The Widow's Christmas

Sandor, a steelworker on Csepel Island, died fighting the Russians in the 1956 revolution. His widow Ilona, left with three children, has never been able to understand what he believed in and what he had hoped for when he joined the other men in the uprising. After Sandor's death, the workers' council at the Csepel plant gave Ilona a pension of half her husband's salary. But the Kadar government disbanded the council, and the pension stopped. She was ordered evicted from her gloomy "workers' " room-and-kitchen, but it proved too small and dark for the party functionaries who viewed it, so she stayed on. At school, ten-year-old Sandor Jr. was nearly expelled for arguing in defense of what is now known in Budapest as "the counter-revolution"; only by going down on her knees did she persuade the principal to relent.

The worst thing was the loneliness. Everyone was afraid to help her or to speak to her. No one would give her a job. For a time she survived by selling family possessions. In the end, she became a scavenger on "Garbage Mountain," a monstrous, 75-year-old dump that rises 300 feet above the fields south of Budapest, its sides gleaming with broken glass, its volcano-shaped top forever smoking from the fires that smoulder deep in its interior.

Letters to Jezuska. Scratching for salable trash on Garbage Mountain is illegal. To Ilona it was also shameful. One day five-year-old Joska came home from school badly beaten up; he had fought with other children who called his mother a "garbage bag." But the scrap iron she found could be sold, and the half-burned coal and coke kept the family warm. She made enough to pay the rent ($8 a month), enough to buy cabbage.

Snow lay on the hills of Buda, and truckloads of Christmas trees began coming into town. One evening after the market closed, Ilona picked up some broken pine branches and fastened them to a stick to make a Christmas tree. She spent 13-c- for five little white candles, one for each member of the family, including her dead husband. On St. Nicholas Day, when small Hungarians traditionally make their Christmas wishes, Joska and little Ilona wrote letters to Jezuska, the Christ Child: Ilona asked for a doll that could shut its eyes; Joska wanted some bananas --now seen in Budapest shop windows for the first time in years. Sandor, old enough to understand how things are in Hungary, asked for nothing.

Visit to the Post Office. Last week Ilona got a note from the post office: a food parcel addressed to her had arrived from her cousin in Austria. It would surely contain coffee and cocoa which she could sell for enough to buy the doll and bananas. Gaily she told the children that, if they were good, Jezuska would grant their wishes. She went to the main post office--it was her first visit there in eight months, the first package in eight months. The clerk produced the package and also told Ilona that the government had put a new duty on food parcels coming from the West. He asked for $36.

Thirty-six dollars. For that, she would have to dig out more than a ton of scrap iron from the Mountain. Ilona left the package where it was. She walked out from the post office without even protesting. Maybe Jezuska would answer the children's letters next year.

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