BLUEPRINT

For my sister, whom I can no longer turn to...

The Kivadár estate lay alongside the poplar-lined highway in the valley of the Rinya, some five kilometres from the Municipal town of Nagyatád in County Somogy. When it came into my grandfather’s[1] possession in 1864 (since great-grandfather[2] shared out his estates between his sons during his lifetime) there were probably only a few farm-labourers’ dwellings and stables there. Grandfather was twenty-five then and newly married. He began building right away: a granary, a sheep-pen, workshops, and to give the soul its due, a church and a presbitery. The mausoleum’s turn came later; which was where he buried my grandmother[3]. That is when he put down the foundations of my future home as well, adding to and beautifying it for another twenty years. At the turn of the century he sank an artesian well, raising above it a water tower and bath-house. When grandfather died in 1919, my father[4] inherited Kivadár, and moved there with us. We were four boys, myself just a year-old. My sister[5] was born in Kivadár, and in his elation my father hoisted the family standard onto the pinnacle of the kastély[6]. This was a crenellated projection of the house, where we would later on frequently climb to through the attic, to watch the birds on the chestnut tree or the visitors below with their broad-brimmed hats taking tea in its shade.

Not as if my father didn’t have elsewhere to live. Prior to coming to Kivadár, he farmed at Kopaszhegy (Bald Mountain), in the Kadarkút municipality, where his house had been completed sometime around 1912 in the crook of a hill. It was a modern house compared to the one at Kivadár, there just wasn’t anything around it. Far from the paved road, only saplings and seedlings indicated the outline of the future park, but the visitor - as if in recompense - was greeted in the entrance hall by a stained glass window designed by József Rippl-Rónai[7], a friend of my father’s. Father married in 1913, and this was where he brought my mother[8] from Berlin, with their first-born[9] in her arms. Barely had they settled down, when the outbreak of the First World War interrupted the pleasures of their shared life, of setting up their home. My father joined up as an officer in the reserve at Pécs, and my two middle brothers were born there. I arrived in Budapest at the end of the war.

My mother probably didn’t really consider Kopaszhegy her true home as she never had much chance of getting attached to it. I believe she was not at all put out by the move to Kivadár. Theirs was a late union: Father was forty-seven, Mother thirty-six, when they tied the knot, yet in no time they founded a large family, as if cocking a snook at the ogre of war. The family home was no novelty to my father, but it must have been so to my mother.

My maternal grandfather[10] was the Monarchy’s ambassador to Germany for twenty-two years, and Mother lived in Berlin from her teens until her marriage. Grandfather also left the German capital in 1914, retiring to his estate at Csór in County Fejér. One of his last official functions at the age of seventy-four, was to hand to Kaiser Wilhelm Franz Joseph’s letter about the declaration of war in the park at Potsdam. I know from family discussions that he himself opposed getting involved in the war.

I wonder how my mother would have regarded Kivadár? How would she have felt there, in the southernmost cranny of Somogy, having spent the best part of her youth in a metropolis? Perhaps trying to describe what I remember of the place, might shed some light on that too.

The house stood next to the highway, in the longer leg of a double curve, which points to the fact that the settlement and the house had already been there when the road was surfaced. If that was not the case, why the curve? - I asked myself a as a young lad. I received a reply only later: It had been grandfather’s doing, so that the highway, running through his estate, should become Kivadár’s main street. That meant a great advantage to him. While the less fortunate landowners had to extricate themselves from the potholes of the muddy village lanes, the surfaced road led all the way to his threshold. Be that as it may, the din, or should I say, the sounds of the farm, easily filtered through the open window into my room, whence I could see as far as the farmstead on the opposite side of the road. The pole of the draw-well (shadoof), reared its shape in the forefront, at its foot a trough hewn out of a poplar’s trunk, where the field-hands came to water the animals, and the buffalo drover with his water-cart. As soon as the extremely slowly shambling buffalos caught sight of the well in the sultry summer heat, they perked up, and if there was a puddle around the well, only the yoke deterred them from immersing themselves in it. Behind the well was the long cowshed with the manure-pit at its remotest point, then the stables for the workhorses and somewhat further away a sawmill. When planks, or beams were being cut, I could play at guessing the thickness and length of the log and what was being cut from it, merely by listening to the whine of the saw. The din of the workshops in the shade of the big tree, punctuated by the rhythm of the smith’s hammer blended with the men’s voices driving, calling, scolding the animals and coloured by female voices now, because there were also flats in the block: those of the wheelwright, the liveried coachman and the schoolmistress. When the schoolmistress moved nearer to the school, and when we became owners of a car, the chauffeur and his family took her place. Most of the long, thatched farm-labourers’ dwellings consisted of four-five dirt-floored single rooms and kitchens; the entire family living in the one room. The coachmen and the field-hands frequently slept over in the stables. When electricity was installed in the house, the power plant with its purring oil-engine was set up in the area between the stables and the workshops. Because of their proximity these flats also received electricity, but not the rest of the houses on the estate, except for that of the steward.

Thus, most every part of the day was orchestrated. In the other leg of the double curve, where the road turns toward Nagyatád, there was a wooden bridge, which, every time a vehicle crossed it, emitted a thudding signal, intensifying the racket made by the vendors and gypsies, the chanting of the pilgrims. In winter all this became more muted. Crows scanned the road from the bare poplars for delectable droppings plopping from under the horses harnessed to sleighs. Their plaintive cawing kept piercing the air. We used to shoot at them with our Flobert rifles during the Christmas holidays.

Our house was not ‘surrounded by a huge, beautiful park’ – as such places are usually described – but stood at the edge of it, virtually built into the estate.  Looking out from the first-floor window of the west-wing, the gravel-covered road bisecting the park directed one’s gaze as far as the vineyard and the press-shed, and past that to the apiary with the traditional old lime-tree and the millstone table, surrounded by the orchard. This image somehow lives in my memory like a kind of ground plan. I watched my father’s funeral from that window. I was eleven, and I was not allowed out of the house due to my illness. On that gravel-road, then covered in snow, four men carried the coffin to the mausoleum, which stood in the cusp of sparsely planted oaks, poplars and pines, past the apiary. The black suits of the men and the coffin stood in sharp contrast to the whiteness of the snowy landscape. The previous evening wailing women came to the house, surrounding the catafalque in the entrance hall. They recited a litany of Father’s fortunes-misfortunes, lamenting his loss. Their whining and wailing invaded my room, and I went downstairs the better to listen to them. Squeezed among them, I could feel the warmth of their bodies.

Grandfather had purchased the marble for the mausoleum in Austria, in the vicinity of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee. That is where he had his summer residence, a one storey holiday villa, which he gave to my mother during his lifetime, perhaps in his joy that she had presented him with five grandchildren. His other two sons were childless, and his daughter, my Aunt Eszter[11] never got married. The entrance to the mausoleum was decorated by a tympanon resting on four columns and guarded by two lions. The crypt was under the chapel, and the coffin was carried through the back gate to its place, into the vacant cement chamber next to that of my grandparents. Later it was closed off by an inscribed marble slab.

Grandfather had used the leftover marble to construct the wide stairs and the floor of the glassed-in terrace. One could enter the salon straight from the terrace, since this wing of the house was built onto an elevated foundation. It was a cool room, the wisteria-covered glassed-in terrace protecting it from the heat of the setting sun. As a teenager I spent a lot of summer afternoons here. We called it the salon, although with its bookcases and leather wingchairs the old-fashioned expression ‘smoking-room’ would have been more appropriate for it. In the padded armrest of one of the high-backed wingchairs there was a copper-collared socket that could accommodate the leg of a swiveling reading-board. When it was not in place, some absentminded visitors sometimes dropped their cigar or cigarette ash into it. This only amused me until I too started using the reading-board, and had to first scrape the dirt out from the hole.

To open the bookcase, its glass door had to be lifted up and with the aid of an expandable band slid back into its aperture. This little procedure of getting at it, only augmented the excitement of finally holding the book in my hand. Ármin Vámbéry’s signed books and the works of other orientalists stood in a row on the shelves. This somehow accounted for the bust of the meditating Buddha and the other eastern bronze figurines on top of the cabinet standing opposite. Among the authors I recall the names of Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, Ligeti and Burton; who for a while were my favourite companions. At that time I certainly could never have guessed how far, to the southernmost brim of Asia, fate would lead me.  From the well-organized rows of Hungarian editions, classics and memoirs, some books virtually leapt out: Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (in Hungarian!) and Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. I frequently turned the leaves of the latter in the leather armchair’s reading-board. It was an even more exciting guide than the accounts of the orientalists, into the jungle of human behaviour and passions. On a marble-topped little table, between the bookcase and the Buddha bust, Roman and Ancient Greek pots and statuettes stood, among them my favourite, a replica of the Cretan gold vessel with the famous bulls. One of the bulls is already in the tamer’s net, the other one (or was it the same?) is stomping on the tamer, while the latter’s associate is trying to restrain it by its horns. All this decorated in beaten gold. It was beautiful! I loved to handle it.

I came upon Uncle Viktor’s[12] papers in the cupboard under the bust of the Buddha. Uncle Viktor had been grandfather’s brother, a bachelor. The family regarded him as somewhat of an eccentric. He spent most of his time in Vienna, where he worked on and honed his inventions and played his music. He also had an estate and house at Babócsa, which was his share of the paternal land distribution. Judging from the drawings and descriptions found in the cupboard, he was engrossed in the problems of the newly electrified transport service, especially with how to prevent accidents being caused by trams hurtling along among peacefully walking pedestrians and citizens going about their legitimate business. He sketched the mechanisms of various alarm- and brake-systems, but it appears that he did not trust any of them. Hence his final solution was to place a man in a basket attached to the tram’s front, who would use a long stick to disperse the pedestrians stumbling in the path of the dangerous vehicle. His marches, dedicated to the archdukes with the printed titles Erzherzog... Marsch, revealed his musical predilection. His piano pieces were short and to the point, with captions such as: Sunrise, Birdsong, Rain. I believe he was a better composer than inventor. He bequeathed his estate at Babócsa, Halastó-farm to us four brothers. His nieces tried to contest his will, but to no avail.

Father took me to Halastó on several occasions, because it had been agreed that it would be mine once I ‘grew up’. The estate, some twenty-five kilometres from Kivadár, was being managed by a steward, who used to show us around, after which we had lunch at his house. He had two pretty daughters with whom I used to dance, when I was in senior school.  The younger one had a stunted arm. At the end of the school holidays, when we went back to the boarding school at Pécs, we got on the train at Babócsa. She came to the station to see me off. I was so surprised that in my embarrassment I wasn’t even nice to her, but afterwards I thought of her a lot.

My godfather, Uncle Béla[13] had a house at Babócsa. I didn’t know him, as he died young. His widow[14] became the wife of the painter Miklós Merész, whom the family referred to as the pictor. They ignored me; I had no luck with my godparents, along with my brother Zsiga who could claim Kaiser Wilhelm as his godfather.

Grandfather’s estates were situated alongside the highway from Babócsa to Nagyatád. If there was land for sale, he bought it – he was the investor in the family. We never returned home empty-handed from Halastó. Some sort of a fortification was located there during Turkish times, and at tilling time the plough often turned up rusted harnesses, weapons and pots. It sometimes happened that my father got off the cart to discover something at the foot of a mound. He had a good eye for this. At Kopaszhegy he even found some stone age implements. We took these pieces home, and the better ones, nicely cleaned, found a home on the table or in the cabinet.

The other salon was between the smoking-room and the dining room. We could call it the Ladies’ salon, where the ladies retired after meals, but this was not the custom in our home, where everyone followed my mother when she rose from table. This room was decorated with an electric chandelier. When the white-gloved footman switched it on, its light a glistening reflection in the windows of the china cabinets, bringing to life the silver and porcelain figurines lined up on the shelves. Even the ancestors’ portraits on the walls were brightened up by it. We rarely used this salon, only if we had ‘distinguished’ visitors, or so many that they did not fit into the smoking room. It became a kind of transit room, to be traversed on the way to the dining room.

This is where I discovered the great treasure trove. The corner cupboard was jam-packed with magazines, exhibition catalogues, books. Ady, Móricz, Kosztolányi, Babits, Krúdy, but also the works of some lesser greats, such as Ambrus, Csáth, Cholnoky co-mingled on the shelves with issues of Nyugat[15]. It might still have been at Kopaszhegy that Father amassed all this, and they were placed in the cupboard believing he would arrange them at a later date. I was once again left to my own devices to deal with this discovery. It swept me off my feet like a torrent; there and then on the carpet I launched into the books, ogling the pictures, while outside kerchiefed peasant girls were weeding the garden path. I was a fourteen-fifteen year old youngster, a ‘country boy’. For me the outside world was represented by the high school at Pécs, summer holidays at Pörtschach and the Lido, the houses of the neighbouring landowners, and the cinema at Nagyatád. When we visited the capital, I used to watch the Danube from the windows of the Hotel Gellért or the Carlton, but I had never yet been to the Opera. I only became a city dweller after my matura, when I enrolled at university. It was as if this heap of books had been a message from my father, a continuation of the paternal body contact, when, sitting on his knee I used to listen to him reading out the poetry of Petőfi. The invective: ‘...don’t trust the German, even his liver is deceitful’ (or was it ‘fetid’?), stayed with me as a memory of one of these recitals, though to this day I don’t know where the quote came from. I have learnt a lot from the books found in the cupboard about what at the time was called Hungarian Reality; it dawned on me, my ears and eyes were opening up. Listening to the natter of our visitors and the people hanging around the wheelwright’s or the stables, more and more details got etched into my mind of what life was about out there. In my imagination Az elsodort falu (The Village That Was Swept Away[16]), set up the scenery of the stage onto whose backcloth the First World War’s images were projected. (When during World War II, Army M.O.s examined us as recruits, it reminded me of how in the novel the village lads tried to wriggle out of being conscripted in the First World War: they ate chalk, and masturbated to excess. They hoped that their pale faces – the presumed result of the above two actions – would suffice to classify them as unfit for service.)

The windows of the dining room, which opened off the room with the chandelier, looked out onto the big lilac bush, and past it onto the livery stable. No one deemed that view upsetting, least of all the guests, while savouring their hors-d’oeuvre with the monogrammed silver forks; the stable (a handsome building) and the horses inside it, were part and parcel of the household. We children also knew that the cesspit was in the vicinity of the lilac bush, and that its opening was camouflaged by lawn. A gipsy family undertook its cleaning. They came either at dawn or late at night. Its contents were emptied into the barrel on the buffalo-drawn cart with buckets hung on poles. They carried out their work in silence, chewing tobacco. All one could hear was the panting of the buffalos. The stench of the pit tranquilly mingled with the heady perfume of the lilac blossoms. A nightingale nested in the bush. The window of my room (above the dining room) was on the same level with the top of the bush. When everything became quiet, the nightingale, after a few introductory flourishes, broke into its inimitable, exquisite song, and I listened to it, falling asleep happily.

The rear entrance of the house also opened in this direction. Its gate was locked by an unwieldy, huge key, and it had also an iron bar with which to secure it. Nobody took the locking of the gate seriously, and on summer nights the covered entrance became a sort of chinwag place for the staff. In winter the chopped firewood was stored here, and when Mother wanted to go for a ride, that is where her horse, Holló was led. Having finished his rounds around midday, the milkman too parked his cart here. His cart resembled a booth mounted on four wheels, with a door that could be slid to both sides from the middle. He delivered milk, butter, cream cheese and sour cream to private customers in Nagyatád - not only the estate’s produce, but also that of the farm workers, in labelled cans. (The farm workers’ payment in kind, the kommenció, included also the keeping of cows. The cows were driven to the pasture in the morning by the cowherd. When they returned in the evening, they knew exactly which way to turn to their own shed.) The milkman had to leave at dawn for the fresh milk to be on the Nagyatád burgher’s table in time for breakfast. He also carried the mail, and did the shopping for the chef if he needed something in a hurry, and for the farm women too, if they wanted buttons, thread or the like. Having finished his rounds, he then sorted the mail, accounted for the change, and got ready for the following day’s work. The milkman was called Imre Csáfor, and he could without doubt have been entrusted with the management of a large company. The milkman’s horse, which knew the streets and houses of Nagyatád just as thoroughly as his master, was housed in a smaller stable, together with two standby horses. Only a wall separated it from the livery stable, but that wall and the separate entrance denoted the hierarchical order obviously valid for horses as well, according to which the milkman’s horse and its mates had to eat apart from the coach horses and the saddle horses.

The star of the stable, the above mentioned Holló, had a stall next to the entrance, where she could move around at will. When she caught sight of my mother, she greeted her with a nod, and with a graceful movement of her head accepted the sugar cube from her hand. Holló was a white Lipizzaner mare with faded flecks. She was aged over twenty, a great age in the life of a horse. Mother rode her side-saddle, and on these occasions Holló paraded with her, moving with gorgeous elegance. It was quite obvious that they loved each other.

My horse was called Koma. I was given him as a birthday gift. He was a playful, lithe of step, black Arab purebred, but quite stubborn. If a thick root happened to be in his way in the woods, he stopped and was disinclined to step across it. Perhaps he thought it was a snake. When he galloped, he virtually flew. And I flew too, right off him, when a hare cut in front of us at the edge of the corn-field, and he suddenly reared. I broke my right arm, and had to learn to type with my left hand. I went out riding every day. We wandered all over the fields, the woods, the neighbouring villages, but we avoided Nagyatád, because the traffic and the noise made Koma nervous. Our friendship ended on a tragic note. During the Christmas vacation I decided to harness him to a sled. The brittle plank of the freshly snow-covered bridge at Fácános collapsed under him, and Koma broke his leg as he stepped into the gaping hole. The splinter of the bone stuck through his skin. I ran panting for help. The last house on the estate belonged to our forester, Kálmán Herlicska. As soon as I entered, he saw that there was trouble. He went to get the steward, with whom he returned on a sleigh. Both of them had rifles. After a short deliberation at the bridge, they decided that Koma had to be shot. I have never mounted a horse since. The steward was called Jenő Jády. He was a handsome strapping man with a walrus moustache, like a character from a Zsigmond Móricz novel. It dawned on me much later that he might have felt guilty about Koma’s death. After all, it would have been his responsibility to keep the bridges in good condition. I couldn’t ask him, because by then he was no longer the steward, but a certain Mr. Horgos, whose title was bailiff, and whose function it was to modernize the estate.

Behind the stables was the oat-store and the coachmen’s room. There were three of them: József Gönye, (uncle) János Kernyák and János Horváth. Gönye was the groom, and number one coachman. He saddled the mounts, and rode out with them. At confirmation time he drove the bishop’s four-in-hand with his ostrich-plumed derby on his head. The horses knew what he wanted from the slightest signal murmured from the corner of his mouth. He was a small, agile man, built like a jockey. Kernyák, the second coachman was his exact opposite: a tall, older man with a motionless face. He radiated authority and assurance, which the horses could sense. He was a particularly fine hunting coachman: his horses drew the carriage noiselessly at a walking pace on the forest path, and it was usually he who first spotted the deer or stag hiding in the dense undergrowth. The hunting carriage was a low coach, from which it was easy to step down, and deceive the game observing the carriage, allowing the hunter to aim at it with his murderous weapon. One could shoot from the carriage with a propped up arm, but that was considered unsportsmanlike. János Horváth was a quiet man. He drove the inexperienced horses, trained them, and transported the official visitors from Atád. Here too some sort of hierarchical method was at work, as the lawyer and the doctor were driven in a better carriage than the vet, the music teacher or the Franciscan monk. This sometimes depended also on the coachman’s personal favour.

The coachmen’s chamber was Gönye’s realm, should I say his office, where he frequently entertained visitors from the house and the estate. It was also here that the guest coachmen took a glass or two after they had unhitched and watered their horses. There were two palliasses in the room, covered with lambskin and rugs. One of the coachmen, usually Gönye, always slept there, so that someone should be near the horses during the night. It is possible that the rugs came straight off the horses’ backs, but whoever sat or lay on those beds, would inevitable end up smelling of horse. If one of the womenfolk happened to visit him, and one would not put that past Gönye, it was immediately known where she had been. It was not a bad smell, only all-pervading in its concentrated state. (Béla Bartók was mightily cheered up, when it wafted towards him from a side-street in New York.)

János Horváth was replaced by a young workhorse-driver, Gyula Bencsik. Thinking back, he represented the ‘new’ generation, if there was such a phenomenon among the workers on the large landholdings of that time. He was a tall, strong young man, who performed his work with ease, and it was somehow written all over his person that he would not be doing this all his life. When I got home after the war, I came across him share-cutting wood in our forest. He wore my Oxford patterned shirt. I tried to conceal my astonishment at meeting up with my shirt, but reflected that, if he didn’t wear it, it would probably be covering the shoulders of a Russian soldier. We stood somewhat embarrassed next to the tree-stump, he leaning on the handle of his axe (he could have struck me dead, flashed through my mind), and for the moment we just didn’t know what to say to each other. The other ‘new generation’ young man was Gönye’s son. They planned that he would take over from his father when the latter retired. He rode out with us more and more frequently. His mother was a tall, thin woman, whose suffering face reflected her husband’s frequent unfaithfulness. Her only son, the apple of her eye, inherited her figure and his father’s nature: he was constantly preoccupied with the girls. We could perceive this ourselves during our riding excursions, from the way he greeted the hoeing, water-carting girls, or the way they looked at him.

Adjacent to the stables were the toolshed, the cart-house, and behind it the riding hall. The toolshed was built together with a vaulted drive-in where the carriages were assembled. There were different kinds of carriages: a barouche (with a seat outside for the driver and a hood protecting only the passenger), a lighter, larger-wheeled buggy or the two-seater chaise (driven not by a coachman, but the master). The purebreds were lunged and the mounts broken in the riding-hall. My father taught me to ride. He had been a hussar and was an expert. By then he rarely mounted a horse, and it was a great moment for me, when I could accompany him for the first time on his riding round. He had served in the regiment of the famous Seventh Hussars until 1900. He was thirty-four when he exchanged his military career for farming. Grandfather, just like my great-grandfather, had followed the family tradition, when during his lifetime he gave my father Kopaszhegy. The idea being that the young generation strengthens and expands its properties (as it did, indeed, happen in my father’s case), augmenting the family’s wealth and authority. That is how the family spread out in Zala and Somogy[17]. Uncle Béla got Babócsa, József[18] Páczod, which was also situated near a sharp curve. That was a smaller estate, with not even a decent house on it. My Uncle Jóska had already landed himself in debt as a young man. Grandfather paid it off, but deducted it from his patrimony. At least that is how I heard it. Daughters were not entitled to land. Aunt Eszter was an exception. Hearsay had it that she was given Bara-puszta (Kispuszta), adjacent to Kivadár,  with the proviso that if she got married, her property would revert to the male branch. But she did not get married. She built a nice house, and became the neighbourhood’s benefactress. She was good at healing. With her concoctions made of local herbs and plants she treated complaining women and children and gnarled fingered old people. After World War II, when medicines were scarce and doctors as rare as hens’ teeth, her business increased with Russian soldiers also coming for help. It was said that as a girl she had been in love with a young Italian doctor. Maybe she was remembering him with her healing.

The riding hall was separated by a smaller orchard from the bath, which was situated on the side of an incline, in the best position for the flow of the water. There was plenty left for it from the artesian well. The water cascaded day and night into the pool, while the overflow was carried to the fishpond by a rill trickling away at the end of the vegetable garden. We spent the major part of our summers in the pool. We never wanted to get out of its warm water, and even repeated messages and urgings could not persuade us to go to lunch. Thus we mostly missed that meal. In its stead we went across to the kitchen garden to pick red currants and raspberries. If we had guests, their children joined us whilst their parents went back to the house. It was the girls in their modish bathing suits we were interested in. They liked to climb trees, and we would follow or watch them from below. The garden was separated from the pool by hazelnut bushes and a prickly hedge of elderberry and bramble. The vegetation was almost southern, for even figs grew here. We made a mess of ourselves with the sugary juice of the fruit, then got back into the water. That is where I learnt to make water pistols, carve whistles and lots of other things from my friends the farm kids, who happened along.

The water of the artesian well could be directed to the garden, so that even in times of drought it stayed verdant. I raised cacti in the hothouses from seeds and cuttings. I also experimented growing dates and oranges. Our gardener helped and taught me. In winter he often slept in the chamber next to the glass house, to mind the fire. We always had therefore off-season vegetables on the table and fruit from the apple larder, where the Jonathans spent the winter on straw-lined shelves.

If the water from the well didn’t flow into the garden, it ran across the poultry yard in a bricked conduit. Thus the birds didn’t suffer from lack of water either. Grandfather and Father had planned all this extremely well, also lessening the danger of malaria. The wood-shed was at the far end of the stable, and the oven and laundry were in the building that stood in the poultry yard. Huge loaves of ryebread were baked in the oven, and smaller ones made with non-sifted whole wheat flour, called Graham-bread; Mother liked the latter, as did I. Before she cut the bread, cook etched a cross on it with the tip of the knife. The oven was used for drying fruit as well, but they also sun-dried some on linen cloths spread out in the open. The dropping fruit from the wild-pear and plum trees in the yard was snapped up by the ducks and geese as if they were maybeetles. Jam was also cooked here, on the open fire, in cauldrons, stirred with wooden spoons the size of shovels. The pigsty was shaded by a mulberry bush, under it the slop-trough.

Pig killing (“Disznóölés”) was always a major event, and on these occasions the area in front of the laundry became the scene of the poor pig’s dismemberment. There was great hustle-bustle with helpers from the farm, and we were dancing attendance around them already before breakfast. Flushed-faced girls were carting the liverwurst, black-pudding and innards in large tubs to the kitchen, where all these were relentlessly thrust into pans, and the aroma of roasting sausage pervaded the long corridor.

The corridor connected the kitchen to the two-storeyed wing of the house. Rooms lay along both of its sides: they were the staff’s quarters, the larder and the polishing-room, and the door to the attic stairs. The gate of the back entrance also opened in this direction. The attention of anyone entering it was instantly drawn to a large oil painting of three cows hanging on the opposite wall. It was a handsome composition with fields and trees in the background, but the cows themselves were somehow misdrawn. The picture had been painted by József Somssich, my grandmother’s father.[19] Grandfather, Papa Ádi, married his distant niece, thus my grandmother, Mama Teréz, was also a Somssich progeny. There were several other paintings by great-grandfather in the house, particularly family portraits. He was a friend and contemporary of Miklós Barabás[20], and more than a mere amateur. He painted altarpieces for the neighbouring churches and for the one’s at Kivadár and at Nagyatád. When he got old and his eyesight began to fail him, he started painting large pictures. According to family lore he fell off a ladder and broke his arm. He then continued to work with his left hand on the picture of the cows, which because of its sheer size couldn’t be hung anywhere else but in the corridor. It just might have portrayed those cows that used to draw his carriage. He was allergic to the smell of horses, and therefore he had cows or oxen harnessed to his coach. They could even trot. He was the ‘cow count’ (“ökrös gróf”). This despite the fact that he had spent his youth among horses, as he too was a Hussar. He joined the militia as a major in ’48. After the War of Independence was suppressed by Austria, he retired to his estate at Szarkavár. His asthma, and perhaps his talent for painting also developed at that time.

During our childhood the corridor was the scene of tremendous tearings about. Scooters became fashionable around that time. These were platforms mounted on two wheels, which could be steered by a handle fitted to the front wheel. We stood on it with one foot, pushed with the other, and raced each other as fast as we could. We had two dogs at the time: Fatty, the French bulldog and Luxi, the German shepherd. They practically regarded it as their duty to run along with us, yelping. Snuffling, overweight Fatty usually couldn’t keep up with us, and was only halfway when we were already on our way back; he would then turn around, thankful that he didn’t have to do the whole lap. At the turning points we braked only in the very last minute, not to lose momentum. This wasn’t a problem at the kitchen door, as it was always open, but at the other end of the corridor we often steered right into the solid bottom part of the frosted-glass door; the whole house would reverberate from it.

One rainy morning, my brother Laci was exercising by himself. He never failed to run into the door, one could almost work out when he would bang into it next. Father, who was at the time suffering from fierce headaches, must have become fed up with the noise. He came downstairs, took hold of my brother (who had practically fallen into his arms at the door), and hit his head into the wall. Not too heftily, but repeatedly. I was observing them from the polishing room. This was the first and perhaps the only time that I saw Father in a moment of sudden rage. Our governess, Bözsi placated him; he always listened to her. His headaches were probably due to the cerebrosclerosis that caused his untimely death. Bözsi was the daughter of the owner of the Wiedemann-café at Kőszeg. She was a schoolteacher, and this might well have been her first job. We liked her very much, and this was mutual. I wasn yet ten when I offered to marry her.

The food had to travel a long way across the corridor before it got to the table, as had the firewood to the stove, the bathwater to the tub. Directly next to the kitchen was the room of the chef, János Prekub. With his tall stature, augmented by his chef’s hat, he was the director and at the same time protagonist of the daily changing production that was played out in the kitchen and dining room, when the masters were in residence. Of an evening he would come upstairs to discuss the following day’s menu with Mother, which he carefully jotted down in his notebook. Guests were entitled to a gala performance, and the scenes - courses - were co-ordinated accordingly. We ate the local produce: mutton (frequently), hare, game, pheasant, fish with various French sauces, although on washing days there often was nothing more than spinach with fried eggs or poppy seed noodles. The wine came from the cellar under the house.

Prekub was followed by a more adventurous but less refined young chef, Sándor, who cooked Italian, Serb and Hungarian dishes. He was a handsome, strong man, the kitchen maids liked him. His room was the scene of conversation and card evenings, combined with a little wine tasting. I too dropped in from time to time to listen to what his visitors were talking about. Our valet, Ernő, used to shave Sándor. This became almost a ritual. One of the kitchen maids, the blonde Margit B. whom I too found attractive, brought the warm water, shaving-brush and soap, and tied the serviette around Sándor’s neck, while Ernő sharpened the knife. When he considered it sharp enough, and had finished lathering Sándor’s face to his satisfaction, he pulled up the skin with the thumb of his left hand to gauge and mark out the line of the side-whiskers with his first stroke. He then checked Sándor’s sideburns for symmetry. Ernő wiped the excess foam into a cloth (held by Margit), only the leftover lather from the smaller corrective strokes ended up on the serviette around Sándor’s neck. Quiet reigned, not a word was spoken. I too watched in awe how Ernő was skilfully steering clear of Sándor’s prominent Adam’s apple. If they were smoking, they would occasionally stop for a couple of draws, a few words, and then the blade would flash once again in Ernő’s hand. It was during one such pause that I picked up the razor; I don’t know why, perhaps to see whether I too could scrape the bristle off Sándor’s face. I was already holding the blade at the level of his face, when Sándor suddenly turned towards me, bumped into its edge, and the blood spurted out from his cheek. For a second he didn’t realize what had happened, but when he saw the razor in my hand and the blood on his finger, his countenance darkened. I thought he would hit me, but Margit stood between us, dabbed the wound with the corner of the cloth, put styptic on it, and I stood there embarrassed, not knowing how to explain what I had done. Ernő quietly took the razor out of my hand, carried on with his work, thus condemning Sándor to immobility. After all, they couldn’t box the ears of the master’s son. Maybe this was what hurt me most. I sensed the absurdity of the situation, and when Margit left the room, I blushingly followed her.

Opposite Sándor’s room, at the end of a side-corridor, there were two rooms which were furnished as guest-rooms. (This wing of the house stands to this day, transformed into a shop and a pub.) My two middle brothers, Laci[21] and Józsi[22] moved there when they were in senior high-school. It became their separate suite. (Destiny kept them close to each other in New York later on as well: Laci migrated there at the end of the forties, Józsi after the ’56 Revolution.) The entrance hall was a sort of a garderobe. In the built-in wardrobes Father’s uniforms, Hungarian gala suits, tails, morning coats were steeping in mothballs, while further on ladies’ robes, ball gowns, fur coats and stoles recalled bygone times. The shelves housed all sorts of headgear from shakos to top-hats, ladies’ hats decorated with veils and feathers, as well as scarves. Boots stood guard at the bottom of the wardrobe, and patent-leather shoes, together with ladies’ pumps were awaiting their chance to step out once more onto the dance-floor. There were a lot of bits and pieces in these wardrobes, maybe even from our grandparents’ time, and when I used to rummage through them I could not have foreseen that even then I could already have safely written on the wardrobe doors: Fuit. As did my maternal grandfather on the back of a photograph. In the photo he was travelling to the Kaiser’s court in a state-coach drawn by two black, caparisoned horses.

I was reminded of my grandfather in Sydney by an elderly friend, the excellent artist Imre Szigeti, who studied in Berlin after the First World War, as being a Jew he was barred from the university in Hungary. “Your grandfather was a good Hungarian,” he told me. “Why?”, I asked. “Because it was said of him that he always wore a black Hungarian gala suit on official occasions, and we thought it was his way of demonstrating that he remembered ‘48[23].” Whether he did it for that reason, or simply because he was mourning his only son,[24] who passed away at age six, I don’t know. On the other hand, it was said about his father, my great-grandfather[25] that he had Kossuth, who incidentally was related to us, imprisoned. This clearly did not deter my mother from exhibiting Kossuth’s picture in her room. “He was a handsome man,” she declared. She had obviously been enthusiastic about him as a young girl. Grandfather, the confidant and friend of the heir to the throne, Archduke Rudolf, have been in contact with the secret movement of Young Hungarians who gathered around the Crown Prince. Perhaps that is what made him popular among the Hungarian students in Berlin. After the war all that became redundant. Still, it was remarkable that after several decades it emerged from the memory of a (twice over) emigrant.

The boudoir separated my parents’ room from the one where I was convalescing at the time of Father’s death. It was a sort of a dressing-room, where Mother kept her clothes and wrote her letters on her drop-front secrétaire. A watercolour on the wall depicted her, leading her twelve children across a poppy and cornflower strewn meadow, birds fluttering above. It was my father’s watercolour portraying Mother’s desire to have such a large family. She kept photo albums on the bookshelf, commenting on the pictures in her handwriting. She compiled a separate album for each of us. She probably did that instead of keeping a diary. Books on Swedish gymnastics, the Müller-method, homeopathy and the like lined the shelves, and in the corner stood a ‘Kolos gymnastics bench’. This was a Hungarian invention which she used frequently; she tried to encourage me to do so too. When she saw that it was too big for me, she had a smaller one made by Uncle Klausz, the wheelwright. Basically it was nothing but a bench made of slats on short legs with a bar above one’s head. Grabbing hold of the two ends of the bar, one could do exercises either on one’s back or stomach. Upright it served as wall bars. Mother was an exercise devotee. She took walks, rode, skated, and each year swam right across the Wörthersee, which in the vicinity of our summer villa was a good 1-2 kilometres wide, very deep and cold. She wanted to toughen me too, to build up my resistance against the colds and bronchitis I suffered from regularly several times a year. Purportedly I caught ‘pneumonia’ eight or nine times, twice exacerbated by pleurisy. She decided to take me out of the Pius gymnasium, and for two years I became a home schooler at Kivadár. Prior to that, while still at Pécs, I was taken to hospital, because the boarding school’s sick-bay could not provide me with the intensive treatment they deemed necessary. (The medic in charge of the sick-bay was Brother Béla Galina, loved by everyone, whom we nicknamed kind uncle. While still a civilian, he had worked as a theatre dresser in the National Theatre.) In the hospital they gave me cold compresses and hot mustard poultices. They wrapped oil-cloth around these. On one occasion the mustard was too hot, with the result that it burned my chest. Proud flesh grew in its stead, requiring months of treatment. When girls would later ask me how I got the scar, I bragged it was in a duel. When I fell off Koma, the local doctor at Nagyatád settled for putting my arm in a sling. Only when I went back to Pécs and it was X-rayed, did it turn out that the bone had been fractured and had grown back together, but badly. Dr. Vertán, the hospital’s quick-tempered chief surgeon, commanded two brawny orderlies to the lecture theatre, where the seats were in tiers. One of the orderlies, in the upper tier, grabbed my shoulder, the other my arm and, wrenching it in opposite directions, they managed to reset the bone in one go, while the professor kept telling me, this is the soldier’s lot. After that they put my arm in plaster. It was also Professor Vertán, who removed my appendix. Mother came to Pécs, and remained there as long as I was in hospital. She stayed with some good friends, the two sisters of the organ maker Angster family, who brewed excellent coffee. She brought some to me each morning, piping hot, with a fresh ham-roll. Ever since then this combination is my favourite snack. When she left to go back home, I burst into tears. Could it be that I was weeping for the loss of the good coffee?

Seeing that I had so many health problems, one can imagine how many more worries Mother had with my siblings, although I definitely took the cake. Dr. Kramár, the internist of the hospital occasionally came to visit from Pécs, combining my treatment with some chamber music. His newest initiative was the cold water cure. They set up a bathtub in Mother’s room where she took me in so that she could nurse me. It was a round tin contraption with two handles. The water reached hip-height when it was full. With the help of Aunt Erzsi, Ernő poured in turn hot and cold water over me. If my memory serves me well, he even chilled the water with ice. I hastened to recover.

It was Father who had made plans for introducing plumbing; I recall the drawings and discussions. Some half of the house would have had to be dismantled to install it. In the building, attached to the water tower, there were two in-ground bathtubs and we took our baths there. During mid-winter this was not practicable, so we confined ourselves to portable hip-baths and large sponges, with which Aunt Erzsi or someone else scrubbed our backs. There was a bath at the base of the water tower, which could accommodate several people. This was for the staff, but people from the farm were also allowed to use it to cure their gouty joints. When they brought their children along, the racket they made reverberated inside the tower. A winding metal staircase led to the roof, under which there were two reservoirs. Zsolt Harsányi wrote in one of his short stories that when Father took his visitors to show off the tower, their coachman tipped his hat to them from one of the basins and that was all he was wearing. The guests didn’t stay for tea.

The enclosed roof terrace was the favourite sunbathing spot of my sister’s French governess, Hélène and some female visitors. They could safely sunbake in the nude, where no one could see them. The view from there was really beautiful. In the North, following the line of the poplar-lined highway one could see as far as Bodvica, in the East to the Rinya, and past it to Simongát. In-between the glittering mirror of the fish-pond, fields of wheat and the cemetery shaped the picture of the landscape, which, together with many other of its details, remained indelibly etched in my mind. In the West, the woods and fields extended as far as the brook at Tarany, with the steeple of the church in the background. Southward, along the highway were farm houses, and then more woods and cornfields as far as Háromfa. It was a beautiful countryside, a self-contained entity, at least for me, because I grew up there and knew its every nook and cranny. Even the railway kept clear of it. Coming from the capital or Dombóvár, the passenger from Atád or Bodvica had to change at Somogyszob. The only way to get to Kivadár was by car. If there was no direct connection, we drove straight to Somogyszob to reach the Budapest express. Travelling in the opposite direction, if we got on the Fiume express at eleven at night, by morning it was already the blue of the Adriatic that welcomed us.

In the local train an entirely different world awaited the traveller. In a homely atmosphere the market women discussed their sales, the insolence of officials and showed each other what they had bought, or bartered for eggs, chickens and bacon. In the second-class at most a couple of lonesome official civilians sat around. When looking out of the window, it was not unusual to see deer, hares or a covey of partridges taking wing.

The whistle of the train rarely wafted as far as Kivadár. Peace and quiet reigned, with some infrequent exceptions, such as when, for instance Rózsi, our chambermaid was found in the attic with a rope around her neck. She was a redhead; I can’t get her pale, anguished face out of my mind. She was in love with a tailor’s mate from Nagyatád, they said, but who knows what else distressed her. The other suicide was discovered on the tree in the orchard behind the vineyard in wintertime. He was already dead: a humpbacked little man, a kind of village idiot, who spent his days tramping around. Once I came upon him with Father in the woods, on the edge of the Kis Tölös. The little old man was squatting next to a fire he had lit. He might even have been preparing a meal. Father motioned to me not to disturb him. But he greeted us, and we went across to him after all. Father talked to him like an old acquaintance. We were on foot, a rifle on Father’s shoulder, more as a pretext for the walk than anything else. He didn’t take it off, when I spotted a roe-buck among the trees. It pricked up its head, looked at us, and with a few steps disappeared in the undergrowth. The young forest (oak and spruce) alongside the Rinya ran on as far as the bridge at Rinyaszentkirály. On the way back the hunchback was no longer there, only the residue of his fire.

We often came across stag tracks in the sand of the Rinya. They used to cross over at night from the woods of the Mándy’s Simongát estate: they had no need for a bridge. During rutting, or if there was a beet- or cornfield nearby, the traffic would increase. They were heading for a fall, since my brothers were waiting for them with their telescopic rifles in their ambuscades: in hollows or in a Hochstand set up at the edge of the woods. This wasn’t actually sportsmanlike, because the hart carrying the trophy on its head was not ours, but the neighbour’s. Herlicska, who organized these nocturnal shoots, knew exactly which forest the antler came from, but when it came to shooting, he kept utterly quiet. At the time I was only permitted to use my light, small-calibre Flobert rifle, and that only on rare occasions.

There was a grove on the banks of the Rinya, where the pheasants used to come to roost in the evenings. I noticed that when I went fishing. One late afternoon, I didn’t tell anyone, and with the Flobert on my shoulder I set out towards the grove. All I had to do was to sit down in the line of trees and wait, motionless. The sun was shining in my eyes, which was not exactly helpful, but it eventually disappeared behind the foliage of the Tölös. In the approaching twilight I caught sight of the first pheasant as it came strutting inwards. I was sitting in the third or fourth row. I waited for it with the gun on my shoulder, and when it reached the row, I pulled the trigger. The pheasant slumped to the ground without a sound. The Flobert doesn’t crack, it only pops, as if nothing had happened. I didn’t get up, but stayed where I was, waiting for the next one. They came one-by-one, comfortably toddling along. By the time it became dark, I had bagged about five: at least that was as many as I found. I couldn’t even take them all home. Great was the amazement, when I entered the kitchen with my booty. Margit threw up her hands in astonishment and complimented me, and Ernő promised to cycle out at dawn to see how many birds I had left there in the dark. Unless, of course, a fox had taken them. I was proud of my exploit: I was convinced that I had become a real huntsman. But I never went back to that grove to repeat the slaughter, because I knew that it had not been ‘fair’, and that if my father were alive, he would explain this to me.

Some days we would have a picnic in the woods. We’d carve a spit, barbecue bacon, letting its fat drip onto the bread toasting on the other spit. When we got tired of playing parlour games, we ran down to the Rinya. One of the girls came with me too. We lay down in the grass, and watched the sky. Emilie tickled my face with a blade of grass. I had a box of matches in my pocket; I put it next to me. The box caught fire from the heat, the matches crackled. In a flash we jumped into the water.

On another occasion we had a magician as a guest. He gave performances at Nagyatád, and somehow got to our place. The clearing, called the remíz, was made into the theatre. Everyone from the house came, and so did the people from the estate with their children. The vintner brought the wine in demijohns while Ernő and Herlicska busied themselves around the fire. The girls from the estate lent a hand, dressed in their finery. The steward and the schoolmistresses came as well. Everyone was in a good mood, the demijohns were emptied one-by-one. A little further on, behind sheets strung out between trees, was the magician’s dressing room. Here he retired to between two acts to prepare his next prestidigitation. He was a young man with a supple body and piercing eyes and he was able to hypnotize people. His magic wand could perform miracles while we watched him in astonishment. He mingled with us during the interval, and it is likely that it was then when he put or extracted the knick-knacks from our pockets, which he would later conjure up. I was eager to know what was behind the sheet. Unnoticed I slunk behind it, into the magician’s workshop. My head was spinning from excitement; I didn’t know where to look first. By the time I came to my senses, the curtain fluttered, and the magician entered. We stared at each other wordlessly. Perhaps we both had the same thought: I caught you. The magician didn’t utter a sound. Without taking his eyes off me, he put his hand on my shoulder and steered me out of the tent. Behind it he made me promise that I would never tell anybody what I had seen. “It is our secret,” he said, and I have kept it ever since.

On saint’s day at Bárdibükk I met the magician once again. He greeted me with a knowing smile. I was watching the feats performed by a strongman. He was lifting a heavy anvil, bending iron bars, blowing fire. In the great effort his penis slipped out from under his shorts. Its size could have rivalled that of a mule. The women stared at it in consternation, giggling; the men cursed and mocked him, calling out obscenities. The magician merely shrugged his shoulders and went on his way.

The Gosztonyis’ daughter, Mária, had a pottery studio in the Bárdibükk park, next to the lake. She had studied in Italy. The majolica plaque that was fitted into the wall of the courtyard between the entrance and the tower, below Father’s study, was her work. The centre of the courtyard was not adorned by the ubiquitous gushing fountain, but with a lemon tree that blossomed each spring. Father’s portrait next to the window was placed there by Mother after his death. He is wearing a white jacket, a blue-striped yellow shirt with a red tie. The lapel and the wrinkles are marked by erratic brown brush-strokes. The portrait was painted by Rippl-Rónai at Kopaszhegy, where Father lived after he had renounced the military. Rippl-Rónai, who had returned from France about that time, was a frequent guest of his there. Actually Kopaszhegy got its name from him (the estate was officially called Vóta-puszta), since Father had his hair completely shorn each summer. That is how RR described a visit to his brother Ödön: ‘... I spent all week at Géza Somssich’s place. He is pleasant company, interested in everything, and his comments are meaningful. We went shooting a few times (incidentally, I have to report that I shot a lame deer); we went for frequent, long walks, over hedge and ditch, hill and dale for 3-4 hours in the most awful rainy, slippery weather. I also painted. Him. He likes it very much. He is sitting in a white room. He lives much like I do in Kapos. His home at Kopaszhegy is a bailiff’s house of 3 rooms. White walls, very ordinary plain furniture, which he bought from the bailiff. But as an ex-Captain of Hussars, it suits him very well.[26]’ (The painting has been auctioned recently in Budapest by its unknown owner.)

When Rippl-Rónai bought the Villa Roma, he wanted also to farm the surrounding acres. Father became his ‘agricultural advisor’, which often ended up in daylong partying, and Father enjoyed the excellent cooking of the painter’s French wife, Lazarine. The little farm did not succeed eventually, but the red wine that the painter offered his guests, came from his own vineyard.

I know precious little about these dozen or so years of Father’s life that elapsed between his leaving the army and his marriage, and now there is no one left, whom I could ask. That is why I quoted from his contemporary RR’s letter, which, together with the portrait and the pictures, bear witness to this period in my father’s life. As does the flute with which he entertained his guests on the veranda of the bailiff’s cottage. The flute, which his head shepherd, master Kapoli had carved, whose (and his son’s) many other masterpieces found their way from Kopaszhegy to the house in Kivadár.

The entire shelf of the bookcase opposite the desk was occupied by the writings of Richard Wagner and the piano scores of his operas. I was mainly interested in these, although there were other things there as well, including the Great Pallas Encyclopaedia, great-grandfather’s memoirs[27] (in softback, largely uncut) and art books. It didn’t take me long to become a Wagner enthusiast as well, and I listened to the broadcasts of the Bayreuth performances with the piano score in my hand. Father went to Bayreuth on several occasions. He was able to expand his study tours in Germany (he was experimenting with new types of wheat) by mixing business with pleasure: seed improvement with the cult of Wagner, or perhaps vice versa. In his youth Wagner’s musical dramas and Liszt’s music represented progress, the ‘New’, and to visit Bayreuth was the equivalent of going on a pilgrimage.

My first music teacher was Mr. Niedermeyer in the Pius gymnasium’s boarding school, where I became a boarder in my first year. He taught me to play the cello and piano. He was of German origin, and Mother addressed him as Herr Professor and spoke to him in German. His philosophy of life was that only those who looked after their health could become good musicians. To avoid catching a cold, for instance, it was advisable to drink a mouthful of cold water before stepping out into the cold from a heated room. It was really not his fault that I didn’t become a sturdy fellow and a great cellist. He did, however, see to it that I played in the school orchestra and what is more, I even played a solo (Brahms’s Lullaby) in the interval of a school play. I was already feverish during the performance, and I could barely stagger from the theatre to the sickbay. I thought I was going to die. Next day they removed my appendix in the hospital. While I was being given the anaesthetic I asked Professor Vertán whether I wouldn’t ‘kick the bucket’. That stirred his temper, but I could no longer hear his reply.

I continued playing music at home too (could it be that all the infirmities were only due to wanting to return home?). Hélène taught me to play the piano. There were two pianos in the house. There was a Bösendorfer in Mother’s room, and another one in Hélène’s, next to the window opening onto the garden. This one was a Hungarian make, a masterpiece of the Thék furniture factory. When Hélène played Debussy on it, the heavenly sounds wafted through to the trees of the park, and it seemed to me that I had never heard anything so beautiful. She made me play Bartók’s easier piano pieces, and once again I felt that I was on a tour of discovery. Hélène wasn’t a piano teacher, she taught my sister French, and I received the piano lessons from her as a by-product, as an adventure from the world of music. She was a freckle-faced red-head from Alsace, and spoke good German as well. She liked to ski, but the undulating Kivadár landscape didn’t offer much of a chance for that. She hated shooting, but was fond of swimming, sledding and visiting neighbours. Hélène subscribed to the weekly magazine Candide from Paris, and on long winter afternoons regaled us by reading out aloud from it; which is how we got acquainted with the works of French writers and artists.

Mother had a collection of sheet music bound in red leather. Her pet name, Manyó was printed in gold leaf in the lower corner of the cover in her handwriting. They were piano-cello duets, from sonatas to the fashionable arrangements of the late nineteenth-century. She was given them as a birthday gift by her teacher, the noted pianist, Alfred Grünfeld. She used to play the duets with Alfred’s cellist brother. Kaiser Wilhelm occasionally attended the concerts at the embassy. He was a music lover, who also composed operas and songs. One of his popular songs, the Sang an Aegir was mocked by the Berliners as Kaiserschmarn. On other occasions he would drop in unannounced at the embassy in the morning. Grandfather was a notoriously late riser, and while he got himself ready, Mother entertained the unexpected visitor, peeling him an apple. It would have been difficult for him to do it himself with his withered arm.

The Grünfeld brothers, although not twins, looked like two peas in a pod. On the occasion of a cercle, Franz Joseph asked Alfred whether the famous cellist was his brother. Since court etiquette prohibits a negative answer, Alfred’s reply was: “Yes, Your Majesty, only there is a year between us.” “Da bedauere ich aber Ihre Frau Mama” (then I am really sorry for your dear mother), retorted the old monarch.

The sheet music didn’t lie there unused. Whenever she could find a partner, Mother played from them. Her favourite chamber music partner was Count Móric Benyovszky, master of Siklós castle and an outstanding cello player. We were frequent visitors at the castle (it had even a drawbridge), either when we had leave or during school holidays, when Mother came to pick us up at Pécs. There was also a large workshop in the basement, where the lord of the castle carried on his favourite hobby, carpentry. He carved furniture, perhaps a cello. We used to have bicycle races with his children in the corridor that was twice as long as ours. The beauty and slender figure of their mother, Countess Lujza highlighted the romantic atmosphere of the castle. She particularly favoured my brother Laci, who was already a senior, and the tallest among us. As he sat down to the piano with his tousled hair, and began to improvise in the style of Chopin, he too turned into a romantic figure. I yearned that I too would one day be able to play with such fantasy, so freely.

A miracle happened at Christmas: a cello in its velvet-lined case was shining under the Christmas tree – a gift from Uncle Móric. My brothers couldn’t be envious, as only I could play it. This was my first musical instrument. I cherished it as the apple of my eye. A cellist from Nagyatád by the name of Sebestyén became my teacher. He was a slightly built, pale faced man, who with his long hair resembled Paganini – he also limped. The staff observed him with revulsion as if he were the devil’s emissary, and on account of his stunted leg there were mutterings of ‘the pox’. Once they realized that he didn’t bite, they became friendlier towards him, and he too became more talkative during the afternoon teas following my lessons. The coachmen knew that he was entitled to two rugs, because he was not only reserved, but also sensitive to the cold.

My happiness with the cello was marred by my brother Zsiga. In the heat of some argument he snatched it out of my hand, and hit it on the corner of the table. Whether on purpose or not – probably even he couldn’t tell by now (if he were alive). The result was a crack the size of a fingernail on the left side of the instrument. What the rumpus was about, I no longer recall, but all the more I remember the flashing of his eyes that mirrored his resolve. He might have been jealous of the instrument, because it guarded a territory he could not penetrate. I was convinced that the crack could not be repaired, so I left it like that, cracked, for years, as my chagrin: unappeasable. (When I pinched his suit while he was a POW in Russia, maybe I subconsciously revenged his deed.)

The stairs of the one-storeyed wing’s attic also opened from the kitchen corridor. There was a round hole at its bottom for the cat. When Luxi chased it, this was its escape hatch. I often visited this attic. I don’t know why, but the flour bin was kept there, and I liked to go upstairs when Margit, with the bushel under her arm, went to fetch flour. While she was getting it, I used to chat to her, in the meantime browsing to see whether I could find anything interesting among all the useless stuff. I opened suitcases, boxes, leafed through old newspapers, looked at pictures, and if something caught my fancy, I took it down with me. Most of the time they were objects not even Mother knew about. Two-three generations’ litter was hoarded here, some of it from well before her time. Once she too came up, looked around, and threw out most of the junk. She tidied up.

That is where Margit and I came upon the injured cat one day. It was yowling in a corner. Its paw was hurt. It could have been the dog that had caught it, but it might have been a gun wound. The lead in the Flobert’s cartridge was no bigger than a largish pellet. Could my brothers have aimed at it, as they did at my rabbits? Margit prepared a soft bed for, and fed it bread soaked in milk, while I watched her as she kept bending down in her summer dress. By next day the cat was gone. It must have recovered.

My rabbit-farm was at the northern edge of the park in an uninhabited house. One of its rooms was used by the milkman as an office, another one by the gendarmes when Kivadár was on their route. One could see them from afar as they marched in the centre of the highway, their bayonets flashing on the horizon. They used the room for interrogations. Once I saw Gönye coming out from there; his face was red, and he did not respond when I asked him what had happened. I was given the last room for my rabbits. The mason broke down the wall, and into the opening he fitted half-doors that could be opened on top or on the bottom, so that when I let the rabbits out from their cages, they could run around freely. I bought books on them, and raised various breeds. The Belgian rabbit was the largest. One day I found the bodies of three of the rabbits on the floor among cabbage leaves and gnawed carrots. Two of my brothers had practised target-shooting on them. They wanted to pierce their ears. Their excuse was that the rabbits had moved their heads too fast and it wasn’t their fault. They offered three neckties as compensation, and offered to take their booty to the kitchen. “They will make a good lapin chasseur,” they said, but I tearfully tore them out of their hands, and buried them.

The polishing room was next to the attic stairs, the last room before the frosted-glass door. Its door was always wide open. It was not worthwhile to closing it because of the constant traffic. Everyone who lived in the house called in, but so did people from outside: the forester, the milkman, the itinerant tinker, the various tradespeople. Here they polished shoes, guns, hunting boots, as well as the silver. The drawer of the large table was full of brushes, polishes, velvety chamois leather and blunt knives for scraping. Feather-dusters, brooms and carpet-beaters hung from the walls. When Herlicska cleaned the guns with oily rags and wire brushes, I used to listen to his hunting yarns. He was the Magic Hunter. He knew the animals as well as they knew him, and they pricked up their ears when they caught sight of him between the trees. In winter he built feeding boxes for them, so that they shouldn’t wander away because of hunger. Before we reached the forest, he extinguished his pipe, licked his finger and raised it into the air to determine whence the wind was blowing. “Because the game can get the better of us, just as much as we can get the better of it,” he said. “And what would happen if the game would also have a gun?” I asked him. “It has a sense of smell,” he replied and fell silent. Herlicska was also good at table rapping. He set up the table at the foot of the lilac bush, and we sat around it in the moonlight. He fabricated a sort of Ouija board with the letters of the ABC, and we tried to decipher the messages coming from the spirit world. It was great fun, especially if I could huddle close to a pretty girl. His daughter Lenke was a playmate of ours. At school performances she outshone everybody, and my memory is of her wearing angel’s wings, standing under the Christmas tree, next to the Christ Child’s manger.

The rooms of the lady’s maid, the butler and the chamber maid were on the other side of the corridor, where the windows opened towards the highway. The lady’s maid was called Tera. She came from Austria. There was a sewing machine in her room on which she made the costumes for us when we played theatre. She sewed dresses for the farm girls too. They came to her for fittings. On winter nights there were card games in her room, and when she had a backache, she had the mason’s little boy stomp on her buttocks. That was the local version of Chinese massage. Tera returned to her home country, and from then on we only had a chamber maid.

While Father was alive we had two menservants, the Matich brothers, but after his death only one of them, Pista remained with us. He retired as the janitor of the Budapest apartment house. Ernő our wheelwright’s second son replaced him. The personal staff did not usually come from the estate, but from elsewhere with experience and recommendations gained from other manors. Ernő was the exception. Mother chose him, thus he learned the ‘trade’ in our house. We often crossed our fingers for him when there were a lot of guests, and we saw that he was struggling. He was courting Juliska, the kitchen-maid. Ernő’s parents who were artisans, objected to their marriage, because the girl came from a big unskilled worker’s family. When the baby arrived, Mother stood by them, and arranged their marriage. They moved into the lady’s maid’s double-doored room. Juliska became the cook, and their little girl, Pucika was brought up in our home. Ernő’s brother helped his father in the workshop. The parents marked out another kitchen-maid, Bözsi, for him, but she was in love with someone else. On their wedding night she hid in the hen-house, and later got a divorce.

During election times we went to the cinema in Nagyatád to listen to the candidates. One of them was supported by Gyula Gömbös[28]. Gömbös came over to Kivadár as well, to pay his respects to my mother. Afterwards he visited his niece, the wife of our chauffeur Endre Prasszer. The Prasszers lived in the same house as the Gönyes and Klauszes. I accompanied the great man on his visit. They received him with a lovely afternoon tea and good conversation. The Prassers had two children, my juniors. We were very fond of their father – he was our chum, and sometimes he let me sit behind the wheel of the big Daimler on the empty highway. The damper of the exhaust pipe could be opened with a handle, and then the big engine’s rumbling, like that of an aeroplane, could be heard from far and wide. The garage was near the bridge, next to it the workshop where I used to repair my bicycle. On the way to Kaposvár the road was not surfaced everywhere, and on one occasion buffaloes had to haul the car out of the mud. When Mother took me to the Pius by car, and I watched from the doorway as she got back into the car to leave me and drive away, Endre, while opening the door for her, gave me a wink. That cheered me up, and I returned intrepidly to join the noisy kids.

The other car in the neighbourhood belonged to Panci J., the parish priest of Háromfa. His purple cingulum (if he wore it, because as a rule he wore priestly mufti) indicated his rank of provost. He was a priest with the manners of a man of the world, who called on us frequently in his British made Essex car. He had studied theology in Rome, and maybe he too harked back to the Eternal City, the scene of his youth, as Mother did to Berlin. Not as if he would have shown any signs of nostalgia, for on the contrary, with his joi de vivre and lifestyle he created his own Rome at Háromfa, which was once an abbey. Opposite the church was the presbytery, a manor house, which he had furnished with impeccable taste with family and peasant-furniture. The latter he acquired during his village rounds. His mother stemmed from a ducal family, and he was a welcome guest not only at our place, but in the other neighbourhood chateaux. Many of their occupants were related to him, just as we were. When they came to visit him, his chauffeur donned white gloves and acted as butler. Panci performed baptisms, marriages, burials in a grand style, and took the Eucharist by car to the dying if the person lived far away. When he gave a sermon, the church filled up with women. With his long hair – although he was already going bald – he recalled the cassocked Franz Liszt.

Háromfa was ten kilometres from Kivadár, on the way to Nagyatád. Panci (real name István) used to drop in more and more frequently to us, and Mother regarded him almost like a fifth son. Amid the worries of running the estate and having to raise five children on her own, his figure must have been a welcome distraction in her life. He was a witty, entertaining man. We too were captivated by his horse-riding prowess, and Gönye let him have the best chargers. We raced along with him, jumping over hill and dale, as if we were riding in a steeple chase. He sat the horse in the Italianate manner, with a long stirrup-strap, and I tried to emulate that looser, more graceful style. Panci’s excellent taste manifested itself in every field. Whether the subject was where to hang a picture, how to tie a necktie, or about furniture, his opinion was spot on, and whoever took his advice, could for a while see the world through rose-coloured glasses. He could easily have exchanged his priestly calling with that of an interior decorator. There was one occasion though, when someone got the better of him. An émigré Russian aristocrat, Baron Rosen, who became a horse-breeder and trainer, was staying at the time with the Count of Visonta. Rumour had it that he celebrated Christmas with his horses, putting up a Christmas tree for them in the stables. He came to visit us several times, together with Panci. He was a balding, smallish man. One day, while taking coffee with Mother, the Russian’s name came up. Whether he was just in a gossipy mood, or in a scheming one, Panci remarked that Hélène was flirting with him, and he was ardently courting her. When he took his leave from mother, Hélène rushed out of my sister’s room, ran down the stairs, and confronted him, hissing with a flushed face: “Salaud!” I stood at the bottom of the staircase in utter incomprehension. Hélène turned on her heels, and as fast as she had left it, she ran back to her room, which was next to my sister’s, which in turn adjoined Mother’s, who always liked open doors. Crossing the room, she might have heard (or eavesdropped?) what Panci was talking about. I immediately took Hélène’s side, even though I did not know why. For a second Panci was taken aback, and then continued on his way with slower steps towards the exit. He sat in his car and tore away. That day Hélène did not appear at lunch. I felt that I had learned something.

When we moved to Budapest, we saw less of Panci. He became titular abbot near Lake Balaton. He was imprisoned and tortured in connection with the Rajk[29] trial. Even under these circumstances his style did not abandon him. He escaped, and became the private chaplain of a Spanish marquis and passed away there, in Spain.

Our priest, Domonkos Novák, a retired parish priest, lived with his housekeeper in the presbytery opposite the church. He received his benefice from the patron (my father). Kivadár did not have a parish, because it was not big enough. Uncle Domonkos was very old by then, and it happened that he sometimes even passed wind before the altar, but only we altar boys heard it. At the end of the war, when he had already long been dead, and after the German, Bulgarian and Russian occupiers were also gone, and Mother returned home, I furnished the empty presbytery for her with whatever furniture there remained. For a while I stayed with her, joined by my brother Józsi, and eventually Zsiga. Later she had to leave from there too. This time the communists chased her away. By then I was already in Australia. Mother moved to Bodvica with Zsiga. They rented a flat in an assistant teacher’s house. They did not leave her in peace there either: she was ‘relocated’ (in other words: deported), together with my brother to a place called Lenin-farm in the Great Plains. By the time they were allowed to return, they had lost everything. The teacher had auctioned off all their belongings. “Be glad that you came through alive,” he told my brother, who, after his return from POW camp, now had the second occasion to be thankful.

Uncle Domonkos prepared me for my confirmation. I liked to go to his place, because his housekeeper always had some choice morsels to offer. The bishop of Veszprém, Nándor Rott performed the confirmation on his annual round. On these occasions he was our guest, and the four-in-hand fetched and carried him. At Nagyatád he stayed in the Franciscan monastery. He was well-looked after there, but even better in our home. He reciprocated Mother’s hospitality by inviting us in turn, and that is how for a few days we became guests of the episcopal palace. Nándor Rott had an informal manner and a clear head. All the clerics of the neighbourhood, including Panci and the Franciscans, took part in the confirmation procession in full regalia. Following the procession the distinguished guests took breakfast with us, after which they all went their separate ways, including the bishop. Mother did not see him again until the evening, on the way to dinner. He stood on a carved chair in the entrance hall. At the foot of the chair seething with anger, Fatty was trying to get at him, but he was too fat to nip the episcopal ankle by jumping up to the chair. Mother didn’t lose a second; grabbing Fatty by the neck, she planted him behind the glass-door. By the time she returned, bishop Nándor had descended from the chair, smilingly awaiting Mother to escort her to the dining room. But that did not go without a hitch either. In the doorway Ernő and the maid, totally ignoring our presence, were chasing a mouse. Mother, who by now had had enough of the bedlam, tried to soothe them by saying: “Couldn’t this be left until tomorrow?” Ernő too considered that a good idea, and finally we could sit down to dinner.

For that matter, Fatty was the laziest dog in the world. He liked to sleep next to the heater. The tiny twitches his body indicated that he was dreaming. When Mother set out on her walk in her lace-up boots and her walking stick carved by Kapoli, he would follow her with feigned enthusiasm, but only for a short while, he soon turned back. He didn’t fancy long walks, nor did he like strangers. That is why he was locked away when we had guests, and that indignity only augmented his fury. Forgetting his asthma and his gout he would charge at the enemy with bloodshot eyes. He picked particularly on official-looking, dark-suited persons. One of these was Krieger, the assessor from the Board of Guardians, who came from Kaposvár, to oversee the management of our inheritance. Legally Mother was only the beneficial owner of the estate, which after Father’s death devolved to the five of us. (Mother had her own paternal inheritance: the estate at Szolgaegyháza in County Fejér, which a tenant was farming.) An exuberant, jolly man was our Mr. Krieger, with whom Mother could converse very well. After dinner he ensconced himself in the easy-chair with the book-board and lit a cigar. I watched with baited breath to see when he would drop the ashes into the socket. Fatty also eyed Farkas, the chief bailiff askance, although he usually wore knee-breeches. His spindly legs were somehow in contrast with his paunch. As the bailiff of Kopaszhegy, he supervised the bailiffs of Kivadár and Halastó as well. Given his choleric temperament it was not advisable to annoy him. Fatty didn’t mind him while he was seated. But the moment that he was upright, he would promptly have jumped at him, had Mother not restrained him. Neither was the lawyer Bodó safe when he came to our place, although with his smooth manners he did not give any cause for it. His manicured fingers held the fountain pen elegantly, which he would then hand to Mother to sign the papers he had put in front of her, and he stirred his coffee with just as much elegance after the official business had been completed. It happened that Mother went to his office in Nagyatád, and on those occasions he and his wife offered us their hospitality. There was a glass-fronted book case in the parlour, and they also owned a piano. A bourgeois atmosphere permeated the house, a novel experience for me.

Discrimination was also demonstrated in putting up casual visitors. The President of the Board of Guardians was deemed to merit a guest-room, but the chief bailiff only got the room that was inside the glass-door, and therefore on the border of the inner house and the kitchen corridor. It would make a long list to enumerate all who had stayed in that room and the one opposite with the double doors. That was where Wu-Wu (Aunt Lina), a very old, wizened German lady also lived for a while. She had been the childhood governess of Mother and her siblings, and she taught us some German. In winter she wore a muff and a veil on her turban-like hat. Once she sat behind me on the sled and her wig fell off her head. The other was Aunt Erzsi, the retired lady’s maid, who stopped the cuckoo clock at the moment of Father’s death.

As our instructors came and went, they could choose between these two rooms. One of them, a tall, dandified man, constantly picked on my brother Józsi, and on one occasion slapped his face. This upset me, especially since Józsi was a quiet, rather gauche, squinting boy with a stammer. As he developed, he lost his stammer as well as the squint. He was operated on by the recently beatified Prince Batthyány-Strattman in his hospital at Körmend. Józsi rode out the war because of his eye, but not so the terror. He languished in Recsk[30] for two and a half years, where he was sent from the detention camp at Kistarcsa. There he was confined, because he was nabbed at the border while trying to cross it illegally. His case never came before a court though. He escaped to the US after the Revolution of ‘56. He died in New York and his ashes were scattered over the ocean by our brother.

The jewellery merchants were also lodged there, when they showed up on Mother’s invitation. Although she didn’t let anyone in on it, I knew that she was showing them her jewels that she kept in the safe. Necklaces, rings, pearls and brooches were gathered behind its door, while grandfather’s medal collection and the larger pieces of silver were resting in the cupboards of the tower room. The jewel boxes exuded the lustre and aplomb of family heirlooms, court balls and gracious gifts. The economic slump did not spare the large landowners either, but I do not believe that Mother would have had financial worries, although on one occasion I saw her lose her composure like never before. That happened when Uncle Jóska came to visit us with his wife, my Aunt Camilla.[31] Uncle Jóska did not go into farming, nor was he interested in it. After a brief artistic venture (he wanted to be a painter), he chose a diplomatic career. He met Mother’s older sister, Camilla, who became his wife, at the Embassy in Berlin. Mother married Father fourteen years later. From then on a double bond linked the Somssiches to the Szőgyény family: two brothers’ marriages to two sisters. The third daughter, my Aunt Lilly[32] became the wife of an Austrian count, Carl Chorinsky[33]. For a short while after the First World War, Uncle Jóska was foreign minister and subsequently ambassador to the Vatican. After his retirement he lived in Csór near Székesfehérvár in grandfather Szőgyény’s house, which Aunt Camilla had inherited. He didn’t have a house, while Father had two, nor did he have any children, while Father had five. They didn’t have any worries either, while Mother had countless, and lived accordingly in luxury under circumstances reminiscent of ambassadorial times, in the gorgeously furnished house at Csór, and in winter in their town house in the Castle District. Csór’s proximity to Budapest was a magnet for a host of visitors, from Cardinal Serédi (who as a young priest had acted as librarian in the Vatican) to Archduke József Ferenc. István (Flöci) Csáky, the later foreign minister in the Teleki-government was a regular guest, as was István Zichy, director of the National Museum’s history department, who was a cousin on the Szőgyény side (and who had teased out the kinship with Kossuth), as well as many others. Now and then a bank manager would also show up, and on those occasions the conversation most probably did not concern the good old times, but loans, amortizations, etc. that enabled the maintenance of the lavish lifestyle. It was patently obvious that my uncle and aunt decreased rather than increased their assets.

That afternoon Mother was sobbing inconsolably in her boudoir, while Uncle Jóska and his wife were standing by impotently (uncaringly?). I watched them from the doorway. I did not know why Mother was crying, but I saw that she was miserable. Maybe that is when it finally dawned on her that she was alone with no one to depend on, not even her closest relatives. My uncle and aunt left the following day. It was then that my mother decided that we would only spend the summer months at Kivadár and Pörtschach. My brothers were nearing their final high school exams, I had another three years to go, and she had to find a suitable school for my sister as well. As there was no gymnazium in Atád, she was studying at home. There was no further mention of modernizing the house, nor of having the water laid on, as the move to the capital became the central subject. That is what Mother discussed with all her visitors. She became particularly friendly with a woman, who used to come down from Budapest regarding jewellery matters. She and our lawyer, Bodó, assisted her in finding a suitable apartment, which they eventually did on the top floor of 100 Andrássy Road, one house removed from the corner of Bajza Street.

Mother kept up the relationship with the woman, who, towards the end of the war, appeared unexpectedly at Kivadár, and asked Mother to look after a box that she had brought along. She was Jewish, so not only her possessions, but her life were in danger. The laws were passed in the Hungarian parliament, the deportations were carried out by the Germans on Hungarian trains. Mother put the box in the safe next to her own things. She could not foresee what the future would bring.

In the spring of 1944 our apartment was hit by a bomb. I lived through the carpet-bombing in the shelter. A few weeks later I got my call-up papers (by then I was already an ensign in the reserve), and I was ordered to Eszterháza, where I was put in charge of the Anti-Aircraft Riflerange’s training centre. We evaluated the hits of the batteries placed along Lake Fertő with the help of theodolites. The black sleeve targets were hauled up into the air by planes. We were the only such unit in the country. Our activity was no longer of any use, but our superiors still believed in the German miracle weapons.

Mother was left on her own in the house in the autumn of 1944. Her sons were dispersed: Zsiga on the Eastern front, Laci at the embassy in Zagreb and Józsi, who had been adopted by Uncle Jóska, with the widowed Aunt Camilla at Csór. My sister had married First Lieutenant Miklós Selmeczy,[34] and they were waiting at Nagyatád to see where his regiment would be ordered to. Mother first went to Kispuszta, thence to Perdócz-puszta, the estate of her son-in-law’s parents, to be with her daughter who was expecting a child. Finally she ended up at the estate of her cousin, Countess Ferenc Eltz,[35] in Celldömölk, at the Western edge of the country. By then Aunt Camilla and Józsi had also arrived there. I managed to visit Mother before she moved away. It took me the better part of a day to travel on blacked out trains as far as Kivadár. My sister and her husband came as well. By now only Mother and Ernő with his family lived in the big house. The shrouded pieces of furniture patiently awaited their fate, and the shuttered windows stared blindly into the void. My valiant brother-in-law handed me a pistol and several hand grenades ‘in case you get into trouble,’ he said. We did not specify whence the trouble could come, we were in it up to our necks. On the way back I was accompanied by the rumble of cannon fire. When the Russians were approaching Celldömölk, Józsi buried the boxes in the exact spot where the Russians would dig the cesspit. The treasure became merely an object of dreams. I recall a cigar box of pure gold, with Kaiser Wilhelm’s miniature on its lid, framed by diamonds. The Jewish woman returned. Her worldly goods were lost, but she survived.

But, at the beginning of the thirties, at Kivadár, who would have thought of another war and the cataclysm that would follow it? The older generation was still recalling its war, from which they had barely recovered, but for us young ones it seemed like a distant incident, and we were bored when the subject came up. Perhaps Hélène had an inkling of what the future would bring. She was listening to the French news on our five-valve super-radio, and her face clouded over. The blustering of the poseur with the toothbrush moustache filled her with horror. The scene she had staged with Panci at the staircase I had also put down to her Frenchness, and it only boosted my sympathy that a ‘French’ ancestor of mine had been its backdrop. The etching on the wall in the stairwell depicted Ferdinand Géramb,[36] the uncle of my maternal grandmother, Mária Géramb[37]. He was a soldier, the father of six children, and became a Trappist monk. And I envisaged him wordless in the monastery amid balls of cheese and casks of liqueur, or as a hero on the battlefield. As the picture portrayed the general girded by his sword with a Busby on his head. (Reality was even more colourful than my imagination. The Géramb family lived in the Monarchy and they owned a mine at Selmecbánya. Ferdinand’s father went to France, but returned to Hungary when the French Revolution broke out. Ferdinand was born in Lyons, but was educated in Hungary, at the officers’ school in Pozsony. In the first half of his life he fought against the hated Napoleon with a recruited army in Austria, and on the side of the insurgents in Spain. After the fall of the empire he begged to be admitted as a novice to the order. Between these events he had fallen into the hands of Napoleon, who imprisoned him in the fortress of Vincennes. His swashbuckling life took him from London to Naples where he fought a duel near the mouth of Mount Vesuvius. Nor did he stay put in the monastery for long. He described his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in a book written in Rome. There, though he was not a priest, he held the office of procurator-general of La Trappe, and Gregory XVI named him titular abbot with the insignia of the ring and pectoral cross, a privilege without any precedent. He frequenented not only the salons of Rome in his white habit, but also the corridors of the Vatican. A village priest, believing that he was the Pope, knelt down before him, asking for his blessing. Learning of this, the Holy Father sat him next to himself, saying: “now there are two of us.” He died in Rome in 1848.[38]

Rippl-Rónai’s picture hung on the wall at the bottom of the staircase. I saw it again in the nineties in the Kaposvár Rippl-Rónai-museum, entitled Three Slim Poplars and Two Ricks. Actually I had always considered the ‘ricks’ as stacks, which we climbed on ladders, and when we got to the top and slumped into the golden straw, all that was above us was the blue sky, speckled by fleecy clouds. The greater part of the picture is also filled by the blue sky – not a bird or man in sight, only the verdant line of the woods and the yellow stubble-field in the background. The painting could virtually have been the symbol of the great landed estate. There are no such haystacks and poplars on peasant fields.

I came across three more familiar Rippl-Rónai paintings in the museum. To my question, when such questions could already be asked after the change of regime of how these pictures happened to get there, I have not received a genuine answer to this day. One of the pastels, Two Little Boys: a portrait of Zsiga and Laci at four and five respectively ‘was brought in by a policeman as a lost and found object,’ wrote the museum’s ex-director, a well-known poet and respected elderly gentleman. Another picture shows my Aunt Eszter at fourteen, Young Girl with Racquet. It used to decorate the wall of my sister’s room. The fourth painting portrays my mother in profile, with a cup in her hand. Mother allegedly did not like that picture. After Father’s marriage, the friendship with Rippl-Rónai suffered a rift, and perhaps this picture also mirrored that situation.

Another picture (an etching) in the stairwell depicted the Castle of Csáktornya, entitled in German, Czagkathurn. The captain of the castle, an ancestor of ours called Miklós died in 1671. Genealogists usually commence the family tree with him, as his sons had won the letter patent of nobility in Hungary, but the ancestors were already noblemen earlier in Croatia. According to one version of the family lore, they drove pigs from Croatia to Bohemia and Moravia via Hungary. En route, in the endless primeval forests of Transdanubia, the herd fed on acorn, and the piglets fattened. They fetched a good price in the wealthy mining towns. On their return journey all the ancestors had to do, was to carry the gold, but most of them stayed on in Hungary. Be that as it may, the connection shows up in the family. My great-grandfather was born in Prague, and grandfather in Sternberg, in the home of great-great-grandfather’s[39] wife, baroness Lujza Hirsch von Sternberg[40]. One of the tourist advertisements placed in the first-class compartments of the Fiume Express showed the turreted chateau, as if symbolizing our family’s expansion from the South towards the North. My paternal grandmother was also born in the Czech Klattau, and Uncle Victor died in Fiume. The defender of the castle at Csáktornya did not fight in vain against the Turks.

At the top of the stairs a camouflaged door led to the attic, where Rózsi had been cut off the rope. It was through this attic that one could climb out to the crenellated projection mentioned earlier. It was a mysterious, dark place; it still haunts my dreams. A huge, black cupboard divided into several compartments stood in the foreground. With its striated pattern it was reminiscent of carved pieces of peasant furniture. It had some five doors that could be locked with keys. Mother kept the delicacies for the kitchen in it: chocolate, sugar-loafs, dates and the Ovomaltine. Why she did it, I could not fathom. Mother was never petty-minded, and I would never have presumed that the staff would filch anything, especially not the kitchen-maids. My thinking was in curious contrast with my own practice, since on more than one occasion I pilfered the contents of the cupboard, when it had been left open. The cylindrical boxes of Ovomaltine stood out from amongst the spices; we were wholesale consumers. So much so that the Swiss Wander factory made use of Mother to advertise their product. The leaflet accompanying the boxes displayed Mother’s letter, a testimonial to the benefits and the use of this healthy beverage. As proof there was a photo of all five of us: a veritable picture of health!

I often accompanied Mother on her shopping trips to Atád, whose two main objectives were the corner grocer and Feigelstock’s (later Fazekas) drapery and mercery. Mr. Fazekas offered Mother a chair for her comfort while making her purchases. When they finished, Mrs. Fazekas would appear to ask Mother in to their apartment behind the shop. Theirs was the biggest house on the southern side of Széchenyi Square. Inside afternoon tea and an open piano awaited Mother. Erzsébet Fazekas was an opera singer, but she gave up her career after her marriage; the room became her stage as soon as the first notes rolled out from her throat. She used also to come to Kivadár. On those occasions Mother proceeded with her to the piano through the doorway, both of whose wings had been opened wide. The whole house resounded with the music, and even the girls tiptoed up from the kitchen to hear the arias.

The Fazekas’s neighbour was the Benyáks’ stationery shop, where a printing press clattered in the background. It was a pretty exciting place, especially the printing section. The Benyák brothers did not mind if I hung around; they showed me the typefaces, the machines and how the bookbinding worked. They also sold books in the shop, but these were mainly schoolbooks and publications of local interest. On the other hand, the one-armed tobacconist on the western side of the square carried real literature: classics from Balzac to the works of the then fashionable Mihály Földi (who was called the Hungarian Dostoevsky), Körmendi and Lajos Zilahy, all in their blue covers published by the Pesti Napló (or was it the Tolnai Világlapja?). I bought them the minute they arrived in the shop. It was a great temptation to get the newest issues of the Tolnai Világlapja or the Színházi Élet displayed on the counter, but if I had any money left at all, I spent it on cigarettes, which the tobacconist sold by the piece from the cheap Symphonia, the dearer Miriam and Memphis to the gold-tipped Egyptian brands. The adults, who would rather have us read Tihamér Tóth’s Tiszta férfiúság (Pure Manhood), regarded the Színházi Élet an ‘immoral’ paper. I had to make do with random issues found in the waiting room of the dentist, Dr. Lővy or the barbershop of Mr. Plasinka, where I first had a chance to read a poem by Ernő Szép[41].

On market days the colourful crowd that filled the square spilled over into the neighbouring streets as well. Kerchiefed women, who a short while ago were still selling eggs and poultry, were now picking and choosing from the merchandise set out on the counter of the Fazekas emporium. In the neighbouring inn, dealers and farmers were drinking toasts. Around midday Kálmán the gipsy fiddler would make an appearance, nosing around to see whether there were any customers who wanted to make merry in the evening. There was no need to take the money too far: the savings bank was on the corner, and opposite it the Rotter brothers’ hardware store. Everything was available here that a farmer would need, from nails to plough-shares. In my fret-saw days, I used to go there to browse and buy. The street that flanked the eastern side of the square where the Rotters’ shop was located, was also the site of the parish hall, the lovely baroque church (with great-grandfather’s altarpiece), with the monastery next to it. On that side of the square, in the centre of a little park stood the steaming thermal bath, whose well was dug at the same time as the one at Kivadár. The row of houses on the northern side included that of Mr. Mike the notary, the buildings of the fire brigade and the post office. A street separated the latter from the cinema and the Hotel Korona. That was the street where Dr. Árpád Nagy, the district medical officer had his surgery. He was the one who (mis)treated me when I broke my arm, and on another occasion gave me a massive dose of tetanus vaccine.

We used to go to the movies on Saturdays. Mother was only rarely keen to go for such an outing, but Hélène all the more. In winter the driver tethered the horses in the Fransiscans’ stable. I got to know the stars of the silent films and later of the talkies in the Nagyatád cinema. We sat in boxes in the elevated part of the hall, surrounded by the Atád intelligentsia and the officers of the garrison. The newsreel was preceded by people greeting each other left and right, and when ‘the beautiful Mrs. Bánffy’ arrived with her husband, a major and the handsome first-lieutenant Erdős, her beau, all eyes were drawn to them. In front of the screen, a pianiste accompanied the antics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and provided the appropriate background music for thrilling and heart-rending scenes. When the hall was used as a theatre, those who used to sit in the back of the cinema, now occupied the front rows. The theatrical companies that stopped off in Nagyatád gave a fillip to the whole town; everybody talked about them, and about who entertained the actresses after the performance. Uncle Kálmán was serenading until the early hours, his eyes becoming more and more bloodshot. There were also amateur theatricals. The star of operetta was Mrs. Müller, the silk factory’s manager’s dulcet-voiced wife. I was very taken by her, particularly after she performed a dance scene in diaphanous green gown. Occasionally politicians and writers also appeared on stage. I attended a presentation by Sándor Sík[42], who, with visionary intuition, talked about the anti-intellectual ‘chauffeur-type’, followed by some of his poems, demonstrating that all was not yet lost. During election time electioneering agents and candidates strutted on the stage. I remember Ferenc Ulain: he hung around the party bosses a lot. Hecklers were booed or ejected. All this was of no interest to the farm labourers; their lot had not changed for generations, why should it do so now? They did not have the franchise, and even for those who did, the ballot was not secret. Therefore hardly any politicians came to Kivadár. Gyula Gömbös was the exception.

Having finished her visit to the Fazekases, Mother called in at the Mandels’ (later the Karbuczky couple’s) corner grocery. That is whence she replenished the contents of the black cupboard, and while she sampled the merchandise, I quickly dropped in to Bárány’s radio store on the other side of the road. Along here an open space separated the shops from the highway, a sort of a parking lot for the farmers with carts and for market stall-keepers. Just as the barber Plasinka next door, Mr. Bárány always had an audience of kibitzing, nattering cronies, who sat around him while he was dismantling radios, and I watched how he went about it. Further on, at the Vasdénnyey pharmacy a bell signalled the entrance of customers. Red and green glass globes were the shop’s signs. Purple containers with glass stoppers and various jars stood on the shelves, whilst on the counter polished scales awaited the powders that the walrus-moustached Mr. Vasdénnyey, or his assistant would carefully measure out in the pan. The pharmacist was a highly regarded, respected citizen of Nagyatád, whose flowers and kitchengarden were later looked after by Anna, a quick-witted and beautiful girl from Kivadár.

Approaching from Kivadár, the highway veered left at the northern side of the main square, towards the station. That is where Mandel, the grocer moved into a two-storeyed house, where he now ran his shop as a delicatessen and wholesale business.  He did well, because the peasant women not only bought merchandise, but also supplied him with it. A young tailor by the name of Menyhárt, rented one of the ground floor premises. He used to come to Kivadár, and I too got a suit made by him with the then fashionable wide-legged trousers and double-breasted waistcoat. They said that Rózsi had committed suicide because of him. No one would have thought that he would one day become the top men of the Arrow Cross Party in Nagyatád. Another Mandel owned a grain business on the opposite side of the road. His two good-looking teenage girls used to eye the passers-by from behind the counter, and I eyed them, when I happened to bicycle that way. Not far from them was Dr. Krausz’s surgery, and past that the chambers of the lawyer Bodó. (The Bodós had a nephew, who was learning to play the piano. He didn’t like to practise. Later, in Sydney, he told me that they used to try and spur him on to work harder by telling him how diligent I was. He became an excellent pianist and supplemented his income as an emigrant by playing in restaurants and clubs.)  The customs house, the Calvinist church and the so-called Chateau Lelbach were located on the same side of the road, with the military barracks opposite them.

The officers of the garrison used to call on us. The first to do so was Captain Kreghszky, who arrived on horseback. Mother received him in the study. Resting the hilt of his sword on this left arm, he came through the door that Ernő opened for him, and when he sat down, he placed his shako on the carpet next to his foot. He could have left it together with his sword on the coat-rack, but the etiquette of the ‘first visit’ did not allow that. He sat on the edge of the armchair, straight of back, bent slightly forward; to slump into it, or to cross his legs, would have been ill-mannered. Mother did not bother about such picayune matters, and promptly questioned her visitor about his life; she had an inquisitive nature. It was as a result of the Captain’s visit that Koma came to our place – he recommended it. When it transpired that he was a good bridge player, Mother invited him to her card games, thus expanding the circle of her regular partners. The latter were neighbouring couples: the Grubanoviches, the Baron Feketes, Flóra Szécheny and Géza Mándy, whose estate at Simongát was separated from ours by the River Rinya. The director of an Austrian firm, Heimbold and his wife were perhaps the most assiduous players, and they became Mother’s close friends. Their Austrian home was close to Pörtschach, so the card games could be kept up also during the summer holidays. The exiled Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, who lived on the other side of the lake at the Hotel Golf (Mother’s goal when she swam across, while we accompanied her in a boat), also took part in some of the games. His relative, Count Hoyos brought him along to our place.

At that time all reasonably good players used Culbertson’s system of bidding. I was taught it by a Russian emigrant, Prince Thermatheusoff. Like so many of his comrades in misfortune in the neighbouring chateaux, he availed himself of our hospitality, whiling away his time until he could settle permanently somewhere in Europe. He played patiently, conversing with us in French, reminiscing about his ravaged home.

We learned to dance from an American girl of Hungarian origin, called Irene, and later from Józsa Járitz, who became a well-known painter. Both of them spent a summer each at Kivadár. The music emanated from the horn of a wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone, and we awkwardly danced the foxtrot, tango, and the English waltz with our ‘teachers’ and girl visitors. Irene put cottonwool into the toes of her shoes. My Austrian cousin and her girlfriend, “Pipi” wore flared trousers and smoked their cigarettes from long holders: they were acting the flapper type. We also had an English student as a summer paying guest. During the holidays I listened to Caruso, Galli-Curci and Chaliapin records, or to Árpád Balázs, who sang his Gipsy-Hungarian style compositions in his finely nuanced, slight voice, among them his song based on Petőfi’s poem that begins with “I'll be a tree, if you are its flower...” Irene was a flat-chested girl with a strong American accent, quick to take offence. She didn’t have it easy with four youngsters. The petite Józsa Járitz was enthusiastic about the buffalos; she kept painting them day after day. This immediately endeared her to me, as I adored them ever since I was a little child, and ran after them, when I caught sight of them with the water-waggon. The buffalo driver, Miska Pfeifer, was a burly, slightly half-witted man. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly, but one could imagine that one day he would raise his shovel-sized hand and strike someone dead. At any rate, his buffalos did his bidding. Sometimes he would come into the park with them to help the gardener cart away hay or garbage. At such times I would even miss my meals as I kept watching Józsa paint the buffalos. We called the gardener Kuka. He was a deaf-mute, but the flowers understood him: he grew beautiful roses. Once the harvesters brought in an injured fawn; it hadn’t jumped away quickly enough before the scythe. Kuka fed it from a baby’s bottle and kept it in the glass-house behind the house. When it recovered, he let it loose in the park. It grew antlers, and pushed Zsiga over with a runnning jump. They took him then and set him free in the woods. At least I hope that that is what happened.

Among our summer tutors, Ladislas Thiel was the most unforgettable. He came from Austria, and financed his university studies with private tutoring. In winter he instructed in a Viennese princely palace, in summer at our place. In theory he taught us German, but in fact he was rather our companion and minder, who became a lifelong friend. He was different from our other teachers: the stocky, Mongolian-looking Kálmán Baranyai or the awkward, lanky Franci Selymes. Thiel, with his tall frame, blue eyes and wavy hair, was the highlander among the men of the plains, the naïve hero. (He became a high-ranking official in the Austrian ministry of education, a family man, who  with his lovely wife, Anne-Marie placed their apartment at our disposal, when fleeing from Hungary in 1949, I arrived in Vienna with my family.)

Aunt Eszter lived a short walk away from us at Kispuszta. The hike itself was a pleasure through the oak forest, where we picked mushrooms after the rain. My aunt grew medicinal herbs in her garden. In summer she too was always surrounded by guests. The Dömmel girls came from Pécs. Márta was studying to become a dentist, and when she married Professor Cholnoky, she spent her summers with him and their children at Kispuszta. When her younger sister, Bözsinc, turned twenty, she entered a missionary order, which sent doctors and nurses to India and Kashmir, where male doctors could not treat women. Bözsinc sailed from London to India, where she nursed first in the order’s hospital in Rawalpindi and later in Islamabad. She took the name: Bernadette. After the Proclamation of Independence, when Pakistan seceded from India, the patients were crowded out by the victims of the Hindu–Muslim atrocities. Doctors and nurses waded ankle-deep in blood in the hospital’s corridors. After forty-two years’ of service, Bernadette announced that she wanted to go home in answer to the call of her niece’s widowed husband, to look after him. Her mother superior wouldn’t hear of it, to which Bernadette wrote to the Pope. She received her dispensation soon after, returned home, and she and her friend planned to wed. They asked their old friend the bishop of Pécs, to marry them. Now it was his turn to object, but only until Bernadette pulled out the Pope’s letter from her pocket. Bernadette-Bözsinc was slightly older than us; she could have been our sister; Aunt Eszter regarded both girls as her family. We keep in contact to this day with Bernadette, who – herself a widow now – visits lonely old people, many of them her juniors, providing them with the Sacraments and with love. I think of her as ‘the living saint’.

My Aunt Eszter’s closest friends were schoolmistresses at Atád, Aqui and Józsika. We called them with tongue in cheek sorors, although they were not sisters (not even blood relations), but extremely well educated spinsters, who devoted their lives to teaching, and regarded Kispuszta their second home. They taught my sister when she was a private student. Once they brought up the subject, whether animals had souls. “And if they did, would they be resurrected?”, I asked. Perhaps I was thinking of Koma. Sándor Horváth, the Dominican father, also a regular visitor, would have been more appropriate for settling the question. A gigantic man, he came from a peasant background, taught at a Swiss university (in Latin), and wrote massive tomes on the philosophy of Saint Thomas. The sorors hung on his every word. He liked to play ball and banter with us. He returned the hospitality by saying daily mass in the chapel adjoining the house. My aunt had the reputation of being ‘a saintly woman’, and so many people came to mass on Sundays that, crowded out of the aisles, they chanted the hymns from outside, with the accompaniment of Aunt Aqui on the harmonium.

The two children of our relatives, ‘the Somssiches from Pécs’, also came under Aunt Eszter’s wings.  Their parents had drowned in the Dráva, and the two orphans were brought up by their grandmother, Aunt Etelka. In summer they also made an appearance at Kispuszta, and used to come to us to have a swim and to pick hazelnuts. We instinctively behaved better in Aunt Eszter’s presence, because she was very strict. Her severity extended to the Russian officers billeted on her: they walked on tiptoes not to disturb her, and even attended Sunday mass. During the war she didn’t leave the house, hence it, together with its owner, remained unharmed. My mother would also have done better had she stayed with her (with the boxes). The communists did not evict her either: the people would have risen against them, had they done it. After her death students of the agricultural college lived in the house, and when they too moved out, the building started to go to rack and ruin; no one bothered with it. It still stands today: reduced to rubble, and on the veranda near the garden, a little tree has grown out of a stray seed.

The sheep-pen was located along the road leading to Kispuszta. It burnt down one summer evening. Luckily it was empty, as the sheep spent the night in the corral. There was a farm-labourers’ house not far from the pen, as well as wooden buildings housing the granary and the corn-loft. That was the northern wing of the estate, next to the park. We were roused by the tolling of the bell. We ran up to Hélène’s room, as that was the closest to the fire. Tongues of flame were clashing with the rolling smoke, and we could hear the crackling of the dampened fire. When the roof fell in, the flames leapt to the sky, and illuminated our faces. Burning shreds of thatch and straw drifted in the air, and I suddenly turned to run to the fire. There was a gap in the fence next to the rabbit hutch and I climbed through it. By then a lot of people had arrived. Men and women formed a line and passed buckets of water from the well. By the time the water cart arrived, only the walls were still standing. I spotted Margit in the line, and slipped in next to her, passing the buckets into her hand. That night I couldn’t sleep: all I could see behind my closed eyelids were the flames, and the tolling of the bell reverberated in my ears. I was only sorry that I hadn’t rung it. To toll the knell is allowed only in case of great calamities – fire or death. I missed a rare opportunity.

I had been a private student for a year, and was panic-stricken at the thought of having to exchange my home for the forbidding walls of the boarding school at Pécs. At the end of summer I took to my bed. The doctors experimented with all sorts of things: ephedrine tablets, digitalis heart drops and the like. At any rate my mother decided to keep me at home for another year, and that turned out to be the best medicine. My brothers set off for Pécs in the autumn, while I stayed at Kivadár with my sister. After breakfast we sat down with my tutor, Kálmán in my room, or if the weather was nice, in the garden. After the lessons I was free as a bird to go anywhere I wanted.

At the boundary of the puszta was the Öregerdő (Old Forest), perhaps the remnant of the primeval forest that had once covered Transdanubia as far as the Bakony mountains. A swampy woodland, covered by dense undergrowth, in the shadow of the foliage of huge oak trees. There were no avenues through the woods here, only some tracks that the game had trampled down, or perhaps the outlaws of olden days. The horse could only fumble its way through the fallen, rotting tree-trunks, while it constantly flapped its tail to rid itself from the hordes of bloodsucking horseflies. It was rare to see deer here, but weasels, skunks, foxes could still be seen, and even if what I took for a lynx was merely a feral cat, it only increased the magic of the forest. The hunchbacked little man too used to spend his time here – the site of his hovel was still visible. The Small Tölös had grown out of the deforestation of the Öregerdő. They were felling there once again. The tapping of the axes and the calls of the woodcutters – timber! – signalling the toppling of the tree giants, could be heard a long way. One end of the stumped logs was chained to the front axle of a dismantled cart, the other to the rear one. That is how they hauled them to the sawmill or the station. That was never an easy job, but when the rains came, the carts bottomed on the ground that had become a quagmire. I became a witness to such a scene one November afternoon. In vain did Z. the driver hit the horses, the cart just wouldn’t budge. The horses strained with trembling tendons, steam exuding from their bodies. Sweat was pouring from Z.’s face too. An elderly man, he was just as powerless now as his horses. He stood with head lowered next to them, in his patched jacket and worn boots. Neither of them protected him from the dampness that had numbed his limbs since the crack of dawn. Not much distinguished him now from the workhorse, except that his harness was different – his hands were left free. He bent down, picked up a stout stick and started to bludgeon the wretched animals with it. He hit the pole-horse fiercely, although that one was straining harder than its companion, which only tugged and did not really pull. I thought they would not be able to stand it; only the harness held them from dropping down. The woodcutters too, who so far had silently watched Z.’s exertions, would have lifted and pushed the cart, but the weight on it was such, that human hands could not dislodge it. Earth-shattering curses shook the treetops, and finally the cart started to move. Z. beat the horses until they reached drier soil. I stared at the hellish scene, with thumping heart, rooted to the spot. I felt that the poor horses were suffering doubly: not only from the horrendous weight (four horses should have been used for it), but also from the fact that their driver vented all the bitterness of his dreary life on them. The bitterness of a fate little better than that of a landless outcast. At the time I couldn’t, of course, formulate it this way, but I saw how they lived in their earthen-floored rooms, and what was weighed out to them from the granary as their ration. Later on I found out from books, that it was barely enough to keep body and soul together. At school the topic never came up, but nor did it in the electioneering speeches. The large estate was taboo, and the fate of the estate workers came under social scrutiny only once the writings of the rural researchers and folkish writers appeared in the windows of the capital’s elegant bookshops.

During the Christmas vacation the house filled up once again; the fire crackled merrily in the tiled stoves. We went skating on the lake, sledding in the snow, and in the evenings we played theatre. Zsiga and Laci, although a year separated them, were in the same class, and that was their last year in school. They were going to sit for their final exam in the following year: 1933. Their thoughts were mainly taken up by hunting, and therefore for them the highlight of the holiday (if I can call it that) was the battue. This was the first time that I too was allowed to take part as a hunter. In this variant of a shooting party the beaters form a large circle and with their sticks force the panicky game to flee. But in the bald, wintry landscape it has nowhere to hide. The hunters, distributed in shooting distance, tighten the circle with the beaters, and nothing that runs or flies can escape from the fire of the double-barrelled guns. The hare zigzags, and ends its brief life with a somersault. At the end of the shoot the catch was laid out and counted. The hunters got some of it, but the major part went straight into the ice pit, and we fed off it all year, occasionally biting on a pellet. The beaters went home just as hungry as they had arrived.

After the vacation the house became quiet. Only the four of us were left on the first floor: my mother, my sister, Hélène and I. Kálmán was preparing for his law exams in his ground-floor room. In the entrance hall the new stove throbbed and purred, and at dusk the flames blazing behind its transparent door illuminated the stairwell. When the lights were turned on, the bulbs flickered, if the generator motor was still on.

In the course of my various illnesses I slept in almost every first floor room. I survived my most serious pneumonia attack in the corner room. Lying in bed in feverish delirium, I could still hear what went on around me. My eyes gazed at the ceiling or the walls, and my imagination transformed the slightest irregularities and bulges on their surface into human or animal shapes. The timber of the door opening to the room next-door was dappled with knots. On one of its wings there was a hole at teenage eye-height. Either the knot had got loose, or else my brothers knocked it out for a peephole. That hole was now sealed with some putty. When Hélène first came to us, I lived on the other side of that door in the ‘nightingale room’. It came to my mind several times that I should knock the putty out and observe what Hélène was doing, yet I never did. After all I could have opened her door any time; she never kept it locked. My sister was Hélène’s other neighbour, in the room from whose window I had watched my father’s funeral. Now too it was winter, snow had fallen, and not even the rattle of cartwheels broke the deep silence – work proceeded by sleds. The world was totally shut out. That was the time when I began reading long novels, and under their influence to create a world in my mind where my own life and everything around it was happening in a story-like manner. I included my sister and Hélène in the game as well, weaving the pattern of the story together with them.

I was reading in bed, when the door opened and Hélène entered. She was in her pyjamas, and sat down on the edge of my bed. ‘Hitler has come into power!’[43] she said in horror and anger. (I think that instead of the name she used some abusive expression.) ‘I heard it on the radio.’ Her red hair blazed in the light of the reading lamp. For a moment I didn’t know what to say and think, but I sensed that now everything was going to change. It was as if an eerie draught had made me shiver – had the wind of history touched me?!

In the autumn I went back to Pécs, and after my final exam straight to our apartment in Budapest. My sister attended the Sacré Coeur gymnasium, and Hélène returned to Strasbourg and later to Paris, where her sister lived. Her country was ravaged by the war sooner than ours. The Germans occupied Hungary only in 1944.

That spring the town’s Jewish inhabitants, who had already been deprived of their homes and businesses, were made to assemble in Nagyatád’s main square. Gendarmes and their civilian collaborators guarded the families, the elderly men and women clutching their hastily gathered belongings. An officer yanked her silk quilt off a woman, saying: ‘you won’t be needing this’. Friends, acquaintances, old customers, officials filled the square, some of them even harbouring some hope, although the train made up of cattle wagons that was to take them away was already at the station. Whereto? At that time only few people had an inkling, fewer knew. (In May–June the Jews of the entire countryside were forced into transit camps, whence they were deported to German extermination camps. Only a few of them returned; most of those were the younger ones. The sons of the Fazekas and Mándy families were among them.)

Complying with my call-up papers, I travelled for four days to Eszterháza. The train hadn’t even started yet, when the Southern railway station was hit by a bombing raid. I awaited death lying on my stomach between the rails, thinking of a girl called Stefánia. We cooled our heels for almost a full day at Győr. While I was sightseeing, the sirens started up, and I sought refuge in the nearest gateway. I found myself in the cellar of the episcopal palace. It was full of people, who looked at me askance as I was in uniform. When I introduced myself to the priest who stood in the door, they were reassured. He was the bishop, Baron Apor. The brave bishop was hiding Jews and later nuns. A Red Army soldier killed him. He was beatified by the Pope half a century later.

Only the skeleton of our house still stood after the war. My mother was its last inhabitant. It was demolished in the fifties (with the exception of the two rooms I have mentioned) and dismantled. The park and the press-shed also went to rack and ruin. The mausoleum was ordered to be torn down by the authorities. The mortal remains of my grandfather and my father were interred in the cemetery of Nagyatád. Zsiga had their tombstones carved from the remainder of the marble. Later both he and my mother were put to rest there. The solid concrete bath-house still stands. The solid concrete bath-house still stands. In the 90s an enterprising young man used to breed African catfish in the reservoirs; now the tanks have become dry and empty.

The view from the roof terrace is enduringly, achingly (for me) beautiful, and the well is still generously streaming its sulphurous, warm water. I have often dreamt of the house, mostly so that I moved back into it, wanting to make it once again habitable. Perhaps the fact that I was not able do so, induced me to redraw the fading lines of the blueprint.

Chatswood, NSW Australia, February 2005.

Translated from Hungarian by Ann Major, November 2005, Sydney.

[1] Adolf Somssich jn., 1839-1919.

[2] Adolf Somssich sn., 1808-1869.

[3] Css. Adolf Somssich jn., née Terézia Somssich, 1841-1900.

[4] Géza Somssich, 1866-1929.

[5] Mariteréz Somssich, Mrs. Miklós Selmeczy, 1921-2004.

[6] Hungarian: a large house, belonging to the owner of the estate; manor.

[7] József Rippl-Rónai, 1861-1927, prominent Hungarian painter.

[8] Css. Géza Somssich, née Mária Szőgyény-Marich, 1877-1966.

[9] Zsigmond Somssi0ch, 1914-1988.

[10] László Szőgyény-Marich jn., 1840-1916.

[11] Css.Eszter Somssich, 1876-1951.

[12] Viktor Somssich, 1848-1918.

[13] Béla Somssich, 1868-1921.

[14] Css. Béla Somssich, née Erzsébet Coreth, 1879 -?

[15] Hungarian Literary Magazine.

[16] Dezső Szabó’s large, expressionistic novel (1919) combined antiwar sentiment with a romantic cult of the peasantry.

[17] See Dr. Zoltán Kaposi: A Somssich família földbirtoklása Somogy vármegyében. [The Somssich family’s landholdings in County Somogy. ] A Janus Pannonius Tudományegyetem Gazdaságtörténeti Tanszéke, 1998.

[18] József Somssich, 1864–1941.

[19] József Somssich sn., 1821–1894.

[20] Miklós Barabás, 1810-1898, Hungarian painter.

[21] László Somssich, 1915–.

[22] József Somssich, 1917–2000.

[23] Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49.

[24] Zsigmond Szőgyény-Marich, 1874–1880. He died of scarlet fever, and with him the male branch of the family became extinct. That is what motivated me to adopt the Szőgyény name in 1940.

[25] Szőgyény László sn., 1806–1893. He added his wife Mária Marich’s (1815–1890) name to his in 1854. In the course of his long public service career he was chief judge in the court of the Hungarian palatine; vice chancellor of the royal court; member of the Austrian parliament or Reichsrat; president of the Upper House in Hungary; county lord lieutenant; chief justice of Hungary.

[26] See: István Genthon, Rippl-Rónai kiadatlan levelei (RR’s unpublished letters), 1969.

[27] See: Szőgyény László Emlékiratai, három kötet, a Magyar Tudományos Akadémia kiadásában [The Memoirs of László Szőgyény, three volumes, published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.]  The first two volumes appeared in 1895, the third (documentary appendix) only in 1917, because it was not publishable during the reign of Franz Joseph.

[28] Prime Minister of Hungary, 1932-1936.

[29] Communist Foreign Minister, 1949. Arrested, tried on trumped up charges and executed in the same year.

[30] A secret GULAG-like camp operating in Hungary 1950-1953.

[31] Css. József Somssich, née Camilla Szőgyény-Marich, 1876–1966.

[32] Css. Carl Chorinsky, née Ilona Szőgyény-Marich, 1879–1950.

[33] Count Carl Chorinsky, 1873–1939.

[34] Miklós Selmeczy, 1912–1985.

[35] Css. Ferenc Eltz, née Paula Szőgyény-Marich, 1897–1992.

[36] Br. Ferdinand de Géramb, 1772-1848.

[37] Mrs. László Szőgyény-Marich, née bss. Maria Géramb, 1848-1926.

[38] Sándor L. Baumgarten: He was buried in a Trappist monk’s habit. In: Új Látóhatár, 1966, p. 341.

[39] János Somssich, 1784–1861. He was made a baron in 1812, and a count in 1813.

[40] Css. János Somssich, née bss. Aloysia (Lujza) Hirsch von Sternberg, 1789–1837.

[41] Ernő Szép, 1884-1953, Hungarian poet.

[42] Sándor Sík, 1889-1962, Poet, Piarist priest, educationalist.

[43] Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and head of state in 1934.