Zsuzsa Bánk: The Swimmer
In the course of the last fifty years, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its terrible aftermath have furnished material for several novels both by Hungarians and by writers in other languages. None that I have encountered, however, matches the subtlety and quiet, undemonstrative power of this splendid first novel, an eloquent meditation on those dark days, which was released in German in 2002.
Zsuzsa Bánk was born in Frankfurt in 1965. According to the brief biographical account that accompanies the German text of this novel, she is a writer and journalist, equally fluent in German and Hungarian, who studied political science in Europe and in the USA. Her father escaped from Hungary, presumably during or shortly after the 1956 disturbances. Some, at least, of the material in ‘The Swimmer’ must have come from his reminiscences of the perils and disappointments of those years. Bánk’s second book, a collection of twelve short stories, ‘Heißester Sommer’ was published in late 2005.
‘The Swimmer’ is set, unobtrusively it must be added, in the grim decades when Hungary was no more than a vassal of the Soviet Union. The historical detail is all there: the events of 1956 and, before that, the day in 1953 when everything seemed to stop, the day when “something had come to an end, a man’s life was over, and with it a time, an era and [people] felt something that was almost like mourning. Only years later … when everyone knew more … were they ashamed at what they had felt then.”
The oblique nature of that remark is characteristic of the strength of this remarkable book. Stalin is never mentioned by name, there or elsewhere, nor is there any detailed reference to what happened after the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. Instead, the reader reaches an understanding of these large and menacing events through the impact they make on obscure people, all of whom, one way or another, find their lives altered by circumstances they cannot control and do not, indeed, understand fully. Both Bánk’s diction (eloquently captured in this English version) and the intricate construction of her novel, where past and the present are beautifully melded, mirror the perplexity and confusions of men, women and children caught up in these world-shaking events, which are so near and yet seem so far away. We must piece together from the often trivial details of their everyday existence the stories of their lives – and deaths – just as we must piece together what is, in effect, the history of Hungary in the second half of the twentieth century.
The narrator is a woman called Kata, who remembers her childhood, the years she and her father (we eventually find out that he was called Kálmán) and her younger brother Isti spent wandering around the length and breadth of Hungary, rootless, homeless, directionless and obviously hopeless. Her recollections start in a village in the west of Hungary where she and Isti used live with their parents. But one day their mother boarded a train bound for Vienna and disappeared – we discover eventually that she seized the opportunity offered by the few days in 1956 when Hungary’s frontiers were porous, when the usually vigilant border-guards looked the other way. So Kálmán began his wanderings from west to east, from north to south, from a grimy Budapest where Kata and Isti stare at the sluggish waters of the Danube, to summer idylls on the banks of a large lake – clearly Lake Balaton, though it is never named – and then to other villages, other towns, until their journey covers every part of that small nation. The people they stay with – sometimes very unwilling hosts – are vividly captured, with a deft stroke or two of the pen. All of them, whether youngsters like Jenö, a young pianist who also disappears without a trace, or the elderly Zoltán, who is fast sinking into dementia, the lovely Virág (her name means flower), hardly more than girl yet already singed by disappointed love, Éva, a casually faithless wife, the tormented and the unaware, the opportunists and those with a drop or two of the milk of human kindness, experience, directly or indirectly, the effects of terrible deeds and events. They are all victims, yet every one of them is fundamentally, even perhaps triumphantly, human.
This is particularly true of Kata herself and of her brother Isti. “I had few memories of my mother,” are the words with which Kata begins this intricately intertwined network of memories. Her brother does not remember their mother at all, yet her absence weighs more and more heavily on him, forcing him at length into strange silences, into experiencing ambiguous visions and, above all, into the solace of swimming, floating on water – obviously seeking a kind of oblivion. As the years pass, as no more than a few puzzling words arrive from Katalin, their mother, her children, but particularly her son, feel more and more detached from the world, from the people around them and, above all, from their enigmatic, at times brutal father. The few times we are permitted to see Katalin herself, at refugee camps in Austria and Germany, later as a dish-hand in a broken down café in a gloomy German city, only increases the sense of her absence – that she has passed beyond the confines of the world Bánk’s novel explores so eloquently, with such fine feeling for places, landscapes, people and moods.
This is an outstanding novel, almost perfect in its poise, its capacity to move and its unfaltering sense of structure. The fact that this English version seems, at the moment at least, to be available only in North America is to be deplored; here again is an instance of the cultural tunnel-vision of British and Australian publishers. With luck, though, an English-language publisher somewhere outside North America will take notice and make this wonderful novel more widely available. It deserves no less.
I would like to end on a personal note. ‘The Swimmer’ spoke to me with particular eloquence because of some long-buried associations it dragged up for me from the past. During the 1956 revolution, when we had been living in Australia for the best part of ten years, my mother grew very anxious about the fate of her one remaining relative in Hungary, her first cousin, at the time a young woman in her twenties. We asked the Red Cross to trace our cousin – curiously, also called Zsuzsa – but never heard anything in reply. We presumed she had perished. Many, many years later, in 1992, when my mother had been dead for twenty years, I discovered that cousin, alive though not happily so, in a broken-down block of flats in Budapest. Yes, she said, she’d heard that we were looking for her via the Red Cross from people who had listened to the broadcasts beamed into Hungary from the West – as the characters of ‘The Swimmer’ hear those broadcasts – but she did nothing. I never found out at the time, or when I visited her the following year, why she had remained silent – and she died two years later.
The Book
Bank, Zsuzsa: The Swimmer / translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo. - Orlando : Harcourt, 2005. - 278 pages ISBN 0-15-100932-5 Original Title: Der Schwimmer (German)
