I come from a rather strange family. I always felt something was off, though I couldn’t name it as a child — only that everyone around me seemed duller, simpler, smaller than the picture a kid likes to paint of their own family. My grandfather, for example, owned exactly two books: From Albert to Zsák — a collection of short profiles of Hungarian footballers in alphabetical order — and Móricz’s Rózsa Sándor, which he probably never read. I have no idea how he got them, but once a year, he would take the book into his hands like a sacred relic, stroke the cover, and smile at me: “When I die, you will inherit this.”
As a child, I was treated like some sort of curiosity. They even took my report cards to their workplaces to show them off, as if I were a circus act. Support, however, was something they simply couldn’t give. They knew nothing about the world. They didn’t know nature, plants, birds; they didn’t read; basic maths confused them; and their connection to culture ended where the TV screen started. The only night I remember from my childhood when my parents actually went to the cinema, I stayed with my grandparents.
So I learned early that I had to do everything alone. Homework, reading journals, extra assignments — everything. If something needed to be done, I did it. I spent hours in the library without thinking twice. I didn’t ask questions. There was no one to ask.
I must have been around seven when I realised that my mother’s overflowing weekend kindness wasn’t an excess of love at all, but simply the effect of alcohol. I loved her — children love instinctively — but my trust in her vanished early. Back then, returning empty bottles for the deposit was a serious source of pocket money for any kid. My mother regularly sent me to the shop for cherry brandy, with that transparent little story that “a colleague needs it for tomorrow.” I wanted certainty, so of course I marked the label. And yes, a week later it was right there among the bottles packed for return — the one with my mark. I wasn’t surprised.
Fortunately — and it feels strange to write this — I spent little time with my parents. They left for work at dawn, and it was my grandfather next door who woke me. I had breakfast at their place, got ready there, and after school, I went straight back to them. I ate there, did my homework there, and from there I went out to play. At six or seven, it already felt natural to go everywhere on my own. I had to be home by dinnertime, I greeted my parents, and then I went straight over to my grandparents’ to bathe and watch the evening cartoon. After it ended around half past seven, I walked back to my parents’ flat to sleep. They watched the evening news; sometimes I’m not sure they even realised I had already gone to bed.
On weekends, my father usually spent his time in the wine bar. Even so, I never saw him drunk. He didn’t go there to drink. I think he was escaping. He played cards, chatted, and sat in the noise where no one bothered him. He just didn’t want to be at home.
You reach the crossroads every single day,
No one waits there, no one comes for you.
You’d go home, but home no longer wants you;
Their message is clear: stay where you’ve been allowed to stay.
Just go — long years are still ahead of you.
Our fates have tangled once; now carry mine with you.
Dawn will strip the bed and make it new,
And your hard, steel-forged heart will rest in it at last.
When we eventually moved away from my grandparents, nothing changed. I became a “key kid”. I tried to spend as little time at home as possible. Every Friday afternoon, I went back to my grandparents’ place and stayed until Sunday. On Sunday evenings, I shut myself in my room, put on my headphones, and listened to Poptarisznya, shutting the world out. Every week, from two to nine. Music kept me from thinking too much. Looking back, until the age of fourteen, my life was nothing but music, books, and wandering around. I didn’t have to study — whatever I heard once, I remembered; whatever I saw once, stayed with me.
My parents’ divorce didn’t shake me either. I was already avoiding my mother, and I hardly saw my father. Yet there is one night that burned into me. He was still living with us; my mother was so drunk she tried to come into my room to “sleep with her little boy”. My father led her out, put her on the couch, then put on his coat and left. That was how he moved out. Quietly, head down. And as I later learned, already terminally ill.
There aren’t many things I truly regret in life, but I do regret that in those years we drifted apart, and I never told him how important he was to me. Everything I know about dealing with people, I learned from him. He taught me how to live without ever making it obvious.
After he left, my mother fell apart completely. She lost her job, lived off occasional shifts. By the time I moved back to my grandparents during high school, she had become almost feral. There was no electricity in the flat, garbage reached up to your knees. I tried to get her into rehab, to doctors, psychologists — nothing worked. She preferred brushing away imaginary opium beetles in her alcohol-fuelled delirium.
The last time I saw her was when she was babysitting her two-year-old granddaughter. I went to pick up my daughter; my mother was lying on the kitchen floor, foaming at the mouth, soaked in urine. My child was sitting in the other room, happily playing with her dolls. That night, when my mother sobered up, I gave her one last choice: alcohol, or us. I never saw her again.
If I’m right, she died seventeen years later, in 2010. That was when I was officially deregistered from the municipal flat she lived in. I don’t know what she thought in her final moments. Maybe nothing. Maybe she had one clear second. Maybe she regretted everything. I don’t know where she is buried. I never will.
There is a saying: “You only get one mother.” And sometimes, that’s exactly the problem.
Let the road you walk not grow too heavy
For I am waiting for your return
I ask only this — may the burden never weigh you down;
I will never reach you if you keep dividing your life into two.