“Did you ever find out who he really was?”
“Some details, but it’s of no importance as I told you...My life is a novel,” she concludes, “somebody should write it. Why don’t you? I am sure you could make a lot of money with it. If the Russians hadn’t stolen my journals...thirty volumes from 1920 to 1945. In 1937 —— wanted to publish it. I had to refuse of course. I was still married to your father at the time and it contained things...I would never do anything that might harm his reputation. To begin all over again now? I tried a few times, with a tape recorder in Hungarian, but to find somebody to translate it. It’s impossible for me in English. But you,” she smiles, looking coyly at her daughter, “you write in English, it’s easy, all you have to do is write it in good English, the story is all there and you could make money with it.”
IT IS STRANGE even in a dream to find yourself in the country of your childhood; she had been traveling up the Costa Brava bound for Italy when suddenly the railway tracks stopped in the middle of a marshy meadow. The fields were flooded throughout the north of Spain, the Barcelona radio had announced—or was that in another dream? For here she is greeted by a group of Hungarian peasants who insist that this muddy swamp is the Danube. They invite her to a meal in the kitchen of a farmhouse whose low curved ceiling is as sooty as the inside of an oven; she speaks guardedly: Will they recognize by her accent that she is a foreigner? Why are they so friendly? One of the kerchiefed women looks like Aunt Lea from Budapest. Do they know that she left for America before the war? Is this a trap to punish for deserting? For she did not plan this visit. She came to Europe to make a tour of Spain and Italy: there was a fresco of the Last Judgment in Pisa she was supposed to see before continuing to Naples, and the geographic as well as political boundaries of Europe had been drastically rearranged so she’d be caught in the Hungarian plains.
Dreams have their own topography and it is to the country of childhood she returned, sometimes as a traveling scholar; or slyly substituting the child, dressed in regulation sailor blouse, navy pleated skirt and high-laced shoes, she descended the wide stairs of a vaulted building with a group of schoolchildren. It is the entrance to the baths of St. Gellert with its bubbling pool ringed by marble columns. The cavelike walls are hewn out of the mountain. At its peak, far above the Danube, is the statue of a martyr saint holding up the apostolic cross. The entrance forms part of an old basilica: its walls are hung with notices, like in French village churches, announcing weddings, births, baptisms, funerals, current cinema showings, books, either approved or banned by ecclesiastical authorities. As the line moves ahead the child edges toward the wall and tries to make out the writing which becomes more blurred as she comes close while, three thousand miles and three decades away from the scene, the dreamer, impatient for the information, whispers with awe, “These are the most ancient archives of memory...” The child can just barely distinguish the white square of the bulletin from the darker wall. The child, unable to make out a message, disappears. The dreamer awakes.
Some minutes are necessary to overcome the frustration of not having glimpsed a single word of the message, while in the window frame the laddered water tanks at various rooftop levels come into focus in the early morning Hudson River light. Breakfast must be prolonged to recover from the deception, the shame of having once more been so seduced. Finally, the bed made, the boots on, the coat belted and the day begun, dropping three nickels in the coin box of the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus, it is disconcerting to have to acknowledge that Hungary is a real place on the map of Europe and not the private property of the dreamer. That its capital, though heavily bombed in the last years of the Second World War, has not been utterly destroyed like Lidice, but restored to its former
