Work-in-Progress…
Lotte became a refugee in 1947, and since the war had taken everything she had, she took the war with her, wherever she went, and continued to fight it for the rest of her life in exile. She would bring it up seemingly every other day, and she would pick at it, reminding her children of her former glory and her family’s status, which progressed from haute bourgeoisie to minor Austro-Hungarian nobility as she aged, until finally her youngest daughter Sissi started calling her the Countess of Budapest in her old age. She didn’t seem to mind, maybe even thought it was true. Her children thought that was hilarious. The unfortunate aspect of Lotte’s discontent, from her children’s perspective, was that she would pick on her husband János, making as though he were responsible for all her misfortune. That, combined with her promiscuity, would make him nuts. Their children received the brunt of that anger and violence, when he should have beat the shit out of her instead. Heck, what’s a little cuckolding among friends, Hungarians in exile.
The poor schmuck got drafted into the Hungarian army, and was sent to fight on the Russian front. Until Vietnam, I didn’t think there was anything worse. Nobody knows how he got back from the front. But let’s not feel too sorry for János. He could be a pretty scary guy, as we will see later when his obituary is published.
If Lotte boasted about her rank in Hungarian society, Janos did something similar, often boasting to his son Johnny about his family’s cars: Mercedes Benz, Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet. Chevys? He made no reference to his father having been given charge of a furniture factory expropriated from a Jewish family by the state under its Jewish laws, and handed over to Aryan management. That would explain the cars.
Off they went, first to Brazil for ten years, and then to the United States for the rest of their lives. That was punishment indeed.
Lotte never adjusted to her reduced circumstances; she became a perpetual malcontent. First, it was how low Brazilians were, then how low Americans were. While this was irritating to her children, it also piqued our curiosity, since it made us feel like we had some status, somewhere, even if it was just in her own mind.
She adored her father and their house in the center of Budapest, and she worshipped the photographs that she still had of him and their house. The house photos were slightly toned black and white, giving them a brownish tinge. They were pictures of rooms without people, staged, just furnishings. One of them, a dining room, had a large piece of china porcelain at the center of a dining table. This, we were told solemnly and repeatedly over the years, is a Meissen soup tureen. We became enthralled by this object. What’s a soup tureen? This, you ignorant children, is how soup is served in fine homes, like ours. We had no idea, since we only knew about heating up soup from a can on a stove top. We realized that this fine object in a fine home required servants to deliver it to the table, a datum that only made us more giddy with excitement. Yes, Lotte admitted, we had many servants in my father’s house. We gasped dutifully, thinking how cold the soup would be by the time it got from the kitchen to your plate.
The house was nationalized by the communist government, and some of the contents stored in a museum in Budapest. Sometime in the 1990s, Lotte was actually able to retrieve some of these furnishings, and had them shipped to the States. Lotte and her sister Mia, who lived in the midwest, split up the loot: Katya got the soup tureen, Lotte got various items of furniture. Improbably, the tureen had survived; survived the war, the communists, the basement of the museum, and the trip by sea to the US.
The next part of the story concerns Lotte’s sister Mia and her death some three decades later.
Tragically, Sissi had remained Lotte’s acolyte over the years while her older brother and sister fled, one to Canada for a while, the other to Brazil. Sissi eventually rejected them both for this betrayal. Since Sissi had been palmed off by Lotte for years, every summer, on Mia and her husband, Sissi probably assumed that. This was fine with Johnny and ??, so they kept their distance, as getting in Sissi’s way by then was like stepping in front of a freight train.
Sissi would visit Mia around the time Katya was forced to go into an assisted living facility (her house had burned down, due to a faulty space heater). Sissi would visit, they would argue, then Sissi would make her go back to the nursing home, which Katya did not want to do. On one of these trips to visit Katya, she took a few things back home with her. Yes, the soup tureen. And half of a supposedly antique Bible in two volumes, Old and New Testament (Lotte had the other half). We don’t know who got which half. Nor do we know what else Sissi had managed to spirit away.
Katya was not happy about any of this. So she gets a visit from her lawyer, urging her to make a will. Sissi had previously alienated them both (Katya and lawyer), as well as Katya’s caretaker. Katya was longer her old self, already a little eccentric to begin with. The lawyer urges her to leave her estate to a bird sanctuary, since she was convinced by now that only the birds loved her. She had always fed them lavishly. Her nieces and nephews were, quite explicitly, to get nothing.
As it turned out, Mioa was an avid stock market investor, and loved receiving those periodic corporate dividends. She had positions in General Dynamics, Disney, BP, Chevron, etc., a portfolio that had appreciated to around 2 million dollars at the time of her death. She never knew.
If you ask us how much a Meissen soup tureen is worth, we would tell you, “About two million.”
__________________________________________
*See Katya’s obituary in Chapter …
thepoor pieces of royal copenhagen (with seagull motifs) that were endlessly glued together and filled with plaster
She worried it like a bone (Didion)
Alas, World War Two put an end to all that, sending most of our family into emigration, and what remained behind into communist bondage.
