The Inheritance of Shame Page 2

  By grade six, I began skipping out of school midday, raising my hand in Sister Agatha’s catechism class and, instead of going to the bathroom, walking the three blocks home, sneaking in through the basement, past my mother, who seemed to always be in the kitchen, aproned and baking, up the second creaking flight of stairs, around the corner, and down a bookshelved hallway to my room, and crawling into bed. Buried beneath comforters during the day there were never any nightmares, only dreams in which my arms turned into wings and I flew far away.

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  My mother always helped me make each of my annual Halloween trick-or-treat costumes: a giant stick of “Juicy Fruit” gum, constructed out of colored cardboard that we bought at our local five-and-dime, which slipped over my head like a bodysuit with holes for arms and head; the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, made from old soup cans and a funnel for a hat from my father’s toolshed; a magician, with black cape, top hat, and wand.

  Every Christmas she took Pisti and me on the bus to the big downtown department store in a red brick building with the animated Santa Claus, reindeer, and elves in its storefront windows. In the food court on the main floor, she bought bags of Pascall White Heather Chocolates so we could string them for our Christmas tree back home. Sometimes we ate slices of pie in the diner on the mezzanine, looking down on all the twinkling lights and decorations. Before bed, I told my mother that I loved her more than the distance from our house to that downtown department store because nothing in the world was bigger or farther away than the distance from our house to that store.

  Twice a year we also bussed to a European delicatessen that smelled of candied coffee and crème pastries. The aisles were over-flowing with all sorts of boxed nuts and dried fruit, jars of jams and tin cans of special cookies and exotic teas, grains, and beans. Behind the glassed-in countertop full of freshly baked tortes, the woman, with jet-black hair and a thick accent like my father’s, ground bags of poppy seeds fresh for my mother. Back home, my mother mixed the black bitter seeds with milk, sugar, and lemon rind on the stove, kneaded out dough on the floured tabletop, then rolled a dozen strudels stuffed with the hot, creamy filling, while my father tried his best to teach me the correct pronunciation for poppy seeds in Hungarian.

  “Mák,” he’d say.

  “Muck.”

  “Not muck. Mák. It’s a long á, máááááák. Try again.”

  “Muuuuck.”

  However the word was pronounced, one of our favorites was definitely mákos tészta, or poppy seed noodles—freshly cooked German egg noodles tossed in butter and mák, sugar, and lemon rind. While my brothers and sisters were out on the front street playing softball or hide-and-go-seek with the other neighborhood kids every weekend, I was in the kitchen with my mother, cooking and baking, helping to cut up the chunks of stewing beef for Hungarian goulash, stuffing the cabbage rolls, and sprinkling paprika on the chicken goulash, or paprikás csirke, as my father always corrected me.

  Desserts like palacsintas, or Hungarian crepes, with sweetened cottage cheese, raisins, and lemon rind were reserved for Sundays, but during the week, we sometimes devoured prune pockets— gnocchi dough stuffed with sweetened prunes, boiled like pasta and then fried in butter and breadcrumbs. Zserbó squares—yeast dough between layers of apricot jam, ground walnuts and sugar, then strawberry jam, ground walnuts and sugar, and topped with chocolate ganache—was a dessert my mother explained had originated all the way from a konditorei in Budapest, the capital city of Hungary, called Café Gerbeaud. I asked my mother to translate madártej, and she said it was “birds milk,” but I didn’t see any birds, only cooked egg whites floating in vanilla custard. A Dobos torte, which looked like its translation of “drum cake,” was the most special dessert of them all and always brought streaks of panic across the faces of any schoolmates at our birthday parties as father cut through its caramelized, candied topping with an electric knife.

  And then there was aranygaluska.

  “There is no translation for aranygaluska,” my father had explained several times before. “But arany means ‘golden,’ so I suppose you could call it ‘golden dinner cake,’” which is precisely what we did. I had the most important job, or so my mother said, sprinkling ground walnuts, sugar, and raisins between layers of yeast dough cut into discs. Then my mother baked it till the whole house smelled like caramelized yeast.

  “We always ate aranygaluska after a clear soup back home,” my mother said one Sunday afternoon as she prepared the finishing touches: the custard sauce that we’d pour over the warm aranygaluska before eating. She had told me “the story” before.

  “First we ate our clear soup…maybe a chicken soup. Then we ate our aranygaluska, like a dessert but really as a main course.”

  “When I grow up I’m going to go to Hungary,” I said, “just like my daddy.”

  “No you won’t,” my mother said.

  “Why not?”

  “Hungary is behind the Iron Curtain.”

  I knew that curtains, like the green ones in our living room, were made from fabric, so I could not understand how an entire country could be behind a curtain made from iron.

  Helping my mother bake anything from the “the old country” always meant listening to her talk about her childhood, which would inevitably lead us to “the camps,” where she had learned, before her escape, about the scarcity of food. My siblings and I always knew somehow not to leave a scrap of food on our dinner plates. We didn’t need to think of all those starving children in Ethiopia. Our mother told us about our starving relatives in the camps, deaths from dysentery, her own malnutrition, lice in the barracks. Anything we did end up leaving on our dinner plates—a lump of mashed potato, a carrot, or a Brussels sprout—our mother promptly swept onto hers and gobbled it down herself. Even chicken bones, clean of meat, our mother sucked dry. All good, loving mothers had once escaped these camps, I thought as a child, just like my mommy.

  Once, in the middle of her baking, “Those Were the Days” started playing on our portable Sony AM/FM transistor radio.

  “Oh I love this song,” she said. “We listened to this in Russian back home.”

  Suddenly she clasped my hands, and we started waltzing through the kitchen, laughing and singing along with Mary Hopkin.

  Those were the days my friend

  We thought they’d never end

  We’d sing and dance forever and a day

  We’d live the life we choose

  We’d fight and never lose

  For we were young and sure to have our way.

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  The night my sister, Kriska, ran away from home, I was watching The Brady Bunch in the den. I was eight; she was sixteen. The last thing I saw as she walked through the room clutching a handful of laundry, turned the corner, and disappeared down the basement stairs were her eyes.

  Goodbye, I could have sworn they’d said.

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  MY PARENTS NEVER FOUGHT, but they often debated, especially around anything to do with the political history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; European war pacts and peace treaties; the occupation and oppression of various territories and minorities; and neighboring countries whose borders changed, and the resulting change of citizenships to national citizens. No simple question, like “Where were your parents born?” was ever answered simply. My mother’s father, born Austrian in a town that, at the time of his birth, 1899, was Austria-Hungary, later “became,” as a result of shifting borders, a citizen of Romania, whose region changed again soon after to the newly formed but short-lived Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. “Everyone sat in everyone else’s backyard,” my mother used to say when I was still young, and then she’d leave it at that, as if that explained it all.

  Whenever I’d ask my mother for more details on her upbringing, which I did progressively as I got older, she said that she came from a long history of eighteenth-century German pioneers who had settled in a region of the Balkans called “the Banat.” Together, they were
considered Volksdeutsche, or German nationals living outside the borders of Germany. But she had also been a Yugoslav citizen because she was born in Modosch, a village that at the time of her birth in 1924 had still been part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later to become, in 1929, Yugoslavia.

  “Wouldn’t that make you Yugoslavian?” I’d ask.

  “I am German, through and through,” she’d repeat.

  “I don’t understand. How can you be German if you were born in Yugoslavia?”

  Ethnicity—a person’s cultural heritage—was not the same as citizenship, which changed often in Europe as a result of a change to borders or country names, both my parents tried to explain, as if their explanations helped clarify anything, except my unending confusion. “You can look at a map of Europe,” my mother said once, “and still have no idea of the culture of each of its country’s inhabitants.”

  High above the chatter and the smells of goulash cooking in the kitchen, the damp and drafty attic of my family home became my only haven. I made a nest from moth-ridden clothes, and there I’d lie for hours, typing on my father’s old 1950s Remington, whose keys looked like a skeletal ribcage.

  Fully formed inside that typewriter’s cavity lay buried all the secrets of the world, I imagined, waiting to be discovered.

  Of the countless black-and-white photographs I found stashed in their dusty old travel trunks, the few of my father were of him and his Hungarian buddies after their arrival in Canada—the gang of them driving across the country in a brown Studebaker, dressed in gray flannel suits like the Rat Pack, smoking Marlboros, and wearing fedoras and turbans. Most photographs of my mother had been taken near Liverpool, a few years after her escape from the camp. Sometimes I read old letters that my father had written to my mother after they were married in northern British Columbia, while he was working in various construction jobs around the province. His English was still broken, but he called her “dearest” and “darling,” said that he loved her, like I’d heard him say a thousand times in the house.

  “I love you, dearest,” he’d say, and then they’d hug and kiss on the lips, sweetly, and I knew that the world was safe and at peace, even though all the nuns at school repeated that someone called Brezhnev could put his finger on a button and blow us all up on any given day.

  Reading through my father’s letters in the attic, often I wondered what his life had been like as a child, before fleeing Hungary. One night, as I was reading a letter, he appeared from behind a stack of boxes, flashlight in hand, calling me to dinner. When he saw the trunks thrown open and the pictures strewn across the wooden floorboards, he asked me what I was doing.

  “You should never look at another person’s property, Peter,” he said to me from the doorway. “We each have our lives, and you must respect the privacy of another person’s history. Now come to dinner, and forget about our past.”

  I knew, instantly, that what I’d done was bad, but was it my reading the letters or attempting to unlock the mystery of who they really were? The political history of Europe, which both of my parents discussed without hesitation, interested me far less than their personal experiences of war, which neither would even mention. I could never ask them anything about their “emotional lives” in Europe, that much I knew. Silence was a language best understood by children, and already I was a master of intuition.

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  My own silence resolved around sex. Boys were still the enemy, but their bodies now gave me all sorts of butterflies, made me lightheaded, and aroused fantasies of touching them, their skin, and kissing their lips.

  I wanted their bodies, or at least that’s how I thought it to myself. In my child’s mind, “wanting their bodies” meant replacing my own body with one of theirs, because their bodies were good and strong, whereas mine was bad and weak. Boys did not like other boys; only girls liked boys. If I’d been born a girl, or had a girl’s body, then it would’ve made sense for me to like boys. Except I didn’t want to be a girl or have a girl’s body. I wanted a boy’s body, to remain a boy. Confusion lapped onto confusion, and nothing made sense, least of all boys, or bodies.

  Before my mother went to work as a librarian, she stayed home to take care of her children, but she did take night classes at a nearby university. She wrote stories with made-up names, but they really were all about her home country, the camps. Her teacher told her she should try to get them published, but she never did.

  “One day I will write my memoirs about Europe,” she’d tell me over and over again. “One day…”

  “Three Candles to Light” was one of her stories she wrote for school. She asked me if I wanted to read it when I was thirteen.

  “It’s about my first Christmas in the concentration camp,” she said.

  I said of course, yes, I wanted to read it, but I didn’t understand much of any of it, or even, still, what concentration camps were.

  Then the television miniseries Holocaust aired in 1978, and Sophie’s Choice a few years later. Instead of waiting for her to talk about the camps, now I asked questions.

  “Those films are about National Socialist concentration camps, the Nazis,” she’d try to explain. “I was in a communist concentration camp, in Yugoslavia.”

  I still couldn’t understand how she could’ve been German if she’d been born in Yugoslavia, nor could I differentiate between National Socialist, or Nazi, concentration camps, which were only starting to receive some media attention, and communist concentration camps, least of all in somewhere called the Banat, a province of Yugoslavia, under the rule of some dictator called Marshal Tito.

  What I did understand, implicitly, was that anything I could ever say, do, or feel about my own life would never rival my mother’s grief and anger over the injustice of how “her people” had been incarcerated, rounded up like cattle and moved into concentration camps, tortured, and murdered, left to die. Shame silenced any possibility for redemption, and my own shame silenced me absolutely.

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  Boys turned into men, and when I was fourteen, I had sex with another man.

  I had skipped out of school, was steps off the bus downtown, when I saw him, a perfect stranger, on the street. He was blond, with a handlebar moustache, and I remember that he licked his lips and motioned for me to follow him, which I did, like a sleepwalker, through the underground shopping mall, into a department store parkade, and down into the bottom of a concrete stairwell. Neither of us said a word the whole time we walked. Words weren’t necessary.

  The stink of piss and cum dizzied my mind as the stranger pushed me up against the graffitied wall and kissed me, hard, on the lips, held my hands above my head, and devoured me, as I did him, each of us like sexual cannibals, starved for what the other had to give. When I opened my eyes, two other men were five steps up, like on a balcony, rubbing crotches through bulging 501s, kissing, entering each other’s flesh while spitting, sweating, watching.

  When he knelt down before me, for an instant the image of Sunday Mass flashed across my mind, then joined the memory of the fat man in my elementary school toilet that seemed suddenly like it had never left me and had now only surfaced. But then a pressure peaked in my groin as the man’s hands slid up inside my shirt, and out came from inside of me all thought, and memory, and fear.

  “Thanks, boy,” he said, wiping his mouth, zipping up.

  There was a gap in my thinking where I followed his lead and thanked him as well. I looked up the stairs, but the other men had disappeared. When he pushed open the heavy aluminum door, the sight of an alleyway lined with drunks and junkies rushed inside of me with a gust of fresh fear.

  With every panicked step toward the bus around a corner, I repeated to myself that what I’d done could not be done again, would not be done again.

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  That same year, in my grade nine sex-education class at my all-boys Catholic high school, I learned all about the “lifestyle of the homosexual,” which sounded frighteningl
y similar to the life that I was already living. Like a revised Book of Revelation, the final chapter of our textbook explained it all, beginning with the homosexual’s choice to act on an immoral and intrinsically disordered behavior and ending with their self-imposed misery, diseased body, and assured annihilation. There was no happy ending for the homosexual.

  If I thought of anything during the endless hours of English, French, Mathematics, Catechism, History, and Social Studies, I thought only of how I could divide myself in two, like a wishbone, stray as far away from my desires as possible. Instead of homework each night, I lip-synched songs from my black Denon portable turntable: Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”…Three Dog Night’s “The Show Must Go On.” The Rolling Stones scared me because Kriska had listened to the Stones before she ran away from home. Maybe if I listened to the Stones then I, too, would end up like her: an outcast, unloved, a runaway. So I listened to Queen instead, alone in my bedroom after dinner, acting out the lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

  Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality…

  Despite my prayers the night before, the blinding light of day forced me up and out of the house each morning and back to school where facts and figures from all my classes flowed over me. Nothing stuck; nothing was absorbed. If the Catholic Brothers, each of them cassocked and clutching long wooden rulers, didn’t mock me, make fun of my endless failed exams, my sixteen percents, then, when they read my grades aloud for all to scorn, they’d pronounce the first syllable of my last name like the severest of punishments.