Francis Berger
  • Blog
  • My Work

Unscripted

10/1/2019

11 Comments

 
I am not supposed to be here. Here - in a small, nondescript Hungarian village mere kilometers from the Austrian border. It was not in the script. Mind you, the script was never engraved in stone or stamped with a seal, but it had certain boundaries and constraints, certain contractual responsibilities and understandings that, in lieu of a careful and pedantic inspection, left little room for improvisation.

My parents escaped this country as young adults, a little less than a year before I was born. Yes, escaped. You see, Hungary was still communist back then and the western part of the country wore a crown of barbwire bedecked with watchtowers and bejeweled by landmines. My parents applied for travel pass to Yugoslavia shortly after they were married. They told the authorities they were going to the Adriatic for a honeymoon, and then went off script and slipped across the Italian border, leaving everything they had ever known behind. Eventually, they found their way to America, and I was born in New York – another faceless immigrant kid in an ocean of faceless immigrant kids.

My sister was born a short time later, and my parents spent the next four years trying to find a place to call home. That place became a small town just outside the northern fringes of Toronto, Canada. Though I came into the world an American, I grew up Canadian, complete with an ingrained love of ice hockey and a certain foolhardy nonchalance for subzero temperatures. We lived beside a modest lake, which ensured my childhood was a good one, marked with glorious amounts of time in the woods and fields and water and fresh air, but as I grew older, our small town grew bigger, and was encircled by rings of soulless subdivisions.

The familiar faded and the unknown seeped in. Most of the kids I knew moved away as they matured. Those who remained drifted until connections became nothing more than accidental meetings at gas stations and awkward how the hell are yous in the thresholds of convenience stores. The molten change of progress fossilized the place I had known and made it lifeless, but I remained and stuck to the script I believed it my duty to follow.

I got an education and tried to find decent work. I fell in love and mused about buying a house somewhere and settling down, but I could not commit to love or my faint domestic aspirations because I no longer felt at home. I tried to keep to the script, to find that better life my parents had slipped under the barbed wire for, but the better life ended up escaping them as well. Their adopted script had been the hardworking immigrant script, and the diligence and doggedness with which they followed that script did bear fruit. They achieved respectable levels of material success, yet this success ultimately led to failure. They divorced shortly after I turned eighteen. Definitely not in the script. My own wispy daydreams of domestic bliss evaporated for a time. I took the script I had carried in my back pocket my whole life, threw it to the wind, and turned my attention to becoming a writer.

Ten years passed. I wrote volumes during that time, but I did not succeed at becoming a writer. As I was on the verge of abandoning this ambition, I met a young woman from Hungary who happened to be in Canada. Six months later, she was my wife. After that, we set sail on an odyssey, one that took us many places. Like Odysseus before us, a decade was needed before I found my way home, but the nostalgia I experienced was tainted far more with sickness than it was with joy.

The script I had tossed away years before fluttered back to my feet – dirty, worn, covered in grime. I picked it up, dusted it off, and did my best to reprise the role I had abandoned, but to no avail. The lines in the script seemed unnatural and forced. I had outgrown the part, or perhaps the part had outgrown me. After my son was born, my wife and I set sail again, headlong against the prevailing winds. In a fit of defiance, I threw away the rudder and allowed our craft to float away whichever way the waves desired. Before the year was out, we washed up here, in a nondescript village in Hungary mere kilometers from the Austrian border.

It was a place neither of us had known. A place we had never considered knowing. A place that had been as distant from our conscious thought as the silvery outlines of blurred moonlight dreams. And in this place, in this most unlikely of places, which had never appeared in any script, not even vaguely, has become home the way none of the other homes we left scattered in the world ever could.

In my more pensive and reflective moments, I consider picking up a quill and composing a new script, one for this place and this time, but after a few moments, I allow the thought to seep away. For the first time since childhood, I feel an affinity. I know where I am. I know where I am going. My physical vagabondism has come to an end. What I am engaged in now is a different sort of travel.

Though this is home to me now, there is one last destination I hope to reach. This destination is clearer than any I have ever considered before. Clear enough to allow the journey to remain unscripted, as the best journeys home often are.  
11 Comments
S.K. Orr link
10/1/2019 23:42:31

A lovely and inspiring glimpse of your life, Francis. Thank you for posting it. I will confess that I envy your sense of affinity.

Reply
Francis Berger
10/2/2019 08:49:18

@ S.K. - Thanks!

Reply
Bookslinger
10/2/2019 00:55:32

This is good.

Reply
Francis Berger
10/2/2019 08:50:12

@ Bookslinger - I am happy you enjoyed it.

Reply
J.D.
10/2/2019 20:52:49

Loved reading this, Francis Berger, written on my husband's birthday.
You are definitely a writer. Someday, when I get over my obsession
with memoir (maybe even before), I will read your book.

Thank you!

Reply
Francis Berger
10/2/2019 21:15:27

@JD - Thank you. I appreciate the interest in my novel. I think its a good story, but it addresses some ugly subject matter. A few readers have commented that the novel "is not for the squeamish."

Reply
J.D.
10/3/2019 16:08:55

Thank you for warning me. I am squeamish personified. Could not even watch "The Passion". You will just have to write another, maybe a memoir.

Reply
Bookslinger
10/3/2019 17:08:45

I suppose you are already familiar with him, but for those who are not...

You're story somewhat parallels Sebastian Gorka's. He was born to Hungarian refugees/escapees in England, and came to the US.

He catapulted into the limelight as an interpreter/analyst on Sep 11, 2001, while he was visiting Hungary, and was invited into a tv studio to interpret American TV that day, and also to try to explain what it meant or would mean to Americans.

He has several books out, and has a daily 3 hour podcast. I learned of him while listening to the John Batchelor show, as he has done many segments (usually 20 min) there.

To catch up on the gist of what he is about, here are a smattering of episodes he was on for John Batchelor:
https://audioboom.com/search/posts?q=john+batchelor+sebastian+gorka

He was an advisor to the Trump administration for a brief period.

Reply
Francis Berger
10/3/2019 19:26:45

@ Bookslinger - I have heard about Gorka and that he is of Hungarian heritage and had served in the Trump administration. Other than that, I don't know too much about him. That's what you get for vowing to cut back on the news/media. Thanks for the information.

Reply
John Fitzgerald link
10/9/2019 09:27:08

Superbly written, Frank. Evocative and moving. Great understanding and perspective earned the hard way.

Reply
Francis Berger
10/9/2019 10:33:52

Cheers, John. I enjoyed writing this post; I am happy to hear it resonated with you.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    RSS Feed

    Blog and Comments

    Blog posts tend to be spontaneous, unpolished, first draft entries ranging from the insightful and periodically profound to the poorly-argued and occasionally disparaging.
     

    Comments are moderated. Anonymous comments are never published (please use your name or a pseudonym). 

    Emails welcome:

    f er en c ber g er (at) h otm   ail (dot) co m
    Blogs/Sites I Read
    Bruce Charlton's Notions
    Meeting the Masters
    From The Narrow Desert
    Synlogos ✞ Aggregator
    New World Island  
    New World Island YouTube
    ​Steeple Tea
    Berdyaev.com
    Adam Piggott
    Fourth Gospel Blog
    The Orthosphere
    Junior Ganymede

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    April 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012

    Picture
    A free PDF is also available in My Work. 
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.