The language of friendship and napoleons

Looking out of a Hungarian bakery through the leaves of my family tree.

I'm sitting in the house of my oldest friend and travelling partner.  She's on her computer searching up ghosts of relatives long passed, and I'm on my electronics writing about the ghost I faced recently.

We struck out yesterday, on what has to have been the hottest day of the year, on a whirlwind tour of Cleveland, Ohio.  She wanted to take me to a Hungarian bakery because she knows my heritage is important to me.  The minute I walked in the door I could feel the heaviness in my chest, and not from the artery clogging cream I was about to consume.  I've written before of my strong attachment to the grandfather I never knew, and here he could have been, in the flesh, covered in flour and rolling out dough as was his trade.

Instead of my grandfather, though, was another Hungarian, a man named Farkas. I was told the bakery belonged first to his father, and it has new owners now. Young Farkas, well he's probably about 70 years young, still comes to the bakery on weekends to (ahem) help out.  I think it's just to visit and playfully chide the customers. He was a very entertaining man.

I felt impelled to tell him that my grandfather was a Hungarian baker as well, and he immediately wanted to know his name.  My father was the same way.  He wanted to know the names of any Hungarian students I came across, as if he might know them.  Young Farkas corrected my pronunciation and then told me my name meant emperor and bowed to me.  Then he told me to take the heat back to Mississippi.  (His loyalty was short-lived).

At his urging, or rather lack of it, I got a napoleon, which ironically is a French pastry. We sat, and as I ate the flaky pastry filled with chocolate custard and lightly whipped cream another man walked in the door.  I did not even bother to look up, the pastry was much more interesting.  At least until I heard the customer call Farkas by name and ask for a dobos torte and then continue speaking. That is when the ghost manifested as a full bodied apparition.  

It was not a ghost of a figure actually, but a ghost of sound. Time stood still for me at that moment. My head raised and I stopped chewing so I could hear every syllable and let it wash over me like music. The words the two men exchanged were not English, but the native tongue of my grandparents, and the first language of my father. It's the language I heard every day when my father would come home from work and greet my grandmother. It's the language he and his brothers spoke when they were together. Even more, the language the baker and the customer spoke was littered with English, just like my father's; Hungarian, Hungarian, English, Hungarian Hungarian.

The chocolaty goodness of the bite of napoleon I had just taken could not go down past the lump that was swelling in my throat. I could not help but cry. I cried not only because I missed my daddy so much at that very moment, but I cried for the loss of the sound of those thick words that used to tumble out of his mouth with no effort at all. I cried for the loss of my childhood. I cried for the loss of my family unit as it used to be. I cried. In the bakery.

When two friends know each other as well as my oldest friend and travelling partner and I do, they can communicate without speaking.  Her ears heard it too and she stopped chewing and looked at me, but I could only look away.  And cry. Without asking I had a paper cup of water from the dispenser on its way to me. That's what friends are for, not to ask, just to do, and know when to do it.

It's funny how the times have changed (our books now lean towards the electronic kind) but also stayed the same.  When we were younger my sisters used to tease us about our social habits.  They could not understand why we would spend hours of our time together in separate rooms.  She would be in one place reading a book, or visiting, and I would be in another room reading a book or watching television.  It didn't matter that we were not speaking to each other every minute of our time together.  The best of friends do not have to entertain each other, they just enjoy their proximity.  So it is only perfectly normal that we live 900 miles away from each other, but when we get together we are content to be in the same room, even if she is on one computer and I another.

And that's o.k. because if she's around and the ghost returns I know I will have water.