The Legacy of Babel: Part Two

Lake Balaton’s morning breath condensed in heavy drapes on either side of the small road, replacing Hungarian countryside with a gauze landscape of soapy green and grey. Melinda’s father sat behind the wheel, his eyes scanning the slick road ahead while he kept the car at a polite pace – two acts that are atypical of the Magyar motorist stereotype.

Unfortunately, given my level of excitement, this break-nothing speed combined with the colours and textures of our surroundings so as to make me feel less like a traveller bound for an anticipated destination, and more like a slug ambling along a lettuce leaf.

There was good reason for my insect-inspired agitation. At the end of that dawn road lay the town of Sümig – a pretty little village built around a castle and church, supported by the summer stream of German tourists determined to be knocked off their horse in a pseudo-medieval jousting tourney.

It was also the home of my mother’s aunt and cousin.

We stopped the car on a quiet street, opposite the curved, yellow wall of an apartment block. The early mists had frayed and a pleasant autumn day welcomed us by warming the wet out of our jackets. There were no apparent signs to indicate whether or not this was the right place – presumably Sümig is small enough of a village that everyone knows exactly where they’re going, and little thought may be given for the likelihood of strangers travelling to anywhere that wasn’t the prominent hilltop castle.

We asked a passing woman if she knew where we could find my aunt’s address, but she just shook her head and passed beneath the arch towards the apartments. As she did so, we noticed the small plaque beside the archway that marked it out as our destination. Flanked by the honour guard of Melinda and her father, we slowly walked through the gateway and scanned for the number 4.

Awkwardly, the door to apartment number 4 was blocked by the figure of the passing woman. I made a mental note that she proved my theory about the small village – knowing exactly where she was going, despite not having the address – whilst giving her the faintest of “I know, let’s not mention it” smiles.

But at that moment my line of sight locked onto a shade of red much deeper than the blushing of the woman’s cheeks. A fire-headed vision, beaming and wool-wrapped, launched itself out from the apartment’s shadows and grappled me into a joyous embrace. Though she could only coo gently into my ear, I knew immediately that I stood face-to-shoulder with my mother’s cousin, Gabi.

Beyond the front door, Gabi’s apartment was a tight den filled with a mix of very old Hungarian heirlooms and stacks of books and random papers. Still pinching and stroking me, Gabi led the three of us into a sitting room where she immediately provided coffee and strange, cheese-encrusted pastries. From somewhere amidst the collected clutter, another voice emerged, speaking Hungarian with a voice that merged an aged strain with a youthful lightness.

Manyi neni, my mother’s aunt, shuffled into the sitting room. I recognised her broad forehead as the mark of my maternal family, and soon after shadows fell aside from crinkled eyes, a flat nose and a very large grin. She stood at only half my size, a beloved creature from another world, clapping her hands with a joy normally displayed by a child at Christmas time. That was all I could take. Mirroring her grin, I leapt out of my chair and embraced her. Every moment of the last few weeks burst up inside me and I tried to channel it all into this magical woman.

For years Mum had spoken of her aunt in a morbid past tense. Lack of contact meant that Manyi was, like Schrodinger’s cat, forever suspended between death and senility. On my first morning in Tapolca, before calling Australia, I’d vainly torn through the local cemetery with the dread that I would find her name carved into one of its stones. Now that she was in my arms, this stranger embodied a great victory. I had not just found a lost relative – I was bearing witness to a form of resurrection.

And she was sharp. Whether donning her headscarf to collect wood from outside (she would only let me help with a grudging “danke schön”), or preparing a meal, Manyi always absorbed her world with gleeful eyes. She and Gabi interrogated Melinda and Balazs, learning all about how I had landed as a guest in their house. Magyar and English soon bounced around the tiny room in a quick volley that sought to recreate the last twenty odd years within the space of an hour. My coffee was still cold and half full when Melinda turned to me and said, “Would you like to stay here?”

It was easy to translate the Hungarian gazes locked onto me. It was impossible for me to have said “No”.

There was, however, the question of how we would talk. Melinda’s deft ability to fill linguistic potholes had spoilt me, but Manyi caught the helplessness on my face and giggled, pointing up to the ceiling.

“She says that they have dictionaries,” Melinda reassured me.

One night, ten years earlier, I was a chubby boy hovering around my Mum in our kitchen. For all my life, no matter where we’d lived, a collection of ceramic plates had decorated this space, each one hand-painted with flowers, birds or vegetative patterns. Made by my mother’s other cousin – Tilda – these were a constant launching pad for discussion about her family.

“I’m not sure why I’m really learning German,” I said.

“Well,” Mum replied, gesturing to the plates, “it could come in handy if you ever visited Manyi neni.”

For the next four years I continued studying German, something seemingly useless except for the spare potential that maybe one day I would meet a lost woman thousands of kilometres away. Sadly, that little dream was extinguished by the laziness of later adolescence; I dropped German solely because I couldn’t be bothered completing homework at the last minute in another language.

The moment I was alone with my relatives, every German word stored in my brain gave a polite cough and left the premises. At best only five words remained in my vocabulary, which is as useful as a handful of flour in the middle of a gale.

“It is said,” Manyi told me early on, “that the English language was invented by people trying to speak German with a pipe in their mouth.”

One particular example of this haunted me throughout my attempts to drawl in pidgin Deutsch. Being a procrastinator, I’ve developed a long-term de facto relationship with the English verb ‘will’, delaying absolutely everything with that useful syllable. However, the German will means ‘want’, and what I really needed was that elusive bastard werde. The end result had me apparently demanding the most abstract objects from a bemused Manyi and Gabi.

However, as promised, Manyi summoned up two volumes of her Magyar/English dictionary that both remained grafted to our laps for the rest of my stay. Whenever we reached an impasse in our conversation – which, let’s face it, was already moving as smoothly as a baked baby’s behind – our fingers would flick through the dry pages, accompanied with as many sighs and hand gestures as we required. Discussions at the dinner table – weren’t.

During lunchtime on the day that I left, I recovered from a failed attempt at German by gesturing to Manyi that I had a pipe in my mouth. She laughed, but her eyes looked straight into mine with something sadder than her smile.

“When you say things like that, it is as if Irene were in the room with me.”

Since a very early age, I’ve always been compared with my maternal grandmother. We were inseparable for the first year of my life; she would bounce me on her lap while I played with a plastic telephone, she fed my toothless maw with peeled grapes and processed meats and, according to a photograph, let me wear her wig.

She died of breast cancer before my second birthday, and I have no actual memory of her.

But a faded image appears whenever I look in the mirror. We have the same eyes, the same forehead, the same lips and nose. Nowadays, when someone points out how similar we look, I laugh and say, “Yes, it must be because of the beard.”

Manyi told me of how much she missed her sister, of how Irene’s fiery soul carried her out of Hungary to Paris and of how, unwilling to return to the Soviet grip, she left for Australia. Married and a mother, Manyi remained in the old house where their grandparents had once run a butcher shop. Such was Irene’s dislike of Communist Hungary that the two may never have met again, were it not for the fact that my grandmother’s husband had an accident while visiting Hungary, and demanded that his wife and step-child fly over to see him.

“When Irene and Jackyka last visited us,” Manyi told me, “Irene had a dream that our mother was yelling at her. She’d shouted, ‘You are too fat!’ We laughed about it at the time but, later, when she was in hospital, Irene said to me, ‘If I wasn’t so fat, maybe they would have found this before it was too late.’”

It is hard to describe how I felt when I left Sümig after that meal. My last image of Manyi is of her standing at the front door to Number 4, her wispy hair reaching out to all corners of the universe. Those clear eyes of hers were misted like the Balaton morning and she raised her hand to her lips, kissing the distance between us goodbye.

My short time staying with Hungarians – both my family as well as Melinda’s – had shown me a part of a world that seems to be history without end. Hungary is heavy with the past, from its legendary founding by Arpad through to the Treaty of Trianon that many Magyars still consider an act of butchery. And within each household there are shelves and walls filled with private ghosts.

The single, unifying entity amongst all these people and stories is their language. I heard it while listening to Melinda sing out the lyrics to Hungary’s very first rock opera, and when I tackled wits with Manyi and her dictionary; there was something proud living within their words. It was something that made it worthwhile to learn a language spoken by only a few million people across the globe. Something distinctly Hungarian that could never have been expressed were it not for the jealous rage of a desert deity long ago.