Dossier K: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

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 atthe 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