Hungarians

It was always a treat to be taken to the office with my father when I was a child.  It was a treat to be selected as the one to go to the office.  It was a treat to rummage around in the loft that held the samples of goods that my father imported.  It was a treat to date correspondence with a stamp that recorded the date and number of letter copies.  Best of all treats was getting café glacé.  Whenever my father took any of us to the office, it was a given that we also got this delicious concoction.  My father would send the office boy to Osman’s, a bakery nearby that specialized in coffee; everything in the shop smelled and was flavored by coffee.  The delectable café glacé consisted of a little iced coffee, a lot of heavy cream, and a large scoop of ice cream, and one had to sip it through a straw to get the right combination of all the ingredients.  I have tried to recreate this treat, but the one in my memory always wins.

Fortified with my café glacé, I would proceed to the loft to see what new discoveries I could make among the samples.  My father represented a Hungarian textile firm called Hungarotex, and these were the samples I liked best.  The textile samples consisted of swatches of about 4x4 inches glued on accordioned cardboard, but once in a while, there would also be larger pieces of about 8x20 inches of cotton fabrics.  These were the real prize.  When there were duplicate samples, I could take them home. In the early 1950s, multicolored gypsy skirts were popular, and my mother would make us skirts out of these samples.  If she couldn’t use them, my sisters, friends and I always could. 

  

Hungarotex was one of my father’s biggest clients in the 1950s.  The Hungarian embassy was located about a block away from our apartment, and since my father spent a lot of time with the trade attaché, the embassy staff became family friends.  The men at the embassy were assigned there on single status, so my parents often invited them to eat with us. I recall them celebrating my birthday, and gifting me a cherished clockwork bull that bucked and charged.  They reciprocated by inviting us children to the embassy, a relatively modest house for an embassy, with offices on the main floor, bedrooms on the second floor, and a basement.  In my memory, the basement was enchanted. It had a water fountain that trickled and echoed against the tile floor, and best of all, there was a xylophone that we were allowed to play.  It seemed that I spent many hours in that basement hammering on the xylophone and sampling treats like salami, which I’d never tasted before.  Even now, I think it was the best salami I ever had, and like the café glacé, I have never found its match. 

When Hungarians revolted against their government and the Soviets invaded in 1956, everything changed.  The embassy staff, which had been friendly and relaxed, became tense and worried. The attachés had left their families behind and were concerned about them. I remember my parents listening intently to BBC news and calling our friends at the embassy for updates.  None of them seemed to have any idea what this invasion meant for their country or their personal futures, except that it probably wasn’t good.  Looking back, I think that the embassy staff weren’t particularly political, even though they were representatives of a Soviet-led government.  For the most part they were academics, economists, and scientists without much interest in dogma.

One of the attaches had been in Hungary during the unrest and had managed to return to Tehran with his wife before the Soviets actually invaded.  To cheer everyone up, we went on a picnic, a subdued affair, since everyone was still in limbo about their families and their futures. My mother was chatting with the wife who had returned with her husband, when she suddenly started to stare and went silent.  On the woman’s left forearm was a tattooed number.  After a moment’s stunned silence, my mother asked her why she had the tattoo.  Was she Jewish?  The woman looked down at the tattoo and said nothing for a minute, then explained that she had been in a concentration camp for reasons I could not understand.

At the age of ten, I knew little about concentration camps or tattooed numbers.  I could not understand this conversation and missed a lot of the details in my effort to make sense of it. All I knew was that my mother had seen something that made her lose her composure. That evening I asked her what this conversation meant, and she told me about concentration camps and Nazis.  I felt much less at home in the world after that.  Soviets could invade a homeland and leave people with a tortured future and Nazis could try to subjugate Europe and annihilate anyone they found undesirable.

Eventually, the Hungarian diplomats were replaced, and we were no longer welcome at the embassy. My father continued to do business with Hungary, but his relationship with the embassy staff was much more formal.  I don’t know if he stayed in touch with any of the old staff or if that would have put them or him in danger.  Iran was not all that partial to Communists, and I can only guess that the men who had been in Iran were probably not considered loyal enough to Communism.   

In any case, my father always maintained that Budapest was his favorite city in the world.  I remember proudly showing him San Francisco from the Marin Headlands across Golden Gate Bridge, and his response was, “It’s not Budapest.”