In the summer of her 95th year was when I first saw my great-aunt's hair its natural color. For all my 23 years she'd dyed it, back to what was, presumably, its original color. Dyed, it was a sort of orangish brown - paprika-colored, hearkening back to its original pale auburn. It was a good dye job, slightly varied in shades, like real hair, colored down to the roots. My aunts helped her dye it.
The first sign that she was getting tired was when she refused the dye job. Somewhere around Christmas it was; an aunt offered to help her with it, and she said, "hát, talán nem."
Well, maybe not.After that, my aunt told me, they watched her hair go white. I wasn't there - I only come there in August, with my family - but my aunts around her watched. They said it grew out first into a pale gold, almost a blonde, like a halo around her head. Then, time turning, it lightened and lightened into pure, dandelion-fluff white.
When I saw her that August it was cut and styled, combed and washed. It was a cloud arranged around her head; I could see scalp through it at the front, but it was still full enough that she didn't look
old-old. The rest of her body did - from changeless-thin she'd become, over one year, delicately thin, bird-ish bones and skin laid wrinkled over them. There was a chestnut-sized clump of vein in her arm that I'd never seen before, blue in her papery skin. Her eyes were gummy but searched me out; her acne was better this year than I'd even seen it, with only one huge, burst-open pimple on her forehead. She dressed in lace and blouses, and sat upright in her chair, one leg crossed over the other. Motion looked painful, or at least like a huge effort, but when she sat still she looked out at me like an English princess.
~:~
Margácska was born one of twins. I know that. One of those twins died young, I know that as well. This is where my family history lies - in a pile of geneology, a few dates, and a lot of stories. If she died on December 27th of 2009 between 6:00 and 7:00 in the morning at 95 years, then she was born in 1914. She was my grandfather's older sister, and there was an older or younger brother, too, somewhere.
I know nothing about her childhood. 1914 in Central Europe was a hard time; it was Austria-Hungary, then. I know my grandfather, Margácska's younger brother, fought in a war, but it must have been the next one. In between wars my great-aunt grew up, from child to woman. I know she never married - I don't know if she never met anyone or just never got around to it.
She worked, I know that. There's stories of her as an accountant, helping bring money into the house. When my mother and her siblings were being born, Margácska was working, during the change from WWII to Communist-era government. Here my knowledge takes a sharp leap, as it's here my mother enters into the picture.
Margácska lived with her younger brother - my grandfather - and his family. In a five-room house, she had one of the rooms. My mom's five siblings slept in one room, my grandfather and grandmother in another, and my mom out in the hall by the heating-stove. Margácska's room was blocked off by a white-painted glass-paned door. In the mornings she would take up the bathroom to herself - my mom and aunts and uncles would have to scramble to use it before Margácska got her turn. I can only assume she worked during the day, all day, as my grandfather did; one of my mom's stories tells of her coming home early and, finding my mom staying home sick from school, exclaiming, "na, már megint beteg vagy?"
Well! Are you ill yet again?Perhaps it was my grandmother who called her the English Princess, or maybe it was my mom and her siblings. It was accurate: Margácska dressed even then in laces and blouses, kept her room neat and tidy, sat primly up in her chair (perhaps from learning good posture at work). She was princessly-prudish, too: she would would protest to my grandmother about my mother reading books Inappropriate For Young Ladies. Once - my mother tells me, laughing - my mom came home with a hickey; Margácska wondered, "Márikám, megsérültél?"
Márikám, have you hurt yourself?~:~
There's another blank in there for me, between my mom's growing up with Margácska around stories, and the time I came into the picture. That's a twenty-some- bordering on thirty-year gap. In there, Margácska grew old. She went from forties to seventies; by the time I was consciously involved in life, she was in her eighties.
The house that my mom grew up in was always, to me, Anyóka's house. Anyóka was my grandmother, and it was always her, one of my aunts, and Margácska living there. After my grandmother passed on it was only Vera and Margácska; now, for a time, it's only Vera. My Hungarian family's houses are in constant flux - building, adding on, rebuilding, rearranging. one family will live in a few rooms for ten years or five kids, then move on. The family expands out like a ripple from the houses on Táborhegy - two houses close, a few hosues further, some out in Pilis, some out in Sárospatak ("Muddy Creek").
In Anyóka's house, though, one room was always Margácska's. She worked no longer, but read a lot. Now and then she'd walk down the mountain and take the trolley into town - to get her hair done, to buy necessaries, to go to church. We had lunch with her, my parents and brother and I; she never cooked, but came out and joined us once we were at the table.
And, as years went on, she walked less. The Carpathians aren't steep, but a mile of hill is a long way for a woman in her eighties, eighty-fives, nineties. She stopped going into town, and slowly, slowly, she stopped having lunch or dinner with us. Walking down the hill - even down the two levels of gardens it took from my aunt's house to Margácska's - was hard, and took long, and a woman in her nineties will take long in doing it. She puffed and wheezed while eating; her acne made her hard to look at, and her deafness made her hard to talk to. She had sympathy in front of her and covered, embarrased frustration behind her.
~:~
"Margácska" is a diminuitive, in Hungarian. "-ácska" is like "-y" or "-let" in English; it makes things small and cute.
Könvyecske: little book, booklet.
Kiskutyácska: little doggy.
Királylányka: little princess.
Her real name is Marga. Maybe when she worked she was Margit - that's a more formal version, and in the forties a woman accountant had to show her competance. At home she was Németh Marga, since she never married. To her peers, fewer and fewer every year, she was Marga. To those of us younger than her, more and more all the time, she was Margácska.
There's another Margit in the family, now, a grinning, curly-haired seven-year-old. I don't know if she was named after Margácska, or if her parents just liked the name. Her nicknames are Margó and Pampi, but never, never Margácska. Margácska was someone else.
~:~
When I returned from China for the first time, in 2006, I brought pictures. Hundreds of them. I was brimming with stories and enthusiasm, and I wanted to tell
everyone in the family about my adventures there. I was excited, and so were they - they'd never had someone in the family speak Chinese before.
I showed pictures. I made shows of them, bringing out my clumps of albums, handing photos around a circle, telling stories. The photos of one story always returned to me before I'd finished, though, and the kids would get impatient, or the cousins would pass photos from hand to hand and then stand up, not actually waiting for me to be done, but restless and energetic.
Perhaps it was because Margácska was a captive audience that she listened. Standing up was work. Restlessness was a distant memory. She had all the time in the world. But I know she was fascinated, because she told me:
I'd always wanted to see the Great Wall. Oh, I see pictures of it, and it's so beautiful, it must be huge! It always looks so grand! So, enthusiastic that she was listening, I showed her my pictures. I stopped for a half-hour at a time over some pictures, explaining, gesturing, getting up and waving my arms to show the size of things. I halted and started and staggered in my Hungarian, but got more fluent as vacation went on and I talked more; I told her what I'd seen in China and where the pollution was and how the markets worked, and what the great palaces looked like. When she couldn't hear, I scooted my chair closer and talked. I didn't mind the pus-y blister by her nose, or her smacking her lips as she breathed in, because she looked so close at the pictures I'd brought. I could tell her all my stories, and even though she was close to deaf, she was trying to
listen.~:~
Now, I imagine her room. It is square, with a high ceiling. Directly in front of the glass-paned doors is her couch - she would lie, feet facing the door, head propped up on a pillow to read (and, I suspect, to see people approaching the door because she couldn't hear them). To the left is her bed, that she made every single day of her life, except for the last two. In the center, a table, lace-clothed and with flowers, and holding the most recently letters or gifts from kids who stop by. Behind it, my aunt's old, out-of-tune piano, its notes plonky and graceless but whose sound even Margácska could hear.
The windows are open. In the summer, the hot winds of July turn into the northern, cooling winds of August. Eighty degrees is called hot; breezes slam doors if you aren't careful. Geraniums line the sill, in good Hungarian tradition; between them portula catch the sun, and plants whose English names I don't know. Under the window, on top of the radiator, an old lemon-juice bottle is half-filled with water for the plants.
How weird it'll be, I know, to go there this summer, with Margácska gone. How weird, to wander my aunt's garden in the morning and not hear the
tank-tnk-tnk of her windows opening, see her dyed hair and bloused back shuffling away from the window. How weird, to get back from being in the city all day, put my feet up and rest, and remind myself, "ah! I have to spend some time with Margácska," only to remember, "oh. Wait."
Perhaps there were harder parts of her life, that I never saw. Well, certainly there were - given Hungary's recent history, I'm certain of it. But all I saw of her and heard of her was old. I'm glad I learned to spend time with her - maybe it was only three months of time, but at ninety, love counts. And mabye I don't have the frustration with her that some had - but then, my experiences of her growing up were very different than my mom's, or my aunts', or my uncles'.
Margácska was a fixture. She was the great-aunt you had to say hi to every year. She was the one room in my grandmother's house. She never went hiking with me and by brother, nor ever cooked with us, nor ever told us stories..
But she listened.
That, I guess, was the end of her life. I never saw her in motion, only the gradual, ten-year winding down of an old clock. I tried to deny it, but only out of politeness - when I saw the white hair, I knew I wouldn't be surprised when we got the phone call or email. After that it was mile-markers. No more reading. No more eating. No making her bed. No getting out of it.
She told me, over the summer,
I'm sorry I can't listen. It's just so black, you know? Every time I finished a conversation, it was a goodbye - I never knew if I'd see her the next day.
She lived long enough to see a new baby be born, though, and join in that celebration. She lived through Christmas, the time when all the family came to that house on the mountain. That was good. She got her goodbyes.
My family, in constant flux, plans to move my cousin into her room. My aunt will move elsewhere. The geraniums will stay on the windowsill; the glass-paned doors might stay or might go. I don't know. I don't know how they'll reconstruct and rearrange who lives where.
Maybe, when they clean out her room, they'll find a three-year old, sticky-glossy photograph of the Great Wall of China.
