Now You See It, Now You Don’t and House of Cards have been included as part of the Open Society Archive dedicated to this period in the CEU. You can read a serialisation of them here on Xpatloop. You can also buy the dual-volume book on Kindle as well as in Stanfords London.

Book Two, Chapter 7, Part 2

November was dark and cheerless, one of the months I would always have happily hibernated through: alternately foggy and grey, or wet and blustery. Coming home from school with the children one afternoon, my umbrella blown inside out, my raw numbed fingers grappled with the post box key. An airmail letter dropped out into my hands. A letter from America. I quickly unfolded its blue tissue sheets as I mounted the stairs, reading avidly.

Virginia was well. She and the children were living with her parents, but already planning to move to the student hostel where she would then spend a year studying to have her Hungarian theology qualifications accredited. A lawyer had been consulted about the legal status of the children and the details would be finalised regarding József’s access.

She was missing Hungary and her friends, as was Flora, but the two younger children were already immersed in their new lives and busy adapting to their unfamiliar but exciting circumstances, and had expressed little if any homesickness.

She added that a friend of hers would be travelling to Budapest for Christmas, and Virginia wanted to use the opportunity to have a few personal papers brought from Dabas. ‘If you don’t feel too awkward about seeing József – I’ve already written to him telling him you might come – I’d be really grateful if you could get the things on this list and give them to my friend before she flies back here.’

Virginia included the number of the phone which had been connected since her departure. Though we felt József must to some extent see us as silent collaborators at best, and fellow conspirators at worst, we decided to ring and arrange a visit.

*

József came out of the front door of the new parsonage, his hand held out in greeting, his careworn face lined with pain. In spite of all that Virginia had told us, and the few scenes we had witnessed, it was impossible not to feel sympathy for this man whose children meant everything to him, and for whose ultimate well-being he selflessly sacrificed his own claim to them.

If indeed, as I felt, his antipathy towards the brave new world he had found himself in was the underlying reason for his attacks on Virginia and what he felt she represented, then he could be regarded every bit as much a victim as the aristocrat who had died in the garden shed, or the homeless and unemployed of Budapest’s subways.

We followed him inside with John and Hannah to where his elderly mother was clearing up in the kitchen.

‘I’ve collected together the things Virginia wants,’ he said quietly, handing Paul a bag of papers. ‘Are you going to contact the girl?’

‘Yes,’ Paul answered.
 

As József made tea, we sat in awkward silence in the unnaturally quiet house. Even the children dared not disturb the strange stillness. The clock ticked loudly above what had been Virginia’s desk in the corner of the room.

As I looked at the desk itself I realised that nothing had been touched: the small prayer cards were propped up as they had always been, next to some dried flowers in a vase and a photo of the children in the paddling pool in their garden. An old letter and pen lay as if Virginia were about to start a reply, and a dusty pair of her slippers were on the floor beneath the desk.

I walked across the hall and looked into the children’s rooms: discarded clothes hung on chair backs and books lay in the tangle of unmade bedding; toys and games spilled out of their boxes on the floor and the calendar still showed June.

The whole house felt as if Virginia and the children had just left, gone out for a walk perhaps, and at any moment would come traipsing back through the garden. Maybe this was why József had left everything as it was that morning when they departed: maybe he was trying to perpetuate the illusion of their possible and imminent return.

I was drawn to the window and the garden, though I knew it was unlikely that József had made any changes here either. But what I saw affected me even more than the memories littering the room I was standing in. I now had a clear view of the corner where the Party Secretary once lived, the road leading to József’s church. An empty space transfixed my horrified gaze: there was an ugly gap in the trees. The old rectory was gone.

I ran to the kitchen. ‘What happened to your old house?’ I demanded.

‘It fell down,’ József stated simply.

‘But how? I didn’t realise it was in such a bad state!’ I said, almost in tones of accusation, as if he should in some way have prepared me for this.

‘It wasn’t. Some young business people bought it. They said they would put new foundations underneath and renovate it, but when they started work the whole thing collapsed. Of course, it may have been deliberate, they may just have wanted to build a new house there like all the other people who came to look at it. But we’ll never know.’

Dazed and speechless I walked out past him, out of the back door and into the garden. I stumbled over broken bricks that lay scattered in the thick mud until I was standing at the edge of an abyss. I gazed numbly down, disconnected thoughts crowding my mind.

Virginia was gone. Only this gaping, muddy crater remained where the rectory had once stood, a pit of shattered roof tiles, uprooted ivy and bittersweet memories of a life and a marriage that had ended with the house’s destruction.

I stared blankly into the brown pool of rain that had gathered at its base. Memories rippled with the reflection of the bare trees in the water’s breeze-blown surface: images of a way of life that had been so mercilessly swept away in the past years. But Virginia’s children would never miss the former home they could now barely remember, and a new generation would no doubt unquestioningly accept those phenomena of the newly-emerging lifestyle whose presence made us long for aspects of a life past.



I thought of Lingua, born out of enthusiasm and idealism, where success had been measured by the loyalty of its students and teachers, and their commitment to learning and teaching English, and which had been forced to move into the new world order of a market economy.

Thus, the premises in Óbuda were now deemed dowdy in the glare of bright lights that had eclipsed socialism’s more sombre illuminations, and had been abandoned for the more fashionable Szent István Körút. Teaching English had become a business, and financial considerations had now to supersede all others if Lingua were to survive.

Miklós and János had agreed, as in all good divorces, to separate amicably – János to continue running Lingua, Miklós to find some new projects in which to invest his idealism.

‘Learning English is the only thing spreading faster than AIDS,’ Paul was often heard to remark. And certainly, much business was to be gained both by institutions offering to teach English, and by those individuals who acquired sufficient of the language to work for one of the recently-arrived multinational companies, which promised ‘western living’, albeit an anodyne version, to their Hungarian employees.

Meanwhile, in Moszkva tér, peasant women in multitudinous skirts continued to sell their flowers and fruit from baskets they had filled from their gardens in the dawn light, while opposite them shone the golden arches of McDonald’s next door to a satellite television provider. Outside the metro entrance gypsies continued to hawk umbrellas in the rain, leather jackets in the snow, and flowery dresses in the heat of summer.

Groups of Hungarians and a motley assortment of men from neighbouring countries hung round the square in small clusters, in the hope of being offered casual labour for a day or two, cash in hand, no questions asked, barely noticed by the new breed of insurance clerk and office worker in suit, tie and shiny shoes, rushing past them for the underground.

Nearby, the alcoholics and unemployed picked up cigarette stubs thrown down at the terminus of the number four tram, and homeless men and women stretched in long queues at the Maltese Cross centre, while fleets of sleek cars streamed past them heading for the elegant Second District and the fashionable suburbs in the hills beyond. Pensioners sat in the subways, unaffordable prescriptions in their outstretched hands, beneath posters advertising holidays in so-long promised lands which their generation would never see.

Foreigners crowded elegant restaurants and trendy bars with references to Communism, giving a veritable theme-park quality to the country and its past – a past they had never known, though they could still visit the park with the statues of Lenin or buy his likeness on a t-shirt. It was now perfectly possible to manage life without a word of the language, and even without much contact with the locals, and many of them did, though still satisfied that Hungary counted as an acceptably ‘interesting’ place to live so shortly after Communism’s demise.

Nick’s ashes lay with his dreams in the small churchyard at Dunafalva, his home now sheltering a refugee family from Yugoslavia; but Tom and Donát had decided to establish a foundation to commemorate him, which would support children in the local school from the three areas Nick felt closest to – the English language, computers and music.    

*

Then, in the distance, I heard the children calling for me, jolting me from my memories. I shivered in the November wind; I had not thought to put on my coat. Slowly, I turned away from the dusty debris of my past, and walked back towards the new house. 
 

Moszkva tér

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