Tamás Ungár

Maids Across the Ocean

 

I'm whirling around, I've been whirling around since Christmas!" says Bernadett contentedly.
The 27-year-old from Pécs arrived home from New York two days before Christmas Eve and has been enjoying herself ever since. Bernadett feels that discos, movies, shopping, friends and chatting away till dawn help her keep her head straight.
Bernadett often thinks back to when she first stumbled. She says it was in secondary school: she failed physics in her second year. She had been a top student in primary school and secondary school wasn't going badly but she just couldn't cope with physics.
"After I failed, everyone was so condescending and treated me like an idiot," she says without sounding a bit offended. "My mother and father and brother still think I'm no good at anything."
Bernadett matriculated from night school, learning shorthand-typing on the side; she worked first as a secretary and then in a café. Four years ago she ran into a girlfriend she hadn't seen in years. Kati had just come back from the US and told her how much she enjoyed it there and how well she was paid as a bébiszitter (child-minder) in the States. Bernadett decided she would go too. Getting her American visa needed a few tricky moves. Kati got a letter of invitation for her, then a relative falsified an employer's certificate from the firm where she worked, stating that Bernadett had a very important job and they could only let her go for two weeks at the most. And that her salary was several hundred thousand forints a month. After that she went to a bank with Kati, who transferred one and a half million forints to Bernadett's account. Ten minutes later Bernadett transferred this sum back to Kati's account. This allowed her to get an account statement showing that she had one and a half million in her account. She attached this to the visa application; all of this showed the American Embassy that Bernadett's career was running smoothly. In other words, she wouldn't be a potential illegal worker. She got the visa.
With money borrowed from her mother, Bernadett bought her air ticket and arrived in New York in June 2000. Robi met her at the airport. This 32-year-old was making a living by getting work for Hungarian girls in the New World. In return the girls had to pay him a month's salary. At the airport Robi took Bernadett's passport and returned it only when he had been paid his fee. Robi rented a house where, at that time, eighteen girls were living in three rooms. Every day he took the girls for an interview or an introductory talk with the families looking for child-minders.
The whole family was always present at the interview. The parents watched how the new girl got on with the children. The mother's word was decisive, so the girls tried not to look too pretty. Bernadette pinned up her long blond hair in a bun and didn't put on any make-up; she wore her very weak glasses, concealed her shapely legs beneath a long skirt and gave herself an ungainly walk by wearing flat shoes.
Since Bernadett's English was sketchy, at first she wasn't able to get a job as a child-minder, she was taken on to do the housework for a family with three children for $325 a week. The father was a businessman, the mother didn't work. Bernadett escaped from them after four weeks.
"They never had a kind word for me, all they did was order me about," she explained her escape. "From seven in the morning till seven at night I washed, swept, scrubbed and did the dishes. The children had enough toys to fill a shop. They spread them around the floor ten times a day and it was always me who put everything back on the shelves. In the meantime the mother looked on, barking out orders, don't put that there, put it here, yes, here. My God, what a pain this Hungarian girl is!"
At the end of the fourth week, Bernadett paid Robi off and got her passport back. She called up a boy she knew from Pécs who was living in New York and asked him to let her stay for a day or two till she found a new job. He was earning $1000 a week as a house-painter and took her in. Bernadett placed an ad in a newspaper: "Hungarian girl with experience and references seeks employment as a live-in child-minder." She was given the "reference" by Klári, a girl she met in a bar, who'd been living in the States for five years and spoke perfect English. When parents inquiring about Bernadett phoned Klári, she reeled off a load of claptrap.
"Oh, Bernie is a wonderful girl. Clean, hard-working and patient. She left me because my children are bigger now and we don't need a child-minder, just someone to clean, but she wants to work with children. It's her life."
There were several dozen applicants and Bernadett chose an Italian family whose home was 70 kilometres from New York. The man was a technician in the village and his wife a book-keeper in New York. They were a loving couple, making so much noise at night that even the neighbours tossed and turned. The manly-looking husband, fond of beer and swearing, bought Bernadett a 25-year- old Oldsmobile which had eight bulletholes on one side. In this she ferried the nine-year-old boy and five-year-old girl to school and nursery school. The wife came home at seven in the evening, when she grabbed a bottle of wine, lit a cigarette and beckoned to Bernadett to come and have a chat. Sipping wine and smoking they nattered on about what the kids had been doing. The little boy usually behaved beautifully, the angelic little girl was a devil: if she didn't like something she pinched and punched Bernadett.
"I had to put up with that and I couldn't even raise my voice," recalled Bernadett. "Occasionally I complained about the girl, but she denied everything and the parents didn't believe me. One day the little girl kicked me in the head and my glasses landed in the far corner of the room. I was so humiliated I cried. In May 2001 I got an unbearable headache and that was when I did a bunk from there too."
Bernadett didn't stop till she got home to Pécs. In three months she blew the one million forints worth of dollars she had saved in the U.S. It was as if she wanted to give vent to all that she had suffered abroad in the discos and shopping centres. As her money dwindled she tried to find work, but she couldn't find anything suitable-at the best all she could get was something paying the minimum wage. In December 2001, once again with a visa acquired under false pretenses, she flew back to America.
"I was employed by a Jewish family from Connecticut," Bernadett related. He was a successful lawyer of about 50, amusing and good-natured, who worked from dawn to dusk. His wife used to be a singer, but had retired and spent the whole day on the phone. They had a three-year-old son, David. Six months later she gave birth to another son. They were very good to me, I had a lovely room, with a separate telephone line. They also bought me a cell phone and a six- months-old Nissan. I didn't have to do any cleaning, another girl did that.
In the autumn of 2002, Bernadett found herself more and more frequently out of breath. She felt weak, she was afraid of getting into the car, her face was disfigured by spots. On January 1, 2003 she woke up to find that she couldn't move her left side. She was taken to outpatients, where they established that she had nothing organically wrong with her but suffered from a panic disorder.
"I couldn't stand the maid's lot," she claimed. I suffered from being at someone's back and call all the time. I hated having to jump up at any moment. It was unbearable the way they spoilt David. Sometimes I had to prepare four or five kinds of breakfast for him because he just pushed away what he'd asked for. Once the younger one made a fuss because I pulled down his pants when I was changing his nappy and he wanted to pull them down himself. He whimpered for a whole hour, until on orders from his mother I had to go out to the rubbish bin, fish around for the dirty nappy, bring it in and put it back on him. He calmed down at that, then pulled down his pants so I was able to put his clean nappy on again. If David wanted something, he was always in the right. When I gave in my notice I cried. David's mother cried too. She understood."
Bernadett didn't take on any more live-in jobs. She hoped to become a daily help, and that the tensions of being at someone's beck and call would pass. She rented a room in a pretty scruffy location in the Bronx. Her neighbours were Hungarian girls. She went out to clean for an Irish family where she stayed five months. In all that time the two fifteen-year-old girls in the family didn't once return her greeting. The twins cut her dead. If they had their period they threw their pants in the laundry basket together with the bloody pad. Every gesture of theirs suggested that the Hungarian girl was there to tidy up.
Bernadett's anxiety got worse and she decided to come home for good. Her plane landed in Budapest on December 22. She says she'll never go abroad to be a maid again.
"It's only worth going if you've got definite plans. If, let's say, you plan to work abroad for three or four years, living a secluded life, earning enough for an apartment and a car. Once you've got the money together, you have to go home. I didn't have that sort of aim in mind. So, although I was earning well, I was spending all I earned. My illness was very expensive: I had to pay $300-$400 for a check-up. I had my mother over to stay three times and a girlfriend twice.
I spent a tremendous amount on phone calls. Every day I spoke for an hour with my mother, to be sure, when at home we hardly speak to each other. On the weekends I always went shopping and then I went out in the town. It took my mind off my loneliness. I never bought good quality things, my money went on $5 to $10 tops and cheap jeans. In the States I had about fifty Hungarian girlfriends, many of them lived just as I did. Saturdays they put on their shortest skirts, and tops that dislayed their belly buttons and breasts to the best advantage and took themselves off to the noisiest clubs and discos.
Bernadett returned home with seventy kilos of clothes. Her suitcases were weighed down by four huge photograph albums. The photos show girls giggling with abandon and a few self-confident young men. Bernadett is happy to show the albums.
"That girl with the long legs is Emese. She's been cleaning for a family for five years, and she's been going to college for three years doing business management. The father of the family screwed her and he's paying her college fees in secret. Gréta went to an arts secondary school back home; she wanted to be a dancer. She's abroad legally, she studies history at college and the college guarantees her a $600 a month job. She takes on occasional cleaning and ironing. She doesn't want to come home, she lives in Harlem, in a place where I didn't dare get out of the taxi. Andi is 36, she's been a child-minder for five years. She doesn't want to come back, she wants to get married to be able to stay on, which means she either has to marry someone who's doing well for love, or pay a guy $10,000 for a marriage of convenience. I'm afraid she hasn't even got a thousand dollars to her name. I used to go out with Adam, but he went on holiday to Thailand and when he came back he told me we couldn't make love for a while because he had spent the two weeks screwing around, and once his rubber had burst. Alex is a successful lawyer, he wanted to marry me; he sent me my second invitation letter. He bought a Saab Cabrio for me but I didn't stay a minute with him. He wasn't attractive. In fact he was really ugly: like Frankenstein with a hangover. Mari works for a florist, she earns $1,500 a month, her partner Gábor on the other hand earns four thousand. He's a scaffolder. He gets twice as much work done as anyone else because he doesn't use a harness. He got the job when a place became vacant: a guy fell from the fortieth floor. He wasn't wearing a harness.

Translated by Elizabeth Szász

Tamás Ungár
is the Pécs correspondent of Népszabadság, a national daily, which first published
this article.