The MWL was sitting in the park, with his ladder, passing his time watching the people around him passing their time, watching him. Because he was sitting on a ladder, people expected that at any moment he might do something interesting, like juggle fish or roll hot stones around in his mouth and, for that minute, they seemed ready to allot him some portion of their attention all day.
Everybody watched him with the slow, detached, idling curiosity reserved for jugglers and street performers, everybody that is, except one oddly dressed man whose attention was much more active and personal, not of the waiting to be entertained sort, but of the struggling and straining to remember kind. After alternatively peering and craning his neck for a while, he let his curiosity move his feet slowly and steadily until he stood quietly in front and off to the side of the ladder.
"Do we know one another?" asked the MWL.
"I'm Hungarian," the man replied enthusiastically.
The MWL recognized something familiar about him, not the indistinct familiarity of the not-utterly-foreign, but the definite, tangible familiarity that puts a person in the category of the husband of one's mistress, or an ex-wife, or one's first grade teacher, or one-couldn't-remember-which-person exactly, but someone who at one point in one's life, in some not exactly straight forward way, one was very, very close to.
The MWL prided himself in home grown linguistic skills and he marveled at the fact that the man standing before him absolutely lacked an accent. "It's odd," he thought to himself, "that the way this man pronounces his words sounds exactly like the way I pronounce my words."
"I visited Hungary once," the MWL said. It wasn't true, but he wished it were true enough for him to make the statement, and it made his question easier to ask. "Where in Hungary were you born?"
"Oh, I wasn't born in Hungary," the man replied. "I was born in the Bronx, at the Maternity Hospital." It was the very hospital that the MWL was born in.
The MWL reasoned that the man's parents who were born in Hungary and that they must have taken him back there as a young child so that, in growing up in Hungary, the man naturally enough thought of himself as a Hungarian.
"Where in Hungary did you grow up?" the MWL amended his question.
The man appeared sad for a moment but responded cheerfully. "I didn't grow up in Hungary. I grew up in the Bronx, about four blocks from the hospital. "As if all of the bolts and screws of the cage incarcerating memory had sheared and failed at the same time, the MWL remembered where he knew the man from.
They had gone to the same public school. Memories scuffled and jousted with one another to get to the front of the line and be the first to leap to the freedom of awareness. The one that succeeded was the most painful. This forty five year old man with a gray toupee, cowboy boots, and pince nez glasses was the boy who had made his school life miserable, the arrogant bully who had selected him as his private target and over eight years, practiced every form of cruelty on him that his constricted imagination could devise.
The present and the past clashed in his head. He wanted to voice forty year old complaints, but the confused present won over the cumulated and definite but half decayed particulars of the past.
"How can you say you are Hungarian," the MWL heard himself say angrily, as if his old nemesis had shifted tactics and was practicing mental cruelty exclusively in his middle years, "when you were born and grew up in the Bronx," (and, although he didn't say it out loud, are Italian to boot.)
"I didn't say I was from Hungary, only that I am Hungarian," the man replied soothingly and only a little defensively.
"It's the same thing," the MWL said although he wasn't exactly sure.
"No, it's not," said the man, his voice conveying a robust and comfortable, but hard won, certainty. "Sometimes you live in a place with people and they're not your people, and it's not your place. Even if one of them gave birth to you, and the other fathered you, and the others crept out of the same crevice you did, and you eat the same food as they do, and speak the same language as they do, they're not your people, and it's not your place, and it's not your food or your language. Other people know you're different," he added, "but they don't know how, and they decide your queer or crazy. Even your parents have a gnawing feeling about you as if their real son was stolen by the gypsies and they got you just to mark the place from which their own child had been taken. I'm sorry I picked on you," he said apropos nothing. "I know it was wrong. I knew it then but.... I would be grateful if you forgave me, I mean here, to my face."
The MWL said "I forgive you," quickly, and not entirely convincingly, but enough to satisfy the man.
"That was the way I felt," the man said. "I walked around feeling queer, odd, out of place," implying that, that was the explanation for his reprehensible behavior.
"I had certain unshakable prejudices and odd unnameable longings. I had impulses that came from nowhere and went nowhere because there was nothing to do them to, or with, or for. Certain times of the year I felt like celebrating but there was no holiday in sight, and other times I mourned unknown dead."
"I saw the world differently from anyone I knew, and I was frightened continuously for the first 15 years of my life. I'm afraid I acted badly." He moved his feet in a funny little shuffle. The MWL tried to remember back to see if this information corresponded to anything he remembered and inquire of the boy he was then, whether it would have made any difference if he had known it; but in his head the memories said 'stop', and while he was waiting there for the light to change, his curiosity got the better of him. He shifted his attention to the present and the man in front of him.
"What happened?" he asked.
"When I started seeing things I dropped out of school and worked for a while. Then I began traveling. I dragged myself over half the world until I got to Hungary. Suddenly it was as if I had returned to my native land after a long journey. All of the longings had names, all of the prejudices were sensible, all of the impulses had targets. Everyone was almost like me, only definitely more so."
"They treated me as a native son who was slow. I traveled around Hungary for a while and then stumbled on a little village called Styagsy and I was home, my street, my house. It's strange," he said quietly, "I never had been to the place, never seen the people and could not understand the language, yet it was my place.
For a moment the man looked infinitely far away, and a little homesick." I rented a room and met my people. They treated me as one treats a relative whose exact genealogy was known only by an old aunt who died. I met all of my relatives. It was a small town. I knew who I was finally."
"What happened," the MWL asked after a little while. "Why did you come back?"
"I couldn't get a job. I tried to get work, but it was impossible. The bureaucracy, the papers, the language, you know. They took care of me for a while, but I could see that they really couldn't afford it. I met this girl, actually a second cousin I think. We got married and I emigrated back here.
"Do you get homesick?" asked the MWL.
"Not too often, and not too bad," the man replied. "Now and then. I've done fairly well here. Now and then," he repeated. "The important thing is that I know who I am. I'm sorry," he said again, "for public school.
"It's over and done with and I can see that it wasn't entirely your fault," said the MWL, meaning it, but not entirely convinced it was enough of the truth to excuse his companion's bad behavior as a youth. He opened a door in his mind for the particular memories of public school to leave at their leisure.
"I was wondering," the man said quietly. "You're not Hungarian?" he asked.
"No," said the MWL, "I'm not Hungarian."
"You looked Hungarian sometimes. It's the only reason I asked," the man said. He readjusted his glasses. "I have to leave now," he said and walked off and disappeared down the walk.
After he was gone the MWL heard a little voice in his head. "Are you sure you're not Hungarian?" it asked, which another voice in his mind answered with a silence that lasted long enough for the first voice to inquire, "if you're not Hungarian, what are you?"