Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday, and what I wanted most was to explore. 

At six o'clock, I set out on a bicycle in search of the River Drava. I was told yesterday that I was very close when I biked to the bus station, and that people illegally cross tracks behind the depot to get to a very scenic area. This was my intent.

As with my first two mornings, I woke at four due to jetlag and to roosters and horses and what I think was a squealing pig, and I awaited the sun.

Before taking out the bicycle, the sun and light green of an early morning misted over everything, and I tried to photograph the experience of the dawn as seen from the back yard.

Fence to Tibor's walnut grove.

View from the fence to our house

Water tower in the distance

Dawn

There are many bicyclists riding through town, even at this time of the morning. There are no shoulders on the streets, and the bikers themselves cruise very leisurely on the sides of the narrow roads on mountain bikes with dynamo lights, something that's disappeared from the United States but not in Hungary, where it was invented. Cars swing to the middle and no one seems to dial up the road rage the way they do in Seattle or any other city. Also, no one wears a helmet, or owns one. 

I reached the bus depot, cross the train tracks, and was deeply rewarded. The early morning stills the water and the low sun brushes the trees in a soft glow. In the pictures below, you see the River Drava, and on the other side, Croatia.

A path running along the banks of the river leads to the bridge over which are Route Six and a border crossing to Croatia. Near the bus depot end is this beautiful building, as well as a legitimate road over the rails.

Near the bridge, meanwhile, sits a footbridge, remarkable because it is a landmark of beauty overwhelmed on one side by an industrial pit covered in a plastered white dust and small cranes extending nearly to its roof.

Nearby is a campground, occupied today by a dozen tents, and near this too is a path down which I took the bicycle until the groove in the earth was crowded with weeds. But the sunlight still turned everything yellow, and the lines of sticky web now draping across me and the bike began to appear over leaves in larger canvases. I braved ten mosquito-bitten minutes trying to force my camera to focus on the walnut-sized spider in the last picture here.

Visual rhyming time! This tunnel led under the border crossing and pointed me back towards town.

Four hours later, we were on our way to Pécs. Once we found a legitimate place to park and found our way into the old center, Stephanie and I were stunned by what we found. We really are in Europe. The kids, meanwhile, especially Maisie and Amelia, wanted to return home immediately, or at least find an air-conditioned corner out of the heat. They spent most of the time asking to leave, or to drink something cold, or to eat something, or to stop walking already.


The proof is in Maisie's punim.




But once we ate, put some cold drink into them, and wandered back out into the world...

...we were able to explore.

 Then we left, stopping off at the mall and Interspar for cold water.

Ten minutes from home, I pulled over to a playground at a neighboring village and slept. There, apparently, Sophie had her first encounter with Roma society, where she was surrounded by gypsy children practicing their English and stroking her long hair. Sophie said they were very friendly.

Now we are home. Sophie, unscathed, is playing the violin; Maisie and Amelia are playing with legos. We came closer to finishing the meal prepared three days ago for our arrival. Though I am exhausted and ready to pull over and sleep once more, I find that, on my birthday, perhaps I should spend less time trying to put the spider into focus and more on its intricate home among the leaves.

The Transition

August 11, 2010

We’re on our way. At this very moment, I’m using a computer on power I’m not even positive I can replace. We’re soon to be flying over the British Isles.

We shared a house with Tibor, Katalin, Kata and Lili or a few days and felt their excitement and warmth, and shared much of their exhaustion. They had experienced a double dose of jetlag and had been living out of suitcases for a week, their daughters exposed to much unfamiliar food, and Kata and Tibor had prepared with untold packing, organizing and cleaning; and yet they embraced everything and forgave everything, as Stephanie and I scrambled with last minute packing and errands of our own and even some clutter.

Here are our families together right before we Grosskopfs left for Hungary. I'm on the left, next to Tibor in yellow, Katalin, Stephanie, then on the bottom, Kata, Amelia, Sophie and Maisie--who started sucking her thumb again on this day. Lilien is not pictured because she was sick in bed at the time.

We went on a few walks and errands together, but, as I told Tibor, I had intended our time together to be the first priority. It turned out to be the second priority. Here is one of our quiet moments, in Cowen Park:

Some of our major preparations included a new roof, fridge, back deck (thank you, Ben), and restoring a ceiling in a bathroom; and Stephanie bore a large portion of the work while I was in Washington, DC, at the Fulbright orientation: the final organizing and cleaning and packing fell entirely with her; and because ordinarily life made its usual full time demands (work, camp, playdates, potlucks, taking the kids to get a TB skin test with a nurse whose idea of good pediatrics is lots of warning about how much pain they will and experience and when), Stephanie did much of this late at night and with out stopping to eat. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sleeping much either because I was out with exchange teachers from around the world, laughing and dancing and drinking ‘til close.

The children at first played very shyly in their separate corners--in fact, on separate floors for much of the first two days. Each set needed to face their fears about communicating with someone who didn't speak their language, and who better to engage in that first step than their counterparts in the exact same situation? Eventually, the girls found a way to interact, as you can see in the half-minute video below:

One of the things I had done to welcome the Devais was try to make a few connections with the local Hungarian community in Seattle. This included attending a meeting at the Pécs-Seattle Sister City Association, where I met some very friendly men and women a few generations removed—several with stories bound to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution—and where I picked up a kind of rolled pastry for a dinner with friends later that evening. Before I left, I felt very warmly embraced and was given several pointed pieces of advice (you don’t have the right of way as a pedestrian, so watch out—no one’s stopping for you), and an invitation the next day for a breakfast and further advice. The president of the association and her husband welcomed me into their home the next day. On their coffee table was a copy of a Hungarian book, and another, in English—War and Peace. First conversations began with how fine a book was the latter; conversations later detailed histories and experiences that fueled a deep anger and disgust for the Russians, the Count Leo notwithstanding. They also talked to me about the gypsies in Hungary—assimilation attempts made by various governments that have failed for 200 years. I nodded my head and silently countered everything they said with my liberal upbringing; but on what truths and knowledge do I do so? I am very happy to have met this Seattle community, and I hope it is something Tibor’s family might put to use.

Our last and most joyous preparation was saying goodbye; and while there were moments where I caught a whiff of enormity and dislocation, the farewells felt entirely like appreciation and love. Below are pictures from our welcome-farewell party and one from a planned former student gathering after a Shakespeare-in-the-park.

Here are Tibor and his new colleague, Tom.

On the right are some of the students who showed up for a great production of As You Like It in West Seattle. Pictured are, from left to right, Ava, Elaine, Amy, Ariana, some guy, Sonja, Andy, Allie, and me. Not pictured include Allie D., Gabe, Jessa, Michi, Roman, Sarah, my sister, Lauren, her husband, Jeff, the unborn baby growing in Lauren's belly, and my parents -- Dad and Wendy.

Louise is talking to Lauren in the middle of this picture. My father is on the right. On the left, Kurt and Amy, whose water broke during the party and... Amy, did you have the baby?

 Many people here, foregrounded by kids.

Dad and Lauren with our old friend Doug are pictured at left. Cora and Janine, also new colleagues for Tibor, are here on the right.

Tibor meets the Hungarian Honorary Consul of the Pacific Northwest, Helen Szablya, and Maria Kramer, President of Seattle-Pécs Sister City Association.

 

Neighbors Pauline and Chrissy and baby Frankie welcome the Dévais to our block.

Our goodbyes finally concluded, we departed for our voyage across the continent and Atlantic, over the British Isles and part of Europe. The trip was a smooth one, but there was a traumatizing hiccough in Germany, where we needed to pass a security checkpoint to get to our gate, and, as it turns out, the United States for all our long lines and complaining have nothing to compare to the vigilance of the Fatherland. I set off the metal detector, something I have never done before, and was wanded, which was a very ticklish experience--the first time it happened. Because I did go through the experience again, when I was told I had to dispose of the water in my bottle and could only do so in a bathroom outside the checkpoint. I didn't know that emptying this water was also going to drain my sense of basic calm. But it did. Because then I had to wait in line again, and every bag was a careful study, and three of every five people were setting off the metal detector, through which no one could pass until each wanding was also complete, and most of all, I couldn't see Stephanie and the girls. All this is to say our trip was fine, except for this excruciation 40 minute separation, whose moral is, Jews don't like it when agents of the German government and separate them from their families.

On the plane at left.


In the airport in Frankfurt on the right.

August 12, 2010. Arrival

Bags in Seattle

Bags in Barcs

We have finally arrived in Barcs. Katalin’s parents set us down before a feast of meat stew, stuffed chicken, dumplings, cabbage slaw and several kinds of desserts, and I also drank glasses of wine from Tokaji and Teleki. The entire family has been in a stupor ever since. Maisie is sick and Stephanie has slept much more than usual—is asleep at this very moment. My vice principal took the rest of us on a walk this morning and I visited our school, very beautiful building next to its dorms for the students who live in town during the school week. Sophie and Amelia were hot, miserable and tired the whole way, Amelia looking at me in a silent eight year old rage.

But we’re here, and it’s glorious, and a bit scary.

Jetlag, exhaustion. Túl fáradtak.

Anticipating Culture Shock

I have not strayed far from my country, though I've wanted to. I spent a month in Spain, another in Italy, a week in Mexico, and long ago, when I was seven, a month in Israel. The Fulbright organizers tell us we will be following a culture shock curve that begins in a honeymoon fervor that falls to despair and rises again in a period of adjustment. Because I have traveled so little, I think I stayed in the honeymoon phase in most cases, except in Spain when I was about done with paella and gazpacho.

On the other hand, I did have a moment of discomfort in Italy with the clown who undressed me in a crowded piazza, and before this as a seven year old in Israel, when I thought exploding a bag in a bank in Tel Aviv would be funny though this turned out not to be so.

Nevertheless, I have had experiences with apart-ness. What comes to mind right now is my job over summers during college as a nurse aide in a nursing home. The residents were so institutionalized and the caretakers seemed to be equally so, lining up the wheelchairs in the hallway an hour before meals and treating life functions as so much machinery. There were layers to the culture shock too. I was the only white worker in the place, and families frequently approached me during sickness or death and called me doctor. Also, I spent a lot of time flirting with a Filipina woman, until one day the activity director her brother called me into his office to tell me that, back in the Philippines, his family was involved with a mob and there was violence like I wouldn't believe; like, he said, if someone were to be messing with your sister, for example, we'd get a group of guys and we'd mess him up. Here's how I dealt with my culture shock in this particular instance: Oh, I said. During the other aspects of this culture shock, the routines seemed endless, the bare tasks of humanity utterly surreal. I responded by trying to learn to be as efficient as others seemed to be, but also trying to make eye and verbal contact as directly and as often as I could, to keep humanity right there in bold. And I kept flirting, which was something that crossed several boundaries at once.

Anticipating what might be stressful or culturally different to a visitor of America, meanwhile, is perhaps even more difficult to imagine right now. That's part of what makes this whole journey so powerful and interesting -- not just that we are going to learn about other cultures, but that we are going to discover our own.

So here I am, trying to imagine stress points for internationals in America, and I think about general stress points, like traffic, or shopping malls.

Here's something a visitor in America can use. In the United States, the customer is always right. If you want to be treated like a queen, go pretend you're going to buy something expensive, like a car. Salespeople will bend over backwards for you, at least until they think you're ready to buy something. Some stores even have professional greeters, there at the door to welcome you (and to make you uncomfortable if you planned to do any shoplifting). If you don't like something you bought, you can often say so and return it.

This attitude often extends into the classroom. Some politicians and instructional leaders and parents view schools as a business where students or student learning is The Product and parents -- by virtue of tax contributions -- are Customers; some of these parents, rightly or wrongly but often rightly, may feel that they have not had good returns on their tax dollars: they may feel that their children have had lousy experiences in our schools. In such cases, "the customer is always right" can lead to some very demanding parents.

But, as Tibor said in our conversation whose title was, "Things I'm afraid to tell you," smiles are universally warming, and kindness, patience and understanding can make a big difference in the case of such encounters.

Still, the pervasiveness of business as a cultural model runs deep in our country. Take for example, the following two terms: “At the end of the day.” “Bottom line.”

Both of these highly American expressions are about focusing in on a final result instead of the messy processes that lead to it. In any kind of tension between the means and ends, these experessions emphasize that the means are not really important. People voice them when others are spending too much energy on trivial things like precedent, ethics, or feelings.

All this is to say, at the end of the day, I can write and plan and reflect; but I know nothing of cultural shock as of yet.

A Literary Point of View

I have now picked up a few pieces of literature from Hungary, as recommended by a dear family friend; and if this is a true sampling, this is a bleak body of literature. Valerie, if you’re reading this, did you recognize the empty hole of loneliness and disconnection at the center of these works?

The first is an allegorical novel called Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy (1999), a magical realist work in which a man on his way to a linguistics convention finds himself in an unintended stopover in a crowded city where no one speaks a language in any way recognizable, even to the linguist, and word patterns remain elusive, while everyone everywhere is thronging and rude. This reminds me of a Kazuo Ishiguro book called The Unconsoled, where a man goes through daily routines with a benumbed insomnia. Is it a coincidence that this book too takes place in central Europe, or that its first location is a Hungarian café? In any event, on the jacket, events of Metropole are described this way: “One claustrophobic day blurs into another as [the main character] desperately struggles to survive in this vastly overpopulated metropolis where there are as many languages as there are people.”

Another novel, which will be much more fun according to Stephanie, is Dezsö Kosztolányi’s Skylark (1930). The context of this novel is described this way: “Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.” One can’t help but draw a line between the unremitting tedium in one book and the aphasic linguist pushing his way through hectic mobs in the other.

Finally, a book of poems by János Pilinszky (Selected Poems, translated by Ted Hughes and János Csokits, 1976) gives voice to an even more tangible despair. Here are a sampling of three of the less violent poems that I find, in the first two cases, beautiful, and in the last, hilarious:

“By the Time You Come”

I am alone. And by the time you come

I shall be the only one still alive.

Just feathers in an empty roost.

Stars instead of a sky.

In my orphanage, unburied,

as on a wintry dump

picking among the rubbish

I keep finding scraps of my life.

And that will be flawless peace.

Even my heart inaudible.

All around me the ecstatic

barriers of silence.

Naked eternity.

And yours, simply yours.

A majestic simplicity

made for you, from the first day.

Like a lumpish basketwork dummy

time just sits, without a word.

Desire has no longer any limbs.

It has only a gasping trunk.

By the time you come I shall have lost everything.

No house, no soft bed.

I shall be able to lie undisturbed

in a bleak ecstasy.

Only you must not rob me, you must not desert me.

If you are weak, that is the end of me.

And horrible, to awake, in a bed

among pillows, hearing the noise of the street.

“The Desert of Love”

A bridge, and a hot concrete road—

the day is emptying its pockets,

laying out, one by one, all its possessions.

You are quite alone in the catatonic twilight.

A landscape like the bed of a wrinkled pit,

with glowing scars, a darkness which dazzles.

Dusk thickens. I stand numb with brightness

blinded by the sun. The summer will not leave me.

Summer. And the flashing heat.

The chickens stand, like burning cherubs,

in the boarded-up, splintered cages.

I know their wings do not even tremble.

Do you still remember? First there was the wind.

And then the earth. Then the cage.

Flames, dung. And now and again

a few wing-flutters, a few empty reflexes.

And thirst. I asked for water—

Even today I hear that feverish gulping,

and helplessly, like a stone, bear

and quench the mirages.

Years are passing. And years. And hope

is like a tin-cup toppled into the straw.

“Fable”

Detail from his KZ_Oratorio: Dark Heaven

Once upon a time

there was a lonely wolf

lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.

He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls

the caresses of its bricklayers.

But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.

Apart from God nobody ever

found them so beautiful

as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.

He stopped in the middle of the room

and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes

and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.