Johanna Adorján: An Exclusive Love
From that matter-of-fact police report – reproduced at the end of this marvellous book – the couple’s granddaughter (the cultural editor of the highly respected German daily the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”) set out to reconstruct the last day of her grandparents’ lives.
Adorján’s grandfather was in his early eighties at the time, his wife was eleven years younger. She was still a healthy, attractive woman of great vitality and charm, the chain-smoking queen of the friendly Copenhagen neighbourhood. Her husband was in the last stages of a terminal disease. They decided to die together – as Adorján came to realise, this was not the first time that her grandmother found herself unable to contemplate life without her husband.
One strand in this tender and moving memoir – made all the more moving by its tact and restraint – is an imagined reconstruction of that autumn Sunday when the elderly couple went about the business of preparing die. Adorján could not possibly have known about the hundreds of tiny things her grandparents did, thought and felt that day. Yet her inevitably fictional account of her grandparents’ last hours is informed by a higher kind of truth.
We catch a glimpse of Adorján’s grandmother getting up in the morning, jotting down things down in a notebook as she waits for the coffee to brew. Later she busies herself with household chores, bakes something for a friend, tends the garden, tidies up in the kitchen – in short all the things that one might do on a normal Sunday. Her husband rises later. He is weak; he has difficulty breathing; a few steps exhaust him.
As the day goes on they bicker in the comfortable way of happily married couples. The husband strums on the out-of-tune piano. There is a dispute whether he should go with his wife to deliver the cake she has baked and also – as it turns out – take their beloved dog Mitzi to another friend, a woman who has agreed to look after her for a few days while the couple are supposed to be visiting relatives in Germany. Then, as evening draws in, they turn their minds to last things: writing letters, wrapping gifts – rings, wristwatches – for friends and relations, following meticulously the timetable for suicide laid down in the American how-to book they had so much trouble getting hold of. At 7.30 they get into bed and die.
This sad (and sadly familiar) story is made all the more poignant by the Adorján’s account of how Pista and Vera Adorján came to the end of their lives in a suburb of Copenhagen. They were Hungarians, Jews in the way that so many Hungarians (my family among them) were classified and persecuted as Jews in the middle of the last century when they themselves set little store by their Jewish antecedents, regarding Judaism as no more than a discarded religion.
They met in Budapest in 1940 when “the war seemed far away [and] all was peaceful there”. In 1944 Pista (like my father, another Pista) was carted off to a forced labour camp on the outskirts of the city. My father managed to escape; Pista Adorján survived Mauthausen, the camp in Austria to which he had been transported, where captives were literally worked to death. Vera survived the war with her baby son, the author’s father (just as my mother and I survived) hiding in Budapest with false identity papers. Her parents were among the men, women and children who were lined up, day after day, on the Danube embankment and shot in the back.
Unlike my family, the Adorjáns (they used to be called Adler but, like so many others, changed their name in the 1920s or 30s to make it sound more Hungarian) did not leave Hungary after the war. They stayed and enjoyed the good life of highly-placed Party members. Then came 1956; they fled to Austria. Australia, Canada and the US wouldn’t take them, so they settled in Denmark.
How much had their terrible wartime experiences influence their decision to die together? Did they kill themselves, their granddaughter wonders, because, like others – Primo Levi for instance – who survived persecution and whose friends and relatives had been slaughtered in barbaric ways, they were intent on taking charge of their own deaths? Or was it because of the Hungarian penchant for suicide? Adorján mentions “Gloomy Sunday”, a celebrated hit-song of 1933, which provoked a rash of suicides throughout Hungary.
As she travels around Europe and America interviewing the few elderly women who knew her grandparents during the war – most memorably a lady in a dismal Paris flat stuffed with dolls and toy animals – discovering that they are reluctant to talk or even think about the past, as she pores over ambiguous documents and photographs, Johanna Adorján’s thoughts circle around that conundrum. She comes to realise how grievously her grandparents had been stunted by the horrors they experienced and that only a few of their Danish friends and neighbours had been able to see behind the façade so carefully erected by the “aristocratic couple”. Vera’s fear of being left alone once more made her decide to join her husband in death.
This is a magnificent book. Adorján is a most accomplished writer, bringing the wit, literary skill and wry compassion of Janet Malcolm to mind. Anthea Bell’s translation is gracefully idiomatic. The Melbourne publishing house Text brought off a notable coup by acquiring the English-language rights to this splendid memoir well ahead of its British and American rivals.
The Book
Johanna Adorján: An Exclusive Love / translated by Anthea Bell - Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2010. - 186 pages. ISBN 9781921656569
Original title: Eine exklusive Liebe (German)
