Let's get in the mood for the Holidays with excerpts from the Life in the Barracks! Chapter 9: Home for Christmas - part 3.

Laszlo Hopp: Christmas Eve

Literary

In this section Tibor and his father celebrate Christmas Eve together. They get guests and the conversation turns into the politics of the days. Later, Tibor hears the full story of his father as a POW in post WW2 Russia. He understands his father's message with the story: "Don't give up and make compromises you can live with!"

CHAPTER 9. Home for Christmas, part 3    

The next day, Tibor and his father did everything exactly the same way as they had always done for Christmas Eve, for all twenty-six years of Tibor’s life.

    By the time darkness fell, the tree was ready to be unveiled in its full splendor. As usual, his father lit a few sparklers, jingled the little old bell, and Tibor came in the room to admire the glittering tree he had adorned with the familial trinkets earlier that afternoon. They listened to traditional church music on their outdated tape recorder while saying a silent prayer for those who were dear to them but could not be there. Then both of them looked for presents under the tree.

    Tibor had bought a leather-bound stamp album for his father, to encourage his newly budding hobby of stamp collection. His father, in turn, got him a Parker pressurized ball pen since he liked writing while lying on his back. Nagyi, his maternal grandmother, surprised him with an extended function handheld calculator: an “industrial marvel” and a dream come true for Tibor.

    They sat down to their modest Christmas dinner in remembrance of Tibor’s maternal great grandparents. Then the doorbell rang.

    “Must be your Aunt Molly and Uncle Jozsef,” Tibor’s father said. The two had been a permanent fixture in their past Christmas Eve gatherings. Their daughter also used to come, but now she had her own family to celebrate with. They remained frequently unannounced but never unexpected guests for the Christmas dinners. The food had always been plentiful, much like at the time of Iftar for those observing Ramadan.

    “Merry Christmas!” they yelled with festive cheer when Tibor opened the door.

    “Merry Christmas, aunty and uncle!” Tibor smacked a kiss on their cheeks. “Come in, you’re just in time for dinner!”

    “Tibor, let me see you in your uniform, you big lieutenant!” his uncle said.

    “Only a second lieutenant, uncle. And no uniform on Christmas Eve. I’ll show you a picture if you really want to laugh at me,” Tibor said.

    Aunt Molly, the youngest sister of Tibor’s mother, was a unique character in the family of six. She was a loud, jovial, rotund woman in sharp contrast to her more pensive and rather thin older siblings. Whenever she was around, the small apartment got filled with the sounds of her rattling laughter as if the walls could not contain her overflowing spirit. Tibor always felt infected with her buoyant good cheer. Uncle Jozsef, a skimpy, small-framed man, couldn’t have been more different from her. He came from a humble background, having grown up in the plains of Hungary in a landless peasant family. For a time he had served as the local Communist Party secretary. He had a habit of going on long political rants, and was of the opinion that only a miracle could prevent the third world war.

    “So, Tibor, now that you have firsthand experience with the army, do you think we could beat back NATO if they decided to attack us?” Uncle Jozsef asked towards the end of dinner, diving into his favorite subject.

    “To be honest, I don’t know if our trucks would start, uncle,” Tibor said jokingly, trying to prevent more weighty discussion. “I hope that the diplomats have gotten smarter since they let the demon loose before World War Two.”

    Uncle Jozsef pushed on with his agenda. “Perhaps they have, but human nature hasn’t changed. If one feels that he’s stronger, nothing will hold him back from moving in for the kill. That’s why the Russians have to keep up with the American military, that’s why you have to spend a year in the army even though you chose to be a doctor and not a military man.”

    “Damn the Yankees and the Russians!” cried Tibor’s father. “They should do what they had done in Biblical times. If Brezhnev and Carter have problems with each other, let them go and fight it out like David and Goliath did.”

Ever since Tibor was young, his father had maintained this sort of simplistic, idealized view of political affairs. Tibor had long since concluded that it must have stemmed from a sense of helplessness in changing the course of events in an ever more complicated and dangerous world.

    “Oh, those big politicians and generals; all the money they waste on those bombs and what-not should be spent on feeding the world,” said Aunt Molly.

    Hmm, feeding the world; hasn’t she looked into the mirror lately? Tibor mused, but remained quiet. Instead, somewhat caught in the trap of Uncle Jozsef, he asked. “Uncle, isn’t it written in the Communist Manifesto that ‘A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.’? And this too: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution.’ So who is threatening who here?”

    “That is all just rhetoric! Those words were written 150 years ago by two middle-class Germans who had no clue what a realspecter looks like. They never experienced the two world wars. They couldn’t have had a clue that the ‘ghosts’ humanity can create would one day exterminate seventy million people in six bloody years or would be able to cause a Hiroshima-size catastrophe within a split second.” Uncle Jozsef narrowed his eyes, puckered his brow, and started gesturing. “Your father and I were part of the last war. We know what real specter is about. The Russians went through two grueling wars and lost twenty million people in World War Two alone. Twenty million, sixty times more than the Americans. They know what true suffering means! The Americans have not witnessed war on their soil for over a hundred years.”

    “Where are you going with this, uncle?” Tibor asked.

    “The Americans have no idea what war brings to people. The Russians will never attack first! The Russian people wouldn’t allow it! The American public, on the other hand, can easily be talked into any war frenzy as long they can watch it in the news on their color TV.”

    “Let’s turn on the TV,” Tibor’s father proposed in an attempt to cut off the boiling dispute. “Even if it’s only black and white.”

​They did.

    And, what a wonderful coincidence! A documentary had just started about a most unlikely event that took place on a Christmas Eve during World War One. They showed original footage, reports, and accounts of old survivors of the British, French and German armies who had called a temporary truce and come out of their snow-covered foxholes to celebrate Christmas together on a long ago night in the midst of a bloody confrontation—a moment of sanity in a world gone mad.

    Shortly after the documentary ended the guests gathered their belongings and said their goodbyes. After they left, father and son quietly sat at the dinner table, absorbed in their memories. The family was together again: Tibor, his father, and his mother’s framed picture where she normally would have sat, along with the freshly decorated Christmas tree. It stood in its usual corner of the room, glittering with the same sixteen electric candles that Tibor had grown up with.

    When Tibor was only five, he’d asked his parents, “How come the Little Jesus brought the same candles every year on the Christmas tree?”

    “It’s because he remembers which child got which candles and ornaments,” they reassured him.

    Many of the ornaments were older than Tibor. There was one, however, that was only a year old: a pair of porcelain bells with golden rims and a green ribbon that held them together. His mother had gotten them for last Christmas. She had bought a new ornament for every single Christmas ever since Tibor was born. This one was her last. There would be no more new Christmas ornaments on their trees.

    The table was clean now. The room still smelled of the sparklers his father had burned. In front of them were a bowl of Christmas sweets—testament to his father’s unexpected baking skills—and the traditional liquor that his father only made for Christmas.

    His father sat at the table, absentmindedly running his fingers around the rim of his shot glass. “So, Tibor, tell me honestly, how are you doing in Kisliget?”

    Tibor didn’t want to burden his father with his problems with Vida, Katona, and Irmai. He wanted to spare him from troubled thoughts about dilemmas he faced at the base. He didn’t want to talk about the sense of powerlessness that had been tormenting him and the difficulties he faced with providing the best possible care he had learned in medical school. He didn’t want to complain that his boss hardly ever showed up in the infirmary and thus he had to figure out everything pretty much on his own: starting with how to reconcile his perfect textbook knowledge with the reality of a military clinic, all the way up to the fine details of how to supervise and administer the over-regulated military health services. He didn’t want to get into his suspicion that the commander of the camp was in some inexplicable cahoots with Vida, his hunting buddy.

    He didn’t want to talk about Fazekas either. He hadn’t quite gotten over that near-tragedy or his self-reproach that he could have done more to prevent it. He blamed himself for not having noticed the clear signs of the poor tortured soul’s impending breakdown!

There were so many things he found unsettling about the infirmary. He felt that a showdown with Vida was in the air even though he hoped for a peaceful resolution, perhaps aided by his as yet unapproved plans for the drug trial. But Tibor had never dealt with a situation like this before, and he was still unsure whether his reticence to join Vida was naïve. Perhaps things would be much easier for him if he only cared for the goodwill of his boss. But was that how he was supposed to manage his life from now on? To do what he was told to do regardless of his own conviction? Was that how the real world was supposed to work?

    No, he did not want to tell his father about any of these brewing doubts about himself, his work, his whole life in the military, and perhaps even after the military.

    “I miss being close to you, father. I can’t come home more than once every three or four months at best. I know how lonely you are.”

    “I want to know how you feel, Tibor, not what you think about me,” his father insisted. Tibor took a swig from his glass and filled it again. “Shall I top off yours?” His father shook his head but said nothing. He was waiting.

    “You made it delicious this year.” Tibor breathed in deep and smacked his tongue. His father remained silent.

    “I don’t know how long I’ll last there,” Tibor finally said. He looked at his father, who showed no sign of surprise, as if he knew already what Tibor was trying to hide from him. He seemed deep in his thoughts for awhile, then started to talk.

    “Tibor, you know a few things about my captivity in Russia, don’t you? Or at least what I’ve told you. But you should know that I haven’t given you the whole account of those years. It was too painful to discuss. Only your mother knew why I woke up on so many nights with nightmares, drenched in sweat. Now, I will finish that story and you will understand why.”    

    Tibor saw his father’s struggle. Even thirty years after the events his eyes clouded over with fear as he remembered and yet he steeled himself and clenched his jaw. He spoke in a low, unwavering voice.

    “On May 9th, 1945, two days after Germany capitulated and the Second World War officially ended in Europe, the Russians captured me. You heard that part of the story already. I became a POW despite never having had live ammunition in a gun so old it wouldn’t have fired anyway. We were transported in freight cars to a small village in the Ukraine, close to the river Don, and I was billeted in the house of a local peasant.

My group was forced to work in a coal mine. Of course, you know that I have bad claustrophobia. Remember how many times you made fun of me because I couldn’t get into the elevator at your Aunt Ethel’s? Imagine the horror I felt every single day of those two years in the coalmine! Down in those deep, narrow, sooty, dark and incredibly hot tunnels.”

Tibor pictured it and shuddered.

    “Once I caught dysentery and they transferred me to an open tarp. They called that tarp the infirmary. We used to call it the morgue. They were waiting for me to die there, you see. Every day, the men in the ‘infirmary’ died and were wheeled out under white sheets. One died on the bed next to me. But, somehow I got lucky.” His father gave an acrid smile. “Would you believe it, I survived?”

    Tibor smiled. “I have to.”

    “Yet, when they took me back down the chute for the first time after my recovery, I cried. You wouldn’t believe it but I envied those who had died alongside me. I was so afraid down there.

I carried a picture of your mother in my boot in those days. Do you remember that portrait of your mother in the first page of our photo album? You may still smell the odor of my boots on that picture.”

Both cracked a faint smile and Tibor noticed with pleasure that his father still knew how to laugh at himself.

“You know, we weren’t married yet but I talked to her every night in my thoughts. I asked her to please wait for me because I’d come back to her. Wanting to see her—it’s the only thing that kept me alive.”

    “And she did wait for you,” Tibor interjected.

    His father approvingly shook his head then continued. “We survived on bread and cabbage soup loaded with lard for calories. That’s what we ate. That’s what the Russians in the house ate. There was no food for anyone there. Not even the villagers. The retreating Germans burnt and destroyed the land and everything they could put their hands on. I traded my cigarette ration for bread. The heavy smokers traded their food for cigarettes and they starved.”

Tibor’s father hesitated for a moment as he collected his thoughts. “When they finally decided to release me, they transferred me to a sort of ‘nutritional camp’ somewhere in Moldova. After a whole month of eating as much food as I wanted, food I’d only dreamt of in the coal mine, I came home weighing 130 pounds. I had weighed 180 pounds when I was captured.”

    His father paused. “I know what hardship is, Tibor: it’s a test of your determination, your will, your survival skills. If you set your mind to making it, you’ll find the best path to follow. Of course, it’s a lie that it always works, as some zealots try to convince us about the power of will and determination, but at least you’ll find your best chance. You’ll find out how far you can get. If you give up, you’ll never know what chances you missed.”

    Happy to be done with his painful reminiscence, his father looked Tibor in the eye. His own eyes sparkled now, as if some inside fire was burning through them.

    “I’m not sure that you’ve considered all your options, Tibor. Quitting isn’t the only option when you’re cornered—nor is slavishly submitting to the rules of those who cornered you. Look for your own ways or at least look for a compromise that you can live with.”

    Tibor was silent for a moment. He sipped at the Christmas liquor and felt it wash down his throat, warming his belly from the inside. “You read me very well, father,” he finally said.

His father smiled.

    Tibor stared at the candle, burning in the middle of the table. He remembered his mother saying many times that when the wick of a burning candle turned toward a person, it meant the person would die that year. Tibor had never believed this old superstition. But, he remembered vividly that the previous Christmas Eve the wick had leaned toward his mother. And now she was dead.

    The wick, curling up slowly as it burned toward its end, now turned toward his father. Tibor quickly reached out and turned the candleholder the other way. To his father it may have seemed only as nervous, aimless gesture.


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