Was that where she spent her childhood?
No, that was just a temporary residence to which they pulled back after fleeing from Cluj-Kolozsvár to Budapest.
When was that?
In 1919, after the Romanian forces occupied the city.
So up till then they lived in Kolozsvár. Can you say anything more about that? Do you know anything at all about your mother’s side of the family?
In truth, not a lot. My grandfather was a bank official at the Franco-Hungarian Bank in Kolozsvár. He was called Mór Jakab; he was an elegantly dressed, quiet, and handsome man with a silky moustache and a melancholy smile. He carried around with him the pleasant fruit scent of the nitroglycerin lozenges that he had to take for his heart disease and that he kept on him at all times in a graceful little box in a jacket pocket. I never knew Mother’s mother; after bringing her fourth daughter into the world she died from the physical exhaustion of childbearing, and Mother never forgave Bessie (the fourth girl) or, in practice, my grandfather for that, because Grandmother had contracted TB and the doctors forbade her from having any more children after the third.
That’s sad, but the poor girl could hardly be blamed for that …
That’s what I said to my mother.
And …?
Her response was that she also had other bad qualities.
Was she being ironical, or …
She steered well clear of irony; she didn’t have a spark of humour. On the other hand, she was deeply attached to her mother and took great exception to the fact that my grandfather remarried, though he did that precisely in the interests of the four girls; for him to have raised them on his own would undoubtedly have been beyond his energy, which was far from abundant.
In this case, unlike with your other grandfather, I am starting to get the feel of a likeable but slightly dissolute male figure.
You are probably not too wide of the mark. Piecing together all the things I heard from my mother, I also formed the impression that in the marriage between the two of them, the grandmother whom I never knew was most likely the dominant partner, only I have such a hazy grasp of the facts … There you are, a person is sick of family history all his life, and then just when it becomes important, he is left grubbing around in an unfamiliar past.
I have gathered from your writings that you’re not a great fan of stifling family secrets, or family life in general.
“Families, I hate you!” André Gide wrote. “Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.” Yes, there was a time when I thought that the source of all psychological illnesses, and nearly all illnesses are psychological illnesses, was the family, or stifling family life, as you put it: the big, soft, musty marriage-bed which suffocates all life.
But you no longer think that way?
Look, my second wife, Magda, has a son, and he has a very nice wife, and the two of them have a little girl and a little boy …
And that’s forced you to take an easier-going approach.
There’s no denying it.
And now you regret not having taken a greater interest in the grandma you never knew.
All the more because among the relatives of that grandmother there were a lot of interesting people, one or two of whom left their stamp on university life in Cluj-Kolozsvár to the present day.
Who are you thinking of?
György Bretter, first and foremost, a philosopher and lecturer in literature who met an untimely death and may well have been a second cousin and in any case was almost certainly a kinsman. My grandmother’s name was Betty Bretter. Zsófi Balla, the young ethnic Transylvanian Magyar poet who now lives in Budapest, completed her university studies at Cluj-Kolozsvár and was a student of Professor György Bretter. When I brought up the matter of a family relationship, she said that the way I speak, my gestures, my whole “phiz” reminded her a little of György Bretter.
Did you ever try to establish any sort of contact with him?
Never. At first I shared André Gide’s opinion, and now I’m too late. As I said, he died when he was still young, and as far as I know he, too, died of TB, just like my Bretter grandmother. Incidentally, my mother also contracted a so-called “infiltrating” tuberculosis, of which she was fortunately cured around the mid-Thirties at the Irén Barát TB Sanatorium in Budakeszi. By then she had long been divorced from my father, but he still took me along to visit her on the “Magic Mountain” of Buda. We got on the cog-wheel railway in the Városmajor, a long way from Tömő Street, then on the way back we went for a walk on Swabian Hill into town. My father loved going on walks.
So, your maternal grandfather remarried, then at the end of the First World War the family … fled, was that, to Budapest?
That was how they saw it, I reckon.
Your grandfather abandoned a sure livelihood, his post as a bank official — there must have been some pressing reasons compelling him. How old was he?
I’m not absolutely sure about that. He would have been about forty years old. It’s perfectly conceivable that the bank would have gone belly-up even without Romanian help. I’m more inclined to think that Hungary’s loss of the war hit my grandfather a bit too close. He may well have viewed it as a personal failure; he identified with the collapse and lost his footing in the panic of defeat. Of course, that was an unconscious process, but it happened to a lot of people. At such times one bad decision follows another; people give way to mass psychosis and either slip into deep depression or join the crowd in baying for revenge. It’s curious that no one in Hungary has properly analyzed this phenomenon, although the interwar period in Hungary in particular — along with Germany, of course — produced by the barrel-load the sort of psychoses that prepared people to accept the most dreadful dictatorships and the catastrophe of the Second World War.
You say that people in Hungary haven’t properly analyzed the phenomenon, but have you read about it anywhere else?
I seem to remember that Sebastian Haffner, a superb German writer and journalist who fled to London from Hitler, deals with the subject in his books.
But I don’t suppose your grandfather was among those who bayed for revenge.
All the less so as he was Jewish, and the sharply anti-Semitic line that dominated Hungarian public life between 1919 and 1924 must have been very trying for him, since he had fled from the Romanian occupation of Transylvania to what was referred to as the “mother country.”
Did he speak about that?
Never. And anyway, even if he did, he would not have done so to his grandson, who was just a child. To be quite frank, no relation of confidence ever developed between us, nor could it have done, as we saw each other only seldom. It could be, therefore, that everything I have said about him is purely speculative, but I cannot explain the aristocratic restraint from behind which the lethargy of defeat was perceptible. When I was a young boy I regarded that as an extraordinarily moving trait, though I wouldn’t have been able to give it a name at the time, of course. At all events, he was not a great intellect; when he went into retirement, out of his own resources and with help from the family he purchased a modest two-room house in Rákosszentmihály,2 where he lived with his wife, who I only found out later was not my “real” grandma. Every now and again, my mother’s side of the family would get together in that small Rákosszentmihály house on a Sunday evening. By then the Second World War was already in progress. My grandfather would gather the menfolk and usher them into the second room and, brows furrowed by concern, his voice almost a whisper, he would ask, “Now then, what’s new? What have you learned? What’s going to happen?”