Refugee from Paradise

By Dalma Takács

Refugee from Paradise is a fictional diary of a Hungarian refugee girl living in England after World War II. Her "Paradise" is the beautiful memory of her childhood in Hungary, in stark contrast to the nightmare the communist regime calls "the workers' paradise." Penny Kiss relishes her new life in school and college, but news about her family left behind in Hungary torment her. Her mother and her new stepfather warn her daily about secret communist infiltrators in England, who could hurt her father in Hungary. Suspicious of strangers, Penny has an encounter with Andrew, a mysterious young man who takes an interest in her. But how can she make friends in a world where she can't trust anyone?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479792962

Dalma Takács

Dalma Takács was born in Hungary and has lived through World War II as a child. She left Hungary at the age of 14 and spent her young adulthood in England watching the ravages of the communist system on her country and her family from a distance. Throughout her career in England and the US as teacher of English, librarian, college teacher, and writer, her Hungarian background has been her firm foundation. She has edited Clear the Line: Hungary's Struggle to Leave the Axis in the Second World War, a historical memoir by her mother, Laura-Louise Veress. She is the author of Meet Me at the Globe, a novel of Shakespeare's England; Our Story: Saga of a Hungarian-American Family; and The Condo, Or...Life, a Sequel, a visit to a parallel universe.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Dalma Takács.

Cover illustration and design by Judy Takács

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013902564

ISBN:

   Hardcover   978-1-4797-9295-5

   Softcover    978-1-4797-9294-8

   Ebook         978-1-4797-9296-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Penny’s Preface

1948:   They Have Spies Everywhere

1949:   It’s My Father’s Voice

1950:   Trying to Tell a Story No One Wants to Hear

1951:   Tears Congealed with Fear

1952:   My Own Spot at Hyde Park Corner

1953:   Suddenly I Think Death is Wonderful

1954:   I’m Not an Idiot; Please Don’t Treat Me Like One

1955:   I’m Not Quite as British as Everybody Else

1956:   A Terrible Hope

FOR MY FAMILY

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all the members of my family, who in one way or another are part of the story told in this book:

—My father, who showed me the beauty of my Hungarian heritage.

—My mother, who helped him and later helped me to grow up and determined the course of my life by taking me away from communist Hungary.

—My stepfather, who pushed me to achieve more and more in my new life.

—My husband, who was my steady cheerleader and supported me as I pursued my career.

—My daughter Judy, who read the manuscript and painted the cover illustration.

—My daughters Sue and Judy, who gave us many years of joy as they grew up and recently became my cheerful and capable helpers during my illness.

—My son-in-law, Scott, whose concern and advice made me seek help and succeed in tackling my health challenges.

—My grandsons David, Eric and Mark, who along with the rest of the family conspired to keep my spirits up as I recovered from chemo sessions.

—In my family I include my colleagues at Notre Dame College and the many friends who cheered me on and prayed for me.

The people you meet in Refugee From Paradise are not portraits of family and friends, but they are part of my world, and I owe them deep gratitude.

Penny’s Preface

February, 2013

The Middle East is still in turmoil: when two years ago Egyptians deposed their dictator, Mubarak, I asked my students how they felt about the events in Egypt. How did it compare with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I asked them. I met with vague smiles and blank stares. Their minute life spans of 20 or so years barely embrace the events of September 11, 2001. The Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Empire seem to them like shadowy visions in a history book. I remembered our joy and hopes for the future when the Wall came tumbling down in 1989. I recalled how in a few years the joy became mixed with new fears—of economic chaos and political dissension. Liberation and rejoicing gave way to despondency and political strife. Today, when we see the news from the Middle East, we witness the jubilation turning to fear again.

I am a child of the Cold War. I may live in The US, and the horrors of communist Eastern Europe are no more, but I cannot erase those years from my memory.

When I left Hungary, I carried my baggage of sympathies and loyalties with me to England and locked them up in my diary. When I moved to America, my diary came with me. Life in America forced me to be happy with my fate and I kept my journal under lock and key. But the baggage is still in my closet, and tonight it demands to come out.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose say the French. The more things change, the more they stay the same. People also change. I am not the same person I was when I wrote my diary in the 50s. The world is not the same today that it was in the 50s. We are no longer fighting the same battles. In 1956 Hungarians fought and died to defeat communism. They failed in 1956, but they started a process that led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of Soviet dictatorship.

Today 1956 is only a blip in the radar screen of history. The Fall of the Wall is another blip. From one blip to the next we live, we fall in love, we marry, start a family, get old and die. My blip is not necessarily your blip, but my blip has determined my place in the world as yours has determined yours. The songs that echo in my head are the Hungarian folk songs my father taught me. Your songs may be rock songs or country music, but you treasure them the same way because they are part of who you are. Our enemies and weapons may be different, but we share the same goals: we fight for survival as human beings.

So I unpack my journal to see how the fight for survival looked in the 1950s, and I find strength as I read. Perhaps you will too.

1948

They Have Spies Everywhere

Monday, September 6th, 1948

I’ve received a letter from Aunt Felicia. You are a lucky girl to be going to school in London, she writes. I know she is right, even though I am lying in bed at home with the chickenpox on the first day of school, and I am worrying about missing two weeks of school work with my English so poor. At least I can practice by writing in my journal.

I know Aunt Felicia is right, even though Uncle Ed hasn’t found a job yet, and we have to live on what Mami earns by making hand-embroidered blouses for Mrs. Pavel.

I know I’m lucky, even though food in England is scarce and rationed. Most weeks our ration books allow us to buy only a quarter pound of butter, half a pound of bacon, and one or two eggs per person. We buy meat not by the pound, but by the book.

I must remember next time to use the right word in the butcher’s shop. Even now, as I sit here scratching, the memory of my humiliation stings. I walked up to the counter and said in what I thought was perfect English, Please give me some flesh for one ration book. The butcher said, Blimy!, the customers laughed, and I fled the shop, flaming red in the face. In Hungarian meat is flesh and flesh is meat. The same word serves for both.

I know I’m lucky because we don’t have to pay for medicine or doctor visits, because school and school supplies are all free, because we have a roof over our heads and no Russian soldiers in the street.

I know I’m lucky, but I don’t feel lucky at all.

I spend the day trying to forget the itch and wondering what my face will look like when the blisters are gone. I wasn’t much of a beauty to begin with, and I doubt that craters on my cheeks will improve my appearance. I take aspirin for the fever, and I lie awake most of the night; at fifteen, chickenpox is no longer a child’s disease. I try to pass the time by writing letters home—home to Hungary, the country I’ve had to leave and will never see again. I have written to Daddy telling him about all the sights of London: the mummies in the British Museum, the Rembrandts in the National Gallery, the Crown Jewels in the Tower. Before I seal the letter, I must show it to Mami and Uncle Ed. They have to make sure there is nothing political in it that could hurt Daddy at home. The Communist government is looking to arrest anyone who criticizes the system.

Daddy is not very careful with his letters to me. He writes about things he loves—Hungarian literature, history, folk music and art. But he also includes remarks about the government in what we call flower language, using innocent words to fool the censor. Of course, by now I’m sure the censor knows perfectly well that illness and hospital are flower language for arrest and imprisonment, but Daddy doesn’t care. Our neighbor Peter was suddenly taken ill last night, he writes. He will spend the next ten years in the hospital. Doctors are quite ruthless these days.

Thursday, September 9th, 1948

I have a meerschaum pipe in my bottom drawer. It has a long black stem and a beautiful burnt orange bowl carved like a ribbed seashell. When I run my fingers over the smooth stone, I always feel better. Last night my blisters were itching and hurting, and I could not sleep. I got up quietly so my mother would not wake up, and found my pipe.

When we arrived in England and unpacked, my mother saw the pipe among my underwear.

What on earth possessed you to bring this thing? she said.

When I was a young child, I would have immediately told her why. But I am fifteen now, and I can no longer share my pain with my mother. What makes her happy makes me cry in the night. I know she loved my father up to a point. I know she cried when we left. But she left Hungary to go to the man she loved—and tore me away from my life. I know I’m better off here. I know things are getting worse at home. But I can’t help feeling that she let me down. When I was a child, my mother could fix anything that went wrong for me. Then I found a terrible wrong that she could not fix—and did not even try. So I did not tell her why I smuggled out the meerschaum pipe.

The pipe had belonged to my grandfather who had a whole set of them, all with long stems, carved in various graceful shapes. He kept them in a polished wood display case called a pipatórium.

When my grandfather died in 1938, my father inherited the pipes. Daddy rarely smoked them, but he polished them carefully and often held one in his hand when he was thinking or when he had something important to say.

As I am holding the empty pipe, I see my father. He is sitting across from me in our living room with the pipe in his hand.

Promise me you will tell your mother that you’ll stay with me if she leaves, he is saying. Will you promise?

I promise.

Will you give me your hand?

I do. And I keep my promise. I tell my mother that I want to stay with my father.

Nonsense, she says. A girl has to go with her mother. That was my last heart-to-heart talk with my mother. She thinks she knows what’s inside me, but she is only guessing.

When I was three years old, a wise lady taught me how to cry quietly. My father had taken me to visit friends in another city. I think it had something to do with keeping my mother from running away. Anyway, my mother didn’t know where I was, and I was crying for her. This lady, the sister of Daddy’s friend, tried in vain to distract me. Her ears must have been sorely tried with my wailing. Finally she said to me, Penny, you must learn to cry quietly. We all cry quietly. I cry quietly, Uncle Bill cries quietly, Uncle Ernie cries quietly. So you must learn to cry quietly too. And she taught me how to let my tears flow without making a sound. It is a skill I find very useful now because I sleep in the same room with my mother.

We have two rooms. Uncle Ed has a room to himself. Mother visits him at night, and then comes back to our room. The secret of a happy marriage, she says, is separate bedrooms.

Well, they’re not actually married yet—Mother’s divorce is not quite finished—but I’m sure they’ll be very happy when they are. They’d better be!

Saturday, September 11th, 1948

I am not allowed outside because I am still contagious, but I feel a little better today, so I sit by the window trying to see more of life than I can find in this room.

There is the milkman with his horse and cart coming down the street, milk bottles clinking. He is one of the few tradesmen who can sometimes ignore the ration book. Today he is whistling. He must have a surplus.

I hear music. It’s an old man pushing a perambulator. But the baby carriage doesn’t have an infant in it. He has ingeniously fixed a gramophone to it and he walks up and down the streets playing records. His hat is lying next to the gramophone. When the music slurs to a halt, he stops to wind up his machine and count the pennies in his hat. He is a beggar who provides a service. It must be important to him to do something in return for the money. He smiles at the policeman who waves to him.

There is a young man going to work. He looks quite handsome, but he is probably just a man. He has no real feelings inside. When he is with a woman, he is probably no better than that Russian soldier who bothered that sobbing girl. He had his submachine gun on his back and he was laughing and kissing her. It did not matter to him that the girl was crying, or that I was in the same cellar vault, watching. I was only eleven years old at the time, so I was not interesting to him. He was a member of the victorious Russian army, a conquering hero, and I was just a small fish caught in the net with the big ones.

Wednesday, September 22nd, 1948

So I am finally an English schoolgirl. I have my navy blue skirt, my light blue blouse, my navy and green tie, my beret with the school badge and my navy blazer. I even have a leather satchel for my books. I still have crusts of brown pockmarks on my face, sharing space with the egg-shaped mole on my left cheek. When the pockmarks peel off, I wish they’d take the mole with them. It’s too big to be a beauty spot and too small for the freak show at the circus.

I rode a big red double-decker bus this morning to a part of London called Chelsea. I sat in the very front seat of the bus, just behind the driver, my favorite place. I like it there because the back of the driver’s seat is like a mirror. In it I can see myself and all the passengers behind me, but I don’t have to talk to anyone. I like being alone with my thoughts, though sometimes I wish someone would come and share them with me. My best friend, Kati, I had to leave behind in Hungary. With her I could talk freely, but now we can’t talk any more, or even write about anything that’s important to us because the Hungarian censor will read everything and may make trouble for her. In a way, this diary is a long letter to Kati. Maybe one day I can show it to her.

There is no way I will show it to any of the girls in my class. They are nice enough, but I can’t talk to them. Today at lunch (they call it school dinner) I sat quietly listening to the loud talk that had no interest for me: talk of trips to the cinema with boyfriends; talk of saving clothes ration coupons to buy a pair of nylons; indignation at the headmistress who told us that we should spend our coupons on school uniforms. What does all this matter to me?

One of the girls at my table tried to make me talk. So, you are from Hungary?

That’s why she’s always hungry, someone else said. Everyone laughed.

There was a girl called Rebecca who tried her best to sound interested. Tell us about Hungary.

I almost started to tell her about my family, and how the Communists arrested my uncle for refusing to attend Marxist orientation meetings. But her next question made me choke up again: When are you going back for a visit? I bet you’ll have a lot to talk about.

The crowd did not wait for my answer anyway. The next minute they were all laughing at someone’s rowdy story. So I put on my fake smile and retired into my private thoughts.

Friday, October 1st, 1948

There is a new girl in the class; her name is Olga Samek. She is Czech.

You must have a lot in common, our form mistress said. She assigned her a seat next to mine, and I smiled at the new girl. After all, she couldn’t help being a Czech. But it was her country that took away a piece of my country almost thirty years ago—the piece where my father was born and where my grandparents lived. It was her people who put my father in jail for flying a Hungarian flag from the church steeple in his hometown. And it was her people that my father went to fight in 1938 to get his hometown back.

Daddy was not a regular soldier. Officially the Hungarian army did not fight Czechoslovakia. Daddy was a guerrilla. They called themselves the Ragged Guard. He was issued guerrilla boots, a warm jacket and a fur hat, and off he went to fight the Czechs. We had to keep his whereabouts a big secret. We had a lot of secrets in our family, so I was used to keeping my mouth shut, but one thing I could never do was to tell a lie. So when my aunt Teréz asked me, Where’s your Daddy? I told her, He’s gone to be a guerrilla.

After I got home, my mother asked me, Did Teréz ask you about Daddy? I had to tell her, Yes.

And what did you tell her?

I had to tell my mother the truth too, and the truth got me into big trouble.

Mami didn’t spank me. The punishment was much worse. Teréz will blab it out at the office, she said. Her boss is going to tell the police. Daddy will lose his job. And I knew that it would be all my fault. I was only five years old, and already I had ruined my family.

You must have a lot in common with Olga, the teacher said.

Certainly, we have a lot in common. My father has a Czech soldier’s cap that he got off a dead soldier in the Carpathian Mountains. He is not sure if he has killed the man; he had been exchanging shots with unseen people on the hillside. When the shooting stopped, he and his guerrilla buddies advanced up the hill and found the man stretched out under some bushes.

At lunch Olga sat next to me, and we smiled at each other. Can you understand each other’s language? someone asked. I had to explain that Hungarian is quite different from Czech; that Hungarian belongs to the Finno-Ugrian family of languages, and Czech is a Slav language. Still, you must have a lot in common. Your countries are neighbors. Yes, and part of my country was occupied by her countrymen for twenty years after World War I. And in my grandparents’ hometown the Hungarian street signs were replaced by Czech signs, and the police was Czech, and the laws were written in Czech, and if you wanted anything done in city hall, you had to speak Czech.

Could I tell her all this? And could I tell her how wonderful it was when the Czechs were sent packing, and my father’s hometown was returned to Hungary? Could I tell her how we celebrated the return of the lost counties? How we went to visit my grandparents and we did not need a passport? My grandparents’ house was filled with guests for months. Grandfather made trips to his vineyard and brought back his best wine in huge bottles encased in basket weave called demijohns. He even forgot about his painful nerve disease and played his cello to entertain the company. Then one evening he said good night to everyone and said, I’m going to bed now. Don’t expect me to wake up in the morning. And he didn’t.

Whenever I smell a privet hedge on a hot summer day, I think of the cemetery in Beregszász where my grandfather is buried. Beregszász is now called Beregovo and it doesn’t even belong to Czechoslovakia: since the end of World War II it’s part of the USSR, and the street signs are all in Russian, and the police are Russian, and the laws are written in Russian. My grandmother can no longer go back to her house. She is living in Budapest with my aunt and her husband.

Tuesday, October 5th, 1948

It was windy and cold today, but we still had to go outside in the break. The girls were shooting baskets; they call it netball here. Olga and I were standing at the edge of the netball court, shivering. The cold was one thing at least that we had in common. She told me about her family. Her father was a diplomat before the war. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, he lost his job and was put in jail because he opposed the Nazis. Then the Germans were defeated, and the Russians invaded the country. He worked at the British Embassy for a while, but when the Communists took over, he opposed the Communists too. When his best friend and colleague was arrested, he knew it was his turn next. His friends at the British Embassy helped him and Olga come to England. I asked her what happened to her mother. She said her mother had died when she was quite little. I can’t imagine what I would have done without my mother when I was a little girl.

The bell rang and we hardly noticed. During history class I kept thinking about Olga. She had told me all about her father; how could I tell her about mine?

But my father hates the Nazis too. And both men hate the Communists. I remember that day not long after the war when Daddy showed Uncle Mike the door. Uncle Mike was not really an uncle, just one of Daddy’s old friends from the Labor Union. He used to come to our house, and sometimes we visited him and his family in their home. When the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944, Uncle Mike worked with my father for the underground.

In 1945 peace came, but not for us. Uncle Mike became an influential labor leader. One day he came to our house for a visit, just like in the old times. But the old times were gone. The country was now ruled by the Communists, who forced everyone to follow their way or suffer the consequences.

My father had just that morning found out that Uncle Mike was a member of the Communist Party. You’ve sold the country to the Communists, he said to his old friend. You are no longer my friend.

Uncle Mike listened with an awkward, sad smile. You are lucky I’m the only one to hear you, he said as he got up to leave.

I remember running to the door and opening it wide for him to leave. He stopped for a moment, shocked. He looked at me as if I had slapped him in the face. Uncle Mike is now head of the Labor Union and a member of the Communist government. Maybe I have more in common with Olga than I thought.

Sunday, October 10th, 1948

We have just finished reading Twelfth Night. It is a play about Viola who is shipwrecked in a strange country and disguises herself as a boy to get a job as servant to the