I, like many other people in the world, still remember where I was when I first heard of the Twin Tower terror attacks when two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City.
It was September 11 in 2001 and I was on my way to the boarding school in Mezökovácsháza from Békéscsaba where I was learning to ride a 50cc scooter.
The village, another tongue twister, Medgyesegyháza, where I was born is halfway between these two cities so I decided to get off the train and pop home to say hi to my father.
On good days, when he wasn’t drunk we would have some interesting conversations so I was hoping it would be another chat about the day’s driving.
Instead, he was steaming drunk and half unconscientious on the sofa at my grandmother’s former home, with the TV in front of him blearing out the news about the Twin Towers in New York City. I had a couple of hours until the next train so I decided to stick around to watch the news.
I remember the Hungarian commenter saying there may have been as many as 50,000 people in the tower, which is how many people they could accommodate at full capacity. Obviously, since then we know the real number of casualities was thankfully much lower, but at the time when nobody knew anything they were basically plucking numbers out of thin air.
It was around 4PM at the time in Hungary which would have been just about an hour after the first plane struck the World Trade Center. I tried waking my father up but by then he completely passed out so I gave up. I had to get going in about an hour because I had to be back for dinner, so I headed out for the train station.
Before I left I decided to look back and say goodbye to him, although I am pretty sure he did not hear it in his state. He was watching the TV at my granny’s place who had already passed away by then but my father kept the house as it was only next door to ours.
It was where he grew up with his brother, mother and father, all of whom had already died by then.
But back to the story of making sure to say goodbye to him. A few years earlier, when I went home to our own house in the same street after an evening of watching TV I looked back to see what my uncle was up to but he was facing the other direction, towards the wall, so I decided not to say goodbye to him.
The next morning I woke to a woman screaming her head off and banging on our window, asking for my father to rush over to my grandmother’s place where my uncle lived. It turned out he hanged himself very early in the morning, so that last glance was the very last in my life I saw him alive.
I felt terrible for not saying goodbye, or at least going back to ask him how he was. Maybe he just needed to talk to someone, anyone, but I was a kid and I never thought that I would never see him again. It was in 1997 and I made sure to say goodbye to my granny and father every time we parted for whatever reason, just in case that would be the last time we see each other.
So I turned around and had a last good look at my father and told him I was leaving, then left for the train station.
By the time I got to the boarding school everyone was talking about the terror attacks and the teachers allowed us to skip the evening study class and watch the news instead.
It was a complete shock to everyone and we did not really understand what was going on…
Anyhow, the next day we had to go back to school and carry on life as usual.
Unfortunately, my life was never going to be the same again following the terror attacks.
On Friday, as the week was over I got the train home at 4PM and went to see my father over at my grandmother’s place, but I could not find him. I went to look in the garden but he was not there.
It was not unusual for him to disappear, normally he would be in the pub getting drunk, or passed out in the garden or talking to his lawyers who were suing the hospital for him where my mother passed away giving birth to my youngest brother.
It was a caesarian section and the doctors completely botched it. My brother survived but my mother did not. After the funeral the family pretty much fell apart. I stayed with my father, while my mother’s brother and his wife adopted my baby brother. My eldest brother was living with my maternal grandmother 40 miles away and my second brother and sister both only came home for weekends. They eventually moved in with my maternal grandmother, so I was the only one staying at my father’s place, in the same street with my paternal grandmother.
She died in January 2001 from natural causes, she was 75 years old. My father was basically completely alone by then, his father died in 1985, wife in 1992, brother in 1997 and his mother in 2001.
I stayed with him because that was where I grew up, and I did not really know anything else, at the end of the day I was only 7 and I did not enjoy staying at my maternal grandmother’s place that much. Problem is, all the tragedies in my father’s life, the drinking and taking prescription drugs unfortunately fried his brain and he had paranoid skizophrenia.
That meant it was often like hell living with him as he hardly ever trusted anything anyone said or did. Even when you said something, he would cross question you and try and dig out some kind of an answer, another story between the lines.
It was pretty hard work with him and even when he was sober he would turn the radio or TV on full blast to annoy the neighbours. He did that because he considered himself a democrat, a freedom fighter against the communist who filled the street. This actually landed him in prison as a subversive.
In Hungary you either belonged to the party and worked at a state-run institute, or you were classed as a “maszek”, a private investor who ran his own business. Strange as it sounds, by the 1970s private enterprises were legal in communist Hungary, although the state would never promote anyone that owned its own business. Business people were sort of outcasts, but they did pretty well.
My father owned several acres of land and various houses with huge gardens where he would grow trees, shrubs and vegetables. He would take the vegetables to the market or sell it to the agriculture co-op. The trees and shrubs were in huge demand, sometimes co-ops would come from across the country to buy his trees. So, they were doing pretty well.
On the other hand, my father’s uncle was a founding member of the local communist party branch and he had insider knowledge about land confiscations and everything else. So, before the state cofiscated my grandfather’s land, he convinced my grandfather to buy his own land from him, without telling his own brother that the communists would confiscate it within weeks (without compensation of course). When that happened my grandfather completely broke down and never recovered, eventually committing suicide in 1985.
The same uncle later reported my father for listening to Radio Free Europe loudly in the garden, which was a crime punishable by prison. Ergo, they locked my father up and he only managed to get out when the president pardoned him after the fall of the Iron Curtain!
My father’s annual income after which had to pay tax in the early 1980’s was about 120,000 forint, which was an astronomical sum compared to a state salary. At the time, a loaf of bread was 1 forint and the same for milk and other consumables.
He also had two cars, not only one, which was also quite unheard of at the time and they started to build a bigger house in 1983.
Unfortunately, he started drinking when the builders brought the beer to the house and then everything started to go downhill from there. By 1992 when my mother died he was on at least 10 bottles of beer 5 liters) a day and then he had a nervous breakdown when my mother passed away.
They prescribed him the strongest anti-depressents but if you drank on them then it basically fried your brain.
And, sadly, my father would not give up drinking. That’s exactly what he was doing that ominous Friday, 9/11 in 2001 when I got home from High School. He was at home drinking heavily and when he saw me he started screaming at me asking me why I piled up a large amount of leaves in the middle of the garden?
It was September, so the previous weekend I started to work in the garden to clear out the weeds and make it look nicer, ready for the winter. I really enjoyed gardening and the plan was to burn the leaves the next weekend. Then came the 9/11 terror attacks!
Because I piled the leaves in the garden my father started thinking in his twisted way that I must have been getting ready to signal to the terrorists where to fly next.
Above our house is the international flight path between western Europe and the Middle East and Asia, so there are regular flights above us almost every ten minutes.
So, he said it was my plan all along to get a plane fly into our house, ultimately killing him! No matter what I said, it just did not matter – he had it in his head and that was it.
I remembered, one time we visited my grandmother (his mother) in hospital, not long before she died, and when we got home I made dinner and my favourite pudding which I thought would make my father happy. Instead, he got home drunk and told me he wouldn’t touch the food because it must have been laced with poison as my maternal grandmother probably hired me to kill him.
That was his usual kind of thinking. But this time, with the terrorists and all he went one step too far and told me that he would kill me right there if I did not get out at once!
I told him to fuck off and get out of my way, but he was blocking the door and would not let me past.
I was so disappointed. Although it may sound like a “soft” word, I think this is best to describe my situation on that day. I was really looking forward to getting home from High School and doing my gardening project that weekend and perhaps going to the market with my father in the neighbouring town. Instead, here I was, fighting with this alcoholic nutcase to let me in to play on my computer and to forget about this whole argument.
Sadly, that was not to be. Instead of giving up, he got a knife out and threatened to kill me for real. I thought he must have gone completely bonkers and told him to do it if he really wanted to! He then started shouting at me even louder, saying I was an agent of the terrorists, the communists and that I was spying on him for my maternal grandmother and my brothers and sister.
Never mind that they hardly spoke to me for the same reason, as in they thought I was spying on them for my father. They actually had a grudge against me: my father wrote a will and disowned them and wanted to leave everything to me.
He said I was the only son he really loved and that I was the only person that deserved his money because I stayed with him in good and bad times. I was the only person that visited him in hospital when he fell off the bicycle drunk and broke his shoulder, I was the one that cooked for him and cleaned his clothes and kept him company when nobody else listened.
Yet, here we were standing in front of each other with him holding a huge knife in his hand, ready to stab me. I never understood this dual personality he had, but I guess that is what drinking and drugs do to your brain.
That knife, I will never forget it, was so huge that I once told my grandmother it could be used as a sword by a praetorian in the Caesar’s palace. I was so thin it could have stabbed right through me three times, which I told her when we were having dinner once. We actually used that knife to slice bread as it was stainless steel and quite sharp. She told me to stop saying stupid things like that, but I showed it to her, and I put the knife next to my belly and pointed out I was correct. That’s when that knife left her house and my father hid it in our house in the same street.
And it was the same knife he wanted to use to kill me. We were standing there for a while, shouting all sorts of expletives at each other when I told him he did not need to kill me, I would do it for him. I don’t know if I was bluffing or not, but I was very angry and I pushed past him and locked myself into the kitchen. I wedged a chair between the door and the fridge so he could not get in and then turned the radio on so I would not hear him shouting.
By then of course he panicked and told me to stop doing whatever I was doing, he did not want me to die. I told him to fuck right off and to let me finish what he started. He started kicking on the door but he could not open it, but eventually managed to push his arm through a small opening and move the chair.
He was begging me to not do anything stupid, telling me the spies would come and save my life anyway, no matter what I do. All I could tell him was to fuck right off and I was screaming at him by then.
So, eventually he shut up and we were both standing there in silence, with only the radio making some noise.
I don’t remember how much time passed like this, but after a while a song came on the radio. It was Titiyo’s Come Along.
I barely spoke any English, in fact, no English, but I understood that sentence. Now that I speak English fluently, I understand what the song is actually about, which makes it even more poignant.
It felt like a divine intervention at the time, like God telling me to leave and come along to a better place. At that moment I decided to leave him, my home and never come back. As my father was standing there I looked him in the eye and told him this was the last time he messed around with me, I was leaving him.
With that, I walked out, nothing in my hand just my vallet and phone in the pocket and headed to the nearest bus stop, ready to go over to my brother’s place 40 miles away.
By then he got married and moved in with his wife and he took me in to their spare room where I stayed for the next year and a half until I moved to Ireland.
In the meantime, my father begged me to come back home and live with him again because he said he loved me, but I stood my ground and told him I had enough of the abuse.
A month and a half later I heard from the village doctor that he fell off the bike again and broke his other shoulder, so I visited him in hospital to check on him. He was there in the hospital where my mother died and he said he was very afraid they would kill him for suing them.
By then I had had enough of his stupid stories, and did not even bother to tell him to just shut up about it. Instead, I went to the shop and got him a warm pyjama because he was cold all the time, a few bottles of juice and some biscuits, then sat with him for about an hour to deliver some bad news.
While he was in hospital the gypsies in the village broke into my grandmother’s house and took the TV, the furniture and some money which totally devastated him. Clearly, he just wanted to go home to check on the place, but the doctors would not let him out.
That was the last time I saw him – with all the panic in his eyes and desparation to go home. I told him it was not possible and that he needed to calm down and get better before he left the hospital. He started crying and grabbed my hand, begging me to come back home with him but I had to tell him the same I told him when we were in the kitchen: I would never move back with him.
I told him I am going to visit him and see how he is doing, but I cannot put up with his daily abuse any more.
The next week I was planning to visit him but other things took over and the following week the village notary called my brother to ask about my father because nobody had seen him in days.
My brother had no idea what my father was up to so he phoned me to check on him, but by then the last train had already gone so I could not go home.
In retrospect I was very fortunate I had missed the train: the notary went out to do a site visit and had to break in with the police to find my father hanging in the corner…he hanged himself above his bed onto the gas pipe, one week before my birthday on 21 December.
The pathology report told us he wanted to be sure to die: he first drank a very strong poison that dissolved the cup and ate through the table, then he put the noose around his neck and died a few days before they found him.
I am very greatful I missed the train, it is not something I would have liked to see myself. Now, I am nearly 34 years old and he kicked me out 17 years ago, so it is kind of a turning point in my life. From here on I will have lived more than half my life away from the place where I was born and trying to build a life for myself.
It also means the terror attacks in New York were exactly half a lifetime ago for me.
In 2016 I actually managed to visit the site of the destruction and see for myself what it is that completely changed my life. I did not pay to visit the museum as it was expensive, but seeing the waterfalls and memorials outside was a very interesting feeling.
I can’t even imagine how those people felt/feel when the planes flew into the towers, but in a way that moment also indirectly completely changed my life too.
And why am I writing this now? Should I not just keep something so shocking private without posting it here for the whole world to see?
I have thought about it quite a lot, but what gave me the final push was a couple of programs on TV this week. One of them is Hollyoaks, in which the alcoholic father keeps arguing with his son, who I thought was in the same shoes as I was those 17 years ago.
Seeing those arguments, although sometimes through pretty bad acting, made me remember my own arguments with my father and how we never managed to make “truce”.
The Office for National Statistics also published its latest report into suicides in the UK, and how people deal with it. A couple of months ago I listened to another program in the USA while driving in the Midwest and a recording of that program reminded me of my experience with suicide in the family and how I have dealt with it.
On these two programs about suicide I heard from people sharing their feelings and emotions, explaining what hurt it caused them to lose a loved one.
While sometimes I might talk about my experience very casually, it was not always “easy” but I learned to cope with it. What helped me most was to talk about these things and share my feelings with people that cared to listen. Which is my best advice to everyone dealing with suicide: seek help and talk to someone about your feelings – it will surely help.
So, I thought I would write this down here in case someone else might find it helps them to overcome their grief and open up a little more than before.
Finally, it is Rosh Ha’shanah today, and although I cannot tell my father, I hope he knows somehow that I have forgiven him. All the things he had gone through his life must have completely broken him and he probably wasn’t aware of the hurt he was causing when he was drunk.
Now that it is nearly the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers, I thought it might be a poignant reminder that it did not only affect the lives of New Yorkers, but a lot of other people around the world, including myself.
Fortunately I did OK for myself and managed to build a good life with the help of friends, so if you need help just open up a bit and talk to your friends.