Chapter 1: Family Rituals

According to my birth certificate, my name is Hubertusz, from the Latin Hubertus. One day, when my mother was heavily pregnant with me, my father was out hunting. He was stalking a particular stag, and he swore, “If I shoot this stag, and the baby is a girl, she’s going to be called Diana [the Roman goddess of the hunt], and if it’s a boy, he’ll be called Hubert.” Guess what? He got that stag.

My namesake, St. Hubert, is a Belgian saint. According to legend, he was out hunting on Christmas in the year 686, when he saw an apparition of a white stag with a cross between its antlers. He spared the animal, but even so St. Hubert became the patron saint of hunters. (I’ve visited the town in Belgium—called, naturally, Saint-Hubert—where this event is said to have occurred.)

The Heinrich Udvar, the main house where I grew up, was a busy place. The ground floor, fronting the Üllöi út, housed the retail store of the firm. In the left wing of the building was the apartment of the portás bácsi and portás néni (the portier and his wife). Above them on the rez-de-chausée lived the vice bácsi and vice néni (the house caretaker and his wife).

Our portás bácsi ruled with an iron fist. He wore a uniform and had a frightening looking mustache, big and curly. The portás bácsi didn’t get his hands dirty, and so the manual labor—like sweeping horse manure—was the responsibility of the vice bácsi. At the end of each work day, he would check employees leaving the premises for stolen goods. (In Hungarian, “néni,” meaning aunt, and “bácsi,” meaning uncle, are titles of respect, not of family. When I was younger, I called every man above the age of twenty “bácsi.” When I am in Hungary now, I am always called bácsi, because of my age.)

A vaulted entrance covered the approach to the house to protect the vehicles that pulled up. During my childhood, most of the traffic consisted of horse-drawn carriages, some of which hauled freight. Automobiles and trucks came much later. 

The first car that my father owned (at least the first car that I can recall) was a Steyr-Puch, an Austrian brand. It was a two-seater with an additional two seats available inside the trunk, making its use practical only in fine weather, as winters were extremely cold in those days in Hungary. My father’s second car was a Mercedes model 170, but when he went out alone, he preferred his Puch motorcycle.

The house’s first floor, probably the original family home, belonged to my grandmother. Opposite her apartment (in the right-hand wing) was cousin Gábor. The floor above that on the left-hand side was ours, across from Uncle Dezsö’s apartment (which later belonged to his son, Pisti). The offices of the firm were on the next floor. At the back lived my great-uncle Aladár, who was addicted to morphine.He lived with his sister, Margit, who was known as Matata.

Inside, an elevator was flanked by a stairway, an arrangement that was considered very modern at the time.The elevator was operated by the liftes bácsi. We children were not allowed to use the elevator without him. Furthermore, the elevator was to be used only for going up!

The apartments were quite large. Our apartment had three rooms in the front: a master bedroom, the gentlemen’s room, and the salon. A corridor led to the dining room in back. Off that corridor was the main entrance to the apartment. From the dining room another corridor led back to the kitchen, servants’ quarters, a toilet, and the room where my brother and I slept. The kitchen was also accessible through the gang, an open walkway in the courtyard. There was a gang for each story of the building, and they were all open to the air except for the walkway at the top floor, which was shielded by a glass cover. The building had no central heating, except in the apartment of my grandmother. 

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