Dr Buchler

Anoushka, shapeless and toothless, imploring in impenetrable
Magyarsk, let us in. She hugged my brother, sister, and I, her eyes lit
with the maternal delight of a mother of thirteen children. Once they
had grown old enough to be free of her care, she had devoted herself to
my grandfather, whom we called Laci.

Anoushka was a little younger than him, but looked far older, the
inevitable price of being born a peasant. I remembered a visit a few
years previously, when one of her countless grandchildren had come to
help. She was thirteen years old, going on fourty, with her rough hands
and staid flowery dress and apron. Her eyes bashfully avoided those of
the Western visitors.

The flat was exactly as I remembered it, walls of the obsolete
dining-room turned into a shrine of photographs of his largely absent
children and grandchildren, particularly my siblings and I. Another
grandson was pictured graduating in Canada, a daughter smiling from
Chicago.

Those photographs will always carry a tragi-comic memory for me from
an earlier visit, just my parents and I. At first, my grandfather
conversed only in Hungarian, as he had become accustomed with Anoushka.
Like many of the older residents of Kosice, he and Anoushka originated
from the other side of the nearby border. After a little while of
translation from my mother, Laci suddenly lifted his drooping head and,
with a flawless English accent informed us 'When I was in the army,
they used to call me the polyglot, because I spoke so many
languages.'
'You did, boci.' my mother smiled. She had told me about Laci's
scholarly background; he could speak Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, German,
Yiddish, English, Russian, Polish and Hebrew, amongst other
languages.
Then he said to my mother that my father was 'a nice man', but that
'It would be nice if you had a son.'
'We do, boci,' she said, laughing at the sadness of it, 'there are the
photographs of him on the wall.'
He seemed to acknowledge the fact, and sank back into himself for a
moment. My father, aware that this was almost certainly the last time
that we would see him, attempted to find out more about his
father-in-law's varied career as a member of the Free Czech Army during
the Second World War. He and asked him where they were at the close of
hostilities; Laci believed that he was in Russia at that time. And, he
reminded us again, 'When I was in the army, they used to call me the
polyglot, because I spoke so many languages.'

A year-and-a-half later it didn't seem like he was gone; I expected to
see him there wedged into his favourite chair, breaking into Hebrew and
Yiddish songs, asking in his perfect accent 'Where are my glasses?' and
my mother's affectionate reply, 'They're on your head, boci'.

It was a nice flat by Slovak standards, given to my grandfather by the
Communist Party in reparation for his house, which was demolished to
make way for the block. We began to rummage through the drawers, where
we found the set of medals that he had been awarded, including the
'Order of Stalin' for bravery. My mother remembers crying, when, aged
three, she was told that her kind uncle Josef had died.

There was a small, round depression in the mattress where Laci had
lain every night for so many years. He was only as tall as my shoulder
the last few times I visited him; he was the smallest man in the Free
Czech Army. I'm always amused my the photograph we have pinned up at
home of him meeting President Svoboda, where the line-up consists of
strapping Slavs, until the sudden dip where my grandfather stands
shaking hands with the president.

Above the bed hung a large sepia photograph of Laci's parents, Max and
Anna B?chler, that I had never seen before, having never peered into
his room on my earlier visits. They looked wonderfully representative
of their time. The pose was formal; she, seated, wearing a black dress
with a high neck and mutton-chop sleeves, her hair in an enormous dark
bun. My great grandfather looked equally severe in a black suit with
waistcoat, a bow tie, his mouth obscured by an impressive handlebar
moustache. His hand rested on her shoulder, but they both stared
fixedly at the camera, as looking at one another would have seemed
undignified, I presume. I found it hard to reconcile these solid
figures with the ghosts of the Holocaust that they had always appeared
to me; if, indeed, they appeared at all.

The day after visiting the flat, the main purpose of our journey;
Laci's stone-setting. An American rabbi oversaw the ceremony, helped by
the shuffling remnants of Kosice's Jewish community. Most of their
children had made aliyah to Israel in the years since the Velvet
Revolution, leaving their parents with photographs of children in the
sun, letters, and, if all went well, a few dollars a month. In the last
few years of his life, my grandfather asked only for the money we sent
him to be put towards his burial, as if he always had one eye on death.
The result, a flat black stone next to that of his second wife.

We picked around the damp ground for pebbles to lay on his grave; just
a little sign to show that we had been there. I could see the old men
wondering who would come to put pebbles on their graves, surrounded as
we were by stones nearly overgrown with creeping plants, and watched
over by the decrepit wooden Star of David. As we walked out of the
gate, the ancient cemetery dog feebly barked and coughed.