the soldier said and that was the most precise answer. He quickly told some poorly patched together story about how he fell prisoner to the Germans during the attack on H., how he was sent to work in the salt mines behind German lines, how they worked there, slept there—in the end the Germans were forced to beat a hasty retreat and dynamited the entrance to the mine. Of the thirty prisoners, he was the only survivor and found a hole to crawl out of. But from that long stay in the dark he had badly damaged his eyes and so, half-blind, he had traveled for months before reaching his home village. The mayor listened, his fellow villagers who had gathered around in the meantime listened. The women bawled, the men blew their noses noisily so as not to bawl themselves, while the mayor grimly crumpled his cap. Whether the people really swallowed that story or whether they wanted to save him is unclear, but in any case they all decided to believe it, and the mayor helped arrange things with the higher-ups in the city. They quietly reissued the dead man’s passport, cut off his wife’s widow’s pension, only his name remained on the memorial. And so as to do away with any lingering doubts, the mayor ordered the local bard to make up a song about the soldier who happily returned home a year and some after the end of the war. The song was a heroic one, according to all the rules of the time, telling at great length and breadth about “his dark suffering in the mine so deep” and how Georgi the Talashmaner (from the name of the village) “tossed the boulder to make his way, to see the sun” with Herculean strength. This was followed by his almost Odyssey-length return and the blind hero’s miraculous orientation toward his beloved homeland and the village of his birth.
Risen Georgi (that’s what they called him in the village) lived a long life, he saw well in the evenings, but by day was blind as a mole. He came out of the basement, yet the basement stayed inside him. During that year and a half, several lives had happened to him and it became ever harder for him to remember which of them was the real one.
Perhaps he had perished in that little Hungarian town after all? Was that Hungarian woman who changed the course of the war to keep him really young, or was she an old woman who had lost her son? How did he manage to escape from the German mine? And that which gave him no peace until the very end—the child’s hand, traced on an ordinary white sheet of notebook paper and sent in a postal envelope.
(Both versions end with the same small child’s hand, traced on a piece of paper. But stories always end in one of two ways—with a child or with death.)
A PLACE TO STOP
Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these different times. Did everyone come back from the war? How about from the fair in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the Minotaur of childhood . . . I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.
A SHORT CATALOGUE OF ABANDONMENTS
The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.
The abandoned child with the bull’s head, thrown into Minos’s labyrinth . . .
The abandoned Oedipus, the little boy with the pierced ankles, tossed on the mountainside in a basket, who would be adopted first by King Polybus, later by Sophocles, and in the end by his later father, Sigmund Freud.
The abandoned Hansel and Gretel, the Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, and the grown-up Jesus, she wants to go to her grandmother’s house, he to his father’s . . .
In this line come—even without legends to back them up—all those abandoned now or in the past, and all those who shall be abandoned. Having fallen from the manger of myth, let us take them in, in this inn of words, spread beneath them the clean sheets of history, tuck in their frostbitten souls. And leave them in hands, which, as they turn these pages, shall stroke their frightened backs and heads.
How many readers here have not felt abandoned at least once? How many would admit that at least once they have been locked in a room, a closet, or a basement, for edification? And how many would dare say that they have not done the locking up?
In the beginning, I said, there is a child tossed into a cellar.
THE BASEMENT
For a long time, I used to watch the world through a window at sidewalk level. The apartments changed, but every one of them had one such low window. We always lived in the basement, the rooms were cheapest there. My mother, father, and I had just moved into yet another basement. Actually, into another “former basement,” as the landlord said. There’s no such thing as a former basement, my father replied sharply, and the landlord, not knowing how to take this, just laughed. In these parts, when somebody feels uncomfortable, he starts laughing, who knows why.
It’s temporary, my father said, as we carried in the table. It was the mid-70s, I knew that we were defined as “extremely indigent,” I knew that the extremely indigent were those who inhabited a space of less than five square meters per person, and we were waiting our turn for an apartment on some list. Clearly, the list was quite long or someone was cutting in line, because we continued to live in that basement room for several years. On the “ground floor” (which was, in fact, underground), there was a long corridor and just one other room, always locked. I didn’t ask why we didn’t rent it as well, I knew the answer, we’re saving money for an apartment. Plus, we had to maintain that cramped five square meters per person so as not to slip from the category of the extremely indigent. The long corridor played the role of entrance hall and kitchen, but it was so narrow that it had room for only two chairs, a hotplate, and something like a little table. When my mom and dad fought, my dad would go out there to sleep, on the table. He also listened to Radio Free Europe there, secretly, on an old taped-up Selena. I was very proud that my father listened to that station, because I knew it was forbidden. Actually, I was proud that I was part of the conspiracy. When you share a single room, you can’t keep too many secrets.
In fact, the house where that basement apartment was located was downright beautiful. Three stories with big, light windows looming up above. Thousands of shards of glass from beer bottles, green and brown, had been stuck into the deliberately rough plaster, following the fashion of the times, and they sparkled like diamonds in the sun. And the third floor formed a slight semi-circle, almost like a castle. What would it be like to live there, in that round room, with its round windows and curved balcony? A room without edges. From up above you could probably see the whole city and the river. You could see everyone who passes by on the street, and full-length at that, not just as strange creatures made solely of legs and shoes. At school, I never failed to mention that I lived in that house with the rounded tower. Which was the truth. Of course, I didn’t specify which floor.
At the same time, my father dreamed of an apartment with a living room, fully furnished with a drawing-room suite, he could see himself sitting in the large, square armchair with his paper, legs propped on the footstool. He had seen this in a Neckermann catalogue, which some family friends had briefly lent us. My mother dreamed of a real kitchen with cupboards, where she could line up the little white porcelain jars of spices she would some day purchase. I would suspect that same West German Neckermann was responsible for that dream as well.
. . .
Feet and cats. Indolent, slow, cat-length afternoons. I would spend the whole day glued to the window, because it was the lightest place. I would count the passing feet and put together the people above them.
Men’s feet, women’s feet, children’s feet . . . I watched the seasons change through the change of shoes. Sandals,
