Pigeons and Politics

One day, my grandfather found a young pigeon fallen from its nest in the park of the Nemzeti Muzeum, where the crown of the Hungarian kings is kept. He carried it across Muzeum Utca, the narrow street between the Muzeum and our apartment building, and then up flights of worn stone steps to our apartment. The building had once been the town residence of a noble family, but was now split up into apartments, its paint long ago washed away by rains, its plaster cracking, and its hallways smelling of mold and death. We lived in a parlor of sorts, two large rooms divided by enormous glass doors, or so they seemed to me then, when all the world was enormous – the ornate wardrobes like caverns when opened, the coverlets we slept under like mountains of feathers, the claw-footed bathtub like Lake Balaton.

As the pigeon grew, it was allowed to fly about the apartment, perching wherever it pleased. Sometimes we heard a flapping of wings behind the draperies, or beneath the inlaid tables, or by the ceramic stoves that heated each room and had to be fed every day, like ogres, from the pile of coals in the building's cellar. Eventually, he was allowed to look down on Muzeum Utca through a wooden frame set into the window and covered with a net of old pantyhose. There he would stand, his head tilted to one side, watching the park's pigeons as they went about their no doubt important business. They were common city pigeons, the kind one sees in New York as well as Amsterdam, the same color as the buildings of Budapest, which had been dirtied over the years by exhaust from cars built in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The pigeons were part of Budapest. They had been there before any of us, before my mother and her sister had watched Russian tanks rolling down the streets in 1956, before the wars, before the two towns of Buda and Pest were joined across the Danube.

One day, the frame was empty. The pantyhose net was torn open, and the pigeon was gone. But he came back for a long time afterward, to the balcony above the building's central courtyard, to be fed from my grandmother's hand, as he had been when he lived with us in the apartment on Muzeum Utca.

My childhood, like every childhood after it has passed, is a collection of disjointed memories like this one. I remember water-weeds clinging to my legs as I hung from the edge of our wooden platform in Lake Balaton. I remember dangling double cherries from my ears – for propriety's sake, the only earrings I was allowed to wear. I remember the taste of Madár Tej, a sugary cloud of whipped egg whites floating on a pale yellow lake of yolk and milk. And I remember listening, at night, long after I was already supposed to be asleep, to stories from a book of Hungarian fairy tales. Hungarian fairy tales are frightening and sad. Soldiers go off to war, maidens die despite their innocence, witches are relentlessly wicked. I remember a picture of a dragon, green like linden leaves, writhing while the soldier he had eaten chopped open his side with a cavalry saber and emerged from his bowels. Red stained his vivid hide.

Dragons were easy to understand. It was harder to understand why no one could know that we would soon be leaving the country, why I could not practice the English words I was learning in front of my friends. My mother had worked for a year in the United States as a medical student, and she had always wanted to return. She no longer wanted to live in Hungary, where everything seemed lost – land to redistribution, families to diaspora, history to propaganda – and where the air itself tasted of defeat. After her divorce she began the long process of leaving a country with closed borders, bribing officials with liquor and their secretaries with candy, sending money to her sister, who had been allowed to leave the country when she fell in love with and married an Italian. And then, one day, we were gone, a mother and two children over the border, with two suitcases full of children's clothes, a perfectly acceptable tourist visa, and no intention of returning. My mother had twenty-five dollars and a medical degree to sustain us.

We lived for a time with my aunt in Milan, where I refused to eat a dinner of frogs' legs after a day of catching frogs on the paths between the flooded rice fields – to play with, I had thought. The next morning, I saw the skeleton of a frog next to the road, picked clean by ants. Just as Hungarian fairy tales had taught me terror, and my carefully rationed mouthfuls of Madár Tej had taught me delight, that skeleton, so delicately perfect, taught me the beauty of form. We lived for a time in Brussels, where we were taught, in school, to brush our teeth twice a day – my first introduction to the hygienic West. On Sundays the Grand Place was filled with flowers – and with parrots, who brought the colors of the tropics to that staid city, where every pedestrian seemed to be a teacher or a banker.

And then, at last, a visa – the medical degree having worked its magic – and the lights of New York City, seen from the scratched oval of an airplane window. I had never seen anything so confusing in my life.

The Importance of Being Lost

We are, all of us, creatures of place. Even the roaming tribes of the Mongolian steppes or African grasslands have their seasonal routes, their preferred grazing grounds and water holes. Their places are wider than ours, but they are formed by them just as we are by a house our family has lived in over the years, a hill we have rolled down, a tree we have seen from a bedroom window since childhood. The places we live determine who we are. That is why homelessness is experienced as a loss of self. I had spent my childhood moving from country to country, learning language after language. When we landed that day in New York City, all of my possible selves seemed to have been lost, as though a baggage carrier had mislaid them in the airport of some country we had passed through. I still think, sometimes, of landing in Iceland and finding my younger selves there, grown up and living happily on the side of a glacier.

How strange America was. Every game involved the kicking of balls, and the bread tasted like puffs of air. I quickly learned that balls eluded my foot, no matter how conscientiously I tried to kick them, and that my clothes and hair were perpetually and entirely wrong. I no longer knew who I was, but my classmates' eyes told me what I had become – the outsider, whose strange accent and ideas marked her, indelibly as a papal edict, anathema. Being ostracized when young is an invaluable experience for a writer. It assures that one does not become, for instance, an Olympic kickballer. One has, instead, to turn inward. While the other children were running after balls, the few of us whom balls would not obey sat on the jungle gym, discussing the evidence, pro and contra, for the existence of God. God we were not sure of, but we believed in the dragonriders of Pern, believed that if they could find a way from their dimension into ours, they would take us with them to a planet where the dangers were evident, even tangible – far from the subtle terrors of school.

You see, I had discovered the library. I had lost one country after another, but now I discovered new ones, which could never be conquered by foreign powers and which required no passport when crossing the border. I traveled into Narnia through Lantern Waste, then went south to Aslan's How. I stopped for a week in the Shire and proceeded through the dark passes of Mirkwood to the Lonely Mountain. At some point I took a boat and sailed out to the West Reach, where the dragon Yevaud still curls around the hills of Pendor, guarding his treasure. I watched the sun play on the eddies in the River with Mole and Water Rat, ventured into the mysterious third story of Thornfield Hall, and looked down on London, sweeping past below, from a nest in North Wind's hair. I lived for a time, very happily, in the valleys of Nangiyala, then went adventuring again in the strange kingdoms where Azhriaz ruled.

I read through elementary school, under the Japanese cherry trees that grow everywhere around Washington D.C., where we had moved so that my mother could work at the National Institutes of Heath. In late spring, when the blossoms fell, the asphalt was covered with piles of fragrant pink petals, like the rags of a ball gown. I read through high school, in the National Museum of Art, on a bench in front of my favorite painting – a mid-Victorian allegory of golden-haired Youth sailing down a placid river on a boat piled high with flowers, whose sentimentality exactly suited my taste. I read through college, on the golf-course grass of the University of Virginia, surrounded by Thomas Jefferson's neoclassical columns, while my mind searched through the library of Miskatonic University for forbidden tomes, or wandered down the streets of Portsmouth, where in the alcoves albino beasts conducted unholy rites.

And then, I went to law school. If you have ever dreamed, as I often do, of walking down the streets of a strange city at night, knowing that you are lost and vaguely fearing that something – you know not what – may be following behind, you have known what law school is, for a writer. The hallowed halls of Harvard swarmed with unreal spirits in polo shirts, speaking words that had no meaning I could readily understand. The classrooms were abysses, from which rose vapors that took elusive shape and then melted again into misty abstractions. I believe in Kadath in the cold waste, and Ultima Thule. But you cannot prove to me that Harvard Law School actually exists. All I remember of those years is Gustav Moreau's Salomé, staring in horror at the spectral head of John the Baptist, returned to haunt her – next to a Spanish scene by Sargent in the Fogg Museum. Then came the brief nightmare of working as an international corporate attorney – in New York City, on the forty-second floor of the Metropolitan Life building above Grand Central Station, where the elevators always seemed, somehow, to be descending – even when going up.

But through it all I was writing – and beginning to publish, just a little, at first in school literary magazines and then in serious journals. And feeling, at last, as though I were on my way to something called home.

Epilogue at Night

I sit at night in my Boston apartment, with a pile of papers that my students have written on my left, a manuscript waiting for revisions on my right. Somewhere under the manuscript or the pile – I do not know which – is the orals list for my Ph.D. in English literature. I should look at it, soon – but not quite now. I pick up the paper at the top of the pile, then set it back down. The lamp casts a circle of light on the scratched surface of my desk. Outside the cars are passing, with the constant shush of waves on a shore. A cat slides by my ankle with startling softness. I reach for a pad of paper on the window sill, look for a moment into the darkness, and begin to write.

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