The Book of Fathers (19 page)

He began to enjoy having not a penny to his name and no particular aim, and chose the carts to travel on according to the warmth of the carters’ invitation. By a long and roundabout route he came to Sárospatak, where the gatekeeper at the Collegium, glancing at his dress and unkempt beard, had no hesitation in leading him to the modest shelter maintained for the gentlemen of the road. Here he was also given a bowl of gruel and a jug of fresh milk. The following morning he opened his eyes to find a man sitting on a stool next to him, half-lit by the slanting rays of the morning sun. The man was watching him. He seemed familiar, at least the dark eyes with their suffused glint.

“Richard! Richard Stern!” the man exclaimed.

“Good God, Bálint Csokonya!”

“Richard … what has become of you? Where have you been?”

They embraced but could not speak; they wept with the soundless sobs that lie deep in men’s hearts. A while later they were calmer and each gave the other an account of his sufferings in prison, the disasters that had befallen their families, and exchanged news of others. Bálint Csokonya had been held throughout in Kufstein, compared with which Spielberg or Munkács was a spa resort. This was the first news that Richard Stern had of Kazinczy, whose death sentence had been by the King’s grace commuted to life imprisonment; so he was in jail still, though shortly after Richard’s release he had been transferred to the prison at Munkács, which Richard Stern knew so well. Was Kazinczy able to look out onto the hill, he wondered, or did he get one of the cells on the side of the slope? To this question, Richard Stern received an answer only many years later, when he read Kazinczy’s diary of his years in prison.

Bálint Csokonya was an assistant instructor in Greek and Latin at the Collegium. He had been free for some nine months. He warned Richard Stern that spies and informers were everywhere and that he should comport himself bearing this in mind.

“Sometimes even the walls have ears!” he whispered.

He promised Richard Stern that he would have a word with the eminent Professor Telegdy, head of the faculty of grammatical studies at the Collegium. And thanks to Bálint Csokonya’s influence, Richard Stern gained employment in his alma mater as an assistant in French. It fell to him to keep the French books of the library in proper order and to revise the catalogue. He found this work congenial, and as soon as he secured suitable reading glasses—his eyes had been much weakened by the years in prison—he would crouch or kneel all day among the precious books in his care. Rarely did he pick up a volume without reading at least some part of it. He settled quickly to this way of life and had no difficulty imagining that he might spend the rest of his days as a bespectacled bookworm.

He took Bálint Csokonya’s advice and would not let his guard down when conversing with anyone. But he could not, or did not want to, resist renewing his correspondence; in prison it was perhaps this that he had missed most. He wrote on the yellow-veined paper of the Collegium and sealed the couverture with a purple wax seal. He sent news of his liberation to Academician Carmillac, but the terse reply from the University of Paris said only that the Maistre had retired two years earlier and soon after that had departed this life. The curé at Francaroutier informed him that where his windmill had once stood a house of ill-repute had been opened by an exotic dancer from Toulouse, of whom it was rumored that she had been expelled from all the major towns of southern France. The Marquise was in good health; she was childless still; and her second husband
had gone to his grave as the result of a devastating illness which some said was a variety of African syphilis.

He also picked up the threads with his literary friends. His most faithful correspondent was Endre Dembinszki, who had married Bálint Csokonya’s sister and moved to Debreczen to teach at the faculty there. In cooperation with two other professors at Debreczen he was working on a revision and new edition of the pioneering 1795 Debreczen Grammar. In this connection Richard Stern addressed a long memorandum to them, taking issue with the Debreczen triad’s fundamental beliefs, which he considered excessively beholden to traditional views.

Not only is it legitimate to form new words regularly from old, on the basis of analogies borrowed from other languages not alien to the spirit of Hungarian; we must actively encourage writers and scholars to create such words; and word formations that appear in literature and are adjudged to be useful should be made available to all in the form of lists and dictionaries.

Bálint Csokonya was resolutely opposed to this view, as was his brother-in-law. “The language of our fathers is sacred and inviolable. It is not meet to patch and mend it under the slogan of modernity, like some torn item of clothing!”

In the evenings the debates in the rooms in the Collegium would become so heated that their fellow teachers complained about the noise. This was the time that Ferenc Kazinczy was set free from prison, a person they both esteemed as an authority, and as soon as they obtained his address they turned to him in a joint letter with their questions. No reply ever came from Ferenc Kazinczy; it may be that the couverture for some reason failed to reach his hand.

Richard Stern was surprised at the suddenness and the intensity with which he felt the absence of his parents, having assumed that such feelings had long died in his heart. He had dreams and images, more of them and more often, of his mother, both at night and by day. The image he held of her in his mind was but enchantment by the passing of time: gradually the crow’s feet disappeared, the warty growth was smoothed from her brow, and the manifold chins shrank down to one. Her figure became slimmer in her son’s imagination. Her stubby fingers lengthened and grew thinner, the heavy ankles became trim and delicate. The same kind of magical transformation affected his father, István Stern, and to a lesser degree his two brothers Robert and Rudolf, who would not grow old as he had grown old, not even in his imagination.

These wishful thoughts prompted him to write to the Sterns, his relatives in Hegyhát. He weighed carefully every word committed to the writing paper; he did not know who was still alive of those he remembered, and how much remained of the hostile feelings with which Grandfather Aaron had cast out his son-in-law after the Lemberg tragedy. The reply came with unexpected speed, from Grandfather Aaron himself, who—as the opening lines informed him—on account of the tremor in his hand was no longer able himself to write and had dictated this letter to his great-granddaughter Rebecca. Rebecca was the second child of his grandson Benjamin, the son of Aaron’s daughter Eszter. He, Aaron Stern, registered with astonishment that he was in his seventy-ninth year and the whole family was making fevered preparations to celebrate his eightieth birthday. They think reaching such a ripe old age is something of an achievement, but it is more a burden, he wrote, as the number of tormenting memories just grows and grows. At this point in the letter the great-granddaughter inserted a bracketed comment: Uncle Aaron
loves to complain, but at this rate he will live to be a hundred.

Letter followed letter, and soon Richard Stern received a cordial invitation to pay his respects to Uncle Aaron on his eightieth birthday, on which occasion there would be a gathering of the clan, from near and far. He thanked them warmly for the invitation.

I set off on the third day of September. I begged lifts on carts. Nightfall found me in a field, but the following day I reached Tokay. I set off thence on foot for Hegyhát, arriving a day earlier than I was expected
.

As I reached the village, the sun was high in a sky decked by puffy clouds. My heart was in my mouth as I skirted the serried ranks of vines laden with clusters of swollen grapes. It would be a good year for the vine-harvest
.

The road turned sharply, like a man’s elbow, and there on the hill was the cemetery. He stepped into the garden of the dead with head bowed, donning his hat in accordance with Jewish custom. From behind his brow there rose from the dregs of a distant past the forms of the Hebrew characters, as he traced with his index finger the incisions on the gray-brown stones, gleaning the names, more or less. His insides were quaking and he dreaded the pain that would follow if among these ancient symbols he were to stumble upon someone who was family or friend. But he found none such. Later he heard that Grandpa Aaron had wanted to raise a memorial to those who perished in Lemberg, but Rabbi Ben Loew—then still very much alive—had not allowed it. The Rabbi’s own headstone, in accordance with his will, bore only an ancient Jewish blessing.

Richard Stern pushed on, further and deeper into his own past. In the sharp bend of the stream, the old Sonntag hostel still stood, now boasting an extra floor and an additional
wing; on the sign, freshly painted:
Rabinowitz and Burke
. A smaller notice declared:
First-class koshere food and drink
—
Do not aske for credit
. Richard Stern felt an urge to correct the spelling on the notice, but suppressed his teacherly instincts and continued along the steep path. The synagogue seemed considerably bigger. It had been rebuilt using large slabs of stone. Behind it a section of the river-bed had been widened and a few granite steps now linked it to the bank. Four very elderly men sat hissing and clucking in the swirling cold of the water, eyes closed, their white beards floating on the surface like rafts of wood-bark. A ritual bath, thought Richard Stern, recalling vaguely sharing one with his father and grandfather and feeling the flow of the icy water on his skin.

“Richard! Richard Stern!” cried the voice of one of the Methuselahs as he rose from the stream, a hand waving towards him like a shivering bird.

“Grandpa Aaron,” said Richard Stern, stumbling out the words, deducing rather than recognizing. His grandfather had been a strong, powerfully built figure; this old gentleman was more like a child, his skin dried around his bones like parchment, his loin-cloth revealing parts of parts turned gray; Richard Stern had to force himself to look away. “I must go over, embrace him, kiss him!”: the feelings from the past came welling up, and as he enclosed in his arms the ancient, time-worn body, as he touched the damp, goose-pimpled skin, as he heard again the high-pitched voice repeating his name again and again, laughing and crying, he knew, he suddenly knew, that he had at last come home.

In the house where he was born there now lived his aunt Eszter. Everything was so familiar, yet somehow alien.

Richard Stern took the evening meal with his grandfather Aaron. The news of his arrival had brought over, that same day, all the relatives living in Hegyhát, one after the
other. At first Richard Stern was unable to put faces to the names, though the latter he did manage to note. Without anyone ever mentioning it, his newly rediscovered family knew, just as Richard Stern knew himself, that in the future he would be living here, with them, for them. At the end of the academic year he bade farewell to the Collegium in Sárospatak and moved to Hegyhát. At first he enjoyed Grandfather Aaron’s hospitality, but the following spring the male members of the family joined together to build him a house on the hill above the cemetery.

He continued his work as a teacher, bringing to the pupils at the Hegyhát yeshiva his aptitude for foreign languages, while remaining unremitting in his own pursuit of know ledge. He studied the Hebrew language, particularly exploring the Talmud, and at the same time he did not abandon his studies of Hungarian. He played an important role in the countrywide efforts of the writer and editor Ferenc Kazinczy to cultivate the language. Six words that he created for the Hungarian language passed, in time, into general use, and he lived to see them admitted by the dictionaries. His income was spent entirely on books.

When he discovered that Kazinczy, on his marriage to the Countess Sophie Török, some twenty years younger, had found himself in financial straits and therefore sold his books to the Collegium at Sárospatak, Richard Stern was furious. He wrote a thunderous letter to the poet.
It is not meet to profit from the Collegium, may it be blessed a thousand times
. To this letter, too, he never received a reply. This prompted Richard Stern to draw up his will: on his death his books and writings would go to the Collegium, gratis.

His aunt Eszter often shook her head: “Better you were wed.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” Eszter began to list grooms from Hegyhát’s present and recent past, all of whom were about
his age. The triumphal list went on until Richard Stern broke in: “No more, dear aunt … Remember, I have had a taste of marriage and I didn’t like it enough for a second helping!”

“Once bitten is not twice shy, it just needs a second try! We will find you a treat of a girl who will have you licking your lips!”

Richard Stern wanted to bring this exchange firmly to a close: “My bride must have skin the color of honey, locks as dark as night—real ones, not a wig—and a triangular birthmark on her breastbone. And to cap it all, she must speak a foreign tongue. That is how I dreamed it.
Dictum, factum, punctum!
”

He was sure he was asking for the impossible and was very much bemused when he was introduced to the marriageable girls of the region, all of whom spoke a foreign tongue, such as Slovak, Ruthene, or Yiddish. Nor was there any shortage of skins the color of honey or genuine black hair—only the triangular birthmark was lacking. The women of the Stern family put their heads together: we can make a birthmark, all we need is a little ink! But before they could carry out their plan, there came to visit them from Prague a very distant and very poor relative, Yanna. The moment he set eyes on her, Richard Stern was thunderstruck.

In the person of Yanna I came to know someone more wonderful, both within and without, than I could ever have imagined. The description fitted her perfectly: her skin like this season’s honey, her hair the color of ebony, and she could manage only broken Hungarian, her mother tongue being Czech. True, when on our wedding night I parted her from the shimmering bridal gown, I found no birthmark on her alabaster body; but I at once hung around her neck a triangular stone, black, on a gold chain, which I had bought her. Thereafter she would not be seen
without this precious stone, day or night. Thus was the prophecy fulfilled, the vision that I, of little faith, had not for years dared hope to live
.