Darling, impossible!. Eva Novy

      Chapter One

      “Imagine.” This should be the first word anybody learns when they learn Hungarian. “Imagine” as in “Imagine, he wasn’t his real father” or “Imagine, they haven’t spoken to each other in fifteen years”.

      “Imagine,” my grandmother whispers, clutching onto my arm with sharp, red fingernails. “Imagine, he was only eighty-sree.” After fifty-two years in Australia her accent is still so thick it’s hard to tell if she’s speaking English or Hungarian. “Imagine, Lily,” she continues, “he was a real bastard, that one.”

      We are hovering around an expectant grave with a pack of elderly Hun­­garians waiting for the funeral to start. She is unsteady in faded crocodile heels on the moist grass, grasping me so tightly it hurts.

      “A bastard with a tiny shlong! Imagine!” Still whispering, careful not to be heard by the others, she is feigning extreme laryngitis so she doesn’t have to explain to her friends why her twenty-two-year-old unmarried granddaughter just quit medical school.

      “I hate funerals,” she hisses.

      I smile and squeeze her hand. Funerals are one of the few social events she goes to anymore. There is a group of them, eighty-something-year-old Hungarian women who brave the long drive from the breezy bayside Eastern Suburbs through a good hour of sweaty traffic on Parramatta Road to the cemetery on the other side of Sydney. Though all are here to contemplate the life and death of the Bastard with the Tiny Shlong, I imagine the real question on everyone’s mind is: who’s next? We don’t talk about this, my grandmother and I, but the atmosphere is always heavy with inference. One day soon there will be only one of us standing here.

      I sneeze. The air is thick with the smells of wet earth, body odour and hair spray. A fat gardener with ear plugs and builder’s crack is trimming the grave with a deafening whipper snipper only five plots away from us, totally oblivious to the fairly large crowd now gathered around the young rabbi.

      “Friends,” the rabbi yells. “Come, friends. Closer. Don’t be shy! I have competition here.” He stares intently at the gardener, but doesn’t get the eye contact he is after. “Let’s gather to talk about our beloved … uh …” – he glances down at his notes – “Frankie Symonds.” He throws the gardener an irritated look and then turns back to the crowd with a toothy smile. “Let’s remember Frankie Symonds.”

      The crowd shuffles in. Sighing. Sweating.

      “Frankie was a good man. A kind man. A generous soul …”

      Three people check their phones. Two others, their watches. I brace myself for the coming drivel. I know the drill: only heroes and women of valour ever pass away, never the selfish, the miserable, the bitter, or the mediocre.

      It’s going to be a long morning.

      The young Australian rabbi with a cultivated Yiddish accent continues from General Eastern European Old Man Sermon Number 3. “… an inspiration to his friends, a rock to his family. We remember the tragic circumstances of his early life in war-torn Budapest and his heroic survival of the death camps. We remember the terrifying years of post-war Communism, the panic of revolution, the uncertainty of escape and immigration. We remember how he managed to turn the life of a poor refugee into the life of a successful member of the community. We remember the way Frankie managed to turn fear into faith, hatred into love, desperation into success.”

      But I don’t remember this.

      I remember Frankie the Ordinary. I remember Frankie the tired, old landlord who used to waddle into our kitchen uninvited through the back door and drum his fat fingers on the window sill. I remember how one of his eyes didn’t open all the way, how he’d timidly cast unreciprocated glances in my grandmother’s direction, how he’d hesitate when telling my mother our cheque had bounced. Again. I remember how he managed to turn a perfectly peaceful Sunday breakfast into a never-ending morning of trite anecdotes and phony civility. That’s what I remember.

      I look at my grandmother’s face. She remembers Frankie the Bastard.

      The rabbi continues from his notes. “Frankie Symonds was born in Buda­pest in 1926. The son of a businessman and a homemaker, Frankie grew up …”

      But I know the story. It’s our story too. My grandmother, my father’s mother, came here in the fifties with her family as a refugee from

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