“When autumn came the cholera was over and again the witch went through the street crying: ‘There will be famine! There will be famine!’ The poor had no bread. The little flour which the king sent them, they mixed with bran or ground roots or even sawdust. To this day the peasants count time as so many years before the famine or after it. A hard winter it was for every one. We lived in constant dread; for robber bands were passing through the town at night and many Jewish homes were broken into and plundered.

“One morning, just as the beadle was going from house to house, waking the people to go to the synagogue—striking the door with a hammer and crying: ‘Uri, Uri!’ ‘Awake, Awake!’—just as he came to our door, you were born, and ever since you have been called Uri. Of course you received another name, the name of your sainted father, but Uri seems to cling to you. Remember that when I see you, you awaken much sorrow and much joy. When the servants call you Uri, you must not be angry with them.”

I remember the story almost word for word, as mother told it to me; for it was the time when my little brain began to retain impressions, and, moreover, mother insisted upon my apologizing to the servant girl whom I had scratched and beaten, and an apology was not to my liking.

After that a certain kind of sadness crept over me which I could never quite shake off. An intense fear of guns gripped me. I remember this well, for the next day an Hungarian shepherd came into the kitchen and brought his old blunderbuss with him. Old Istvan had fierce moustaches and coal black eyes; he wore strange trousers which looked like divided skirts, and a sheepskin coat with the head of the sheep hanging over his shoulder; but I know it was the gun that I most dreaded, for I cried and shook from fear until Istvan carried it out of the house.

I never forgot what my mother told me about my name, and I did not grow angry again at the servants for calling me Uri. Even now there is a hut in the Carpathians where one of our servants of that period lives. When last I went to see her and told her who I was, a smile spread over her care-worn face and she said as she drew me close to her, “Muy Urinku.” She was the girl I beat and scratched, and as she recalled that incident, she said, “Alle bilie ste hundsut”—“But you were a little rascal.”

II
THE PERIOD OF RACE UNCONSCIOUSNESS

UP to my fifth year I did not know that I was not like my playmates. Democratic, as all children are, I played with the boys and girls belonging to the peasant families living in our neighbourhood. I visited them in their wretched and ill-smelling homes, and was eager to help them with their field work, but was often carried away bodily by my older sisters, who could not understand why I should behead cabbages for the cross-eyed, drunken day-labourer whose son Martin was my age and my boon companion. I assisted in many a pig killing, much to the disgust of my wiser and race-conscious brothers and sisters, and at one time I ate a piece of pork. I realized that it must have been a dreadful thing to do when I had my mouth washed with strong soap. Once I was caught chewing a piece of bacon rind which I carried in my pocket, and the punishment was so severe that for a long time I found it inconvenient to sit down. I never cultivated a distaste for pork, and in later years I heard my elder sister say that she believed this was due to the fact that I had been vaccinated with virus taken from the arm of a Gentile boy and that my blood became contaminated.

Be that as it may, I always enjoyed the society of the Gentile boys and girls. In the spring, I made whistles with them, and I knew the Slavic chant which would evolve a sweet-toned instrument from a willow twig. I even made willow switches at Easter time and went about with the Gentile boys who were bought off from beating the girls, by their gifts of coloured eggs.

At the tender age of six, the boy, to whom I was related by vaccination, became a “Mendic,” that is, a helper in the household of the Lutheran pastor. He rang the bells for church and carried the cross at funerals. For these services he received his schooling free and such board as fell from the pastor’s table. I think I rang the bells for Christian worship as often as he rang them. Once I polished the communion set, pumped the organ for the schoolmaster many a time, and took my full share of those pleasant tasks, as behooves one who finds that his brother has too much to do, even if he be a brother only by vaccination.

I recall delightful springs at that period, when I went far a-field with the Gentile boys; and when everything had its young I followed a flock of geese and goslings to the meadow, in the centre of which stood a Roman Catholic chapel shaded by a huge beech tree. The girl who had charge of the geese, and whose assistant I became, although older, was also in that blissful state of race unconsciousness—and did not know that she, a Magyar and a Roman Catholic, was different from me.