Off to America!

In the early 1950s—I was about four or five years old—the part of Budapest where my family lived was a small, innocent village; perhaps comparable to today's 19th district of Vienna, where detached houses with large gardens and plenty of greenery dominated the landscape. For us children, it was paradise, where we could play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or Russians and partisans to our heart's content. If only the Great Man of Steel (Visavoyonovich Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin) had known! But he sat in the Kremlin, smoking his awful makhorkas and gasping for breath as he approached his final year...

To my annoyance, all my peers back then were female and completely useless—thankfully, that would later change, but perhaps that's a story for another time... In any case, I had no choice but to join the gang of my older brother János (1945–1977), who were about two to four years older than me. Perhaps I should briefly introduce the group.

János, about eight years old, black-haired and incredibly strong. Later, he would be nicknamed, not without reason, "the Russian tank." Then there was Árpád, the same age, son of the judge who lived next door. He traveled abroad several times a year to attend conferences—which wasn't the norm in Hungary at the time—and brought us kids cowboy hats, Chicklets (chewing gum), and comic strips. He was by far the most beloved old man in our neighborhood. Árpád now lives in the USA as a lawyer. Zoltán was the serious, taciturn senior member of our gang and often peeked over at the neighbor girls, biting his fingernails. Today, he's also a lawyer and a grandfather several times over, which I—probably quite wrongly—attribute to his nail-biting. The brothers András and Gábor were cousins, sons of a daring war hero, and well on their way to becoming equally daring heroes themselves. They also live in the USA today, have children, wives and other merits; one as expected as a fire chief, the other as a sports teacher, among other things. Tracing all these life paths would provide material for another book.

Well, and then there was little István, me, the future master spy of our gang. Back then, a blond-haired angel, quite capable of asserting myself in realpolitik with a baby-like pout. Initially, of course, it was difficult to keep up with the grown-ups and make myself indispensable. But gradually, the gang realized that such a small, angelic face could sometimes be quite useful. They graciously let me participate everywhere—or almost everywhere—even though this school was very tough; the little angel sometimes had to work quite hard to keep up. Predictably, this only made the little angel even tougher and more resilient.

Well, that bit about Stalin wasn't just a random aside earlier. We weren't just preoccupied with our own affairs; no, we sometimes hung around the adults, trying to get to the bottom of the things that preoccupied them so much (or that they kept as secret as possible—but self-censorship works here too). And the growing pressure from the East, the stench of the Iron Curtain that threatened to engulf Hungary, perhaps all of Europe, body and soul, was at the heart of their debates—after all, they were bourgeois, Catholic, and Western-oriented.

Of course, I don't know who came up with the idea anymore; I can only say for sure that it wasn't me, honestly! Whatever the case may have been, we played "emigration" or "running away" more and more often, naturally to America. We had no idea about reality, but the fact that Árpád's father brought back the best chewing gum and comic books, and of course the coolest cowboy hats, was an unbeatable argument for America. After all, everyone there wore those hats and looked cool, chewed Chicklets, and read comics. So we walked around looking cool in our papier-mâché cowboy hats, chewed Chicklets until they turned into a crunchy, gray mass, and read comics where people also chewed Chicklets, wore cool cowboy hats, and so on. Wham, Bang and Zoing entered my vocabulary earlier as "ho mee dareis anthropos", "jus primae noctis" or "a digital error has occurred and your computer has to be shut down immediately; Cancel (C) or Continue (C)?"

Perhaps I could tell you about two more things that also entered my vocabulary back then: "Atlantic" and "Operencia," which require a little explanation. It made a lasting impression on me, a little tyke, when my father once expressed the opinion that the Russian steamroller of steel, once set in motion, wouldn't stop in Hungary, but would roll straight on to the Atlantic. Since I knew that steamrollers rolled downhill but never uphill, it was clear to me that this ominous Atlantic must lie far below the horizon. — And the children's song "Túl az Operencián ..." (Beyond the Upper Enns, beyond the great sea...) was sometimes whistled by the adults as well, for example, when they wanted to discuss emigration and signaled to the others that they were meeting in the back room. Little István was certain that the Operencia must be a vast sea that an emigrant would have to laboriously cross. Of course, the etymologists among you immediately recognized that the Operencia is nothing other than the Upper Enns River, and "the sea" is Lake Neusiedl... I vaguely suspected something, though: the Atlantic Ocean, or Operencia, or America. Because of the cowboy hats and all.

Of course, I was the last to find out. To be more precise, I owe it entirely to my exceptionally suspicious attention that I wasn't simply abandoned, left stranded in backward, steel-clad Hungary. The grown-ups behaved almost naturally, but only almost. At some point, I noticed that cult objects like Árpád's ultimate American-made pocketknife were no longer where they were supposed to be. Then Andy's leather pilot's jacket, the one his father had worn in the war, disappeared. When János gave me his comics one afternoon, placed his hand on my shoulder with fatherly seriousness, and murmured in a husky voice that I had to be very brave now and look after our sisters, the penny finally dropped.

Of course, I didn't let on, but something was definitely up. The older kids were acting very mysterious, and I, on the other hand, didn't understand what they were up to—I was only five, or so—and I couldn't exactly ask. So I kept watching and stayed silent. My target was Gábor, my best friend and only a little older than me. I stuck to his heels and wouldn't let go. Wherever he went, I was his shadow. The older kids didn't notice anything, but he was starting to get a little uneasy about the fact that the little one—we're talking about me!—was clinging to him like a burr.

Then, one afternoon, he grew restless. He tried to shake me off; me, the budding future master spy! I gave him a few seconds' head start and stuck to his heels. Gábor scaled the low wall of the neighboring property, crept through a hedge to the next one, and secretly slipped through the cellar of the last neighbor. Over there, on the still-vacant building plot, he breathed a sigh of relief, but nearly died of fright when I sneezed in the dark, musty passageway just a few meters behind him. His desperate look, along with the curses he sent skyward, remains a lasting memory.

Then Andy, Árpád, and János appeared on the other side of the construction site. Zoli had apparently been sitting for a long time on a silently rusting piece of construction equipment, looking at us seriously. The older boys stopped and conferred. I stood next to Gábor and waited. If they were going to do something adventurous, they wouldn't do it without me: I wanted to go along! (Apparently, my family says today, all that remains of that time for me is the defiant attitude of a defiant little angel; — could that possibly be true?).

Catching the neighbor's cat and locking it in the cellar. Stealing the caretaker's moped and riding it around until he came running after us, yelling and cursing. Using the large full-length mirror from my parents' bedroom to shine sunlight on drivers and blind them until one of them stopped and angrily smashed the mirror, which led to considerable argumentative acrobatics. That was roughly what I expected. But nothing came close to what the grown-ups now revealed to me—rather hesitantly and reluctantly.

"We are emigrating," said Zoli, and Árpád added, as if I were slow on the uptake: "...we are running away!"

"We're going to America," Andy and János said in unison.

"But you're too small," said Gábor, my best friend. "We can't take children that small, unfortunately!" A friendship of many years could shatter in a fraction of a second, especially because I really, truly started to cry. No, not from sadness, but from anger. What does "small" even mean here?!

Gábor slowly straightened up, clutching his aching stomach and barely suppressing his tears, for my then-childish fist already possessed some of its later striking power. "So, if he absolutely insists..." he began panting, and János, my brother, was the first to fall. "Well, one could perhaps..." he started, but Andy kicked him in the shin. Zoli rose from his rusty old car and sauntered off. As always in such situations, as a great statesman and world leader, he had no time for crybabies or weaklings; he was destined for greater things.

János immediately took the initiative. "All right, you can come along, little brother!" he said, taking my hand. As we passed Gábor, my former best friend, I muttered, "Phew, you pig!" and shook my curls triumphantly. I really gave it to him, by Zeus!

We followed Zoli, the eldest, unobtrusively; he was the only one who knew how to get from a garden suburb in Budapest to America. Of course, we didn't go down the street—where would you think we'd go! We crept, naturally, through the gardens and fields of the district, along time-honored pirate and robber trails. As we crept through Grandfather's large garden, I tugged at János's shirt, suggesting we might as well go up to Grandma's; she usually had hot cocoa and cake or cookies on hand. America would probably be quite interesting, too, but Grandma's cookies were certainly worth abandoning this adventure. Although I had whispered almost inaudibly, Zoli grumbled reluctantly that they—the grown-ups—had sworn a great, sacred oath to go together and win, or perish together. And should anyone—whoever, I didn't know, of course—catch us, we would be as silent as the grave.

I nodded, intimidated, and János reaffirmed the Great Sacred Oath for me, until "silence as the grave." Then we crept on. No one noticed that "pirates" or "robbers" or "cowboys" were sneaking through the gardens—we did it almost daily. Thus we overcame all obstacles, moving inconspicuously and quietly through the gardens and eventually reaching more populated areas.

Zoli strode purposefully ahead, and soon we crossed the high walls of the hospital complex, which until then had formed a natural barrier, marking the end of the world. More skillfully than the adults had imagined, I used their human pyramid and arrived, awestruck, on the other side of the world's edge. Zoli walked briskly ahead, we crossed a few streets, and then we stood before Budapest's Southern Railway Station, which you might know as Déli Pu. (déli pályaudvar). We lingered for quite a while until Zoli and Andi, who had gone ahead as scouts, waved. Then we crossed the main street and, with pounding hearts, entered the beautiful, old station, whose metal design bears the signature of Gustave Eiffel.

For the younger generation, I should probably add a bit of historical context, as things are handled differently today. These days, we go to the station, get on the right train, and simply board. We either have our tickets saved on our phones via text message or—a bit more old-fashioned—as a computer printout. Those in a real hurry simply board and then pay the conductor, by credit card, of course. Back then, things were a bit slower. Tickets were produced by specially made printing machines, which were only found at larger train stations: the ticket clerk would take a small piece of light brown cardboard, about the size of a matchbox, from a drawer (and if you don't know what a matchbox is, then just go to the tobacco museum next Sunday instead of idling in front of your screen, okay!?). Then, the clerk would find the correct ticket on a large wall panel, where the metal printing plates were alphabetically arranged in small slots, and insert it, along with the cardboard, into a slot on the machine. A quick, nervous check, a press of a spring mechanism, and the metal plate along with the cardboard backing was shot through the machine, emerging again on a small dispensing tray at the bottom. The metal plate with the negative print was then returned to its original packaging, and the passenger received the printed ticket, provided they had the money ready.

I could have stood there for hours, gazing at this marvel of Western engineering, but the grown-ups moved on. Firstly, we had no money, and secondly, riding without a ticket, as they say, is part of the real deal. Of course. Anyway, I whispered to János as we walked on, one day I'd become a ticket clerk, and this amazing ticket machine would be mine, mine forever, I swear!

Of course, you, dear reader, have surely also arrived late to the train station at some point, raced panting through the hall, out onto the platform, and jumped onto the possibly already departing train with your last ounce of strength. Just as this is no longer possible today with the remote-controlled, automatically closing pneumatic doors, back then you wouldn't even have been able to get through the hall.

There are police officers there. In all likelihood, "real" police officers; in all likelihood, railway station police. A matter of luck, because in later years I often exploited their simple-minded self-importance to my advantage. But back then, when we little kids were sneaking through Budapest's Southern Railway Station, we were a matter of doubt.

They were correct.

Two.

Zoli, Árpád, and Andy got through without any trouble; they were obviously hurrying after "their parents." János, Gábor, and I were undoubtedly unlucky, just plain bad luck. The police officers' job was to make sure no riffraff snuck onto the train without a ticket or, even worse, brought sheep or goats along—which really makes you wonder who keeps sheep or goats in a metropolis like Budapest, but anyway, the Balkans weren't far away; as everyone knows, they begin just south of Budapest.

One policeman stared through the asphalt of the platform with X-ray vision, trying to counteract the Earth's rotation by gently swaying his body, still reeling from yesterday's drinking binge; the other glanced irritably to the left, then glumly to the right, and then irritably to the left again. Irritably, of course, because three little tykes, barely eight years old, were coming along, wanting to get to the trains. "That's not possible," he said; "not while I'm on guard duty here, damn it!"

As so often happens in life, several things were now happening simultaneously. First, the locomotive began to chug and rumble mightily, and the carriages started moving with agonizing slowness. Zoli, Árpád, and Andy were already standing on the running board, whispering excitedly to each other because the watchful policeman was holding us back and trying to question us. Then they jumped off again and came closer. János and Gábor took a desperate lunge forward and got past the policeman. My lunge came a split second too late and was also half a percent too short.

He had me in his clutches, that policeman!

The train slowly pulled out of the station. On the completely empty platform were two officers carrying out their duties and six caught kids. Surely the poisonous glares of my gang members would have dropped me dead on the spot, had I not been so aware of my childlike innocence. And I had taken such a huge lunge!

A little later we entered the guardroom. While the bad guys rightly sat contritely on the bench, I soon found myself perched on a secretary's lap, munching on sweets. — Did I mention the little blonde angel yet?

Scene change.

Mother ran from house to house in a panic, searching for us. Soon the other mothers joined in, sharing the panic, the search, and the running. Even today, I can glean complete medical diagnoses from Mother's account, with "impending circulatory collapse" being the mildest of the complaints. After an indeterminate amount of time, the distraught women exchanged glances and decided to alert the respective fathers by phone. What emerged was an improvised, but no less effective, logistical plan, one that I later managed to develop myself in similar panic situations—when my children went missing. I believe that even the news of the legendary Puskás's World Cup goal didn't spread faster through all the police stations in Budapest than the news of the disappearance of a whole handful of magnificent heirs. Wearing dirty-white cowboy hats.

Of course, the report reached "our" station as well. The police officers questioned each of us again, one by one, but we just shook our heads silently. The great sacred oath, you know, the one about "keeping silent until death," and all that.

János, who in the eyes of the law enforcement officers most closely resembled the gang leader, had to sit down at the Grand Mufti's desk and answer his questions. He didn't answer for a long time; only when the all-powerful man turned bright red, as if having a heart attack, and began to roar uncontrollably, did he mutter that his name was Lacika (Lacika is the diminutive form of Laci, Ladislaus. A fairly common first name at the time and perhaps comparable to the American names John or Jim).

Naturally, the questioner shouted that his name must be János Rudas, but János stubbornly shook his head and insisted his name was Lacika. And he said nothing more.

After a while, even the toughest cop gives up, it seems to me, because, wearily, he wiped the sweat from his brow and called my mother to say that the children—or rather, madam, presumably only presumably—were at his station and that she should please come by for identification. She, of course, called my father, and he hurried halfway across the city to come here as well.

The secretary pushed another cookie into my mouth and casually asked what her sweet little angel's name was.

"Pityuka," I said, munching away, and gave her my most innocent look—because no one actually called me Pityuka, a ridiculous diminutive of a diminutive, only for true dwarfs. Not for aspiring master spies. Now my big buddies could see that I, too, could give a false name, keep silent until my grave. Even if they'd ripped my tongue out, I would have still claimed my name was Pipfuka.

"Yes, nice, and what are your parents' names?" she asked, because secretaries always approach things more cleverly than the boss.

"Mommy and Daddy," I said truthfully, having swallowed the cookie and glancing again at their stash. Of course, I'd had to memorize my own name, address, and phone number in case I got lost. But I hadn't gotten lost, had I?

"But surely they must have other names too?" she cooed, baiting me with another cookie. It's incredibly embarrassing for me now, but I genuinely didn't know back then.

"Anyuka and Apuka," I said, hoping you recognize my mommy and daddy. The kind woman waved another cookie and asked where they lived. I remained silent, eyeing the treat. When I finally got it, I correctly stated that we lived "at home." "All children live at home," I added pedantically, "except for Ilona, who lives with her grandma because her parents have a falling out."

"And don't you have any other name besides Pityuka?" she asked, making one last, desperate attempt. Triumphantly, I took her last cookie, then, blushing, I said with my mouth full, "Yes, I do: my little angel!"

What can I say? Time was running out to devour the rest of their supplies, because now Mother and her neighbor stormed in, hugged me, sobbing uncontrollably, and turned to János. He looked grim and stared stubbornly straight ahead.

"But Jánoska, don't you know me?" she asked, pale, looking around desperately, the way any mother would look when her son had become either amnesiac or mentally disabled. The policeman glared again, then finally János admitted that his name was Lacika and that he didn't know this woman at all. Not even a little. Then János stared stubbornly at the window frame again, probably thinking of the 150 warriors of Chief Sitting Bull who had bravely accompanied our gang's self-chosen protector to his death.

Mother's weeping was of no use. The emigrants had sworn to silence and were keeping their oath. The youngest hadn't sworn an oath, but tried to stall for time with childish jokes. The neighbor tried to speak to Árpád—after all, he was her son—but he looked right through her and shook his head emphatically when she brazenly claimed to be his mother.

Even when my father arrived, the men couldn't open their jaws. Silent and stubborn, they sat there, remaining steadfastly silent. My father not only had a sharp mind, he also knew how to use it and quickly brought a folder full of family photos from home. It became almost truly embarrassing when one or another policeman reached into his jacket pocket and then produced pictures of his wife, children, and dog—a culturally ingrained reflex when someone shows their photos.

So everything dissolved into pure bliss and contentment. Or perhaps not quite, for faithful János received a terrible thunderous slap and had to go to bed without supper, and this is how it happened:

We were all standing in front of the guardhouse door when my father turned around again and sternly demanded that János give his name immediately. János turned around, looked seriously at the group of uniformed men, and said:

"Lacika!"