1952
In this excerpt from the novel of the same name, a Hungarian-Israeli mother addresses her daughter in Europe in a letter she never sends. Her monologue, covering a span of several years, alternates between family news and reports of daily life in postwar Israel. Forgách brilliantly captures the complexity of her attitudes towards the new Jewish immigrants, with whom she sympathizes but to whom she feels, as prewar settler, socially superior. While she realizes the newcomers are victims of an experience too hellish for her to imagine, her distaste for the burgeoning Zionist movement confuses her moral sense. Meanwhile, her faith in Stalin and the "cause" has an absolutism that sits uncomfortably alongside her sentimentality. This excerpt, the first time this major Hungarian author has been published in English, has been translated by Tim Wilkinson.
it may be something you and Hannah have agreed on, that now you are expecting you're turning grey as well, jakirati,[4] before you have truly lived, jakirati, my darling little daughter, what's the need for a third? I can understand Hannah, with her only just having married Dmitri, love is still a new thing, ahava hadasha,[5] they're ardent, billing and cooing, a child is needed to cement the link more firmly, it's a joy just looking at them, it doesn't matter that it's 76 steps, Hannah all but flies up to the fifth floor, she daydreams about a house with a garden where every morning she will pick fresh latte off a banana tree, bearing in mind the housing situation here, that day will never come, though Hannah's very self-willed, the world may be a dreadful place, but people find it easier to put up with misfortunes if they are easy at heart and they have plans, that scallywag Dmitri may turn out to be a big chameleon, time will tell, I'm always telling him that if I got a pinch of paprika each time his hackles are raised, I'd never run short, angry people are frank, their anger shows on the tip of their nose, the Arabs say, I miss the Szeged air tremendously, the River Tisza at dawn, no matter, as they say there the big ball will be in Szeged, but only if it doesn't rain, if it does, it won't, and if it doesn't, it will, when I catch the fragrance of that finely milled red paprika that I keep in a linen bag right at the back of the shelf, then all the smells come flooding back to me, like for you oranges and the fragrance of cedars in the heat, and cardomom, halva, hoummus and the earth redolent of baking oleander that you can never enjoy because you developed that fever when you slept in the hay, and freshly picked figs, olives and gefilte fish with onion, and pomegranate trees and groves of gnarled olive trees.
That Dmitri, by the way, is an upstanding, straight dealing boy, if only it weren't for those uncontrolled temper tantrums of his, that Russian accent he has just kills me, that's how I can get him really annoyed, those two languages, Hebrew and Russian, are like two wrestlers, with one minute the Russian flooring the Hebrew, the next minute the Hebrew the Russian, some of our politicians came out when the tsar, the Little Father, was still on the throne, but they too weep for his return, in their opinion Stalin is even worse than the tsars ever were, which is nonsense, if you think about the pogroms, a reactionary thought, I don't even wish to waste words on it when the equal rights of Soviet citizens in everything is common knowledge, they no longer have to confront the spectre of assimilation, admittedly the Soviet Union isn't exactly backward about coming forward with its opinions when it comes to Zionism worming its way into everything, we're only too well aware of the curse of chauvinism and what it leads to, Dmitri hates it if I say noo shto? gavarish parusskie?[6] that's all I can manage, unfortunately, maybe I'll have a crack at it, so that I can read the works of Stalin in the original, if only it weren't for that Cyrillic lettering, it was quite enough boning up on Hebrew, ever since then I only scuff the paper with those printed letters, even though Father was most particular about his Alephbeta to make it easy for the kids, haikari, the main thing is that this time Dmitri really has taken a shine to Hannah, 3 goes at it he had to no avail, three is the Hungarian number for the truth, he has brains, he waited until all the dirty rivals had fallen by the wayside, one encore and our Hannah bloomed like the cactus that only flowers for a couple of days, but then it is heart-wrenchingly splendid, like a butterfly fluttering among the prickly thorns, one mustn't lay a finger on it, just marvel, Hannah is proud, awfully proud, unfortunately she immediately turns any trouble into an illness, she of all people, who knows so much about the psychological cause of every disease, now she's walking four inches above the ground, she's lovely as Cleopatra, it reminds me of the photographs that we had made, the three of us, in Tel Aviv, at Derkowitz's.
When we three, Hannah, you and I, went to make photographs at Allenby Street the day we heard the news on the radio about the siege of Stalingrad, the D-Day landings in Normandy, and the Arabs were cringing, the embers were smouldering under the ashes, casting off any pretence at humanity, the English sent the Jewish refugees back to certain death, a few Arab insurgents were executed, yet for a few moments the idyll nevertheless broke out in Tel Aviv, the wildest idyll at a time of the gentlest carnage, we went around arm in arm right along Bograshov Street, an overpowering fragrance of jasmine simply flooded out from the gardens, making our way in that concentrated scent was like swimming underwater, three women, a mother and her two daughters, you were going to study nursing in Beirut, because the world needed nurses, how pretty you are in your crisp white nurse's uniform, standing between your teachers, at the time you graduated, in that cypress-fringed garden overlooking the sea, like a sugar lump, the sun was dazzling, the trees were casting shadows, you two were laughing about something I didn't understand, there were times when you and Hannah could laugh so wildly that it hurt, my gosh, but how pretty you are in the picture! two radiant stars, two beauty queens, you with your piled-up chestnut hair, which the British wrote down as blonde in your passport, where on earth were they looking? and out of the three of us only you are smiling like the colour of water quivering delicately in the dawn, your hair a crown with tight braids round it, you're a queen with that apple-cheeked smile of yours, a juicy peach, in that low-cut, short-sleeved black dress, you in black, Hannah in white, me under you, scarf round my head, looking into the distance like into the past, my head over your heart, behind me eternally brooding Hannah in that lily-white blouse of hers, do you remember it? dear Mama sewed it, I embroidered a line of pomegranates all round the collar, blood-red pomegranates bordered with green leaves, you three, your Dad said proudly, as if we were all the same age.
That was how Dad flirted, though you were the one he adored, mother and daughters, that flatterer said, actually sisters, he only fell in love with me again because I gave birth to you, how proud he was to hold you up to the world, a startled infant with her eyes shut tight, sitting on a chair, there in the photo, in the Old City, sitting on a bentwood chair in the street, a pram next to it, a young Dad standing guard over your dreams, but 20 years later, each of us in the picture looking in different directions, three of us in three different directions, not one at the camera: you, brimming with confidence, like a wheat field, gently swaying in the breeze, floating like the moon in the sky, or the rising sun that before long will be shining full-blaze, me below you, head to one side, as if I had just been lightly slapped, and Hannah music personified, as if she weren't even there, brooding so sweetly, like a fawn ready to dart back into the trees, a gazelle vanishing behind rocks, a distant melody that is barely breathed and carries on resonating within us as if it were grieving, though there's no knowing for what, a perennial air of melancholy on her face, and tranquillity, too, a stillness of the abyss, how strange that she should be the most melancholy among us, who, if necessary, will leap up and hare over to the far side of town for medicine, meat, a book, a letter, for the most utterly trivial bits and bobs, even forgetting all about her injured leg, her temperature, her runny nose, runs, and runs and runs and yet she is the pillar.
You are going away, leaving me, up to Lebanon, to the North, in a truck with a tarpaulin, it was wartime all the same, there were several people with guns as passengers on the lorry, but when that photo was taken Derkowitz whisked it straight into the shop window, the whole world flocked to admire it, you two gave me back my beauty one last time, the three Graces, Dad said, the big fibber, yet my mood today is much better, for some reason, the sun has peeped out from behind the clouds, January is over and it is no longer pouring with rain, the tomatoes are ripening, the deluge is over, they say the harvest is going to be good this year, as you know that decides everything here, the tomatoes here are like the stock markets elsewhere, so let's enjoy it, spring is here, it doesn't matter that I'm the experienced wife of a canteen proprietor, a Mother Courage with heart disease, I'm dreadfully worried about Hannah, now she's approaching childbirth again, and you too, like she was almost crippled with Shulie, not so much by giving birth, the doctors could only shake their heads, wrinkle their brows, the quacks, our Hannah too almost bled to death, I didn't dare write this before, little Shulie's smile was what cured her, her womb, Hannah said, but in the end even that dope Norbert cleared off, there are no more threats or secret messages or reports to the police, no stranglings on street corners or shabby Party resolutions, Othello fell on his sword and didn't strangle Desdemona, let's hope he doesn't make good on his threat to kidnap his daughter, the thing with you and Robbie is completely different, you are comrades and friends, through thick or thin, and if Robbie is up in the air and has dropped out of favour for a while, and you get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go across to the other side of town, to that draughty monastery or the factory, then there's a Party meeting late in the afternoon at MOM, then in the evening a residents' meeting in the stairwell, if you carry on like this, there'll be nothing of you left over for us, just a gnawed bone
A translated excerpt from András Forgách, Zehuze, Magveto, Budapest, 2007, pp 644.