The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives by Nguyen Viet Thanh

Author:Nguyen, Viet Thanh [Nguyen, Viet Thanh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, History, Biography, Anthologies
ISBN: 9781683352075
Goodreads: 40376021
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2018-04-10T07:00:00+00:00

Second Country

JOSEPH KERTES

When the Hungarians surprised the Russians by rising up against them in the fall of 1956, the borders opened and my family fled. I was almost five. We left behind us our relatives and friends, our comfortable home in Budapest, our possessions (except for what we could carry), our language, our culture, a thousand years of history, and these last memories. I saw a Hungarian soldier hanging from a lamppost, and he was staring right at me, as I was at him, but he could no longer see. He would remain a constant reminder that we still had our lives. And a chance for freedom lay ahead.

We ran like mad, hundreds of us. We ran by foot by night across the frontier into Austria. Bombs kept going off, and my brother and I would stop to look up, but there were no planes dropping them. My brother kept asking what was going on, and no one answered. It was not until we’d crossed the border that we found out we’d been running across a minefield. But my father kept urging us on in the darkness, and he kept telling us we were the lucky ones, but I was young. I kept looking behind me and wondering who the unlucky ones might have been and hoping, possibly, that we still might go home to join them. But then the vision of the hanging soldier loomed up over me, kept me running onward.

We arrived at last at a single lamppost, shining brightly in the darkness, and my father told us, “This is Austria.” I remember thinking what a crappy country we’d come to. We left home for this? This solitary lamppost?

We were uncertain as to where we were headed ultimately, so my grandmother had taken opera records with her, not knowing when she would hear her favorite music again. (My father was so angry with his mother on account of the weight of her bag that he broke a couple of her records on the pedestal of that Austrian lamppost.) My mother had taken old photographs and a few recent ones of my brother and me as babies, plus a few memorabilia. We might as well have been anticipating Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. My father had taken only valuables: gold jewelry and gold coins. My older brother (two and a half years older) carried fighting toys: spurs and a gun in a holster, both of which looked real, and a bullet belt with what looked like real bullets, in case we made it all the way to the Wild West. I had a chocolate marzipan bar, some tin soldiers which my brother also liked, and a sheriff’s badge my brother said I could carry and keep.

Though harried and apprehensive, we nevertheless felt safe outside our homeland. For us, our homeland had a sad history. My mother had lost both her parents and six of her siblings in World War II. My father had lost his only sibling, his only brother.

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