Never, Again by Endre Farkas

Author:Endre Farkas [Farkas, Endre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signature Editions
Published: 2016-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

10

“It’s arranged. We’re leaving tonight,” Tomi’s father announces to everyone the minute he walks through the door. “The seven o’clock train.”

“Tonight?” Emma-mama asks. She has a frightened look.

“Leaving? Where are we going?” Tomi asks.

“We’re going to Sopron for a little while,” his mother says.

“Why Sopron? I thought we wanted to go to Israel.” His parents exchange a look, then his father says, “You’re a big boy now, so I will tell you. We’re going to Sopron and from there we will go to Israel. We’re leaving tonight, but it’s a secret, so you can’t tell anyone. Do you understand?”

“Can I tell Frog?”

“No.”

“You can send him a nice postcard when we get there. It will be a special surprise for him.”

“How long are we going for?

“If we’re lucky, for a long time.”

“Is Gabi coming?”

“No…”

“Yes. We’re going too,” Dezsö-papa says.

“What are you saying?” Emma-mama cries out.

“I thought you didn’t want to take the chance again,” Hannah says.

Sanyi is taken aback. “Are you sure? Even after last time?”

“Sanyi, what’s the point of staying in this pigsty?”

“Dezsö…”

“Emma, why do we want to stay in a place where we have to always worry about hooligans trying to beat down our door? Worry about Gabi all the time? Sleep with one eye open and one ear cocked? We won’t have the blacksmiths standing guard for the rest of our lives. I’m ready to try again.”

Tomi’s mother embraces Emma-mama.

“Go outside and play a while,” Tomi’s father says. It is crisp with a slight wind but snow hasn’t fallen yet. The ground hasn’t frozen but it’s hard. They kick the ball back and forth.

“Gabi, where’s Sopron?”

“In fifth place.”

“I mean in the country.”

“Oh. Near Austria, I think.”

“Where is Israel?”

“Somewhere in the desert.”

“Papa told me when we were coming back from City Hall that it was a country filled with Jews, a country where nobody hates us.”

“Imagine,” Gabi said. “A country full of Rabbi Sterns.”

Tomi laughs and kicks the ball high into the blacksmiths’ yard.

“Hey, Puskás,” Fire calls to Tomi as he rolls the ball back to him. “What’s up?”

“We’re going—” Tomi begins, but remembering his father’s warning, snaps his mouth shut.

“You’re going where?”

“Nowhere.” Tomi answers, taking back the ball.

Walking back to his side of the fence, he stops and looks around. It is beginning to get dark. With the flowers and leaves gone, the rose bushes look like the tangled prickly witch’s hair in his old Hansel and Gretel book. The vegetable garden, which in summer was rows of lush greens and reds, is now just a rectangle of dried earth, rows of little graves, with only a few scraggly shoots showing. And his Golden Green looks like a sad and abandoned field. He doesn’t want to go away. And even though bad things have happened to him and his family in Békes, he likes it here. His best friend Frog is here, and the blacksmiths are here. And everything.

—

“I want to take my soccer ball. And my soccer sweater. And my sword. And my book.” His mother has read The Paul Street Boys to him twice already, but now he is reading it on his own.

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