At the height of rush hour in rain soaked Dublin city centre Franz stood back into the queue. He realised that the bus he was about to board was not the one he wanted. Not only did he feel out of place, he looked out of place too. In his mid forties, he was tall, his black hair brushed flat on top with waves at his temples, slightly bushy eyebrows and dark penetrating eyes. His strong jaw supported a well-proportioned face. He wore a trench coat belted tightly that was wet through from the relentless rain. He was reminded again that in Ireland he was a person of no importance; an anonymous figure at a city bus stop.
At home during the years before he left he had not been a person of any importance either, but his peers remembered a time when he had been. Standing in a bus queue in Budapest he would at least have been familiar with the bus routes. He would also have been able to put in a broad context the other people in the queue and he would have spoken the language. His English was not yet up to more than essential communication. Before the war Franz’s family had been a power in the land. Not long before the German invasion his father had died. Franz left his position lecturing in history at the university and was running the family estates. The problems of living under German occupation were bad enough but when the Communists took power, worse was to come. The family was dispossessed and he lived in a flat with his elderly mother and Josef, his younger brother, who, having a practical skill, continued to work as an engineer. Franz worked in a factory on the assembly line making radios, but with their mother’s blessing the brothers looked for an opportunity to flee to the West.
Biding their time and with careful planning they escaped, arrived in West Germany and travelled to London. Shortly after they arrived they went to a firm of fine art auctioneers with some family jewellery they had smuggled out with them. The firm’s gemologist, when he saw what they wanted to sell, asked frostily:
‘Can you tell me please how these came into your possession.’ Josef, who was of medium height, hair already thinning and tending to weight and whose English was better than that of Franz said:
‘They have been in our family for many generations.’ The gemologist looked from one to the other incredulously, and with his eyeglass scrutinised the jewellery again.
‘Please wait here,’ he said, and taking the jewellery with him he disappeared through a large mahogany door, and re-appeared with a tall grey haired man in a pinstriped suit. He at least smiled. He asked the same question as the first man:
‘Can you tell us how you come to have this jewellery.’
‘It has been in our family for centuries,’ Josef explained again.
‘Can you tell me please where your family is from.’
‘We are from Hungary; we have recently come to the West. My brother is Prince Janos Sigismond. We are a minor branch of the Royal House of Hungary. When the Communists took over in our country our castle and estates were confiscated. These jewels were the only things of value we could smuggle from our home.’
‘Have you documents to identify yourselves?’
‘Our documents are false and do not refer to who we are, but we will have valid documents when our application for asylum is complete.’
When they received their papers granting asylum they auctioned the jewellery and received a considerable sum. By this time they had decided to come to Ireland. They had had an account of the country from a friend who had fled here after the 1956 uprising. He had since gone to America, but had painted such an attractive picture to them that not only did they like the sound of it, but they speculated that it would be easier to buy land and farm in Ireland than in England, and to farm was their ultimate objective.
In order to give them time to get the lie of the land, literally, when they arrived in Dublin they set up a small clock repairing workshop and made a modest living in order to conserve their capital and to give them time to plan.
‘We’ll have to stick together,’ Joseph would say, ‘if we’re to succeed.’
After a couple of years in Dublin the brothers finally found a farm in Co Carlow that they judged to be good value and which they could afford. Josef saw its commercial potential and was driven to succeed at farming in a way he had never had the opportunity at home. He declaimed authoritatively about the land and how best they would use it. He constantly affirmed himself, not only by recounting anything he had achieved, but by displaying how much he knew on every subject under the sun. That Franz was the one with experience in farming didn’t seem to deflect Josef from his usual display of knowledge. Franz, though he found it trying, had learned to be patient.
Franz knew they must succeed, but he also appreciated the smells of the countryside and the beauty of the trees and the hedgerows. When they viewed the property it was a working farm and the smell of hay and the sounds of cattle stirred something deep inside him. They transported him home to the estate before the war. He looked forward to observing the seasons at close quarters and in the winter digging in beside a big open fire with a book. He could no longer get books written in Magyar and was making great strides in reading English. He was curious and looked forward to reading the history of his adopted country.
They had waited patiently to buy land on which they could grow cereal crops, because that was what they had been used to. The farmhouse was a virtual ruin, but they made it safe while they built a house on the other side of the yard. Shortly after they moved in to their temporary ramshackle accommodation a neighbouring farmer, Paddy Byrne, drove into the yard on his tractor. Josef came to the door and watched as he dismounted and approached. The farmer put out his hand and said:
‘You’re very welcome to the area. I hope you get on well.’ Josef did not offer his hand in return.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
‘I just came to welcome you.’ Only then did Josef think to say ‘thank you.’ The farmer finding little response said:
‘We’re just down the road, If there’s anything I can do to help you, let me know.’ He mounted his tractor again and drove out of the yard.
Back in the kitchen Josef recounted the farmer’s visit to Franz, who understood exactly its significance. He tried to explain rural Irish hospitality to Josef who, however, was determined that he and his brother would survive together with only essential contact with other people.
In a couple of days Franz went to the neighbour’s house and thanked him for calling to welcome them. He was invited into the kitchen and given tea and tart by the woman of the house, while her husband gave him a detailed account of the countryside and its residents. It was a kind of hospitality with which Franz was unfamiliar, but he was aware enough to accept it graciously.
The brothers were particularly resourceful. Anything they needed to know they set about learning themselves so that they were able to do most of the work in the building of their new house. They did everything except lay the foundation, the block work and the plastering. They set themselves high standards and eventually had a fine well finished house of design and features that were in the Hungarian rather than the Irish idiom.
One morning, shortly after they moved in Franz found a small basket of eggs on the step. Josef was mystified as to why anyone would put them there.
‘It’s a gift from some neighbour, probably the Byrnes, to mark our move to our new house.’ Franz told him.
‘What will they want in return?’
‘Nothing. It’s a small gift.’
‘But we will be beholden to them, and we don’t want that.’ Josef had tried Franz patience many times since they left home, but this was the first time he let him see his irritation.
‘Of course we won’t. Irish country people are warm, friendly and generous,’ said Franz.
‘And they won’t be satisfied until they know your business,’ responded Josef, ‘and they aren’t going to know ours. We should give back the eggs or we won’t know how they’ll invade our privacy next.’
Franz was shocked. ‘We can live and be neighbourly without anyone knowing our business. The logical conclusion of your point of view is to put locks on both gates and a roof over the farm.’
Josef went out into the yard and not another word was said about the eggs. It was the basket that became the problem. At lunch Josef asked:
‘Will they come and collect the basket or do we keep it?’ Franz took a deep breath and said slowly:
‘No, we leave it back in a day or two and say ‘thank you.’ I’ll drop it in tomorrow on my way to town for paint.’ Josef did not respond.
Next day Franz brought the basket back to Byrnes. Paddy was out and Betty insisted that Franz would come in. He sat again at the kitchen table, drank tea and talked to Betty. He was reminded of the warm cosy kitchens of his tenants before the war, and speculated that they were still in their same cottages, but having had to surrender their freedom in exchange for a minimum of state security. He was reminded of the occasions when he had had to call to tenants on some business or other and how they were obsequious, and his communication with them was no more than the bare essential.
Franz was conscious that he and Josef had regained their freedom but they now had to establish their security in a new way, in a new country. He was conscious of what Josef had failed to grasp; that if they were to survive they must adapt. Franz knew that surviving materially was the least of their problems; with hard work they would both be able to do that. They would have to survive emotionally and socially and he could see that this would inevitably lead to conflict with Josef. They would become isolated in a strange land if they were to adopt his way. Franz knew that they would have to forget a great deal and meet new people if life was not to become an endless and nauseous tedium of work and sleep.
As he talked to Betty he was conscious, above all, of the warmth of her humanity. She talked about Paddy and the children and how for them their whole way of life was of a piece. Their material survival on a small farm, and their family and social life were all one. She and Paddy clearly had no ambition to be rich, but to give their three children an education so they would have every chance in life to do whatever it was they wanted to do.
Unlike Paddy, Betty didn’t ask questions. She didn’t pry about Franz and Josef’s past. There were plenty of rumours locally about that, but like most rural rumour it was either half-truth or entirely the product of somebody’s imagination. When the rumour moved one person away from its originator it became ‘a known fact,’ and if it was challenged it went one step further and became ‘true as God.’
Betty seemed concerned that Franz and Josef would be happy in their new life. As foreigners she wanted them to feel welcome and to be comfortable with their neighbours. Franz could see that not only was she intelligent, but that she had enough imagination to understand something of the strangeness for the brothers of their new situation. The farm was Betty’s home place. Paddy was a boss lodger; he had ‘married in.’ She had been a teacher in her early life and she and Franz began to find common ground in their interest in history. He awakened in her a mental stimulation that had lain dormant since she gave up her work and had become a wife and mother. She in turn was the first person with whom Franz had had an educated conversation since he came to the West.
From the day they moved in the brothers were planning and preparing for their first spring and the sowing of crops. They realised that, initially at least, they would have to do mixed farming, so they planned to make hay or silage from some of the land to fatten cattle. Whereas Josef had to concede that Franz knew his stuff about cereal crops he became the undisputed fount of all knowledge on fattening cattle. Their determination to be as self sufficient meant that they would not borrow equipment or machinery. Until they became established they used contractors to plough and to cut silage, and Josef never let them out of his sight while they were there.
Josef seldom left the farm. He never went to town with Franz, who did all the shopping for the house and bought most of everything else they needed. From time to time Franz called, on some pretext or other, to Byrnes. He enjoyed the friendly atmosphere of their kitchen and he learned to parry Paddy’s prurience.
This early pattern of their lives in the country became established. Franz was popular with the neighbours for his more sociable and gentlemanly ways. At home the brothers worked well together despite inevitable tensions between them. At night Franz would sit and read, while Josef pottered at things around the house or in the yard.
During their second winter Franz took to calling to Byrne’s at night to talk Irish history with Betty. He was interested in her detailed knowledge, and she was fascinated by his perspective as an academic historian and outsider.
One night Paddy Byrne arrived home early from an I F A meeting to see the light on in the bedroom. He parked the car and when he arrived into the house there was nobody in the kitchen. He went down the back passage and out into the yard to lock up the dog and saw Franz getting over the fence into the field and disappearing into the night. He put the dog in the shed and went back into the kitchen where Betty was putting anthracite into the cooker. Paddy went upstairs and found the bed had been disturbed. He went downstairs again. Betty boiled the kettle and made tea and enquired about Paddy’s meeting.
‘There weren’t enough people there to sign a letter to the Minister, so it was postponed until next Friday.’
No further word of the night’s events passed between them. Later in the week Paddy and Betty were in the kitchen when Franz arrived at Byrnes. He received his usual welcome and Betty made tea. The three sat around the kitchen table and made small talk. Paddy recounted what the IFA delegation was going to say to the minister, and when he had finished he excused himself and went outside.
Betty and Franz sat on in the kitchen talking and they heard Paddy start the digger and drive out of the yard.
‘It’s better if you’re not here when he gets back.’ Betty advised. Josef was at home fixing a drip under the kitchen sink when he heard a vehicle driving into the yard. He joined the waste pipe before getting up to go and see who it was. Before he had finished there was an almighty crash at the front of the house. When he got out to the hall, through the dust, he saw the bucket of a digger reversing having demolished the porch and broken down the front door. He couldn’t get out through the rubble and ran out the back and around the house just in time to see the lights of the digger disappearing down the road.
Franz arrived home and when he saw the destruction he explained why it had happened and why there was nothing they could do about it. For Josef, Franz account of what it was all about was even more devastating than the damage done to the house.