The proprietress of the shop returns with a large, twenty-five-cent folding map of Budapest and its outskirts. She is taking it of course, it’s exactly what she needs but she wants to buy something more. That large new Legends of the Magyars for children, with illustrations, appeals at first, but in English it has lost its flavor. On another shelf, however, she has just spotted a schoolbook-size volume badly printed in Argentina, appropriately titled A Multunk (Our Past), with a picture of the white-haired lady who wants Hungarians wherever they happen to be to remember their past. It’s all there, from the legend of the golden stag that lured Nimrod’s sons to the promised land: a bird flies from branch to branch, a song flies from mouth to mouth.
It’s all there. She remembers looking at the same picture in her schoolbook. It was an elementary school primer for the second to the fourth grades, in which ancient legends, stories of historic battles and kings, were oddly mixed with contemporary sketches of little Gyuri’s visit to Fiume, how silver is mined, and timeless lyrics on the beauty of wildflowers.
Leafing through, it’s a shock to experience that none of this has become foreign to her. A language and stories she left behind, shed, some twenty-five years ago, read like yesterday, or simply now. As if nothing has changed, neither the reader nor the book. Sophie’s schoolchild’s feelings about Attila, the kings and legends of Hungary, have been preserved, fresh in their original color, and stored away inside her, differently, more mysteriously than in the book: the images evoked by the text and line drawings have that sudden, unexpected power, of sound that is not in the notation of the score. It is clear also that whatever more sophisticated perspectives, judgments, or suspensions of judgment subsequent study of history might produce in her, she can have no other feelings about Attila and the kings of the house of Arpad than the feelings that continue to haunt and sound from images formed in the first grades.
She is looking for a picture, but she doesn’t find it in this book: the scene of the people gathered on the frozen Danube to proclaim Matthias king while he was prisoner in Prague. She realizes, having leafed through chapters on the glorious renaissance of Hungary, the picture she thought she remembered from her elementary school primer vivid and throbbing with life is missing. Finally, from another book, or perhaps from the fleeting memory of a poem learned in class she remembers: It is the picture of a woman in a room, the mother of the future King Matthias, a writing stand with quill beside her; she stands by the window, her arm outstretched, her face lifted to the black raven who has just flown off with her letter to her son, prisoner of Frederick III in Prague.
The elementary school book of Hungarian history ends with the battle of Mohacs: 1526. Now Sophie understands why the stretch from the sixteenth to the twentieth century has to this day been a misty, insubstantial rift, a gap in time. It explains why important facts and dates she learned in school—Napoleon, the French Revolution, Cromwell, Bismarck, the Boston Tea Party and the Victorian Age—though dutifully copied from blackboard to notebook, and passing obediently from notebook to examination papers, never took root in her mind where three centuries were a swamp: endless massacres, mud, misery under Turkish hooves, Hapsburg heels. She returns the book to the shelf.
She reads, in a volume of ballads by Arany Janos, opened at random, poems she read as a child. She reads like a child: the poem walks away with her, like a man dancing with a small child, so tall she can’t see his head. She knows it’s not for real, she does not understand the power moving her, the movement stronger than emotion or meaning. This poem is silent, holding its breath, stepping like a thief or a fugitive. The poem about the woman washing a bloody sheet in the brook does not move at all. In the last stanza as in the first, she washes the torn rags, her hair gray, her knees frozen into the ice, still she washes the thin rag that the brook is still playfully snatching from hand but cannot relieve her of. The story in the middle, of her imprisonment, trial, acquittal, serves to make the single image larger and stronger, to prepare for the last stanza that turns the key once more in the lock.
She is startled to find herself in a bookstore, tall and bulky in her coat, looking out on Second Avenue, as she raises her eyes from the book.
THREE
PAPI LIKED to talk about things Sophie did when they lived in an apartment building on the other side of the river in Pest. But she herself didn’t remember
