Chapter 4
More Strange People and Acquaintances
Remembering my difficulties in getting a job a year earlier I didn’t hope for any better. At once I went to the district employment agency bureau and registered. Fortunately my jobless period was short. Exactly one month after my last day with L’s office I was interviewed by my next employer and the next day I started work there.
I found the ad of that company in the advertising daily and it surprised me as the address given was very near to my home. It was the middle of June and as it was fine that day I thought I could walk there. I knew the surroundings – better to say I thought I knew it – and it looked as if I could go through a small patch of woods and be where I wanted to find that address. Well, it happened slightly differently. In the ‘50s and ‘60s construction debris had been transported to an empty meadow in our district until it covered an area about two kilometre square. The debris had been piled up about ten metre high and left there for nature to conquer it. It was called on maps – it still is – Cseri dump. To that time I write about grass, bushes, trees grew there. Over there lies the patch of woods I mentioned, and over the woods there is a new housing estate built on the meadow along our former living place, where some of our neighbours had been growing cabbage and green peas.
The dump had been occupied by homeless lately, who had built shacks and had turned the dirty environment even dirtier. A large pack of straying dogs had found there a good living. As soon as I reached their territory they were running to me and I would have been attacked had I not leave the area quickly. I have never ventured on that surrounding since. I made detour and along the highway I soon arrived where I wanted to get to. The address meant the centre of the housing estate, only it was not very easy to find. Almost ten years before I was looking for a house in Moscow, but certain parts of the city were arranged completely dissimilarly as that on my very fine map – or vice versa. Joe S. told me it was no incident, it was distraction made by intelligence. On that place something secret must have been. My problem was the same here as there was no order in the numbers of houses. At last a woman told me where it was: I almost stood in front of the house.
There were different firms shown on the glass door, but I thought I would ask again. It was the right place, only the woman I was introduced to said sorry she found her choice. But she said there was another person who was looking for somebody with linguistic skills. I was taken to a tall man with a stately black beard. He put me questions and said he was looking for someone who could translate articles in English and German trade journals into Hungarian. He told me it was a brand new enterprise and the place was transformed. I was given a German language journal and sent home to translate an article and to take it the next morning to them on a floppy. I did it and he said he would phone me about his decision.
He was quick to do it. I was hired. The next day I started my work, for the time being at home, because the realignment of the place hadn’t happen yet, but a week later I got my first place – at least four times it would be changed. I think it doesn’t harm if I give a short description of that working environment.
It involves again speaking about people from Transylvania, as my boss has been brought up in the town of Marosvasarhely (Tirgu Mures in Romanian) that is the Szekler capital. After the deceleration of the anti-dictator movements in Romania around 1993 he took his family (wife and two daughters) and came to Hungary to establish a living. His original occupation had been technician for woodworking, but his mind had always been very active and art had been his hobby, as well as publishing. Here he was derailed from them at first, as while looking for a job he answered an ad in cleaning, where he met another man (with no Transylvanian connection, however) and together they joined a small business. Soon they started their own one, but they had remained partners for a long time. It meant that, as that small firm had been owned by various people, all of them appeared sooner or later in my view.
Name of that man is Tibor Ritz. The other man is Stephen Seffer. Their company was a limited responsibility society (Kft. in Hungarian) and it was named after them: SERI Kft. It was a service company for buildings – i.e. cleaning. Around that time professional cleaning began to get its due segment within the service industry. T. and S. had been working hard (I can’t recollect to have someone more tough than these two men) and could rent an office and store, later have a few employees. Customers as hotels and offices learned their names and their company grew.
At the end of the ‘90s the cleaning sector in this country had experienced an extension and manufacturers of machines and devices were investing here. I remember another ad I answered before contacting T. that would have hired me immediately and have given me a training in their upright and deep-cleaning vacuum cleaners. A German manufacturer was looking for a representative – and possibly a subsidiary company – to sell as many machines as possible. The two new entrepreneurs together with one of their employees decided to extend their market by splitting their activity in three areas. Beside the mother company doing cleaning (and machine renting) they founded a firm for research, consultation and publishing, as well as a joint subsidiary of the German manufacturer.
They split their funds in three, T. became the owner of SERI where S. was named managing director, S. owned Futttar (the surplus letter t stood for ‘TisztaTerTechnologia’ meaning CleanSpaceTechnology, Futtar means otherwise messenger) with T. as managing director and the third companion, Andrea A. became the managing director in her firm owned by her and the Germans in equal parts. Her company was named after the mother German firm and got a Hungary tag after it.
It was she who placed the ad I answered. Fortunately for me, although she found the right person about half an hour before my arrival, T. needed a translator with a technical background and he was glad to find me. But it was me who was the real winner: at fifty eight a job is worth a lottery win with only one miss. The office has been situated in a suite of rooms with direct entrance on the ground floor. It consisted of a great space occupying the whole width of the 4-storey building with entrances on both the front and back sides, a middle-sized side-room and a smaller room, as well as a toilet and tea kitchen complex. The bigger side-room had been the office of the woman who moved into another similar office about a hundred meter farther.
After her moving out the place had been rearranged and refurnished. This action became also necessary because of an inconvenient accident during one night. It was my first Monday morning there, and as I arrived I saw a lot of cardboard boxes around the entrance on the pavement. A great bustle was going on. I learned that for two days already salvage was going on as during Saturday night – of course, Murphy can always select the best instances to make small problems bigger – a small water pipe had broken and until Sunday morning when S. had been alerted water was coming from the leaking. Water could not be deeper than a few inches as it flew out under the two doors, but boxes stored on the floor actually suffered. So did chipboard desks and shelves too. Well, after salvage everything was packed onto its old place, but it was decided that new cardboard was to be purchased and new furniture made. The tailoring work for them was to be done by S’s private workshop and his father. He has been living at the same housing estate where we had our first own flat with my wife.
My first desk was actually a shelf in a built-in bookshelf for the PC and monitor, as well as a small portable table for phones to put my keyboard on. It was difficult to spread the originals I was translating. Soon I was given a real desk and it was much better. With my first tasks done as fine as I could I earned the respect of T., my boss and also S., who had the same kind of diploma from engineering as I did, only it was involving machine tools. Before he established his own business with T., he was working in one of the factories of my former employer SZIM as an NC lathe operator.
The office was extremely crowded even after A. A. moved out. SERI had several foremen – better to say forewomen – who were not working there, because they organized work for their crews, but still it was their working place. The firm’s manager S. and his secretary Vera had their desks there and were present almost constantly. Also a salesperson for acquiring more customers for the company, sat there. There was someone to answer telephone calls and switch them to the right person. She was Monika, a blind girl with a large German shepherd. Her employment was advantageous for S. because of some regulation. She was very skilled in topics of earlier PCs and we always asked for her help when needed. Her boyfriend was blind too, they understood each-other well. She used a special software that turned written text into audio and, as it sounded strange, we said M. was teaching her parrot to speak.
T. had the bigger side-room for himself. His wife Kate was sitting somewhere that was free she didn’t have any fix place. There was Susan for typing work and she operated the only laser printer. And there was Leslie, who was another Transylvanian and came only once every month and remained about a week. As for where he slept during that period I was uninformed for a long time. Later we became close, almost friends, but I always felt that he had his self-esteem very high. When we met first he checked all my translations very thoroughly as if he hadn’t been sure I was up to my task. It changed soon, but he retained his upper hand behaviour.
L. was living in the town his ancestors moved to about a century before. That time Hungary had about four times as large area as it has today. His relatives were still living in the present Hungary around Debrecen. He has already been born in a country where people speaking the same mother tongue as he were considered a minority, sometimes even an unwanted one. But descendants of the three million Hungarians having been cut away in a foreign land – they still number about two million – has adopted well to minority fate and have been living as if in their own country. He finished his schools and became a creative artist with a good name in both countries. He also did computer graphics and became skilled in graphics edition for printing. For T. he did just that.
That summer was very hot and we were suffering, I myself in two senses. First, from heat. It can destroy one’s ability to work, performance will go down. But for me there was another ordeal, draught. I am very sensitive to it and I gave up long ago trying to convince people who aren’t how dangerous it is for the human organism. Until fall came I was in a very bad state of health. All the same, I did a lot of translation both from English and German trade journals and various other texts T. wanted me to translate.
As the summer heat gave way T. and L. began to manufacture our new furniture. They began with making S. cut the chipboard plates into the necessary shapes, then razed almost all of the old pieces. As the office became empty, they took pieces of wall-to-wall carpet left over after laying carpet at various customers and covered the floor with them. The original had been eliminated after the flood. It resulted in a fine merry pattern like in a nursery. It was surprising for someone who saw it first, but we soon became accustomed to it. The new furniture consisted of built-in bookshelves not damaged by water and brand new desks and working and conference tables. It could not have been denied that the pieces were the creation of artists. There was not a right angle in them and all were tailored to the environment there. For himself T. chose chipboard of a fine pattern and his office looked really elegant. For a certain time all went on this way.
That summer was memorable for me for the solar eclipse too. In Budapest it was about 5% short of total, but at the southern parts of the country it was total eclipse. It happened in August, T. let us observe this phenomenon from the free space in front of the office. My previous experience of such kind was during my student years, we had been watching the round disc of the sun on the wall where I projected it with my lens, as the moon was taking it and its shine became less and less. This time, however, every one was watching it alone though black glass pieces.