MY GRANDFATHER HAD been the most constant figure in my childhood, as I have frequently acknowledged. As a land surveyor, my mother was often away, and when she was in Budapest, she worked during the day and liked to go out with her friends in the evenings. I was too young to sympathize and quite unforgiving of her second marriage to the balding Jeno, an idealistic Communist with a pugilistic son, nicknamed Jenci. Jenci’s idea of a good time was to try to wrestle me into submission, and when that didn’t work, he practiced his boxing skills on my head and stomach.
As she often explained, she had married my father because she was desperate to escape the boarding school where my grandparents had parked her; she was only seventeen and he was thirty, and anyway, he was probably in love with my grandmother. She married Jeno only because he could pull strings in the Communist Party. It was the only way to extract my grandfather from prison. She did not think he would last much longer at hard labour. I was usually angry with both my mother and father when I was younger but tended to forgive my grandfather’s serial infidelities.
Vili is the storyteller of my book The Storyteller: Memory, Secrets, Magic and Lies, the man who didn’t stop telling me tales until I was in my teens and we were living in New Zealand. His form of exile was my aunt and uncle’s horse farm near Hastings, mine was the Sacred Heart Convent. When I began to write about him so many years later, his fanciful stories became intertwined with my own memories of events in Hungary. His fantasies about our family’s ancient past were tangled with his retelling of our country’s history in a way he believed was suitable for my age. He believed he was shaping a young Hungarian to be ready to resist the depredations of the Soviet empire, Hungary being one of its outposts. I was to be a dissident poet with a large, underground following. I loved our long walks along the Danube, the hushed conversations in coffee houses, even the incomprehensible jokes his friends told and our random meetings with people he pretended not to recognize.
Later, in New Zealand, I missed those times as much as Vili did. He was always hoping that there would be another revolution, that this one would succeed against Soviet armour, and that we would return home. He thought I would return as the Hungarian poet-hero, and judging by his impassioned letters, he didn’t give up on that idea even after I became a Canadian book publisher. Publishing, as it happened, was part of his own past as a magazine publisher.
During the 1980s I returned to Hungary a few times, twice with my mother, who had wanted to see a couple of her old friends, once with Julian when the TTC was planning to buy Hungarian streetcars, and again with financial wizard Andy Sarlos, who was working on his autobiographyI while exploring ways to start new businesses with his former countrymen. Andy was a legendary Bay Street arbitrageur, tireless gossip, power broker, and another 1956 refugee.
I have always found being in Hungary stressful, in part because I have never managed to lay my childhood ghosts to rest, and in part because I find I am a different person when I speak Hungarian. The ghosts lurk behind doors where I am still expecting that late-night knock, the one that takes away friends and family. That different person may be the one I would have been, had we never left. She is at once scared and defiant.
I wrote much of The Storyteller late at night and during summer weekends on Quarry Island, over a period of several years—not an ideal way to write, but I was too busy with my family and other people’s books to take a long time away. I would sit through long meetings about warehousing and distribution, about pricing and returns, and find that I couldn’t focus. Being a publisher is complicated enough if you are focused, let alone when you are imagining long-forgotten events in Transylvania and Serbia.
In 1997, when my daughter Julia offered to come to Hungary with me to help with the research for The Storyteller, I grabbed the opportunity. Andy Sarlos lent us a friend’s car and driver for the long journey to Transylvania. He was delighted that my ancestors had lived there and charmed that they had been around long enough to do battle with the Turks in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Unfortunately, Julia and I found no trace of them. Not a ruined building. Not a fallen gravestone. Nothing. But we did find Hunyadvar, the Hunyadis’ castle, where one of our ancestors, my grandfather claimed, had stabbed a disloyal royal retainer. I told Julia some of the stories I had grown up with. We climbed up into the Carpathian mountains, where the great Transylvanian dragon used to thrive, and we explored the site in Arad where the Hungarian generals were executed after a failed attempt to free their lands from the Hapsburgs (another story).
It was not until a year or so later, with my mother and our cousins, that we found Vili’s parents’ grave in Kula, now in Serbia. There was also the wooden pew in the little church where the family had knelt on Sundays during the long sermons and where the child Vili had been fascinated by the painting of that Transylvanian dragon behind the altar.
I had wanted to keep writing The Storyteller long after I sent it to the publisher, but Modris Eksteins’s story of escaping from the past had taught me that all stories have to end somewhere, and with the visit to Kula, Vili’s story came back to its beginnings.
I. Andy’s autobiography, Fireworks, was published in 1993. Peter Newman contributed the foreword. It was Andy who proposed me for the board of Alliance Communications, run by another Hungarian expat, Robert Lantos.