The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History. Michael Blumenthal
leg, penetrating all the way through the flesh and into the fibula.
Kormány’s wife, a nurse in the local hospital, seemed to take a certain private glee in her husband’s injury. Nonetheless, she was reluctantly summoned to bandage the wound and check the dog for rabies, her negative verdict concerning which did little to alleviate either Kormány’s anger, or his pain.
Kormány, in fact, had never been terribly fond of Etus, having long felt that her virtual lock on the annual fish soup prize was one of the reasons for his own mother’s premature death from a cardiac infarction—he described it as a “fish-soup-broken heart”—two years earlier. The elder Aunt Kormány’s concoction, her son knew, had been far superior to Etus’s soup, and it was only the sentimental admiration in which Etus and her family were held—as contrasted with the distance most of the villagers kept from the legendarily drunken Kormány clan—that, he was certain, explained such an undeserved monopoly.
Gyula, the eldest of the foursome, had once made what seemed a reasonable living as a go-between in the summer rental market for vineyard houses to Austrian tourists. But he had fallen victim, both to his increasing penchant for women and drink, and his inability to accommodate his rather lackadaisical spirit to the realities of the new market economy. Each passing year found him spending more and more of his time at the Italbolt in the company of Roland, a former carpenter who had severed his right hand with a chainsaw while drunk three years earlier, and less and less time at the “business office”—a three-legged kitchen table supported by bricks, on top of which was perched a 1928 maroon Continental typewriter—he had set up in his widowed mother’s pantry.
So—when news of Kormány Lajos’s wounding spread from the vineyard to the ABC store, and then from the ABC store to the pub—it took little in the way of urging for the wounded victim to recruit Gyula and Roland to the righteousness of his quest for vengeance against relatively affluent, and well-respected, Etus and her clan.
Etus herself, who spent much of her time baking cheese strudel to be sold at the beach in nearby Szigliget, was hardly a vindictive sort, and—wounded as she was by the violent death of her beloved puli—would have preferred to let the incident pass and get on with her acts of charity and culinary generosity. Nor was Árpi, whose drinking and carousing Etus was convinced had caused the premature death of his father some twenty years earlier, easily aroused from his usual, less than fully conscious, state on his mother’s behalf.
But the writer Fischer and the sculptor, Kepes, both of whose families had been longtime friends of Etus’s, felt particularly aggrieved by Fekete’s death and the consigning of Etus to a kind of second widowhood. The day after the killing, they took it upon themselves to pay a visit to the Mayor, Horvath János, to inquire as to what justice could be rendered the cold-blooded killers of Etus’s dog.
Horvath János was a firm believer in maintaining the village’s veneer of tranquility at all costs. He had for years been witness to the “revolving door” of trying to tame the impulses of the troublesome quartet—periodic short-term jailings in nearby Tapolca, accompanied by repeated reprimands by both himself and the local police chief—none of which had resulted in even the slightest change in their behavior.
“Kedves barátaim,” he addressed Fischer and Kepes as he invited them into his winemaking house on Szent György hill. “My dear friends…There is really nothing I can do about this matter. It is, after all, only a dog, and not a human being, that has been put to death.”
“Yes, of course, it’s a dog,” Fischer, not one to be easily intimidated, replied, “but it’s a widow’s dog—a widow, I might add, who has been a source of kindness in this village for more than sixty years—and I don’t think we should merely stand by and do nothing when poor Etus’s companion—an innocent dog, at that—is murdered in cold blood by four no-good drunkards.”
“I agree,” Kepes, who rarely left the confines of his newly converted studio, even to go to the Lake, and had been dragged along by Fischer, concurred. “It is not good for the village’s reputation,” he added, appealing to an area he knew to be high on the list of the Mayor’s concerns, “for the dogs of our widows to be randomly slaughtered.”
Kepes’s appeal to Hegymagas’s public relations seemed to have a momentary impact on the Mayor, who paused to remove the glass borlopó he had been using to fill a bottle of Chardonnay from a wooden cask from his lips.
“Yes,” he said, “I suppose you’re right—it’s not good for the village’s image. But, on the other hand, we must remember,” he was quick to add, immediately returning to his avocation, “that we are not Keszthely . . . it is hardly as if droves of German and Austrian tourists in search of cheap dental care will be discouraged from coming here by the death of a dog. Why, we don’t even have a dentist!”
“I am not talking about public relations,” Fischer, a former samizdat writer and democratic resistance leader who was quick to lapse into cosmopolitan-style abstractions, was turning rather red. “I am talking about justice for poor Etus and her dog.”
The Mayor, a member of the rather right-wing Smallholder’s Party that was currently part of the governing coalition, had never been terribly fond of Fischer. He looked up from his more domestic duties, removing the borlopó once again from between his lips.
“Kedves barátom,” he said, addressing the writer with a combination of feigned respect and ill-disguised disdain, “I am afraid that such appeals to higher authorities carry far more weight in Budapest than here in our little village. I am merely trying, as best I can, to keep the peace.”
A slight expression of distaste began to make its way onto Fischer’s face as he paused to take a sip of the Mayor’s rather mediocre Sauvignon Blanc. “It is not,” he replied, “a ‘higher authority’ we are appealing to . . . it is your authority.”
“And that authority, I am afraid, kedves Fischer úr,” the Mayor rejoined, “is severely limited by the realities of our village life.”
Disgusted by what he perceived to be the Mayor’s condescending and parochial, small-town attitude, Fischer, followed obediently by Kepes, turned on his heels and strode out the door of the Mayor’s cottage. “In that case,” he turned to address the Mayor once more as the twosome headed back down the hill, “we will simply have to take justice for poor Etus into our own hands.”
***
Hardly three days later, Kormány Lajos’s prize sheep, a dark-haired animal by the name of Levente, was found hanging from a large oak just behind the stream that separated the village from neighboring Raposka.
The very next day, one of Hegymagas’s most eloquent citizens, the thirty-four-year-old parrot, Attila, was found dead on the floor of his wooden cage beside the kitchen table in Gyula’s mother’s kitchen. Not even the most loving ministrations of Kormány Lajos’s wife could revive the bird—a gift from Gyula’s grandmother shortly after her emigration to Chile in 1956—who had startled, and endeared itself to, even Hegymagas’s most patriotic citizens with its ability to pronounce the nearly unpronounceable Hungarian word for drugstore—gyógyszertár.
But it was only when, finally, Feri’s antique gumi csizma were found, the following week, melted into a foul-smelling rubbery blob in the stone fireplace just below Árpi’s hillside hectares, and Roland’s prosthetic hand was discovered, the following day, to have been stolen from his bedside table, that the Mayor decided the time had come to involve himself personally in the increasingly anarchic system of law and order that was threatening to engulf the village.
Knocking on the door of Fischer’s two-story village house late one afternoon, Horvath, emboldened by a half bottle of plum pálinka, greeted the writer with the habitual Hungarian kiss on each cheek.
“Jó napot kivánok, kedves barátaim,” the Mayor announced, stepping over the threshold into the kitchen and adopting what was, vis à vis Fischer, an unusually amiable tone. “Good day.”
“Good