Gabor Berenyi (20/10/1930 – 28/11/2011)

Dear Uncle Gabor,

We should have talked more when you were alive, but isn't that always the way. I was too young to know you properly, but in my mind you are always laughing, always smiling, always cooking, always with a glass of wine in your hand. Your lonely vintner's existence was to me, strange and normal at the same time, the way a child's world view often is. The way you lived in a shed without carpets or floorboards, just rammed earth. A shed without interior walls, just curtains hung from the metal railings. I remember the tractor and and lot of things covered with heavy cloths, and your living space, a tiny corner of the high ceilinged shed, with a camp stove and a camp bed and a photo of your family back home in Hungary.

Running in the mountains through the snow and the ice

escaping in the winter, gotta look behind twice.

Your family back home in Hungary also kept a photo of you up on the mantle over their fire. They called you hero, they called you the lucky one and they told stories of you and kept your legend alive.

You crossed the Carpathian Mountains in winter with nothing but a loaf of bread and a photograph. Escaping the Russians, escaping oppression, escaping the nineteen fifties to live another five decades, eventually making a new home in Australia. Growing grapes, making wine, bringing the best things from your home and making them grow in foreign soil. We drank your wine at your funeral. Organic, preservative free, using old Hungarian methods that didn't strip the tannins from the grapes, resulting in a different flavour every vintage. We drank and you were in the room with us, even your son, who gave a speech and was very humble, contrite.

He wished he could have loved you better while you were alive, but isn't that always the way.

Tonight I went to a concert, a Hungarian/Transylvanian gypsy violinist named Anti von Klewitz.

After the show I spoke with her and I told her of you, running through the mountains to start again in a new country.

Now I will tell you of her, and of my time at the concert.

Anti von Klewitz

* * *

When I am gone, wait for me until the wheat is tall and yellow

if am not back by then, wait until the grapes are blue and sweet

and if I am not back by then,

you don't have to wait any longer

because I will not be coming home ever again.

Thus spoke Anti von Klewitz. Thus the nature and character of Hungarian gypsy music speaks of an unending homesickness that can never be satiated. She, tall, wild of hair, with bony fingers and a bony face, a woman with a straight back and a laugh that knows all there is to know about pain, but which is still laughter.

The room is hot, I peel off my coat as I enter, uncoil my scarf and twist the cap off my wine bottle, a glass poured before I speak to anyone. The room is full and bursting with conversation an hour before the show, the kitchen too crowded to even open a drawer, pots of soup simmer, cakes and biscuits and wine in tea-cups are in hands and on shelves. Grey hair, silver hair, bald heads. Beaded jewellery, seeded jewellery, faces like coastlines, like good books.

But the music...oh the music.

A trio.

The upright bass, played at times with bow, at others he plucked. The player is tall strong, unshaven and skinny, his white shirt is wrinkled, worn. His black rimmed glasses give him that magnified look, like a man in love, like whatever he's lookin' at, he's staring at it, like, buddy he's here for the music and you better believe that.

The guitar player could be a warrior, or a mountain priest, or a father of four with a good job. He is broad shouldered with strong and proud features. His white wrinkled shirt, short white goatee and bald head give him the air of someone who is in charge, but his playing is all for her...

She, smoky voice, dusty violin, white wrinkled shirt and heavy belt worn in a mannish way. She like a woman whose life is music and who has paid the price every step of the way. She describes the musician's life as one long mistake. Musicians are human as well, after all she laughs in that way that you know she's laughing with you at everything, at the whole human joke.

This song is about, that, Love is a curse you know, but it is something we need anyway. The song says, Love is like growing roses, they need a big space to really bloom.

She sings, the violin pressed out from her shoulder, like a rifle, like a crutch, pointing it at us, and her voice...

Oh, what a thing to behold a person who sings like themselves. Sometimes not much more than speaking, sometimes singing duet with the melody of her strings, she was the voice of the music, and the poetry, though Hungarian, seemed easy to understand.

These three, between the fireplace and the bookshelf, were together for us. They were servants of the songs, releasing a sort of manna, a quintessence into the room, which we drank, faces aglow and eyes and minds and ears and all our attention pouring towards them. Synchronicity seems too mechanical a word, symbiosis too cellular. They played together like the music meant something to them, and the chance to play it meant something more. They listened so carefully to each other that the tiniest fragment of disagreement could not be heard between them, the comfort and confidence they displayed to us is an example that can be applied to all life. The softest and subtlest nuances in volume, or pressure was felt by all three and all three responded as if they were dancing down a staircase, hand in hand, hand in hand, hand in hand.

And we,

the audience seated with our soup cups and wine cups...

We saw all that, we witnessed it together, that testament to the astounding purity and beauty of human intentions.

Music.

We are not the fearful, aggressive, greedy, manipulative, harmful, corrupt and vengeful human race.

We are this. Music. Hand in hand.

* * *

Thank you Uncle Gabor, for your smile which is forever shining in my mind. You who had the least, were the happiest. You who lost your home, your country, your family, your farm, your wife, your son...you were the happiest of us. You knew something that no-one else even believed in. I cannot name it, but you know it, and I want to know it, and perhaps when I have lost as much as you, then I will smile like you.

With a glass in my hand and a song in my broken heart

Morgan.

* * *