Triptych Page 6

  Évike’s demand, that she be allowed to stay, was overridden by loud cries from the crowd. Imre Nagy had appeared on the parliament building balcony.

  “He looks as if he has a gun to his back,” Évike’s mother said under her breath.

  Évike stared expectantly. It was her first glimpse of Nagy and she agreed, he looked stiff, uncomfortable. Then she noticed a slight paunch, obvious even under his well-cut suit—and with his bespectacled round face, receding hairline, and dark walrus mustache, to Évike, he looked more bourgeois peasant than premier.

  He adjusted his glasses and—could it be?—his hand shook.

  “Comrades,” Nagy began, using the traditional Soviet greeting. The incensed crowd booed and whistled. “We are not comrades!” they roared. “Fellow Hungarians,” he corrected himself.

  And then Nagy spoke. He talked of resolving matters within the ruling Party, of returning to the popular, but short-lived, more lenient reform program of 1953. That was it, just two minutes—and he had not addressed directly any of the sixteen Points.

  Évike had been holding her parents’ hands during the address. An awkward silence followed, and she could almost feel their stunned disappointment coursing through her mittens and up through her arms.

  Then Nagy invited the crowd to join him in singing the national anthem. Her parents hesitated, but then their voices united with the others. Moved by the stirring melody and patriotic words, Évike felt a tear trickling down her cheek.

  Nagy then asked the demonstrators to go home. With few exceptions, they did not.

  ***

  Budapest, 24 October 1956

  The morning after the demonstration, school was officially called off, and Évike lingered in bed. Her father had gone out early. Hearing him call out, “I’m back,” she bolted upright, straining to hear what was being said on the other side of the paper-thin wall that divided her bedroom from the living room on the other side.

  Her parents spoke in low excited voices.

  “What is happening?” her mother asked.

  Her father unleashed the news from the street.

  Last night, at Kossuth tér, as Nagy’s disappointing speech was ending, on the other side of town at the Radio building, the group agitating for an on-air reading of the 16 Points had run out of patience. A van reversed against the wooden entrance gates like a battering ram; insurgents began hurling bricks from a nearby building site through the windows. AVO men stationed inside the building volleyed back with tear gas and water jets from fire hoses. Then shots were fired. Some students were cut down. Incited compatriots using primitive weapons, mostly petrol bombs, sought revenge and, by early morning, they had managed to take over the building.

  The conversation grew more hushed. Évike crept from her bed and stood against the wall to hear better.

  After Nagy’s speech, her father was saying, an immense crowd had also assembled near Heroes’ Square at the most hated symbol of the Stalinist era, the giant twenty-six-foot bronze statue of the tyrannical leader. Évike had walked past it many times and tried to imagine the scene as her father described factory workers, working with ropes and the acetylene torches they’d brought, struggling to bring it down. Then her father’s voice increased in volume and Évike sensed he was smiling, saying, “Hours later, with the crowd roaring, Stalin toppled from the pedestal in the square that had been renamed for him. All that is left…two enormous boots standing upright.” At this, her mother shouted with joy.

  Her father’s tone grew quiet and serious again, repeating what he’d heard about freedom fighters, as they were now being called, attacking telephone exchanges, printing presses and several arms factories in various parts of the city. They’d removed posters of Stalin, portraits of General Secretary Rakosi, and books from shops selling Russian literature, and tossed them into the streets before burning them. They’d stormed the offices of Szabad Nép, the Communist daily newspaper carrying “official” news, and overtaken the presses.

  Her mother had been right, Évike concluded. The symbolic act of cutting the hammer and sickle from the Hungarian tricolor had become a revolutionary act. In less than forty-eight hours, two hundred insurgents had lost their lives in the fighting in Budapest, the majority at the radio building.

  A demonstration had been fueled into the Uprising.

  Chapter Five

  Chicago, 1986

  Today: Discuss the article of clothing or native costume you brought with you to America. Next Meeting: Bring a favorite ‘old country’ recipe!

  I like to model the assignments that I give to the women in the English conversation group I lead twice a month. So I am wearing Auntie Mariska’s fringed silk shawl draped over my shoulders. The shawl is black and splashed with colorful flowers embroidered in a traditional Hungarian pattern. The flowers form a wide meandering border cascading to a large bouquet at the “V” of the triangular shawl’s tip. A free-floating cluster in a circular design rests festively upon each of my shoulders.

  I have sketched a dress next to today’s assignment. Now, the bit of flair. I begin filling in a ribbony swath over the bodice. The chalk squeaks. My body convulses in an involuntary shiver and the billowing piece gets an extra squiggle. I return the chalk to the grooved tray at the base of the blackboard. The shawl slips. I am rearranging it, centering the clusters on my shoulders, as the door opens and the excited, high-pitched cacophony of several women speaking at once spills into the library meeting room.

  Called Circle of World Women, or COWWs, as we jokingly refer to ourselves, the conversation group—part cultural orientation, part English practice, part emotional support—is one of several community outreach programs I run for the Willow Grove County Library System.

  “To really succeed in America, immigrants need to be both bicultural and bilingual,” the library director told me at the ten-minute briefing at which I was handed the experimental project, in skeleton form, three years ago. “Ildikó, you’ll be their cultural bridge.”

  I was thrilled to be entrusted with such a humanitarian venture. I had an approach up my sleeve. Simply apply the technique that got my mother to open up. Put a swath of linen into her hands and when she started sewing, ask questions. But for COWWs, instead of using embroidery, as I had with her, I select an activity or assignment that will evoke some aspect of the cultural heritage of the women. I might bring a drawing or photograph, a poem, magazine article, fairy tale, or even music. For recent immigrants who have only been together a few times, like today’s group, I’ve found using an article of clothing is like introducing a universal language. What woman can resist talking about the dress she is wearing, where she got it, how much it cost, why it makes her feel good?

  “Troi oi! A beauteous cloth,” Hoa says, walking toward me in slacks and a blouse.

  Hoa is older than the other women in the group, and she looks it. Bossy, funny, and filled with newcomer zest, it is hard to imagine that just two years ago she left Vietnam in a leaky boat filled with passengers packed so tightly for four days and four nights that they could not even get up to relieve themselves. Now she works the night shift at the horse-meat processing factory on the outskirts of town, a different sort of nightmare.

  “Many colors,” Meena says softly. A shy, pretty young woman with huge dark eyes, Meena was originally from Kurdistan. A pastel blue and white scarf covers her head and shoulders, and only her face, framed by the cloth, is visible as she stands behind Hoa, peering over Hoa’s shoulder, her eyes slightly downcast

  Ioana is eyeing my shoulder. “What happen here?” she asks. A barrel-chested, big-boned woman originally from Romania, Ioana is wearing tight jeans and a baby doll top. Her unkempt bottle-blond hair is parted down the middle and hangs like curtains along the sides of her face. The curtains close as she leans in for a closer look. “Blunder?”

  I can smell the cigarette smoke embedded in her clothes. I inch away.
“No, it is not a mistake,” I say. “It’s my creation.”

  Like my mother, I enjoy needlework, but with a different twist. I transform secondhand embroidered linens by removing the original pattern, counting the stitching by color, then re-embroidering a modern abstract design. In the shoulder cluster motif, threads in bright primary hues of yellow, red, blue, and orange had once composed a floral pattern, but I had reworked the threads to form a series of irregular rings. Circles within circles, with the dominant threads forming the outer ring, and the inner circles descending to a center dot of the most negligible color.

  “But you are from Hungary,” Ioana says. “This, it look more like a creation of Kandinsky from Odessa than work of a Magyar.”

  Talk about Auntie Mariska’s shawl was supposed to lead into the story I had planned to share about her escape from the Hungarian Revolution, thirty years ago. The challenges she met on her journey to the States. How she had come with nothing, but now was co-owner of a business. She had even managed to hire me during summers while I was in college. Yet now the ladies only want to know my intent for unstitching and re-stitching the design.

  “I look at it as building a relationship between the artist’s earlier work and modern work,” I tell them. “Bringing the past into the present.” The women look unconvinced. “Or a way to connect to the past,” I say, paring the concept to its core.

  It is an uphill battle, with several women in the group sure that what I am doing is sacrilegious. Even my explanation that the shawl had been mass-produced, not hand sewn, does not placate them.

  “You are unpicking a woman’s history,” Hoa protests. “Stripping bare the love, talent, time…soul…she put into creating.”

  “Stealing. In my country, for this you lose a hand.” Meena’s voice trembles, and her comments are barely audible, but I feel their sting.

  I remind them that in America, there is freedom of expression. Re-stiching is more of a craft, but also an art form. Art is meant to move the viewer, and it often moves two people differently. This prompts discussion. Welcome to America.

  Willow Grove’s identity for the better part of the last 150 years has been mainly European. Expansion of the local university’s curriculum in recent years has attracted a more diverse faculty and student base. Because Willow Grove has almost no unemployment and a relatively low cost of living, three years ago it was selected by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement as a preferred community for newly arrived refugees.

  My emigration to Willow Grove involved just twenty miles, a move from one Chicago suburb to the next, to attend college. Morning coffee and a muffin at Kat’s Kafe once meant poring over my daily planner while eavesdropping on the local gossip. Now, when sipping coffee at Kat’s, the chatter at surrounding tables is unintelligible. It’s like I’m in the cafeteria at the International House at the Sorbonne. While the women’s conversation group is intended to benefit the immigrants, I sometimes wonder if I’m not the real beneficiary—experiencing cultures of so many different countries.

  The early arrivers solicit opinions from the newcomers on my shawl. The vote is evenly divided between admirers and critics.

  To get us back on track, I ask Ioana to describe something new that’s happened since our last meeting. It’s what we usually do to kick off our meetings, with each woman in the circle taking a turn. The slices of life prompt lessons and practical tips relating to acculturation.

  Ioana says she took her daughter to the emergency room because she had a sore throat and fever.

  Hoa is surprised. “But emergency rooms they are expensive.”

  “I call Ask a Nurse, and she tell me I should go.”

  “Called Ask a Nurse. She told me I should go. Then you did the right thing,” I say. “Is your daughter better?”

  Ioana nods proudly. “I buy her medicine.” She catches my frown. “I bought her medicine.”

  The open-ended dialogue continues for another twenty minutes. Meena wants to know if the other women allow their children to drink Coke and watch cartoons. Hoa wonders if it is best to try to speak English or to stick with Vietnamese in the home. Several of the women trade names of doctors who specialize in female problems.

  We have covered a lot of ground on adapting to life in America. The other part of our meeting is reserved for helping the women to hold onto the good from the old culture while taking advantage of the new. “Engage them,” the library director had said in my briefing. “Talk about where they come from, the things they cared about, things they ought to hold onto going forward here in Willow Grove.”

  I turn the focus back to Mariska’s shawl and share an abbreviated version of her odyssey. “Now your turn. Tell us why the item you brought is special,” I say. “What it tells about the world you lived in, and how the article relates to the world you live in now. Who’d like to go first?”

  Hoa volunteers. She is wearing clothes she found at a Goodwill store. The only clothing she had taken with her from Vietnam was what she’d worn as she left. The items had to be burned after they landed, she explains. She holds up a jade bracelet. “This was my mother’s. I hide it in my body, keep it safe through all my long journey.” Someone sniffles, and I am aware of my eyes pooling with tears. In the manner of an experienced show woman, Hoa brings her audience back up again. “In America, I have learned the tricks of wise shopper. These slacks and blouse,” she adds proudly, making a sweeping gesture along her outfit, “Very cheap.”

  She is smiling and looks so happy I cannot bring myself to nitpick her grammar.

  Wai-Ling is next. She is wearing a lovely fitted red silk blouse with a mandarin collar and tiny covered buttons running, top to bottom, on a diagonal. Wai-Ling chooses not to talk about her journey, instead she shows a picture and talks about her mother and sister, both wearing full dark pants and mandarin-style shirts, still living at home in China. “My body it is here in America,” Wai-Ling says in a small voice. “But my heart remains with them, in my homeland.”

  I am only too familiar with this stage in a refugee’s adjustment. Or as in my mother’s case, non-adjustment. “It is impossible to truly appreciate an adopted land, if you do not hold onto some memories of your native land,” I say gently. “Is there something good you have discovered since settling in Sycamore that relates to what you have brought today…the picture?”

  Wai-Ling looks thoughtful for a moment. She smiles shyly. “With help of our kindly neighbor, I have learned how to mail letters at the post office to my mother and sister.”

  Divina, originally from the Philippines, removes a long elegant salmon pink dress from a garment bag. “A traditional costume,” she says, explaining that she’d brought it to wear in a beauty contest she’d come to America, at age seventeen, to attend. Entering the contest was the idea of her sister who was already here, married to an American. After swearing us to secrecy, she shows us the seam that had been re stitched after her sister had removed the currency their parents, unbeknownst to Divina, had hidden in the dress’ lining. “Part of a bigger plan my family work out to allow me to stay here,” she says, the color in her full cheeks rising.

  Ioana shows off a small purse embellished with felt cutouts forming a traditional Russian pattern. Vita from Sicily has brought a lacy black headscarf. Abeba from Eritrea brought the long, roomy robe she’d worn crossing Sudan on camel at night, pregnant with two young children in tow.

  The final few women share their symbols and their stories. As is normal, I close with some words of encouragement, drawing from the many heartfelt memories and remarks expressed during the session.

  I am still basking in the women’s response to their COWWs’ assignment when I reach the vestibule at the entrance to the main room of the library. My soul feels richer, more at peace. You’re making a difference, my heart sings. Helping worlds mesh. Building community.

  Consumed with the swelling notion that what I am doing in m
y small way might actually have a positive rippling effect, I think of Peter in the Twelve Dancing Princesses.

  The story centers on the mysterious enchantment to which the king’s twelve daughters have fallen prey. Although locked in their bedchamber at night, each morning they emerge pale and tired, with their satin dancing slippers worn through. The king pleads with his daughters for an explanation, but to no avail. Where once they had been open and warmhearted, they now had grown cold and haughty.

  Dismayed, the king makes a proclamation: Whoever discovers how the princesses wear out their shoes can choose one of them for his wife.

  Fairy tales are open to interpretation and many versions have been published since the original by the Brothers Grimm. In my childhood adaptation, it is Peter, a humble gardener, who succeeds after a dozen princes fail the challenge, each one mysteriously disappearing.

  Peter is a farmer from a small village, but has always yearned for a life unlike his own. One night a fair lady appears to him in a dream saying, “Go to the castle and solve the riddle of the princesses.” Off he sets. He takes a gardener position then is quickly besotted by the youngest princess, Elise. Unlike her sisters who ignore the gardener, Elise admires Peter’s hard work and appreciates the beautiful bouquets he leaves for the princesses each day. Her sisters mock Elise when they overhear her thanking him for her flowers and afterward laugh when she comments on his handsomeness. “He is beneath us,” they say.

  Peter admires Elise’s beauty but more than that, he appreciates the spirit she shows in acknowledging him. He determines he must win Elise’s hand. He remembers the fair woman who had appeared to him in a dream at his farm. “Seek help from what you know best,” she’d said. “Through your own gifts you shall succeed.”

  The next day, in his garden, Peter discovers a rare flower that causes him to be invisible when he wears it. At nightfall, with flower in place, he follows the princesses. A secret passageway leads them to three groves of trees; the first having leaves of silver, the second of gold, and the third of diamonds. The procession passes through this enchanted forest until they come upon a lake. Twelve boats with twelve princes wait. Each princess gets into one of the boats, and the invisible Peter steps into the boat with Elise, the added weight causing the prince rowing Elise’s boat to struggle, unsuccessfully, to keep up with the others.