They understood and asked me to continue visiting them.

I did continue my visits until I had a somewhat disappointing, should I say embarrassing encounter with one of the members, a very pretty girl from England. As she looked just like the girl I had envisioned for my wife and knowing that she strictly followed the Christian principles, I thought I would not mind marrying her. After many conversations with her, one day I bluntly asked her to be my wife. I still had no desire to become a member and I was actually hoping that if she said yes, she would leave the organization.

“So sorry,” she smiled apologetically, “we can’t decide who we marry. It’s God’s decision. In our case this decision is relayed to us by the messiah, Reverend Moon. When the time comes, he will choose a husband for me.”

“So, even if I joined the church, chances are you would never be my wife?”

“You might get lucky.”

“Enough of this,” I said somewhat angrily. I walked out thinking I would not return ever again.

It was already the beginning of December. Winter in New York was rather nasty. Anytime I had to stand at the corner on Third Avenue, trying to catch an empty taxi for a tenant in the ice cold rainstorm or in the falling snow or in the strong, gusty north wind, I hated being a doorman.

Return to the past

As I was getting homesick again, I was very happy to come across some news about the general amnesty the Hungarian government issued to all those who had left the country illegally. I went to the library to find older newspapers that had articles about the amnesty. I learned that there was a meeting of governments in Finland, attended by delegates from all European countries as well as from Canada and the USA, earlier that year. The year was 1975. The Helsinki Agreement, as the closing document was named, was signed by all attending delegates, including the Hungarians. The Agreement stated that the governments, whose delegates signed the document, would guarantee all basic human rights to all their citizens going forward.

I found articles in the New York Times, which by then I could read and understand fairly well, that praised the communist governments of Eastern Europe, including the Hungarian regime, for implementing the new rules and granting citizens their rights. People now can have passports and they are free to leave the country anytime they want to, I read in the paper.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘if this is the case, it makes no sense for me to stay in America any longer. If I can go home and not get punished, and then I can have a passport and travel freely, there is no reason not to live in Hungary.’

Of course, there was doubt in my mind. I had a hard time imagining that the monster system would really be willing to reform itself. However, my desire to be home again was so strong that I allowed the New York Times to convince me that everything will be fine if I return.

I was also very curious. Aside from my homesickness, I really wanted to see for myself whether what the New York Times was heralding was true indeed. So, I went to the Hungarian Consulate in Manhattan and asked for the forms I needed to complete to receive what was called the “Permission to return home”. Soon after I turned in the application and paid the nominal fee, the postman delivered my permission.

Well, I did have some goose bumps again when I read the instructions on the back of the permission mainly because of the dictatorial nature of the language. The words ‘must’ and ‘forbidden’ strongly reminded me of the old ways. Besides, it was stated that if I wanted to take advantage of this amnesty, I had to return no later than by the end of 1976.

‘At least I have time to think about it,’ I told myself. I knew I would not be packing the next day.

Christmas brought both happiness and sorrow.

The good part was that the tenants started handing out envelopes a few days before the holiday. The tips ranged from five to twenty dollars. Actually, one tip, from the owner of a sex magazine, was fifty dollars. Those that gave no envelopes presented us with bottles of expensive drinks such as Johnny Walker Whisky or Jamaican Rum. After I sold all drinks to my colleagues for five dollars each, my Christmas gifts totaled a little over two thousand dollars.

The sad news was about my new South American girlfriend who stayed with relatives on one of the upper floors. The tenant, an older lady, informed me that my girlfriend had to return to her country because she became pregnant and needed an abortion.

“Did she get pregnant from me?” I wondered loudly.

The lady looked at me very angrily and stormed back to the elevator without saying another word.

During the first week of January, I had an accident. I slipped on a patch of black ice and hurt my back so badly I was not able to get out of bed for a few days. My manager, the Hungarian superintendent, must have thought I had had enough of being a doorman in the New York winter, and laid me off. This way I was entitled to collect unemployment insurance benefits.

With over five thousand dollars in my savings account, and the hundred dollars a week unemployment check, I felt I had no reason to worry about anything. Today, I think that perhaps I should have stayed on as a doorman, buy a house and not even think about returning to Hungary. Well, today I would have the emotional strength to do just that. However, back then, I was emotionally very weak and my ability to reason was very far from being developed. I know I had all kinds of dreams swirling inside me but the strongest of all at that time was my desire to be home. What I also did not understand was that being in Hungary did not necessarily mean being at home.

Of course, since then I realized that home is inside me, that it has to be wherever I happen to be.

I decided that I would try to see as much of the USA as possible before traveling back to Hungary by the end of the year. Since I did not have a job, I had the time to play in chess tournaments. When I saw in the tournament calendar published in the US Chess Life magazine that there were larger tournaments almost every weekend in different cities on the East Coast, I decided to buy a used car again. At this time I got a Pontiac for eight hundred dollars.

The car was in good shape, it took me everywhere I wanted to go. The weekend tournaments were usually five rounds, three played Saturday and two on Sunday. I always drove on Fridays, stayed in motel rooms, and then drove back to New York on Mondays. These tournaments took me to places like Portland in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts, Hartford in Connecticut, Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, Baltimore in Maryland, or Washington, D.C. I drove as far north as Montreal in Quebec. In fact, I was in Montreal during the summer Olympics. From Montreal, I left a Friday morning and drove all the way down south to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I drove in heavy rain late at night from Washington and arrived after midnight. I won all five rounds Saturday and Sunday and received a four-hundred dollar cash prize. In all fairness, I must admit these winnings were mainly possible because my American rating still did not catch up with my real strength, so I was able to compete in sections for lower rated players.

Before the end of winter, I flew to Jacksonville, Florida, for one week. There, I really enjoyed the balmy subtropical weather.

During the summer, first I flew to Vancouver, B.C., in Canada for ten days. There I stayed at a friend’s house. I knew this person before leaving Hungary. We had visited the same chess club when I lived in Budapest in 1969. After returning from Vancouver, I took a trip to Los Angeles, California. Plane tickets were cheap. Round trips between the East and the West Coasts could be purchased for less than two hundred dollars. The car I rented in Los Angeles for the ten days I spent there only cost about seventy dollars and the downtown hotel was very affordable as well.

My California vacation was the highlight of 1976. I drove to San Diego in the south and Santa Barbara up north. When I saw Ventura and Santa Barbara, I was daydreaming about living there one day.

My return to Hungary almost got derailed by a relationship I had in New York at the end of summer. It was Central Park where the affair began. This all-American white girl just moved to the city from upstate New York where she graduated from a college as an economist. She was hired by one of the Wall Street firms and had a nice studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, close to what was then the Hungarian district. The two of us spent some very nice time together. We visited museums, attended concerts, took long walks in the park, listened to music at her place, etc. Once we drove up north as she wanted me to meet her parents. In the fall, she came with me to Washington, D.C. where I played in a chess tournament. We spent the night at the house of one of her friends. In the morning, she had the idea that we should go look for an apartment because she wanted to move from New York City. I drove her all over D.C. and waited patiently until she checked out every apartment where she saw the ‘For Rent’ sign posted. She did not seem to know what she wanted so I told her to stop looking because it was time for us to drive back home anyway. This started an argument between us that just got uglier and uglier. We could not talk to each other on the way back, and the two-month long affair came to an end. Once again, I was thinking of Hungary and dreaming of a Hungarian girl I would have no difficulties communicating with.

In November, I started preparing for my trip back home. As I had rather carelessly spent my savings during the year, I had only about two thousand dollars left. I bought a one way ticket to Luxembourg on Iceland Air for a couple of hundred dollars. My plan was to take the train from Luxembourg to Koblenz in Germany where a friend of mine lived at that time.

I needed visas for European countries because I was not a citizen of the USA yet. After two years in the USA, at the beginning of 1976, I became a permanent resident and received my American ‘Re-entry Permit’ travel document. This was not exactly an American passport but it functioned as such if one obtained the necessary visas.

After I managed to secure visas for Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, I was ready for the trip. A few days before my flight, I packed most of my personal belongings into boxes and mailed the packages to myself at my parents’ address in Hungary. In addition to sending home all my LP records with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other famous bands, I even mailed my small black and white television set not knowing that it would not work in Hungary.

About two weeks before Christmas, I showed up at JFK for my flight with luggage, my sophisticated record player stereo radio that had a handle and looked like a large briefcase, and a bag with my clothes in it. The plane landed in Luxembourg the next day in a snow storm. My friend in Koblenz knew of the exact time of my arrival, so he and his girlfriend were waiting for me at the train station.

I spent one week at my friend’s place, a small but very comfortable studio apartment he rented. During my stay, I bought a used Volkswagen and with the help of my friend’s girlfriend, who was a native of Germany, I obtained the necessary registrations to drive the car, and the customs permit to take it out of the country. I was driving with an International Driving Permit that I had obtained before I left New York.

My friend tried to talk me out of returning to Hungary.

“I am sure you will regret this move,” he said. “Why don’t you try to find a way to stay here in Germany? When we met in New Brunswick in 1974, before I moved to Germany, you were so much against the communist regime. Now you are going back? That does not make any sense. I can understand if you don’t like America. I didn’t like it, either. Remember how desperately I tried to find work as a musician? I was a member of the symphony orchestra in Kolozsvar before I defected from a trip the band took in Italy. Of course, I did not enjoy being a janitor at that hospital in New Brunswick. Luckily, I had a colleague who came to Koblenz in the meantime and then he helped me get a job here at the local orchestra… If I were you, I’d think it over.”

I did not listen to him. Finally, when we said good-bye, he made me promise that I would write to him and let him know how things worked out. We agreed, that if I did not like Hungary, I would write about the weather being bad. (We expected that letters to the west might still be opened and read by communist authorities so we had to use ‘hidden’ language.)

I drove south from Koblenz and entered Switzerland at Basel. I was heading for Fribourg to visit another Hungarian friend I had met in the Puski Hungarian bookstore on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By the time I reached central Switzerland, I was driving in heavy snow. I had a good road map of Europe but the traffic signs were often covered by snow so I had a difficult time finding the right direction. I got lost a couple of times and it was already late at night when I arrived in Fribourg. I did not want to call my friend that late so I checked into a hotel for the night. The next morning I found my way to my friend’s apartment.

“Welcome to Fribourg,” my friend greeted me. “Looking at your car I am amazed you were able to get here last night in that blizzard. You don’t even have snow tires!”

I only had one more day to spend if I wanted to be home for Christmas. Of course, my parents knew I was coming; I had sent postcards from New York as well as from Luxembourg and Germany. During the summer, after I informed them of my decision about returning home, my father wrote that he and my mother were very happy and that they always had room for me.

My friend in Fribourg gave me some interesting books and tape cassettes and he talked to me at length about some kind of conspiracy by a secretive group of people who wanted to take over the whole world.

“Whether you are on this side of the Iron Curtain or on the other side makes no big difference anymore. Of course, you can still live better in Switzerland or in America.”

I told him I would read the books and listen to the tapes when I am home.

My drive the following day through Switzerland was very enjoyable under the blue sky. The temperature was below freezing but the heating in my car worked well. The roads had already been cleared so it was an easy drive.

I spent the night in a small hotel in Vaduz, Lichtenstein.

The next day I made it as far as Linz in Austria where I had to pay 220 Shillings for a hotel room. I was already running dangerously low on money. I also kept losing on the exchange rates after I converted all my dollars in Germany. I had two more one-hundred German Mark bills left.

Back in the cage

It was mid afternoon when I reached the Hungarian border. The weather had turned depressing by then, the sky was gray and a light rain was coming down.

My heart started beating faster when I saw the heavy metal barrier in the road. There was a building to the right and an elevated guard post to the left. I saw a soldier with a machine gun standing inside the post looking in my direction.

The barrier slowly opened up and I drove through the gate. I saw the barrier in the rearview mirror closing down behind me.

Suddenly, several soldiers appeared from the building to block my way. They all carried machine guns.

I stopped my car, rolled down the window and handed over my ‘Permit to return home by December 31, 1976’.

“Out!” one of the soldiers shouted at me after he glanced at the document.

“Did you steal this wreck?” another one commented.

“It is almost ten years old but it is running very well,” I answered. “I did not steal it. I bought it in Germany.”

“Really?” the soldier said in a sarcastic tone.

“Makes no difference,” said the one that had ordered me out of the car. He raised his voice again. “Give me the key! You leave everything out here because we are going to do a thorough inspection. If you have locked luggage in your trunk, you’d better open the lock now before we cut it open. Go through that door and report to the officer on duty!”

The officer on duty took me to one of the many offices where I had to endure an interrogation of several hours by plain clothes agents. Questions ranged from the ridiculous to the frightening. When the questioning was finally over, and I was handed a ‘road permit’ that specified what route I had to take to arrive at my parents’ address and stated that I had to report at the police station there within twenty-four hours, I realized that, indeed, it was a big mistake to return to Hungary.

The soldiers were still reassembling my vehicle as it had been taken apart as much as possible. My luggage was thrown on the wet, muddy concrete. The books and tapes my friend in Fribourg gave me were in the hands of one of the soldiers.

“These are not allowed in Hungary,” he said.

I had to stay there at least for another half an hour until I was permitted to leave the military complex. It was already getting dark.

The road from Hegyeshalom to Budapest was narrow with only one lane in both directions. The asphalt was wet so I had to drive slowly. It was almost midnight when I reached Budapest. I decided to find my brother who had moved from Ozd to Vac, a small town about an hour drive north of the capital.

I had the impression that my brother was not particularly happy about my arrival but he was definitely curious so he asked me many questions. He was mainly interested in whether his name came up during my interrogation at the border.

After sleeping only a few hours, I continued my drive home to Ozd. My brother’s wife had the idea that she would come with me to her mother bringing her two children along, so I was no longer alone in the car. I wanted to take the route through the city of Miskolc which the police specified but she talked me out of it.

“It’s much shorter if we take the northern route,” she insisted and I did not want to argue.

Her seven year old son took the front seat while she and her little daughter sat in the back.

The northern route ran through mountains. It was very narrow and very curvy. The rain made the asphalt muddy and very slippery.

The Volkswagen had its engine in the back. My belongings in the trunk up front were not heavy. My sister-in-law in the back, however, weighed at least two hundred pounds. I think it was this poor distribution of weight that caused the accident we had. Driving downhill, in a curve to the left where the road sloped to the right, I stepped on the brake. I was driving very slowly but I wanted to be sure I could make the curve safely. The front tires slipped and we went off the road. There was no shoulder. The car rolled over on the steep roadside and came to a rest upside down. I bruised my forehead hitting the rearview mirror but no one else suffered even slight injuries.

After we all climbed out of the vehicle, we stood there in the rain for a while waiting for another vehicle to come by. Luckily, we did not have to wait too long, and the heavy duty truck that came was exactly what we needed. It had a crane, and an extra man beside the driver. We managed to pull my car back to the road and flip it back onto its tires. The windshield was cracked so badly it was impossible to see through it and the top was caved in. Otherwise, the car was drivable. I had to stick my head out the left window for the remaining twenty some miles.

I dropped off my passengers and drove to my parents’ house.

I was shocked to see how much my parents had aged.

Both my father and my mother had tears in their eyes as they welcomed me.

I had mixed emotions but all in all I was glad to be home.

That afternoon, I reported to the police station where I had to put up with a lot of additional crap. The worst part was how all the official people talked to me, making me feel like I was a major criminal. Every one of them advised me to respect the law in the future. They said, hopefully, I had learned my lessons and would become a useful member of our socialist society. They all sounded spiteful, jealous and very shallow.

I had to report back at the station after Christmas to receive my temporary ID book. Once I had that, I was given permission to leave Ozd if I wanted to look for work somewhere else. Immediately, I got on the bus and traveled to Gyongyos where I had worked before my escape. I had to change buses at the terminal in Eger, a small city well known for its delicious red wine, the Bikaver. While waiting for the connection, I ran into a man I knew from previous chess tournaments.

“I have not seen you in tournaments for years,” he started after we greeted each other. “Where have you been?”

I briefly told him about my previous few years.

“And now, what team are you going to play for?”

“Right now, chess is the last thing on my mind,” I answered. “I need to find work in a big hurry.”

“You are looking for work?” He laughed. “Why would that be a problem? You come and play in our team and you have to look no further. While you were gone, I became the leader of the team here in Eger. I have all the connections I need. You want a good job? I’ll get you one.”

After I agreed to join his team, he gave me a piece of paper to write my address on it.

“You’ll hear from me in a few days. I assume your parents have no telephone… No problem, I’ll send you a telegram after the first of January.”

The telegram arrived on the second. It was brief:

“Eger, Tobacco factory, Quality Controller, 2,800 Forints per month”

It also gave me the name of the person in the QC department I had to see.

When I showed up for the interview a day later, the head of the QC department greeted me as if we had always known each other. Besides being friendly, he appeared to be very open-minded. He also had a pretty good sense of humor.

Finding a furnished room was not a problem, so I quickly moved to Eger.

I started working the second week of January. My immediate supervisor was a very attractive woman, only a couple of years older than me. I had three other colleagues doing QC. Soon I found out that there was not enough real work even for one person in that department. The QC department was an excellent example of internal unemployment typical of the socialist economy. Plus we had two secretaries who sat around most of the days polishing their nails, drinking coffee, reading the newspapers or chatting.

I got along very well with my co-workers, especially with my supervisor who often asked me to go with her to sample the new tobacco bales. More often than not there were no new bales.

“Well, we’ll find them sooner or later,” she used to say with a big, seductive smile. “We just have to keep looking.”

So, we often looked for those new bales for a long time, wandering between the rows of piles, taking rests here and there. Most of the times, there were no other people in the warehouse so we did not have to worry about being seen.

The big chief often gave me extra assignments. I had to translate for him. He prepared speeches he would later deliver in English at a symposium, often in another country. He paid me well, even though I was free to do the work during office hours.

... 

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