The Sunflower Forest

‘No,’ I replied. ‘But there’ll be plenty again when spring comes. Remember all the new ones Daddy planted?’

Megan had wrested the kettle from me so that she could fix Mama’s coffee herself. Carefully, she measured a spoonful of granules from the jar. ‘Here, Mama,’ she said, stirring the boiling water in. ‘Here’s your coffee.’ She squeezed her body between my mother and the sink in an effort to make Mama look down at her. She held up the mug of steaming liquid. ‘Here, Mama. Just the way you like it.’ But my mother stared over her to the window.

They didn’t look much alike, my sister and my mother. Megan was thin and lithe and dark, like some half-imagined thing escaped from the pages of a fairy tale. Mama was tall and pale, with broad, prominent features. Her hair was still light as sea sand. The only thing she had given Megan was her blue eyes, and they were very blue, like chambray cloth.

Mama turned entirely away from the window, and Megan had to run around to be in front of her again.

‘I’m sick of this place,’ Mama said. ‘It’s too cold. I hate the cold.’

Mama went over to the table and sat down. With both hands she finally accepted Megan’s mug of coffee.

‘Does that mean we’re going to move again?’ Megan asked very quietly.

‘I don’t like it here,’ Mama replied.

‘I do,’ Megan said, her voice still soft and tentative. Mama was looking at her over the top of her mug as she drank the coffee. ‘I think it’s nice here, Mama. I got friends here. Like Katie and Tracey Pickett.’

My mother lowered the cup. ‘There are no flowers.’

‘But Mama, it’s January.’

With a sigh my mother set the coffee mug on the table. She gazed at it. ‘But there are no flowers here.’

‘There aren’t any flowers anywhere in January, Mama,’ Megan said.

My mother was silent for a moment. ‘There were in Lébény. In Popi’s conservatory,’ she said. ‘There were always flowers there.’

Megan’s face brightened abruptly. Coming closer to Mama, she knelt down and put her arms around Mama’s neck. With one hand she moved Mama’s face away from the direction of the coffee mug so that she would have to look at her. ‘Tell me and Lessie about Lébény, OK, Mama? About Popi’s flowers, OK? Tell us about that time you and Elek sneaked in and took Popi’s camellias for your hair and then you two went to that dance. You know. That time you weren’t supposed to be up late because it was a big-people’s party. The time they played “The Blue Danube” and you and Elek danced in the upstairs hallway and you could smell all the beautiful ladies’ perfume. Tell us that story, OK?’

My mother’s face softened. The tired, bloodless look left her and she smiled down at Megan, who was on her knees beside the chair. ‘You know that story, Liebes. I have told you that story a hundred times already.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Megan said, her expression beguiling. ‘But it’s really my super favourite. Tell me again, OK? Please? Me and Lessie want to hear it.’

Mama was still smiling when she touched Megan’s face. The smile made my mother very beautiful.

Chapter Two (#ulink_e649122f-2644-5dfa-b5f0-392d8bf4c569)

My mother was born into a family of the Hungarian gentry, genteelly declining in the ruins of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, who had fought alongside von Hindenburg in the Great War, had retired from the military a short time afterwards and returned to manage his family estate in northwestern Hungary. His child bride, whom he’d met and married in 1914, was the youngest daughter of one of the old, established families in Meissen, in Saxonia.

Besides my mother, there had been three other children in her family. Her older brother, Mihály, she remembered only dimly because he had gone far away for schooling in Germany before she was two. Her beloved younger brother, Elek, however, was only thirteen months her junior, and they had been constant childhood companions. Mama’s stories about Elek were so vivid he almost seemed to be my brother. Her younger sister, Johanna, had died of scarlet fever the year Mama was eight.

Although my mother never said as much, I suspect she had been her father’s favourite among the four children. She had been a strikingly beautiful child, with that blonde, clear-eyed pureness that was so prized in those days in that part of Europe. In all the photographs, she was dressed up like a little princess, in velvets and silks and lace. Her flaxen hair was very long and carefully curled. And even with the solemn mood of those old pictures, she’d managed just the slightest hint of a smile on her lips. We had only one photograph of her entire family together, and in it, my mother stood apart from the other children and leaned against Popi’s arm. If you looked carefully, you could see his hand on her shoulder, his fingers twisted lovingly through her hair.

Popi had seen to it that she was well turned out. She had been bilingual all her life because Mutti spoke to her only in German, while Popi spoke Hungarian. But he had also brought a special tutor from Milan for her when she was six so that she could learn Italian. She had had dancing lessons and voice lessons and had learned to play the piano and the organ. When she’d wanted a pony, Popi had hired a riding instructor from Vienna and bought her a white horse.

Like her older brother, Mihály, my mother had been a gifted student. As always, Popi was determined to give her the best advantages. Both he and Mutti believed in the superiority of a German education, so when my mother was twelve, she went to live with Mutti’s sister, Tante Elfie, in Dresden. There she attended a private girls’ school and prepared for university.

My mother had hated leaving home. For a solid year, she said, she was homesick, crying herself to sleep so many nights that Tante Elfie finally moved her bed into the hallway so that she wouldn’t disturb Birgitta, Tante Elfie’s daughter, with whom Mama was sharing a room. On this occasion Popi didn’t give in to her pleas, and she stayed in Dresden. Slowly, she grew accustomed to life in the city, to Tante Elfie, who insisted on always setting her table with a lace tablecloth, and to Birgitta, who snored.

The war broke out during my mother’s first year at the university in Jena. She was sixteen and able to continue her studies into the autumn of that year before the turmoil disrupted university life. She would have been sent back to Hungary, she told us, because Hitler was deporting everyone with foreign birth certificates, but she was recognized as an ethnic German, a Volksdeutscherin, and allowed to stay. Soon afterward, she went to a youth hostel in northern Germany with several other girls who had been members of the Bund deutscher Mädchen.

Mama didn’t have a lot of stories about those years. I think she was desperately frightened for much of the time. The hostel wasn’t far from Hamburg, and my mother often spoke of hiding in a cupboard to muffle the sounds of the Allied planes flying over. What we did hear about, when she told stories, was the countryside, broad, flat, humid in summer, frigid in winter. And we heard sometimes about other girls and women whom she met during the war. Part of the time she worked on a farm, and she met one of her best characters during those experiences. Jadwiga was a Polish matron from Warsaw. I was never exactly clear how Jadwiga came to be on the farm, and from the way Mama told it, Jadwiga always sounded slightly surprised by the circumstances herself. What amused Mama was that it seemed to bother Jadwiga not so much that she was a city housewife out doing farmwork but rather that she was forced into intimacy with such socially inferior individuals as she thought all the other women to be. Mama, who had a wicked gift for mimicking people, would give us the whole show, imitating Jadwiga down to her walk, her buck teeth and her nasal accent. Mama would sashay around and around the room, snorting at us in mock Polish, contorting her face into a rabbity look of disdain until she broke up, laughing so hard that she was forced to stop. Then she’d drop into a chair, clutching her stomach, overcome with hilarity. Inevitably, Megan and I would laugh until we had tears running down our faces.

By 1945, when the British soldiers came with chocolate and cigarettes, my mother had typhus and was so sick she had no memory of them. She did recall the chocolate bars, however, and in her drawer in the bedroom, she still kept the wrapper from the first one she was given after the war.

It was then, while lying in the hospital recovering, that my mother had met my father. He was an American GI who had come to visit someone else in the ward. Mama was in bed, still weak from typhus, half bald from malnutrition and with her arm bandaged from wrist to elbow because of a septic cut. As my dad was walking down the aisle between the rows of beds, Mama, who was trying to eat soup with the wrong hand, dropped not only her spoon but the tray and bowl as well. Soup went everywhere. My father bent down to retrieve the rolling soup bowl. When he stood up and gave it back to her, that was it, he said. He loved her instantly, bandage, bald head, soup and all. Whether that’s precisely how it happened, it’s hard to say. My father always has been a romantic.

They married in Vienna on New Year’s Day, 1946. My mother’s one wish as she grew stronger had been to return to Hungary and locate her family. She’d lost contact with all of them during the course of the war. Throughout the winter of 1945–6, she and my father searched through the war-ravaged countryside of Germany, Austria, western Czechoslovakia and northwestern Hungary.

None of my mother’s immediate family had survived the war. Her brother Mihály, who already had a wife and child by the time the war broke out, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1936. He was killed during manoeuvres in France. Mutti died of heart failure in 1940. Elek, who had remained at home to help his father run the estate rather than joining the military the way most boys his age had done, was shot by German soldiers in 1942. Popi, distraught and alone, had gone up to Tante Elfie’s in Dresden to search for information about my mother. He and Tante Elfie were killed in the 1945 Allied bombings. My mother never located Birgitta.

In September 1946 my father was posted to an army base in southern England. After discharge the following spring, he and my mother had remained in Great Britain, eventually moving to Wales. Most of the following ten years were spent living in a cottage on a Welsh mountainside. Mama told Megan and me beautifully elaborate stories about that period of their lives. The cottage where they lived had been derelict, and the farmer Dad worked for had told them they could live in it rent free, if they wanted to fix it up. He’d felt sorry for Mama, who was still in poor health, and he said the mountain air would help speed her recovery. The cottage was way up in the hills without even a road to it. They had to walk up a steep trail through a forest and over a footbridge to get there. Chiselled in slate above the door was the name of the cottage in Welsh. It meant Forest of Flowers. Mama said when they came the whole back garden of the cottage was overgrown with sunflowers. Mama took that to be a good omen, since sunflowers didn’t normally do well in Wales because of the rain. But at Forest of Flowers they thrived. My parents lived there until the late fifties. Then there was a cold winter, followed by a wet summer, and the sunflowers didn’t bloom. Mama and Daddy moved.

I waited until my father had finished his supper that Saturday evening and had gone up to his study. At night after a meal he liked to go there to sit among his things and listen to the radio. Occasionally he would read or write letters, but usually he did nothing more than push back the lounger, put the music station on and listen.

‘Dad?’ I said, opening the door slightly. ‘May I talk to you?’

He had the lounger fully reclined and his eyes were closed. He opened them. ‘Yes, of course, Lessie, come in.’

I shut the door carefully behind me and came over to sit on the footstool beside the chair. I touched the arm of the lounger with one finger to feel the rough, knobby threads in the upholstery.

‘Are we going to move, Dad?’

He had his eyes closed again. The radio was playing quite loudly. It was classical music. In all honesty I don’t believe my father knew up from down about such music. My mother did. She knew the titles, who composed what when, which type of music it was and who the performing artist was. But Dad neither knew nor particularly cared. He liked to listen because that was the only radio station with almost no commercials.

He didn’t answer my question.

‘I hear Mama beginning to talk,’ I said. ‘She’s thinking about it.’

‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’

‘No. She hasn’t said anything to me either. But I can hear it nonetheless.’

He didn’t stir.

‘So? Are we?’ I asked.

‘Your mama needs a warmer climate, Lessie,’ he said at last and opened his eyes again. ‘It’s too cold for her here.’

‘We’ve been to warmer climates before, Dad, and she didn’t like any of them either. Face it. She doesn’t really like it anywhere.’

I could see the pupils of his eyes dilate. They grew larger for a moment and then shrank back.

‘Your mama hasn’t said a thing to me,’ he said. ‘So don’t go thinking up problems you haven’t got.’

I felt the upholstery again with my finger.

‘And another thing. I don’t like to hear you talk like that. The cold bothers her. You know that. It aggravates her back. So it’s through no fault of her own.’