IN 1975 I had received an astonishing phone call from a man who claimed he knew my father.
I must admit that I have understated my efforts to find my father. I wrote him long letters when I was growing up in Budapest and gave them to Vili to post to wherever he thought my father resided. My mother had stopped looking for him after she served her time in jail for attempting to leave the country to join him in Austria. Incarcerated in the Sacred Heart Convent school, I had visions of being rescued by my recalcitrant father, who had, so far, failed to appear. The convent would offer him a grand opportunity to redeem himself, I thought. I wrote heart-rending letters and long heroic poems to him and tried to send them via my aunt Leah, who said she knew where he was. She said she had promised not to tell me.
My other aunt, Sari, mentioned once that my father had moved to Australia. When I was working two jobs and going to university, I saved up enough to hire a private detective to track him down. I am not sure he tried very hard, though he reported that a Hungarian immigrant called Szigethy had changed his name to Spencer and lived in Perth, Australia. Then he told me that Spencer had left with his family for the United States. He said he had no more information and my money ran out.
The man who called me at M&S said he had seen an article about me in The Globe and Mail and made the connection. The article had mentioned my pre-Porter name. The caller claimed he knew a man who had used the same name once. Naturally, I was wary.
“He used to be István Szigethy, but he has changed his name to Steven Spencer and he lives in Winnipeg,” the man informed me. Steven Spencer had married a Hungarian woman with two children, whom he had adopted. He had been a social worker. He was charming and had many friends. He was a patron of the Winnipeg arts scene. He and his wife were passionate bridge players. The man knew this from personal experience. He and his wife had played bridge with the Spencers. He gave me a Winnipeg phone number.
I think I called at least four times before I found my voice. He denied all knowledge of a daughter, all knowledge of Hungary, my mother, his time in the Gulag. He claimed he was born here, in Canada. He made this claim with a heavy Hungarian accent, not so different from how my grandfather sounded after twenty years of trying to learn English.
I hung up.
But I did tell Jack McClelland the story one evening over drinks at the Fort Garry bar. Since we were already in Winnipeg, Jack seized the opportunity and, pretending he was a stringer for Time magazine, phoned Mr. Spencer. Jack said he was writing a story about his daughter, Anna, and wished to interview him.
My father—because Mr. Spencer really was my father—reluctantly consented. Jack drove me to the apartment building but decided to leave me on my own for the occasion. That was how I met my father for the first time since he ruined my Christmas in 1949 by appearing in a greatcoat at our door in Budapest just as my presents were likely to be opened.
He seemed quite ordinary, as was his apartment, with the photographs of his wife and two children, the rug, the coffee table, the TV set. Everything was ordinary, except the fact that he now conceded he remembered a small girl who was said to be his daughter.
He told me a long story about having been too afraid of Vili to stay in touch, too afraid even to send money once he had found a job in Australia. He did not want to talk about his time in the Gulag but told me how he had met his current wife and her children in an Austrian refugee camp in Salzburg. Oddly enough, it was the same refugee camp where my mother and I stayed before we were shipped off to New Zealand.
I visited him again a few years later when he was already dying of Parkinson’s. His wife had placed a large photograph of me on top of his TV set. “He is very proud of you,” she told me. She encouraged me to take him for a walk in the park across from their apartment. He talked about my mother as I pushed him in his wheelchair and how pretty she had been and how young when they met during the war. He talked about Vili, who had seemed all-powerful to him, as Vili had seemed to me, but for him, my grandfather was a dangerous, threatening presence, not the benevolent storyteller of my childhood.
When I told my mother that I had met him, she was surprised that he had finally acknowledged me. A few weeks before my phone call, she had found out where he was and phoned him. She said he showed no interest in seeing either of us again. That was the first time she mentioned that she knew he had fathered another child, a boy, in the Gulag. The mother was one of the villagers who lived near the labour camp. Some of them had been kind to the inmates, gave them bits of bread and potatoes, though they didn’t have much themselves. In my father’s case, one of them had given him a bit of love. When we met for the last time, I didn’t ask him about his son. Years later I learned that he had been in Vorkuta Gulag, the labour camp I featured in my novel The Appraisal. One day, maybe, I shall visit Vorkuta and try to find my half-brother.
I had wanted my father to meet his granddaughter Catherine at least once before he died. In hindsight, I am glad it didn’t work out. She would have retained a memory of an old, dying man who was a complete stranger to both of us.
* * *
MY BELOVED GRANDFATHER Vili Racz died on July 18, 1976. We had talked a couple of weeks before his death, when he was trying to decide whether to go into hospital for an operation or stay and wait for death at home. I cried during most of our conversation. He tried to keep my spirits up by saying that he would not allow a little thing like cancer to beat him. In hindsight, of course, I should have flown down to Australia to be with him, but I kept putting it off and then it was too late.
The night he died, our windows rattled and one of our doors slammed shut in the wind. I wondered whether he had been saying goodbye.