Page 11 - Sajo ENG

János Térey: An Educational Trail on Atlantis
It all started with a fib.
We, some boys from Debrecen, were about twelve or
thirteen years old when we went to summer camp for a
few days. A boy of about my age boasted on the pier in
Balatonszemes that he had been in every church in our
town. That’s a strange notion, isn’t it? He didn’t come
from a religious family, and nor did I, except that I’d
been baptised. And he wasn’t planning to be an architect
like I was at the time. He said that he had already been
in Jesus’ Heart. What a strange thing to say! That was
the first time I heard about Jesus having a built heart.
What’s more, this boy even claimed that he had had all
the chapels in the Public Cemetery opened. All of them.
I got suspicious at this point because, even though I was
a child, I knew full well that those brick-clad cubes were
actually family crypts full of dried skulls and shinbones,
and they can hardly be walked into just like that. I knew
that they had no phone numbers on their doors and that
strange families, especially all of them (including the
ones that have already died out), wouldn’t have opened
these crypts up for this adolescent boy under socialism... staircases were not always closed at that time and you
I interrogated him suspiciously about who let him into
those synagogues, which were properly closed, dark and
haunted at the time.
Well, the parish clerk did that too, he replied decisively. Park in Péter Nádas’ novel. A boy just a bit older than me
No way, now you’ve been caught, clever clogs.
He must be thinking of the schammes (I knew this word
by coincidence). I figured that he couldn’t have made his
way through those churches if he thought it was alright for
a synagogue to have a parish clerk. When I was in year
eight at school, I decided that I would actually explore
our churches, for real, and thoroughly. Even the ones in
Józsa. And that’s what I did. This is how it happened that
I was one of the first people to enter the Lutheran church
in the town centre, in what was then Dimitrov Street and
is now called Miklós Street. The pastor there told me
that it had been planned to add a slender tower to the
main building in the 1930s.
“You know, it was designed by Sajó. The man who also
designed the stadium and the building at No. 6 Hatvan
Street... Do you know it? Yes, that big, flesh-coloured house
at the beginning of the street. Where bus number 31 stops.
He travelled all over America, designing skyscrapers in
New York. Everything he does is so unusual. At least for
the eyes of people in Debrecen. Understandably, he’s not
held in such high esteem. Are you interested in him? His
widow is still alive, and so are his two daughters. Look
their numbers up in the phone book.”
I looked them up. I found a phone box and a coin in my
pocket, and dialled.
Then, one autumn Sunday afternoon, I rang the bell for
the first floor apartment of one of the grey apartment
buildings on Endre Ságvári Street. Intercom: Sajo. The
could sometimes just walk up them without a problem.
When I entered, some old ladies were playing cards
at a round table. In retrospect, it was as if I had been
looking at a prefiguration of the ladies of St Stephen’s
introduced himself by the name of a famous footballer;
another teenager had the long, curly hair of a rocker. A
few years later I saw him in my secondary school’s band
as the lead guitarist and thirty years later he became my
publisher’s lawyer.
I was suddenly transported into a world whose existence
I had some idea of – as I had seen stylish furniture, a
suburban villa and a bourgeois living room in my own
family – but this was different. Bright, transparent space.
Square metre upon square metre, yet not a labyrinth. It
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