Dossier K: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

store.
    Your mother and father had divorced by then
 …
    Maybe not as yet, but they had separated.
    How old were you at this point?
    Four or five, but even later on I used to spend half the summer with him up until I was ten, when my father found a place on Baross Street, still in Józsefváros, at the corner with what was then Thék Endre and is now Leonardo da Vinci Road.
    And you have no memories of the holiday weeks you spent with your mother?
    Of course I do. Mother always took me out of the city to some bathing resort. My strongest memories are of Erdőbénye and Parádfürdő. 1 It’s hard to believe now, but those were then well-heeled, upper-middle-class spas with first-rate hotels that after the war were converted into “trade union holiday centres” and other institutions serving functions of that ilk, and then they were run down to the ground. Once, when we reached Erdőbénye, Mother had something still to sort out at the travel agent’s, and I spotted the dried-up bed of astream nearby. I was curious about what there might be there and, broken loose from my mother’s proximity as I was, I started to run, then I slipped on a rock and slid down the steep bank into the channel of the stream and the rocks lining it. That limited our diversions, because for at least a week my cuts had to be dabbed regularly with iodine and the dressings changed. But look here, these anecdotes can be of no interest to anyone, me least of all.
    In that case, let’s cut back briefly to Tömő Street, because you have said nothing about your grandmother
.
    No, I haven’t, but then there’s not much I can say about her, poor thing. By the time I came into the world, the youngest of the Hartmann girls had become a cantankerous old biddy. She was fat, hard of hearing, had trouble with her blood pressure and she continually complained either about her health or how they had “come down” in the world, with reference to the “palmy days.” Grandfather endured that without a word, even though it must have been most depressing; however, he would occasionally chide her with a “Zelma, you’re always gr
oo
mbling” — like that, pronouncing the “u” as “oo.” She would sometimes be overcome by bouts of lovingness when she would be all over me, smothering me with kisses, after which, as I recall—children can be horrid—I would wipe my face.
    So, let’s pass from Tömő Street to Molnár Street and your maternal grandparents
.
    I never actually visited the place in Molnár Street; I only know the address because I heard about it from Mother.
    In what connection?
    She would sometimes bring up the subject of her young days; Molnár Street must have been a nightmarish memory for her. It was the crampedness of the space above all that stayed with her like some sort of claustrophobic memory.
    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 totake 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