The Voralberg
Andrew Szemeredy
©
Copyright 2025 by Andrew Szemeredy
|
Photo by Johannes Rampp aat Pexels. |
My
uncle left Hungary at the conclusion of the 1956 revolution there.
Our family stayed back. My mother suffered a grave illness, and Uncle
Peter dared to come to Hungary again, ten years after his escape, to
meet her perhaps for the last time in their lives. Uncle Peter risked
a lot by stepping on Hungarian soil, because his escape was
considered illegal at the time, while at the same time he had already
passed the exams and worked as a successful and talented paediatric
cardiologist in Toronto, Canada.
He
invited my mother and me for a trip out to the West. Western Europe.
To make the trip as little strenuous for my mother as possible, Uncle
rented a car, an Opel Captain. It had manual transmission, which my
uncle had never driven before, as in Canada at the time almost all
new cars were manufactured with automatic transmission.
Uncle
was religious man. He was a Roman Catholic. He had been born Jewish,
but his heart was RC, and it was not a put-on by him, or a false
image, although many had secretly accused him of that. He was
sincerely and by his truest of heart a Christian.
In
his church, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, where the Hungarian community
was focussed, he met Judy, whom he liked or did not like, but the
apathy was most unrequited; she was head-over-heals into Uncle. She
told her girlfriends that she will accompany Peter on his European
trip, and will come back as Mrs. Frankovich (not the real last name
of Uncle Peter.) Peter got a whiff of this on the grapevine, and he
had booked his air plane ticket in greatest secrecy. The day came to
fly to Budapest, and he got to the airport, got on the plane, and
settled in into his seat, when a voice beside him greeted him: "Hi,
Peter." It was Judy.
They
flew to Budapest, with a transfer at Amsterdam or at Frankfurt am
Main, and they picked up the rental car in Budapest. For some
stranger reason Mom and I took the train to Vienna, Austria, and
that’s where Uncle Peter picked me and my Mom up. We set out
westward.
I
had motion sickness. I hadn't known before, as this was the first
time I ever sat in a car. Yes, I was in other cars before, but not
one which was equipped with manual transmission, and driven by a guy
who had no clue how to change gears; furthermore, Uncle Peter had
some rare and somewhat unique conviction according to which he
thought that he had to constantly pump the gas pedal to get the
gasoline from the tank to the engine block. The car therefore
constantly rocked back-and-forth; not noticed by sane and healthy
people with healthy inner ears, where the orientation and balance
sensors are located in humans. But the constant rocking via the gas
pedal pumping, and the starting to move the car from stationary
position, each of which attempt was an adventure in and by itself,
exacerbated my own, private condition. Which was nausea, and an urge
to vomit.
We
wanted to go to Salzburg from Vienna, but we got on a divided
highway, likely having built on order by Hitler, that took us toward
the town of Linz. Peter and my mother sat in the front, Judy and I,
in the back. I became more and more speechless, as I had to
concentrate all my energies not to see back my breakfast. But to no
avail. At around the two-hundred-and-twenty milestone from Vienna, I
upchucked. Judy, the brave warrior of love, the unstoppable
one-person-army of self-directed match-making, held out her two
hands, cusped, and caught the upcoming miasma. We could not stop for
another forty kilometres, because there were no road shoulders. Then
when the opportunity presented, we got off the highway, Judy washed
up, and from then on they took me seriously when I declared I felt
sick.
Back
in Vienna, only to find our highway that would take us to Salzburg,
Uncle Peter bought some Gravol. We also stopped at some roadside rest
spots, and they gave me my first glass of Coca-cola. The awful taste
is still in my mouth, some sixty years later. It was a unique taste,
the kind one never forgets. Perhaps akin to remembering the smell and
taste of ground water that prisoners drank in and around Auschwitz,
which was a huge land area replete with mass graves. The adults
around me were amazed, because all they had seen before were kids who
drank copious amounts of this dark, bubbling, witches' brew and liked
it. But those kids had been indoctrinated to the taste, via TV
commercials and peer pressure. In my dirt poor country we had no TV,
and the peers had never tasted it either, as Coca Cola was considered
there (for those who heard about it, which was not many) a bourgeois
luxury, a counter-revolutionary beverage foreign to the taste buds of
the honest and progressive workers’ class.
While
in Vienna, we stayed at a posh hotel. It was incredibly expensive,
and while the elders of the four of us were busy exchanging old
memories, I watched the guests. Even today my language skills are
inadequate to describe them. There were two nobility-looking older
women, made up, dressed, and bejewelled to the hill, and talking a
most beautiful, very loud English. And there was the
broad-shouldered, moustached man, in a tweed jacket, to whom his wife
was talking non-stop also in English, and who shot the occasional
smile at his wife, but mostly he stared in front of himself with a
face that gave away nothing of his thoughts. It was a scene worthy of
a shot in any James Bond movie. Absolute luxury, in a setting meant
for kings and queens.
The
first morning when we went down to breakfast, I said I was hungry.
They asked me what I wanted. I had come then, in the summer of 1966,
being twelve years of age, from communist Hungary, where we had no
concept of Korn Flakes, or ham and eggs, or kippers with English
muffins. The menu was in German, of which I understood nothing. I was
speechless, I could not say what I wanted. They asked me, did I want
a sandwich. Yes, please, that would be nice. Although I felt in the
back of my mind that my mouth was too dry to chew bread. My elders
ordered a sandwich. It took an inordinately long time to bring out
the food. I almost said, I need now two sandwiches, because I was
enormously hungry. Finally they brought out...
...
a huge tray full of cold cuts. There had to be at least two pounds'
worth of meat there. But I could not eat just meat: my
gastrointestinal expectation for a sandwich was a lot of bread, with
a thin layer of butter spread over it, and a tiny sliver of meat.
This had been my idea of a luxurious communist meat sandwich. I could
not eat a different ratio of carbs against meat. I ate half of the
plate's meats before I found the bread, a tiny half-slice from some
inedible rye bread. In my experience prior to that, we only ate white
wheat bread with yummy crust. I was served a most luxurious meal, and
yet the least satisfying for all that mattered.
You
had to understand the situation. My mother and Uncle Peter, with
other relatives, had been prisoners in Auschwitz. They both had come
home after the war ended, while the majority of the family had been
murdered in the gas chambers. My mother kept on living in war-torn,
poverty-stricken, undeveloping, (not just in an underdeveloped
country, but one that was regressive in its economic process), a
dirty and dusty Hungary, while my Uncle Peter got out to Canada, the
land of incredible wealth and limitless opportunities, and worked
there as a physician. He had a large income, and was revered by the
population of his patients. He wanted to show all the love and
affection he felt for his first cousin, my mother; their hearts must
have been bleeding when they saw each other again then, in 1966, ten
years after he had escaped communist rule. He wanted to show all his
affection and goodwill, and the only way he could do that, was to
smother mother with luxurious gifts, hotel accommodations, and meals.
This
would have been a very, very emotional time if not for the pesky
presence of Judy, who had to be trucked around too, for Uncle Peter
was a gentleman, and it was impossible to just let her go into the
wild streets of Vienna. And the emotionality was also hindered by the
pest of my almost uncontrollable urge to puke in the car wherever and
whenever we had to go anywhere in it. There aren’t many things
that can dampen emotional upheaval more forcefully than the imminent
prospect of puking.
We
headed towards Switzerland, and I have no clue why. We had to cross
in one leg of the trip a little area across Germany. My mother almost
got sick with the sheer idea that she had to step foot again there.
So, we took a side trip in small, curving and undeveloped country
roads, about one hundred kilometres, to avoid crossing the border. By
this time Uncle Bandi has joined us, too. Uncle Bandi was Judy's
brother, who was living in Holland at the time. He had also escaped
communist rule, much like Uncle Peter and Judy. Peter and Bandi
shared the driving. At one point Bandi slid into another car in front
of us. We pulled to the side of the road, and Uncle Bandi put it into
reverse to give some room between the cars, in order to be able to
inspect the damage, if any. But by that time a police car had been
parked behind us. The cruiser must have been just following us by
sheer coincidence, because he stopped almost immediately after we
did. So, Uncle Bandi backed into and hit the cruiser behind our car.
There was much discussion to follow after. Because: there were two
Hungarians and a Canadian (by our passports) who were related; and
one other Canadian and one Belgian who lived in the Netherlands who
were related to each other. The two Canadians were not related. The
entire lot of these goobledy-gooks was born in Hungary. Of the lot,
two spoke German fluently (Mom and Uncle Peter), two spoke English
fluently (Peter and Judy) and two spoke no language that the cop
could understand (Uncle Bandi and I). After a number of attempts to
understand the situation, it turned out that the driver of our car,
Bandi, had no driver's license. In those days, in the mid
nineteen-sixties, in Brussels people needed no drivers' licenses; if
they knew how to drive, they did, if they did not know, they did not.
Period.
Seeing that there was no damage to any of
the cars, and no
personal injuries were apparent, the cop let everyone go, because it
was far the easiest thing to do. Heck, he could not even cope with
the spelling of our last names.
This
incident over, next day we reached Europe's most formidable mountain
pass: the Vorarlberg.
Now,
there was a nasty dude if you ever saw one. A serpentine going up one
side, and a serpentine coming down on the other side. One side was
the mountain wall; the other side, a cliff that was thousands of
metres straight down. My mother had had a rather very morbid fear of
heights. She screamed the whole time we went through this
treacherous, wretched part of the trip. Other people would have seen
it as a beautiful, unique part of highway driving, a real experience,
a most beautiful experience, and not at all dangerous. Mother saw it
as a road to hell and damnation, and to certain death. Add to it that
we were mostly in the midst of the cloud cover, so it was misty, wet,
and miserable.
We
somehow got to Zurich. There we spent the most boring time in my life
that far. We went to visit some people, of whom to this day I have no
clue who they were. Could have been old friends, or old relatives of
my people. They talked German. I had no understanding of that
language. Once in a while I wanted to ask something, but they told me
to please be a good boy and to stay quiet. I did. For several hours
at end.
Next
day they sent me to a department store next door to the hotel where
we stayed. Now, that was more like my cup of tea. There were no malls
in those days, especially not in Europe. If you wanted to buy
something other than groceries, you either went to a
specialty
store, or else to a department store.
It
was the first time I had a chance to ride on escalators, which in
Hungarian you'd call "moving stairways". I fully enjoyed
that experience, until...
...until
I happened upon the toys department.
Now,
there was a cat that really was gone. I had been given a sliver of
money, to spend on anything I wanted to, when I was let go in the
store away from the adults of my company. The displays were in the
style of the west, which we see now in every store, but then it was
brand new: everything out in the open, not behind the counters on
shelves. You could touch and examine the pieces yourself. It was an
incredibly rich experience, seeing all those brilliant toys in a
myriad of brilliant colours, plastic models of railways and cars,
locomotives and air planes. Dolls, and a million other toys, right
there, in front of me. I was intoxicated.
I
finally bought two boxes with parts to glue together to make plastic
air planes. I put one together in the hotel room later that day, and
the other, once back in Hungary. They proved to be useless as toys.
Yes, you could wave them through the air in your hand and make
broom-broom sounds, but that was the pinnacle of that excitement. I
used to play realistic events with my toys; substituted the missing
realisms with my imagination, but there was always a human story
(mostly cowboys and Indians) behind the games I played alone. These
old war planes that had no moving parts or accessible room inside
that could be used as cargo space, were a real bore, if you ask me,
despite being realistic and therefore very cute replicas of the real
things.
Anyhow.
I was wondering in the store, when to my utter surprise I heard
voices speaking in Hungarian. For two weeks by then, I was
disaccostumed to hear the only language I understood, other than what
my travel companions were saying. All I heard on the streets, in
restaurants, in hotels and in church buildings -- due to my Uncle
Peter's obsession to visit all Roman Catholic churches we could
possibly manage to see -- was German. Hearing something I could
understand, spoken in my mother-tongue, was an experience that was
surprising, sweet, and very welcome. I went closer to the source, and
could not wipe the grin of absolute gladness from my face. One of the
two women who spoke said in Hungarian as they passed by where I was
standing and staring at them with the gleeful grin, "look at
this boy, how happy he is with his toys."
Then
I passed by the tobacco kiosk. There the woman was tearing up cartons
of cigarettes, and put the cigarettes on the display shelves; and
trashed the cartons, that were printed in the same colours and
designs as the cigarette packs.
I
and my friends collected cigarette packs from the West. They were
colourful, lively, they were nearly song-like, they were so
beautiful. Especially when contrasted to the drab design on our local
tobacco products.
So
I went to the counter, and after much discussion with the sales
woman, all in non-pre-arranged symbolic sign language, I got a huge
amount of empty cartons. The discussion was an experience, too. We
spoke a language each that the other could not understand; and we
each had value systems that other could not understand. I wondered
why the woman would just chuck these highly valuable torn-open paper
products; she could not understand how anyone could see value in and
want to own discarded cigarette cartons. But at the end we both came
out gloriously happy from the interaction. We packed up and took the
same cigarette cartons home, and I would have been the envy of the
neighbourhood if I had showed only to anyone what I had scored, but I
was always too shy to proudly display my achievements and possessions
– partly due to the fact that I was afraid of losing them had I
showed them to anyone, by force of robbery or by clandestine theft.
Then
we started the trek home. Mother of course screamed her way backward
across the Vorarlberg pass. We stopped in Salzburg, the birth place
of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the musical and musician idol of my Uncle
Peter, who was heavily into listening operas. He had a collection of
at least five thousand long playing record albums, all full of operas
and classical music. There were many duplicate titles, but with
different performers. Herbert von Karajan, Otto Klemperer, Alexander
Solti... the Berliner Philharmonic, the Milanese Scala, the Vienna
Quartette... Pablo Casals, Earnest Hemingway, and Leo Tolstoy, just
to name the most famous opera singers recorded on the grooves of
Peter's record collection.
For
me, the most impressive part of the trip was the Schloss (the Castle)
of Salzburg. It was reminiscent of the Castle of Buda, my birth town.
At night it was illuminated for the American tourists. It was
breathtaking. The entire town of Salzburg was breathtaking, as it had
not been bombed ot rabble. It was built mainly at around the same
time as downtown Pest in Budapest. The architecture was the same
baroque or rococo style. Ornate ornaments, turning silver, shining
bands of gold. Cherubs and cherubinos all over the place in ceilings,
walls, tympani, as paintings, statues and relief figures.
Another
place we hit that could have been the backdrop of a James Bond movie
again, was Zell am See. It is a ski resort in the winter, with
numerous downhill runways. In the summer you can feed the swans in
the lake, or climb mountains, or take the hanging Lanovkas (Slovak
word, I don't know the German or even the English equivalent) up to
the mountains, and be oppressed by the enormous size and infinite
beauty of the snow-capped high mountains that surround the idyllic
lake of Zell. Views fit for any postcard or coffee table
book.
Almost every building around the lake was, and presumably still
is,
a hotel, hostel, or BnB place. I swam in the lake in the morning
(brrr, very cold, and half a meter, or two feet, below the top layer
it's even colder), and played a snowball-fight on the mountain with
my uncle in the afternoon.
For your information, a Lanovka is
not a ski lift. It travels higher above the ground, it is enclosed,
and it can take more than two or four people in its cabin, much more
many than a ski lift.
We
decided to part in Vienna. My mother finally could do what she wanted
to do the whole trip: go shopping. She was not a vain person. She
never adorned herself. She never bothered to even wear a bra. But she
discovered a shop where they catered to Hungarians who were out there
for a visit only, not as immigrants. The shop was full of retail
stuff that were either scantily, or not at all available in stores in
Hungary. The prices were very favourable compared to what they’d
cost in Hungary. People depended on getting these from those who
smuggled the goods into Hungary. Mother was no exception. She lived
all her adult life in abject poverty; here was an opportunity to make
some money.
Peter
saw it better if he drove the car himself to Budapest, and mother and
I took the train. Which we did. An almost catastrophic journey.
Because
of the goods she bought on the last day in the shop that catered to
visiting Hungarians.
The
Passport Kontroll Bitte guy came and went, the ticket Kontroll Bitte
guy came and went, and then came... the all-important Import Duty
Bitte guy.
He
was merciless with my mother. She had got into a complete panic
phase, and she was screaming again in fear. The import duty guy could
not sew up any charges against her, because the shop keeper in that
shop had a precise list that showed how much of any of the items you
could take in without paying any import duty on them. My mother kept
her purchases to those limits. The more the Import Duty Bitte guy saw
goods up to the limit but not beyond, the angrier and nastier he got,
and my poor mother, more panicky and screamy she got.
Once we
crossed the border, it took her a long time to calm down.
And
it took me a long time to finally sit down and write the series of
the horrible and unbearably nasty experiences I suffered on this posh
luxury trip of every high-class convenience and pleasure one could
buy.
I
guess poverty is not just a piece of mind, it is not just a force of
economic circumstances, it is also a way of life that you get so
comfortable in that you become dependent on it to enjoy the life you
live.
After
we got home, and I ran downstairs to play with my little buddies on
the street, a neighbour stopped me, an adult, and asked me how the
trip was. I was in no mood to talk to her, I wanted to play. So I
said, "It was okay." To which the neighbour replied, "yeah,
but what did you see?" I said, "A lot, but only a few
things." They let me go, but I heard one adult neighbour say,
who had been witnessing the conversation, "I guess little Andrew
is still too young to truly appreciate the trip."
I
was Born in 1954 in Budapest, Hungary, immigrated to Canada in 1972,
got my first award for first prize with the winning story "Wallet"
in the White Wall Review competition run by Ryerson Polytechnic in
1985 or 86. Won literary prizes by Mensa Canada contests in three
years in a row; missed one year, and got the fourth this year.
(Unless
you
type
the
author's name
in
the subject
line
of the message
we
won't know where to send it.)
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