Father had said: “Don’t stick your nose into grown-ups’ business.”

But he was not to be shaken off like this and showered his parents with questions: why, when, how, and why not. On one occasion during a three-hander he got so worked up that his voice began to sound like a dog howling and he yelled: “And if you don’t make me a little brother or sister, may you rot in hell!”

“Fine,” said his father.

“Now Willie, dear, that’s going too far!” exclaimed his mother, and let rip with a stinging slap across the face.

On that occasion there was no blood; now it would not stop. Sniffing, his mother brought the first-aid box and took out a little pillow of gauze to place on the split lip-she had done a first-aid course at her workplace. She wanted to know what had happened between the two men, but neither seemed inclined to tell her.

Hours later his father drew him to one side: “Come out onto the balcony!”

Outside he lit a cigarette and offered his packet of Mátra cigarettes to his son: “Want one?”

“Papa, I don’t smoke, and anyway… you’ve forbidden me to!”

“Come, come… you really don’t smoke?”

“No.”

“Clever lad.” For a while he puffed away without saying anything. “My boy. Now listen carefully to what I’m going to say. This topic is taboo. Do you know what taboo means? Right. One hundred percent taboo. One thousand percent. There is no such thing as a Jew. There are only people. There are people who are shits, there are people who are good, there are people who are so-so. There are no Jews, no Gypsies, no nothing. Do you understand me?” and he grabbed his son by his shirt, so roughly that the top button popped out of its hole.

“Yes.” He was scared.

“So that’s that cleared up.”

“But you haven’t yet… you didn’t…”

His father butted in: “You are dismissed.”

For years Vilmos Csillag wondered why his father had used this military expression. He was constantly preparing to bring up the subject again. He was just waiting for a suitable opportunity. But his father communicated with him less and less, and with others, too.

Once he had the idea of writing him a letter. He spent weeks trying to find the best way of putting things, sketching his ideas in the big spiral-bound notebook. Here and there he decorated the draft. He planned to transfer, when he was ready, the text onto the magnolia-colored writing paper he had received for his fourteenth birthday, but had not used a single sheet of the hundred in the set of stationery.

Dear Papa

Pap

My Dear Father

Dear Father

Father,

I am writing to you addressing you my Father I am writing because I feel in conversation to have a conversation I cannot you do not want you cannot we cannot.

It would be so good I would so much like to talk, if we did not live like complete strangers two English gentlemen, with little in common or to say to one another. Why do you not want with me a normal ordinary proper relationship human connection? When I was small I seriously thought that every family behaved as we did, that is, everyone did his own thing and does not care about the others. I thought it was like this everywhere they behaved like this. I was open-mouthed when I saw at Gidus’s at János Buda’s they always have their evening meal together and tell each other in turn what sort of day they’ve had what their day was like, so they share the good and the bad, like in the fairy tales, do you understand?!

X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X Y X

As long as

Since

Ever since I’ve been aware of things you have always been more or less ill, and our life consists of leaving you alone dangling in peace, because any excitement is bad for you. But why does it count as excitement if start talking we have a conversation? If a father and a son If a father thinks of his son as If there is mutual trust between father and son? If they make each other feel If they express If they indicate their love for one another?

Where did we go wrong, Father?

When did it go wrong

What made it

Why

I don’t understand why this is it has to be like this. I would like to ask something. Tell me, are you really totally not even a little interested in me? Never Nothing do you know about me and I know nothing about you. Perhaps you would not care you would not be worried if I just skipped school. Do you know how well I’m doing? What my favorite subjects are? (history, Hungarian literature). Do you even know what year I’m in?

And why do you not want to share with me what you know? Why do you not ask how I’m doing with the girls? It’s ridiculous but since I have been alive I can recall just one solely no more than one serious proper conversation, and that happened because I humiliated you in front of your friends; I think you remember that. I couldn’t have been six yet, when I heard some dirty words from some of the others and I asked right there in front of all the guests: Daddy, what does fuck mean. But you didn’t laugh even then, not like the others, you just told me off, to be ashamed of myself, and locked me out; I hadn’t the foggiest what was so awful about what I’d done. The next day you set about giving me the birds and the bees and mutual respect and love among human beings; I didn’t get a single word of the whole business, but I was afraid in case I brought your anger down on my head bring your wrath down on me and when you ran out of examples from the world of fauna and avia was exhausted, I nodded that I had understood. Then Pityu Farkas lifted the veil on the whole big secret, at first I couldn’t believe it, it sounded so revolting, I parroted back to him what you’d said about the birds and the bees and, among human beings, mutual love and respect, he laughed his head off so I kicked him in the groin; then he gave me a good hammering. You didn’t even teach me how to fight; all I got from you was “Don’t let them get away with it.” That’s easier said than done.

The more

The moral

The more I write, the less it contains what I want I would like it to the point.

By the time, however, that this letter was ready to send, Dr. Balázs Csillag was no longer in the land of the living. Vilmos Csillag did not stop writing. It might take months for him to add or delete a sentence. The point was not the text, but the thinking about it. The fragment of autobiography destined for a nonexistent addressee took long years to write.

You couldn’t have known Gabi Kulin; we were thirds when he transferred from the Apácza. Once, during form master’s class, we were discussing the oldest Hungarian families, those that can trace themselves back to the seventeenth century, and silly old Boney picked on Gabi Kulin. He was a tall, well-built chap, with girlish locks.

I wonder what you would have said if I’d behaved like him: in vain did Boney and the head constantly go on at him about his hair; he didn’t give a damn, until the head went ballistic and came in with a pair of hairclippers and cut a swath lengthwise through his hair, saying, “Now you will go and get a haircut!” Gabi Kulin did indeed go to the barbers’ and had another swath cut, crosswise! God, they almost threw him out.

But that’s not what I wanted to say this time; in that class he eventually stood up and declared: as Sir seems to be so interested, I can reveal that my ancestors go back to the twelfth century, because we are descended from the Bán of Kulin, that’s why my parents were sent into internal exile to Nagykáta. Boney was speechless and eventually said there must have been other reasons as well. Gabi Kulin snapped back: I am no liar, we had committed no crime and had only the patent of nobility, because the family fortune had been lost at the card tables. Boney ended the exchange saying: sit down, my boy, and don’t answer me back.