Stories of Forgery
According to Adél Néni, she'd stood in the middle of her basement, apron on, feather duster tucked in an armpit, and gone through the passport, examining customs stamps from places as far afield as Bolivia, Ghana, and Singapore, before returning to the photo and marveling at the odds of Gerhard...
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| Published in: | Confrontation (Southampton, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2007-03 (98/99), p.100 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Magazinearticle |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | According to Adél Néni, she'd stood in the middle of her basement, apron on, feather duster tucked in an armpit, and gone through the passport, examining customs stamps from places as far afield as Bolivia, Ghana, and Singapore, before returning to the photo and marveling at the odds of Gerhard having the same name as her late brother-in-law. According to family lore, established well before I was born, Zsigmond Bacsi had inherited this position when his parents (my grandparents), Árpád and Anikó, were shot in the street in 1947 by AVO, the Hungarian secret police, as punishment for Árpád's participation in the Smallholders Party. [...]the family had tried to divert him from his horticulturist calling, given that no one ever offered him real horticulturist work, but in the end gardening was the only job he'd managed to make a go of after leaving Hungary, taking on landscaping contracts in and around Toronto until the family decided it was demeaning for a man of Zsigmond Bácsi's age to be hauling around wheelbarrows of compost, and pooled together the money that let him ease into an early but austere retirement. CHARLIE WAS AN old friend and colleague from the university-though not from the Department of English but the Department of Criminology-and the only person I could think of who might verify whether Gerhard's passport was a forgery. Since we often dropped by each other's places, he wasn't surprised to see me, though by the time we sat down in his dining room, and he'd poured us each a scotch, and I'd begun to tell Laci Bácsi's story-from his death months ago, to the arrival of his old friend Gerhard Erlichman for the funeral, to the discovery of the passport-Charlie was shaking his head. |
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| ISSN: | 0010-5716 |