Triptych Page 3

  She could have used some help once the ship docked, in June 1947, at one of the huge piers in the bustling port of San Francisco.

  My mother shifted her position on the couch. The flower was finished. The needle circled, submerged and reappeared. Pulling the thread taut, she bit the pink line near the knot she’d created and set the needle with its tail free.

  “And then you arrived in America,” I reminded her, as she began scavenging through the round tin next to her, containing her cache of threads.

  Her hand paused, hovering in the silken nest. She looked up, her eyes focused on something in the distance behind me, remembering the moment. “Our family it is but one small unit among hundreds of refugees walking down plank,” she said. “Around us, it is like big festival. Everyone happy, waving, cheering. So excited. We get to bottom. Children suddenly very quiet, eyes big, watching people we lived with for weeks rushing into open arms of relatives and sponsors, they’re greeting them. We watch long time as one family, then another, then another, leaves. Finally, we stand alone. No one has come for us.”

  The difficulties associated with leaving China had been so great that making arrangements for someone to meet the family in the New World had somehow slipped through the cracks. My father found a telephone. But his English was rough. And who would he call? Tapping instinct, he tried a listing for the San Francisco Finnish Lutheran Church and was directed to a widower in Berkeley, a minister who opened his home to my family.

  Swarms of GIs and transplanted war production workers saturated the San Francisco Bay Area. Affordable housing and jobs were scarce. The arrangement with the minister was only temporary and, after weeks of hitting a wall, my father ferreted out a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at a missionary school in Hartford, Connecticut. The family boarded an eastbound train. A year later, 1949, in Wooster, Ohio, my father’s first parish, my mother delivered baby number five—yours truly, Ildikó Palmay, the family’s “Miss America.”

  Mail service between Europe and China had been suspended for four years, from 1942 to 1946. Once in America, my mother tried to fill the gap, reserving Sunday afternoons for letter writing. Strings of illegible Hungarian scrawl, private messages to her sisters and parents, filled countless thin blue aerograms. Return mail was infrequent, the carefully composed obscure messages inside often disappointing to my mother.

  In 1956, the correspondence that did arrive from Budapest stirred impassioned reactions from my parents. Kati’s letters had stopped and Rózsa did not include anything about her when she wrote. I listened from my covert spot on the stairwell to heated discussions about this and more. Conversations rife with the evils of Communism, of freedoms destroyed, of their fears for family and friends—strife, torture, imprisonment, death.

  I was not limited to eavesdropping. Like so many other families, we subscribed to Life magazine. On its scheduled day of delivery, I raced to the mailbox so that I could preview the latest, first. But in November, just days after I’d shared the special time with my mother on the sofa, engaged in her tales of China, someone beat me to the mailbox. I dashed into the kitchen, ready to accuse my brother.

  My mother was seated at the table. Something was wrong. She never rested in the kitchen except to take her meals, and then only after everyone else had started.

  I edged closer. Her forehead clutched in her hands, she stared at the open pages of the magazine. I peered over her shoulder. Graphic black and white images crammed the pages. Men hung by their feet from trees in a Budapest square; streets spattered with bodies and littered with rubble left by tanks. I gaped, stomach pitching as though stricken by a sudden flu. My mother turned, and in that moment I knew I would never forget her expression nor the grainy images. Just as I would never forget the line of teletype that had skittered across the bottom of our television screen a week earlier, while the battle captured in the Life photographs raged on: “Civilized people of the world, in the name of liberty and solidarity, we are asking you to help. Our ship is sinking. The light vanishes. Listen to our cry. Start moving. Extend to us brotherly hands. People of the world, save us. S-O-S.”

  The plea, from Hungarian freedom fighters believing the U.S. and United Nations had promised to come to their aid, went unanswered.

  “Momma, those pictures are horrible,” I said. “You must be so scared for your family there. I’m sorry.” I placed a hand on her stiff shoulder and rubbed lightly. Her muscle tightened.

  She grasped my hand, the skin of her palm damp and cool against mine as she removed it. “We will be fine,” she said, choking back a sob, closing the magazine.

  Inside the parsonage walls a darkness descended.

  From as far back as I could remember, visits from Chinese colleagues and from missionaries serving in such faraway places as Tanganyika were always greeted with enthusiasm in our home. But in 1957, when a former freedom fighter in the ’56 uprising, newly arrived from the DP camps in Trieste, Italy, appeared, my mother, at first excited to see him, soon found reason to regret his arrival.

  Me, I was at once repulsed and curious. Rough-edged porcelain stubs protruded from his gums where his front teeth should have been, and the tips of his fingers on both hands were disfigured. Who was he? What had happened?

  From my stairwell listening post, I overheard him in heated conversation with my mother in the kitchen. They spoke Hungarian, but I understood every word. The subject was my mother’s twin, Kati.

  “No, that cannot be. Rózsa, she would write this to me.” My mother’s voice was nasal as if she had been crying.

  “Edit, I am sorry. But kindly try to understand, they are afraid to write this. It is expected the AVO reads all letters leaving and coming into the country.”

  The sound of my mother’s plea was heartbreaking. “But vanished…How?” Silence. Then, “Tibi, you are holding something back.” Another silence. “AVO?” The sound was more of a croak than a word.

  “This we do not know. But, yes, it is possible.” A pause. “It is the worst time there, Edit. Rakosi is a butcher…”

  A low keening noise from my mother brought tears to my eyes.

  “There is something else, Edit. Something nearly as bad as a death sentence.” The freedom fighter rushed on. “There are rumors she was a traitor. That she escaped…”

  “What? Where?”

  “Could be anywhere…or nowhere.”

  I retreated from the stairwell, my mother’s muffled sobs more than I could bear.

  ***

  Later, I was introduced to the freedom fighter, Tibi, my mother called him. Tibi and I took a walk. I wanted to ask about my aunt Kati, but didn’t wish to expose myself as an eavesdropper. Especially as he was describing life in a country where a person’s every move was watched.

  “After Second World War, Hungary it was liberated by Soviet Russia,” he began in broken English. “Do you know of Stalin? Have they teach you about him in your school?” He read my puzzled look. “No, of course. You are still very young. For now, believe me when I tell you this: he was the devil himself. And Stalin he appoint his evil disciple, Matyas Rakosi, to be master of Hungary. When Rakosi decide something, if others do not agree…simple—” The freedom fighter sliced his finger across his throat. “He get his way. What do the people get? Those who not join the Party get meager wages, little food, few clothing. All freedom gone.”

  In my storybook, a spell robbed the princesses of their free will. But there were only twelve of them to control. “Hungary has many people…many throats,” I said. “He can’t cut them all. How does he do it? Hold power over an entire country?”

  “Rakosi’s power? The AVO. His secret police. Heartless animals, always on prowl for signs of Party disloyalty. They hound us, fill us with fear. Offer food for information or, more common, take people from their homes in the middle of night, force them to talk. If want, they make things up. Atmosphere it become so poisoned, no
one can be trusted. Neighbors they tell secrets on one another. Even within families people turn.”

  Tibi shook his head. “A terror state. This is how Rakosi rules. People feeling always fear, humiliated, trapped. Helpless, even as tens of thousands of Hungarians disappear. Sent to hard labor. Or maybe kept in cells below AVO headquarters, never to emerge.”

  I was horror-struck. “Never to emerge?”

  He nodded. “In chamber of AVO basement is opening to underground canal, ending at Danube. Convenient for disposal of bodies.” He held out his hands, displayed disfigured fingertips. “This happen at interrogation before I am sent away.” His nails had been lifted off with bamboo sticks for keeping banned Western books in his apartment. “Only books on history of Communism, Marxism, Lenin allowed,” he explained.

  He had been a university student, curious about the bigger world. Afterward, he was assigned to hard labor in a coal mine. “Near one end of the quarry is ridge, rising several hundred feet into the air. We are given job of pounding this hill to gravel so fine it will pass through small sieve. There is quota—two hand trucks full each day. Some days I cannot make this. When I cannot, I must stand in clammy cell, cold water up to my knees, all night. Then, if guards want to play more, next morning, after no sleep, I must carry big rock up and down ladder, dozen times. If I faint, when I wake up game begin again.”

  Sickened, I shuddered, but there was more.

  “To eat, we get only wormy food. Bird portions, not enough for such hard work. But no one care. We die, so what?” His voice was bitter with the memory.

  One night he was caught near the camp’s fence, trying to escape. That was when his teeth were broken off. “But in the end I have big victory.” He grinned unabashedly. “I survive.”

  My child’s heart ached for him. I also felt more deeply for my mother. She did not have to endure the hardships of the Communist regime and the revolution, but this did not mean that living in the Land of the Free she did not suffer. Twenty years would pass before she would return to Hungary. She would miss her older sister Rózsa’s wedding and the birth of Rózsa and Oszkár’s three babies. During her absence, Uncle Oszkár, and my father’s brother, Uncle Gyula, would be taken from their homes and sent to Siberia as slave laborers. Her father would perish, and Kati mysteriously disappear.

  After my walk with Tibi, I went in search of my mother. “You’re very brave, Momma,” I said, finding her in the kitchen stirring a pot on the stove. “Leaving Hungary has been very hard on you. You haven’t seen your family for so long. So much has happened, plenty of bad things, too.”

  The spoon stopped. My mother glanced up. Green eyes flashed. “What do you know? You dream of princesses, your prince, escaping to a castle…”

  “No, Momma. I don’t want to go away.” I was standing next to her. I placed my hand gently on her arm. It jerked away. The stirring resumed. “Momma, I’m your little girl. I love you, I’m here for you, always…”

  The spoon hesitated. A sad sigh followed. “Home is where the heart is.”

  “But you always talk as if home is over there…”

  As her meaning sank in, my words trailed off. My mother had a husband, five children and lived in a midwest parsonage. But “home” was in Europe.

  In 1961, my mother got her wish to return home to Hungary. She went alone, as the Communists were still in power and did not grant visas to Lutheran ministers. The expense was nearly as prohibitive. My mother took a job making sandwiches in the kitchen of the local university, saving so that she could go. Her trip lasted three weeks, and she returned bursting with stories about the relatives she had missed so much. I was happy for her, but now, a typical twelve-year-old, pleasing my friends had become more important to me than winning my mother’s affection. I hardly listened. One item, though, blipped on my radar screen.

  “Man in hat, tugged low over his brow, hide in shadows, follow me everywhere I go.”

  Fresh material for entrancing my friends. “Really, Momma? You’re not making this up from something you saw in one of my Dick Tracy comics, are you?”

  She squinted at me. “I not make this up. On a day when we all go out, leave Aunt Rózsa’s apartment, he slip inside, dig through my suitcase, shovel everything out. We come home, shocked to find big mess he leaves.”

  After her return to America, a resigned sadness settled over my mother. It might have had to do with the trip abroad, but I sensed it might also be related to her “baby’s” shifting interests. I’d always looked up to her, admired her dresses, but now I noticed other mothers wore slacks, drove, bought groceries, paid the bills, lunched with ladies, socialized with neighbors. Why couldn’t she? Before, I had never given her gold-rimmed eyetooth a thought; now, on those rare occasions when she rewarded me with one of the tentative smiles I had once craved, I cringed. I cringed, too, when friends slept over and we awoke to potato pancakes for breakfast. What was wrong with Aunt Jemima? Or Frosted Flakes?

  Occasionally, she’d still take the El train into Chicago, something we used to do together. I had always looked forward to the outings, especially to the competition we’d made up, long ago, in the cosmetics department of Carson Pirie Scott. The object: to see who could spritz on the most samples of perfume from the tester bottles before a saleslady could browbeat us into leaving. Once a source of delight and muffled laughter the game now revolted me. If she came near me, awash in a potpourri of scents after one of her solo trips downtown, I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

  On her trips to the Windy City, my mother liked to frequent coin shops, scouting for something rare and valuable. “When I am rich, I will bring everyone out of Hungary to freedom in America,” she would say firmly.

  Oftentimes, when I was still accompanying her, we would stop by the Hungarian neighborhood and go to Auntie Mariska’s for strudel and coffee. Stepping into my mid-teens, I had more important places to go. Almost always, upon my return to the parsonage from, say, a dance at the YMCA or a movie, especially if I was late, our matching green eyes sparred.

  When she was angry, my mother’s eyes doubled in size. “Hol voltal? Mit csinalatok? Where did you go? What were you doing?” she’d demand, the harsh Hungarian words fraught with her mistrust.

  Her worries and suspicions were understandable. A European of the old school raising an adolescent in the sixties, in the midwest, she was out of her element. Anything I did outside the house—at school, with friends, for entertainment—was alien.

  “Speak English,” I’d snap back, and she would try. But her twisted English no longer charmed me. Blunders such as, “I’m getting getful,” or “Thanks goodness,” exasperated me. My ire accelerated the day I learned that a friend hung up rather than try to communicate with my father after he answered the telephone, booming in his thickly accented baritone, “Gooood eeev-e-ning.”

  My mother was too self-conscious about her English to even touch the phone. She had always been reclusive, and as I began testing my wings, she drew even more inward. No doubt the tauntings of my older siblings with whom I now banded to gang up on her had something to do with it—“Women in Europe don’t shave? Who cares? This is America! Do not wear sleeveless. Blood sausage? The stink! I told you. Gets into my clothes. My friends can smell it.”

  During my not-so-sweet sixteen phase, in 1965, my mother went to Hungary for the second time and never came back. That’s not quite right. She did return to the parsonage for one night, but she was not herself. She was withdrawn, distracted. I barely noticed.

  It was a Friday night and huddled in my bed, I stayed on the telephone talking with my boyfriend until midnight. Early the next morning, my mother tiptoed into my room. “I must go see Mariska,” she whispered, slipping down onto the edge of my mattress and bringing with her a cloud of 4711, a cheap, pungent Old World astringent.

  My nose scrunched in revulsion, but I kept my eyes closed, feigning sleep.

  “A
karsz jonni?”

  Hungarian. Did she have to keep slipping back? Be so obviously foreign? She wanted to know if I would go with her. Was she nuts? Leave my snuggly nest for the damp and gloom outdoors, catch a train and ride into the city with her? The homecoming dance was tonight. I’d told her I was going. And I would need the full day to get ready. Didn’t she remember?

  Strange as it might seem, at that moment, as much as I longed to disassociate from her, I ached to feel her kiss on my cheek. But there was no kiss. And I never opened my eyes or said a word to let her know I’d heard her invitation.

  I also would not make it to the dance. Instead, I was left with the memory of her soft, gloved fingers, lightly brushing a strand of hair from my face. “Nagyon szeretlek. I love you very much,” she said quietly. She stood, the cloud of 4711 diminishing as she left my room, quietly closing the door behind her.

  The police report said that she had been standing on the platform waiting for the El that would whisk her back to our nearby suburb. But she never stepped aboard. It was presumed she tripped, but no one could say for sure. The platform had been very crowded. When police questioned bystanders, they found that it was only after she began tumbling onto the tracks that anyone even noticed her.

  One year later a bystander showed up at the police station claiming she had seen a woman standing next to my mother before the accident. This witness was in the late stages of cancer. She explained that as the disease progressed, odd memories had begun surfacing. She further maintained that the woman had shoved my mother. It had happened so fast that her mind, traumatized from observing the horrifying act, had blocked what she had seen.

  An investigator followed up, interviewing people known to have been on the platform that day. This time, another woman belatedly recalled someone standing near my mother. “I heard their voices,” she said. “They were speaking a foreign language. The words sounded harsh.” The second witness did not mention observing a shove, but did add that when Mother stumbled, a mystery person ran off, going for help she supposed at the time. The second witness could recall nothing about the person’s appearance and could not even say for sure whether it was a man or a woman.