Chapter 22
Upwards
My work has multiplied as our sales manager considered my capacity not fully utilized. Actually my style is misleading for bosses who do not know me. I agree with Andrew Grove: "Clean desk, clear mind.” I organize my work always at start and, except in extremely hard cases, I do it in the time interval available. I am not for extensive overtime work, when I consider my time too short, I work more intensively, mainly reorganizing my agenda.
Well, he gave me another field to deal with, it was Comecon for both machine tools and automotive topics. It took a lot of time to read through multilateral protocols and prepare our suggestions for future ones. I also took part in meetings both home and abroad.
It was the year, when in the spring Andropov died. The name of Chernenko has been unfamiliar to us. Later jokes came again. One of them was the following.
Q.: Why did the Central Committee elect Mr Chernenko as Chairman?
A1: Because his son would not accept the post.
A2: Because of all the members of CC his EKG diagnosis has been the worst.
There was another one.
Q1: What is it: 24 teeth, 4 feet?
A1: A crocodile.
Q2: And this: 24 feet, 4 teeth?
A2: The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
A business trip to the GDR occurred in May 1984. It had the venue I knew well, Magdeburg. I earned some respect with my experience and at the same time I managed to avoid attempts of a pretty young German girl. Fortunately, she quickly recognized her situation and joined another man.
That time I could not find my divorced friends. By the way, their elder daughter was finishing studies that year. They have been divorced, we had got a letter from them in the final months of our African stay informing us about it. Their daughter, Sabine, had begun her study in Szeged in 1979, the year we moved to Ethiopia and she was in her finish that year. She has been frequently with us before our move to the new home and once or twice she visited us also here. Her younger sister became a nurse after she finished school.
I have mentioned the English licence contract for cast iron beds. Quarterly a very intelligent service engineer, about 60, actually chief of their service engineers, visited our foundry. We then spent a day together agreeing in topics of the next 3 months. In the spring of that year he came fore with a proposal for the extension of our licence agreement. He suggested a minor change in calculation of royalty fees and also to insert a clause about participation fees of our representatives covered by them at the annual conferences generally in England. My boss agreed to send the foundry manager and me to a conference that year in Cologne, Germany.
I took arrangement for our trip in my own hands, only the allowance and air tickets has been given by the foreign trade company. I reserved a room in a small hotel through the German tourist board’s office in Cologne. This was the first such event with Meehanite I took part in. It impressed me greatly, how excellent all the arrangements have been – compared to conferences organized by our Scientific Society for Mechanical Engineers – and my respect grew further for everything that was English. In the coming years I would not have to be disappointed.
Shortly before that trip I had to make another one, again to KB in Munich. My trip-mate has been a sales executive, the lady with Turkish-born husband. We went to sign the agreement for consignment store. Our time was short, but we managed to fulfil our task. Also we began talks with technical people about some new developments. These would take me to Moscow the next January.
The only case, when I have been considered a smuggler, occurred at the end of that trip. I have chosen the green corridor to leave the airport arrival hall and I was stopped by a customs officer, a girl of about 25. She asked me if I had something to declare. I answered I did not, and then she made me open my bag. There she found a portable radio cassette recorder I bought in Munich. She considered it above limit in spite of my bill I provided at once. She said it was her authority to supervise values of items imported. It could have been worse, but fortunately she was called to phone. I quickly packed up and slipped out.
My trip in Cologne has been both useful and pleasant. The city’s centre is a beauty, especially the Dom and its surroundings. My companion, our foundry manager, has been a well educated person with a high interest in all technical things. He had also a good eye to recognize the static wonder of this piece of architecture. It is no wonder it remained unhurt even during bombings in World War II. I would feel such an aw only years later in Russian churches and Cathedrals.
My mate also appreciated my success in convincing our boss to agree with our participation in this conference. Well, I think, there is no place for any false modesty when chances of specialists are at stake. One unit of currency is worth many times itself, when it is spent for training of people. This time our foundry manager did not make any mistakes. On our later trips together there would be some funny little faults in his preparations.
My care of our garden has brought results. In the first spring one of the small trees has blossomed, but did not bear any fruit. This made me aware that another plum tree would be needed to help it to bear fruit. I planted one and from the next year progress had been seen. I have never tasted a better flavoured plum, at least for eating raw, but also for canned fruit.
The old pear tree bore some fruits the first summer, but my profound cut-back brought its results from the second year. That is a unique species called Vilmos (Willam) and, as it goes quickly to the ripe stage, it is used also to distil brandy.
Our small cherry trees bore some fruit, but they would never be a hit. My new currant trees fared much better. They had a stem of 3 feet and about a cubic yard of crown. They had even not needed cutting back, their produce was rich every year.
I did a lot of work in gardening. Beside spraying of the trees several times, I grew vegetables and my garden has always been clean of weeds.
Most care was needed by the grapes. When we moved in, there were some stocks along the right-side fence, but nobody cared for them, and they were creeping on the ground. I cut them back completely, and in the second year, i.e. 1984, the first bunches we would taste. They were ordinary wine-grapes, mainly for port-wine. A year before, my first spring in the garden, I bought some good-quality vines at a dealer and almost all of them remained alive.
I have got some ordinary vines and planted them. Most of them developed into stocks. My favourite stock is a species of black wine-grapes, very fine in taste as a fruit and its juice is delicious. Originally I have been sent three vines in the spring of 1984 by our Szekesfehervar factory’s trade union activist. Two of them has been taken by our trade union secretary, only one furthered to me. In two years, when it bore its first fruit, the woman complained me it was worth nothing as it was wine-grapes. I asked her when I "gave it” to her.
As my stocks became older, I had to pour concrete poles and put up an arbour. I placed it along my stocks planted in four feet from the fence. The 80 feet of the arbour has three sections. At the ends there are two 20-foot sections, the middle one is 40 feet. There are passes between them. The height of the highest wire is 6 feet and the lowest is placed at two. Distance between wires is one foot.
In that year I have made some wine in the ordinary way my relatives had done it in the village during my childhood. I had been interested in vintages and tried to observe as much as possible. To be present at pig-kills I had hated, but vintages I liked. My first wines have been simple ones and we used them for dishes cooked with wine. Later I would pay a greater attention to that topic, but my basement is not a proper one for a winery. In the summer it is too hot and wines are not surviving the first year, they go sour. As I drink very little, I have never forced wine-making too much.
That year was the last, when we took active part in the school life of our son. It was his last-but-one grade in the elementary school and we went with him on a class excursion. He did not like it very much, but my wife was impossible to convince of the opposite.
It was not the only case that we went on trip with him, we also visited our national park on the great plains, the Hortobagy. We took a train in the morning and changed at a small town to another line. We lunched in the restaurant and went along exhibitions in the museums. After surveying the grey herd – a special domestic kind of cattle with high horns and fine lean beef – and the famous 9-gap bridge we came home.
We made another trip to the north-eastern tip of our country to the stalactite cave in Aggtelek. We spent the night in a nearby hostel. For the child, as well as for us, it has not only been a recreation, but we got acquainted with places known by us that far only from books and TV documentaries.
Soon the boy would avoid our escort. He would find friends not properly suitable for him, but I can speak about it later.
In my work I have drained my energy almost completely and, at the same time, more and more tasks have been given me by my boss. He was a man of almost limitless capacity and it was frustrating for him to see someone with similar properties. Slowly I began to earn his disgust and hatred. I see it now clearly, but, even if I could begin afresh, I could not be behaving otherwise. It is my weakness, to be strong.
My next task was to prepare an application for the Hungarian Automotive Society – a society of big automotive companies in the country – to accept us as a member. It has been done and at the next board meeting we have been accepted, and our financial obligation decided (5 percent of total costs).
Our brake business branch represented 30 percent in the income of the company, rate within profit has been even higher. But our general manager would not think too much of brakes, and he would not go in person to board meetings of the society. For his deputy he delegated the director of our Kecskemet factory.
On board meetings – an event twice a year – also the representatives of the secretariat have always been present. From our company it was me. That way twice a year I had the possibility to sit together with leading personages of our automotive industry – except RABA, whose management considered the society a "putty chewing club” –, and it has not only been pleasant, but very useful, too. Official lunches were also very interesting and pleasing.
One of the main figures, general manager of the foreign trade company for the automotive industry, has been the brother of the ambassador in Addis Ababa re-called for his life-style. We have had long conversations about him and generally about topics I knew well. He spoke with disgust of the mission given to Thomas to save his stay for another two years.
Only once would the board keep its meeting in our premises. It would be our Kecskemet factory and the only event our general manager would preside personally.
All this resulted in my being drawn into the inner circles of our company life – and in a campaign of intrigues launched by those who did not like me. It has earned me friends and enemies at the same time.
It was also a period, when the management, after restructuring almost four years before, felt themselves strong enough to make a further shift of power. My first boss, dr. K., who has been pushed aside, after the new general manager took his place, was sent to retirement that year. Our commercial department head has been left on his place, but his secretary was promoted to sales executive for traditional machine tools beside her job with me for brakes. One of the sales executives, the son of the former sales director, became sales manager, while our boss became deputy general manager for sales. My status has not been altered in spite of many new tasks assigned.
As I have recounted, for a time we could cooperate well with the girl, my colleague, we did our work at exhibitions every May and, similarly to the company’s annual autumn in-house exhibition and sales promotion called "The Open House”, we organized an in-house event in Kecskemet. It became a success and we have been praised by our boss. Alas, later, when in the Yugoslav cooperation business about traditional lathes she and the boss found each other, my position got worse step by step.
The year 1985 started for me with a Moscow trip about the use of rear brake cylinders of our make on KB licence within a cooperation agreement between the Ikarus company and a Russian factory in Likino near to Moscow.
My technical helper was an engineer from the construction bureau of our Szekesfehervar factory. We had a KB technical expert on our side.
We spent the last evening in our hotel and the next morning, being free till the afternoon flight, went to shop and to see the Tretyakoff gallery. There he played his role as my guide and I have learned much more about art in those two hours, than in all my life before. He even opened my eyes for such techniques as back-ground painting. It was good that we rushed there to see the gallery. In a month it would be closed and for more than 10 years it would remain so.
The foreign trade company for railway brake units selected our products to be exhibited in Moscow at a special exhibition named "40th Anniversary of Hungary’s Liberation.” It has been the last time that event has been named liberation. Even Russians considered it conquering.
Well, the place has been the VDNH exhibition centre in Moscow, the Exhibition of the Achievements in the National Economy, one of its greatest pavilions. As the date to be celebrated would be April 4, the exhibition opened one week before and has been open for two weeks. Our Easter has cut the period in two.
Shortly before this time Mr Chernenko was succeeded by Mr Gorbachev.
At the exhibition there were constant events, seminars, film shows, visits of Russian celebrities and their Hungarian counterparts. There was rumour that during the second week my former boss in the shipyard, who went back to the shipping company, would be present.
At the first day before I bought a bottle of vodka for my colleagues at home. With a guest we drank the spirit. The next day I wanted to buy another bottle, but there were none in the shops. The Gorbachev prohibition has started.
On my working place I have had an old colleague. His job has been to care for transport facilities for our export goods. Also it was his task to keep contact with the exhibition company for our annual show at the industrial fair. He had been an old employee of our company.
One day in the spring of 1985 he brought me a small walnut tree. He knew about my attempts to buy one, but I could get only extremely big ones at the dealer. He cut it out in his garden, where it has grown by chance, as it has been on a path. I did not have much hope, as he had cut its main root. Anyway, I took it home and did all what was needed for a good planting. It has survived, even began to bear fruit in five years and it is the finest tree in my garden.
My son has finished his elementary school and let him convince about registering in a technical secondary school. Three years in it would give him a trade in manual work, one more year and he would sit for final examination for maturity. Another year, and he would become a technician with diploma of the same trade. Trade in talk has been that of a plumber.
During summer my niece, Maria, and her husband, with their two children, Maria jr. and George jr., visited us. It was a hot day and on our lawn under the shade of the house we were talking about their future mission to Moscow. Soon they were to go there, George would be a foreign trade company representative. Their original term has been 5 years, but it would become 7 altogether.
We have been caressing our kittens, they were the offspring of our second cat – our first one, the "intelligent” cat, as our right-hand neighbour said, had disappeared –, given us by the mother of my son’s friend, Leslie, and a female, also ours adapted by our dog. They were about two months old. Their parents would both be lost soon. They would be one pair with a black and a stained offspring, both males. When their mother would disappear, the male would nurse them as if he had been a female.