The Dispossessed: A Novel

We walk and we are silent. Between us there are twenty-three years. Twenty-three cannot be divided. Twenty-three can be divided only by itself. And by one. There is so much solitude between us. It cannot be dismantled into parts. It must be borne as one. We are carrying lunch. We walk across the turned-up earth. We call it sodground. Ogmand’s sodground. When we go into the forest to gather wood, we pass this way. Sometimes we go in the direction of the Szomoga family fields so we can walk along Kaboló Road. Because it isn’t so muddy. We call that puddle slick. Other times we go across the Count’s Forest, up to Palló Street. My mother has a kerchief tied around her head. We call that kurchie. Women must have a kerchief tied over their hair. The old ladies tie them in a knot below their chins. Their kerchiefs must be black. My mother’s kerchief is colored. She knots it in back, beneath her hair, which is done up in a bun. In the summers, she wears light triangular kerchiefs. A white kerchief with blue polka dots. My father got it for her last year from the market in Kölcse. My mother has chestnut-brown hair. Auburn-chestnut hair. Not every chestnut has this tint of auburn. In the autumn, we collect chestnuts with my older sister. There is one single chestnut tree in the village. It is where the Barkóczy manor used to be. All the rest of the chestnut trees were cut down after the war. The earth, always so moist, tolerates only poplars. And willow trees. We call them willo’wood trees. In the spring it’s easy to make a whistle, a willo’wood–tree whistle. We whistle in order to annoy our mother. And the dogs and the neighbors, too.

In the autumn, we escape to the only chestnut tree on the other side of Kepec Meadow. We sneak away behind the gardens. The enormous tree’s five-pointed leaves dry out toward the end of summer and begin to fall. It’s as if there are huge cut-off hands lying around amid the dead leaves. In the spring, the blossoms of the chestnut tree are white candles. Its green burr is like a hedgehog. We make legs for the chestnuts out of matchsticks. We ask my mother for the burned-out matchsticks. Only our mother can touch matches; they’re not for kids.

Scissors, knives, forks—not for little brats, chants my mother.

"BECAUSE WE ARE THE MASTERS NOW. TODAY, THE PEOPLE are the lords. Before, the kulaks exploited us. Now it’s we who exploit the kulaks . . . If they don’t like it, too bad! And that’s that." This is what the people who used to be landless farmers say.

It’s easy for them, because they never brought even so much as an iron nail into the collective, says my grandfather, who misses his horses most of all. "They only take things from it.

Because they like handouts, he murmurs in disgust.

They only know how to squander, he says. They just dissipate everything. They don’t know how to improve anything. It all just goes to waste.

The former landowners miss their horses the most. The land, not so much.

It was the horses, not them, who were tortured on the collective farms. The soul was driven out of them.

They broke those horses. They died before their time. What’s the point of that? my grandfather says.

The new masters were impatient and violent. They addressed everyone as Comrade. They made up new greetings.

Even their fathers were nobodies. All they want are handouts, he grumbles.

Forward! say the comrades, instead of God bless. And they’re always talking about progress.

We must progress with the age, Comrades, progress! We will produce whatever we want. If it’s rubber dandelions we want, then we’ll make rubber dandelions. If it’s rice porridge we want, then we’ll make rice porridge. Whatever the Party wants is what will be. What Comrade Stalin and Comrade Rákosi say is holy writ. We must, Comrades, be victorious over nature! The brigade leaders repeated the slogans to the shivering people during early-morning training sessions. In the meantime, they gulped down a shot or two of brandy.

Devil take you, Comrade, my grandfather muttered under his mustache so they wouldn’t hear. But so that they would still hear. Or so they would at least know.

Well, you watch your mouth there, the new masters grumble. But they don’t want any trouble, either. There had been enough of that already. By then, the kulaks had been let out of the camps. Then most of them had left. They couldn’t handle staying in the village. No one minded not having to look into their eyes anymore.

The ornamental trees had been cut down, the buildings on the estate demolished. The Party building was built where the lane of chestnut trees used to stand on the estate. Everyone is quiet about the old manor house. There is a deep silence.

Peasants know how to keep their mouths shut, my mother says.

No one is allowed to talk about the past. The old people refer to it as the ancient world. What we are silent about doesn’t exist. To erase the past, once and for all . . . they sing with the cantor, as if at a funeral.

DURING THE DAY, MY MOTHER’S HAIR IS IN A BUN. WHEN she lets it down, it’s evening time. I often comb it. I like to comb her hair. Between the wide cracks of the horn comb glide the brilliant strands of hair. Lustrous, like the evening. The sky is full of stars, and it has a good smell. The smell of grass. Of bread. The smell of milk. I get tired of the horn comb. It makes me think of slaughtered animals. There is always some black dirt stuck in the cracks. Greasy dandruff and dust build up and stick together. The women twist their hair into a bun underneath their kerchiefs. They hold it together with a horn hair clip. During the day, my mother’s hair is hidden. Not my older sister’s. On Saturdays, we wash our hair. In the evening, we put the washbasin on the kitchen floor. We boil water on the stovetop, then bathe in it, one after the other. First my older sister, then me, and finally our mother. We all wash our hair with oil soap. We rinse it out in the large pot. We all have the same smell.

I always sense it as soon as I step through the door. Other people’s houses have a different smell. Now we are going to the forest for kindling. My mother is wearing a dark kerchief. A thick woolen kerchief. Now she, too, knots it under her chin, like the old women. So her ears will be warm. Because it’s cold. I’m always freezing, I hold my mother’s hand. Her hand is warm, mine is ice-cold. If she is carrying something, then I stuff my hands into my pockets. She’s always carrying something. So then I warm my hands in my pockets. My fingernails are freezing. I don’t understand how fingernails can freeze. I think about that as I try to keep pace with my mother. After the summer harvest, we’ll collect corn husks. I’m thinking of how good it would be if it could be summer already. Mostly you can find the husks at the edge of the harvested field. At least then it’s warm. But I don’t like that, either.

Nothing’s good enough for you all. If I pricked your asses with a needle, you wouldn’t even like that, says my mother. And then she laughs. As if she has made a joke. But it wasn’t a joke.

We walk along the sidewalk, and I’m shivering. I’m always shivering. My hands are freezing, and my toes are freezing in my shoes. Frost traces the spiderwebs in the holes of the wire fence. The tangled outlines are clearly visible. I play at poking them with my index finger and, like at the touch of a magic wand, they disappear. It’s enough to break even just one thread for the whole thing to collapse. The strands break, and the particles of frost fall to the ground like crystal sugar. Sometimes dogs run ahead of us because of the rattling sound. If my mother lets me, I drag a cane or a stick along the length of the fence. Most of the dogs have no great desire to jump around then. Some dogs follow us on the other side of the fence until we have left their owner’s yard behind. These are the excitable dogs. We call dogs like this jittery. They grimace. They show their snow-white teeth. They stamp their paws. They tremble from rage.

Don’t irritate them, my mother says.

I’m not irritating them, I say and pull in my neck. I watch my mother’s hand from the corner of my eye. I’m standing on her left side. She doesn’t usually hit with her left hand. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Don’t tell lies, she says.

I was just touching the spiderweb a little, I say. My mother doesn’t answer, she looks ahead roughly. And quickens her steps.

You scoundrel, she says. When she says scoundrel, it means she isn’t angry.

MY OLDER SISTER IS ONE. I AM TWO. THAT’S MY NUMBER, two. My older sister is Big. She is the girl. I am the Boy. My little brother is Three. He is the Little One. That’s what they call us.

Rock the Little One to sleep, says my mother. We rock him and put him to sleep. I count how many times we rock him. One, two, three. These are the first words I ever learned. I’ve known how to count to ten for a long time now. I practiced on the eggs. We’ve never had more than ten egg-laying hens.

My mother always makes me count the eggs so we know how many eggs were laid that day. In the morning, she checks the hens for eggs. She tosses the hens out of the hen coop one by one. She grabs their wings with her left hand and, holding the hen against her body, reaches into the hen’s ass with her right index finger. The egg is already waiting there, you can feel it with your finger. She counts how many eggs will be laid that day, and I always have to get all of them by evening. In winter I have to hurry a lot, because it grows dark very early.

If there aren’t as many eggs as she counted in the morning, then she argues with me. My older sister has other tasks to do, so my mother argues with her about other things. The hens lay their eggs at noon. After lunch, I start to collect them. I know already where they hide them away, because they want to conceal the eggs. They aren’t brood hens, they don’t sit on the eggs, they just hide them away. In the haystacks, the piles of wood, behind the shed. Only a few hens sit in the nesting box, although it has been prepared for them.

For a while now, I have also had to feel for the eggs. I get nauseous because my fingers are covered in hen shit. It stays under the edges of my nails, no matter how many times I wash my hands. But the good part is that then my mother doesn’t know how many eggs there are supposed to be that day. I always tell her one fewer than the actual number. If there are any extra, I put one aside for the next day. I always keep one in reserve for tomorrow. This way, my mother can’t fight with me.

Are you sure? she always asks. She can tell I’m lying.

I’m happy when there are seven eggs. I like the number seven. And the number three.

If I put them together, then I get exactly ten. That’s as high as I can count.

THE GROUND IS STILL GRAY AND WHITE FROM THE FROSTS. We walk along the road, which has been hacked out by carts. There are huge ruts in the mud. The mud doesn’t stick because of the frost. Everywhere, there are big chunks of mud. We call them clats. I kick at each and every one. They turn into dust and disintegrate. Or they roll away. Sometimes my toes hurt. But this is also good, because at least they’re not numb. At long as they hurt, it’s fine. My shoes are battered. I’m not wearing warm winter pants but something made of thinner material. And my coat, which I’ve grown out of. My older sister’s cast-off hat and scarf. I have pieces of cloth on my feet. The footcloths keep sliding out of place. And when they slide out of place, then my feet really freeze. They are always freezing, because I am not clever. I don’t know how to tie the cloth tightly around my foot and tuck the end under the last layer at the back of my shin. If I could do it properly, then the footcloth wouldn’t slide all over the place. And my feet wouldn’t freeze. My mother doesn’t have time to wind the cloths around my feet.

You’re a big boy already. Please learn how to do it yourself, she says when I ask for help.

We walk along the frozen sidewalk amid the hoary weeds. There’s no snow by now. But everything is still frozen. The small gardens are ravaged and entangled.

Get a move on, my mother says.

My left hand is freezing. My mother is holding my right hand. The skin on her hand is hard and cracked. Her nails are dirty, like everyone’s. The men cut their nails with pocketknives. My mother chews off the Little One’s nails so he won’t scratch himself. My fingernails are also dirty. When I’m bored, I pry out the black dirt from underneath them. My skin is cracked and my nails are broken from the milking, the washing, cleaning up the soot and ashes. Only the upper parts of my mother’s hands are soft and chubby.

My feet are freezing, I say.

That’s your problem, she mutters, but she isn’t really paying attention.

But my feet are freezing, M’my, I say. They’re really freezing. Pick me up, for the love of God.

Walk on your own two feet, I can’t stand you today already, she says, but I feel that she’s thinking of something else. This vexes me. I am angry.

I’m angry at her because she doesn’t want to pay attention to me. I want her to pay attention only to me. I kick at the cement. I end up rubbing the brown color off the tips of my shoes. She doesn’t notice. Or else she doesn’t feel like hitting me. Other times, she says: If only you would croak, as well! Devil take you . . .

You’ll get it later on, at home, she hisses into my ear. We call it a’home. Then, a’home, weeping, she beats me with the cleaning rag. While doing this, she blows her nose. She wipes away the snot with her hand. This rag is always soaking in the bucket so it is close at hand if dirt, splattered pig swill, or cat shit has to be wiped up. As well as the manure that falls off our shoes. So the water always stinks. The cleaning rag is a strip of cloth torn from my older sister’s gym pants. They are indigo blue. Inside, they’re fluffy. She blows her nose into the rag forcefully, which makes it heavy. My mother never wrings it out properly, that’s how she beats me. I’m yelling more than it actually hurts. My older sister does this, too. I learned it from her. My mother is still striking me with the rag in rage.

The plague take you, she snivels. The plague take you, as well. She is weeping. I know that she’s thinking about herself, and about the village we live in. She isn’t angry at me, it doesn’t hurt. I’m used to it already.

THE CAT IS TREMBLING, BUT IT STILL ESCAPES INTO THE kitchen. It is most afraid of the broom leaning up against the door that opens directly outside. The cat is always hungry. It’s always scavenging for something to eat. My mother tolerates the cat being in the house because of the mice—they cannot be completely exterminated because the walls are made of sun-dried brick—but she doesn’t like it. Cats are odd. They tolerate people, but they don’t love them. And my mother doesn’t like cats. It’s only when the cat is in the woodbox that she doesn’t bother it. The cat warms up in the box under the stove. In the morning she lets the cat in, and in the evening she locks it out. Cats are repulsive to my mother. Sometimes the cat has diarrhea because of something it ate, its stomach swells up. It shits in the room. My mother smells it, and grabs the cat.

You have to shove its nose in it, she tells us. She grabs the cat’s neck and, with disgust, shoves its head in its own shit. The animal tries to escape, writhing. My mother doesn’t let it go.

Let the cat go, M’my! Leave the poor thing alone! But my mother doesn’t stop.

It has to learn once and for all not to shit in here, she shrieks. She is disgusted by cats. As for me, I am disgusted by their shit. She only lets the cat go when it starts scratching and whining. She chases it out with the broom. She hits it with all her might.

Go rot in a ditch, you’re not going to shit in here, she keeps repeating, beating the animal with the broom.

The cat is running crazily around everywhere. My older sister manages to open the door in time, and the cat runs out.

They are always hungry. Cats don’t get a lot to eat.

Let them get their own food, my mother always says. There are mice enough. Birds and beetles in the garden. Let them get their own food.

The cats are skin and bone. Once I saw one of them in the vegetable garden, among the cabbages, making an odd sound. It didn’t notice that I was coming right up to it. I saw its back, straining. This particular cat never drank milk, never ate what it was given. I came closer to the struggling cat and saw what it was doing. Bent forward, it was vomiting.

It had tried to swallow a frog, and now the legs were dangling out of its mouth. It struggled to swallow it. It did not see, it did not hear. It was preoccupied with the frog. I was overcome with nausea, so unexpectedly, as soon as I saw it. But I couldn’t stop watching. The cat struggled for a while, then gave up and began to vomit the frog out. Whimpering, it retched it out. The cat’s entire body convulsed rhythmically. Slowly, the forelegs began to appear. At times, the cat rested. It lasted a long time, until it retched out, via its contracted throat, the morsel that had been too big.

After the frog had fallen out of its mouth, the cat shook itself and, jumping, disappeared among the cabbage leaves.

I CAN’T GET USED TO THEM, SAYS MY MOTHER ABOUT THE villagers. I hate how they don’t bathe. They don’t even wash. They don’t even know if toothpaste is for eating or drinking. Their children are filthy, even the dog doesn’t pay attention to them. They just let them do whatever they want, like God and the fly. There’s such a stink in the shop, it makes me feel sick . . .

My mother is always dissatisfied. She is always cleaning. She scrubs with a scrubbing brush. She cleans the single room that we all live in. There are two beds in this room, placed lengthwise along the back wall. Between the two beds, there is just enough space for me to fit. I hoist myself up between the two headboards. My arms are strong. But I still don’t know how to do a spread eagle. I’m practicing. I balance there while my older sister does her homework with my mother at the table. We have one table. My older sister does not like to do her lessons. They say about her that her head is heavy. She stares ahead indifferently and waits for it to be over. For our little brother to start crying, or for someone to call out to her from the street. For the milk to boil over. She stares straight ahead. She does not speak.

She is stubbornly silent. She pretends to be looking at the book. But she isn’t looking at it. She is learning the national anthem. I’ve even learned the second stanza already, I just don’t understand it. The blood of Bendegúz . . . I have no idea who Bendegúz is.

Now the book is in the center of the kitchen table. Two aluminum washbasins have been placed on the plank of the leaved table. We call it aluminom. But we don’t use them. We only take them out for the pig slaughter. Two small stools go with the table. One has a drawer in which we keep the shoe brush and the things for shining shoes. The rag and Csillag shoe polish in the metal container. In black and brown. Every spring my mother uses them, turned upside down, to smooth the room’s earthen floor. There is our bookcase and our clothes chest with a backrest that we sit on. It’s covered with coarse, tattered blankets. Then the stove, which we use for heating in winter; in the summer we use it only for cooking. The walls of the house are made of mud bricks. We call this an earthen house because even inside, beyond the threshold, there is earth. Hard-packed earth. My mother always resurfaces it in the spring. She mixes horse manure with a small amount of clayey earth and chaff until it becomes thick. If there’s enough horse manure, there will be a thick crust when it dries. We put a tar cloth on the ground in the middle of the room, because that’s where we spend most of our time, around the table. That’s where everything happens. Our whole damned life, as my mother puts it. That’s where we eat, and that’s where my mother washes me. That’s where she kneads the bread and plucks the chickens. That’s where we do our homework. Sometimes my mother reads to us there.

My older sister sleeps with my father, I sleep with my mother. Not too long ago, a cradle appeared next to our bed so that if my little brother cries at night, he’s near at hand to my mother. At night we also put one of the stools next to the bed. My mother grumbles sleepily when the Little One cries. She reaches for him with one hand and rocks him.

He had a bad dream again, I think. I often have bad dreams. When I do, I pee in bed. In the morning my mother is angry. She slaps me in rage. Sometimes, if it soaks through the sheet, I get a slap on the face. We change the straw-filled mattresses only occasionally.

The kid’s pee doesn’t smell, says my father.

I know that, says my mother.

We don’t have enough straw to keep on changing it. Next time, just leave it. When I was a kid I also peed in bed, he adds.

I’m the one sleeping on it, not you, my mother replies sharply.

So send him over to me, says my father.

That’s why sometimes I sleep in my father’s bed. Then my older sister sleeps with my mother. When this happens, I stay awake a lot. My father snores, and he stinks. He always smells like cigarettes. I sense the machine oil on his skin, and the smell of gasoline. I like gasoline, I hate machine oil. He often gives off the smell of brandy and beer. The dank smell of the tavern. Then he sleeps like the dead, and when he turns over, he lies on top of me. I can hardly pull my arm or leg out from under him.

But I don’t have to sleep with my father for long. My older sister is big already, and it’s uncomfortable for my mother to sleep with her. They don’t fit in the bed. My mother invites me back, hoping I won’t pee this time. The years go by, but I always forget to get up and pull out the potty from under the bed. Or to totter sleepily to the veranda in time to relieve myself into the base of the wall. In the morning there’s a dark stain on the ground or a moist trickle on the mud wall, all around where the foot of the wall must be painted Viennese blue. The other villagers do it, too. The urine patch gives off an odor in the summer; the heat makes it stink. My older sister always jeers at me.

Little peepee, little peepee, she says, making donkey ears. She’s the peepee one, though. Girls always pee their pants.

But it’s the villagers Mother hates the most. Peasants, she calls them.

"Your grandfather’s family are all peasants. They only worship the land. They’re sorry about what was taken away from them. They only think about their land, constantly. They love no one and honor nothing. Only the land. They can starve for years. They eat Lenten soup for breakfast, Lenten soup for lunch, and Lenten soup for dinner, too. They look for the calf under the bull. They’d fuck a goat for two fillérs even if they knew they’d never get the money anyway. They just scrape by. They hoard. They’re misers. Tight-asses. Envious. They would drown each other in a spoonful of water if they could. They’re not human beings. They’re peasants . . ." she says with contempt and then spits on the ground. There’s a look of disgust on her face, as if she has just bitten into something full of larvae. Sometimes at the end of the garden where the raspberries are, we end up biting into a larva with the raspberry. Afterward, you have to keep spitting it out for a long time. Anyone who has never bitten into a larva doesn’t know the taste. Bitter, like spleen. It’s a good thing we’re not peasants.

MY FATHER HAS COME HOME THIS MORNING. WHEN WE open the door to greet him, he yells at us.

Outside at once, go pick the beans, he says.

Hello, Father, we answer, but we are heading outside already.

We take the breadbasket and set off for the garden. The pods are still tiny, though.

Usually our father is at work at this time. He leaves early in the morning; he has to be at the collective by six a.m. Usually I just hear him, I don’t see him, when he gets up, takes his work trousers, steps into his rubber boots, sucks air in through his teeth, clears his throat, and spits. He