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She Said Budapest.

March 31, 2017 by Exangel

by Laura Roman.

 

She said “Budapest.”

The way she said it made me take notice.

I was in a cafe, inadvertently eavesdropping, when I heard her say “Budapest.”

She said it incorrectly, that woman in the cafe.

The “s” should have been “shhhhhh.”

She said “s” as in “sssssss” and it conjured up my Hungarian grandmother and her stories of snake dreams.

It was the only time my grandmother purposely mispronounced the “s” in her mother tongue. She wanted to emphasize the dreams as warnings, signs of an imminent betrayal.

II

She had been married to a young Hungarian veterinary surgeon, my grandfather, at their families’ plotting. Behind them was the weight of history. She bore two sons, one after the next, in 1941 and 1942, with World War II raging all around them.

He did what he wanted, my grandfather. My grandmother would return home to find she had been locked out until he had finished with the servants.

“Sóhaj, there are no problems. People create problems,” she said.

And so she waited.

In the late 1940s of post WWII, they were living in Southern Hungary, when the borders shifted, and they suddenly found themselves in Communist Yugoslavia. Elizabeth’s husband, the veterinary surgeon, had a lucrative private practice there. The Communists told him they would not tolerate private enterprise and gave him the choice of joining the Communist party and working for the state, or getting out of Yugoslavia, since they were not citizens. Elizabeth rescued Andrew from being lined up against a wall to be shot, by pleading with the Communist Commissar’s girlfriend to intercede.

Elizabeth formed an ambitious goal – to emigrate with her family to the US. She motivated her husband to bribe the Communist officials to issue them an exit visa. In the spring of 1950, the family took a train from Belgrade to Trieste, Italy, where they lived in a Quonset hut in a Camp for Displaced Persons. They couldn’t get a visa to the US, but they did get one to Canada. Andrew went ahead several months to set up a household in Ontario, and later that year, Elizabeth and her two young sons traveled by train to Aurich, Germany, and lived in a refugee camp staging area. From there, they sailed from the German port of Bremerhaven to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax they took the train to Ontario, arriving in Canada October 1950. There, Elizabeth and her husband worked in the Bata shoe factory, owned by another European immigrant. My grandfather was unable to practice medicine.

My grandmother learned English in night school. After several years, the family finally received their immigration papers to the US, and moved to Fitchburg, MA, just outside of Boston. “Women have rights in America,” she said. My grandmother filed for divorce. She packed up her boys and moved to California, where for 25 years, she was a successful realtor in Beverly Hills.

Her husband, blindsided, eventually returned to Budapest, and then Prague, where he died alone.

III

My grandmother was a conjuror. That conjuring was the antidote to betrayal, which she said ran deep in our veins. Hundreds of years of betrayal meant that our blood was a kind of magnet for deception.

“Meg foglak védeni.”

“I will protect you,” she said.

She said that death is a myth – that you just need to learn a new mode of communication.

I would know by my dreams she said.

Of when the snake was coming to visit.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Now., Spring 2017: If Not Then

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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