again.
* * *A few days later, a thick letter arrives, addressed to me. It’s from Béla.
It is the ĕrst of many long letters he will write, ĕrst from the TB
hospital, and then from his home in Prešov, where he was born and
raised—the third-largest city in Slovakia, just twenty miles north of
Košice. As I learn more about Béla, begin to assemble the facts he gives
me in these letters into a life, the gray-haired man with a stutter and
sarcastic sense of humor becomes a person with contours.
Béla’s earliest memory, he writes, is of going for a walk with his
grandfather, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and being
denied a cookie from the patisserie. When he leaves the hospital, he
will take over this same grandfather’s business, wholesaling produce
from the region’s farmers, grinding coffee and grinding wheat for all of
Slovakia. Béla is a full pantry, a country of plenty, he is a feast.
Like my mother, Béla lost one of his parents when he was very
young. His father, who had been the mayor of Prešov, and before that,
a renowned lawyer for the poor, went to a conference in Prague the
winter Béla was four. He stepped off the train and fell into an
avalanche of snow. Or that is what the police told Béla’s mother. Béla
suspects that his father, a controversial ĕgure because he rebelled
against the Prešov elite by serving as an advocate for the poor and
disenfranchised, was murdered, but the official word was that he’d
suffocated under all that snow. Ever since his father’s death, Béla has
spoken with a stutter.
His mother never recovered from his father’s death. Her father-in-
law, Béla’s grandfather, kept her locked up in the house to keep her
from meeting other men. During the war, Béla’s aunt and uncle
invited her to join them in Hungary, where they were living in hiding
using false identiĕcation papers. One day Béla’s mother was at the