Aunt Kata and the crystal vase
Let me start with the family relationships. Marianne was my wife for 68 years. Our first-born is called Gillian. By 1990 she had studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Lincoln College. Oxford. Kata was Marianne’s aunt, Gillian’s great-aunt, who lived in Budapest all her life. As a teenager in the early 1930s, she had been a promising dancer. Unfortunately, before she reached 20, Kata fell in love with everything sweet — without discrimination. Soon she had to choose between her career in dancing and her cakes. She chose the cakes. She grew overweight. She had to give up dreams of her dancing career, but all her life she imagined herself as a star in light musicals.
Necessity drove her to join a secretarial school, after which she got a job at a publisher’s office. As it happened, she became very good at this role. She excelled at typing and shorthand, but her real value lay in her political acumen. None of her bosses were ever arrested. She was always consulted when a draft version of anything had to be submitted to higher Party authorities. She always knew where to draw the line, how close to sail to the political wind. Kata could not be promoted because occasionally she did silly things — like starting to teach a young and promising author, 30 years her junior, to dance the shimmy, her favourite dance in her younger days.
Kata owned a vast lead-crystal vase, a family heirloom that weighed a good 20 lb. She wanted us, living in Oxford, to have it. In order to send it by mail she would have needed permission from some government agency. In any case, sending it by post would have been far too expensive. But she realised that Budapest was often visited by young Englishmen, as part of their European tour. So she decided that she just needed one strong man capable of carrying the vase, preferably an Oxford undergraduate, who would deliver the vase to Gillian Solymar at Lincoln College.
To find the vase-carrier, however, represented a major challenge. Her plan was to accost all English-speaking tourists to Budapest between the ages of 20 and 25 and ask the question: “Do you know Gillian?” Not surprisingly, those she found were not keen to talk to her. What conceivable topics could a young man have to discuss with a woman in her seventies who dressed in a manner reminiscent of Jean Giraudoux’s Folle de Chaillot?
Against all the odds, it took Kata only a few months to find her Oxford graduate. To her genuine surprise, a quite good looking young Englishman sitting unsuspectingly in a group in the sunshine replied: “Yes: we know Gillian. She is doing PPE. We do French, all three of us.” They were indeed on a tour of Eastern Europe, it transpired. “You must be her grandmother, aren’t you?” he asked. “No, I am her great-aunt. May I invite you to a meal in my home? It takes just five minutes by bus to get there.”
When they all arrived at Kata’s flat, it turned out that all that was available to eat were two tins of sardines, and to drink, only a bottle of sickly sweet Soviet champagne. It was a combination that would have upset the sturdiest stomach. The young British scholars of the French language moved, one after the other, to the toilet. When they were together again, Kata found a third tin of sardines, opened it and warmly offered its contents to her guests. When the offer was refused she resorted to the most robust expression of Hungarian hospitality. “Nem izlik?” (You don’t like it?”) It took some time to convince her that they loved the sardines, but for the time being they did not want more. They were ready to leave.
Kata’s grand design seemed to be in danger. Just in time, before they stood up, she addressed Matt, the tallest and the strongest of the three young men. “Gillian would be so grateful if you could take her a little something I no longer need. Would you do that for me?” “Of course. It would be a pleasure,” said Matt, impeccably polite. Whereupon Kata produced the giant vase. Mat realised what he was in for. He was to carry the vase in his rucksack all over Europe, to Istanbul and back. His only compensation was a kiss from Gillian at delivery. Matt wanted more than a kiss. He wanted a hug as well. Gillian took a sudden step backwards. Matt, holding the vase in both hands, tried to follow her. He tripped and a sickening noise followed. The two young people looked down simultaneously. There lay the vase – in a thousand shards. Matt was upset. All Gillian could do was to hug him.
They remain good friends to this day.
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