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    Gratuity And Other Stories
    Gratuity And Other Stories
    Gratuity And Other Stories
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Gratuity And Other Stories

    By Ortutay Peter

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    Many of us here in Hungary still no doubt remember Tennessee Williams’ staggering play the SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH very well. We can do it for at least two reasons. The first one is that it was once, or even more often, staged by theaters in Budapest, and it always was a sold–out; and secondly, the translator was a no lesser figure than the well–known István Örkény, whose brilliant rendering of the text into Hungarian, especially of the climactic parts, was, perhaps, better than the original. But what’s the play about? In a nutshell, it’s a drama, a tragedy, and it is about life itself, and says that life can be hard and bitter, but still, it’s always sweet and beautiful while you are young and feeling young, and that’s why you want it to last for good, because you want to capture, to get hold of the hours, the minutes, the moments of those days, if it were possible. But time, be it sweet or bitter, flies away quickly, and as you become older, you are less and less able to get rid of the feeling that you must have spoilt something there in that remote past. Or maybe, not even you, but somebody else did that for you, but you are no longer sure because all that was so long ago. So everything is dim, hazy, as it were, but still you have the feeling that you must get back, or it would be very nice if you could get back and to amend what was spoilt. For “those were the days, my love”, or anyway, there was something in it that was stolen from you, your freedom or just a possibility, and that made your whole life so damn bitter and miserable. And now, if you only could get back, then you would, or could grasp that something somehow again to make you happy...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOrtutay Peter
    Release dateApr 5, 2018
    ISBN9781370948376
    Gratuity And Other Stories
    Author

    Ortutay Peter

    Rövid önéletrajz:1942. július elsején születtem Ungváron. A középiskolát szülővárosomban végeztem. Rögtön az iskola után egyetemi felvételeim nem sikerültek, így két évig sajtolómunkásként dolgoztam a Peremoha gyárban. Aztán behívtak katonának... a szovjet hadseregbe, ahol három évet húztam le angyalbőrben.1964-ben felvételiztem az Ungvári Állami Egyetem bölcsészkarára, és angol szakos egyetemista lettem. 1969-ben diplomáztam. Még ugyanabban az évben (sőt korábban) Balla László főszerkesztő felajánlotta, hogy dolgozzam fordítóként (majd újságíróként) a Kárpáti Igaz Szó magyar lapnál. Kisebb megszakításokkal a nyolcvanas évek elejéig dolgoztam az Igaz Szónál. 1984-ben költöztem Budapestre. Angol nyelvtanár lettem az Arany János Gimnáziumban, majd a Kandó Kálmán főiskolán. Az ELTE bölcsészkarán doktoráltam angol nyelvészetből, és a tudományos fokozatomnak köszönhetően 1991-ben az Egri Tanárképző Főiskola főigazgatója megkért, hogy legyek a főiskolán az angol tanszék vezetője. Három évig voltam tanszékvezető, aztán előadó tanár ugyanitt.1998-tól 1999-ig az Ohiói Állami Egyetemen (Amerikai Egyesült Államok) is tanítottam egy rövid ideig. Az Egri Gárdonyi Géza Ciszterci Gimnázium tanáraként mentem nyugdíjba 2004-ben.Nyugdíjazásom előtt és után nyelvészeti tudományos munkákat publikáltam, írogattam, szépirodalmat fordítottam. Eddig hat vagy hét műfordítás-kötetem van, főként F. Scott Fitzgerald amerikai író novellái és színművei, valamint Mary Shelly Mathildá-ja, mely fordításomban először jelent meg magyarul. Közben sikerült lefordítanom angolra Szalay Károly (alternatív) Kossuth-díjas írónak az ötvenhatos magyar forradalomról írt Párhuzamos viszonyok című regényét, mely a United P. C. Publisher kiadó gondozásában Parallel Liaisons címmel jelent meg külföldön.

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      Book preview

      Gratuity And Other Stories - Ortutay Peter

      Gratuity

      And Other Stories

      By

      Peter Ortutay

      Edited

      By

      Marianna von-Albrecht Reiss

      Copyright @ Peter Ortutay – 2017

      Smashwords Edition

      CONTENTS

      Apage Satanas

      Buddy’s Return

      The Sweetest Bird of My Youth

      Gratuity

      Old Guys on Motor Bikes

      Room at the Street

      The Old Man and His Friend Buddy

      Apage Satanas

      In our family it was a mark of basic education, or rather a requirement, to know when our parents, grandparents and close relatives were born and to wish them many happy returns on their birthday. Consequently I have inculcated once and for all that my father was born in June the 2nd, 1916, and in Ungvár (Hungary) according to registry, though to my knowledge they lived in Beregszsász then. And all the more he wanted us to congratulate him on his name–day. As the Day of the Elemérs – according to the old calendar – was only once in four years, on the 29th of February, i.e. once in a leap year, it is understandable why he insisted on this. Can I not expect my children to congratulate me on the occasion at least once in four years, he grumbled sullenly if we had forgotten to do so.

      I do not know too much about his childhood, his youth, and about all that happened to him before I was born. What I know is mainly what he himself told us, or somebody else told us about him. So I know more or less precisely that during the rule of the Czechs in Subcarpathia he went to school in Beregszász. He must have been a good student but he never boasted of that. He preferred to speak about other things instead as relevant. For instance, that it was in vogue and was considered to be plug–ugly among boys to walk up and down the town’s prom with their coat–sleeves rolled–up but wearing gloves in winter, or that it was glory to get flunked in Czech language at school, for a Hungarian patriot had to despise everything that was Czech. Or he as a child of a family of gentries had to have piano lessons, and he had been having them for about seventeen years but had learnt absolutely nothing, could not even play the chopsticks. And that he had a cousin, Jancsi Mihajlovics was his name, and he simply admired this cousin for he was a con man of not a small caliber, a real professional so to say, said he. He could fool and make drunk once even his father, i.e. my grandfather who was always an exemplar in the town and everybody knew that he never drank liquor. He also liked to talk about football (soccer) that he had played, too (he was a back inside of the school team), but he was particularly proud of his younger brother Béla, or Tuti, who played in the Fradi, a professional football club in Budapest, and was national champion with the team in 1943 if I am not mistaken. But my guess is that he was a good student even if he never said that. For it was already at the Gimnázium (High School) that he had mastered Latin and was fluent in French. I think he liked history, Hungarian language and literature in particular. He had a very high opinion of Ady’s godly poetry, wrote essays on this topic. Since he could speak Rusin (which is said today Ukrainian but it is not) as his mother tongue (the servants, and part of the people around him belonged to this nationality, and besides my grandparents also spoke fluently the "po-nahshemu (as we speak) language, he must have learned, I believe, the Czech also easily although he had problems with it at the University of Olomouc. He was able to pass the exam in the main subject (I don’t know what it was) that he failed to pass in the first semester in Czech, as he said, only by getting by heart a whole thick volume. He accounted for this decision (learning a whole book by heart) saying to us not once that he did not want to return home shamefully as a fallen student. So that at the final exam even the Czech professor felicitated him on his excellent answer and gave him the highest mark, although he understood less than half of the material. Thus despite the fact that it was not glory (as I have mentioned above) for a Hungarian boy of Beregszász to have good marks in Czech, he mastered the language brilliantly. It was life’s grimace that later he had to learn another Slav language if he wanted to exist in the Soviet Union at all. And he did this, on the highest level at that, from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace whose four thick volumes were available in the library of the concentration camp, and he – to his good custom of long standing – got them all by heart. Briefly, all that I want to say by this is that my father knew a good couple of languages on a level that could not be very low. If I count them properly, beside his mother tongue that was Hungarian of course he knew Rusin, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, French, and Russian, though he spoke this latter with a formidable accent till the end of his life. But who the f… cares," he might, perhaps, have thought in our modern world language which he did not know. Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention Latin that he, as a professor of Latin and Divinity, knew perfectly. He was more than seventy already when he answered the invitation of the Vatican to tender, and on his small worn typewriter he translated the latest Church Law from Latin into Hungarian (up–to now I keep admiring his achievement!), which translation was confiscated in the forthcoming years by the KGB during a house–search… as some clerical anti–communist propaganda writing. This happened at about the middle of the eighties (last century) before Gorbachev yet. And later, democracy here or there, the manuscript, the thick manuscript bundle of many hundred or thousand pages with which he could have perhaps won a prize was never returned to him though he asked the authorities to get them back.

      Anyway, let me try to observe the chronological order and mention sequentially my memories. So, let’s admit that we have closed the years of his childhood and elementary schooling, and let’s start to speak about his youth, education and marriage with the upcoming consecration into priesthood.

      I think they were his life’s most beautiful cloudless days, months and years, but only some because these years were not very many. Subcarpathia, Ungvár, Munkács, Beregszsász are Hungarian again. His father is an MP, chief–dean in Ceholnya, the family is the elite of the highest four hundred in Ungvár, there’s money, abundance and general honor. All this is his, i.e. of his family. And there was no need to acquire theological university diploma in Olomouc struggling with the Czech language, for possibility opened to go to Budapest, to the world famous Péter Pázmány University and to continue his studies in his mother tongue, where after a year or so he managed to get his doctor’s degree.

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