When my father was teaching me how to ride a bike, he also taught me about sin. We lived in Vienna, just having arrived from Minnesota. My parents were missionaries, hoping to move to Budapest, but that was tricky because Hungary was still behind the Iron Curtain. This was 1980.
In those first days my father was mostly gone, taking care of paperwork at the American embassy. My mother brought us to the local grocery store so she could buy ingredients to make us cookies. She misunderstood the label and bought salt instead of sugar. My sister and I ate a few mouthfuls of the cookies anyway.
The bike my father purchased for me was a secondhand Gräf & Stift Austrian brand, sturdy with chipped green paint. I was still at the stage where I needed my father to run beside me with his hand on my back.
My father came from a family of Swedish immigrants. His parents moved to Minnesota from Sweden in the early 20th century. He inherited a somewhat reserved emotional nature from his father, who looked for ways to turn daily tasks into teachable moments. Hence the bike purchase and the bike lessons. My father had something on his mind that day.
After a few rounds of practice, he sat down on a park bench with me and said, “It’s hard to balance, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“What makes it easier?” he asked.
I smiled. “When you hold me up.”
This time he nodded. “It’s sort of like what God does for us,” he said. “He uses his hand to help keep us from sinning.”
“What is sinning?” I asked.
He paused, choosing his words carefully. “That’s when you do something that isn’t right. Like lying. Or drinking.”
He let me think about it for a moment.
“Do you think you could live your whole life without sinning?”
I considered it. We made a few more bike runs. “Well, what do you think?” he said.
“Yes, I think I probably could.”
He paused. “Are you sure?”
“What would happen if I sinned?”
“You would be separated from God forever.”
“You mean hell?”
He nodded.
We went home for supper. The small apartment my parents were renting had only a kitchen and a bedroom. Before bed my mother read to me and my younger sister from the Little House on the Prairie series about a little girl named Laura. In the story Laura’s family had just moved from Minnesota to Kansas, so I felt like I could understand her. In the book Laura’s ma said, “The Lord helps them that help themselves.”
My mother paused her reading and said to us, “That’s not correct. No one can do anything themselves. Ma is wrong.” This frightened me.
My family moved to Hungary two weeks later. We traveled there by train. We sat in a train compartment with one bench facing in the direction the train was traveling and the other bench facing backward. Because my sister and I were sitting on the bench facing backward, my father later said that she and I were the first missionaries in our family to enter Hungary because our bodies entered the country first.
My father rented us an apartment in one of the working-class districts of Budapest. The building was fifteen stories high, constructed from stacked sections of pre-fabricated cement, every apartment identical. It had distance heating, which was very inefficient. Hot water was piped in from massive factories on the outskirts of the city through pipes hung with torn sheets of asbestos insulation. The pipes occasionally sprung leaks, and where this happened were gathered clumped piles of asbestos that my sister and I would mold into makeshift snowballs…filling the air with poison as we played.
My parents started language lessons shortly after we moved from Vienna. The apartment had a tiny, black-and-white television, and my father would switch on the news every evening at 6. My parents sat, staring at the small screen, hungry for any word they could recognize. One day they both recognized the word “no” at the same moment. They laughed and hugged each other.
My own language skills began to develop after the first few months. I remember occasionally I would simply know what the neighborhood kids had just said to me. This realization did not feel like a success, merely a dawning of recognition. One day when the two kids from the neighboring building were preparing for a bike ride with their father, I approached them confidently with my bike and asked if I could go with them. Their father did not allow it. I went home and told my father about what had happened. He seemed more interested in how I had asked them—what sentence I had used—rather than in understanding why I was sad being left at home. When I told him the sentence he pointed out the grammar mistake I made.
Initially my father attempted to maintain a business start-up visa which allowed our family to stay in the country for up to a year at a time before taking a trip back to Western Europe to renew the visa. He rented a small, one-room apartment a few blocks from the British embassy, a requirement for anyone with a business visa. He called it “the office.” He spent a few hours there every week to maintain the cover that he was trying to set up business venture opportunities. Whenever he met anyone official who asked why we were in Hungary, he told them that he was in the import/export business, preparing to ship farm equipment from Minnesota to Hungary. During some of those office visits he would bring me with him and we would watch Hungarian football matches on TV while we drank Coca-Cola from small glass bottles and ate Hungarian milk chocolate (five cents a bar). I couldn’t understand the rules of football yet, but I pretended I did. Being invited to the office with him made me feel important.
I attended Hungarian school from Grade 1 through 6.
The school days when I felt the most like a foreigner were on Hungarian national holidays. These were vacation days, but there was always a school celebration held on the day before vacation. Our class filed into the communal gymnasium with the other grades and sat on ankle-high wooden benches. Our teacher told us to sit still, no rocking. This was hard to do.
The school principal led us in singing through a variety of Soviet-era national songs, designed to encourage Communist solidarity. We all sang together in unison, but I stood out from the crowd in one important way. All of the students wore an official uniform for the Little Drummer Society. I only wore a white shirt with blue jeans.
Every Hungarian student was automatically enrolled, from the age of 6, into the Little Drummer Society. This was a Hungarian student’s first step on the road to Communist party membership. The Little Drummers would be followed by the Path Breakers, the league for the older students which began in the 7th grade. The Path Breakers eventually graduated into Communist party membership once school led into a career.
The Little Drummer uniform was a white shirt with a blue kerchief. There was a whistle attached to an embroidered rope which hung from a shoulder epaulet. The whistle was stored in the pocket of the white shirt. There was also a belt with a buckle featuring a drum beneath a red communist star with the Hungarian word “Előre!” (Forward!) written below.
I wanted a Little Drummer uniform, but my parents forbade it. One day, in an attempt to reason with my father, I explained that if I was going to someday be able to share the Gospel with these students I would need to fit into their ranks. By now I understood how much my father’s mind operated around spreading the teachings of Christ, and I felt that if I appealed to this side of his thinking that I might prevail upon him to relent and allow me the uniform.
“If I am dressed like them, they will see me as a comrade.” My reasoning seemed sound to me. “Comrades are friends, and friends are able to talk openly about their beliefs.”
My father considered it, and my spirits rose when he didn’t immediately say no. He spoke with my teacher one day after school and came home with a pamphlet that explained the purpose of the Little Drummer Society. Later that afternoon he sat me down by the kitchen table.
He said, “The Little Drummers follow six steps. Should you wear this uniform you must agree to these six steps.”
“What are they?” My heart was beating faster with excitement. The uniform seemed within reach.
He read through the first five steps.
“The Little Drummer is a faithful child of his country. The Little Drummer loves and respects his parents, teachers. The Little Drummer diligently studies and helps his partners. The Little Drummer always says the truth. The Little Drummer is clean, ordered, and punctual.”
My father paused. I leaned forward. This seemed easy. How could there be any problem in agreeing to this?
“I can do all those things,” I said.
My father stared at me. Then he said, “The sixth step is: The Little Drummer lives in such a way as to be worthy to wear the red kerchief of the Path Breaker.” He looked up at me. “You know what Path Breakers believe, don’t you?”
I nodded. Even though I didn’t know what Communism was, I knew the conversation was over.
It was during 2nd grade that my grandfather died back home in Minnesota. He had been dealing with heart murmurs and my parents wanted to make a phone call back to America to check on him. Most Hungarian households did not have telephones in 1980. The government wait-list to receive a phone was 10 years long. Pay phones were plentiful, but if my parents wished to make or receive an international phone call they could only do so from a government office in downtown Budapest.
The phone center had bright yellow molded plastic chairs. My parents huddled together behind a wall of glass in the small telephone cubicle. My mother suddenly began to cry. My sister and I, desperate to calm her, asked her what was wrong. She told us he had died. We told my mother again and again, “But, we’ll surely see him again in Heaven.”
My mother said, “That will be such a long time from now.”
I later asked my mother why my father had not cried that night when he heard the news. She assured me that later in the evening, when we were in bed, that he had also cried. I tried to picture it, but I couldn’t.
After my grandfather’s death, my father talked about him more than he had in the past. When my father was a young boy he used to see his father drink shots of moonshine behind the barn with his uncles and cousins. My father watched him throw back the liquor into his mouth and exhale a hard burst of air when the alcohol hit his throat. Whenever my grandfather caught my dad watching them he said, “Now, when you get older, you’re not going to do this.”
My father nodded, knowing that was what was expected, but he snuck up afterwards and stuck his tongue into the shot glass to taste the drops at the bottom of it. It was shortly after this that my grandfather had a conversion experience and began to go to church. He also stopped drinking.
My father used this story when he taught young Hungarian men certain spiritual lessons. He ended the story by saying, “I never felt tempted to drink after my father stopped drinking.”
We went back to Minnesota for my grandfather’s funeral. We stayed with my grandmother in the big empty farm house. She asked my parents how the Hungarian mission was going. My father gestured to me and said, “He can speak Hungarian now.”
We lived in Hungary until I was sixteen. When we returned to Minnesota, we moved into the same small town where my parents grew up, and I graduated from the same high school they did. As time passed, the memories of Hungary misted together and the favorable ones stood out most.
After we were married, my wife and I moved to Hungary ourselves to teach. Our two sons attended Hungarian pre-school. One of my proudest memories was seeing my sons begin to speak the language.
I taught both boys how to ride bikes and used the same hand-on-the-back method that my father used. I wish I could tell you I chose to raise my sons in a completely different way, but if I said that I’d be lying. And lying is a sin.
Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many, many, many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete