The formula “two and two make five” is not without its attractions.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky
MY INTRODUCTION TO CUBA came in the form of the punch line of a Hungarian joke my grandfather left behind for me after his death. We’d never talked much, but in the last decade before his death we hadn’t spoken at all. I lost someone I never really had. Then, after my mother gave me some photographs from his youth and an old cigarette tin from his mandatory service in the Hungarian army, my feelings for him started to change. My mother saved the biggest surprise for the breakfast table not long after he died. She wanted to use what little money he had left her to send me to Cuba.
As far as I can tell, most Hungarian jokes have two central objectives: making you laugh to avoid crying or crying your way into laughter. Alcoholism and suicide rates among Hungarians are some of the highest in the world (and my own family did their part to chip in on both fronts), so perhaps this is to be expected. My deepest connection to my grandfather is through the Hungarian minor chord in music. The composers Béla Bartók and Erik Satie favored the Hungarian minor chord in some of their compositions, whereas most composers avoided it, because too many listeners found the unresolved nature of the melody simply too haunting. Any untrained ear can decipher whether most melodies are happy or sad, but the Hungarian minor chord conjures an ambiguity that leaves you off-balance and unsettled, much like a Hungarian joke.
My grandfather escaped Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling down the streets outside his family’s apartment. One of my mother’s first childhood memories was seeing the tanks outside her window. While in Canada, he sent back whatever money he could to support his family and saved in order to bring his family over with him. It was always his intention to reunite with his wife and two children. It didn’t work out that way. The distance was too much and finally both my grandparents moved on with their lives and divorced six years after his escape. My grandmother met the love of her life while my grandfather never truly recovered.
My uncle was caught trying to escape Hungary and was sent back, but my mother succeeded ten years after my grandfather’s escape and followed him to Canada. At sixteen she reunited with my grandfather but he was a changed man, a drinker, hardened and abusive. She tried to take off three times before she finally got away. That same year she became pregnant with my brother, and married the father. Almost as soon as she gave birth, she was pregnant again. Seven months after giving birth to her second child, he died from crib death. Things kind of spiraled out of control for her after that, until she found God. My grandfather never reached out with any help during that time. She had another child from an affair two years later that ended her first marriage. From then on my mother and brothers lived in the projects while she supported her family on welfare and odd jobs she could get cleaning houses or working with the elderly.
My grandfather, at least while I knew him, was a grumbling, unhappy, standoffish man fastened to the portable whipping post of regret. He shared my mother’s enormous pale blue eyes but lacked the kindness and generosity that kept hers lit up. My favorite story my mother told about him centered on a wedding he attended after he divorced my grandmother. He’d fallen in love with a woman already engaged to someone else. After failing to persuade her against the marriage, he showed up at the wedding and hanged himself in revenge during the ceremony. In the banquet hall, my grandfather swayed for two minutes from the noose before anyone was able to cut him down. He spent the next fifty-six days in a coma.
In his old age, my grandfather expected his family to reach out to him, but I could never find much about him to justify bothering. After about the age of ten, we stopped communicating altogether and the last time I ever saw him was when I visited him in the hospital a few days before his death, not long after his eightieth and my twentieth birthday. He’d had a stroke and could no longer communicate verbally. I couldn’t get past the doorway to his room as he lay there staring at me.
During the last year of his life, the only times I heard his voice were when he would sing Hungarian and Gypsy folk songs on my mother’s answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, warm act that I wasn’t even sure how to approach asking my mother why he’d begun regularly doing it. My mother visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life. There were silly, petty issues with his will where the obvious desire he’d had to look after his two children was complicated by fears of being exploited. He didn’t have much money in the first place, yet his wish to offer something to my mother was botched at the end, and she never complained despite always having financial constraints herself. She laughed about how typical it was of him.
She invited me for a palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) breakfast a few months after he died.
“Darrrrling,” she began in her Count Chocula accent, as I braced myself.
Our breakfast table had always been a dangerous place for me. When I was eight, after having watched her light a candle on the anniversary of my dead brother’s birthday, I asked over palacsinta how anyone could possibly get over the death of a child.
“Well, darrrrling,” she smiled, “your mother lost the will to live.”
I stopped scraping jam over the pancake.
“I couldn’t feel anyt’ing. The only place I could feel anything was tw’oo sex. Not making love. Just sex. Sex was the only t’ing that made me feel like a human being.”
“Sex?”
“Sex was the only t’ing, Bwinny.”
The week before we’d clarified that sex, making love, and fucking were three entirely different things. But it would be another year before I’d seek clarification on which of the distinctly different, obviously designated holes one was supposed to use when seeking to lose one’s virginity. Was it insulting to ask for the “fuck hole” or “sex hole” with a girl? Did all women expect their first time to be through the “making love hole”? If you lost your virginity to someone who’d already lost theirs, was it insulting to ask for the “making love hole”?
“Sex?” I repeated.
“You asked me so I’m telling you.”
“You were still with the husband before daddy?”
“No.” She smiled. “T’ank God I was free of dat.”
“So you were with daddy?”
“No. Dis is before I met your fadder.”
“Okay.”
“Let me have some of your jam if you’re not using it.”
Little was functioning inside me as I contemplated what she was telling me.
“Sex was the only thing that helped you to feel alive?”
“Yes,” she said, fiendishly jamming her knife into the jar of strawberry jam. “Sex was the only t’ing. So every weekend I went to discos and I watched very carefully for the best dancer and I went over to dance. Then after, I would go home with them and we would have sex. On Saturday and Sunday, every week, for an entire year this is what your mother had to do to find any reason to live.”
Multiplication was part of the curriculum that year and, while not having memorized the times tables, I felt confident I had easily gleaned enough to comfortably handle this one. Fifty-two weeks, times two of the best dancers in these clubs every week, equals …
“You slept with two thousand men in one year?”
“Around a hundred, I would say. But then I got much better just before I met your fadder.”
Four years later, at the same table, pancakes steaming on the plate, she brought up the sexual education pamphlet I’d brought home from school the day before.
“Bwinny, I read what you brought home. We have always been open with each other, right?”
“Yep.”
“Have you ever woken up with the sheets moist? I don’t mean pee.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have never had an or-gasm? You know what dat is, right?”
“I don’t think I have.”
“It might happen soon. All I vant to say, it’s very, very normal.”
“How old were you when you had your first one?” I asked her.
“I was eleven. In Budapest they have a beautiful park called Margaret Island. Very beautiful place in the summer. I was dere one summer afternoon and saw an old man feeding birds on zee park bench. All the birds were so happy and some flew into his hand to eat the birdseed. So I sat down across from him and asked for some birdseed.”
“Mom,” I interrupted. “What the hell does this have to do with your first orgasm?”
“I tell you. Zee old man was very kind and asked me to cup my hands and reach over so he could give me some seed. I did and he gave me some and then I started to feed zee birds. But zen zee old man did an interesting t’ing. First he put down the birdseed. Then he came over close to me on zee bench. Then as I kept feeding the happy little birds he reached down and put his hand slowly up my dress and he was touching me.”
“Mom.”
“Let me finish the story. You asked, so I am telling you this story.”
“I don’t want to hear this story.”
“He was touching me there right on the bench and I had never felt deez sensation in my life. I wasn’t scared or hurt, I was confused. But I didn’t say anything or do anything. I just felt this new sensation building and building until, finally, an amazing thing happened. And at that exact moment, this very old man took his hand away, grabbed his birdseed, and walked off.”
“Your first orgasm was from being molested by an old man on a park bench?”
“It’s true.”
“Something like this would scar a woman for life, wouldn’t it?”
“Why? He gave me pleasure and I was never hurt. I t’ink it’s interesting. Someone else can have it mean somet’ing else. I won’t argue with them, they shouldn’t waste time arguing with me.”
When I mentioned this story to my father, he ventured that my mother had been denied the kind of love she needed in her childhood. And maybe that desperation was why she was willing to take such risks in finding it, even from this stranger’s touch. My father always nursed a grudge against my mother’s dad that I adopted very early on. It ended one day after I was back at the breakfast table after my grandfather’s death.
“My father and you never had much closeness. I’m sorry for dat. For both of you. He was better than I think you realize.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“I have a silly question.” My mother smiled. “If you could go anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?”
I’d just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea and a teacher at school had told me that Hemingway’s captain and friend from the story was still alive and kicking at 103 years old in Cojimar, the same town as in the story.
“Cuba,” I told her.
“Why Cuba?”
“To find a boxing trainer and to meet the guy from The Old Man and the Sea.”
“Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you to Cuba. He didn’t leave much, but there’s enough to buy you a ticket. I think he would enjoy giving you this present. So you will have to look up many of my friends in Havana.”
“You have friends in Cuba?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I do.”
“I’ve never heard you mention knowing anybody in Cuba.”
“That’s because I haven’t met them yet. But they’re there. You’ll see, darling.”