A Century's Worth of Living (Part 3)

by Madeleine Kando

My mother Ata sleeps a lot. She is often in pain because of some nerve damage in her feet, but is happy that I have come all the way from Boston to visit her. It is peaceful here in Bergen. Ata lives in an assisted living abutting the 'polders', vast meadows where sheep, horses and cows share the lush, green grass. The enormous sky dwarfs this flat landscape; I have stepped into a Vermeer painting, the church steeples and windmills dotting the low hanging horizon.

I am trying to come to terms with Ata's life ending soon. Part of my life will also come to an end and I don't know how to separate the two. Soon, I will no longer come to Holland. I will no longer sleep in this little guest room, waiting for the day to break while the smell of cow manure, the cawking of the seagulls, the muffled sound of a truck on its morning delivery mingle in the air. It will all be as faded as the photographs that hang on Ata's walls.

Visiting my mother has always been an intense experience. With all that moving from country to country, she has managed to always bring the family past with her. There are so many boxes where I find pieces of myself, boxes stuffed with old letters, drawings, poems and of course, photographs.

In a box marked 'Correspondence Hongroise', I find Ata's letters addressed to her father, some of which date back to 1933. I recognize her handwriting, although she was only 20 when she wrote them. They are written in pencil, in Hungarian, a language that I no longer understand. The return address is Malakoff, probably a suburb of Paris.

What does she write about? I imagine my 20 year old mother, sitting at a rickety wooden table in a studio somewhere in Paris, full of dreams, full of life, not yet marked by the incredible and mostly horrible events that she will experience a decade later. She is at the beginning of her life's journey, beautiful, talented Ata…

What was it like to live back then? Hitler had come to power in Germany, Paris was the Mecca of culture and art and a young Hungarian couple had eloped to Paris to get married in secret. They were discovering the world and themselves, unaware of what the next decade would bring in which Europe would descend into the worst nightmare of its history. The trouble with living life is that it gets lived minute by minute. There is no time to see the bigger picture and Ata and my father Oci, like so many others, were living theirs, trying to carve out an existence as graphic artists. The dark clouds of war had not yet appeared on this young couple's horizon.

If one word could describe our family motto, it was 'survival'. This instinct to survive is hardcoded in our genes. We are Jewish on my mother's side but Ata's grandparents had converted to Christianity, changing the family name from 'Beck' to ‘Beke’, since Jewish families in the Budapest of the late 19th century needed to show that they were good patriots. When my grandfather came along, a nice Jewish boy called 'Guzman', to ask for my grandmother hand, he was promptly told to convert to Christianity and adopt a Christian name or he would be refused to marry her.

So Simon Guzman became Imre Gorog, which means 'Greek' in Hungarian, probably because he was a professor of Greek and Latin. Almost an entire generation of Jews in Hungary 'magyarized' their names. Any Jewishness was neatly cauterized away, proving that they were part of the Hungarian nation.

In another box I find letters dated 1945, sent from 'Sevres, France'. This is where we moved to after the war, apparently in the nick of time, since Hungary soon became a satellite country of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain was drawn, isolating it from the West.

Halfway between Paris and Versailles, Sevres was a charming suburb settled on a hill. A stiff climb through winding streets led to our two- story house. An iron gate mortared into the wall surrounding the property opened onto a lovely manicured garden with rose bushes and an arch covered with lilacs. We lived on the top floor where large windows gave a magnificent view of the valley below. How did my parents manage to settle in such an upscale part of Paris? Why did we not end up in one of the bidons-villes, like all the other refugees?

Down the street lived Madame Niel, a tall and skinny lady with many children and an always absent husband. She gave me piano lessons for free and her daughter Monique taught me French. She became my friend and introduced me to the neighborhood kids. We soon formed alliances with some of them, and made mortal enemies of others. There was constant hostility between the two camps, which at times turned into stone throwing and hitting with sticks. Turf building in this quiet and seemingly peaceful banlieue was a vicious affair.

Up the street was a small corner store where we bought baguettes and lard, which we used to make our daily artery clogging sandwiches. Our diet reflected the very limited budget my parents lived on. We had one good meal a day, usually consisting of potato soup and bread. My mother called it 'soupe pas pognon', a pun on 'soupe a l'oignon'. Pognon is slang for money, so we ate 'no money soup'. Its nutritional value was close to zero but it tasted delicious, with a tinge of bay leaf, a little sour cream, potatoes and onions.

A series of long stone stairs, built long ago by some French monarch, had been carved into the hill, leading from the village below to our street above. They were named after the number of steps, 'les 144 marches'. I always lost count, huffing and puffing my way up to our house after school and trusted the sign that there were actually 144 steps. Ata had to climb them late every night, when she returned from a long day at work in the Quartier Latin, often being harassed by a stranger wanting money or some more carnal experience with this beautiful young woman.

Further up the hill lay the Parc Saint Cloud, a mini version of the grounds at Versailles. It was built by Louis XV and given as a present to his famous mistress, Madame de Pompadour. The park is crisscrossed by wide 'allees' with tall chestnut trees, obviously built for rides in horse drawn carriages. We spent hours gathering chestnuts, crushing their sharp spiked husks with a rock, until they revealed a shiny brown 'marron', as if little gnomes had spent the whole night polishing them and carefully putting them back in their little beds.

A small street led to a door giving entrance to the park. It was enclosed by a six-foot high stone wall where my brother and I often dared each other to walk the length to the next entrance. I was a tomboy and loved to show off my daredevil skills, until the day I fell off and scraped my knees almost to the bone. But my battle scars were a source of great pride to me and I showed them off, as a form of introduction to whomever I met. I loved climbing trees and run down steep hills until my legs couldn't keep up with the speed of my descent. I swung from vines like a young monkey and dared my sister to jump off ledges that were twice our size. She always wisely declined, which gave me a great sense of superiority over my 'little' twin sister. After all, I was 15 minutes older.

The icing on the cake was the 'Bellevue', a point where all the allees converged, with a sprawling view of the entire city of Paris, often made more beautiful by the hazy morning light.

Thinking back on our life in Sevres brings up nostalgia mixed with the sense of alienation of growing up in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. But I realize now that Sevres was not the worst place we could have chosen to spend the post-war years. By pure luck we tumbled into one of the most coveted suburbs of Paris. We spent our cart wheeling years in a vast playground designed by Marie Antoinette's royal gardeners, and the fairly upscale neighborhood, although in sharp contrast to our poverty, was safe, never mind that we had to walk to school on shoes issued by the Red Cross, with the leather stapled to the wooden soles.

To be continued… leave comment here