The Magnificat
I heard the gist of this from my friend Tibor, and published the story I drew from his experience in my writers' journal, Island Writer. Tibor and Gaby were among many Hungarians who managed to escape during the Hungarian Revolution. He had hoped they would find a home in the States or even Australia and was not pleased to learn they were Canada bound. Even then he hoped at least they might be sent somewhere civilized like Montreal or Toronto and was really disappointed when the train kept rolling westward and landed them in Vancouver. They later moved to Victoria where I met them and got to enjoy so much of Gaby's cooking and Tibor's stories. I changed their names for publication but here's his mostly true story as "The Magnificat".
Deposuit potentes de sede
Et exaltavit humiles
The phrase at the bottom of the memorial program intrigued me. I had just enough high school Latin to understand some of the words, but not sufficient knowledge to get a full interpretation. The bigger mystery was the whole religiousness of the service for my best friend of these past ten years, someone who had on many occasions expounded on the stupidity, corruption and complete self-serving viciousness of the whole Christian population and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Why would Tibor have asked for a priest, well a friar from the small monastery in town actually, and a religious funeral service? I'd ask Gaby; she should know.
But when the chapel doors closed behind her and I turned to take her arm, I thought better than to try to distract her grief with my own petty curiosity. The past few months as Tibor's lungs had been overwhelmed by the cancer, had eaten away at the best part of her as well, and she gripped my arm now as if to pull strength from it and to find some balance for her life as well as her body.
She and Tibor had left Eastern Europe forty years before, walking across country to safety from a homeland invaded by a malignancy of political opportunism that had turned on its own citizens with secret police, and their tools of midnight arrests, torture and murder. Communism had promised power to oppressed underclasses but had instituted instead a regime of elitism and terror. Canada had given the two of them refuge and a new start and they had given back the same fierce strength of intention and work that had carried them through the years before and during their escape.
Now, although they had lived within a community of friends and compatriots, Gaby had only me as a really close friend of Tibor's. Me, the bachelor and neighbour, who shared jokes and loud debate and family celebrations and knowledge, although I always felt my grasp of history and politics, especially European, was naïve. I knew pain in much the same way – as a consequence of athletic over-exertion rather than from prison life or torture. Now Gaby and I had both lost a part of ourselves and we clasped each other the more tightly as that knowledge settled over us. I would ask the friar about the Latin words if he came to the reception.
Had I really known Tibor as well as I thought? I'd seen him the past year, talking to this guy in brown robes who passed his shop coming and going twice a week and had joked with Tibor about the clothing - the sandals, heavy cloth and sash. Not much of a fashion statement next to the pope was it? Well, I'd find someone to ask about the words on the program.
There was, however, no priest at the reception and in the general chatter, the clasps of condolence, the anecdotes and food and drink, I forgot about the issue. There were too many people wanting to reminisce about Tibor and his way with motors. He had worked on cars, his own and those of friends, with skills acquired from his time in a prison camp, and I had perched myself on a stool and passed tools and beer cans as we gossiped our way through histories of love affairs and families. And religion.
The one narrative that had arrested all working, drinking and conversation for a moment was his story of riding home once with his grandfather from Sunday mass on the family estate. He was sent to the country during summers and the old man would take him to Sunday service and lecture him along the way on the importance of the family name and what he supposed was their significance in the fortunes of the nation. On the way home, the cranky old aristocrat would whip the horses and crowd off the road any of the peasants, the farm workers, who were walking home from the same service.
Tibor remembered one young man in particular that his grandfather seemed bent on tormenting. That kid would often get a crack across his broad shoulders as they passed, and there was something more, but Tibor stopped as if he had said too much already. For him as the grandson, however, it had marked the end of his association with the church. If his grandfather could behave like that after attending church, then he would have no more of that institution, for he needed some way to distance himself from the enormous embarrassment, the guilt, he felt at being in that carriage, a part of the culture of entitlement that could conduct itself so shamefully with such impunity. To his child's mind, he admitted, it was a natural leap to blame church and grandfather both; but time, he asserted had not shown him that the church deserved any more forgiveness than the old man. It was a revealing story, but not one I had ever repeated. It was too personal, too much a friend's confidence to ever be used as bar room currency.
"Gaby," I asked as we packed away dishes in the dull light of an early winter evening. She would never allow others to do the work of hostess that she had managed for so many years. "Gaby, I've been wondering about something." And it all poured out. Why the priest, or friar or whatever the hell he was? Why the religiousness of the service? And what was that Latin phrase on the brochure?
And she gave what little she had. No, there was no deathbed conversion. Tibor had asked the friar to conduct his funeral service because, although he was never going to return to "the fold" as he put it, he liked the guy and had enjoyed many a good argument with him. He had come from the same part of their country, had escaped and joined a monastery in fulfillment of his own pact with his god.
And the phrase was from a liturgy called "the Magnificat" or Mary's response to the angel Gabriel telling her that she would be the mother of Christ. The part used in the service went, "He has put down the mighty from their seat/ And has exalted them of low degree." Much in the manner of one reciting an oft-repeated passage learned in childhood, Gaby started to chant the Latin phrases with proper inflection and tone, but I interrupted.
Partly to keep her engaged in talking about Tibor, I pressed for more information on his rejection of the church. Did she remember the story of the grandfather with the whip and the peasants? Gaby turned, tea towel wrapped around the glass she was drying and looked at me. And she kept wiping the glass, long after it was dry, and told me the fuller account of that incident.
As Tibor and his grandfather passed the workers, the old tyrant had stopped the carriage, gotten down and begun beating the young man, a fellow easily twice his weight, with the buggy whip. The lad had not shown sufficient deference, had not inclined his head to a satisfactory degree, had displayed in his grandfather's opinion, “damned socialist arrogance” instead of humility, and that was a sin not to be overlooked.
Tibor intervened, tried to take the whip from the flailing hands, pleading, “Poppa, you can’t do this. He hasn’t done anything wrong!” but the child had been included in the thrashing with the old man screaming at them all. The old man had lashed them both, swearing and calling them peasants, and only when he was exhausted, -- no one having intervened -- had he climbed back into the carriage and driven off to the manor house. Tibor had walked home with the group of workers and taken a bus back to his family in the city the next day.
“But there must have been consequences,” I persisted. “What happened? Didn’t any of them report the incident? What did his parents say? Tibor’s or the other kid’s?”
Gaby shook her head slowly, lips a firm line as she turned to set the glass on the cupboard shelf. “It wasn’t something any of them would do. It wasn’t done, not then. But Tibor was finished with his ‘Poppa’ and he never saw him again. I don’t know what he told his parents, but there were no more summer holidays in the country.”
I wondered aloud what the peasant boy had done when the communist promise of a classless society, a workers' paradise, had been forced upon his nation. I knew from Tibor’s long lectures on the subject that if the lad had raised his voice at all, tried to step out of, or up from, the invisible grey mass of the populace, he could only have become one of the oppressed or an oppressor. There was either apprehension late at night and disappearance into the system, or survival as informant and recruit and position, even rank, in the cadre of border guards.
Gaby agreed. "They liked to use locals as border guards (she always used 'they' for the invaders as if she would not name anything so evil) because they knew the land. They were good at rounding up people trying to escape.”
"But you made it, didn't you. Got across into Austria and then on to Canada. It must have been a hell of a trip. Tibor said you only got stopped once, but that it was a local constable who turned a blind eye and let you go on."
"Not exactly turned a blind eye. We got rounded up by a patrol near a little village close to the border and taken to the police barracks inside the village walls to face their commander. But then, by luck, or maybe because the traitorous bastard still had some decency, he spoke to Tibor and then ordered his men to turn in. And when they had gone, he also yawned and said good night. It took us a moment to realize that we were standing in a town square with the gates open, not two miles from the Austrian border and the patrol had gone to bed. We walked away, very quickly."
"I never heard that part of the story," I whispered. "But, Gaby, the commander. What did he say to Tibor?"
"Well,” she smiled, "he didn't know the Latin, I'm sure, but he'd no doubt had the message beaten into him as a kid by the priests. A lot of things got learned by beatings back then. That's why Tibor wanted it on the program."