György Ferdinandy

Hiatus

(Short story)

The refugee camp was situated out in the flood plain of the Rhine, among willow-trees that were paddling in stagnant waters, embankments and canals. One could walk over to the river within a few minutes along the dike. Here, north of the town, the banks of the Rhine were completely uninhabited. We too used to stroll out there: where else was there for one to stroll at that time? We looked at the brown spume and the Black Forest on the far bank. Somewhere over there, opposite us, was the source of the Danube as well, and far away, under the span of the skyline, the pint-sized homeland that would bring tears to one's eyes as evening drew in. Not that we had any wish to return. Barely a few months had passed since we had made it across the minefield separating barbaric East from cultivated West. All the same! We had begun to understand that sometimes there can be a well-nigh intolerable extreme not only of slavery but of freedom too. When a person loses so much that what is left is not worth it. No, those of us who were there, by the Rhine, were longing more for the other, the German bank. In our eyes, at that time, Germany was the Promised Land. An earthly paradise. It was a fact that the neighbouring giant had by then been reborn from the ruins, barely ten years after the war. The Americans had first destroyed it and then reconstructed it. And could anyone fail to be aware how industrious the Germans are! All we saw of it was how cheap petrol was over there, and the fact that one didn't have to swot up on the irregular verbs with which the French plagued our existence in the camp here. And then again, anyone with a German name who gave their word of honour that their forebears were German would be granted citizenship- and very nearly every single family in Hungary could claim ancestors like that. Here on the French side, by contrast, an exile was given the third degree over even a lousy residence permit. Is it any wonder, then, that there were some who swam across the Rhine? Even some who drowned in the attempt. But then we would eventually be granted one of the pale-blue passports issued by the UNHCR in Geneva.

By then I was the proud owner of a 125 cc motor scooter. And I had a job prospect: a Cologne-based publisher was looking for an editor. It stood to reason: I perched on the scooter, with my friend Babó awkwardly riding pillion. Rope dancer!- that's what our associates in the camp called him, because he had once been a ballet dancer in Budapest, but after a two-year break a ballet dancer was one thing he would never be again. Never mind. We scorched across the bridge over the Rhine and produced the two pale-blue passports at the frontier. The Vespa merrily scudded along on the winding German roads, going from village to village as scooters were not permitted on the autobahn. We had planned to make a stop en route at Fulda to pay a visit on Babó's friend who was doing military service there, in Hesse. What did a little detour like that matter to a meteorite that could nip along at forty miles an hour!
It was dark by the time we reached the barrier at the entrance to the barracks. I remember trying to stammer out in English what business had brought me there. "Ákos!" the guard yelled into the telephone.
At that time, after 1956, the American army was largely made up of Hungarians. Immigrants were called up to do military service as soon as they had been granted the right to settle down. If luck was on their side, they would be shipped back to the Old World. Eighteen months after the revolution had collapsed, it was they who were the occupying force for the Germans here in the Rhineland. Little over a year ago, Ákos had been a French horn player in the Budapest Opera House; now, he said, he was a piano tuner. People weren't too hot on French horn players in America. In the army he was a trumpeter: he now played réveille and taps. He didn't have much else to do. As he said, he was the occupying force for the Germans.
I no longer recall how long we stayed in the state of Hesse, or even where we found quarters. I do recall, though, that the French horn player introduced me to a red-haired dreamboat who all but rewrote my travel plans. She had silky skin as white as driven snow- that's what I remember most of all. I have dim recollections of sitting in a park on a velvet-smooth, sweet-smelling lawn. The girl was saying how she had been operated on not long before. No, she didn't remove my hand; on the contrary, she lifted up her colourful little skirt and showed me the long, pink scar in her groin.
As for me- how odd one is at the age of twenty!- a cold shiver ran down my spine. No more exploring for me, thank you very much! All the same, there was something about even this fleeting encounter, something- how should I put it?- heart-rending. Though what it might have been, that I no longer recall.

In Cologne, we found a room in a workers' hostel. On the ground floor, right below us, was a beer house where there was raucous German singing. Babó insisted on waiting for me there, in the boozer. I made a tour of the city on my own in search of my workplace.
The full name of the firm was the American Hungarian Publishing Company, and it was run by a priest, a monsignor. Father Bükkösi Fuvaros's office was up on the first floor of the headquarters, but half of one's day might easily slip by before one was admitted into the good father's presence.
For starters, my particulars were taken down by the parish secretary, a scrawny man of priestly aspect. The Reverend Father did not arrive until noon, and until then I was provided with reading matter. If you wish to pray, said the secretary, I can lend you my rosary.
Priests must have had a really cushy number here, in Germany, by all accounts. I was seated in a fragrant leather armchair that on the left bank of the Rhine would have been fit for a minister. As far as the firm went, it published a mixed list of rigorous classics and woeful dilettantes. At the moment, a gold-embossed volume of poems about Petôfi.
"That's the only way we have of stopping the Bolsheviks from appropriating poetry," said the secretary. He placed before me a critical edition of the works of Jókai that had come with the morning's post.
"There you are!" he exclaimed. "Now they're even daring to criticize Jókai!" By then a volume of essays had already been published about Father Bükkösi, the author of the volume of poems about Petôfi. "The abbot with a maiden's lips," one person had written. And the Reverend Father did indeed have dainty, kissable lips- along with a bull neck, a crewcut and deeply set eyes. He carries a little camera under his white habit, the cover blurb gushed.
"You too should write about him, son," the secretary urged. "It will be a useful letter of introduction!" he added helpfully.
Oh yes! It was high time the- let's be frank- rather tacky poems about Petôfi were brought up to date. "The poet's heart is a scarlet pouch of virtue!" It was not clear from the text whether this assertion applied to Sándor Petôfi or to Cologne's faux-Petôfi.
After which Bükkösi Fuvaros, the author in person, made his arrival. He had diminutive, chubby hands; I had time to notice that as he squeezed my hand at length.
"I want to start a paper," he breathed into my ear. A period, yes, a periodical." He was palpably carrying that little camera under his white habit. "After the revolution," he explained, "students were not the only ones to get out into the big wide world, but nobody gives a hoot about the others." 
The periodical was to bear the title of Young Worker; this was where the editorial role adumbrated in the classified advertisement would be awaiting me. No, the Reverend Father was certainly not a stupid man. The refugees from the war were slowly reaching pensionable age, so he was now starting to line up the next lot of taxpayers: the 1956 refugees.
When you're in your twenties, however, you don't use your loaf. Abhorrence welled up more strongly in me than ambition: I peeled Father Bükkösi's podgy fingers off mine and returned to him the recently signed Petôfi volume.
That is where my first trip abroad came to an end. Babó was waiting for me downstairs in the boozer. By the time I arrived, he too was singing. "There's a song, and no one is singing it!" he muttered drunkenly. When he reached the bit about "and all along the girl just giggles," he roared it out. Admittedly, I too had joined in by then: at this point in the old barrack song there was a three-syllable pause. The Germans nodded appreciatively. Rests like that were also common in their marches: Eins-zwei-drei! Even ten years after the war, they too would still come out with the old marching songs when they had a few too many.

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

György Ferdinandy
writer, poet and critic, was twenty-one when he left Hungary after the 1956 Revolution. He settled in Paris where he lived until 1964, doing menial jobs, writing stories in French and studying for a doctorate in literary history. In 1964 he moved to Puerto Rico, where he was invited to teach Spanish. He has published prolifically: collections of short stories, poems, essays and novels in Hungarian, French and Spanish. He returned to his native Budapest in 1986.