Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (1)

1. An Old Yard


Take a seat, enjoy an ice-cream or coffee on the terrace of the cake-shop
inside Udvarház ("Courtyard-house"). Around you, there are boutiques, a pizza-bar, an antique shop, a bookshop; and above you, above this nicely paved yard-like little square, the yellow tower of the symbol of this town, of the historic Nagytemplom (Great Church) is reaching up to the sky. You are sitting right in the heart of the town.
In the centre of my childfood, too. Some forty years ago there used to be a yard here covered with earth, where I played soccer with my brothers from spring to autumn. In winter we built a snow-hut, we carried water by the buckets to our self-made skate-ring, and when spring came we helped my father to dig up our vegetable-garden so that we could pick tomatoes and green paprika for breakfast all through summer. Exactly where you are sitting now, right here, there once used to be an old, uninhabited wooden pigsty (without a pig by that time), concealed by locust sprouts; a thorns-hidden, moss-covered castle of the sleeping princess Rose Bud, a perfect spot to play for us kids in the yard.
Not all parts of Debrecen have changed this much. The park of "Great Woods"with its lake for rowing boats, the zoo, the soccer stadium, the swimming-pool underneath oak trees - they look almost the same. The university, too, looks the same; situated partly in the park, partly in the woods; this beautiful building that used to induce a special feeling in me each time I stepped in through its gate.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (2)

2. A Garden and a Novel


When it comes to our favorite books, we might recall even after two decades where we read them first. My grandmother used to live in a big house in Józsa, a village at the other edge of the forest behind Debrecen University. During my days at the university, especially in the summer I liked to stay with her. Lying in her wide and wild garden on a blanket spread above the grass in the pleasant sunshine - had I finished my spring term exams yet, I can't recall - I read Esterházy Péter's "Production -Novel" laughing, with amazement.
Its structure is quite unusual: the novel constitutes only a quarter of the book, and the story itself folds out in the lengthy footnotes. With the help of two bookmarks, you are supposed to read it turning the pages back and forth. As if it mirrored our life in those times: we had a complicated official life that could be treated quite briefly and we had a much more important, more spacious private life sharply separated from the outside one.
Reading this book I learned that a good writer first imagines as a reader what kind of book he would wish to read - in this case a never-existed, wonderful, playful and impertinent book - and then he simply sets out to write it down himself. Bravely, and not allowing his pen to somehow slip into known patterns. It seemed to me that a good book has a radiance just like this sunny garden, and that having entered the world of a good novel we can be free and feel safe at the same time - just like I felt in my grandmother's garden.
Today, "Production-Novel" is being taught at schools. Elegant family-houses have been built in Józsa, and you can get there by the city bus, as it has been attached to Debrecen.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (3)

3. Milk-Shop and Mackó Cheese


When I was a kid, we used to go to the milk-shop every morning. As our house was in the same block, in the Court-Yard house, we could walk there without crossing the road. My parents let me go there on my own when I started kindergarten. I stood in line and when my turn came, the lady in white coat, with a beautiful shade of lipstick, ladled the fresh milk into my milk-can. I bought some croissants for my family and a box of triangular shaped cheese. One of the cheese brands is still available in Hungary. The Mackó (Bear) on the seal is a waiter, wearing a bow-tie and tuxedo. This special mixture of seriousness and playfulness makes me remember my childhood. Now, several decades later, living at the other end of the world I caught myself always buying Mackó cheese whenever I visit back to Hungary. I just can't throw the seals away. I keep them, I make drawings of them. This is how I started to paint Mackó paintings - using watercolour, Chinese ink or oil paint. On some of these pictures I write children's rhymes in Japanese or in Hungarian. I believe, that - in a serious and playful sense - what I am doing is: translating Mackó cheese (the image and the experience) into Japanese.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (4)

4. Debrecen University


When I glance at the building, my eyes wander to a window on the fifth floor, of the room that used to belong to my father. The Department of Geography.
Sometimes, when he went there on a Sunday to make preparations for a lecture, he let me accompany him and read or draw in this solemn atmosphere with maps, figures of geological layers and pictures of exotic lands. In time I came to know several archeological layers of the life of this building which, in one way or another has been the setting of my whole youth.
As a high-school student I made pilgrimages to the best library in town, to the beautiful reading room which looked above giant oak trees. My high-school used to hold its yearly school leavers' ball here. Dancers from the ground up to the sky....A live band, "Lux" was playing in the atrium to waves of dancing crowds. Up above the aula, balconies running around on each floor got filled up by white tables; waiters were running around, while our parents - eating and drinking - were looking down to find their neatly dressed and flushed sons and daughters who were dancing there with their first sweethearts. As a university student I spent all my days here. I liked it here. I enjoyed studying, making friends by the balconies up above the atrium; or just standing there observing fellow students, those characteristic figures among us who were dwelling here, and who were responsible for the fashions, trends, and atmosphere of an era.
"What about this luxury? Is it all right to build such a beautiful university?" I pondered, because I had read somewhere that they built it with the intention " to demonstrate Hungarian cultural superiority" over neighbouring nations....I just couldn't throw this spoilsport sentence out of my head. In an era when inner parts of the city were levelled down by full prefabricated housing districts, this university seemed to radiate the peace and power of quality, thus giving a kind of timeless hope to me.
Debrecen University is also where my parents met.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (5)

5. The University Church

It was 20 years ago, in June 1980 when I graduated at Debrecen University as a psychology major. Though our department was located in the main building, most of our classes were held in two little rooms in the university protestant church that had been put out of its function a long time ago.
We liked it here, it was our own separate world. "I'm going to the church" - we joked. It felt quite ironical that psychology classes shoul be held in a church, and that it was only us, students dealing with the "mind" who studied here. Time seemed to stand still; we believed the present political system would go on till eternity. There was no freedom of religion. At philosophy classes they still insisted on marxist dogmas, but since a few years it had become possible to learn psychology at the university. They even put up with me writing my graduation thesis about psychotherapy and a strange Eastern religion: Zen Buddhism. In lack of actual Zen meditation experience my thesis consisted of reviews of literature - of authors who wrote about it in English and of the related fields of contemporary psychology.
Thus, while at university, I went to church every day. It was just right, I realized with a smile, as both psychology and buddhism served as steps to find something that could be called my own personal religion. Today, in the new era of freedom of religion, the music library and the magazine-reading room are placed in the university church building. One of the main Gods of our time also moved in to live here: information. The central computer of the university.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (6)

6. The basement of Subconscious

In summer, when visiting back in Hungary I caught myself gazing down at basement windows in the street. I looked at them astonished. After more than ten years in Japan - in a world of underground trains, passages and even small districts under street level - I forgot about the existence of old, dark and damp basements. You walk along dilapidated blocks of houses in old Budapest or Debrecen, and in the middle of summer heat you are suddenly struck by cool air coming from a dark basement window at the level of the sidewalk. I shieverd and thought of the past, of forgotten memories. I suddenly understood why psychologists compare our subconscious to the dark basement lying below the house of our everyday consciousness. As kids, we needed some courage to venture down to this dark and damp underworld of spider's webs. We used coal heating back then, We kept coal and firewood there, broken toys, all the things we were reluctant to throw away for good, a tricycle we tortured for many years in the yard - all lay here in the dark, in a semi-forgotten status.
One night in Debrecen last summer, I met an old school classmate of mine and he took me for a beer to an underground bar. Piece by piece I put together where we were; in the basement of my childhood neighbour. There used to be a Calvinist priest's house with a quiet garden here; we came and rang the bell on their gate when we happned to kick our soccer ball over their high brick wall. Their basement had been right next to ours. It has been transformed into a jazz bar; a bar of the kind that could be anywhere in the world. Talking about the past with my friend, I realized where exactly I was. After forty years I was sitting among forgotten memories. Both in a metaphorical and a real sense, right inside my own subconscious.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (7)

7. Prairie's Edge


A rare little bird landed inside our garden in the middle of the city.
She was so tired that my elder brother could easily catch her; he identified her using his little book of birds: a kestrel.
Love for animals and plants was in my brother's blood - we used to dream that when we grew up we would live in the middle of the woods with our faithful dog - but it was getting obvious that I would become a city-dweller.
We never found out where this bird came from. We pricked some holes on a shoe-box, put her inside, and took the tram to take her where she belonged: the zoo. Thankfully, they let us in without buying tickets to have a quick look at the eagles, monkeys, the tiger and the black panther.What a pity it wasn't in the morning when we got there but late in the afternoon, about an hour before closing time.
Later we sometimes visited our one-time guest. You didn't need to buy a ticket to be able to see my favorite animal, the American bison, as its shed and run were right next to the zoo fence. He reminded me of Indian stories, of the Wild West. I often stopped by with my bycicle on the quiet road of poplar trees leading to the forest and the cemetery.
Bison my son, certainly you've been exiled here, the edge of the faraway Hungarian prairie. You can't run with your herd, you can't graze, you get the grass mowed and portioned out for you.
He roamed his way with melancholy head, scraped his strong forehead against the green steel fence of the shed, trampled dust, the dust of his bison household, trampled the sandy soil of the Hungarian Plains.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (8)

8. My Points of the Compass


When I am facing North, which side of me is East and which is West?
While for a split second I need to think, the square where we used to live till I was eighteen flushes up in front of me. In this town structured by the one main road running from South to North, through our square, and with our bedroom window facing North it was easy to remember the main directions. Looking out we could see in the centre a statue that could be visalized as the needle of a compass with the head pointing to the North, along Péterfia street to the Great Woods.
On the right side, that is to the East was the building of my elementary school, and to the left, West, the movie theatre Hungaria and the Calvinist College. The statue of Csokonai, Debrecen's great poet of about two hundred years ago, was erected in a way that he should face the Calvinist College, where he used to study. It was one of the oldest and most important schools of the country. West is the direction in which Csokonai looks.
Knowledge and culture are supposed to be in the West; the significant part of Europe is to the West, this is the direction towards which Hungarians have been looking for many centuries.
Today, when I think of the points of the compass, rather than visualizing the little square I imagine looking at the Earth from above Tokyo. On my left, to the West there is Europe but also China, Thailand and even a half of Japan. North and South haven't changed that much. To the East, there is the Pacific Ocean.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (9)

9. From a Classmate


Móricz Zsigmond, the author of a beautiful novel based in Debrecen, used to be a student here himself. When the hero, an innocent little boy from a village enters the famous Kollégium of Debrecen, he often remembers his mothers's words: " Be good, my dear son. Be faithful unto death." This is the title of the novel.
When, in the early sixties the black-and-white movie "Be faithful unto Death" was shot, the square in front of our house looked the same as in this old postcard from the beginning of the century. The film crew didn't need to change much here. Me and my brothers watched the shooting of a scene from our bedroom window: I can still imagine hearing the knocks of boots on the cobbled road, as the boy acting as Misi is hurrying among horse-carts - in the sharp light of the film-crew's lamps.
This postcard was actually sent to me by mail from P., an old classmate of mine. At high-scool both of us were planning to go to a faraway university, possibly to Budapest, and we tended to quote - laughing - , a famous sentence from close to the end of the novel. Misi, bitterly disappointed with the world of adults, cries in tears: "I don't want to be a student in Debrecen any more!"
One night a few years ago I was sitting with P. in the theatre of Debrecen, watching a play for which she was the stage designer. "Be Faithful unto Death", the novel with a quiet beauty has been carved out for today's world as a rumbling rock musical.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (10)

10. The Clinic Cinema

Three classmates of mine at highschool were enjoying that special friendship that can be formed in adolescence, and can last a lifetime - studying and playing together, hanging out and chasing girls together. Once, when one of them got ill, his two friends invited me to see a film. This is when I discovered the Clinic Cinema. The building stood in the corner of the Medical University campus, by the woods. Two nights a week they showed films here. We arrived a bit late. The small cinema seemed to be full and I was sure we wouldn't be able to squeeze in. To my great surprise we didn't hurry to the ticket-office but headed straight to the little old man checking tickets at the entrance to the auditorium.
Good evening, Uncle Szabo! The old ticket-collector, wearing a dove-grey coat, picked out three tickets from his upper pocket and handed them to us. He knew the three friends would come. Should it rain or snow, should they screen a Soviet movie or a French one, the boys will not fail to get here. Twice a week, each time when a film is playing.

Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (11)

11. Lifeplans
I knew him, the headmaster of the highschool where my father taught and where I would go when I grew older. We, the menfolk - teachers and their sons, up to thirty of us - used to gather in front of the TV set in the wide corridor by his office on Sunday afternoons when the national soccer team played. This time we ran into him at the swimming pool, wearing but a swimsuit. I was glad to see my father joking, at ease with the headmaster, a guy with a rough sense of humor. We stopped on the white concrete ground by the cold-water pool, one half of which was four meters deep. Strictly for swimmers. Also for divers, the guys who dared to make jumps from that board, high above. The brave men, real men from head to toe.
He lit a cigarette, and my father playfully scolded him for taking up smoking again. "Coffin-nails, they are", the headmaster used the fashionable word, admitting he had only been able to manage without them for a few weeks. But he didn't think they were that harmful. He was planning on a long life anyway. "To be quite exact, I would like to die on New Year's Eve in the year 2000, while eating sausage." We laughed. Would that date come at all?
Four decades from now, almost. My grandfather, for sure, would not still be living then. It appeared to me as a special privilege to be born with a good chance of being able to glance into another millenium. But, till then...! I must soon learn to swim really well, to be allowed to play in that deep pool. And, what about a jump? Would I some day become brave enough to make a jump?

Postcards of memory - from Debrecen (12)

In Sepia Colour

What a joy, on a summer morning, to be sitting on the terrace of Hotel Aranybika (Golden Bull) in Debrecen! Whereas Budapest..., well, it's not what it used to be: the Japan Café of Krúdy and his fellow writers has been turned into a bookshop; the nearby coffee-shops of Andrássy road are stuffed with loud, neo-rich businessmen. However, taking your time in Aranybika's café you can still watch the people of a good old country-town passing by. You are able to immerse yourself in a Hungarian atmosphere yet unspoilt! So different from our cunning and sophisticated metropolis, Tokyo!
This is what I was told by an acquaintance of mine, a kind-hearted Japanese lady. Around the same time I was reading dark stories by the famous contemporary Debrecen writer, Tar Sándor. Stories of homeless alcoholics, crippled people trapped in sin and hopelessness, people who seem to be wriggling in an accursed town, far away. So far away that I could hardly manage to fit them into the Debrecen of my memories.
There you are! A tactful foreigner, protected by the shell of her innocence; and a person thinking about his hometown after two long decades of absence, protected by distance which would seduce him into painting sentimental, sepia-coloured images.
Dear reader, our twelve-part series has ended here. If you have a chance, please visit Debrecen. When you're there, you might feel like writing a postcard to somebody.