IV
EVEN ON NORTH-FACING CLIFFS HITHERTO BARE, SIGNS of life, ruffs of green. The fruit-trees’ boughs sweep the ground, so swollen are they with their crop. Few whoops or cries from the fowl of the air; hens are busy brooding on the nest. Water lilies carpet the surface of the lakes. The tillers of the soil rejoice: there will be a rich harvest. Those short of food and drink are spurned less often now by those who are not. At times even in daylight an ever-waxing, ever more yellow moon rises in the sky.
They will have their work cut out to gather in this harvest, thought Richard Stern. He raised himself to the iron bars of the cell and let himself dangle as long as his strength allowed, in part by way of exercise, in part to see something of the world outside. Ever since being brought here from Spielberg he had prayed for a cell in the far corner of the tower, whence he might observe the slope that, his cartographic studies led him to deduce, would have a crescent shape.
Already, despite the distance, he was able to identify some of the local farmers and their lads. When all’s said and done, better a cell giving onto a hill in the fortress at Munkács, under the Carpathians, than any cell in that Austrian eyrie, Kufstein; at least Munkács was in Hungary. The horrors they told of the hell of Kufstein! Inmates in irons day and night, no letters in or out, and up to six months without being allowed a turn in the yard. To cap it all, consumption was rife, scores took to the bare boards they had for beds, and the bodies were not released to the family but tossed into the moat in sacks with hardly a sprink ling of lime, let alone a decent spadeful of soil.
Richard Stern never expected a pardon; he thought he knew that the thread of his life, though it might be spun out for quite a long time, would finally be cut in the prison of the fortress of Munkács. So he could work only with what he had. Whenever his eyes could bear it, he spent his time writing; otherwise he hung from the window’s iron bars and feasted them, so that he might take not the bleak cell but the world outside, the summer cavalcade of nature, with him to the bourn whence no earthly traveler returns. He knew in his bones that the heavenly ones would never admit him. As a child he had been brought up in the faith of the Jews, but nowadays he would strain his memory in vain for their word for “devil” or “salvation.” Did the Jews have devils and angels at all? It hardly matters now … It makes not a bean’s worth of difference.
He let go of the iron bars and dropped down onto the rough-hewn stone floor; a twinge of pain shot through his kneecaps. The warmth of the month of July had brought little relief for his aching limbs. He could no longer bend his arms and legs without stabs of pain. It has not taken me long to wear them out, he thought. But that, too, hardly matters now; I expect them to perform little in the way of service to me. He sat down at the rough and splintery table that served two of the functions that mattered to him most: writing and eating. The third was met by the wooden bucket in the corner, whose ill-fitting lid ensured the constant companionship of noisome smells.
He opened The Book of Fathers, of which no more than thirteen folios remained blank. Richard Stern was an industrious diarist, filling more pages of the book by himself than all his ancestors combined. And this was despite his cells, especially the one in Spielberg, being severely deprived of light; sometimes he thought the goose-quill found its own way in the dark. He was given a single candle every other day and learned how to be sparing with it.
Earlier in his life it had not occurred to him that he might himself write in the pages of The Book of Fathers, even though in his younger days he had turned to it more often than even the Bible.
“This is another of the sins of the Sterns: that you don’t even go to the synagogue! Mark my words, the Creator will punish you for this!” came his grandmother’s refrain; she would have preferred him to revert to Sternovszky as his surname.
Richard Stern was not in the least inclined to do this. “Please, Grandma Borbála, spare me these reproaches and rest content with the first half of my name. I owe it to my poor brothers and my mother, and my father, too.”
“Leave your father out of this!” cackled Borbála, who had by this time come to resemble the witches of the fairytales. Her huge bulk could hardly be eased through a normal doorway. True enough, this was rarely required, for she would spend days on end in her round-backed armchair, specially made for her by the turret’s overseer András, who was something of a jack-of-all-trades. Richard Stern loved his grandmother, little good though she did him. Whenever he had the chance, he asked her to sing. When Borbála fully unleashed her voice, the song would carry a long way indeed: The way before me weeps, the trail before me grieves … Richard Stern’s eyes at once clouded with tears when his grandmother began to sing; all the songs she knew were melancholy ones and he, her grandson, was at such times able quite clearly to conjure up the face of his late mother, which had otherwise quite faded. The images of Robert and Rudolf were lost even more deeply in the mists of time.
I have no need of fine words; I will have only words that are true!
With these words Richard Stern began his chapter in The Book of Fathers. He was especially prodigal in the period following his arrest, even in the temporary prison, while awaiting trial. He was fortunate to have it delivered to him at his request, with other books.
There being no looking-glass at my disposal, I am employing my fingers to examine my face for the ravages of time. Since I have been imprisoned I have not shaved off the hair of my face, which thus covers up the random scars left by the childhood pox, of which I was then, as now, very much ashamed. Because of it I was unwilling to show my face to others and always preferred the comfort afforded by solitude. The hair of my head is falling out in clumps and is now very thin. On my chest growth continues apace, even as, here and there, it is turning white.
When I was arrested I was still a young buck, but here one grows old more quickly, since there is little else to do. The angle of my nose is more pronounced, my brow is furrowed much like the rind of muscat melon. I am lanky in build, yet the little flesh that remains has nonetheless begun to droop, especially at my hips and also under my chin, where there has developed a dewlap resembling the collar of a cape, which I find so repulsive that several times a day I claw at it with my nails until I draw blood. Even less am I able to endure the two somewhat feminine little mounds that have developed on my chest, which, especially when I sit, fold themselves onto the upper half of my stomach. Compared with the proportions of my other parts, my hand is on the small side and my left thumb is missing, a victim of the quack after our tragedy at Lemberg: he claimed that gangrene would have set in after the sword cut and that, had he not removed root as well as branch, it might have cost me my hand, my arm, or even my life.
Whenever he thought of his lost thumb, he relived the pain of its loss; a more agonizing experience he had never endured, though his interrogators had tortured him mercilessly with prickings and brandings that pained him still and that perhaps his body would not get over until his dying day. At seven years of age, he had awakened to see two men armed to the teeth ripping off the carriage door. His mother was dragged away by her hair, shrieking; his brothers were sliced up with scimitars, his brother Robert’s head flying off his body like a tossed ball and Rudolf’s bloody guts spilling onto the carriage step and flooding Richard’s only escape route. By then the other door of the carriage had opened and from that side a blade pierced his back even as it seemed also to strike his neck and left hand. In his final glint of consciousness he saw a series of images: a very familiar-looking young man, in irons, in a prison.
As he grew up, he gradually understood that provided he bore the suffering that accompanied his memories of the past, he would be given some taste of the future awaiting him. Once he divined that the young man was himself, he was certain there was no escaping the bitter fate of imprisonment. He was a student at the Sárospatak Collegium when his visions first gave him access to even more curious sights. He could see his own marriage feast, then his wedding night and the birth of his six children, all of them boys. If this prophecy was to be believed, his bride would be a lady who spoke an alien language, with skin the color of honey, hair as black as night, and a triangular birthmark on her breastbone. Though fearful of his visions, yet he trusted them.
As a young man he resisted stubbornly all Borbála’s aggressive efforts and machinations at matchmaking. He stood his ground at her litany of the most incredible dowries and socially most desirable matches and told his grandmother: “You will see that there will come someone who is finer and more lovely; someone right for me.”
At the Sárospatak Collegium there were two subjects—geography and grammar—at which, in his teachers’ opinion, he surpassed even the best of the students. He found that his extraordinary memory was particularly useful. By his third year at the college he had already mastered eight tongues. His favorite teacher, a Frenchman called de la Motte, urged him to try his fortune in the outside world. He wrote for him a letter of recommendation to Academician Carmillac, the distinguished French linguist at the University of Paris, who replied by return that if the Hungarian student had no more than half the talent that de la Motte claimed for him, he was assured of a place in his seminar. Thus did Richard reach the French capital despite the fulminations of Borbála.
“If you go, you must not count on our support!”
“I wouldn’t dream of being a parasite.”
No question, I had no idea how I would keep myself in the city of Paris. Professor de la Motte strongly supported my visit and his parting words to me were: Dieu choisit le courageux! Or as we would say in Hungarian: Fortune favors the brave. I did not feel very brave however when I stood in front of the famous cathedral of Lutetia, Notre Dame, without a sou in my pocket. Fortune did favor me shortly, however, when I secured some students to tutor, three in Latin and two for Greek grammar.
Richard Stern—Risharre, as the French had it—continued his spectacular progress at the University of Paris and was able to join as early as the second term the comparative grammar seminars of Academician Carmillac. Carmillac, whose academic status at the university entitled him to be addressed as Maistre, was engaged in a project to demonstrate that the evolution of the French language was closely linked to the general condition of particular regions. He had selected three regions that he deemed most advanced from the point of view of handicrafts, agriculture, and cultural matters; three that he thought the most underdeveloped in these respects; and a further three that he considered middling. His thesis was that those parts where the network of highways and travel is most advanced, where the wells and other buildings rise highest, where more people purchase newspapers and almanacs and admission to entertainments—these are likely to be the places where people’s usage of the sacred French language, in the Maistre’s view the eighth wonder of the world, will be the most cultivated. Richard Stern concurred, though he was able to make comparisons with only seven other languages, whereas Academician Carmillac could boast knowledge of fifteen, including such rare birds as Basque and Breton—the latter admittedly the Maistre’s grandmother-tongue. The end of March found Richard Stern in the village of Francaroutier, at the foot of the Pyrenees. On the Maistre’s lists, Francaroutier very much brought up the rear.
“Risharre, you will collect the data down there by yourself. Make sure you follow my instructions.”
Richard Stern had made himself a copy of the shorter catechism of Academician Carmillac: seventy-seven numbered points. The size of four folios, he slipped this into The Book of Fathers, in consequence of which he was able to read it often even in the hard years of his imprisonment. In Munkács it prompted him to reflect thus:
What arrant nonsense! To imagine that where they dig more wells, the use of the past subjunctive is more subtle! Knowing what I do today it is well-nigh impossible to understand why I failed to point out that my Maistre’s theory of comparison lacked any solid foundation! Doubtless the unquestioned respect I had for him prompted me to suppress my commonsensical view, fearing that my arguments would be crushed by the weight of his vast erudition and that I would be humiliated. The lesson is that one must speak up if one is convinced something is right, whatever the cost, because not standing by one’s beliefs is also a defeat and the thought of it will gnaw as much thereafter.
In Francaroutier Richard Stern’s careful budgeting had made it possible for him to employ two young men as clerks: one to note down random dialogues in the village marketplace, the other to scour the notices in the village and in the inns and taverns and wherever else he found any writing, noting down both correct and incorrect examples of sentences, as instructed. They would have looked at the local newspaper, too, but in this case there was none. Richard Stern visited in turn the mayor, the notary, the doctor, the fire chief, and other officials, putting to them the questions devised by Academician Carmillac. Of the answers, he had to record only those that were outstandingly good or quite imperfect.
There being no hostelry in Francaroutier, he accepted the hospitality of the curé, who offered not only lodging but also evening meals, in return for suitable payment to the thickset woman who appeared to be his housekeeper. She lived on the far side of the church with her husband and three children and presumably had her hands full with her house, the vegetable garden, and the chicken run, but seemed to spend a deal of her time, from a very early hour, around the rectory. Sometimes even late at night, when the scholar came home from his labors, he could hear the rapid gabble of the good lady, of which at first he could not pick out a single word. The curé enlightened him: “Do not be concerned, Domine, this woman broke her jaw as a child, hence her distorted speech; one gets used to it after a time.”
During one of his endless reveries in the cell it dawned on him that the “housekeeper” was no doubt the curé’s lover. At that time it did not occur to him for a moment. He was a complete innocent in these matters. If during the humid nights he was troubled by wet dreams, he would keep a voluntary fast for several days, thinking that he might thus cleanse himself. Women he merely admired, always and incurably in hopes that he would come across that woman who spoke no Hungarian—honey-colored skin, hair as dark as night, a triangular birthmark above her breastbone—and who would bring him the blessing of six boys. These were his dreams as he lay on the musty-smelling sack of straw on the guest-bed of the parish curé, tolerating alta pace the bites of the cockroaches (these sleep-preventing creatures were somewhat smaller than their Hungarian cousins, but all the more hungry for blood).
The inhabitants of Francaroutier looked forward with especially keen anticipation to the first Sunday after Easter, when there was traditionally an open-air entertainment, the biggest for many miles around, on the field in front of the Grotta. The Grotta was an opening into the depths of the cliff-face above the village. It was so narrow that a grown man could scarcely penetrate it if he crawled into it slowly—if he dared. In the dark crevices of the Grotta lurked evil spirits whose appeasement was secured at this time of the year by means of sacrifices, prayers conducted by the parish curé, and a torchlight procession followed by dancing until dawn. It was whispered that in the old days even newborn babes were sacrificed, but not even the oldest inhabitants could confirm this; these days a ram roasted but still blood-red would be cast into the crack, with two round loaves, a few bottles of the local wine and fruit brandy, all crowned by wreaths of water lilies.
As the two assistants had categorically refused to work on the festival day, Richard Stern was at a loss as to what to do on this day of general jollity; he felt he had not been sent there to enjoy himself. But he was unlikely to find himself a sober companion to converse with. In the milling crowds of the fair, though, he was likely to hear turns of phrase not heard elsewhere. With his notebook in his satchel, goose-quills and inkpot secured to his belt, he set off behind the red-cheeked locals on their way to the Grotta. As he arrived in the field, the ball-throwing competition was well under way. Boys and young men in rolled-up sleeves stood by the white lime line drawn on the grass, to throw the iron balls as close as they could to the red-painted stake. Anyone whose ball was hit and rolled too far was out of the competition, as were those whose balls went in the wrong direction.
By the edge of the forest the butchers were roasting an ox. One could buy honey cake, Spanish tapas, freshly baked pot-loaf, and the delightful dark maroon nectar of the nearby vineyards. Music played as women in clogs swung into the jumping dance with lads in black waistcoats and curly-brimmed felt hats. The spectacle held no interest for Richard Stern, and he pushed his way through the crowd to the mouth of the Grotta. He delayed his meal until later—he liked to save up his pleasures, always leaving the tastiest morsel to the last—so for himself he took only half a pint of wine.
The basalt blocks had been scoured rough by wind, rain, and snow. They looked like untanned hides. The opening had already been garlanded with lilies; Richard Stern’s nose was irritated by the heavy smell of the flowers. He felt a sudden wave of homesickness wash over him, for he knew, not only from The Book of Fathers but from the streams of his own memory, that back home the turret had similarly been built at the site of a cavern; indeed, the builders had used fragments of rock from the explosion. He saw before him Borbála, draped on her deckchair. Next came the famous copper mortar found by his grandfather Bálint Sternovszky after he cleared the bushes away: it was now used by Borbála, since the doctor forbade her sweetmeats, as a container to hide her delicacies. She had a particular fondness for those egg-shaped lumps of starch sugar.
Richard Stern was reminded of the egg-shaped timepiece he had received on leaving Magyarland, as a good-luck charm.
The ornate timepiece was found by my great-great-grandfather, when he lived like a wild dog on the clearing known as Bull Meadow. When it came into my grandfather’s possession, he had it repaired. From him it passed to my father, István Stern, who had to repair it himself on a number of occasions, so that it could once more show the day, the month, and even the year. Now it is mine. But it remains a temperamental little creature, as if it were not a timepiece but a traveler adrift in time. It loses a month or two now and then; on occasion it can be a decade in error.
At the edge of the stalls set up at dawn, a whey-faced peasant was selling quiche lorraine from under an awning fixed to his cart. Tied up nearby were his two little shepherd dogs, their fur trimmed back to an unnatural shortness. Richard Stern was unsure if he should try the quiche lorraine. He often had trouble with his stomach and had just had a bad night, perhaps the result of the previous evening’s bouillabaisse, liberally doused with the homemade wine of the parish curé’s housekeeper. Richard Stern by no means disdained the fruit of the sea and enjoyed everything that grew or bred in salty water, even if this black fish soup from the south of France contained many varieties of crab and shellfish, to say nothing of some edible algae too.
The smell of the fresh-baked quiche lorraine overcame that of the lilies and Richard Stern began to lick his lips. Perhaps they might give him half a slice? As he was hesitating, the crowd behind him fell silent and parted to let through a black-fringed carriage, driven by a grim-faced liveried coachman in charge of plumed horses. The road turned toward the valley at the point where the whey-faced quiche-seller had parked his cart. The carriage slowed to take the turn. From the carriage window there looked out a veiled lady of noble bearing. The moment she saw the two bald dogs she let out a cry: “What immodesty! Drive on, quickly!”
The coachman applied his whip to the horses, which suddenly quickened their pace, giving the carriage a mighty jolt. The front wheels lost their grip on the road and began to slide in the direction of the chasm. The liveried coachman bellowed at the rearing horses, but they were unable to check the momentum of the carriage as it veered sideways. Richard Stern jumped in front of the carriage and would have pushed it back on the road, but he could feel his strength ebbing away as the carriage careered towards him, its passenger compartment listing dangerously. A ghastly rattle rose from his throat as he flexed his body against the wooden spokes, as if he were being broken on the wheel; the lady’s terrified screams were accompanied by the cracking of his bones.
According to eyewitnesses I fell under the carriage wheels, the carriage rolled over me, and it was my chest with its broken ribs that prevented the carriage and its noble occupant from plunging into the chasm. Everyone who saw it assumed I had died on the spot. A catastrophe was averted only by a hair’s breadth. It seemed little short of a miracle when only a short while later I was able to stand up, despite appalling pains. Thus were we both reborn, I and the Marquise des Reaux: we were married at year’s end.
The Marquise des Reaux was the eldest daughter of an impoverished baron; her excessive piety was the subject of gossip even several counties away. Richard Stern knew nothing of this. The veiled lady jumped out of the carriage and leaning above him asked, greatly agitated: “Sir, are you alive?”
Richard Stern said only: “At last.”
The Marquise did not understand. “A doctor! Send for a doctor!” she shouted, and fortunately there was a barber-surgeon in the crowd. Richard Stern closed his eyes but saw still the lady’s honey-colored skin, her hair dark as night, and the triangular birthmark on her breastbone. He shed tears of joy, whereupon the barber-surgeon made him drink a pain-killing decoction.
As soon as his broken ribs were healed he sought out the Marquise des Reaux on her estate and delicately inquired whom he might ask for her hand.
“Me, Monseigneur; I am an orphan in this world.”
In the end there did appear a portly uncle, one Jean-Baptiste des Reaux, who was her guardian until she came of an age to inherit the little that remained after the gambling losses of her late father. The uncle readily gave his blessing to the union, he and the rest of the family having been privately concerned that she might be left on the shelf. The last barrier to the marriage—the des Reaux were Catholics—was surmounted when the husband tobe agreed in the marriage contract to convert as well as to permit any offspring to be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. Even if he had started life as a Jew, he reflected, what reason was there now to cling to his grandparents’ faith?
They were already engaged when Richard Stern inquired: “Mademoiselle, may I ask what you found so immodest in the quiche-seller when we first met?”
“My dear Monseigneur, do you not think it immodest to shear dogs naked? Nakedness sullies the mind!”
The Marquise des Reaux was a précieuse through and through. She forbade all discussion in her presence of male undergarments, of any aspect of the workings of the gut, or of any similarly scandalous topic. She did not tolerate Richard Stern eating in her company, nor would she dine at the same table as her husband-to-be. In accordance with the Marquise’s wishes, their wedding was held in Nîmes cathedral, the bishop officiating. For the ceremony Borbála arrived in the company of several dozen distant relatives, in a caravan of carts that seemed never to end. When it was announced that the Mademoiselle would henceforth be known as the Marquise de Stern—mar-keys dö störn—from the direction of Borbála there could be heard a full-throated gurgle of Hungarian laughter.
There was but one matter in which Richard Stern would not submit to his wife’s demands: he felt not the slightest inclination to lead the life of the minor gentry in the south of France. Ideally he would have liked to return home to Magyarland, but he saw no possibility of the Marquise accompanying him there. But if it had to be Francaroutier, well, it would be through his own skills and efforts that he would support himself and the six sons that he promised, to general applause, to the well-wishers gathered at the wedding breakfast. He wanted to continue his grammatical studies irrespective of whether they brought home the bacon, for a real man does not live by bacon alone. To the chiding of the Marquise he responded with a bon mot from the Paris salons: Do you expect me to sacrifice Holland for the Netherlands? As the lady showed puzzlement, he was obliged to explain the euphemistic wordplay: Holland referred to expensive lace fripperies, while the Pays-Bas stood for the body’s nether regions. The women of the streets offer the latter for the former.
In addition to his grammatical projects, he also had more lucrative plans, based on an account by one of his Dutch fellow students. The lad described how in Holland there were countless windmills, used not only to grind corn but also to generate some kind of electricity that made possible their use to drive machinery and to produce lighting; in places it had wholly replaced the manual labor of the weavers. Richard Stern did not hold out much hope for the support of this project in Francaroutier; the select few to whom he confided these ideas had burst out laughing. Undaunted he decided to build, beside the hundred-year-old watermill on the des Reaux estate, another, with sails to catch the wind. He had the books needed for the design brought over from Holland; in order to read them he managed in the space of six weeks to become passably proficient in Flemish. He then bought the necessary materials and stood daylong instructing a select few of the more intelligent laborers on the estate in the construction of the sails. He imagined that the New Mill—it was so christened by the villagers as soon as the foundations were dug—would be used alternately for grinding and for generating electricity, by means of an ingenious switchgear of his own devising.
To this day I fail to understand how I came to be so humiliated. My machinery was incapable of even beginning to harness the force of the winds, even though I had spent many hours beforehand carefully considering the matter and working everything out with the precision for which I am known, checking all the calculations several times over. I became the object of general mockery, which the Marquise was never to forgive me.
Richard Stern kept up a lively correspondence with Academician Carmillac and other distinguished scholars that he had met at the University of Paris, as well as with his contacts at the Sárospatak Collegium, particularly Bálint Csokonya, who had gained his laurels as a poet while still at the school. It was from the latter that Richard Stern learned of the dire straits in which the Collegium now found itself. Never had the governors of this prestigious school had to face such a difficult situation: not only books but even writing paper and ink were becoming barely affordable. The field of Hungarian culture is a fallow field visited by drought, he wrote; no one considers it of any importance; the intellectual elite of our country read in German, if indeed they read at all; it would seem that they are loath even to speak Hungarian. The few with the talent and means to cultivate our sciences or our arts prefer to pass their time abroad. The character of the nation is fading fast.
The reproach he read between the lines prompted Richard Stern to think of returning, sooner rather than later, to the land of his birth. He sought out by the most delicately circuitous means the views of Academician Carmillac. The Maistre urged him by all means to visit Magyarland and to travel the length and breadth of the country. While doing so he might usefully take advantage of the opportunity to collect data to see if the Carmillac theory also stood the test in a backward land such as his. This sentence stung the patriotic sentiments of Richard Stern. What French arrogance … and in any event we have not yet proven that the Carmillac theory is applicable anywhere at all. He would gladly have shared his dilemma with the Marquise, but the lady had, since the ignominious affair of the windmill, taken pains to avoid his presence and indeed in recent weeks had denied him access to her bedchamber. Richard Stern was not excessively troubled by this; even in better times his wife permitted only one means of amorous dalliance: through a carefully placed slit in her nightwear.
On the eve of their wedding anniversary Richard Stern was called on by Jean-Baptiste des Reaux, who with a great deal of circumlocutory hemming and hawing finally let it be known that his wedded wife had against him a gravamen that was indeed grave.
“The Marquise? Mon Dieu, not that blessed windmill business still?”
“Oh no, my dear sir, it is a matter much more serious. The Marquise desires a congress … Vous comprenez?”
“I certainly do not!”
“Monsieur Störn knows not what means this congress? I tried in vain to dissuade her, but she will not listen to me; she will lead us all into the vipers’ nest of gossip. I have told her: be patient, the good Lord will assurément bless you with child …”
“Is that the problem? That she has not yet conceived by me?”
“Exactement. She has taken it into her head that she wants a proof of her husband’s impotentia. Whoever heard of such a thing? We are having no congress here for almost fifty years! I know what you are feeling now, Monsieur Störn. Perhaps she will think better of it.”
Richard Stern reeled off in one uninterrupted sequence every curse he knew in the French language. He knew he was mired in the deepest trouble. The Marquise had never in her life been known to change her mind. Since he knew little of Hungarian law and even less of French, he needed help, in the form of good advice. He chose as confidant the reverend curé, who explained to him that in essence a congress was the ordering by the ecclesiastical court of an act of coition to be held in the presence of expert witnesses.
“If that is all she wants from me, she can have it!” swore Richard Stern, blushing crimson. They were on their second bottle of wine. Alas, his confidant did not keep his confidence. By the next day the whole village knew that the Magyar Monsieur was soft in the organ. Sniggers dogged his every step. He affected a lofty indifference in the face of his misfortune.
The Marquise de Stern had indeed petitioned the ecclesiastical court. So convinced was she of the justice of her case that in her application, instead of the statutory four experts, she begged for “ten doctors of medicine and mid-wives with expertise in such matters.” Richard Stern would have liked to discuss the matters, but his wife barricaded herself in her wing of the building. Richard Stern composed a lengthy letter in which he eloquently pointed out that the Marquise could not be in the right, if only because, until she denied him her favors, normal coitus had taken place on no fewer than twenty-four occasions.
The chambermaid returned his letter in shreds. “Madame protests that she will not be the recipient of such immodest remarks.”
“She did not even read it?”
“No.”
“Then how does she know the remarks are immodest?”
Stern wrote her another letter, which also came back in shreds. On the back of one scrap were the words: “LET THE LAW DECIDE!”
The preliminary examination of the Marquise took place in one of the bathhouses of Nîmes. The conclusion of the medical experts was unanimous that the Marquise had “without a shadow of doubt been deprived of her virginity.” Richard Stern was jubilant. His jubilation was, however, short-lived. The Marquise de Stern claimed that what the doctors of medicine had observed was merely the “result of a rapprochement by her husband that was vulgar and incompetent and not in the manner deemed appropriate.” The taverns of Francaroutier rang that night with the latest news: “The Magyar can only dig with his digit!”
The congress had the couple summoned to that same bathhouse. On the advice of Academician Carmillac, Richard Stern submitted a particular request: “Ensure that my wife is bathed thoroughly. It may not be beneath her to employ one of those cramping tools employed by the women of the streets.”
Wonder of wonders, the Marquise consented to bathe before the witnesses, fully covered from top to toe, but remarked to her husband: “Monsieur appears to be rather well informed regarding the habits of street women!”
Richard Stern downed the yolks of four new-laid eggs before turning to the Marquise on the bed, whose curtains the court bailiffs had discreetly drawn. “I will make her a boy, the first of the six,” he swore, clenching his fists. Sweat poured off his body, but down below there was no sign of movement. “Impossible! I’m going to have six male offspring! Six boys! Six boys!” he said, in his mother tongue, panicking.
“Your summons here was not for prayer!” hissed the Marquise.
Time went on. One of the shriveled little midwives peeked behind the curtains from time to time and reported to the assembly: “Nothing, not a thing.”
“I’m lost! … I’ve been bewitched!” he croaked bronchially, adding a few choice curses for good measure in the Hungarian that neither the committee nor his eminently pious wife would understand.
The citizens of Nîmes, and those who had gathered here from Francaroutier, had laid substantial bets, some on the husband, some on the wife. Those who had voted for Richard Stern lost their stake when the committee’s decision was made public. The marriage was speedily annulled, the Marquise reverted to being known as des Reaux, her ex-husband was forbidden to set foot on the estate, and his belongings were carted over to the parish curé’s, where he found temporary lodging for a second time.
“Accept the dispensation of providence,” said the reverend.
“I would appreciate it if you kept at least God out of this!”
He spent three days in Paris, saying his farewells to his friends and teachers. As he recounted the details to Academician Carmillac, the latter shook his head in disbelief. This time Richard Stern added the story of how he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed the woman he was destined to marry.
“Perhaps you were mistaken, and she is not, after all, the one.”
Richard Stern shrugged his shoulders and again listed the attributes, like lines of a poem: “Foreign tongue, honey-colored skin, hair as black as night, a triangular birthmark above the breastbone.”
As he packed his bags in Francaroutier he saw that he had acquired almost nothing apart from books. He bought a cart with four reliable horses, so that he would not have to depend on the nags of the post-houses on the way. Before he finally turned his back on his life in France, it happened that he ran into the Marquise des Reaux in the marketplace. The woman was on the arm of a gentleman with auburn whiskers and a tall top hat and was tripping among the stalls with a lack of inhibition that made one doubt that it was truly she. An even more striking change was that her hair had become a light chestnut color, the one the French call brunette. Richard Stern cried out: “Marquise!”
The woman did not look up. Coolly she continued on her way. The same day Richard Stern discovered from one of the coachmen on the estate (in return for a ten-franc note) that as a result of scarlet fever in her childhood the Marquise was to all intents completely bald and had worn a perruque ever since. “I am surprised that this is news to Monsieur Störn … in Francaroutier it is common knowledge!”
To Richard Stern the passage of his time in prison seemed like the progress of a rotting boat floating or, rather, just drifting with infinitesimal slowness, somewhere in the outside world. He pondered the mysterious nature of time, as he hung in his cell window, clinging to the bars, made slippery and slightly warm by his sweat. He tried to grip them at a point as high as possible, but sooner or later his fingers began to slither downwards and he landed on the rough stone ledge, gashing his lower arms, which bore traces similar to the raw wounds left by the rubbing of the leg-irons.
Sometimes it seemed that even a quarter of an hour would not pass, and writing about the endlessness of his days seemed even harder than living through them. Nonetheless, somehow, the seemingly unending, snail’s-pace crawl of the mornings, afternoons, and evenings began to add up to weeks and months, and when the prisoner least expected it, the first year had passed. In The Book of Fathers he regularly and carefully marked with little strokes the calendar of his days of imprisonment. It was as if the boat, having been stuck fast on a reef, at last pushed off and gathered speed, only to become stranded on a sandbank, with no movement again until who knows when. Somehow, lo and behold, the second year, too, was gone, with a sudden impetus at its end like the lightning swoop of an eagle on its prey, after what seems like an eternity of stillness with its wings spread wide.
Richard Stern was still in Spielberg Castle prison when time’s eagle captured its most succulent prey: the century itself. The midnight tolling of the church bells found him kneeling by his bed; in the absence of a table this was also the position in which he wrote in The Book of Fathers. Will anything out of the ordinary happen? After all, it is not every day that the calendar turns the page to a new century.
Nothing.
Well, at least the century is over, he thought. He spent the night awake, first exercising his mind through prayer, then by counting. He stopped when he reached nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine: some unnameable fear gripped him and would not let him utter the figure with four zeroes.
In the early hours of New Century’s Day one of the prisoners began to sing in a low, dark voice: The way before me weeps, the trail before me grieves … Richard Stern broke down in tears. It was the end of the century in which he was born and the one just beginning was likely to hold in store nothing more than damp cell walls. In Spielberg the window was so high that he was not able to look out at all.
Still, something did happen. For the first time since the Marquise had tossed him aside, his loins had stirred. He thought that was something to which he had long since bidden farewell. The erectness was palpable. For some time he did not take the trouble to grasp his manhood and would have had it decline. In vain. He was constrained to take it firmly in hand and enjoy it until it yielded relief.
Borbála had taught him that whatever one does on the first day of the New Year, one will be doing all year long. Ah, if this was true for the first hours of the century … then I shall have no end of trouble. And from that day few were the mornings that he did not bedew. Because of this he was racked by guilt. In his childhood, in the years in the turret, the reverend priest would visit them to celebrate mass and to teach the children. At his bidding, Richard Stern duly reported how he played with himself. The reverend priest shook his head and hissed: “You must not practice self-abuse! It is the work of the Devil! It will rot your brain!”
In the semidarkness of the cell, stewing in his own juices, he consoled himself by saying that there was no more rotting left for his brain to do. In the crawl of his days this was the only event of note. The space allotted him in Spielberg was very small, only half the amount he had afterwards in Munkács.
“MY TIME IS TOO MUCH, MY SPACE IS TOO LITTLE!” he wrote in The Book of Fathers, in capital letters. He pondered whether he had chanced upon some philosophical truth. Could it be that to him whom God had given such a small space—his cell was no more than five paces by five—He would allot a great deal of time? And vice versa: he who is blessed with a vast open space will have only a limited amount of time? Indeed, his ancestors had traveled over much of their land and over the world, and none of them had a very long span. And while he, Richard Stern, was traveling around France, the weeks and months had galloped by; yet here, entombed in a dark, stone box, it was as if, alongside him, they had also captured time.
Looking back upon his youth, he now saw that his childhood had been neatly bisected by the Lemberg tragedy. The smell of the warm nest during one’s first years in the Stern family is hard to forget, even more so the heady honey smell of the vineyards at Hegyhát! His skin remembered still the rough yet soothing touch of Grandfather Aaron’s beard, and he could hear still the Jewish prayers, whose words, left unexplained, the children were made to learn by heart in the Talmud class on Sunday. Some of them Richard Stern could still recite under his breath, if he closed his eyes: Baruch ata adonai … Odd, it does not work with your eyes open.
For the children the world of the Sterns was a veritable paradise, which he wept for in the cold turret where Borbála used a willow withy to punish smaller infractions, using a riding crop for graver ones. Little Aszti, Richard Stern’s little monkey, found it even more difficult to endure the regime, and soon after the Lemberg catastrophe began to show signs of breakdown, climbing into the most impossible places for the night. He squeezed himself through the larder’s tiny ventilation flap and by morning the floor was awash with honey, fat, jam, and broken pieces of crockery. Borbála demanded that István Stern get rid of “that monster!”
Richard Stern clutched his father’s palm, sobbing: “Daddy dearest, don’t, please! Daddy dearest, please don’t let her!”
Little Aszti escaped that time. Next time, however, he insinuated himself into the oven, which was being fired up for baking, managing to singe his arms, brow, and stomach coal black, and ran up and down half-mad and shrieking with pain, wreaking further havoc among the plates and pans and glass; then, as he was being pursued, he squeezed himself through one of the embrasures onto the outside wall of the turret and jumped onto a ledge, ripping down a shutter on the way. His desperate howls were outdone only by Borbála’s ear-splitting ravings.
“My dear boy,” said his father, “we have no choice but to return little Aszti whence he came.”
In vain did he sob and plead, and the little monkey disappeared from his life forever. The story went that they managed to find the Gypsies and returned him to them. Now, thinking back, he was sure that somehow or other they had done away with Aszti, though obviously his father was not responsible. István Stern’s heart was too gentle for that.
The first fiasco stemming from my looking into the future was my marriage in Francaroutier; the second my liberation from Munkács. I believed that my prison gate would never open, that my imprisonment would last until the end of my days. It was in anticipation of this that I wrote about myself and my experiences in so much detail in this book. No longer might I hope that the prophecy that had miscarried, alluring me with thoughts of six fine sons, could ever come true. I suspected I would not have issue who might have the benefit of my admonitions and counsel. But it seems God had second thoughts and decided to do otherwise with me. I was set free as unexpectedly as I had been arrested all those years ago.
Richard Stern put his signature to the German-language document that set him free; he gave it only a cursory glance, as he knew what it was about: in connection with his imprisonment he was not entitled to make any claim of compensation, whether now or in the future; furthermore, in the future he undertook to respect without fail the legal system of the Austrian Empire.
Respect! That I did in earlier times, too; yet here I am. My crime amounted to no more than the fact that I corresponded concerning the grammatical problems of the Hungarian language with a few worthy literati, unaware that they were members of the Freemasons’ lodges. To this day I have no clear notion of the aims of that secret and secretive society; all I know is that my intention was no more than to attempt to stir up the stagnant waters of the Hungarian arts and sciences. If that is against the law, the law is an ass.
At the time of Richard Stern’s arrest the case against the main perpetrators of the Jacobite conspiracy had been concluded. Ferenc Kazinczy, the distinguished littérateur with whom he had corresponded while in France, was sentenced to death. This enraged Richard Stern and he composed, jointly with Bálint Csokonya, a letter to His Majesty begging for a royal pardon and had it countersigned by many former students of Latin at Sárospatak. The case concocted against him was based chiefly on this letter, which had not even been sent: the court ruled that the line of reasoning employed by the signatories was tantamount to treason.
When he was released, he had no idea which way to turn. He had received the sad news of the death of his grandmother Borbála at about the time he was sentenced. At her request, she was laid to rest in the garden around the turret, next to her son, István Stern, who had gone to his Maker while Richard was a student at Sárospatak. His first pilgrimage was to these twin graves, though he knew that the turret now belonged to strangers, as his punishment had included the confiscation of his property.
Grandmother Borbála had then moved to Debreczen, her way of life becoming extremely circumscribed. His uncle János had disappeared without trace. One of his drinking partners claimed he was living in Vienna as a captain of dragoons, under the name Johann Sternov. But to his letters of inquiry to the various military command posts he received identical replies, consisting of a single, if complex, German sentence: “Following exhaustive inquiries carried out in response to your written request, we have the honor to inform you that, in relation to the person you seek, in this division of the army of His Majesty there exists neither in armed nor in noncombatant service any person bearing the surname Sternov, Stern, or Sternovszky.”
Richard Stern placed bouquets made of lilies of the valley on the graves of his father and grandmother, and knelt there from noon until sunset, mourning, remembering, praying. Then he commended himself to the mercy of God, cut himself a stave from the tree behind the graves, and set off into what seemed like endless space, of which he now had plenty. I wonder how much time I have left? He no longer dared believe in the images of the future, which had returned to haunt him even while he was on his knees, chiefly in the form of a wife and six sons. But the bride always resembled the Marquise des Reaux, whom not the least fiber of his being desired, so he shook himself free of the vision with a shudder.
He began to enjoy having not a penny to his name and no particular aim, and chose the carts to travel on according to the warmth of the carters’ invitation. By a long and roundabout route he came to Sárospatak, where the gatekeeper at the Collegium, glancing at his dress and unkempt beard, had no hesitation in leading him to the modest shelter maintained for the gentlemen of the road. Here he was also given a bowl of gruel and a jug of fresh milk. The following morning he opened his eyes to find a man sitting on a stool next to him, half-lit by the slanting rays of the morning sun. The man was watching him. He seemed familiar, at least the dark eyes with their suffused glint.
“Richard! Richard Stern!” the man exclaimed.
“Good God, Bálint Csokonya!”
“Richard … what has become of you? Where have you been?”
They embraced but could not speak; they wept with the soundless sobs that lie deep in men’s hearts. A while later they were calmer and each gave the other an account of his sufferings in prison, the disasters that had befallen their families, and exchanged news of others. Bálint Csokonya had been held throughout in Kufstein, compared with which Spielberg or Munkács was a spa resort. This was the first news that Richard Stern had of Kazinczy, whose death sentence had been by the King’s grace commuted to life imprisonment; so he was in jail still, though shortly after Richard’s release he had been transferred to the prison at Munkács, which Richard Stern knew so well. Was Kazinczy able to look out onto the hill, he wondered, or did he get one of the cells on the side of the slope? To this question, Richard Stern received an answer only many years later, when he read Kazinczy’s diary of his years in prison.
Bálint Csokonya was an assistant instructor in Greek and Latin at the Collegium. He had been free for some nine months. He warned Richard Stern that spies and informers were everywhere and that he should comport himself bearing this in mind.
“Sometimes even the walls have ears!” he whispered.
He promised Richard Stern that he would have a word with the eminent Professor Telegdy, head of the faculty of grammatical studies at the Collegium. And thanks to Bálint Csokonya’s influence, Richard Stern gained employment in his alma mater as an assistant in French. It fell to him to keep the French books of the library in proper order and to revise the catalogue. He found this work congenial, and as soon as he secured suitable reading glasses—his eyes had been much weakened by the years in prison—he would crouch or kneel all day among the precious books in his care. Rarely did he pick up a volume without reading at least some part of it. He settled quickly to this way of life and had no difficulty imagining that he might spend the rest of his days as a bespectacled bookworm.
He took Bálint Csokonya’s advice and would not let his guard down when conversing with anyone. But he could not, or did not want to, resist renewing his correspondence; in prison it was perhaps this that he had missed most. He wrote on the yellow-veined paper of the Collegium and sealed the couverture with a purple wax seal. He sent news of his liberation to Academician Carmillac, but the terse reply from the University of Paris said only that the Maistre had retired two years earlier and soon after that had departed this life. The curé at Francaroutier informed him that where his windmill had once stood a house of ill-repute had been opened by an exotic dancer from Toulouse, of whom it was rumored that she had been expelled from all the major towns of southern France. The Marquise was in good health; she was childless still; and her second husband had gone to his grave as the result of a devastating illness which some said was a variety of African syphilis.
He also picked up the threads with his literary friends. His most faithful correspondent was Endre Dembinszki, who had married Bálint Csokonya’s sister and moved to Debreczen to teach at the faculty there. In cooperation with two other professors at Debreczen he was working on a revision and new edition of the pioneering 1795 Debreczen Grammar. In this connection Richard Stern addressed a long memorandum to them, taking issue with the Debreczen triad’s fundamental beliefs, which he considered excessively beholden to traditional views.
Not only is it legitimate to form new words regularly from old, on the basis of analogies borrowed from other languages not alien to the spirit of Hungarian; we must actively encourage writers and scholars to create such words; and word formations that appear in literature and are adjudged to be useful should be made available to all in the form of lists and dictionaries.
Bálint Csokonya was resolutely opposed to this view, as was his brother-in-law. “The language of our fathers is sacred and inviolable. It is not meet to patch and mend it under the slogan of modernity, like some torn item of clothing!”
In the evenings the debates in the rooms in the Collegium would become so heated that their fellow teachers complained about the noise. This was the time that Ferenc Kazinczy was set free from prison, a person they both esteemed as an authority, and as soon as they obtained his address they turned to him in a joint letter with their questions. No reply ever came from Ferenc Kazinczy; it may be that the couverture for some reason failed to reach his hand.
Richard Stern was surprised at the suddenness and the intensity with which he felt the absence of his parents, having assumed that such feelings had long died in his heart. He had dreams and images, more of them and more often, of his mother, both at night and by day. The image he held of her in his mind was but enchantment by the passing of time: gradually the crow’s feet disappeared, the warty growth was smoothed from her brow, and the manifold chins shrank down to one. Her figure became slimmer in her son’s imagination. Her stubby fingers lengthened and grew thinner, the heavy ankles became trim and delicate. The same kind of magical transformation affected his father, István Stern, and to a lesser degree his two brothers Robert and Rudolf, who would not grow old as he had grown old, not even in his imagination.
These wishful thoughts prompted him to write to the Sterns, his relatives in Hegyhát. He weighed carefully every word committed to the writing paper; he did not know who was still alive of those he remembered, and how much remained of the hostile feelings with which Grandfather Aaron had cast out his son-in-law after the Lemberg tragedy. The reply came with unexpected speed, from Grandfather Aaron himself, who—as the opening lines informed him—on account of the tremor in his hand was no longer able himself to write and had dictated this letter to his great-granddaughter Rebecca. Rebecca was the second child of his grandson Benjamin, the son of Aaron’s daughter Eszter. He, Aaron Stern, registered with astonishment that he was in his seventy-ninth year and the whole family was making fevered preparations to celebrate his eightieth birthday. They think reaching such a ripe old age is something of an achievement, but it is more a burden, he wrote, as the number of tormenting memories just grows and grows. At this point in the letter the great-granddaughter inserted a bracketed comment: Uncle Aaron loves to complain, but at this rate he will live to be a hundred.
Letter followed letter, and soon Richard Stern received a cordial invitation to pay his respects to Uncle Aaron on his eightieth birthday, on which occasion there would be a gathering of the clan, from near and far. He thanked them warmly for the invitation.
I set off on the third day of September. I begged lifts on carts. Nightfall found me in a field, but the following day I reached Tokay. I set off thence on foot for Hegyhát, arriving a day earlier than I was expected.
As I reached the village, the sun was high in a sky decked by puffy clouds. My heart was in my mouth as I skirted the serried ranks of vines laden with clusters of swollen grapes. It would be a good year for the vine-harvest.
The road turned sharply, like a man’s elbow, and there on the hill was the cemetery. He stepped into the garden of the dead with head bowed, donning his hat in accordance with Jewish custom. From behind his brow there rose from the dregs of a distant past the forms of the Hebrew characters, as he traced with his index finger the incisions on the gray-brown stones, gleaning the names, more or less. His insides were quaking and he dreaded the pain that would follow if among these ancient symbols he were to stumble upon someone who was family or friend. But he found none such. Later he heard that Grandpa Aaron had wanted to raise a memorial to those who perished in Lemberg, but Rabbi Ben Loew—then still very much alive—had not allowed it. The Rabbi’s own headstone, in accordance with his will, bore only an ancient Jewish blessing.
Richard Stern pushed on, further and deeper into his own past. In the sharp bend of the stream, the old Sonntag hostel still stood, now boasting an extra floor and an additional wing; on the sign, freshly painted: Rabinowitz and Burke. A smaller notice declared: First-class koshere food and drink—Do not aske for credit. Richard Stern felt an urge to correct the spelling on the notice, but suppressed his teacherly instincts and continued along the steep path. The synagogue seemed considerably bigger. It had been rebuilt using large slabs of stone. Behind it a section of the river-bed had been widened and a few granite steps now linked it to the bank. Four very elderly men sat hissing and clucking in the swirling cold of the water, eyes closed, their white beards floating on the surface like rafts of wood-bark. A ritual bath, thought Richard Stern, recalling vaguely sharing one with his father and grandfather and feeling the flow of the icy water on his skin.
“Richard! Richard Stern!” cried the voice of one of the Methuselahs as he rose from the stream, a hand waving towards him like a shivering bird.
“Grandpa Aaron,” said Richard Stern, stumbling out the words, deducing rather than recognizing. His grandfather had been a strong, powerfully built figure; this old gentleman was more like a child, his skin dried around his bones like parchment, his loin-cloth revealing parts of parts turned gray; Richard Stern had to force himself to look away. “I must go over, embrace him, kiss him!”: the feelings from the past came welling up, and as he enclosed in his arms the ancient, time-worn body, as he touched the damp, goose-pimpled skin, as he heard again the high-pitched voice repeating his name again and again, laughing and crying, he knew, he suddenly knew, that he had at last come home.
In the house where he was born there now lived his aunt Eszter. Everything was so familiar, yet somehow alien.
Richard Stern took the evening meal with his grandfather Aaron. The news of his arrival had brought over, that same day, all the relatives living in Hegyhát, one after the other. At first Richard Stern was unable to put faces to the names, though the latter he did manage to note. Without anyone ever mentioning it, his newly rediscovered family knew, just as Richard Stern knew himself, that in the future he would be living here, with them, for them. At the end of the academic year he bade farewell to the Collegium in Sárospatak and moved to Hegyhát. At first he enjoyed Grandfather Aaron’s hospitality, but the following spring the male members of the family joined together to build him a house on the hill above the cemetery.
He continued his work as a teacher, bringing to the pupils at the Hegyhát yeshiva his aptitude for foreign languages, while remaining unremitting in his own pursuit of know ledge. He studied the Hebrew language, particularly exploring the Talmud, and at the same time he did not abandon his studies of Hungarian. He played an important role in the countrywide efforts of the writer and editor Ferenc Kazinczy to cultivate the language. Six words that he created for the Hungarian language passed, in time, into general use, and he lived to see them admitted by the dictionaries. His income was spent entirely on books.
When he discovered that Kazinczy, on his marriage to the Countess Sophie Török, some twenty years younger, had found himself in financial straits and therefore sold his books to the Collegium at Sárospatak, Richard Stern was furious. He wrote a thunderous letter to the poet. It is not meet to profit from the Collegium, may it be blessed a thousand times. To this letter, too, he never received a reply. This prompted Richard Stern to draw up his will: on his death his books and writings would go to the Collegium, gratis.
His aunt Eszter often shook her head: “Better you were wed.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” Eszter began to list grooms from Hegyhát’s present and recent past, all of whom were about his age. The triumphal list went on until Richard Stern broke in: “No more, dear aunt … Remember, I have had a taste of marriage and I didn’t like it enough for a second helping!”
“Once bitten is not twice shy, it just needs a second try! We will find you a treat of a girl who will have you licking your lips!”
Richard Stern wanted to bring this exchange firmly to a close: “My bride must have skin the color of honey, locks as dark as night—real ones, not a wig—and a triangular birthmark on her breastbone. And to cap it all, she must speak a foreign tongue. That is how I dreamed it. Dictum, factum, punctum!”
He was sure he was asking for the impossible and was very much bemused when he was introduced to the marriageable girls of the region, all of whom spoke a foreign tongue, such as Slovak, Ruthene, or Yiddish. Nor was there any shortage of skins the color of honey or genuine black hair—only the triangular birthmark was lacking. The women of the Stern family put their heads together: we can make a birthmark, all we need is a little ink! But before they could carry out their plan, there came to visit them from Prague a very distant and very poor relative, Yanna. The moment he set eyes on her, Richard Stern was thunderstruck.
In the person of Yanna I came to know someone more wonderful, both within and without, than I could ever have imagined. The description fitted her perfectly: her skin like this season’s honey, her hair the color of ebony, and she could manage only broken Hungarian, her mother tongue being Czech. True, when on our wedding night I parted her from the shimmering bridal gown, I found no birthmark on her alabaster body; but I at once hung around her neck a triangular stone, black, on a gold chain, which I had bought her. Thereafter she would not be seen without this precious stone, day or night. Thus was the prophecy fulfilled, the vision that I, of little faith, had not for years dared hope to live.
In due course their first child was born, a son, hale and healthy. He was christened Otto. He was followed, at intervals of approximately two years, by Ferenc, Ignác, Mihály, József, and János.
Richard Stern lived to a ripe old age in the bosom of his family.
Perhaps now at long last the seven lean years have passed. My ancestors and I have had our share of suffering; from this day forward let years of happiness beckon. If we had a star, it would last for eternity, or even longer.