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Mother in evening dress, mother in ankle-length yellow silk dressing-gown, mother in fashionable suits, with hats, in furs, in a severe black one-piece swimsuit; mother in the bomb-shelter in long trousers, rough brown woollen coat and ski boots when she has to join in the effort to clear away the rubble; my widowed mother after the siege, elegant now in a more humble way, behind the coffee-machine making espressos; my mother in prison clothes; my mother in the grey working-smock of the Corvin department store, in her ankle-high waitressstyle shoes; my mother once more in prison clothes; my mother in smocks and high-ankled shoes again; my mother yet again in long trousers, woollen coat and ski boots as she risks everything and disappears from my sight into the tawdry little passenger train at the Southern Railway Terminal on New Year’s Eve 1956, carrying what few belongings she can take with her. All these images are my mother, there they stand in the kitchen in front of me, here they are within me, each image projected onto the previous one like an exercise in film-montage. She, who carried me inside her, who bore me into the world, who suckled me then entrusted me to others, around and within whom the world changed, a world in which she lived for my sake alone, only for me. There, within me, they move in procession, these old, outworn, superannuated versions of her own propria persona, though in America I find yet another one, one that cooks, irons, cleans, uses screwdrivers and files, looks after other people’s children, bakes cakes for others, one that now wants to make me a gift of America.
I, in the meantime, have treacherously left it till our last few days together: I have been planning the confession that I know will strike at her very heart. I don’t make a good conspirator, my face, my voice, my behaviour, devil knows what, perhaps her own instinct tells her, gives away my secret desire to say something to her. What I have to confess is that, a few years after she left, I sold the enormous, priceless baroque tabernacle, the most beautiful, most valuable, most treasured family possession of her childhood in Arad; that I sold it so I could buy a little second-hand sailing boat to use on Lake Balaton.
It was well over two metres high; it was as imposing as a cathedral. On the upper part there were various forms of baroque volutes and scrolls, an inset giltframed painting of a concert party and two doors like altar screens bearing mirrors. Below them the bureau lid folds down to make a writing table. Behind the mirrored doors and the writing table, and indeed beneath them, countless drawers and recesses, and over the entire surface of highly polished dark brown wood, panels of miraculous marquetry, all kinds of different delicate floral designs. The lower part of the piece comprised a wider section, with three baroque drawers, each with two undulations and ornate baroque brass handles, the whole piece standing on short squat legs. Once the Arrow Cross were chased from our hillside, the Russians, who occupied the villa, took one of the drawers and burned it for firewood. After the siege was over my mother stretched her remaining resources and hired a craftsman to heal the gaping wound.
In the upper part of it, inside the mirrored doors, and behind the writing surface lay forty, almost invisible secret drawers. If I hadn’t taken what jewels remained after the Russians left over to my godmother on the night of my mother’s arrest, together with her not inconsiderable collection of gold and hard currency—the value of the villa at Balatonföldvár that had, cleverly, been sold just before the general nationalisation—and buried it all in Gizi’s garden with the help of her husband, no doubt the two dim plainclothes policemen sent the next dawn to search the house in the presence of the caretaker’s wife, wouldn’t have found it hidden in one of those secret drawers. But Gizi and her husband had taken another person into their confidence, just in case. After their deaths I wanted to dig up the buried treasure, but it was gone.
It is not easy living with a piece of national heritage. In my childhood I had always to be careful not to bump into it, not to scratch it or cause it any damage. Any pieces that had fallen off would be collected in a tin cigarette box so that they could be restored to their rightful place. My mother referred to it as the Maria Theresa, sometimes as the secrétaire, occasionally as the trumeau. It was a genuine tabernacle above, the middle part really a secrétaire or trumeau, as it was used as a writing table. The woman who bought it knew her furniture. It was from her I discovered that it was not from the time of Maria Theresa, but earlier and Southern German in origin. She could see at a glance that I knew nothing about it. I have no idea how much it was worth. She made me an offer and I who am incapable of bargaining and wanted to be through with the deal as soon as possible on account of my bad conscience, immediately accepted it. I don’t even dare write down the sum: it was roughly what the owner asked for the much-used, second-hand, small sailing boat without the sails. Today, it would be of astronomical value.
Sailing is joy, freedom, passion, incomparable delight; a heavenly feeling. One continually longs for it, dreams about it, suffers its absence in a way quite different from anything one might feel for a piece of furniture, however beautiful. That was more or less what I intend to say when my mother actually gets round to asking me if there is anything I want to ask or say. Because she suspects there is. And then I tell her, in fragments as if, rather clumsily, wanting to make light of it all: I confess my sin and resignedly await the thunderclap. It does not hesitate in coming. In a sharp, harsh, almost coarse voice, never heard before, she shouts at me. Have I lost my senses? Do I know what I’ve done? Do I know the value of that family heirloom I have so gaily disposed of? Do I know who owned that beautiful piece of furniture? It was her great-aunt, someone she knew in her childhood, Mrs János Damjanich, wife of the legendary patriotic general of the 1848 revolution, one of the thirteen Martyrs of Arad! All that for a sailing boat! She gasps, makes flailing movements with her arms, mutters, cries out in fury, pushes things aside, walks up and down the room with great heavy strides and I suspect would love to hit me. I have never in my life seen her like this. She doesn’t even ask how much I got for it. I am not in a hurry to tell her. Then she is quiet for a long time and I can practically hear her silent indignation, her furious inner monologue; I can see her disappointment, feel her pain. It’s just as it was when I was a child and had misbehaved: I don’t know whether to sneak out or stay, to say something and to make excuses or to hold my tongue until she calms down.
That night we eat in near silence. The plate makes a loud noise as she bangs it down on the table in front of me. But I have to speak. I am leaving in a couple of days and we can’t part like this. I tell her it all happened in 1958, in the course of a major ideological purge, when, with the active encouragement of my boss, Endre Illés, my late aunt’s lover, a great coward and opportunist, they kicked me out of my job as reader and editor, with, what was more, a cadre reference that ensured I would not find steady work for six years. She knows this, of course, but not in detail. I lived by taking on translations, writing reviews, editing anthologies, doing a spot of reading for publishers, and some radio work—sometimes in poverty, sometimes even in great poverty, occasionally slightly better off, but never free of material care. My then girlfriend, later my first wife, had a little house in Tihany, on the north side of Lake Balaton, that served as the temptation to commit the sin. My mother has never been sailing, all my enthusiasm washes off her. Nevertheless, I feel her fury is abating, which may be, in fact it almost certainly is, because she understands that my life was not easy at the time, and that sailing was a rare source of happiness. For a few days more she keeps returning to the subject, but she is merely chiding, and I am once again her little Nicky, a thoughtless and useless son, but still her little Nicky.
Then there we are at the airport, standing together, my socialist passport in my hand, her kiss on my cheek, with the little cross she draws with her fingers on my brow, and, looking back, I can see her suspiciously glittering eyes and how she tries to mask her feelings by smiling bravely, and then we lose sight of each other, and the Atlantic once again rises between us, separating us for a few more years.

Translated by George Szirtes

Miklós Vajda
an essayist, critic and literary translator, was the literary editor of this journal (1965–1990), and its editor (1990–2005). His work includes a great number of translations from British, American and German authors, and about five dozen plays for the theatre, in additon to anthologies that he selected and edited from Hungarian writing in English and British/American writing in Hungarian.