Hungarian Heritage Review, 1987 (16. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1987-02-01 / 2. szám
®l|e ^literature of JHungarg The gods in their wisdom have granted the benefit of laughter also to the poor. The tenants of huts do not wail all the time, often enough a hearty laughter comes ringing from their dwellings. I might even go to the length of saying that the poor often laugh when they have every reason to cry. I happen to be thoroughly familiar with that kind of world. The generation of the Soos tribe that had brought forth my father went through the direst stages of destitution. At that time, my father worked as a day-labourer in a machine shop. There was nothing for him, nor for anyone else, to brag about in those days. (Yet brag they did.) And it is a fact that never in my life was I to laugh as much as in those very years of my childhood. How, indeed, should I ever again have laughed so heartily after I had lost my merry, red-cheeked mother, who used to laugh so sweetly that, in the end, tears came trickling down her cheeks and her laughter ended in a fit of coughing that almost choked her... But she never laughed as merrily as on the afternoon which we spent searching for seven pennies. We searched, and we found them, too. Three were in the drawer of the sewing machine one in the cupboard. . .the rest were more difficult to find. My mother found the first three pennies all by herself. She thought there ought to be more coins in the drawer, for she used to turn a penny by sewing and kept whatever she earned in that drawer. To me, the drawer of the sewing machine seemed an inexhaustible gold mine, and whenever you delved into it, all your wishes came true. Thus I was flabbergasted to see my mother digging into a mess of needles, thimbles, scissors, bits of SEVEN PENNIES-By -ZSIGMOND MÓRICZ [1879-1942] ribbon, braid and buttons, and, after she had poked around in them a while, to hear her say in astonishment: “They have gone into hiding.” “Who?” “The coins,” she said with a laugh. She pulled out the drawer. “Come on, sonny, let us find the wicked things. Naughty, naughty coins.” She squatted on the floor and put down the drawer so cautiously, she seemed to fear its contents might fly away; then she daintily turned it upside down, as though she were catching butterflies under a hat. You couldn’t help laughing over the way she acted. “Here they are, in here,” she giggled, and was in no hurry to lift up the drawer. “If there’s but a single one, it must be in here.” I squatted on my heels and watched closely for a shiny coin to creep forth somewhere. Nothing stirred. To be quite frank, neither of us really believed that there were any inside. We glanced at each other, laughing over the childish joke. I touched the drawer as it lay there upside down. “Ssht! ” my mother shushed me. “Keep still, child, or they’ll run away. You have no idea how nimble pennies can be. They run so fast, they simply roll away. My, how they roll. We rocked with laughter. We had seen often enough, how easily the pennies could roll away. When we got over our fit of laughter, I stretched out my hand once more to lift the drawer. “Don’t!” mother cried out, and I snatched back my finger as if I had scorched it on a stove. “Easy, you spendthrift. Why be in such a hurry to send them off? They belong to us only while they are safe here, under the hood. Let them remain there for a little while yet. For, you see, I have to do some washing and for that I need some soap, and for the soap I must have at least seven pennies, they won’t give me any for less. I’ve got three already, I need four more, they must be in this little house. They live here, but they hate to be disturbed, and if they grow angry, they’ll vanish and we shan’t ever get hold of them again. Easy, then; for money is a delicate thing and must be handled gently. It wants to be respected. It takes offence quickly, like a sensitive lady...Don’t you know a verse that would lure it from its house?” Oh, how we laughed while she babbled along! My incantation was odd indeed. It went like this: “Uncle Coin, I’m no liar, Your house is on fire. At this I turned the drawer rightside up again. There was every kind of rubbish below it, but coins... there were none. My mother kept rummaging in the heap, making a sour face, but that didn’t help. “What a pity,” she said, “that we have no table. It would have been more respectful to turn it over on a table, and then the coins would have stayed put. I swept up the things and put them back into the drawer. Mother was doing some hard thinking the while. She racked her brains to remember whether she had some time or other put any money elsewhere, but she couldn’t recall it. Of a sudden, I had an idea. “Mother, I know a place where there is a coin.” “Where is it, sonny? Let us catch it before it melts like snow.” —continued next page FEBRUARY 1987 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW 19
