#1302 - my father said

 

1302

26.vii.23

4.208

my father said

 

‘useless language’

‘why bother’

he said ‘no one will understand you’

he said ‘a man cannot serve under two flags’

he said that kind of thing

 

I’d be sitting at the dining room table

with my socialist era textbook

(that was the Bánhidi-Jókay-Szabó, I still have)     

trying to learn

my father would sit at the head of the table

he wasn’t interested

 

I’d come back from Budapest and tell him how many we were

in the phone book now

and he would look vaguely alarmed

 

I guess there were two kinds we could be

he strongly urged me not to make contact

 

everyone asked if he’d ever go back

he’d say ‘go back to what?’

 

old friends would ring him later in life

and he’d be frantically thumbing through

Arthur B. Yolland’s Hungarian-English dictionary

 

that language was a kind of albatross

dark ornament on the shelf

next to the Bible, the cookbook, cyclopaedia

 

there was a time he would have gone back

but he was around eighty by then

…things didn’t work out

I’m not naming names

but the opportunity passed

 

my father never went back again

I’d bring some trinkets though

 

my father was always having to invent himself

never having had much of a model for that kind of thing

he was provided with more of a list of fatal errors to avoid

 

my father did all that was required

he unlearned the metric system

and later learned it again

 

he became whom he had to be

he served under the new flag

 

my father believed in all sorts of things

and made himself believe

 

that Jesus round his neck

with his mother’s kiss

and blessing engraved –

I now see this was very ambiguous

 

it was protection, but what kind of protection?

every kind!

 

I was an important part of the project

it’s how I’m here to say things he never would

 

and here I am all these years later in life

still going back to what?

 

he was young when he left

he always did his best for his country

(whichever one it was)

 

his life mission was

to fight thousands of years of entropy

just with an open heart

 

my father’s skin

thinned to an itch

but in other respects distances were maintained

 

my father was and is an eternal champion

for Hungary

 

and though he never said as much to me

I think he felt betrayed