From Switzerland with Grief

Eight months had passed. All winter I had thrown myself into work until I was too tired to grieve and in spring I began going through what my mother had left behind.

It wasn’t so much leafing through papers as digging and shovelling. Apart from the usual official documents, I’d inherited piles of unsorted photographs, most of them black and white, handwritten letters that weren’t always in the right envelopes, and a few yellowish sheets with frayed edges, stamps and sweeping signatures that seemed mysteriously important. Everything was piled into shoeboxes from upmarket brands, old gingerbread tins and lacquered cardboard boxes, the original contents of which remained a riddle to me. A handful of letters were tucked in a sort of felt folder, covered with colourful fabric patterns and tied with a bow, embroidered by a long-forgotten great-great-aunt, by candlelight, stitch by stitch.

All these papers and letters and pictures had one thing in common: they came from another time. Many, however, also came from a land that no longer existed as it once had: Transylvania, when it was part of Hungary.

I recognised some of the names on the envelopes when I could make them out, though I hardly knew the people behind them. I had even met a few of those in the photographs as a child. I didn’t know who all of them had been, but the mere thought that they might be relatives made it impossible to let any of it go, however respectfully it might be done.

A wastepaper bin was out of the question. Almost every sheet, almost every photograph, came with a story I’d been told before—and not just once, but always without warning and always a little too long for a child’s patience.

Most of these stories were melancholic, some cheerful, often tinged with pride or reverence, and occasionally garnished with an opinion that had fallen out of step with the times. Yet my mother did not care in the slightest that she lived in a different era, thereby inevitably making me an inhabitant of two worlds: hers and mine, the real one.

Strange as I sometimes found it, I also enjoyed being able to escape my reality so easily. With a single leap of imagination, I could dive into my mother’s world as if into a pool filled with the past. I pictured her going dancing with a boy from her class. I’d never have dared go to school with a haircut like his. Or later, at a carnival ball, wearing a striped sailor’s shirt, drinking champagne straight from the bottle with confetti in her hair. I picked cherries with her in my great-grandmother’s garden, in a place with an unpronounceable name, and learned about Barnabás von Géczy, the coffee-house violinist she’d fallen for as a girl and who later conducted a famous orchestra that nobody remembers any more. I especially loved a photograph of my grandmother in the garden at Schäßburg. With a headscarf against the Transylvanian heat, she was holding three of her children on her lap. A break in the harvest, perhaps, before the second great war. I imagined how the air must have smelt of summer.

In Germany, she had never worn a headscarf.

Only now, as an adult, did I grasp something obvious that no child can conceive: the past I’d been allowed to glimpse had once been my mother’s present. A world she had actually seen with her own eyes, not just in photographs as I had. Now that she was gone, those photographs brought her back to me at stages of her life when I hadn’t known her. And only the flood of papers I couldn’t get through, and perhaps didn’t even want to, could keep that old reality alive in my imagination.

At the centre of it all, however, stood a wooden casket, darkly stained and finished with clear varnish. It held just one thing: a very old sheet of heavily yellowed paper. It bore a coat of arms in the top left-hand corner, and below it was densely covered with Hungarian writing in brownish ink. I’d known the sheet since childhood, but I had only a vague idea what it meant. My grandmother rarely took it out, and certainly not for me. There had to be someone rather more important sitting at the table. I couldn’t read it myself, for growing up in a half-Hungarian household didn’t mean learning Hungarian. The mother tongue was reserved for the mothers—mine and hers—so they could talk without me understanding a word, let alone butting in.

How lovely it would be to hear those two voices once more, I thought as I walked from the car park to the cemetery, which I still visited almost every day.

Instead, a shrill squeal came from the neighbouring scrapyard as a press crumpled a car into a cube. As always, I wondered who had chosen the grave where my mother now rested alongside her parents.

Herself? Her sense of irony was notorious, and I could well imagine her choosing a grave with nothing between it and the scrap metal but a fence and a gravel path where dog-walkers took their pets round after round.

She must have been aware that she, too, would lie here one day.

And I was next.

I placed the white and red flowers I’d brought into a cemetery vase and pushed its spike firmly into the earth beside the deep-green gravestone.

Red, white, green—the colours of Hungary.

For once entirely without irony, my mother had decreed that only these colours had any place on or beside the grave. All the others were unwelcome, and one was even expressly forbidden: yellow—!—was part of the Romanian flag, the flag of the country she hated so deeply, to which such large parts of the Hungarian homeland had fallen. She never called the country by its name. The German-settled regions, however, she called ‘Siebenbürgen’, just as the Hungarian areas were ‘Erdély’ or ‘Széklerland’. And all of it together was simply ‘Transylvania’.

I remembered once asking my mother whether there might still be relatives there, in the place she’d been forced to flee.

‘Quite possible,’ she had said, ‘very likely, in fact.’

‘And wouldn’t you want to see them again? Or their descendants? Wouldn’t you like to visit those places?’ I pressed.

‘No.’ She hesitated briefly, as if to check whether she could stand by her answer.

‘It’s not the way it used to be. It never will be again. And people change when they’re forced to.’

Back from the cemetery, I got out the casket. Now that grief was loosening its grip, Transylvania was slowly pushing its way in. Whenever I let myself think of travelling there, it no longer stayed silent. It gave me a nudge. It hadn’t whispered ‘Come on then!’ yet, but it had already cleared its throat. And its strongest lure lay inside the casket.

Covered by a pair of leather gloves, as if to protect it magically from unauthorised access, it had its own compartment in the cupboard, which also held things I’d stuffed out of sight while grief made reading them impossible.

No ordinary joiner had made this little box. At the rear right-hand corner, just above the base, there was a small, sliding strip. Behind it, in a hollow space, the tiny key was hidden. You had to tilt the casket slightly and shake it gently until the key slid into the opening. It worked straight away. Lovely. Some things you don’t like to shake.

The document was folded twice, inside an envelope that looked as though it had been through a great deal. One war at least, perhaps two. Nothing else was in the box. Just age and dust.

I spread the sheet out on my desk. For the first time, I did it myself, rather than having someone else do it for me. I studied it as though I’d never seen it before. About half the size of a newspaper page, it was almost as thin. Its brownish edges were torn in several places, all four corners dog-eared. The writing seemed fainter than when I’d last tried to read it. Even the coat of arms, slightly crooked and not particularly impressive, had seemed to shine more brightly in my memory. Or was I seeing it differently now that I was no longer a child?

No grand plume of feathers above the shield, no mythical creature. Not even a lion or a horse. Even the antlers were missing. Just a man in green stood there, wearing a doublet and breeches, his legs in knee-high boots. In his right hand he held a sort of a club, ready to strike. Beneath him a mound rose as red as the arch spanning above him. On closer inspection, the club turned out to be a morning star, not just an ordinary stick. I was relieved it wasn’t a broom. The rather unheroic fellow wore neither helmet nor armour, just a cap, and could almost have passed for St Sweepweek, the Tireless.

‘I’d love to know who you are!’ I whispered to the man in the doublet. ‘You don’t exactly look like Prince Valiant!’

But the man remained as silent as the writing. I could make out the words, despite their often more than unnecessary length, but only the names meant anything to me. István appeared several times—a Stephen, in other words. There were also a George and an Andrew mentioned, while a Mihály—a Michael—had signed the whole thing. What really impressed me, though, was the year at the very bottom:

1662.

Wasn’t there a French beer with that number on it?

What did Wikipedia have to say about that year?

Not much. The Dutch had lost Taiwan, Blaise Pascal had died, and tea had been introduced at the English court.

Not a word about a man in green breeches with a morning star.

Further down there was a mention of the death of a Transylvanian prince, a certain John Kemény. But it’s easy to overlook what you don’t know.

I carefully folded the sheet back into place, then returned the casket to its compartment. The draught from my hand sent a little gust through the letters. A whole sheaf spilled out, and I couldn’t catch them all.

Good God, what a mess!

At least this one compartment had to be tidied up at once, even if all I did was tie everything together.

Three hours later, I too was sitting on the floor, my knees long since numb, an island in a sea of paper.

It was unbelievable who had written to whom, and how often! Didn’t these people have anything better to do? My mother’s aunts wrote to their sister every week (and most likely to one another as well), Grandma wrote to her favourite cousin, and Grandfather to his siblings, two of whom lived in America. And I could gather all this from the envelopes only, as the contents were mostly in Hungarian.

So was the only letter from Switzerland. Inside, however, was a card of handmade paper edged in black.

And this death notice spoke German!

A man named Dénes had lost his Ildikó, a distant cousin of my mother’s. Far too soon, of course, much too young. It was dated a quarter of a century ago.

At last. A relative who spoke both German and Hungarian. And who might even still be alive!

I found nothing about him online. All I had was the address on the padded envelope, with that stamp depicting an edelweiss. The letter had been posted in Chur, but I’d never heard of the village where it had been written.

This man, provided he wasn’t blind or senile, would be able to read and translate the document in the casket. And a few of those tens of thousands of letters. Perhaps even all of them.

‘Aren’t there translation agencies for that?’ piped up a voice that hadn’t butted in for months.

‘Of course there are. But I’m not related to them. And I can’t afford them, either!’

Going to Switzerland on the off-chance wasn’t a good idea. Writing, on the other hand, certainly was.

Special occasions call for special letters. Almost reverently, I drew ink into my old fountain pen.

The sight of my scrawl startled me. Would Dénes be able to read what I wanted to ask him, what I needed to ask of him?

Two weeks later, he wrote back. Typed, with a fading ribbon and letters that danced out of line. But the message was clear enough.

And I accepted the invitation.