So this is the short and sweets remotely from Nógrád where I’ve been doing some private teaching with the previously mentioned family in the previously mentioned village.  The short stack of what I’ve learned so far includes the fact that America will never be as good as Hungary in water polo, off road vehicles will flip over if you drive them up the steepest grade of a hill—sideways, if you don’t start including the vast array of Magyar soups into your daily diet soon you might as well never eat again, and if you make the trek to teach someone else your mother tongue you will undoubtedly learn more about their language and culture (and probably more about yourself along the way).

I’ll be finished in another two days and will get back to the land of regular blurbing.  I have been note-taking and snapping away like mad, so warm yourself up a pot and get the biscuits out of the oven.  It’s going to be a long one.

Free-roaming Donkey from previous post was put into the stables as a punishment by the workers this morning because he ate their food.  He was not pleased.

Imagine this:  the sound of the metal train gate slowly creaking into position, followed by the chug of the steam.  A Puli barks.  Just below the window, you can hear the plastic wheels of the toy motorcycle which the youngest child has put in motion.  He is laughing at Lili and Mira who have eaten the heads of the pansies.  Hogy vagy, Dávid?  How are you? The neighbor girl asks him.  She has arrived with a carton of black raspberries and a basket of plums, which she picked at sunrise.  Kösz jól, he replies.  Thanks, good.  He is only two, but has already learned the polite exchange.

A woman is making an announcement on the loudspeaker, which the entire village of Nógrád (population just over 1,500) can hear.  The humidity is low today.  There will be fireworks for St. Stephen’s Day.  The pharmacy will be open on Friday.

You slowly wake and dress, leave the guesthouse for the main house, where the mother, Marcsi, has set out a beautiful breakfast of breads and cheeses.  There is goose liver and ham to spread, a variety of juices and teas.  You’re not used to drinking 2.8% milk, and enjoy the smooth texture of the hot chocolate.

Everyone has gathered around the table, the extended family, the people who work for the father, Konrad.  The eldest child, Korinna, talks about painting camp in Slovakia, and her younger brother, Konika, about driving school.  Donát is reciting English numbers as clearly as any four year old American boy.  Everyone is smiling, exchanging programs for the day.  Tennis, maybe, at Oli’s house, or a walk to the castle.

Outside the house and across the tracks and creek, another train has arrived.  A few are waiting in the tiny station on the wooden floorboards and benches.  Some will be delivered to Vác.  Some will go on to Budapest.

And even though you have been in Hungary for nearly two months now, this scene entirely amazes you.  It is breathtaking.  It is wholly new and also reminiscent of a different time.  And even though you are here to meet the family and the two oldest children with whom you will help study English next week, you are almost completely lost in its quaintness.

There are not enough pinches for it.  For an ice cream at the village store that closes every day for two hours at lunchtime.  Or how everyone says hellos to everyone as they pass on the narrow streets.  Jó napot kívánok.  Szia. Csókolom.  The two women hanging laundry on a line next to a bucked of freshly harvested red potatoes.  The newborn foal in the stables with pale blue eyes.  The wild horses on the opposite side of the ranch.

For the way that the family has welcomed you though some can’t even speak your language.  How they have welcomed you into their home with every kindness.  There are not enough ways to say it—does this place, do these kinds of good people still exist in this hard world? So I won’t.  I will speak of it from the distance of the page.  And let you imagine it for yourself.

It is the middle of August.  The sun blushes behind Fisherman’s Bastion.  To the east, across the slow-rippling Duna, Parliament awakens in a coral glow.  Budapest in its quietest form.  Curling between the neo-gothic arches are the aching gypsy melodies. Domes, spires, dolomite ramparts as common as carbons. Follow the music into panorama.  Upstream.  Down.  Margit Island to Gellért Hill. You’re not a tourist anymore.

For a very short background on the Hungarian revolution of 1956, read my previous post.

So, after the fall of communism in 1989, the first things to be removed were the pro-communist, pro-soviet statues.  In most former-communist countries, these statutes were destroyed, and understandably so, as there is satisfaction in destroying the symbols of any oppressor.

Hungarians had the foresight to save many of these statues, however, and in doing such, laid collection for what would become Memento Park (Szoborpark or Statue Park).

With Stalin’s boots promptly displayed on a re-created Grand Stand at the entrance, and statues of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Hungarian communists like Béla Kun, this outdoor museum, for obvious reasons, is an extremely popular tourist attraction in Budapest’s XXII district.

But since this blog isn’t funded by the Hungarian Board of Tourism, I don’t feel like I need to really go the route of most other Budapest tourist websites or logs in proclaiming it as a stunning must-see.  Not that I discourage anyone from going.  Quite to the contrary.  At only 1,500 forints ($9.50), it’s really worth an afternoon trip.  But be prepared.  The atmosphere is a little bit, well, creepy, especially if you are there with Hungarians who have any memories before 1989.

We arrived around 1pm.  It was sunny and hot but not humid, a really typical August day here, and a relief from all of the rain we have been getting.  It’s kind of a miracle we even found it, as the only sign for the park was at the entrance itself, as the roadside billboards were dedicated to Ikea and the various Superduper supermarkets, Tesco, Auchan, etc.

At the ticket stand, a middle-aged woman emerged from behind the cloud of smoke and communist-era children songs playing what must have been a little too loud for her comfort.  From behind her smoke and song reddened eyes, she calmly took our forints and gave us our tickets.  The bathroom is around the corner.  The bus for Pest leaves at 5.

I’m not sure what we were expecting.  But there they were:  the soviet-era statues wrapped around a winding path, smack in the middle of a quiet Budapest neighborhood.  Frankly, it was almost suburban, (that is if those sculptures at the park you take your kids to every day are actually giant sized dying martyrs or crumbling plaques proclaiming the everlasting and loyal friendship between soviets and your home country).

We didn’t really know what to do, and probably our behavior reflected the uncertainty of what we were seeing and feeling.  We took funny pictures holding hands with Lenin.  We giggled at the pigeons balancing on the swords of the soviet troops.  For me, I really had no connection to the statues or the era, and for the Hungarians, their feelings were mixed enough to spend the afternoon with me in this mood.

But on the way out, with the boots of Stalin in the foreground and the soviet star pierced into the road blocks, we stopped to look at what many others had stopped to quietly read:  a poem carved into the iron gate by Gyula Illyés: Egy mondat a zsarnokságról (A Sentence About Tyranny) ending with the date:  1956.

In the car on the ride home I started scrolling through the pictures that I had taken.  After a long silence, the park took its real affect.  As is usual when I know I’m going to write about something, I take notes in the trusty moleskine or record interviews or write out conversations for later posting or plotting or poeming.  But for reasons I stated in my past post, and because I suppose it is the only thing I can do to prevent myself from attaching my ever pulsing light at the top of the hill American lens here, I’ve decided to simply transcribe the interview after Memento Park, as is.

J:  So you must have some memories, though.  You were nine when communism fell.

G:  I remember that when we started school, we became kisdobosok, which is young or little drummer.  It meant we had to take an oath in a special uniform:  white shirt, blue trousers or skirts, special belt and whistle.

J:  What was the oath?

G:  It included six points but I can’t remember them all.  It was all of the points about how we swore to be loyal members of the society, how we would do whatever our parents said, how we prepared to be úttörők.

J:  What’s úttörők?

G:  The whole system was divided into two parts.  In primary school was the kisdobos and from 5th grade to the 8th was the úttörő.  And the uniform, from what I can remember, was exactly the same, but the úttörő was red, like real socialists.  Or communists, rather.

J:  hmm.

G:  what?

J:  I’m trying to think of something comparable in the United States.  I mean it seems stupid but the only thing I can think of is like the Boy Scouts or something.

G:  So yeah it can be compared the same, because scouts have an oath too, and they have things to do, for nature or the community.  They go to camps.  They spend time with each other.  The have tasks to do.  They live a healthy life.

J:  This is like a pinko endorsement of the scouts.  I’m sure they would be thrilled.

G:  Uh huh.  But it was weird because you had a little id.  A little kisdobos id.

J:  What kind of id?

G:  I can show you an example of one later.

J:  Ok so the main thing I was wondering about was your experience there.  Because I know from my perspective it’s really historical and sort of like I’m looking at history in a lab, distilled.  But what is your reaction?

G:  Yes it’s difficult because, um, I really didn’t consider myself as being a significant part of this ideology, but it was weird to be there.  It felt a little bit bad and sad and depressing because it’s something that we are ashamed of.  Or what you don’t want to remember.

J:  So why do you think that if people don’t want to remember it, I mean, why is it there at all?

G:  Because it can be considered as a museum.  But I think it was built mainly for the tourists who came to Hungary as a big socialist or communist country and isn’t anymore and it’s surprising.  So maybe it’s fun for them to find a little piece of socialism or communism.

That’s why it was a little bit weird.  I didn’t have good feelings to go there.  And I was a little bit hurt because I knew that people went there because probably it’s a little bit funny for them.  But for me it’s more depressing.  I mean I don’t remember many things but this feeling is still inside of me.  And yes, we can get rid of the statues, of the symbols, of the red stars or all of these things, but in our hearts it stuck a little bit.

J:  That’s sad.

G:  Yes.

J:  What would you say to someone who wanted to know what it was like or if they should go?

G:  Yes, sure, go.

J:  Why?

G:  The statues themselves can be fascinating.  And probably, for people who didn’t live in this era, they’re just statues.

It was late October in central Budapest.  The afternoon was a little chilly, a little overcast, but not atypical for fall in Carpathian basin.  People were already wearing overcoats, and buttoning them.  Scarves were stylishly worn, even then, and wool hats covered some heads, as was the style in the mid 1950s.

Emboldened by the Polish October, and the students in Szeged who were the first to re-establish the democratic student union in Hungary, Péter Veres, the President of the Hungarian Writer’s Union, led a peaceful gathering at the Bem Statue, where 20,000 students watched a wreath being laid in support of the pro-revolution Polish movement.  They listened to him read the manifesto, the list of demands against the Soviets and the communist rule.

And then someone cut the soviet arms from the Hungarian flag leaving a gaping hole in the fabric.

The crowd started to stir, followed suit, cheering, chanting revolutionary songs and the banned Petőfi Sándor poem that had inspired another Hungarian revolution over 100 years earlier.

Where our grave mounds lie,
Our grandchildren will kneel,
And with blessing prayer,
Recite our sainted names.
On the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves
No longer!

By early evening, students, revolutionaries, writers, and others started to cross the bridges to the square.  The numbers crested 200,000.  They marched toward Parliament.

A statue of Stalin was toppled and demolished down to his boots, in which the crowd filled with Hungarian flags.  At that same time that night, students stormed the Radio building to have their demands read, but instead were detained by the State Security Police.  When the crowd demanded their release, they were released, but subsequently fired upon from gunners hidden in the building.  Tear gas was everywhere, it drafted across the Danube and into the hills of Buda.

The revolutionaries had enough.  They began firing back.

The freedom fighters formed militias, overtook Soviet tanks, threw molotov cocktails, killed soviet soldiers and soviet-sympathizing Hungarians.  The communist-installed Secretary Ernő Gerő was forced to escape to the Soviet Union as Parliament came under attack. Imre Nagy became Prime Minister.

It seemed, for ten days, that the Soviets had actually been forced out of Hungary, that having been pushed just a little bit too far, the little guy actually stood up and took something back.  Charles Wheeler of the BBC even arrived with his crew to make a short movie of this remarkable feat.  They took interviews from confident Hungarians in defiance of the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact.   Of course, as they left to go back to London, the Soviet Army was already powering toward Hungary.

Surveys were taken, statistics were plotted onto graphs, recommendations were formed among the international community.  Eisenhower hadn’t fully realized his doctrine yet, and agreed with the other military brass in doing, well, nothing.

So on November 4th, Soviet troops came rolling in from Soroksári u. (in the south) and Váci u. (in the north).  The city had been split in half, and soon would be back under communist rule.  Early in the morning, from the free radio, Imre Nagy made a final plea to the international community (in Hungarian and English) for help, as the Soviets were attacking the city.  Three hours later, the radio went silent.

Close to a quarter million Hungarians fled Hungary, while thousands of others were imprisoned, executed, or sent to the Soviet Union.

I am not a historian, though I find this story to be a compelling one.  I grew up in the town that has this in the city center, after all.

But this is a story that’s easy to retell from an American perspective.  Americans grow up with an ingrained mythology that condemns communism and espouses the pro-revolutionary tales.  And yes, many agree that the Hungarian revolution of 1956 was the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  And yes, it’s full of the kind of mythos that is familiar to Americans.

Living here, however, 52 years since that time, I find that it’s a little bit more sticky than the American version X of the story.   A lot happened between 1956 and 1989.  A lot of people happened, involved or uninvolved, activist or apathetic.  And in an attempt to avoid making assessments of this story, or my trip yesterday to Memorial Park, with the American gaze, I’m going to break this post in two and try to recount the day with the most plainly objective view that I can.  Hopefully, this will serve as a small background for those of you unfamiliar, which will make Part II tomorrow, and my trip to Memorial Park, a little easier to understand.

Still I would like to be

as wonderful

as that old idea.

–from Mary Oliver, “Lilies”

While Emese slept, the great Turul, feathers onyx as the deep eastern rivers, claws hard as corundum, appeared in his softest to her in a dream.  A stream formed, clear and cool as a thousand snow fed rivers from the last of the untouched mountains.  And from her it flowed westward and grew, quartz by quartz, rapid by rapid, into a mighty river.  Emese (priestess in Sumerian), the first priestess of the yet named ancient Magyars, woke with the seed of a kingdom.  Or it was a child, Álmos, now growing inside of her and who would take the tribes westward, who would father Árpád and a great line of Hungarian warriors.

In most of the legends, the Turul is a messenger of God perched atop the Tree of Life with the spirits of yet conceived of children who have taken the shape of birds.  In most of the legends, the Turul is the genesis between the house of Attila and the first tribes of Hungary.  And the children, born and unborn, were the first to read meaning from the sky and the stars.

This is the Hungarian origination myth, which every nation has, though some are less compelling than others, or rather some nations are too young to get into the gritty of myth (where, for example, star reading and tree-god whispering and impregnation-by-giant-falcon-while-sleeping stories are just a little far fetched to be taken seriously at Thanksgiving dinners).  But give it 1500 years.  See what shape they take then.

[Pausing for Full Disclosure]  You may be asking—where’s the picture?  There is a very famous Turul statue right here in at the castle, after all, and yes, I have many pictures of it.  But currently, there is a very heated, complex, and deeply emotional debate between the government (who wants to remove a similar statue in the western Hungarian town of Tatabánya —as a recent court decision requires— because it was used as a symbol by the fascist party during WWII who was responsible for the extermination of 600,000 of Hungary’s Jews and Romani population) and ultra right-wing nationalists who claim it is the foremost symbol of the Hungarian nation.  And this posting is not about the politics of the last century, nor the Turul, nor the various problems of usurping symbols as a kind of social language– it’s about myth and how we find ourselves inside of it.  But because I am in no way a supporter of the ultra right-wing nationalists, nor their reasons for keeping the statue in place, I have simply decided to not post a picture.  If you want to see a picture, you can google it.

So.

Europe is certainly a place of myth and legend, especially this land along the river.  It’s not that you walk down the street and meet random Hungarians who claim to read the will of God from the storm clouds.  And if you’re on the metro in Pest and someone tells you he’s carrying the sword of God, get off, walk calmly to the nearest Ikea, buy a towel rack and a gingerale and then call the police.  That’s just common sense.

But myth does become part of the bloodline, it intertwines with general social and cultural self-conceptions.  One of my reasons for being here is to figure out some of the missing pieces of my family’s history.  And it’s not just Hungarian blood and bones, but that is certainly an important part.  Where I grew up in northeastern Ohio there are many third-generation Americans from this piece of the world, from places that were only just once an idea somewhere in the East, beyond a few seas, a few rivers, a few ranges.

And whether science and anthropology and history trace that idea, and therefore you, to an iris in ancient Sumeria or a grain of salt kicked across the globe before the continents divided, you can always return to the myth because the myth is you as an idea, the yet-to-be-conceived-of you in feather-form on the branch of the tree.

Whether your grandparents were from Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania.  You can return to the myth.  Regardless of your tribe-nation.  Regardless of your nation-state.  You can return.

It doesn’t matter what language you speak or what origination myth it was told in.  If there is some platelet inside of you that was formed somewhere in the past, near or far, return to it, even in dream, under a clear night and the slanted dome of evening stars.  Return.  And maybe it seems droll, absurd, a question for vacationing poets with too much time in the stacks with The Golden Bough, too much propaganda of the fanciful or sentimental.  Return to it anyway.  No one will see you.  What or who or where is it that you want to reconnect?  Is your story full told?  Look it up, write it down, even just one line, return.

Or rather, wherever you live, cross the river and try not to think of it, that slow-forming stream inside, the idea, or you as part of it.