Gábor Németh

Even If They Do Look Inside

I have a name, and yet I don't.
I open my ID booklet, everything's in order, just that secret name of mine, that's not in it.
I swear to God, I do have one. They put it in a big book, there in Saint Stephen's Basilica. It was a Dutchman who gave it to me, actually. A Dutchman who held me as the baptismal water came. A half-Hungarian Dutchman. The son of my grandma's brother. Uncle Johan. And this became my invisible name, too. No Uncle, of course. Just Johan. Like the name of a tree. The yarran, for example. In Dutch they write Johan with just one 'n', and that's elegant.
Back then in '56, Uncle Johan was obviously not yet an Uncle, he can't have been more than twenty-five. Was he there in the Basilica at all? The christening was some time in December; the fraternal tanks had long set themselves up. Or was the border still open, here and there?
Uncle Johan was a racing driver.
My godfather's a racing driver, you see?
He sat in his Porsche, his open-top Porsche, for Uncle Johan pays no heed to the great Russian winter, and with a long scarf around his neck he tears across Europe to find me under the holy baptismal water in time, to save my soul from Kádár. The Yankee machine-gun clattered away on the back seat. Uncle Johan was never frightened of death.
Or is that not quite how it happened?
I look at the pictures, the old family photos, or rather I'd look at them but they're packed away somewhere. (It's a bit strange that the most of my very Catholic Dutch cousins look like Sephardic Jews, especially my godfather. Actually, to this day, I'm still not able to ask about this.) Aunt Toncsi ended up there, she was part of the Dutch programme to fatten up the children, sometime in the twenties. Invited by the Queen, or something. She came home, then went back again. She fell in love with a Dutchman, a very Dutch and very Catholic Dutchman, they made themselves twelve children, after every three boys they had a girl, right up until nineteen fifty-five. The ones that took after their mother had what they called uncontrollable black curls. Most of the boys were damnedly, horribly handsome, with olive-brown skin. They might even make you think of the tough Jews in Once Upon a Time in America. So that's how I always imagined the Dutch. Six foot tall, smiling Brooklyn gangsters.
There's a type of cigarette you can't get nowadays. Stuyvesant. Peter Stuyvesant, the man who founded New York. At one time that's what I smoked, when anything, esoterically proving that I was on the point of being Dutch.
A little bit Dutch at heart. A Dutch learner smoker.
Actually, just to let you know, New York was originally called New Amsterdam.
A habit it was a shame to give up.
The world as a Dutch colony. A Dutch planet. Basic Dutch-the language everyone would try to speak in. Ear, nose and throat specialists would have their work cut out. Einstein is leaving the room, so he turns to the other Nobel laureates in Dutch: Gentlemen, you can switch to Hungarian now.
Sometimes the Dutch come home, back to Hungary.
The situation is complicated by the fact that my godmother is Dutch, or rather entirely Hungarian, as she is the daughter of my grandma's other sister, who stayed behind in Hungary. So my godmother was born Hungarian, but when she went to visit Aunt Toncsi in the beginning of the sixties, a Dutchman got into her compartment in Vienna, and they started to talk. She and Robi. And I always like to imagine that by the time they reached Aachen, Robi had made a wife out of Márta in the buffet car.
So the Dutch come sometimes, like Aunt Toncsi's husband, come in whopping great Western cars, we go out to dinner at a hundred miles an hour, even though Uncle Johan (he is Johan, too, just to make things harder) is blind in one eye, because he was wounded in the war, or had an accident, I can't remember. But he's a mechanic. So obviously because he's a mechanic he is allowed to drive, he knows more about cars than non-mechanics who can see properly, the two things cancel each other out, I told myself, trembling, as we were going at a hundred and fifty. It is nineteen sixty-two. Quite simply, the Hungarian police had nothing that could catch up with him. I am a bit scared of Uncle Johan anyway, strict and playful at the same time, and if we are eating I can't take my eyes off his glass eye.
On the subject of eating, the Dutch like Hungarian food, at home they are stingy, of course, it drives my grandma round the twist at home when they count the number of meat slices, if there are seven people for dinner, so my grandma tells me, then seven pieces of meat are cooked, the mind boggles. While down here, Hungarian chicken legs are flying all over the place. It doesn't matter. Not that I mind, just it's strange that arithmetic doesn't call the shots in the same way down here.
And look how thin they slice bread, she points out.
Almost thin enough to see through.
And there are no curtains in front of the windows. You walk down the street, you can peep in anywhere, obviously no one actually peeps in anywhere, but away they live their lives so that you can peep in at any time and not see anything shocking.
Transparent.
Once the Dutch brought glass marbles, a bag of them.
A little bag, a bit like what you get garlic in nowadays. Tight little nylon rhombuses. There are thirty marbles, I have never seen marbles as nice as these in my life, a bit like glass eyes, maybe, but they're really nice. I roll them on the floor. The marble rolls, the Sun plays with it, not just me. It spins, some blue light glows from inside. Must be a nice place, Holland.
And I can't tell you how much I love Dutch cocoa. I come home from the park, after football, there's the pan on the stove, down it in one. I think my grandma left it there on purpose.
She made it.
Real Dutch cocoa.
Droste.
On the tin box is a Dutch woman, with a funny whatsit on her head, like she were a nun. The woman is shown as Dutch. Wooden clogs, of course, and folk dress, shame you can't wear a windmill. There's a tray in the nun's hands with a tin of the same cocoa on it, then there in miniature is the Dutch woman on the tin painted on the tin, holding herself in her hands, et cetera. If the tunnel were fine enough, you could see into infinity.
You can still have a look, of course, for an eternity.
As if you were standing at the sea.
I read that in 1939 the Dutch made a decision, nice and resentfully, that if you guys are stupid enough to invade us, then we'll become an island, flood eastern Holland with water, it'll work, just think, it's all below sea level.
I wonder what anyone in eastern Holland thought about that idea.
We would get to the edge of the continent, and there would be Sneezy and Grumpy waiting for us, we'd punch our tickets, then off to Amsterdam, some nice little café.
I don't know if I mentioned it, but the Dutch live on a boat, that boat doesn't go anywhere, but it's a good mooring, with grass all over half of it, I mean that's not bad.
But being Dutch is pretty good anyway.
If you're Dutch, and for some reason you have to live in a house, if your boat has a hole in it or something, then there is a pulley-rope hanging from the wall, you don't have to carry the piano up on your back.
Actually it could have been good for me, too, I could have been Dutch, if my grandma had stayed there rather than her sister. If I see or hear the word Dutch, the chance of another life appears before me, simpler, more gallant, more cheeky, more free, to name four things for a start.
For example, in this other life I would have a boat, with two masts and black tulips planted on it. From time to time I would gobble some very expensive raw fish at the market, and down it with a little gin. In a heroic struggle, I would thieve land from the sea.
Now let us look at how I formed my first conception of the Hollander. Let's face it, it's no simple story, and I'll show you why.
I'm running a temperature, at times like this my mother tells me a story, maybe from my favourite book of fairy-tales, maybe my favourite story, the temperature and the book together, that really gets to me, the Stone Heart really gets to me, and then it gets to the part where "Now there is so much money in the country, the people have lost their honour and turned bad. On Sundays, young men dance and whoop, and curse so strongly it is painful to listen to; but things were still different back then, and even if he looks in through the window, I will say the same thing
I have said so many times: Michael the Hollander is the cause of this decline."
Even if he looks in through the window.
How about that?
The icy sweat on my back.
The Hollander looks in, his boots were made from the skin of a pair of oxen, he looks in, in he comes, tears your heart out, puts it in a jar on a shelf of the larder and in its place in your ribcage, he lays a cold stone.
The last thing you needed before lunch, as László Garaczi would say.
I imagined that stone a lot of times. Rugged, about the size of a properly-grown avocado, and cold, but above all heavy, once it's inside, it presses on your stomach, so it hurts like hell, and so after a while you start screaming.
It doesn't even hurt, according to the Hollander.
It doesn't hurt but: ".is quite pleasantly cool. Why should a heart have to be warm? In winter the heart's warmth doesn't help, a good cherry brandy is more use than a warm heart, and in summer, when everything is suffocating and hot, you won't believe how this kind of heart will cool things down. And as I say, neither worry, nor alarm, nor inane compassion, nor any other affliction can make this kind of heart beat."
That inane compassion shouldn't make it beat.
The thing is, the max is that if you throw away the inane compassion, the pain, then you throw away pleasure, too, and the only thing that remains up there is a big, unblemished surface, and under that there really is nothing, just curiosity, easily drugged with cold and easy methods, the curiosity as to what comes next, what life can throw up in your path.
Occasionally we would go out to dinner with them, to the nice places, Margaret Island, the Grand Hotel, that kind of thing. A lot of us around a long table, the adults talk with each other, it's totally dull, and out of boredom Paula and I start to play tag. The pebbles crunch as we spin around. Paula's pretty good at it, she's a year older, it's true, it's only later she'll get fat, later still she'll be cheerful and cheeky fat, it is only when she's fat she'll start being cheeky. Watch it, there'll be trouble, that's all she can say in Hungarian. All she can say in her own mother tongue. Now she's still slim and running after me. I run, I get away, while running I bend over to squeeze underneath some metal bar painted green. I pulled myself up at exactly the wrong moment. I straightened myself up and immediately the world began to change. What's this heat in my ears? Why is everything moving so slowly? Someone in a distance is saying, Jesus, he's cracked his head. I cracked my head because of the Dutch. Watch it, there'll be trouble. The Dutch have cracked my head. Unfortunately I can't take a look at the hole from above, but if it's cracked, obviously you can look inside. Shame about that, because it must be pretty interesting. My mum takes me to hospital by taxi.
The way not to cry is to empty your heart.
That is how the Dutch recipe would go.
You put a cold stone inside there.
Or you can do what really happens.
That it is not a stone they put in you, but money. This is what they shove down your throat nowadays. As far as I am concerned, it is still better to be Dutch, or at least it was better until now: they had the world's most entertaining currency, beautiful yellows, mature oranges, light blues, relaxed, asymmetric design. About a thousand times nicer than the Euro.
My grandma kept her sewing kit in a Dutch chocolate tin, if I scrape all the buttons out of it, and all the thread, the tips of my fingers will smell of chocolate. Chocola. That's the way they write chocolate in Dutch, sounds a little disgusting, roughly like a turkey taking a crap, but who cares. Dutch chocolate is just the best in the world. Otherwise they wouldn't bring it every time. Sometimes they bring a ball, too, my godfather brings it in his Porsche, and on the first day it's burst by the tram on Pozsonyi Street. A beautiful, red, rock-hard plastic ball: I am king of Saint Stephen's Park. For about seven minutes. Or is it not even red, am I making everything up? Round about the second time we're on the attack, someone kicks a long pass forwards, a bit like one of Zoli Varga's, but just too long and out of the Park, right underneath the number fifteen tram.
Nothing is left of it.
I'm not crying.
I'm sitting on my mother's lap, she's taking me to hospital. She holds me tightly, doesn't fuss about the blood, it's nice as she holds me, the taxi is light green, a brand new Moskvitch, it's nice to look out of, the houses fade away nicely behind us. Let's say it's still something I can credit the Dutch for.

Translated by David Robert Evans

Gábor Németh's
latest work, Zsidó vagy? (Are You Jewish?), a novel, from which this text has been excerpted, appeared in 2004, and was reviewed in the previous issue of HQ.