A stork wheeled above on white arc wings, dipped its long black primary feathers, and turned toward a hazy horizon. The road to Budapest bore us south through the Hungary that Zita remembered, the one her grandparents would recognize. Gypsies walked in the dust and bicycles carried workers between farms. Peasants, hoes over their shoulders, returned from orchards. Housewives pedaled home with groceries and paraffin balanced on handlebars. Horses drew carts alongside us, their drivers dozing on beds of reeds. Geese flocked to market, their feathers to fill the pillows of Vienna, and dogs slept in the road, rarely disturbed by traffic. Winston’s ears stood to attention like bristled pink envelopes. The sound and scent of his fellows had aroused him. Zita would have enjoyed the company of another pig, but there simply wasn’t room on the backseat. Winston was growing and liked to stretch his trotters unhindered from armrest to hatbox when he snoozed.
The fields unfolded like origami and crossroad towns sprouted beyond the poplars. Nothing, really, had changed on the puszta. The graphite Porsche, racing from Berlin, was a Teutonic knight. Ikarusz buses, stinking of burned rubber, were stagecoaches. A convoy of Soviet tanks was a Roman century marching to Pannonia. They trooped past an ancient woman whose bowed pegs were wrapped in black stockings and woolen leggings. Neither the march of time nor the thunder of armies — Roman, Ottoman, German, and Russian — had ever broken her step. The twentieth century seemed to have been tacked on to the past like an afterthought.
We arrived unannounced in the village of open streams, and down a lane of steeply roofed houses, garden gates closed against the world, found Vilmos’s folly. The homemade house was wrapped in a skin of pine that had been hewn into onion turrets and mad ornamentation. It had the look of a czarina’s summer gazebo, built to quarter scale, and stood out from its neighbors in fantastic, aberrant pretense.
As we stopped, a miniature man, in scale with the building, leapt from a carved chair on the porch. With great ceremony he ushered us into a baroque conservatory, chattering excitedly, and ignored Alajos’s letter of introduction. Zita’s Hungarian was rusty, but she managed to catch the word “tripe.” A stewed bowl of it stood on the table. A banquet had been prepared, steam rose from the dishes, but the house was empty. We sat on pine thrones, tooled with mazed decoration, while Pappi stroked his elfin ears.
“Can’t be for us,” whispered Zita. “They didn’t know we were coming.” We appealed for an explanation. Pappi raised his hand, fingers smeared with wood stain, and begged us to be patient. Then he winked at Zita. “Tripe gives me the willies,” added my aunt.
The approaching cars made such a racket that Winston hid behind our legs. Three black and green taxis drew up and disgorged a riot of humanity that whooped and whirled into the miniature villa. Pappi grasped his sons, men twice his size, and pushed them through the throng toward us. I was embraced and Zita’s hand kissed before our introduction was read. It was the brothers’ wedding anniversary. They had married twin sisters thirty-two years ago.
“Willi, not Vilmos,” insisted our host. His mustache was impertinent and he had the shape of head that women wanted to pull to their breasts and stroke. “And this is József bácsi — Uncle Joe — a good man to know.” He deferred to his brother with obvious respect; or was it fear?
“Our parents nicknamed me Handsome,” relayed József. I didn’t like his eyes and he had a nose that should have had a ring through it. “Not a surprise, really.” He consciously stroked his lapel, a gesture long associated with Party membership, though the Lenin badge was missing, and Zita immediately felt at home.
They swept us into the cyclone and to the table. Five generations clamored for a place, embraced us, ate. Neighbors arrived, seized vacated seats, ate. Wine was mixed with Coke, glasses raised, “Hello, hello” went the toast. Behind a screen of carved rosettes great pots cooked on a tiny stove: borsch, spicy gulyás, and halpaprikás, catfish soup swimming on cottage cheese noodles. The tripe was delicious. Pappi bustled cauldrons to the table. “Grosse Familie,” he crooned in his only words of German and spooned out coils of tripe.
The men, once replete, played cards. Willi dealt. Zita was determined to join in.
“My game may be a little queer,” she volunteered and, laying her hand on the table, said, “Vingt et un.” They were actually playing skat. Willi reshuffled. Pappi moved from shoulder to shoulder and ground his teeth when wrong cards were played.
“Gin,” she announced out of turn and again laid down her cards. Rules bored her. Poker, bridge, rummy; all were simply card games. Restrictions implied narrow-mindedness. She was profoundly skeptical of formula. She pointed at her cards. “I’ve got three nines.”
“How much airplane to America?” a neighbor asked me.
“Churchill gave away Transylvania,” declared József. “Hitler, Stalin, Churchill.” I thought he was being a trifle unfair.
“Stalin was the worst,” interrupted his brother. “He stuck his nose into everyone’s pie. That is the correct expression, yes? I must improve my English for business.”
“You don’t know your history,” challenged József. “Look.” He took a modern atlas from the bookshelf. Its first map was historical; Hungary as she was before the Great War. “This is Hungary. Churchill gave Transylvania to Romania, Burgenland to Austria, Banat to Yugoslavia. Gone. Our land.” He stabbed the kingdom with his finger. “This is our land.” In 1918 Austria-Hungary had been divided and dismembered, more than half its territory was given away.
“Churchill had nothing to do with Versailles.”
“We were betrayed. Vae victis.”
“In ‘56 too,” Willi said to me, “you — the West — did nothing. You let our children be killed. You left us to dictatorship.”
“That was different,” said József.
“Remember my brother is always right. He is the mayor,” Willi reminded me.
József sat upright. “And are you still a Party member?” I asked.
“We have our beliefs — and we have our careers,” responded József. “My brother was in the Party, too.”
“Of course, everyone was.”
“Alajos wasn’t.”
Willi sighed. “Alajos, yes. Alajos isn’t a realistic man.” He dismissed him with a wave. “He didn’t do anything.”
“He worried about his children.”
József snorted and Willi answered, “Worrying about your children became an excuse for doing nothing. The problem was you could never tell if your family was in genuine jeopardy or if you were using it as an alibi for cowardice.”
“He didn’t join the Party.”
The mayor burped. “More fool him.”
“My hobby is no politics,” said Willi. “But my brother is a politician and he has no choice. I do my woodwork and keep myself to myself.”
“And your taxes from the state.”
“Why should I pay for you to build yourself another villa? How you sleep at night, I do not know. Now I’m a businessman. I run my taxis. Life’s become expensive.”
“Ça c’est le problème de I’Ouest,” said Zita, speaking French for no apparent reason other than that it was spring. “Ça coute chèr, le choix. La liberté nest pas libre. Qu’est ce qu’ils disent, les Français? Liberté! Egalité! Facteur!”
Willi smiled politely. He hadn’t understood a word. “If only I could afford to live the way my brother lives.”
Willi and József were chancers. As boys they had stuffed firecrackers into the mouths of frogs. At a Young Pioneers dinner before the May Day parade they had added laxative powder to the apricot strudel with satisfying results. During the ‘56 Uprising they were guards on the Austrian border enforcing the false division on Europe. They were too shrewd to tear the red stars from their uniforms, and when the tanks returned, inevitable as the cycle of the seasons, the brothers were above suspicion. They seized a profitable opportunity and over the next year spirited hundreds across the border. A little money was made (of course) and it kindled jealousies that threatened to expose them, so at the end of their military service they moved as far away as possible. In the village of open streams they joined the Party, met twin sisters, and married.
While Willi was content to remain a clerk, József pursued ambition. He ingratiated himself with the village council. He said the right words, befriended the right people, and was rewarded with power.
“Now they speak behind his back because they fear for their jobs,” said Willi. He polished his brother’s ego, always on the point of tarnishing like old silver.
“You do have some honest friends, don’t you?” mocked József, “apart from Alajos.”
“Oh yes, they pay their taxes and don’t deal on the black market. They are model citizens and their children are disappointed in them.”
“The kids ask, ‘Why haven’t we got a Mercedes? We’ve only got this rotten Trabant.’ Dissatisfaction makes for poor citizens,” expounded the mayor.
“Look at our family.” With a sweep of his hand Willi encompassed the room. “They went to university, they own cars, my taxis are Mercedes. We have nothing to fear.”
“I arranged his taxi license.”
“This is my brother and I love him.” They embraced and upset the card table. It didn’t matter. Pappi had tuned the radio to a football match. The women retuned it to a music program. Willi vanished and reappeared playing a battered saxophone. One of the twins, either József’s or Willi’s wife for we could never tell them apart, followed with an accordion. She glowed like a teenager in love, her eyes glittering almost as brightly as her acrylic jumper. Willi announced that they hadn’t played together for twenty years. It seemed an underestimation. The racket was atrocious. The instruments were out of tune and the playing uncoordinated, but their enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone was on their feet. Each grasped a partner and whirled around the table. A niece as red-haired as a Celt presented herself to me to be seized. Zita was grabbed by Pappi. He squeezed her bottom when my back was turned. She slapped him but kept dancing. When he squeezed her again a smile broke over her face like a wave on a beach. The tempo increased. The tune was Russian. József broke into a Cossack dance. The family encircled him, clapping and shouting. Their beloved József bacsi dropped lower and lower, spun faster and faster. He moved with an incredible sense of release. He danced until he turned gray and had to be laid on the table like a corpse. Willi simply laughed and laughed. “Hello, hello,” he toasted. The drink flowed. Night fell.
Zita had never seen the puszta, or so she told Pappi when his arm was around her waist. A chorus of disapproval swelled up as if national pride had been offended. The taxis were filled with the trappings of celebration — saxophone, wine, cherry cream cake — and the party transported out onto the plain. Willi, at the wheel of the lead car, roared through the deserted lanes at great speed, kicking up clouds of dust. Someone’s wife and I were beside him, Zita and Pappi, playing the accordion, were in the back. The other cars followed.
“Look at it all, all that space,” Willi said to me. “And we’ve got a housing problem. It’s the Russians’ fault, of course. You know they have sixty thousand troops in our country. Well, we offered to drive them home.”
“To Moscow?”
“By taxi. The new government had asked them to leave early — to solve our housing crisis and give us back our barracks. The Russians, well, they apologized. They’d like to help, but it was impossible. They had serious transportation problems and it would take them eighteen months to arrange the trains. So we got together — all the taxis in Hungary; from Debrecen, from Györ, from Budapest — and offered to drive them home. The officers, the soldiers, their wives, their children. For free. No charge. But on one condition: that they didn’t come back. It was a one-way trip.”
I laughed. “The offer was no joke. When a division can be moved across the continent in forty-eight hours, why do the Soviets need almost two years to leave Hungary?”
We lurched over a hump and the glove compartment fell open. Speeding tickets fluttered to the floor. Willi grabbed a handful and tossed them out the window.
“This is why I love democracy.” To commemorate the fall of communism, the authorities had granted amnesty to all traffic offenders. He threw away another handful. “Good-bye, good-bye.”
The road swept through the grasses like a causeway over the sea. Homesteads were tethered to pontoons, their broad eaves thatched to the ground and washed by verdant waves. Islands of rushes were stacked in conical mounds like camps of wigwams. But soon the camps, the lights, and even the acacia trees fell away behind us. A great barren plain, Europe’s largest deserted grassland, opened before us.
The silence, when the cars stopped, was deafening. Heaven was an embroidered cloth of stars draped from pole to pole. The earth was flat, not round, and its empty horizon was unbroken but for the stab of sweep wells, surreal structures like cockeyed crucifixes.
The party’s spark quickly discharged, grounded by the enormity of space. József, too drunk to walk, was laid to rest on a rug on the ground. Only Winston retained the evening’s madness, routing wildly in the sandy soil. An owl fluttered off clutching a shrew supper. Willi lit a fire and the group gathered around. Pappi sang a herdsman’s lament, unaccompanied, beating the sad rhythm with his foot. The wind caught his voice and carried it into the dark, where cattle, gray with wide sweeping horns, stirred.
“The stars are out in full force tonight,” observed my aunt.
“To Hungary!” József had woken, a glass in his hand, and ordered, “Drink!” He clapped me on the shoulder. “We are friends. We will forget Churchill.”
“And Stalin?”
“Forget them all.” He gulped his glass, gasped for air, and addressed his brother, “Willi, look.” He held the steppes in his hands. “Am I so wrong? Nothing has changed here for ten thousand years.” József expected, correctly, that he would be returned to office in the coming election; nothing ever changed for the little kings. He fell backward in a stupor. Zita and Pappi had dozed off counting stars. The fire burned down to its embers. We settled into groups, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and let go of time. Willi wandered into the darkness. The air of his saxophone drifted on the puszta as sleep overcame us.
We woke to the whisper of wind. A skylark hovered, suspended in space. Dawn, silver lilac, found us cleansed. We felt fresh as after a bath, the dirt washed away. We paused at a farm to buy milk still warm from the cow. Birds flocked around Zita as they might have around St. Francis; a gaggle of geese, red-combed hens with chicks, flights of lovebirds, and doves on the terracotta roof. At her feet sparrows fussed and disturbed Winston’s slumber. Even a stork descended from her great nest. Zita walked through the fray as if the gathering were the most natural thing on earth.
József had a headache so we drove slowly back to the village of open streams and wasted the morning in indolence. It was early afternoon before Zita and I climbed into the Trabant. The family waved us off. As soon as we pulled away from the czarina’s gazebo she started to talk.
“Who was that appalling man in the Trot suit?” she asked.
“Tracksuit.”
“What?”
“It’s a tracksuit not a trot suit.”
“Are you completely gaga? It’s Trot, from Trotsky.”
“No, track from trotting.”
“Bloody hell, and I thought he was a Communist.”
“He was the mayor.”
“Mayor of what?”
“The village.”
“God help us.”
Zita had said little since our departure from Slovakia. The days spent with Vera seemed to have changed her. Perhaps the sisters had acknowledged their differences, perhaps they had reawoken memories of the past. They had parted without words with a clumsy embrace. But along with Vera had gone Zita’s imperious manner. She no longer knew where she stood.
I had left her to her thoughts, but whatever she had learned seemed suddenly to have been forgotten. For a moment she was her old self again, my aunt who denied in order to survive.
“You know all this unfamiliar food has played ruddy havoc with my insides,” she confided, “but I think the tripe sorted me out, the dancing too. It was about bloody time we fell into clover.” Her mannerisms were a good veneer.
We turned west toward Budapest and dentists. The road followed the main railway line toward the capital. Zita knew the route.
“The Budapest Express,” she reminisced. “Your uncle and I rode it together many, many times.” When she spoke she waved her hands as if to conjure up secrets never before expressed.
“I thought you hated trains.”
“For heaven’s sake, not then, then it was the only way to travel: first-class Wagon-Lits. The rhythm of the wheels. Ha ha.” She inhaled deeply on a gut-tearer. “I forgot those times, you know. It was, oh my God, fifteen, no, twenty years ago — our bloody honeymoon and everything.”
“Zita, you were married in 1946.”
“What the blazes; I can’t be that old.”
After her rescue from the sow in Slovakia Zita nourished the seeds of love. The Edison was broken, at least it was after she’d ripped out the leather drive belt, and Peter was invited home to fix it. He succeeded. A speech by Tomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, echoed up the trumpet, she removed it, and they kissed clutching the brass horn between them.
Too soon he was recalled to Moscow. He asked her to accompany him as far as the border but no further. She was, after all, the enemy. She arrived wearing a red scarf, good proletarian colors, one might have thought, had the material not been cut from a Nazi flag. Two packs of Lucky Stripe secured them a private compartment. They drank looted champagne and first made love on the last night of the war. In the throes of passion, she cried, “Your face, I must see your face.” He switched on the light in defiance of blackout restrictions. Outside, a soldier, either drunk or inimical, took a potshot at the passing train. The window shattered, the bulb blew, and in the dark, in a whirlwind of soot and embers, my aunt and uncle were joined. The next morning, when she dismounted and watched the locomotive steam him away into Russia, her skin was as black as an African’s but for the silhouette of a hand on the buttock that he had clasped all night.
“I love you I love you I love you,” read the telegram she sent to Dzerzhinski Square. Peter avoided reprimand by explaining the message was code, which it was in a way. Nevertheless his superiors, cautious men by necessity, were anxious that their protégé not be led astray. He was transferred from Slovakia and reassigned to Hungary. Zita would have followed him up the Limpopo, but she only had to go as far as the Danube. They rode the Budapest Express back and forth, back and forth to the border, no further, until my aunt became someone else.