Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Gabor

“THIS IS GABOR,” SAID MY father in a solemn, rehearsed, slightly wavering voice.

This was early in 1957. The war was still then quite fresh in the memory — even of those, like myself, who were born after it. Most households seemed to have framed photographs of figures in uniform, younger Dads, jauntily posed astride gun barrels, sitting on wings. Across the asphalt playground of my County Primary School the tireless struggle between English and Germans was regularly enacted. This was the only war, and its mythology ousted other, lesser intrusions into peace. I was too young to be aware of Korea. Then there was Suez, and Hungary.

“Gabor, this is Mrs. Everett,” continued my father, enunciating slowly, “Roger’s Mummy. And this is Roger.”

Gabor was a lanky, dark-haired boy. He was dressed in a worn black jacket, a navy blue jumper, grey shorts, long grey socks and black shoes. Only the jacket and limp haversack, which he held in one hand, looked as if they were his. He had a thick, pale, straight-sided face, dark, horizontal eyes and a heavy mouth. Above his upper lip — I found this remarkable because he was only my age — was a crescent of gossamer, blackish hairs, like a faint moustache.

“Hello,” said my mother. Poised in the doorway, a fixed smile on her face, she was not at all clear what was to be done on occasions like this — whether motherly hugs or formality were required. She had half expected to be ready with blankets and soup.

Father and the newcomer stood pathetically immobile on the doorstep.

“Hello Gabor,” I said. One adult custom which seemed to me, for once, eminently practical, and vindicated by moments like this, was to shake hands. I reached out and took the visitor’s wrist. Gabor went a salmony colour under his pale skin and spoke, for the first time, something incomprehensible. Mother and Father beamed benignly.

Gabor was a refugee from Budapest.

He was largely Father’s doing. As I see it now, he was the sort of ideal foster-child he had always wanted; the answer to his forlorn, lugubrious, strangely martyrish prayers. Father had been an infantry officer during the war. He had been in North Africa and Normandy and at the liberation of concentration camps. He had seen almost all his friends killed around him. These experiences had given him the sense that suffering was the reality of life and that he had, in its presence, a peculiarly privileged understanding and power to reassure. Peace was for him a brittle veneer. He was not happy with his steady job in marine insurance, with the welfare state blandishments of those post-ration years. The contentments of fatherhood were equivocal. Now, as I look back, I see him waiting, watching over me, the corners of his stern mouth melancholically down-turned, waiting for me to encounter pain, grief, to discover that the world was not the sunny playground I thought it to be; so that he could bestow on me at last — with love I am sure — the benefits of his own experience, of his sorrow and strength, the large, tobaccoey palms of his protection.

I must have hurt him. While he lived with his war-time ghosts, I was Richard Todd as Guy Gibson, with an RT mask made from my cupped hand, skimming ecstatically over our back lawn to bomb the Möhne Dam; or Kenneth More as Douglas Bader, cheerily cannonading the Luftwaffe.

Father scanned the newspapers. At headlines of trouble and disaster he looked wise. When the news broke of the uprising in Hungary and its suppression, and later the stories of orphaned Hungarian children of my generation coming to our shores, who needed to be found homes, he acquired a new mission in life.

I did not take kindly to Gabor’s arrival. Though he was not a proper adoption and was to be with us at first only on what the authorities called a “trial basis,” I was envious of him as as substitute child — a replacement for myself. A minor war, of a kind unenvisaged, between England and Hungary, might have ensued in our house. But I saw how — from the very start — I had a facility with Gabor which my parents did not, and the pride I derived from this checked my resentment. Besides, Gabor had the appeal of someone who — like my father — had lived through real bloodshed and conflict, though in his case the experience was of the present, not of the past, and belonged moreover to a boy my own age. Perhaps — unlike my father — he would share in, and enhance, the flavour of my war games.

Should this happen it would assuage another long-standing grievance against my father. I could not understand why, seasoned veteran as he was, he did not participate in, at least smile on, my imaginary battles. I began to regard him as a bad sport and — more serious — to doubt his own quite authentic credentials. I tried to see in my father the features of my cinema heroes but failed to do so. He lacked their sunburned cragginess or devilmay-care nonchalance. His own face was pasty, almost clerical. Consequently I suspected that his real exploits in the war (which I had only heard about vaguely) were lies.

The first lesson in English manners I taught Gabor was how to shoot Germans.

When I reflect on this, it was remarkable that he grasped what was required of him. Not only did he scarcely know a word of English, but there was an historical difficulty. I had absolutely no knowledge of Hungary’s role in the Second World War (I was ignorant of its collaboration with the Nazis), which I took to be a national duel between England and Germany. Nonetheless, when the smoke from our bren guns or hand grenades had cleared, and I informed Gabor, after bravely reconnoitering, of another knocked out Panzer, another slaughtered infantry patrol, he would look up at me with implicit trust and grin, manically, jubilantly.

“Jó,” he would say. “Good, good.”

Father was horrified at the careless zeal with which Gabor took part in my games. He could not understand how a boy who had known real violence, whose own parents (for all we knew) had been brutally killed, could lend a part so blithely to these fantasies. Some impenetrable barrier — like a glass wall which gave to my father the forlorn qualities of a goldfish — existed for him between reality and illusion so that he could not cross from one to the other. But it was not just this that distressed him. He saw how Gabor looked to me and not to him, how when he returned from our forays at the end of the garden Gabor would follow me like a trusted commander; how, from the very beginning, that affinity which he had hoped to have with this child of suffering had eluded him. I often wondered how they had managed together on that first day, when father had gone up to “collect” Gabor, like some new purchase. I pictured them coming home, sitting mutely on opposite seats in the train compartment as they bounced through suburbia, like two lost souls.

“Gabor,” Father would say as he lit his cigarette after dinner, with the air of being about to make some vital announcement or to ask some searching question.

“Igen?” Gabor would say. “Yes?”

Father would open his lips and look into Gabor’s face, but something, some obstacle greater than that of language, would leave his words trapped.

“Nothing.”

“Yes?”

Gabor would go pink; his eyes would swivel in my direction.

Later, when Gabor had acquired a little more English, I asked him whether he liked my father. He gave a rambling, inarticulate answer, but I understood it to mean from the manner in which it was spoken that he was afraid of him. “Tell me about your own mother and father,” I asked. Gabor’s chin trembled, his lips twisted, his eyes went oily. For two days not even the prospect of Messerschmitts to be shot down persuaded him to smile.

Gabor went to my primary school with me. Except when he had special language tuition he was scarcely ever out of my company. He was an intelligent boy and after eighteen months his English was remarkably fluent. He had a way of sitting in the class with a sad expression on his face which made all the teachers fall for him. I alone knew he was not really sad. My closeness to Gabor gave me a superior standing among my English friends. Gabor would now and then mutter phrases in Hungarian because he knew this gave him a certain charisma; I would acquire even more charisma by casually translating them. In our newly-built brick school, with its grass verges and laburnums, its pictures of the Queen, maps of the Commonwealth and catkins in jam-jars, there was very little to disturb our lives. Only the eleven-plus hung, like a precipice, at the end of it all.

In the summer holidays Gabor and I would play till dark. At the end of our garden were the ramshackle plots of some old small holdings, and beyond that open fields and hedges sloping down to a road. These provided limitless scope for the waging of all types of warfare. We would scale the fence at the end of the garden, steal venturously past the tumbled sheds and smashed cucumber frames of the small holdings (still technically private property) and into the long grass beyond (later they built a housing estate over all this). At one point there was a sizeable crater in the ground, made by an actual flying-bomb in the war, filled with old paint cans and discarded prams. We would crouch in it and pretend we were being blown up; after each grisly death our bodies would be miraculously reconstituted. And everywhere, amongst the brambles and ground-ivy, there were little oddities, and discoveries, holes, tree-stumps, rusted tools, shattered porcelain, debris of former existences (I believed it was this ground-eye view of things which adults lacked), which gave to our patch of territory infinite imaginary depths.

A few impressions are sufficient to recapture that time: my mother’s thin wail, as if she herself were lost, coming to us from the garden fence as the dark gathered: “Roger! Gabor!”; Gabor’s hoarse breath as we stalked, watching for enemy snipers, through the undergrowth, and the sporadic accompaniment, as if we shared a code, of his Hungarian: “Menjünk! Megvárj!”; Father, trying to restrain his anger, his disappointment, as we trailed in finally through our back door. He would scan disapprovingly our sweaty frames. He would furrow his brows at me as if I was Gabor’s corruptor, and avoid Gabor’s eyes. He would not dare raise his voice or lay a finger on me because of Gabor’s presence. But even if Gabor had not been there he would have been afraid to use violence against me.

Father would not believe that Gabor was happy.

In the summer in which I waited with foreboding to hear the result of my eleven-plus, and Gabor also waited for his own fate to be sealed (he had not sat the exam, the education committee deciding he was a “special case”), something happened to distract us from our usual bellicose games. We had taken to ranging far into the field and to the slopes leading down to the road, from which, camouflaged by bushes or the tall grass, we would machine-gun passing cars. The July weather was fine. One day we saw the motor-bike — an old BSA model (its enemy insignia visible through imaginary field-glasses) — lying near the road by a clump of hawthorn. Then there was the man and the girl, coming up one of the chalk gulleys to where the slope flattened off — talking, disappearing and reappearing, as they drew level with us, behind the banks and troughs of grass, like swimmers behind waves. They dipped for some time behind one of the grass billows, then appeared again, returning. The man held the girl’s hand so she would not slip down the gulley. The girl drew her pleated skirt between her legs before mounting the pillion.

The motor-cycle appeared the next day at the same time, about five in the hot afternoon. Without saying anything to each other, we returned to the same vantage point the following day, and our attention turned from bombarding cars to stalking the man and the girl. On the fourth day we hid ourselves in a bed of ferns along the way the couple usually took, from which we could just see, through the fronds, a section of road, the top of the gulley and, in the other direction, at eye level, the waving ears of grass. Amongst the grass there were pink spears of willow herb. We heard the motor-bike, heard its engine cut, and saw the couple appear at the top of the gulley. The girl had a cotton skirt and a red blouse. The man wore a T-shirt with sweat at the arm-pits. They passed within a few feet of our look-out then settled some yards away in the grass. For a good while we saw just the tops of their heads or were aware of their presence only by the signs of movement in the taller stems of grass. Sounds of an indistinct and sometimes hectic kind reached us through the buzzing of bees and flies, the flutter of the breeze.

“Mi az?” whispered Gabor. “Mit csinálnak?” Something had made him forget his English.

After a silence we saw the girl sit up, her back towards us. Her shoulders were bare. She said something and laughed. She tilted her head back, shaking her dark hair, raising her face to the sun. Then, abruptly turning round and quite unwittingly smiling straight at us as if we had called her, she presented to us two white, sunlit, pink-flowered globes.

On the way back I suddenly realised that Gabor was trying not to cry. Bravely and wordlessly he was fighting back tears.

It so happened that that day was my parents’ wedding anniversary. Every July this occasion was observed with punctilious sentimentality. Father would buy, on his way home from work, a bottle of my mother’s favourite sweet white wine. My mother would cook “Steak au Poivre” or “Duck à l’Orange” and put on her organdie summer frock with bits of tulle around the neckline. They would eat. After the meal my father would wash up, sportingly wearing my mother’s frilled apron. If the evening was fine they would sit outside, as if on some colonial patio. My father would fetch the Martell. My mother would put on the gramophone so that its sound wafted through the open window, “Love is a Many Splendoured Thing” by Nat King Cole.

In previous years, given an early supper and packed off to bed, I had viewed this ritual from a distance, but now, perhaps for Gabor’s sake, we were allowed to partake. Solemnly we sipped our half-glasses of sweet wine; solemnly we watched my parents. Inside, we still crouched, eyes wide, amongst the ferns.

“Fifteen years ago,” Father explained to Gabor, “Roger’s mother and I were married. Wed-ding ann-i-versary,” he articulated slowly so that Gabor might learn the expression.

I looked at Gabor. He kept his head lowered towards the tablecloth. His eyes were dry but I could see that at any moment they might start to gush.

Mother and Father ate their steaks. Their cutlery snipped and scraped meticulously. “Gorgeous,” my father said after the second mouthful, “beautiful.” My mother blinked and drew back her lips obligingly. I noticed that, despite her puffy dress, her chest was quite flat.

Gabor caught my eyes. Some sorrow, some memory of which none of us knew, could no longer be contained. Father intercepted the glance and turned with sudden heed towards Gabor. For the first time that evening something like animation awoke in his eyes. I could imagine him, in a moment or so, pushing aside the remainder of his steak, rejecting with a knitting of his brows the bottle of Barsac, the bowl of roses in the middle of the table, grasping Gabor’s hand and saying: “Yes, of course, this is all nonsense …”

But this was not to be. I was determined, if only to defy father, that Gabor would not cry. There was something in our experience of that afternoon, I recognised, for which tears were only one response. Gabor relowered his head, but I pinned my gaze, like a mind-reader, on his black mop of hair, and now and then his eyes flashed up at me. A nervous, expectant silence hung over the dinner table, in which my parents resumed eating, their elbows and jaws moving as if on wires. I saw them suddenly as Gabor must have seen them — as though they were not my parents at all. Each time Gabor looked up I caught his eyes, willing them not to moisten, to read my thoughts, to follow my own glance as I looked, now at my father’s slack jowl, now at Mother’s thin throat.

Gabor sat in front of the window. With the evening light behind him and his head bent forward, his infant moustache showed distinctly.

Then suddenly, like boys in church who cannot restrain a joke, he and I began to laugh.

I learnt that I was to be accepted at a new grammar school. Gabor, by some inept piece of administration, was granted a place at a similar, but not the same institution, and arrangements were made for continuing his private tuition. The whole question of Gabor’s future, whether or not he was to be formally adopted into our family, was at this stage “under review.” We had till September to pretend we were free. We watched for the couple on their motor-bike. They did not reappear. Somehow the final defeat or destruction of the last remnants of the German army, accomplished that summer, did not compensate for this. But our future advance in status brought with it new liberties. Father, whose face had become more dour (I sometimes wondered if he would be glad or sorry if the authorities decided that he could legally be Gabor’s father), suggested that I might spend a day or two of our holiday showing Gabor round London. I knew this was a sacrifice. We had gone to London before, as a family, to show Gabor the sights. Gabor had trailed sheepishly after my parents, showing a token, dutiful interest. I knew that Father had had a dream once, which he had abandoned now, of taking Gabor by himself up to London, of showing him buildings and monuments, of extending to him his grown man’s knowledge of the world, his shrewdness in its ways, of seeing his eyes kindle and warm as to a new-found father.

I took Gabor up on the train to London Bridge. I knew my way about from the times Father had taken me, and was a confident guide. We had fun. We rode on the Underground and on the top decks of buses. In the City and around St. Paul’s there were bomb-sites with willow-herb sprouting in the rubble. We bought ice-creams at the Tower and took each other’s photo in Trafalgar Square. We watched Life Guards riding like toys down the Mall. When we got home (not long before Father himself came in from work) Father asked, seeing our contented faces: “Well, and how was the big city?” Gabor replied, with the grave, wise expression he always had when concentrating on his English: “I like London. Iss full history. Iss full history.”