The Red Ghost

In 1956, the year the Russian tanks came back to Budapest, Árpád Sugár turned 10, joined the Pioneers and told his mother that he would never again set foot inside a synagogue. From there he progressed to the Young Communist League and came of age when he joined the Party, which he never left. They left him when they self-combusted in 1989. That was when Árpád Sugár’s son Misi told him he wanted to have a barmitzvah. The Jewish revival was underway in Hungary and it was the post-’89 kids that were bringing the Yiddishkeit home, whether their parents wanted it or not. Árpád had lost his job teaching Russian Literature at university the year before and with it, all of his life’s bearings. He was horribly thin, pale and fragile as a soft-boiled egg. His wife Éva was an economist (no one put Marxist in front of that word anymore), and she was hired by a multi-national cosmetics firm that had just opened their Eastern European headquarters in Budapest. The corporate folk were steering clear of the Yugoslav house of cards and the Ceauşescu disaster over the border in Romania. By comparison, Hungary was an ocean of calm, of political stability and culinary sophistication.

They lived in Újlipótváros. It was their own little village just beside the city centre, complete with cafés, restaurants, synagogues, churches, schools, shops, gossips and idiots. It was built in the late 1920s, predominantly by middle class Jews in answer to the established elite across the road in Lipótváros who’d shut them out. They were Bauhaus, for the most part, while the Catholics across the ring road were decidedly Secessionist. This is the place where the Progressive Jews lived. The urbane, secular intelligentsia that wanted to distance themselves from their Orthodox brethren who lived in poverty and darkness beside their creaking, old synagogues in the stinking heart of the city. In Újlipótváros the buildings were airy and painted yellow and pink, with balconies and big windows. The cafés had terraces, and white umbrellas in the summer, and Szent István Park was just a stroll away, as was the Danube. This is where the Sugárs had lived since the late ‘20s, when they ceased to be Zuckermanns and became Cukors. After the war, in anticipation of their departure for America, Árpád’s father had Anglicized their name from Cukor to Sugár. Had they gone to America, Sugar would have been sweet, but to the Hungarians, Sugár, with the long accented “á”, had an oddly atomic-era quality to it as their name now meant “ray”.

“So, tell me Misi, why is this barmitzveh so important to you?” Árpád had asked his son.

He pronounced the word “barmitzveh” with emphatic disdain, but also unwittingly with a pitch-perfect Ashkenazic accent. The emphasis was all on the final syllable “eh”. It was not the Sephardic open-mouthed “ah”, it was a pained, pinched, slightly hunched “eh”. One tiny syllable in which so much of life’s angst, and apathy, could be expressed. Árpád did not realise that even after a lifetime of studiously avoiding the vernacular of his childhood that that little “eh” had followed him, had in fact never left him.

In the end, it wasn’t what Misi said that convinced him, it was the earnest fire in his son’s eyes. He knew it so well, knew how it could feed the blood, as well as the bile. He knew that fire because it had not entirely died in him either.

As they stepped into the Visegrádi utca Zsinagóga the morning of Misi’s barmitzvah, “Mazal tovs” peppered the air like bullets at a Balkan wedding. An elderly man named Rabbi Schwartz introduced himself to Árpád.

“Mazel tov, mazel tov,” he crowed. “I come over vunce a veek from Vienna on shabbes.”

Árpád smiled tightly. He spoke Hungarian just like his uncle Avrum who’d gone out to Austria in ‘45: stiffly Germanic and stopped in time. 

“He iz a good boy. He haz studied hard. Vould you like to lay tefillin?”

“I’ve never put tefillin on and I don’t think I’ll start now.”

The rabbi shrugged, looked the man over, took in the stubborn red star pin on his lapel and left him alone. Árpád sighed and looked around. This was the very synagogue his mother had taken him to as a boy. He’d been circumcised here in 1946, the first shoot of new life for the decimated community after Auschwitz. Of course, everything seemed so much smaller now, but lighter too. The dingy blinds that were always pulled down over the windows were gone, the walls were freshly painted and amazingly there was laughter in the synagogue, for now the children outnumbered the adults. He watched the docile way the boys copied the rabbi, the way they stood as one and sat as one, their sheepish chanting, their incessant page-turning. And then the way in which all these scripted movements repeated themselves again. The “Kaddish”, the “Shemah”, the “Amidah”. It was all so atavistic, so elaborately choreographed, and yet, here they all were, as if Marx had never existed and God had never died. Only Misi’s brief, somewhat stumbling performance stilled the quicksand hopelessness he felt and reminded him what he was doing there.

When the service finally ended –with a rather rousing “Adon Olam”– the entire congregation piled into the room next door for kiddush. A long table covered in a frummie’s favourite plastic tablecloth was filled with bottles of Slivovitz, Carmel wine and Sprite, and plastic plates piled high with marble cake. Árpád watched his son clowning around with his friends and his heart pounded with a love both fierce and tender. He was no longer needed here, he’d played his part. He turned to leave but the doorway was blocked by a giant man in a pale grey suit. 

“Mazal tov! Not bad for the son of a Red,” the man said, sticking out his hand. 

“Comrade János! What brings you here?”

“The sing-alongs, free cake and booze.”

“This is my first time in 33 years. I never thought I’d see the inside of this prehistoric cave again.”

János boomed with laughter. “Well, caves have their uses too.”

A week after Misi’s barmitzvah, Éva moved Árpád out of their bedroom and into what had once been the maid’s room off the kitchen. She did this after repeated attempts to seduce him had failed to rouse him from his stupor. Can’t or won’t?She didn’t know, but she was hurt that he no longer seemed to desire her. 

“I just need more time,” he told her.

“Time for what?”

He shrugged his shoulders. 

“Too much time is dangerous.”

She thought that inactivity was feeding his incipient madness. More than once she’d come home to find him spitting and shaking his fists at walls, screaming in Russian at the top of his lungs, the windows thrown open, the neighbours banging on the walls and Misi crying in a corner. But he refused to see a psychiatrist, or take medication and he wouldn’t hear about supplements, or jogging, or even learning a new instrument. He would not, or could not work, but he needed to do some-thing, Éva was convinced of it. So she taught him to keep house. To cook, to clean, to launder, to shop, to anticipate needs. But his domestication was not seamless, indeed could not be. It wasn’t that Árpád actually minded being led, or even doing what for all his radicalism he still believed was women’s work, it was that his mind was porous as marooned coral. He would ask Éva about her day and then promptly forget all she’d said. He rarely spoke but when he did he’d say things like, “Sometimes I wonder about the wallpaper,” or, “Pity the grapes were so acidic this year.” He was an idealist with shattered ideals. And although he could never forgive them their betrayal, he still missed the Party. He was not alone in his sense of devastation. The city was filled with Red ghosts.

As he drifted silently through Pest on his errands, nebulous, opaque, entirely self-absorbed, Árpád began to see János wherever he went. Was it chance? Or had he been sent? 

“János,pleasetell me, why are you following me?” Árpád begged him one day on the #2 tram.

“Well, I have to have something to put in your file.”

Reeling with confusion, Árpád nearly fell over as the tram swerved round the Parliament. János folded him into a nearby seat and sat down opposite him.

“Sorry, it’s probably too soon to joke about the ÁVH. I heard they shut down Russian Lit. Are you going to switch to English?”

The state were re-training the old Russian teachers to teach English. This was a straight-faced offer from the politicos, made without a trace of irony, but not one that Árpád could be convinced to take up.

“Well, why don’t you come to shul next week? It’s Yom Kippur. An old puritan like you would probably enjoy mortifying the flesh for 25 hours, looking within and purging yourself of your sins. After all sins are sins, whether they’re against the Party or against God.”

Árpád looked away from him and out the window at the sludgy Danube. He watched it disappear as the tram headed inland between the buildings.

Over the next few days he avoided leaving the apartment so that he wouldn’t bump into János again, but he thought obsessively about their last meeting. It was true, the idea of fasting appealed to him, but not for the reasons János thought. What appealed to him about Yom Kippur was spending the day with Misi, with his boy, while he was still a boy and wanted to do things with his father. That, and not going near the kitchen for a day, and being out of the house for a day, but not having to hang around the library like a hobo with the flu. On the morning of Yom Kippur he stood silently outside the front door and waited for Misi.

At first he felt self-conscious sitting there on the narrow bench beside his boy, stiff, thirsty, dreading a sarcastic remark from János, but he enjoyed not having to be anywhere or do anything. Occasionally he glanced down at the machzor, reassured himself that the words were ridiculous, then just went on sitting quietly. He thought that sitting quietly would be like thinking, but it wasn’t, because thinking required movement and equipment: a room to pace in, a park to walk in, paper, pens, coffee, lots of coffee. Conversely, sitting in shul was the opposite of thinking, an irony not entirely lost on him, but that too had its appeal.

A trainee cantor had come over from Vienna with the rabbi. He was young and nervous, but deadly serious about the business of repentance. When he sang the “Avinu Malkeinu” he pleaded with God to forgive all of them their sins. When he knelt down during the “Aleinu” he prostrated himself so that all the arthritic alte kakers could stay sitting and still be forgiven. But during the “Amidah”, when the cantor pulled his tallit over his head for a quiet moment with God, Árpád found himself doing the same. In the scratchy wool cocoon, his face hidden away from the world, the emotional intensity of the day finally seeped in. It felt like his mind had been stretched tight by longing, by physical and spiritual longing. The shock was that he hadn’t realized he still longed for anything except the past. With longing came a noisy, clambering instinct he was still too befuddled to recognize as life. At 6.26pm, by the time the shofar sounded, his head was pounding with caffeine withdrawal, but he felt it as a new abstraction struggling to be born. He watched the rabbi’s lips trembling with the effort of coaxing sound out of the astonishing ram’s horn. Te-ki-ah. All around him he could hear the rustling of sweet wrappers and he marveled at the absurd, strange logic of that moment.

In the days following Yom Kippur, that abstraction, that thought or feeling, that sense of something new tickled his brain like an incomplete memory lost in the grey fug. No, not a memory exactly, an idea, a not un-pleasant idea. But what was it?He lay on his bed to think but found himself humming the “Avinu Malkeinu”. He stopped in disgust but started again anyway. On Saturday morning on his way back from the market he was on Visegrádi utca and remembered how he used to walk to the synagogue with his mother as a boy, how she was always in a hurry to get there and pulled him along behind her as if he were a kite. And how sometimes, when sitting still in shul for a second longer felt harder than breathing underwater she’d let him go out and play in the courtyard. This one time he was out playing marbles, it was winter, someone was boiling chicken nearby, he heard the adults singing the “Ein Keloheinu” and he peeked in through the window to listen. As he pressed his face against the glass his breath melted the frost on the pane. He saw his mother, right there, and she looked so pretty, so smooth in the face, that before he could think what he was doing he tapped on the window and waved at her. She turned and he thought she’d be angry with him for interrupting her prayers, but she wasn’t. She smiled at him, slowly, like morning sun stretching across a kitchen wall. The surprise of her smile in that moment, the unexpectedness of it, that was it, that was what he’d felt on Yom Kippur.   

So he went back again to the little prayer house to see if he could feel that relief, that unexpected jolt of pleasure again. He sat there all through the autumn and into the winter and the new year, watching, waiting. What he felt was inevitably not the same, but it was just as unexpected. He found that what he liked most about sitting there was that it lacked all monumentality. He liked sitting there on Friday nights and watching the lights come on outside in the courtyard. He liked that nobody asked him about his beliefs, his loyalties, what he read or who he associated with. He liked that nobody wanted him to check up on anyone else. He was always welcomed and over time he realized he was no longer afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing because there was a sense that everyone was stumbling through this together, that they were all learning to be Jewish together, just as they were all learning to be citizens and not subjects.

But Árpád’s spirit did not just crave calm, it craved rigour. He was not a man accustomed to loose affiliations and breezy emotions. And although he could never admit it to himself, the need to obey lived on inside him. Now, when someone wants to obey, there is no better religion in the world than Judaism. 248 positive commandments, 365 negative commandments, a whopping 613 commandments, 613 being the total number of organs and sinews in the human body. Medically questionable, but spiritually right-on. The problem was, he didn’t know how to learn belief, but he thought that he could read himself into it, all he needed was a solid reading list. So he went to see the rabbi. 

“It iz not somesing you read, it iz somesing you feel, and only by degrees. I do not believe in light-bulb revelations any more than I do in love at first sight. Before belief and faith comes awe, and awe iz tricky because it raises us up to ze heavens but it also humbles us. Ven vee feel it, vee have this avareness of our place in Hashem’s design. Vee may be His Chosen Ones, but vee are also just tiny specks of star dust in His great cosmic work.”

“Okay, so, what should I read?”

The rabbi scratched his beard and smiled. “No, I do not sink it iz books you need. I sink it iz Mozart.”

“Mozart? Really? Then why not what’s-his-name Carlebach?”

“Ach, Carlebach! Vy eat carob ven you can eat chocolate? Do not trouble yourself about Mozart’s religion, just listen to his music, preferably his Requiem, and ask yourself, iz this music earthly or celestial? If you find in favour of the heavens, you vill have experienced somesing like awe.”

When Árpád told János what the rabbi had said János was triumphant. “I knew it! I could have sworn I saw a ‘Don Giovanni’ cd sticking out of his coat pocket the other day! Typical Austrian, they’re all Mozart fuckers.”

It hurt him to feel, exhausted him. There were whole days of tears and shame. Afterwards, there was no forgetting, he could never not know those feelings again. The skeptic within him was becalmed because he began to trust in something outside of himself again. He transformed his little room off the kitchen into a monk’s cell and set to studying. He contemplated the teachings of the Torah and the Prophets with the same rigour he had once applied to Gogol and Goncharov. Only now, with the release of his mind from earthbound explanations, the answers he thought he needed to breathe lost their razor urgency. He became less critical, less accurate, more susceptible to the mystical. When he didn’t understand something he didn’t always question it because now he could explain certain things away as unknowable, as Divine. Magical things like Messianic Redemption and The Resurrection, so much more potent than Marx in fighting the terrors of eternal night. And whereas before he had found the prayers impenetrable, now he felt their poetry. He was a natural monotheist. He took to singing “Yigdal” and “Adon Olam” as he went about the business of his life. Certain phrases returned to him like waves to the shore: …without beginning without end… inscrutable and infinite… nothing preceded His precedence…He simplified his wardrobe to a single black suit and half a dozen white shirts, but he still wore his red star pin because he liked saying a friendly “up yours” to the Capitalists. In early spring Árpád became Dávid again, became the man he now believed he’d always been destined to be. He was alive again, sentient again. He thrummed with mystic spice. 

He was alive again but he never fullyreturned to his family. Now he regarded them somewhat askance, his goyische heathens, with their soulless, secular ways. Yet with new life came old urges. He began to visit Éva again at night. It had been months since she’d moved him into the maid’s room and now here he was again, calmly come to collect his marital dues.

“I feel as if he’s walked out on me and then half a year on just walked straight back in without an explanation, without so much as an apology.” Éva was sitting in the kitchen with a shower cap on, phone ear out, warming herself in a lone winter sunbeam, as she waited for “Chestnut Magic” to transform her hair. “Yes, I know I did, but I still feel as if I’ve been abandoned. Why shouldn’t I? Why? You’ve never been lonely? Listen, if I waited for everything to be perfect before having sex with him I’d be like you and never have sex. Put it this way, it’s not a punishment, it never has been. Do you really want to know? Ok, well, he’s patient and attentive. No. He still sleeps in the spare room. Well the problem is that in spite of all that I feel as if I’m being used. Of course I’m happy he’s ‘healthy’ again, but sometimes I don’t know if I want to slap him or rock him in my arms. It’s always so all-consuming with him, it exhausts me. You know, if there’s one thing that being in the cosmetics business has taught me it’s that Hungarian women don’t just need to feel beautiful after all the Communist ugliness, they need to feel human, they’re tired of being programmed from above, they need something more than Kinder, Küche, Kirche… My point isI feel like I’m always alone. I eat alone because Árpád, Dávid, whatever the hell he calls himself these days has become kosher and only eats in his room now. I go out alone because he never wants to go anywhere except synagogue. I’m sure people will think I’m divorced…” She sighed and inched her chair closer to the sun. “No, I don’t want to divorce him. Because he’s honest, that’s why.”

But what began as frustration ossified into a right. She deserved more! She deserved more because she worked hard, she’d earned the right to more. And when more did not manifest itself at home, she began to look elsewhere. She discovered the transient pleasures of shopping. She learnt to love all the pretty things that money can buy. She discovered needs she never knew she had.

The transformation that was underway across the country inevitably reached 22 Pannónia utca. Incrementally the long, grey decades of Communism were being papered over by poppycock and gloss. The dirty cream walls of their building were to be upgraded to Pastripe Lemon. Rent had gone north and many of the oldies who could not afford the price hike were moved out. Hasty renovations were undertaken, expats and new tenants were moved in. One of them was an elderly widow named Elzi Spitzer. On her way to aerobics one Saturday morning, Elzi introduced Éva to her son George. He’d left Hungary in the early ‘80s on a scholarship and found work in London. His mother was unwell so he was home for a visit. Their eyes locked - George didn’t shake hands as he was a surgeon and highly protective of his small, precision instruments - and Éva sensed that here was the moreshe needed. On George’s next visit they began their affair. Elzi was so delighted with her son’s prompt return that after that she decided to fall ill fortnightly. It was an arrangement too deliciously convenient not to continue. George could stay married to his proper English wife who detested Budapest (“It’s the Balkans dressed up as Vienna”), Elzi had her doting son home twice a month, and now Éva had what she needed. 

For Éva, George was an escape from Dávid’s unrelenting earnestness. With George she could enjoy the pretty lights and bright things that the aspiring capital now offered. With George she could take her new dresses out to dinner. She could discuss bottom lines and profit, and instead of feeling greedy, instead of feeling judged, she could feel justified. It was easy enough to invent reasons to be out. Business dinners and work conferences materialized as they were needed. George wasn’t a great lover, he worried too much about his hands, but he was brief and polite, which suited Éva well enough. Afterwards they could get on with their afternoon teas and dinners, and their country lunches, for what George truly lusted after was food, and not the English kind. 

One Saturday night, as Dávid was putting away the Havdalah things in his room, he smelt Éva and the blood thundered down to his groin. He ran his fingers through his hair and stuck his head around the door.

“Where are you off to?”

“Oh, a work thing.”

“Already?” he asked

“Yes,” she said, blowing on her wine red nails. 

He’d have to wait. He was about to duck back into his room, when he saw her pull a small bottle of perfume out of her evening bag and squirt it down into her cleavage. He frowned. When she’d gone, he followed her out. From the balcony, he could see down into the courtyard. He pressed himself against the wall and waited. Just as Éva arrived downstairs, George Spitzer walked out of his mother’s apartment. She stood waiting for him by the building entrance. They greeted one another with an unmistakably familiar peck on the lips and then they turned to go. 

He stood there until long after they’d left, until the cold blade ache of betrayal congealed and reconfigured itself as revenge. He walked back into the apartment and into their bedroom. He turned on the light and looked, something he hadn’t done in a long while as he always came to her at night. He opened the wardrobe and saw that she had filled the spaces he’d once occupied with her things. Thingsmade of velvet and silk, things that danced on hangers and winked at him malevolently with their beaded, sequined eyes. Thingsfrom which price tags still dangled, insouciantly as a handbag on a woman’s arm. He touched everything, smelt everything too and was filled with repulsion. He pulled a suitcase out from under the bed and packed up all of her things. The shoes and bags and trinkets, the make-up and all the perfume bottles too, even her underpants and stockings, which nauseated him with longing. 

He dragged the suitcase to the metro but did not feel its weight. He took the blue train to the end of the line. On the empty seat beside him was a newspaper. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at a newspaper. It was April 9, 1990 and the results of the country’s first democratic election were in, second if you counted ‘47. He saw the names and faces of men he’d known from the Party and although their betrayal sickened him, he was not so far gone as to be surprised. He knew, they all knew back in ’89, that this is what would happen and you didn’t need a crystal ball for that. For that, all you needed was to be Hungarian, because the Hungarian has a very finely tuned sense of cynicism. Hungarian history is full of turncoats and petty bureaucrats who don’t care whose trumpet they’re blowing so long as their pockets are being lined. No, it wasn’t the resurrection of the un-dead that shocked him, it was not understanding how you could live without belief. He turned the page with such violence that it ripped in two. He pushed the two halves together and saw a picture of some new political young gun called Viktor Orbán. He was talking about his party, Fidesz, and how in spite of not winning the election they would keep on keeping on until every last Soviet soldier had left Hungarian soil. Below all the rabble-rousing was a picture of their election poster. In the top half Honecker and Brezhnev are greeting each other on the lips (a bad idea in retrospect). In the bottom half a handsome young couple are sitting on a park bench kissing. The kiss between the ugly old Reds looked perverse compared to the p.y.t.s who were holding hands chastely, looking virginal as unpicked flowers. In big black letters between the two images it said: Make Your Choice. Dávid didn’t especially like either choice, or maybe it was the newness of choice that was confusing. Still, he couldn’t help admiring their pluck. Not so long ago, a cheap shot like that could have ruined your life. 

He got out at Kőbánya-Kispest and headed towards the Kispest housing estate. Last week on a bus he heard someone say that there were people living in cardboard boxes out here, but he didn’t really know because he rarely left Újlipótváros any more. He was as out of touch with what was happening in the city as he was with his own family. Instinctively he folded his jacket lapel in and hid away his red star. It was a mild night and there were lots of men standing around smoking and drinking bootleg pálinka from plastic bottles. He could hear babies and a synthesizer and conversations toing and froing across balconies. He could smell un-emptied bins and sweat. It was his own and it reeked of fear, but he was shielded from it by his righteous fury. He walked straight over to the nearest group of men and asked them about the homeless people. They discussed his question among themselves as if he weren’t there. They were unable to decide if he was a bloody Jew, a bloody do-gooder from Holland or a bloody poof looking for some action. A man in grey overalls told him to move his bloody ass along if he didn’t want to get it kicked and that if he was looking for the bloody gypsies he wouldn’t find them ‘round here and he’d have to sniff ‘round in the bushes, over that way, like the bloody mole he was and find them for himself. 

He didn’t find them. They found him. He’d rehearsed the speech he was going to give and how he would ask them to accept these gifts and how he hoped they’d use them in good health, but there was no need for so many words. They took the suitcase off his hands and his jacket and wallet too. When he asked them for his red star pin they said, “Sure, catch”, and tossed it deep into the green. He watched as the men took turns throwing Éva’s shoes at eachother. He watched as they threw her necklaces up over their women’s heads and they landed in the branches. He watched until all of the pretty things that she loved so much were strewn across the grass like soggy confetti after a party. Then he walked home.

The night sky was pristine and the moon at half mast. Mars was above him, swollen and rosy. He clenched his fists by his sides and leered. He could not answer every betrayal, but at least he’d answered one. ◊

“The Red Ghost” was first published by The Chaffin Journal, 2019

https://english.eku.edu/chaffin-journal