California Institute of the Arts

I’m From Around Here

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts in Writing

by

Lianna Kissinger-Virizlay

2013

i

Readers

1st Reader: Mady Schutzman

2nd Reader: Maggie Nelson

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Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Part One 1

Part Two 12

Part Three 34

Part Four 53

Acknowledgements 69

iii

Abstract

I’m From Around Here presents public record and private memory to explore how

domestic identities are formed. Using details of her father’s emigration from Hungary to

America, his subsequent career as a classical cellist, his addiction to gambling, and her

experience of his death, L.K.V. excavates, interrogates, and rehabilitates discrepancies

between history, memory, and the interpretation of both. Though presented as a personal

record of a daughter’s experience of her father while growing up in Baltimore, Maryland,

this work ultimately asks us all to question where we come from.

I’m From Around Here

1

PART ONE To get to America, my father walked across a winter white dusted no-man’s-land with nothing but a cello on his back and a wife, the first of four, by his side. It was 1956, the year of the doomed Hungarian Revolution—or uprising, as it was called when Soviet tanks stormed in to stop it. They flattened treads along the road that splits Buda from Pest, dividing the city in half. Buda, named for a warrior. Pest, named for a furnace. Neither legacy prevailed, and within days the revolution’s fire was snuffed out. Hungary shrank and trembled under Soviet occupation for 45 years, from the end of the Second World War through the whole of the Cold, until the Pan-European Picnic opened the route my father took to the rest of Eastern Europe, and the last of the Red Army withdrew from Hungary in 1991—the same year I spent my first summer in Budapest.

2

In memory my father speaks exclusively in poetry, Hungarian, and music. Even his yawns became songs. I know that in reality he scolded me more than once and that I said I hated him to his face. Once or twice he spanked me, but I do not remember anything other than poetry, Hungarian, and music. Poetry my father crushed to sand, sifting its melodies over my body at bedtime in stories loud and long and full of characters. Clutched against my heart, my teddy bear Apu and I would journey through forests and deserts and jungles and back, conducted safely along my father’s imagined freeways, directed by bilingual road signs. Apu, whose name translates to the man who raised me: daddy. I met them on the same day, the day I was born, my tongue already learning two languages, two words with one meaning, two things with one name. Leány, he called me. “Girl” is what it means.

3

His father having died, my father saved the women of his family from Soviet soldiers who looted their apartment complex. As the soldiers ascended the stairs, my father’s mother, aunts, and sister hid in boxes and closets, but nothing could muffle the crescendo of kicked-down doors and broken glass, of screams from the first, second, and third floors’ women begging not to be invaded. From her hiding place, my father’s mother told him, “Go get your cello!” and he did. She told him, “Play Russian folk songs!” and he did, as they burst through the door. Hearing him play the songs of their homeland, the soldiers fell to their knees. They cried and provided my family with rations, as if Russia were under their feet and not Hungary. As if my father had invited them in, and, as good houseguests, the soldiers bore gifts. When my father visited his old apartment building in the new century, its residents still remembered him as the savior of his family.

4

When I was growing up, my father told me I could not date until age thirty-five. That although he’d taken hayrides with girls growing up, they’d only held pinkies when they sat side by side. “And nothing but,” he said.

“But boys these days are not nearly as modest as I was.”

5

In Hungary, my father earned money as a recording artist for the state, playing in programs the broadcast station arranged for Radio Bartók. In 1950, he received a letter from the studio instructing him to meet the pianist Agi Rado, rehearse, and choose a program. Agi had recovered her career after losing her entire family in concentration camps during the war. She was the only one to return, and all that remained of her home was music. When she auditioned for the state artist program, the station’s windows were still blown out from the war. It was winter and freezing, but she was accepted. Six weeks after they met, she and my father were engaged.

“It seemed all very romantic,” she recalls.

The two kept a pet parakeet. Agi says it was the most important member of the family, trained to tell them, “Misi, Agi, practice. Misi, Agi, practice.

“Misi, Agi, you are a crazy bird. “Caw!”

6

My father and Agi’s apartment was in the middle of a busy boulevard. When Soviet tanks arrived in Hungary to put down the Revolution, they shot at every building their vehicles passed. My father’s one window became a gaping hole, so the couple took shelter in a neighbor’s basement. “Ours was on one side of the circle and his was on the other,” says Agi. “And in the middle, the tanks.” Before they left their shelled apartment, my father tucked their bird inside his coat’s breast pocket. He carried its cage across the crumbling square and into what Agi calls the “shooting time.”

7

Agi secured performance visas for herself and my father, and they left by train for Vienna on December 5th, 1956. The station was packed with bodies trying to escape. The train itself was overrun, as anxious civilians, police, and Soviet soldiers swarmed the platform. Those without visas were pulled from the train through its windows. Between the Hungarian drop-off and the Austrian border, there were five kilometers of border territory. Everyone crossed it on foot, “right out in the open,” says Agi, “where anybody could shoot us.” They left the bird behind. My father carried his state-issued cello on his back, in keeping with the story that he and Agi were to play a concert, but when they made it to the other side of the border, Austrian officials instructed them in their new identities: “You are not musicians,” they said.

“You are refugees.”

8

The U.S. helped Hungarian refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom fled the curtain tightening around them, packing camps first in Austria, then spilling into embassies across Western Europe. After a broadcast with Radio Vienna, my father and Agi traveled to Munich, where their reputations secured them room on a plane bound for America. The aircraft they took was an ancient Army propeller plane. It lost an engine shortly after departing from Frankfurt and made an emergency landing in the volcanic Azores Islands. Once over the ocean, the refugees onboard were told to compose their last wills and testaments and instructed in the uses of shark repellent. Each passenger received a packet of the powder, “in case we ditched,” Agi says. My father wretched the whole way.

9

My father and Agi were brought to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, the largest processing camp of American soldiers deployed to fight the Axis powers in World War II. Eisenhower returned it to active status to accept my father and some 30,000 of his countrymen, moved by their country’s lost fight for democracy to strive for the Land of the Free itself. They were held for three days, then released to their sponsor, the already established Hungarian cellist, Janos Starker, who was then principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony and had been my father’s first cello teacher in Budapest. My father’s first job in the United States came a week after moving to Chicago, when the Dallas Symphony called Starker with a question. The first cellist of the Dallas Symphony had tragically lost an arm to cancer; this became my father’s lucky break. It was the height of international response to the events in Hungary, and the vacant seat in Dallas was reserved for a Hungarian refugee. The symphony called Starker to ask if he knew of one. “Here, I have one on my couch!” he cried and promptly offered my father.

10

My father learned English studying soap operas and hearing the lyrics of Texas, Li’l Darlin’, the first program he played in Dallas. In his mouth, the melodies of words would sing, and in the singing translate to something other than they meant before. “New Citizens ‘Sing’ Freedom’s Song,” reads the headline from the Pittsburgh Press, March 23, 1962, the day my father and Agi swore their new allegiance. Above the headline, the couple smiles, wrapped in stars and stripes. That same year, they moved to Baltimore, where my father was made first chair of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for forty years before retiring with the title Principal Cellist Emeritus.

11

Between the occupation and the revolution, their immigration and their naturalization, my father and Agi carted all they held between them in the cargo of trains, planes, boats, and buses, through camps, hotels, closets, and couches; they moved through countless homes in the quest to have their voices heard. By the time they reached their final destination, all their bags were empty. Agi left. Baltimore would see three more of my father’s marriages built and broken and all three of his children born: one boy each from his second and third, and me from his final and fourth. Although his love stories remain unfinished, unending symphonies—Mozart’s Requiem—his life’s story binds us all.

12

PART TWO My father bought a house near Johns Hopkins University, which all three of his children called home: a white stucco, two-story, Spanish-style, single-family construction, with planters beneath each front-facing window. Unruly azaleas bloomed in our front yard, their pink and white blossoms assaulting the large living room window. I loved those flowers growing up. No matter how many I cut to put in cups around our house or in crowns upon my head, their population always bloomed back in self-righteous survival.

13

In 1968, my father returned the state-issued cello he’d left with to Hungary. Afterward, he began to play again in Eastern Europe and Budapest. From that point on, he became fond of saying that when he went back to Hungary, he went home. That when he returned to America, he came home. My visits to Hungary are remembered mainly through items we brought back: embroidered curtains and blouses, yards of Csipke lace, five dining sets of hand-painted Herend china. I remember the sweet smell of ice cream ripened by filth along the street as we walked back to my aunt’s apartment from a playground nearby, and that the milk cartons had to be cut open to get what was inside. My father brought his family back American clothes, games, appliances, and souvenirs, but by the time I was born it was no longer necessary. The apartment was inundated with the tokens of his success.

14

In 1972, my father recorded his solo sonata for cello with the British Broadcasting Corp., his song made manifest by dream, his dream broadcast for thousands. He translated his homeland for foreign ears, and made of foreign lands new homes. My brothers have called me BBC since before I can remember. “I love you, BBC,” they say, and I always reveled in the association.

15

In 1985, my father was featured in the Baltimore Sun’s Food section. “There is nothing too difficult to cooking a Hungarian meal,” he said. “I seldom use a cookbook because I like to improvise. I don’t think anything ever tastes the same with my food. Always a little bit more of this, less of that.” The reporter noted that this “love of variety” carried over into my father’s compositions. “I’ve always felt that 20th Century music in a way has brought back Babylon, in which the composers speak many different languages,” my father responded. “I like to speak of my music as being in several languages, and that’s the truth.”

16

From every city that my father toured, he told me there were only two houses. He would ask me over the phone—

“Leány, how many houses did I see in New York?” And I’d say, “Two, daddy.” He would ask me, “How many in London?” And I’d say, “Two, too!” In Seoul, I knew: “Only two!”

It was something he could always ask in a few minutes from the other side of the world, so that although he was only waking and I turning to sleep, we were together, our own two houses connected by a wire.

17

Of the cello my father said that it possessed “a magical middle range that has the power of the human voice.” It possessed him, his second voice, the one his wives would say spoke purely from his heart. One that sang beautifully. One that never lied.

18

At night I’d hear my parents practicing downstairs from my childhood room above, where I lay tucked taut beneath bed sheets, my door cracked just enough for the hallway’s light to limn a narrow strip across my ceiling. I imagined my ancestors walked to me at night, beckoned by music and light-guided by this slender path from heaven. They came to listen—

He on cello: two necks nestled close together, his thick with cologne. The fingers of his left hand wrapped around it, pressing points to summon deep, sweet tones. Its wooden shoulders rested on his chest, well-crafted curves within a warm embrace. My mother sat next to him, on keys both black and white.

This their union echoed up the stairs and through the hall, to entertain my ancestors in their sky box seats and fall upon me in my dreams.

19

My father loved baseball, and from his lap I watched Baltimore’s orange and black birds, cradled in his arms in his blue reclining chair. We made up cheers—Get it right! Pitch a strike!—broadcasts before bedtime brewed in dreams, coloring fairytales the Orioles Way: “work fast, change speeds, and throw strikes.” In 1991, a commercial aired locally for Baltimore’s Other Major League Team. In it, a man proclaims, “They’re one of the best teams playing today!” and I see my father’s fingers, frantic in their feats of sound. He wears a penguin suit.

20

My father liked driving big, American-made cars. “Boats,” he called them with admiration, like those that brought the tired, the poor, and huddled masses across Atlantic ocean waves long before and after he flew over them himself. While I was growing up, my father owned a midnight blue Chevy Caprice bought the year before I was born. When he picked me up in it, he always arrived early to sit inside it, docked, awaiting my embarking.

21

Once, I won a school-wide fundraising competition by taking all my candy to the symphony hall and selling out, thanks to my father’s pressure on his tuxedo-clad colleagues. “Buy some chocolate from my daughter,” he didn’t even ask. “Go on.” For winning, a long black limo picked me up from school one day instead of his Chevy. It drove me strip-lighted all the way to Memorial Stadium, home of the Orioles, and I met one. Though I have since lost the ball the bird signed for me, and with it his name, I remember thanking my father profusely for making it all possible.

22

At Christmas and Thanksgiving my father cooked—

First course: cold cherry soup, with eleven secret spices. “But never the same eleven!” he said with pride. Second: chicken paprikás cooked in a deep pot, with chopped green peppers and white onion sautéed first in hot red paprika—Hungarian colors. Then the chicken, browned on its bones and drowned in water, boiled, and left to simmer for an hour. The flavors circulated. Often, my father served this stew on a mound of German spaetzle, overcooked, for good measure. Third: Hungarian hamburger, the meat mixed with bread and onion—a dish for the sons and daughters of immigrants with first generation tastes. And dessert: of poppy seeds swaddled in dough, baked bégli. When sliced, their gooey black insides spiraled alongside flaky white dough. Each piece either stuck or crumbled, always without warning.

23

When I was three, my father fell asleep watching baseball in his blue reclining chair. I climbed from his lap, walked out of our house and crossed Charles, “the busiest street in Baltimore.” The alarm must have sounded when I left, but my father didn’t hear it. He didn’t follow.

24

When it opened its doors to newcomers in 1979, my father turned his Chevy toward a new Atlantic, a city shored up by house odds. On weeknights he steered his boat from the concert hall to the casino to invest. The ledgers at his own home grew imbalanced, and he stopped inviting friends along when he went. They exist, the stories of basements thick with smoke that my brothers sat outside of, waiting in the car all night for my father to emerge; threats of broken fingers paying debts; the remains of broken contracts of every kind. In 1985, my father sold his 17th Century Montagnana cello to pay off gambling debts. When I was five, he sold its replacement. I don’t remember, but I’m told I started asking where my father was at night.

25

In 1995, I wrote a paper for school about my father’s homeland. Across the top, I drew the familiar configuration of its red, white, and green flag. It was the first D I ever received. When my teacher returned it to me, I realized I’d reversed the colors on the flag. Where green should have been, red was. Rather than asking for my father’s help to fix it, I crumpled the evidence of my confusion and threw it in the garbage.

26

One day my father brought me home early from a friend’s house. He acted as if nothing were out of the ordinary when we approached the front door. He turned the key, and as the door clicked open, the familiar single beep of our security alarm sounded. But before I stepped inside, I could sense my mother’s absence in our own rooms’ half-emptiness.

“Someone stole our second piano!” I cried out. “No,” my father said, “Your mother left you. She has taken her piano, and left

you here behind.” Later, when told that I could choose which house was home, I chose my mother’s. When I visited my father’s house afterward, no ancestors danced on my ceiling, for my door was shut against him. No poetry played before bedtime, and no music colored my dreams.

27

The last summer I spent in Budapest, The Lion King was released. I had grown fond of pronouncing Mufasa’s name with all of the wonder that the mystic Rafiki used to conjure him, Simba’s lost father, back from the dead. I would say his name, and extend the magic further—Mu-Fassssah. It sounded like Hungarian for ‘my father’ to my little girl ears, and I loved invoking it. Within hours of my arrival that summer, my nagymama grew enraged—fasz, a curse in Hungarian. I had been calling my father, Mufasa: fasz, dick, a, his. He was ordered to subdue me, but I could not believe the name signified anything other than I originally knew. I repeated the offense, louder.

28

In the spring, my grandmother died, and afterward our visits to Budapest ceased. The night after my father learned of his mother’s death, he was scheduled to play the protagonist in Strauss’ Don Quixote with the Baltimore Symphony. He dedicated the performance to her memory. “Always a persuasive Quixote,” said a reviewer for the Sun, “Virizlay on this occasion was nothing less that heartbreaking in the mad knight’s vision of Dulcinea and, particularly, in Quixote’s death scene, which concludes the work.”

29

Although the cello spoke often on behalf of my father’s heart, it could not help him when it failed. So while he watched me watch a baseball game, clogged vessels clouded his mind and sedated him to dreamless sleep, just as doctors would do later. The year his mother died, they cut his chest in two. Afterward, a gold chain traced the mark, two charms twinkling at its end, hanging in the hollow at the base of his sternum: a sterling silver giraffe that he bought me at the zoo, which I returned to him for good luck before the surgery, and one bright, yellow circle, which marked the day that opened him, which turned him from whole sum to moveable parts—body collage in coronary red. It was the first of my father’s scars that I would see. He told me it meant that he was healed. But the charm for luck hung dull and inverted beside the shiny disc, which marked his heart as broken. Other parts soon followed.

30

I do not remember this— My mother brought me to visit my father in the hospital after his surgery. She was trying to avoid seeing him, so I went in alone. When it was time for me to go, he wouldn’t let me. He held on so tightly that the nurse had to ask my mother for help. When she freed me from his grip, he followed us down the hall, his intravenous drip dragging behind. We waited for the elevator as he shouted for us not to go. “You’re going to kill me,” he called after my mother and me. “You’re going to kill me,” he said. “I’ll have a heart attack!”

31

The summer following my father’s surgery, I was sent to camp. I saw myself what nature holds in shadows cast by age old trees whose newborn leaves die every season. Trees know of loss and how to cope; each year’s spring they sprout new green, forgetting the old ones burnt by summer’s heat, loosed by autumn’s wedge, and cut by winter’s cold, sharp edge. I was told to gather leaves. I did, the ones I wanted torn early from their branches, still green. I laid them to rest in a marble mortar and crushed them there with wooden pestle. Eager sap poured out from a makeshift siphon, and I squeezed. I pressed the leaves to pulp. Added water and spread the mixture atop canvases of wire mesh, all the parts of tree before me, but still the sum stopped short of whole. Ages passed overnight and turned my cyborg seedling to sheets, blank and flattened. I peeled and cut and bound them into books and wrote fairytales upon my little leaves to cover them again in meaning. My parents played a concert that summer, outside under shade of trees. They spread flat before me, a tableau of mother and father, a music box with tiny dancers fixed but twirling—I do not remember this.

32

What I remember is afterward, saying goodbye to friends. One of them asked me while looking at my parents—was I adopted? “No,” I answered resolutely. My friend looked past my brown eyes and saw my long dark shadow cast in moonlight, reaching toward my parents where they stood in full lunar illumination. My parents—green-eyed and blue—bright figures. I could not see the forest for their trees. This same friend later asked me if I knew how to kiss my elbow. We spun around in circles trying until the efforts knotted our spines. We unwound ourselves on the tire swing, coiling its tether tightly and leaning our heads back in ecstasy as it whipped us around and around until its ropes again hung straight and loose. Then we got up, twisted, and tried to kiss ourselves again.

33

My father taught me that the three most important things in life are love, children, and music. He told me, too, to always remember to Love, Like, Listen, Learn, Laugh—the five Ls, a childhood refrain. A nursery rhyme I practiced on the way to school. My father taught me all five Ls, but I was left alone to learn the sixth.

34

PART THREE When I was thirteen, my mother told me that the man who raised me is not my biological father. He learned on the day I was born, but we never spoke of it. This is what he did: in the hospital gift shop, my father bought me a teddy bear, named him daddy, and laid him in my crib. I held Apu against me every night until one day, I grew too old for teddy bears.

35

My brothers learned Hungarian growing up, though my father never taught me much beyond apu. The father’s language to the father’s sons, a language which when translated has trouble distinguishing between he and she—she, me. He, them. Through careful study I have come to share in teasing out Hungarian’s guttural affect, which rumbles and soars through glottal stops and sung vowels, which hollows the whole mouth and sends sounds crashing just to hear the echoes. Loud and boisterous, it riots; it sounds and sounds again for the sake of making noise, not meaning—

Choke them csókolom! (I kiss you!) A hodge podge hogy vagy? (How are you?) A secret szeretlek kiss kislány. (I love you, little girl.) All of us olvas are sure to a sorok curse it között. (Read between the lines.)

36

Once my brother Stefan told me that one day while driving, my father was cut off by a black woman in Baltimore. My young brother in the car heard him christen her— “Black. Bitch. Cunt.” My brother calls me BBC. He has, since before I can remember. “I love you, BBC,” he says.

37

My father crashed Caprice when I was thirteen, while exiting an automated car wash. The accelerator stuck, and we swung into the street. He jerked the wheel and popped a U-y into a parked car. Its door fell off. This was my last ride in my father’s dreamboat.

38

Once, I asked my father if he’d really been so innocent growing up. “You held her pinky,” I said, “and nothing but?” “OK,” he confessed. “We were necking!” When I turned sixteen, he asked me why I did not have a boyfriend.

39

“I’d like to say a couple of words before we play this piece.” It is Sunday, January 26, 2003, and I am sitting in Johns Hopkins’ Turner Auditorium, one seat from the aisle, where my father sits beside me. It is the Medical Institutions’ Office of Cultural Affairs 25th anniversary concert. I have been here before but will not be again. “This is a piece by Mihaly Virizlay, affectionately known as Me-She around Baltimore. It’s one of his many engaging compositions. Throughout the years, Misi has played in this hall many, many times. Trio repertoire, quartet repertoire. He’s played recitals with piano, so throughout the 25 years of cultural affairs here, Misi has been a very integral part of it. Today his piece, The Emperor’s New Clothes…” I stop listening to the introduction; I know the story. I attempt to narrow my shoulders enough not to touch my father’s arm resting next to me. He has lost some weight, making this easier. The silver cane he’s needed to walk since suffering a small stroke less than a year ago rests against the seat in front of him. I stare at it. It has been eight years since my parents’ separation, but my mother sits dutifully on my other side, listening. I lean into her. A gong sounds, clearing space for my father’s communal fantasy—

40

At our weekly dinners, my father would lay his palm open on the table, begging for me to hold it. It would start to tremble and the longer I took to grasp it, the more it would shake, until the flatware chimed against the hollowware, and I took his hand just to make it stop.

41

Memorial Stadium, otherwise known as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum,” was demolished in 2001 so Baltimore could build a new ballpark. My father filed for bankruptcy in 1993 but made it some years longer than the Orioles before he also said goodbye to home.

42

In baseball, superstition runs deep, like lucky socks lost in the washer losing games, or connecting rhymes to time like bats to baseballs—and baseball runs deep in my veins. When I look over the Orioles’ record and my father’s life, I see they spiraled in the same directions—seeds of success planted in a new home, eager denizens of Baltimore just playing the game. In what are called their Glory Years—the two decades that spanned Vietnam, disco, and AIDS—the O’s and my father exemplified their ethic: “perfect practice makes perfect!” But every O’s game I went to was rained out, and I began to wonder whether a cloud hangs over my love for them full of the fact that my daddy fell asleep watching a game, watching me. Because that’s when it started—the losses, the player’s strike, the impasse, in the backs of tour buses and basements. Key players traded away for unproven prospects. From 1995 to 1997, three years of dubious triumph. There’s something about attendance that’s important, and the Yankees. Individual success trumped by bad calls—a bypass, a trade, a fall in the nightcap. The O’s last reached the postseason in 1997, which in both their history and my father’s was the last year before the beginning of a downturn. Retired in a ceremony. Downfall. The Orioles, in the year my father died, finished last for the first time since the year I was born.

43

I first saw my father lose control over the middle digit of his fingering hand, so often thrown up joyously between its neighbors—read between the lines!—making meaning through the obfuscation of intention. Slowly, the smallest, darkest, purple night descended on its tip, a universe swirling, shifting color on his finger’s nimble pad. He began to leak out of himself. The digit itself was bruised then bandaged. Gingerly, he placed its pink plastic flesh against his cello’s taught gut string, pressed down, and cried out in pain.

44

His bowing arm followed, clutching crutch. I remember the care with which he stepped, his toes by then with fungus overgrown, chapped and elephantine. There was a day he lifted his crutch above his head, triumphant—a return from hospital, alive! Renewed! Fall breezes warmed for his parade up Hadley Square. Only, the night swelled up again—

45

I dreamed my father lost it all while driving in his Chevy on a black-tarred road I recognized as one that wound back to our home from the freeway, its white, wood pylons spaced too far apart and too close to the edge of the drop-off they bordered. I watched my father’s body fall limp, his voice depart, the swerve of steering wheel, and strike of guardrail. The slow turning over of steel, and heat combusting into flame. I watched him die inside my dreams and cried aloud when I awoke.

46

He is lying on the bed moaning and the nurses tell me that they need me. He’s looking at me with eyes wide, bewildered, betraying his confusion at being reduced to this state. I’m holding him in my arms, gripping his face tightly like the nurse told me to. His eyes shift to avoid me as I move closer. My cheek now on his head, holding it still, my arms around his ears. “It’s OK, Daddy. It’s going to be OK.” I stroke his hair, sweaty, smelling of sick. I turn my head when tears come so they fall where he cannot see. But I cannot stop them. I know he is dying, and that a part of me is glad. There is a part of me dying, the part I don’t understand. A part I want to let go of but am told to hold on to.

47

His words are trapped inside. His right arm lies petrified, and his mouth hangs open like a dying carp’s. I can hear his heart beating within it. Escaping sometimes through the gills, a caw!—raw, animalistic rejection, with no words to tame it. He lifts his left hand near his end, in final salute to the nurses— Olvas a sorok között!

48

When I visit my father in his new nursing home, staffed with women to feed him, bathe and change his body, and trim his hair and toenails with quotidian care and procedural love, I bring his daughter’s voice full of poetry so we will both have someone to talk to.

49

When the title of the house at 3904 Hadley Square West was transferred to my name so my father could qualify for Medicare, I realized that, in fact, the house I grew up in was this: orphaned, gutted, refurbished, repurposed, inevitable purgatory, the nursing home in which my father stayed trapped inside himself for three long years. On visits, I stared at photos of my father goofing off with his friends, frozen laughing in the past. Despite persistent study, I stopped remembering how he really used to look.

50

When I noticed my father’s teeth had disappeared—where did they go?—my father was emptied of fight. What remained: a red, gaping hole unable to hold. Out, my father flew, and with him went his voice, his mind, his body, and dreams. His poetry, Hungarian, and music.

51

“Where are you from?” a stranger stops to ask me. I’m walking along 39th Street, shortly after moving back into my father’s house to be nearer to his nursing care. I am caught off guard, and blurt my answer out—“Me?” I ask. “I’m from around here.”

52

We put the house on Hadley Square up for sale the year my father died. It had become too expensive to keep.

53

PART FOUR In my beginning, speech gurgled up uncorrupt but incomprehensible—na-bana, han-gerber, ta-pato. Apu. With tongues confused my words reversed, but in first grade I still received high marks in language. My mechanics were at 96 percent, my expression over 99. Combined the scores said I was better than 98 percent of my peers at navigating was the test called “Total Language.” The year my mother left, my tongue tharted thlipping theeking s. Finding t, it landed: lithp. In second grade I spent recess in speech therapy. I went for the lisp and to re-wire my word reversals. In fourth grade, my mechanics were at 99 percent and my expression, 94. It makes me wonder, what is the exchange rate of speech therapy? Withdraw: flop-flipping and lithpth and leave a depository for—

54

TO LIANNA proclaims a blank sheet of staff paper in my father’s scrawling hand. I turn the page to a short composition. The notes dot across the page, measured. An epigraph instructs the musician to play in “solemn celebration.” There is a companion piece—a tripping three page march composed “with love” for my brothers, long before I was born.

55

The hallways I walked through to meet the speech therapist appeared in nightmares I would have. They were always still, deserted, and in the silence I could hear I was safe from the monster I’d come there to hide from. I let the empty hallways walk me back to waking.

56

It is my brother Stefan who invokes our father’s nickname Misi with the skipping word-reversal She-me me-she, Me-she, she-me, so I imagine our voices all are more enmeshed than we might think, and that meaning lies especially where we listen for it. I’ve told myself my father’s story over and over, like practicing tongue twisters to perfection. But in the memorization, memory’s meaning is fixed. I mean to break it, like Sally sold her seashells to surf everyday.

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My father was born in 1931 in a village called Kispest—kis-, meaning little—its name alone suggesting humble beginnings. When he was four, my father started learning violin from his father. At six, his mother brought him to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest to begin his formal studies. Upon arriving, he faced a room full of violinists, so he promptly switched to the cello. “I liked the idea that I could sit to play,” he liked to say. The opportunism served him well. By age eight he was playing solo recitals, and at twelve: planning for his European debut.

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When he was old enough to make the trip from his village to the city without his mother’s company, my father saved what money he could on fare by hitching rides in the backs of hay trucks, leaping blindly into their beds, grateful when a load of hay would greet him and not a hardened floor. Once, he was discovered by a farmer who admonished—

“It was just this morning that I took out all the pitchforks.”

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My father’s motion sickness was legendary. He started playing poker in the backs of tour buses to distract himself from feeling sick. His friends remember that it didn’t matter what hand he held—he played it. They guessed he wanted to see how it all would end. When he was twelve, my father got caught throwing dice in a dirt alley for a few extra coins. His father used hands, not words, to dissuade him from the habit. It is a story I never heard my father tell, and the less he said about it, the more I learned its lesson.

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The sickness had been with him since he started dating. On his first date with one girl, they went to the County Fair. At the end of the night, she wanted to go to the top of the Ferris wheel. My father obliged, but by the time they reached the top, her dress was completely ruined. “Needless to say,” my father said, “I never saw a second date.”

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My father’s father died during World War II, though he was not a soldier. A violinist at heart, he was an electrician by trade. It was the only job he could find during the war, so he spent his days occupied with wires, not strings. He died from infection after an appendectomy that in the end, itself was unnecessary. Diagnosed first with appendicitis, the doctors realized only after the surgery that his pain was caused by kidney stones. The hospital had no penicillin to offer once the infection set in. My father said that experiencing his father’s death at such an early age affected him dramatically.

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At the Academy, my father trained with Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, whose nationalist theories on music education taught a generation of Hungarian artists how to speak a second native language. In mid-October 1956, my father and Agi attended a performance of Kodály’s Choral Works. The most recent was Hymn of Zrinyi, inspired by the writings of a 16th century Hungarian poet and national leader of the same name. Its conclusion rings out in a hopeful nine-part, D-major chord. “At the end, the audience was screaming,” Agi remembers. “It was a few days later that the Revolution started.”

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Hope remained for the Revolution, until the sound waves were seized. Radio Free Europe, long considered to be the international voice of U.S. ideals, had been blasting anti-communist rhetoric across Budapest and beyond from at least 1950 well into the uprising, when it became a voice for the revolutionary cause. Its broadcasts promised Western aid and built up democratic hopes, which plummeted when Moscow received word directly from President Eisenhower’s mouth that the U.S. would not aid the Hungarian rebels’ cause. On November 3rd, an RFE broadcast over loudspeakers in the city’s squares encouraged freedom fighters to stand firm. On the 4th, tanks opened the ground beneath them. Survivors say they kept resisting until they heard radio silence.

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There’s an old saying in Hungary that if there are 10 million people, there are 11 million musicians—they all trained at the Franz Liszt Academy. Many, like my father and Starker, had trained under Kodály, and their nationalistic ties were tight, if frayed. As Hungary herself splintered war after war after occupation, her people used music to be heard. My father said he threw paving stones and Molotov cocktails in support of the Revolution, which broke out on October 23, 1956. He had already received his Artist’s Diploma and graduated from the Academy. Kodály had recently asked him to make recordings of two compositions, and my father wrote later of his lasting regret that “the October political events put a halt to the recording.

“I left Hungary shortly thereafter.”

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It was Agi’s dream to leave. She says it was the dream of all Europeans. She looked out over the city when its Revolution ended and saw only ruins. She convinced my father to go to America, “the wondrous country where everything grows on trees, and you just have to pick it up, and it’s gold.” She told me she thought there would be no more music in Hungary.

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On a tour of Albania before he left home behind for freedom, my father performed at a gala in Tirana, which was attended by the premier and a large number of soldiers. During an encore, he looked up to find several soldiers arguing and gesticulating wildly. As he played, he watched them erupt into a full-scale brawl. He thought about leaving the stage, but stayed. When he finished playing, the soldiers lunged toward him. My father grabbed his cello and managed to outrun them. Only later, when the manager of the theater caught up with him, did he learn that the rival garrisons were fighting to determine which would carry him out on their shoulders. My father said he never played a concert that could match the Albanian Success.

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The first time my father returned to Hungary in August 1968, he took his family sightseeing near Hungary’s border with Czechoslovakia. As they approached it, a soldier stepped out and told them to stop, rifle at the ready. My father had already returned his cello to the state, but he sweated while stopped at the check point. They waited, and he watched as the Red Army spread its way north from his country into another. When the tanks had all passed through, my father was free to go.

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While I was growing up, my father rarely talked about his revolution. Instead, he told me fairytales—stories small enough for bedtime, but big enough for dreams. Stories where soldiers fought for music, not to stop it.

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Acknowledgements

Deep thanks to my family and my father’s family, from Little Pest to Baltimore,

Britain to Chicago. Thanks also and especially to Mady Schutzman and her MFA Thesis

Workshop, Doug Kearney, Maggie Nelson, Tisa Bryant, Jen Hofer, and my cohorts at

CalArts. This piece is dedicated to Agi Rado and the late Janos Starker, without whom I

would never have inherited my father’s story, and to my mother Robin Kissinger, who

helped me find my way to tell it.