Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (10 page)

A CANADIAN EDUCATION

T
HERE ARE SO MANY
other lives I might have lived. Sometimes I feel that I have merely borrowed this one. One day I may have to return it.

There is the life I left behind in Hungary. It’s not a terrible life, though there are aspects of it I am glad I have avoided. My aunt Edie, for example, spent ten years in jail because she was judged guilty of taking part in the ’56 Revolution. Edie had helped the British embassy staff escape to London after their ill-advised assistance to students. She may also have taken part in the attack on the national radio station.

She’s had a hard life, my aunt. Her sons were raised in state-run institutions while she tried to appeal her fate. Her younger son, who is my age, spends most of his time training peregrine falcons. I think he must have watched the birds from his grated window at the orphanage. He is still
unsure whether to forgive his mother for missing his childhood.

My mother believed I would have been in that jail too, had we stayed in Budapest after the revolution was lost. A childhood acquaintance was kept there until he was eighteen. Then he was executed.

During my childhood I imagined I was a great Hungarian patriot. The stories I knew were all Hungarian stories. The thought that I would one day live somewhere else, speak another language, would never have occurred to me. I was, most of the time, in the company of my grandfather, a fantastic man who told riveting tales about our history, loved magic, played cheater chess, fought duels with brass-hilted swords, had hundreds of friends all over Budapest, and knew every street corner, every bridge, the remnants of every castle wherever we roamed. My world was circumscribed by the stories he shared with me.

My grandfather had been a book and magazine publisher before the war, but above all, he loved poetry. Poets, he believed, could see the world more clearly than other people. He would recite long narrative poems while he shaved and I waited for our walk to one of his favourite coffee houses, where clandestine writers, revolutionary poets, former
journalists, and other enemies of the Communist regime gathered and talked.

Because he was my hero, I wrote poems. Many of them were long, with galloping rhythms and very predictable rhymes. When I finished a poem, I would present it to my grandfather and he would read it, nodding in appreciation. Sometimes he read out loud, slipping around the rhymes, letting the rhythm take care of itself. I think, had we stayed in Hungary, I would have tried to be a poet—perhaps not a particularly good one, but I would have persevered. Hungarians are famous for persevering. That’s how their language has survived in a sea of Germans and Slavs.

Since the Iron Curtain was parted, I have returned for visits. In some ways I have tried to reclaim a past and a history I had once imagined filled the world.

I travelled to my grandfather’s birthplace in Bácska, now part of Yugoslavia, or Serbia, close to Hungary’s southern border. I placed flowers on his parents’ graves and sat in the white church where he had first encountered the Transylvanian dragon. I climbed the steep hill to Hunyadvar, the ancient seat of the Hunyadi princes, where my ancestors fought to defend their lord. We had been warrior folk, given
to sword fights, fast horses and white-faced women with long brownish tresses. We had always treated dragons with respect.

I went to Tövis, now in Romania, where we thrived for some four hundred years, and tried to find traces of our once fertile lands.

In Budapest, I wandered along the Danube, following my grandfather’s footsteps, skirting the Castle, across the bridges from Buda to Pest and back again. I sat in Vörösmarty Square and ate ice cream and chestnut purée in the Gerbaud café. I saluted the Anonymous statue on Margaret Island and studied the blood-coloured portraits of heroic ancestors in the National Gallery. I danced in the middle of Heroes’ Square and flirted with the grim faces of the Millennium Monument’s seven tribal leaders.

I climbed to the third floor of our old rat-infested apartment building on Rákoczi Street and almost met myself leaping down the wide-angled stairs. I followed myself down to the basement, where there are still woodpiles and coal mounds, but the man whose fingernails had been yanked out doesn’t speak to me any more. When I see him in my dreams, his hands are covered by darkness. He no longer frightens me.

In Toronto there are no political prisoners whose nails are extracted, and very few people are beaten to
death by the police. When someone dies in custody, there are investigations, newspaper reports, tribunals, and sometimes policemen are sent to jail. In Hungary, when someone went to jail, it was best not to mention that person again. It was safest to pretend he or she had never existed. We lived in a Communist dictatorship. When my mother was in jail, we said she was working on the prairies. When my grandfather was jailed, no one asked about him.

After he had served his time at hard labour, the government allowed him to leave his beloved Hungary. He had agreed to go because he knew he could not remain silent about the regime of terror that ruled the country, and the price one paid for speaking up was to be jailed. He died in exile in New Zealand.

I grew up in New Zealand.

It’s one of the world’s most beautiful countries, with mountains and pastures, endless ocean vistas, noisy, colourful birds, hot springs and icefields. I think of it as verdant and terrifying in a way Hungary wasn’t. In New Zealand, I was scared of being alone. I was alone most of the time. I didn’t adapt well to the change. Nor did I ever feel welcome or wanted. New
Zealand, though it may be the most beautiful place in the world, is not hospitable for exiles.

When I go back now, I meet myself swinging down the street in Christchurch, and think about the person I might be, had I stayed and kept trying to fit in. I would most certainly own a good bicycle. I used to ride an old, paint-peeling, bent-handlebarred bike from Ainsley Terrace on the river Avon. I had to stand on the pedals to brake. Once, I was arrested for borrowing another bike—well, I suppose it did seem like theft—and I was charged and fingerprinted. The police sergeant thought I would be frightened by the procedure. “Have you ever been inside a jail before?” he asked me portentously. “Have you ever been in an interrogation room?” I shook my head. No sense in telling him the truth.

Early mornings, I used to pedal to the Princess Margaret Hospital to clean toilets and walls. I would be up at four and out the door in half an hour, dreading the long bike ride along the Avon. I remember keeping to the middle of the half-lit street, away from the shadows cast by the weaving willows. I hated my light green uniform because a Hungarian soothsayer gypsy woman had warned me once to stay away from green. She had insisted that green was my unlucky colour.

I had become rather fond of one of the old ladies on the “mental ward.” Most days she would take my face between her dry-fingered hands and tell me what she could see. “There is a scar that starts just here, under your hairline, and it runs across your nose and down to your mouth, catches the corner. It’s hard for you to smile, isn’t it, dear? Such an angry red scar.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” I would tell her, but she knew better. She smiled her sad, lopsided smile. She had a scar too, and she didn’t think there was time for it to heal. She was too old; her skin had lost its resilience. “You have time, though,” she reassured me. I was eighteen years old. I was studying English literature. I had discovered Milton, Shakespeare, Auden, T.S. Eliot, Shelley, Keats and Blake. That may have been what took me to England.

I had really wanted to love London. When I arrived, broke and anxious for work, I thought London put Budapest to shame: this was a great city. I fed pigeons in Trafalgar Square, checked out the stores on King’s Road, walked both sides of the Thames, stood in line for student tickets at the galleries, climbed the narrow staircases of the Tower, read history, ate Wimpy burgers, drank G & T’s and warm
beer in pubs. I read Dickens, Smollett, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Thackeray, Hardy, E.M. Forster, Henry James, Christopher Isherwood. I saw my first Shakespeare play and finally understood why
Love’s Labour’s Lost
is a comedy and
Measure for Measure
is not.

Determined not to wash toilets any more, I lied my way into a job at Cassell. There was just enough pay for a fifth of a basement flat, but at least I was in publishing, and I knew my grandfather would approve. The flat was shared by Kiwis (as New Zealanders called themselves) and Aussies. We took turns in the bathtub, each person’s water becoming progressively colder. We couldn’t afford more than one tubful of hot water each day.

London was an adventure, not a home. Though I had grown to love their literature, I felt hopelessly foreign amongst the English. When I read George Mikes’s
How to Be an Alien
, I knew why.

Visiting London now, I can see myself walking up Kensington Church Street to Notting Hill tube station. By now, I imagine, I have a brown speckled umbrella, and it’s opened. I wear a brown mac and have a rolled newspaper under my arm. I gaze at my reflection in the shop windows along Oxford Street; I am still trying to fit in. I catch sight of myself, too,
in the Red Lion pub near Marble Arch, where I used to hang out with the salespeople from Collier Macmillan. I am trying to sound English, dyeing my hair purple and wearing black vinyl boots or button-down cardigans and scratchy brown hose, thinking of becoming a writer but travelling too much to write.

When I lived in London, I was always travelling, coming back ready for the next trip. I think even then I was looking for a place where I could stay. I saw most of Scotland, as well as every university town in England, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. I talked with the ghostly friar in Trondheim cathedral, fed the goldfish in the pond of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, fished off a houseboat along the coast, near Lund and got drunk on Polish vodka at the Majestic in Helsinki. I doubt I would have married—never there long enough to get to know anybody.

After London I tried Peru, but the poverty was so intense I couldn’t sleep nights, and I almost died of typhus. There was something about the cool marble floors of the mansion in Miraflores that made me homesick for the bug-infested home I had shared with my grandparents and my mother in Budapest. A
woman in rags near Machu Picchu offered me her baby, and I was afraid to touch it because it was covered in oozing sores. In the end, I felt so guilty about neither dying of hunger nor being able to stop anyone else from doing so that I had no regrets left over for the lovely man I had gone to visit.

I arrived in Canada at the beginning of winter. I was carrying a New Zealand passport, a British work permit, an American publisher’s guarantee of work, a letter of introduction to a Canadian journalist from a British character actor who had distinguished himself playing a Dalek on
Doctor Who
, a blue suitcase with everything I owned, and a sense of foreboding. I checked into the Royal York Hotel in Toronto and studied the wallpaper overnight. A series of green and yellow hunting scenes. Some blue sky. The operator crackled with delight when I asked her to “knock me up in the morning.” She’d heard the British expression before, but it hadn’t ceased to amuse her.

At 7
A.M.
there was no blue sky over Toronto. The trees along Front Street were bare, there was a jagged, gusty wind the doorman said came off the lake, scrunched newspapers flew along the sidewalk. Everything seemed grey. In a small park, on a bench,
a man wearing a green army greatcoat offered to share his sandwich with me. “You’re gonna be mighty cold in that short dress, young lady.”

An Indian woman in a drugstore near University Avenue told me where to buy something to cover my head. “This wind,” she said, “is cold enough to make you deaf.” She admired my white boots and guessed I had come from England. “You should have come last year for Expo. What an adventure. We had millions of visitors. My parents came all the way from Delhi.”

The first person I met in the publisher’s office helped me find the apartments-to-share ads in
The Toronto Star
and gave me two pillows, a mattress and sheets. My new boss took me on a bar crawl that included a big old place way up Yonge Street, the Brunswick House on Bloor Street East and, at mid-town, the Barmaid’s Arms. “Not enough pubs here for what you’re used to, but the bars are grand.” He was in his fifties, sturdy, blue-eyed, had been in the navy, played piano, sang ballads and old navy songs. I knew all the words to “Farewell to Nova Scotia” before I found out where Nova Scotia was.

My roommate had been born in Toronto, but her parents were English. She longed to visit “the old country” and loved what she thought was my puffy
English accent. “That’s a bit of New Zealand twang now and then, isn’t it?” I hadn’t mentioned I was Hungarian. In Christchurch, Hungarian meant lousy foreigner; in London, bloody alien, with the hint that one was breathing air meant for the English. I hadn’t yet worked out what it meant in Canada.

My letter of introduction produced a sumptuous meal at a King Street eatery and an English journalist who told me he would never live anywhere else but here. He talked about Pierre Trudeau, who was about to become prime minister, and the people at Toronto city hall who were going to give new meaning to “participatory democracy.” They planned to stop development at the core of Toronto; they knew what made for a great city, and it wasn’t expressways, it was people.