By Zary Fekete
My first memory of the Hungarian language is from when I was six years old. My parents had
moved to Budapest to work, and they were learning the language. Every evening, they watched
the news to see what words they could recognize. At first, they understood nothing. One evening,
they looked each other in triumph and said, “Nem!” They laughed and hugged each other.
“Nem” is the Hungarian word for “no”.
We lived in a pre-fabricated concrete apartment building, ubiquitous throughout central and
eastern Europe in the 1980s. Every afternoon I went down to the muddy yard in front of the
building and played with the neighborhood children. I could not understand anything they said,
but for children this didn’t matter. We rode our bikes on the cobbled streets. Asbestos dripped off
hot water pipes along the side of the road. We molded it into makeshift snowballs and threw
them at each other, filling the air with poison.
A year later my family moved to a smaller apartment on the western side of the city, in the hills
beyond the Danube River. Our neighbors were a married couple with two children, a boy my age
and his younger sister. I played with them. I must have begun to learn Hungarian by then,
although I have no memory of acquiring words. One day their father was preparing to take them
on a bike ride. I said to them, “a fiú is mehet?” (“The boy can go to?”) I was the boy.
My parents enrolled me in Hungarian primary school. I sat in the back of my first grade
classroom understanding nothing the teacher said. I looked up at the ceiling and blew saliva
bubbles out of my lips. During recess I played with the other children. At snack time I must have
learned the name of the food, “zsíros kenyér” (“fatty bread”) White bread spread with lard and
sprinkled with paprika. It was delicious.
By the second grade I was speaking more smoothly. I was able to understand the teacher and
could respond to her when she asked me questions about the lessons. However, I was not a good
student. I didn’t understand that the words “házi feladat” applied to me and not just to the
Hungarian students. “Házi feladat” means “homework”.
In the third grade I memorized my first Hungarian poem for class recitation, a piece by Arany
Janos called “The Late One”, about a man in his old age. I didn’t fully understand all of it, but
today I can still recall snatches of lines: “On his neck is the helpless yoke of old age” and “a vain
deed is better than an unblessed complaint” and “I know I’m never happy when I succeed.”
My Hungarian knowledge slowly grew. I guaged my proficiency by the difficulty of the words I
could understand: közömbös, alkonyat, feszültség. (indifferent, twilight, tension) I could
instantly understand most things adults said, and the few words I missed I could infer their
meaning through the context of the sentences. I spoke fluidly and could talk my way around
missing words in my vocabulary by supplying other words in their place.
Last summer I returned to Hungary after a long absence. I wondered if it would be difficult to
pick up where I had left off. I got into a taxi at the airport and gave the driver the address of the
motel where I would be staying. The car pulled away from the airport. A few moments of silence
went by, and then the taxi driver said, “Mi a véleménye erről az ostobaságról, ami a politikai
pártok között zajlik az Egyesült Államokban?” (What’s your opinion of this nonsense happening
between the political parties in the United States?) I smiled and then settled in for a long
conversation.
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete
Hot Pot Magazine 