The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History - Michael Blumenthal

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the ice cream freezer, began singing a bizarrely Hungarianized take on an old Peter, Paul, and Mary tune, now titled “Hova lett a sok halászlé?”—“Where has all the fish soup gone?”

      “What a crazy sonuvabitch,” Fischer muttered under his breath, lifting his beaker of Slivovitz to his lips.

      “I think it’s rather touching, in its own way,” Kepes observed. “The poor boy is merely a creative spirit gone astray.”

      There was, however, on this particular occasion, a bit more to Feri’s melancholic tune than mere drunken creativity. “Why don’t you take a look outside, my friends,” he interrupted his tune to suggest. Followed closely by Kepes, Fischer made his way to the Italbolt door, from where—gathered across the street on the Post Office lawn beneath a blackening sky—he observed an incredible sight: NO MORE COOKING UNTIL WE HAVE PEACE! The two men read out loud from the large cardboard placard being held up on the post office lawn by none other than Etus néni, Terika néni, Vera néni, Rosza néni, Zsuza néni, Anikó néni and Kati néni—in other words, by all seven of the village’s surviving widows! The town’s women, led by Vera néni, had apparently decided that—Hungarian morality traveling, as it did, through the lower regions of the body—they would try and put an end to the summer’s hatreds and retributions by organizing a kind of culinary work stoppage.

      “I don’t believe it,” Fischer turned incredulously to Kepes, who was unable to keep a hardly faint smile from trickling onto his lips. “Those crazy broads are actually organizing a strike!”

      ***

      A strike, indeed, it turned out to be, as, over the next several days, the village’s usually abundant supply of fish soup, túrós rétes, paprikás csirke, mákos gombos, pörkolt, gulyás, and Hortobágyi palacsinta virtually dried up. The men of the village found themselves increasingly dependent on the fare offered by the grease-laden and radically overpriced Szent György Pince, or the more reasonably priced, but quantitatively miniscule, offerings at Jóska Bácsi’s new roadside restaurant, which simultaneously ran jeep tours of the vineyard, guided by the chef. Worse yet, many of them reverted to the sort of all-liquid diet that had already taken its toll on far too many Hungarians, both famous and infamous, in the past.

      By the third day of the strike, Fischer was suffering from stomach cramps and diarrhea, Kepes’s ulcer had been aggravated by an excess of alcohol, and even the Mayor, whose damaged pancreas dictated a diet at some remove from the Hungarian norm (which his wife, before going on strike, had lovingly supplied) began suffering from severe nausea and insomnia.

      Feri himself, somehow inspired to new levels of eloquence and sobriety by the strike, began, oddly enough, serving as a kind of middleman between the village’s peace-loving and newly undomesticated women and its disputatious men. “All they are saying,” he informed Horvath and Fischer later that week at the Italbolt, borrowing a line from one of his heroes, “is give peace a chance.”

      Fischer, looking rather anemically pale, was cast into a state of profound reflection by Feri’s borrowed words. “Well,” he said, somehow forcing a conciliatory expression onto his features, “perhaps they have a point . . . This is getting to be a rather unpleasant summer, after all.” With the exception of the Italbolt’s proprietress, Kati, for whose business the conflict had proved an unexpected boon, all the other patrons, overhearing the conversation from their usual positions hunched over a pálinka, broke into applause. “Kössünk békét!” cried out Tibor the dairy farmer, “Let’s make peace!”

      The Mayor, lifting his Slivovitz into the air, beamed with the air of a politician who had just brokered an agreement in the Middle East. “Then it’s decided,” he said. “We’ll have peace.” Fischer, following almost enthusiastically in his example, lifted his glass into the air. “Egészségedre . . . to Hegymagas!”

      The next morning, a Saturday, an even stranger gathering than the previous day’s found itself amassed on the Post Office lawn. Feri, freshly shaven and showered and wearing his gray suit beneath his New York Yankees baseball cap, was seated on a high stool, guitar in lap. To either side of him, were standing Árpi and Etus, the latter in a freshly washed and ironed apron. Behind them were gathered some two dozen of the village’s children and, at the very rear—wearing somewhat alcohol-induced, but nonetheless genuinely amiable smiles—were Gyula, Roland, and, dressed in his Sunday best, Kormány.

      At the sight of Fischer, Kepes, and the Mayor walking toward them down Széchenyi út, the gathered group, led by Feri’s rather arrhythmic strumming on the guitar, burst into song.

      “All we are saaaaying,” the Hegymagasians sang in an English that would surely have made John Lennon wince in his grave, “is give peace a chance.”

      “All we are saaaaying,” Etus, perpetually a good half-beat behind, intoned along, just as the sky opened and a torrential but soothing rain began to fall, “is give peace a chance.”

      ***

      Hardly forty-eight hours later, Gyula’s mother awoke to the sound of a bird squawking “jó reggelt kivánok”—“Good morning”—loudly in Hungarian. She went outside to find a brand new parrot, in a filigreed wooden cage, mounted on a stand in front of her bedroom window. At virtually the same instant, just a few houses down Petöfi út, Feri, confined to his bed with a bad cold and a case of Kaiser sör, awoke in an inebriated haze to find a new pair of gumicsizma—made by the very best company in Györ—beside his front door.

      Further up in the vineyard that morning, Roland entered his parents’ winemaking house on Szent Györgyhegy to find, to his amazement and delight—nestled right between the wooden casks that held his family’s precious Olaszrizling and Balaton Chardonnay—his missing wooden hand. And Kormány Lajos, when he went out to feed the horses that day, was greeted by the ravenous baahhhing of two young black baby sheep.

      That night, all was well in the small village of Hegymagas once more. Fischer and the Mayor, in a rare spirit of mutual affection and camaraderie, lifted a glass in Etus’s honor at the Italbolt, joined by Roland, cradling his glass in his prosthetic arm. Feri, meanwhile—cold, hangover and all—was walking up and down Széchenyi út, proudly displaying his new rubber boots and humming a Hungarian version of “Love Me Tender.”

      Even Kormány Lajos, in a rare spirit of conviviality and peace, could be found at yet another table in front of the pub, playing chess with—of all people—Árpi. But best—and, many people felt, most potent—of all in restoring the village’s usual atmosphere of tranquility and mutual affection was the scent of Etus’s fish soup, simmering in a gigantic kettle in front of the post office, wafting its way all the way up to Árpi’s vineyard and the appreciative nostrils of the new dog, Attila József, that Kormány had bought for her. The soup smelled—Kormány Lajos himself would later admit—as good, perhaps, as his own mother’s had once, and its aroma, he also acknowledged, was far more likely to prevail.

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