Mayor, lifting his Slivovitz into the air, beamed with the air of a politician who had just brokered an agreement in the Middle East. “Then it’s decided,” he said. “We’ll have peace.” Fischer, following almost enthusiastically in his example, lifted his glass into the air. “Egészségedre . . . to Hegymagas!”
The next morning, a Saturday, an even stranger gathering than the previous day’s found itself amassed on the Post Office lawn. Feri, freshly shaven and showered and wearing his gray suit beneath his New York Yankees baseball cap, was seated on a high stool, guitar in lap. To either side of him, were standing Árpi and Etus, the latter in a freshly washed and ironed apron. Behind them were gathered some two dozen of the village’s children and, at the very rear—wearing somewhat alcohol-induced, but nonetheless genuinely amiable smiles—were Gyula, Roland, and, dressed in his Sunday best, Kormány.
At the sight of Fischer, Kepes, and the Mayor walking toward them down Széchenyi út, the gathered group, led by Feri’s rather arrhythmic strumming on the guitar, burst into song.
“All we are saaaaying,” the Hegymagasians sang in an English that would surely have made John Lennon wince in his grave, “is give peace a chance.”
“All we are saaaaying,” Etus, perpetually a good half-beat behind, intoned along, just as the sky opened and a torrential but soothing rain began to fall, “is give peace a chance.”
***
Hardly forty-eight hours later, Gyula’s mother awoke to the sound of a bird squawking “jó reggelt kivánok”—“Good morning”—loudly in Hungarian. She went outside to find a brand new parrot, in a filigreed wooden cage, mounted on a stand in front of her bedroom window. At virtually the same instant, just a few houses down Petöfi út, Feri, confined to his bed with a bad cold and a case of Kaiser sör, awoke in an inebriated haze to find a new pair of gumicsizma—made by the very best company in Györ—beside his front door.
Further up in the vineyard that morning, Roland entered his parents’ winemaking house on Szent Györgyhegy to find, to his amazement and delight—nestled right between the wooden casks that held his family’s precious Olaszrizling and Balaton Chardonnay—his missing wooden hand. And Kormány Lajos, when he went out to feed the horses that day, was greeted by the ravenous baahhhing of two young black baby sheep.
That night, all was well in the small village of Hegymagas once more. Fischer and the Mayor, in a rare spirit of mutual affection and camaraderie, lifted a glass in Etus’s honor at the Italbolt, joined by Roland, cradling his glass in his prosthetic arm. Feri, meanwhile—cold, hangover and all—was walking up and down Széchenyi út, proudly displaying his new rubber boots and humming a Hungarian version of “Love Me Tender.”
Even Kormány Lajos, in a rare spirit of conviviality and peace, could be found at yet another table in front of the pub, playing chess with—of all people—Árpi. But best—and, many people felt, most potent—of all in restoring the village’s usual atmosphere of tranquility and mutual affection was the scent of Etus’s fish soup, simmering in a gigantic kettle in front of the post office, wafting its way all the way up to Árpi’s vineyard and the appreciative nostrils of the new dog, Attila József, that Kormány had bought for her. The soup smelled—Kormány Lajos himself would later admit—as good, perhaps, as his own mother’s had once, and its aroma, he also acknowledged, was far more likely to prevail.
THE GREATEST JEWISH-AMERICAN LOVER IN HUNGARIAN HISTORY
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