Because it has a tilde over the A and an S instead of the Z. That’s just the way it is.
❖
Long before coming to Land’s End, my family had to pass through Brasil for ten years or so after leaving Budapest, where I was born in 1947, after the War and the arrival of the Red Army. I knew nothing of Hungary, except the harsh, angry language spoken by my mother and father and their raucous friends, fellow émigrés. I understood little of what they said, except for my father’s Hungarian swear words, which he directed at my mother, when he realized she was cheating on him. She continued to cheat on him for the next forty years. It was an almost daily routine, carried on from continent to continent. He screamed and yelled, and threw furniture. Yet, oddly, he never beat her.
Early memories are difficult to find. If anything, they are incomplete, fragmentary, and do not constitute coherent stories. I found one as I watched my own son some forty-five years later playing with his metallic matchbox cars on the floor. I realized that I too had done exactly the same. The circumstances were quite different. He didn’t have a mother and father screaming over his head. Lucky for him, my wife and I got along.
