellhops. When the other players went out to the clubs at night, they never invited Bubu, Karcsi, or Attila to join.

The rejection both was and wasn’t personal. A resentment of Transylvanians was brewing in Hungary as their sudden mass immigration and willingness to take jobs at lower pay was making already scarce jobs even tougher to come by. During practice, some of the players teasingly began to call Attila a bozgor, a nasty Romanian term for a homeless person. Unfailingly, this unleashed in the janitor a fury beyond his control. Regardless of the offender’s body mass, the Chicky Panther would chase whoever it was, sometimes all the way into the locker room, and batter him until others could pull Attila off. Attila broke a few noses that way, including his own (again). And thus was revealed our young hero’s Achilles’ heel: the insinuation of irrelevance.

Attila always did his best to brush aside the hard feelings the following day, but his all-too-predictable reaction to the bozgor slight made it something of a parlor trick to send the unsuspecting Panther into instant paroxysm. Attila began detecting other slights as well. For instance, many of the UTE players were falling out of their chairs trying not to laugh when he, Karcsi, and Bubu argued in their antediluvian accents about the proper thickness for salami or how many times Ceauescu shot a bear in Csíkszereda. To their teammates, they were a joke.

Though he tried not to let it show, Attila was crushed. In Romania he’d been nothing but a lowly Hungarian. Now finally in Hungary, he was living in a horse paddock with no hot water, was still waiting for Hungarian citizenship, and, at least by some measures, was nothing but a lowly Romanian. He didn’t need his teammates’ sympathy. He just needed their acceptance.

Attila had never cared about appearances before, but he became obsessed with winning the respect of his peers. He had his bowl-cut brown hair chopped into the popular military-style crew cut, stopped doing grunt work for his teammates, and the next time General Bereczky asked him in front of others to pick up the trash around the stadium, he quit his job as UTE’s janitor, shouting, “I don’t need to be your field hand!” at the highest-ranking Interior Ministry official he knew. It felt great, but when he turned to see his teammates slinking away from the scene, he was quickly reminded just how tenuous his entire existence was. Though he was too ashamed to admit it to anyone but Bubu, Attila was the only player on the UTE squad who wasn’t paid a player salary. His only income had been from his custodial work.

One of the team’s retired players, János Egri, who had become the announcer for the five or six UTE games per season that were broadcast by the country’s only television station, witnessed the Zamboni-obliterating goalie’s second, and potentially ruinous, confrontation with General Bereczky. In his playing days, Egri, a slender argyle-sweater-wearing man of strategic action, had made a decent living doubling as Hungary’s first television game-show host (for Játék a Betkkel!, or Scrabble). He’d made his connections, and he felt sorry for Attila, who surely had none. True, the Chicky Panther was marginally insane, Egri thought, but he was a good egg. Egri talked the general down, then pulled Panther aside after practice a few days later.

There was a three-story apartment building he knew of in the south part of Buda that needed a live-in super, Egri told Attila. It was on the opposite end of the city from Újpest, an hour and a half each way to the hockey stadium—the tram and two subways. But it was a good neighborhood. Residential. And Attila could live there rent-free as long as he kept up the small grassy grounds, the eight-space parking lot, and the stairwells. “You could make it work,” Egri said as they sat in the empty bleachers, watching the junior team practice. Attila had just one question, but it stumped the game-show host. “What do you mean, does it have hot water?” Egri replied.

It was time for Attila Ambrus to enter the modern age of plumbing.

The basement-level one-room apartment on Villányi Street that Egri found for Attila was a groundhog hole with parking compared with the gated palaces with moats that were going up in the undulating Buda hills just miles away to the north. But it came with—yes—hot water, a bathtub, a door without holes, and a ninety-year-old woman on the fourth floor who would provide an unexpected link to love and language lessons.

Margit, whom Attila quickly took to calling Ninny (a term of endearment he’d used before only with his aunt, also a Margit, back in Csíkszereda), had a thing for her new super ever since she saw him taking out the trash in a sweatsuit. He was polite, too. She asked if, for a small retainer, he would help her do her food shopping and walk her to the post office once a week so she could pay her bills. Attila saw her book-lined apartment, which featured not just Hungarian but English titles, and made her a deal. If she would teach him English and help him learn to speak Budapest Hungarian, he would even take her to get her wig done.

A few weeks later, on her own initiative, Ninny placed a personal ad on Attila’s behalf in The Express, Budapest’s free weekly classified newspaper: “Gentlemanly, smart, handsome young man, learning English, in search of a nice, well-educated girl.” Attila didn’t have a phone, so Ninny left her own number. The day after the paper came out, a woman named Judit Milos rang. Ninny listened to her details (“rich, blah, blah, rich, blah, English teacher”), then told Judit how lucky she was. Her ideal man would call her back shortly. Then Ninny buzzed the super.

As promised, Judit found Attila sweet, intelligent, and not the slightest bit arrogant for an athlete. Attila was smitten as well. Judit was twenty-six years old with short red hair and an excellent command of English, as Ninny had required. She had a few extra pounds in her thighs, and her breasts were a little big for Attila’s taste, but she wore fox fur coats, was a graduate of Budapest’s prestigious ELTE university, and was from a well-heeled family, the daughter of a construction engineer who also owned a confectionery factory he’d won in one of the government’s privatization tenders. That could only mean Judit’s father was important and connected, two things never before associated with his daughter’s new boyfriend. Judit’s family even had a small summer place at Lake Balaton, the Hungarian Hamptons, sixty miles southwest of the city. It was like a dream for Attila. Opportunity had finally come knocking on his life’s door, and it would soon lead him to the top of a profession few (including Attila) knew existed.

Although his experience in the ways of wooing had so far been confined to chatting up Katalin about her family’s electrical output from thirty feet up a wooden pole, Attila did his best not to blow his chances with Judit. On their dates he always remembered to bring flowers, as per the Hungarian tradition, whenever he saw her, which wasn’t often, given the extra work he’d taken on in order to make enough cash to keep dating: Egri got Attila a third gig with his wife, an applied artist, and Attila spent months with her building an ornate glass chandelier, which was eventually hung in the supersize McDonald’s adjacent to Budapest’s biggest train depot, Nyugati Station. He also took jobs doing everything from walking dogs to selling Parker pens door-to-door to stocking shelves with Karcsi in a toy warehouse to working as a security guard at Hungary’s National Savings Bank, OTP. He regularly toiled from 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. six days a week, with two hockey practices in between, then showed up exhausted on Sundays at Judit’s apartment near the heart of downtown’s construction-burdened Deák Square business district. “I got you an electric knife,” he would say; another week it was a tennis racket; another time, an afghan for her armchair. He liked Judit a lot, could maybe even love her if he could figure out what she wanted from him.

Between Judit, his half a dozen jobs, and his unsalaried hockey career, the last thing Attila needed was a letter like the one he received in November. His aunt and uncle, with whom he’d by then corresponded a couple of times, must have given his new address to his father, because there was a piece of mail in his box from Károly Ambrus. Károly hoped to visit for a long weekend and gave the date of his planned arrival in two weeks. For Attila, this was like receiving news that all the details had been arranged for his head to be squeezed in a vise.

Attila didn’t know his father well, and he tried not to remember anything about him at all. Yes, Károly Ambrus had bribed the town judge with a pig to keep custody of his only son. But he’d also beaten Attila every time he got drunk, which as far as Attila could recall was something like always. He hadn’t seen his father in years, but it was still his gruff pálinka-coated, Carpai-cigarette-burnished admonition that kept Attila awake at night: “You’re going to die a gray nobody!”

Attila spent a week cleaning and preparing his apartment. He put all of his hockey team photos on display, borrowed some history and travel books from Ninny, and waited for his father’s arrival. The stocky, hook-nosed Károly Ambrus had once commanded significant respect in the Hargita Mountain Valley for his job as one of the chief electricians charged with bringing electricity to that cold, dark corner of the world. When a graying, slower-moving version of that man showed up at the door, Attila shook his father’s small hand. “Apám,” Attila said, using the formal word for father, “you’re going to see the whole city. But before we go, I must inform you that it is not advisable in Budapest to mention Székelys”—the name of the particular tribe of Transylvanian Hungarians to which the Ambruses belonged—“or Erdély,” Transylvania.

“I understand,” said Károly, who had never been to Hungary.

Attila and Károly traveled the city by subway and tram. They went to the Royal Palace on Castle Hill above the Danube River, where until World War I the Hapsburgs spent their summers. They visited the seven-hundred-room Hungarian parliament, with its ludicrously unusable 12.4 miles of staircases and which, despite the fact that Hungarians Ede Teller, Jen Wigner, and Leó Szilárd had been among nuclear energy’s pioneers, was still cooled in summers by ice blocks and fans. And they toured plenty of unimpressive museums whose ocher facades and arched mosaic-trimmed entranceways gleamed grime gray. At night Attila found some new csárdás, or traditional Hungarian restaurants, with the live Gypsy music both he and his father loved (and cots in the back for patrons unable to make the trip home). Attila did not introduce his father to Judit, or anyone else.

Károly could see from Attila’s limited pocket change, ill-fitting clothing, and sparsely furnished apartment that although his son was making a mighty effort to appear otherwise, he was struggling to make a go of it in Hungary. He didn’t expect Attila to admit it. If there was any trait he and his only child shared, it was hardheadedness. Károly could still remember Attila, bloody-nosed after he’d administered a good slapping, running back inside to yell at him, “I’m going to be somebody! You’ll see! I’m going to be famous! I’ll make you proud!”

Károly had plenty of his own memories to cry about: his wife, Klára, leaving him when Attila was a year old; finding his only brother’s dead body a few months later on that electric pole where he’d sent him to work in a storm; eight years later his mother’s untimely death from pneumonia, when Attila was nine. Károly had made a mess of things, no doubt, but he was getting older now and, in his own strained way, wanted to do something right. As hard as it was, he refrained from drinking during his stay with Attila, and on the night before he left, as he and Attila changed for bed, he asked his son to sit down because he had a surprise. “I want you to have my car,” Károly said, referring to his Dacia, the Romanian equivalent of a Yugo, which he’d driven twelve hours over the mountains from Csíkszereda.

It was a generous and, in some ways, enticing offer. Though Attila didn’t yet know how to drive, he desperately wanted a car. But he also knew that driving a Dacia was an unambiguous sign of two things: first, you were broke; and second, and perhaps even worse, you were a Romanian. Relishing the opportunity to strike back at his father with the only power he’d ever been granted, Attila refused. “In Hungary, that is not a car,” he said.

That night, Károly and Attila lay awake in Attila’s lumpy fold-out sofa bed, stubbornly passing Károly’s last hours in Budapest in silence. When the first light glinted from the apartment’s only window in the upper corner of the kitchen, Károly rose, collected his things, and left without saying good-bye. It seemed to both father and son a fitting end to a stilted trip and a stunted relationship.

When the Christmas holidays rolled around, Judit invited Attila on a ski vacation with her family to a resort they frequented in Zell am See, Austria, outside of Salzburg, near Hitler’s famed Eagle’s Nest. Attila had never been west of Hungary, or skiing for that matter, nor did he have a passport. But Egri came to his rescue again, spiriting Attila down to the Hungarian consulate and using his celebrity Scrabble influence to spell out “Give this guy a travel visa and skip the crap about the fourteen-day waiting period.”

Attila had his reservations about the trip. He’d met Judit’s parents a few times and, despite his efforts to appease them, was afraid they, too, thought of him as a bozgor. One night when he was having a steak dinner at their Budapest home, Judit’s mother asked Attila why he wasn’t eating much of the meat, to which he’d replied as delicately as possible that it wasn’t his favorite type. “What do you know from meat?” Judit’s mom had responded coldly. Right, thought Attila. As if he hadn’t grown up in a smokehouse.

But the ski holiday turned out to be unexpectedly fruitful. The weather was so frigid and relentlessly overcast that hardly anyone wanted to go outside, so Attila spent most of the days with the mountain to himself. By the end of the first afternoon, he was almost able to make it down the piste without turning. At night, he collapsed in exhaustion, curling up with Judit in the backroom pub and ordering his beers by metric length in waist-high beakers. Above them on the walls like cave art were dozens of bear, deer, and ram skins.

The inn’s owner was a heavy, ruddy-faced man named Hansi, who liked to chat with his guests about their day, their favorite Heffeweisen, or the type of hooker they would like for the evening. Hansi, whose family—like many of Austria’s—had once lived in Hungarian-speaking regions before the post–World War I fire sale, spoke enough Hungarian to get by, and one night when Attila and Judit’s family were eating dinner he stopped by their table. By Attila’s deference to Judit’s parents on the Budapest small talk, Hansi guessed that he wasn’t part of the city clan. Hansi’s curiosity was piqued, and before the group finished dessert, he was tableside again.

“So, where are you from?” he asked Attila.

“Transylvania,” Attila replied, since Judit’s parents already knew and he sensed something in Hansi’s familiar peasant face and evident interest in him that seemed worthy of a powwow. Indeed, for the first time in Attila’s life, his birthplace couldn’t have been more auspicious. A short chuckle escaped Hansi’s lips as he glanced distractedly around the room, then swooped his large head toward Attila’s ear. “Can you get me some pelts?” he whispered in passable Hungarian.

Attila looked up at the fur-covered walls and racked his mind for whom he might go to for such a thing. He came up with nothing except a vision of himself flush with deutsche marks. “Why not?” he said, securing the first business deal that would change his life.