The following is atrue story. Some of the names have been changed for privacy reasons. The story spans over 30 years and it is a detailed account of my life.


As I might have told you, I have a dad with a controversial personality. On the one hand he had learnt several western languages from books and took his family out of the iron curtain during an era when this was a remarkable feat, on the other hand he was an excessively strict father and a bad husband.

I have a brother who is 7 years older than me. A month after I was born, the family moved to Iran due to dads work. He is a telecom engineer. Iran which was a rather Americanized country at the time (before the Ayatollah Khomeini and his Iranian revolution).

I do not know that at what age did you start visiting Hungary , but you know during commie times it was a rather uniform country. There were perhaps three different types of cars and maybe four different color choices. If you wanted to buy one then you had to spend an amount equal to thirty years average salary and conform to being put on five-year waiting list. The best you could get was a low grade Soviet copy of an Italian Fiat called Lada. Believe or not but that car had a Mercedes status. What most people drove were East German Trabbants; two stroke engine scooters on four wheels with a body made of glued compressed paper (no joke). Probably the Ford T model was more advanced and certainly safer. The term average salary did not really apply here since everybody was! making the same regardless of position or education. People dressed the same, and the selection of consumer goods was very narrow. Unemployment was not an issue since if you did not work you were locked up. There were no western films and definitely no freedom of expression. The entire country was in the hands of the Communist Party Inc. Their brand logo –The Red Star- was everywhere from the modified coats of arms of the country trough the kindergarten walls to the graveyard entrances. The CP Inc was not answerable to God because they did not believe in one. They could do as they pleased as long as they behaved in line with the interests of the Kremlin.

You have to understand that for an east block citizen to make it to the west in the hard commie years was comparable to an illiterate Harlem resident who makes a fortune in an honest way and buys a condo in Fiji . An essentially no chance mission impossible dream come true.

So we moved to Iran , my mom was young beautiful and happy. Iran at the time was an oil rich gulf state allied to The US. It was a Persian America , shopping malls with built in swimming pools and ice-skating facilities an overflow of goods , a floor heated villa made of Persian white marble to live in, ski resorts in the Elborz mountains and wonderful retreats at the Caspian Sea. I remember those myriad little white shells on the Caspian Sea shore ……. So there we were we a kid of seven (my bro) and a little toddler (me). The most we had in Hungary at the time were people ! making queues for luxury items such as oranges and bananas. The trouble was that my brother not only had to learn at the American School of Teheran but also had to comply with the Hungarian curriculum which included Russian and advanced maths among many other subjects just because my father wanted him to do so. My father actually forced my brother not only by action but also by causing spiritual remorse if he did not comply with his absurd academic requirements. This was obviously too much for my brother. A seven year old kid who had to study 12 hours a day for years without end. When we came back behind the iron curtain after several years of free world life and travels, my brother became a rebel adolescent (he was in that age anyway). A rebel against communism and certainly a rebel against the excesses of my father which ranged from nonsense academic expectations, d! irecting his family by causing remorse in case of non compliance, to a Catholicism based on the idea of an avenger god, punishment, burning hell and chastity.

When I was nine and my brother sixteen we took off again and this time landed in Naranja , Parador . Well, this was quite a change again. The same rags to riches Luxury switch as in Teheran but this time in Latin American style. From gray communism and a small flat in a Russian engineered block house to the coast of the cyan blue Pacific, Country Club memberships in two different clubs, trips to different countries in Latin America and Europe, a good car, and a Penthouse with individual rooms to everybody plus an afro servant. To give you an idea of the change in life standard our living room was probably bigger than our entire Hungarian home. Our neighbor’s butler used to work for Cristina Onassis before he came to Latin America . Where we lived was essentially the Latino clone of Beverly Hills .

My mom was still young, really happy but unfortunately my dad could not get rid of his prison guard role. Now my brother was sixteen and this time becoming really rebellious. You see we were both going to a private school where kids of my brother age were driving cars and going after girls. Quite naturally my brother also wanted to perform the usual adolescent “cruise in a car and mate” rituals. Just to give you an idea on how extreme my dads behavior was, he forbade my brother to wear jeans and jogging shoes on grounds that “a gentleman is not supposed to dress like that”. This may sound ridiculous and incomprehensible, buts that’s the way it was. Not to mention the fact that according to my father sexual desires (strongly omnipresent in every teenager) and sex outside marriage is a sin and therefore a one ! way ticket to eternal hell.

My brother was begging my dad to let him drive the company car or to let him go to driving school. My dad of course, refused. “ Such a luxury “ no way ! he said.
After my brother passed the high school exam my dad put him to a private University to study economics. Well, in the first place he did not even ask my brother whether he wanted to study economics or not, secondly the language of instruction was Spanish and I am not sure if my father himself could have made it at the Uni. yet he expected my brother not only to learn at advanced institution with his weak Spanish but also to excel. My brother had no alternative either the Uni. or going back to Hungary to start serving a 2.5 year military service in the Red Army. He was too afraid to tell my father that he does not care about economics and that he does not want to learn there. So he ! kept silent for several months and did not go to the Uni. at all, while his remorse and fear constantly grew (it was an expensive private school). When the truth came to light my Mom begged my father to give my brother another chance which he got after a rather dull sermon but it was too late.
All those years of wrong fatherly role and the extra distress of several months preceding dads sermon took their toll, my poor brother suffered a nervous breakdown. In this broken down state my brother took away dad’s car in the middle of the night and drove away.

He was in a bad state; had no driving routine, no driving license after and fooling around, he finally crashed the car in front of our school. He got hit in his head, became amnesiac and ran away again.

I remember that the next morning the only thing that I noticed was that my mother was bitterly crying. I asked her whets wrong. She told me that there was “big trouble”.

Well, I did not take her seriously and went to school as usual. In front of the school I noticed a car of the same color and make as ours turned upside down with its wheels to the sky. I did not realize it was our car and said to myself what a pity. When I entered the school patio an avalanche of kids came over me, excitedly telling me about what happened.
A couple of days later my brother was still missing I got a phone call from the police that they have captured my brother, as he wanted to steal a car from a showroom.

We went to the indicated police station. I actually saw my brother in small dark stinking, cramped cell. His belt and his shoelaces were taken away and he was surrounded by real heavy-duty criminals. I do not want to tell you how a Latin American prison looks from the inside; I leave it to your fantasy. I remember I went out to the backyard of the Police station to where our car was transported. It was a beautiful moonlit tropical night… A soft salty breeze was coming from the Pacific mixed with the heavy sweet scent of magnolias. The pieces of the shattered windshield were sparkling like a thousand diamonds… and those bloodstained like rubies…

When I got back I saw my big brother lying unconsciously on a table. Unlike me he is a born athlete very tall even according to European standards. Imagine two-meter tall young boy built like a rugby player lying like Gulliver. A nurse gave him injection while all those Latino Lilliputians around where swarming around him, they were trying to lift him so that the waiting ambulance car could take him away but he was too big and heavy. Finally they put a blanket under him and literally rolled him over. He was like a rolling, snoring fallen Oak tree trunk.

When we went for visit him at a clinic could watch him form an observation room half buried in ground. He was moving in the fashion of those early divers did in their brass diving gear 100 meters under water. Somebody conducted him, he could visibly barely move. A Psychiatrist and a male nurse were flown to Lima from Budapest . The Shrink was a she and a childhood acquaintance of my Mom.

The shrink and the nurse were enchanted by the equatorial environment, so enchanted that they were like meat eating rabbits put on Viagra. It was hard not to hear their ecstatic grunts at two clock in the corning coming from bro.’s empty room, which they occupied.

My mom and my brother were sent back to Budapest accompanied by the shrink and the male nurse via Havana and Moscow . This was done on orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party so that my mom could not defect with my brother. My mom had/ has a brother who is a Stanford University professor of Gynecology, who offered us asylum in the states. The party knew his existence. M y coward father did not accept the proposition of his brother in law, what’s more he opted to protect his “career” so he agreed to tear apart the family. He servility gave all our passports to the Ambassador who locked the documents in! the embassy safe. The Ambassador was a guy called William Berak. Billy boy started his career as a member of the workers guard. The Workers Guard was the Praetorian Guard of The Communist Party modeled after Nazi Germany’s “Sturm Abteilung” or Storm Troopers. Only the most reliable people could join their ranks. Murderous predisposition was prerequisite. Even their uniforms were Nazi like gray outfits the only difference being that in the place of the swastika there was a red star… The Workers Guard was the rapid reaction force of the CP. They were the only people who were allowed to keep weapons at home (kalashnhikov machine guns) and just as in Nazi times they had a glass phial containing cyanide sewn into their neck of their shirts in case of need. Most guard members were civilian cab drivers so that they could be swiftly mobilized. Berak’s major asset however was his Russian wife who looked like a wooden doll come alive. Probably! met her in the Soviet Union during a Workers Guard military training. A short fifty something women weighing a ton and dressed like a ten-year-old cutie with two sweet pony tails and a heavy make up. At some point in his career Berak worked in Castro’s Cuba as the driver of a military attaché where he managed to pick up some Spanish. Because of this unusual sign of intelligence he was later made ambassador after completing a one-year doctoral program in Marxism –Leninism at a night school. His only prior training was an elementary school and his workers guard assassin bootcamp.



I stayed with my father in Naranja while my mom was dispatched to Budapest with my brother. I was 11…
Mom and Bro. had to board an Aeroflot (Soviet airliner) plane, which was taking back an entire crew of a Soviet State Fisheries Vessel to Moscow . Those poor bastards were driven right to the plane on a Soviet embassy bus whose windows were painted black so that they could see nothing from capitalism. Despite the two KGB officers on board (standard personnel on all Aeroflot planes leaving the evil empire) a minor pandemonium erupted above the Atlantic when after two permanent years in the high seas without Vodka and women those primitive animals boozed at last with Russian rocket fuel grade beverages tried to harass the stewardesses. Some of them ended up with broken limbs and jaws, expertly handcuffed by the KGB. The Hungarian male nurse who was there because of my brother was desperately! trying to properly fix their dislocated, bleeding and broken members. Because he could not do so due to lack of medical equipment he injected them unconscious with his vast supply of sedatives. A police car was waiting at Sheremethevo airport. The badly behaved fishermen were taken down in the most sadistic way. One of them was kicked down the plane ladder. God knows what happened to them afterwards.


As I later heard Mom, Bro. and their entourage arrived to 1981 Moscow completely exhausted and dirty because a Russian vomited over them during the incident. They were taken to a five star hotel were they were given a room without heating in full Russian winter. A “dejournaja” (female floor supervisor) came to their room and frantically opened their suitcases grabbing their clothes offering rubles for whatever they were willing to sell. Icicles were hanging in the bathroom. By that time the vomit from the plane had crystallized on their clothes from the cold. Luckily somebody from the Hungarian embassy in Moscow helped them out.



The separation lasted a year and a half, and the bad features of my father became even worse. After mom went back to Budapest with my Brother her whole envious family turned her back on her. She was too proud to ask for money. My dad did not send him a cent; it simply “did not occur to him”- were his words when I asked him many years later-. From a Latin American Country Club Senora status with a servant suddenly Mom became the lowliest servant herself in the meanest jobs in Hungary , behind the iron curtain with a sick kid. You see since all jobs were state provided where ever you went your personal file went with you. Once the potential employer read Moms file which contained everything from blood group to spouse’s education was noted she was thrown out. Her file read: Occupation of the Husband: Working in Latin America in a capitalist country. They thought Mom was a whimsical high society woman After all can you imagine Ivana Trump begging for a janitors position?

A year and a half passed and mom came back to Naranja . Bro stayed in Budapest.

By the time she came back she was totally alcoholic.

I remember that when she came back I was not happy. Although I missed her, I became used to live without her. When dad and mom got together again, after a period of time I became anxious or more properly said neurotic. I became introverted and my grades were falling. In school the teachers presumed that I was a drug addict. This was not the case; it was the effect of the constant circus my parents lived in. My mom was drinking heavily and was constantly accusing my father who in turn was accusing her. I was feeling bad and I did not know why. As a thirteen-year-old I supposed that it must be my fault since I started to have strong sexual desires and discovering the natural joys of onanistic self-satisfying. I simply supposed that this is Gods punishment for my sinful thoughts and acts. A kid believes every nonsense his father tells him and I was no ex! emption. I took the extreme catholic ideas of burning hell of my father for granted and without criticism. At one point I got so anxious that my temperature went up and I stayed at home for two weeks. I felt terribly bad and confused. When I told the doctor what my problems were he nearly laughed. Looking back it was a comic thing but certainly it wasn’t then. I felt bad because mom was drinking like hell.


At the end of 1984 when I was fourteen and a half we came back to the workers paradise, to the same small Russian engineered flat we left. Apart from the deeply troubled family life the switch of lifestyle alone was punishing. Those flats where made according to the precepts of Soviet Sociology. Family was a decadent bourgeois entity to be destroyed. Those ugly gray concrete slab card Houses were constructed to achieve this end. The flats were small and designed on purpose to disrupt family life, the rooms were arranged so that there was no privacy. Kitchens were super small, to avoid a gathering activity like a common meal. Commie subjects were supposed to eat in the factory canteen. Those prison like houses had central heating so that if people rebelled they could be freezed (at least in wintertime). No storage room to prevent ! storing larger quantities of food (useful in a revolt). No sound insulation. You could hear pretty well what was going on in the contiguous flat. Those flats were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. If the elevator stopped the walls vibrated. The vertical wall junctions cracked open due to the heat / cold dilatation problems where the wind could and did blow through. I had to fill the cracks with a rubber like substance. These ugly gray monolithic prison and beehive structures still dominate the skyline of the ex block countries from Latvia to former East Germany .

By that time mom had been a heavy drinker for more than two years. Her drinking pattern was the following:
One day she gulped down an entire bottle of 750 cc of vodka and the next day she was sober, the following day another bottle and so on…

When She was sober I was not supposed to know that the day before she was polluted or that the next they she will be drunk again. When she was drunk, she was beside herself: aggressive, mean and tragic.

In the years that followed she kept on drinking in the one day on-another day off mode. Sometimes terrible scenes happened. On one occasion a neighbor came to me saying that mom presumably suicided. I saw my mom lying on the floor: The floor was a cheap green plastic and it contrasted heavily with the puddle of Mom’s own blood she was lying in. At the end it turned out that mom fell off and hurt herself.

There were other nasty and embarrassing scenes, remember the beach in Balaton Aliga? One night I found my mom lying at the side of a waste bin, totally drunk. The waste bin was tumbled and the waste was pouring over mom. This happened during one of those wonderful Balaton sunsets on the beach in front of the buffet, and everybody could see her……. All my friends and all the people who knew me……..

On other occasions I had to collect her from one of the many wine cellars on the Aliga hillside. She only drank wine when she could not get stronger stuff. Once a hillside neighbour told me that mom stole their Palinka (Hungarian Vodka).

When I demanded my father to put an end to this situation his stoic response was that he cannot do anything and that We must wait until mom, lets say collapses and then she will be taken to a hospital. What an asshole! So much about a devout and loving husband.

I also have to tell you that besides my mom, I also had other problems. When we came back form Peru I was put into school right before midterm. At that time I was thinking in Spanish although I could speak Hungarian well and despite I knew all the “word labels” attached to things, I needed a couple of seconds to catch up with their meaning. Besides linguistic problems the teaching of non-humanistic, non-political subjects was very strong in Hungary . I am speaking about maths , physics, chemistry and the rest. They could not teach let’s say history in depth because the regime would not allow it, so they compensated in other areas.

In the first midterm I simply flunked all the above subjects + Hungarian grammar. From then on I was put in the “idiot” category so to speak. I had to repeat the year.
Although I am not an impolite person I was not liked in school. I suppose they were envious because I had lived so many years in the west. They thought I was a spoiled rich kid and assumed that we were keeping gold ingots at home. I did not care to inform them about battlefield home.

On top of that when I turned twelve I started to grow at a very fast pace. I became very thin and my posture became arched. Kids can be very cruel. I remember that back in Lima they made a chant at the rhythm of the Can-Can and they sang it standing around me “Ivan Teine una jiba, .. una jiba” which means that Ivan has a hunch in his back. My nickname was “Quasimodo” or “Quasi” for short.

I still was like that when we came back to Hungary , the girls were telling me things like that I should swallow a sausage across. It was a humiliating experience. Well, I was not doing well in school, certainly was not athletic and had to live in constant fear for my Mom.
My father was threatening me that if my school grades did not improve he would put me in a vocational school or to work in a factory.
I remember that he put newspaper advertisements in the pocket of my coat in which vacant positions in factories were advertised. These were his ways.

The turn came when at sixteen I discovered sports, more precisely doing weights. In just three months of protein rich diet and fanatic bodybuilding exercises I managed to increase my body weight by twenty pounds and suddenly from thin bony Ivan turned into the strongman of the class. I was so desperate to get stronger and more masculine that I went into the library of the University of Physical education and read theses on nutrition of heavy athletes. Bodybuilding officially did not exist “ a capitalist aberration” as they called it. I emulated those nutritional protocols the best I could. The recipe was to eat high protein foods every three hours to maximize digestive capacity and preferably in a liquefied form. Since there were no avail! able protein powders as today I went to a meat plant and purchased industrial grade protein additives, which I mixed with eggs and goat milk. The mixture was so thick that a spoon stood almost still in it. It resembled more like a gel than a shake. I went on drinking well rather forcedly swallowing that disgusting mixture regularly every three hours for several months.. I also mixed some calcium powder and the only brand of off the counter vitamin pill available at that time. The gym was primitive by western standards the training gear were home made copies of equipment seen in western bodybuilding magazines smuggled into the country. Handweights were made in a turners shop and because they were oxidized with thin layer of rust you had to use leather gloves to train. The only pro equipment were Olympic weightlifting sets discarded after international weightlifting competitions. But the overall effect was wonderful. Besides the gym I was going to was full of questionable but essentially happy people. They were the Hungarian underworld gypsies, small time thieves and hit men of the sort who had to be big and strong because of their profession's requirements. A bunch of overgrown kids in Gorilla skin completely disrespectful of any authority pumping iron at the rhythm of Stallone’s Rocky or Olivia Newton John’s Lets Get Physical. They were also notorious womanizers. Relating with these people was an extremely positive experience. After gloomy home and bleak communism these people were filled with life and energy. I also have to say that they had given me a lot of emotional support. They gave me a macho cocky feeling probably they were the only free-minded people in the police state of that time.
Whenever I felt bad about mom or school I simply went for a workout. I was so keen on improving my looks that I regularly went to a sand mine which was close to the Danube. At weekends there was no mining activity and the Danube water filtered trhough forming a crystal clear lake among white sand dunes. the closest thing to the ocean I left behind. I went there as early as mid march and spent the day sun tanning in a wind protected area. I was listening to music with my walkman and seeing the water with half closed eyelids. I could easily make me beleive I was back on the pacific coast. On monday morning I would go to school with a summer suntan.

The other turn came when at the age of 18 while still in high school I started to work as an interpreter. First in Spanish and then in English. This meant working at the side of Big 5 auditors, CEOs and sometimes heads of state. You know limos, elegant hotels, closed government mansions restaurants high up places etc. I think that this period was the prime of my self-confidence in my life so far. I was making 100 bucks per day in a country where the average monthly wage was 150, dressed up in good clothes and doing brainwork. This last feature was especially important to me since it proved that I can't possibly be an idiot. (Contrary to what I had to hear at home from my father and at school without end). At that time in two days I made more than my English teacher did in a month that by the way wanted to fl! unk me. At last I was no more a Quasimodo, no more an imbecile and had plenty of honestly self made bucks! By this time after 6 years of consecutive weight training I was so strong and muscular that I could pick up a hundred pound dumbbell with my left hand and lift it above my head and extend my arm. Just like the Charles Atlas, with one notable difference however: Charles Atlas trained himsef in 7 days while it took me more than 6 years.

By the time I was twenty one I figured out that It is far more comfortable to make other people work instead of interpreting on my own. I registered myself as a small entrepreneur (in the meantime communism started to collapse and private business started to boom) and made use of the contacts I had and the language speaking people I knew of. This was also the time when I had my first girlfriend. I had met her in Lake Balaton Aliga where her family also had a summerhouse. She was a German major at the University in Southern Hungary , and she had the idea that I should join her in the same College. I applied in the spring and was accepted. I was bound to start in the fall. In the meantime my girlfriend took up philosophy at the University and at the same time went to Germany with a scholarship (her first time in the west). When she came back after three months she dumped me for an imbecilic asshole with thick glasses and august ways of self expression who she deemed as a deep philosophical intellectual. You know she was the short brunette who you have also met in Lake Balaton Akali.

Unfortunately my Mom was still drinking according to her on-off pattern like hell and father did not do anything about it.

In the summer of 1991 in Balaton Akali mom went on to drink heavier than usual and I could do nothing about it. My ex girlfriend was also in town, which was not a particularly uplifting experience. So I did more sport than usual and apart from lifting weight I also ran a lot to be able to endure the situation. I became overstrained and lost like 25- 30 pounds of bodyweight in just 2 months.

The fall came and I had to go to the University. Mom was still drinking heavily and my Father was telling me that I better look for some income while I study (I know that he had a job that paid enough so this was not necessary). At the College I regularly saw my ex-girlfriend who treated me with a snobbish intellectual disdain. She was showing off with her philosophical studies, her supposedly superior intelligence and one of her poems, which was bound to be published in the College newspaper. She was particularly fond of her little non-sensible so called avant-garde poem (an avant garde poem is easy to write. Basically when you coin words together with proper grammar and some rhyme but with no meaning at all, then you have such a poem. The less meaning such a poem has the better it is! for the author since no one understands it, because it is not understandable in the first place. Since nobody has the courage to admit that he or she (the reader) does not understand this kind of a poem, the poem ultimately elevates the author to an intellectual height above low brain capacity common people. Or at least that’s what avant garde authors think

My situation grew more and more tense, mom was deteriorating, father was anything but a father and my ex girlfriend was treating me like a mentally retarded kid.

Philosophy was also among the compulsory subjects at the College and I did quite well in it. The advantage I had that as a kid back in Naranja , Parador I received a very strong humanistic training because the school I had attended back then was run by the Franciscan Order.
I daresay that I also had some eloquence and an ease to speak in public due to the years I had previously spent in the interpreting business.

After the third month the philosophy teacher asked us that who wished to enter the Annual University Students Competition. Of course I immediately applied. I did so with the primary intention of impressing my ex-girlfriend and the secondary intention of teaching her a lesson.
My plan was that if I win some sort of a prize with my work in philosophy I will immediately publish and article in the university newspaper in which I will dissect her meaningless little poem plus write about how wrong it is to be a snob and to treat people with intellectual disdain.

I did very well at the student’s contest with a work on Christian philosophy (a heritage from the Franciscan School of Naranja) and I won a prize. After the contest I went straight to the editorial office of the College Newspaper and demanded that my article be published. The chief editor of the newspaper happened to contestant in the very same student’s contest where I had won a prize. He had not won any and he told me that he would gladly publish anything from me, but that I had to wait until next month’s issue, which was to appear in a month’s time.

By this time I was getting a little mad. I figured out that if this asshole (the editor) wants to make me wait a month then I will simply found my own College newspaper.

So I founded my own College newspaper based on a very simple idea.

You should remember that 1991-1992 was the last year of a 50-year Soviet backed communist rule in Hungary and we were in process of reverting to market economy and democracy and our own culture. The country itself was fervently looking into its own past searching its own traditions belonging to the era before the communist takeover 50 years ago, in every aspect of life.

I dug up a 50-year-old copy of a newspaper that was very popular in the period before the communist rule. The name of the newspaper was “Új Idõk” which means “New Times” . This title was perfectly in line with the general sentiment of that time. You know, starting afresh from communism building on our own traditions.

My idea was to resurrect the “New Times” newspaper in the following way: The front page would have been the photocopy of a fifty-year-old issue. The second page would have been an explanation of what is “New times” and a call to revert to our own traditions that existed fifty years ago. The third page was my vivisection on my ex-girlfriends little poem combined with the theme” how bad snobbery is”. I believe it was a well-written piece based on the works of well-known social scientists. The idea was that if anybody wanted to buy a copy of the newspaper then he or she could photocopy it and leave the price of the photocopying + a symbolic profit of a few pennies per page in a box placed alongside a photocopying machine.
If anybody wanted to publish in the paper then he or she could leave her work along the photocopying machine. Of course advertisements could be placed in the paper as well. My plan was to make this a nationwide movement.

I explained the whole idea to my Philosophy teacher and won him over to the cause: He was supposed to be the “Patron” of the whole movement.

As a hotheaded 21-year-old I went even further. I wanted to send copies of this newspaper to famous Hungarians all around the world, like Tom Lantos (member of the Us senate), Otto Von Habsburg (member of the European parliament and a distant relative) and Arpad Göncz (president of the Hungarian Republic at that time) . This seemed natural to me since in my previous years as an interpreter I did work for high ranking government members and even heads of state.

Although my philosophy professor was willing to give his name to the whole idea he told me that he thought that we should at least six months before doing anything serious with it.

By this time my whole overblown idea was slowly taking control of all my thoughts. Let me put it like this: Finally I had found a way to assert and to prove myself (be rich and famous and if possible overnight.) I have finally found a way to compensate myself for all those years of constant distress because of Moms drinking and all the shameful experiences and humiliations because of her alcoholism. All those years of school where the only roles that I had were those of the physically weak, the imbecile clown, the envied spoiled rich kid (in reality sometimes I had nothing to eat because mom drunk all the money) and that of the worst student. All those years of having to tolerate my fathers coercion and his very low opinion on me (he had almost never encouraged me).

I was especially regretting Fathers last remark that I should go to work while I study in College. My girlfriend leaving me was just the last nail in the coffin.

In the process of dealing with my idea I slowly developed a kind of workalcoholism and gradually became insomniac. By this time I was becoming very inpatient and a bit over driven. After a decade of multiple sided oppression I was actually exploding but I was not aware of it.

I think this was the point when I crossed the thin line that separates normality from breaking down. –I gradually went insomniac-

I did not want to wait six months as my philosophy teacher suggested. I wanted immediate success, right there and right then. I ordered myself an elegant business card at a print shop and nominated myself the vice president of “ La Salle International ” This was the name that I gave to my fantasy venture (the newspaper).

Now it becomes really embarrassing to continue my story.

Armed with my elegant business card I went to the office of The Minister of Industry and Trade (I had interpreted for him a few months before) and left my business card at his secretary expostulating that if his boss was interested in a phenomenal business then he should contact The “XXXXXXXXXXXX” College in Southern Hungary .

I have also asked someone to contact your father and support the cause.

I do not know whether my business card had actually reached the minister or not, or that he had done anything afterwards but what I do know for sure that couple of days later there was a TV show in which the moderator was a historian called XXXXXXXXX (his name was identical to the name of my College) speaking about the times before communist takeover. In the background there was your dads big blue Y (YYYYYYY holding logo). I felt like a glorious conqueror…. Finally I made it… I was pretty mad by that time but I did not have visions for sure. This happened during the last two weeks of 1991.

When asked your father a couple of weeks ago whether he had to do anything with the show or whether he was approached with my stupid idea He clearly said no. Since he has a high IQ he would remember an absurd occurrence like the one I am telling you even if it happened ten years ago. Therefore he had nothing to do with the TV show.

Probably the whole show and The Y logo in the back ground had nothing to do with my actions but the whole scenario had a terrible consequence on me.

When I saw the TV show I had an “aha” experience assumed that this is my victory
(The worst part was that I was not the only person who thought that my doings and the TV show were connected) and went amok.

My amokness consisted in not sleeping at all, not being able to switch off and my head was constantly brimming with one business idea after the other. I said to myself that if the concept works in Hungary then it could work elsewhere as well.

Huh…. This is something I have kept to myself in the past ten years. When I am writing these lines I am almost re-living the whole thing. This is awful; it is sending chills down my spine.

So I started to write letters in all the languages that I know to heads of state asking to support the cause with the aim of creating a world peace movement. I wrote a letter to the Spanish King Juan Carlos, another to The Portuguese President Mário Soares and sent a facsimile to the Thai Government (I had been their interpreter and unfortunately I still had their names and their fax number) At least I did this in style. I regularly went into the lobby of the Grand Hotel of Margaret Island and DHL-ed or faxed my wishes on a paper bearing the Hotel’s logo. I signed my letters as Baron Ivan Chekonich.

I have chosen the Baron’s title because it sounded so good. Nevertheless there is truth in this last instance. I know for sure that I have the right to use the “Von” prefix due to a nobility chart given to one of my forefathers by the emperor Leopold Habsburg the II-nd. for bravely defending the empire against the Turks . I dont know what exact set of noble titles I am actually entitled to use but both on my fathers and mothers side I inherited all kinds of nobility titles. For example an old uncle, Karl Ottrubay who I still remember having met as a little kid when I was four, was a personal aid to Emperor and King Franz Josef of the Austro Hungarian Monarchy in the beginning of the XX century. This uncle also took parts in the Versailles peace treaty following WW1. Afte! r the destitution of Karoly Habsburg the IV-th he was asked by Queen Zita Bourbon Parma to join them in their exile on the island of Madeira in order to help the eventual comeback of Crown Prince Otto Von Habsurg who currently is an EU Parliament Member. A generation before that an Ottrubay Baronesse was the morganatic wife of Maximillian Habsburg Emperor of Mexico who was helped to the throne by the French. They were about to get married with Papal dispensation unfortunately Maximillan was killed in Queretaro , Mexico . Another member of the Ottrubay fam! ily is still alive in Switzerland . Her name is Baronesse Melinda Ottrubay. She is the widow of the Hungarian Prince Pal Eszterhazy and as such she is the second richest woman in the world after the current British Monarch Queen Elizabeth Windsor. Melinda Ottrubay owns more land than the territory occupied by Vienna which is the capital of Austria . She also owns lake Fertõ and a number of Castles. Another part of my ascendance lived in then Grand Canale In Venice Italy , under the name Tedeschi. It now serves as the main post office in Venice . There is some silver left from them and all the silver pieces bear a Prince’s crown. And as I mentioned I am even related to the Habsburgs ( a royal family). These are more than family anecdotes, these are documented facts.
If I will have too much time and money (these titles are not much fun without your own castle) I will do some research. I am not telling you to this to impress you but to explain that no matter how mad I was everything I did had some realistic basis.

I do not want to bore you with all the stupid things I had done or that what kind of unrealistic assumptions I have made during these days. For example to my distress when I went down to Szeged and walked around town I saw a jewel collection in the Jewelers window shop in Szeged with a “ La Salle ” logo and I immediately assumed that I had my hand in it. Well ,so much about being in a middle of nervous breakdown and not getting any sleep for three weeks.

As you might know I ended up in a hospital shortly before the X-mass of 1991.
I remember was lying sleeplessly in my bed in the middle of the night when my father appeared with two tough guys dressed in white (male nurses) and I was taken to an ambulance car. At the psychiatric ward I had to sign a paper that I am there on my own free will and at the same time I was given a shot………

I woke up two days later trying to reach the level of consciousness. Have you ever had a nightmare from which you dearly wanted to wake up because you somehow were aware that it’s just a horrible dream tinkering on the edge of sleep and being awake? Thats what it is like to fight for consciousness. They started to treat me (rather experiment on me) with all kinds psychoactive substances simultaneously. It was terrible. Sometimes the drugs they gave me had terrible side effects. One of the shots almost paralyzed my respiratory muscles. I was given an anti poison just in time. The whole place was terrible. It was a urine & cheap chlorine stinking place with dilapidated walls and there was no glass on one of the windows. There was just a plastic bag tangled in between the thick steel bars. The closed P was two rooms with door of lead and steel used in co! mmunist maximum security penitentiaries. Boy, those commies knew how to build prisons for sure.

The guy laying on the bed next to me was a benevolent looking fat pedophile abuser and killer who had spent the past fifteen years in that room. There were like a dozen men in that room. Some of them were old and in beds covered with nets. At night they would scream horribly and the male nurses took off their wooden soled slippers and started hitting them. As an extra prop of this hell like scenario was that for some reason when the night came and the lights were turned off a red light bulb was turned on. It was like a Dantesque hell in a sinister red glare with the cries of tortured people. I was scared to death. The whole “experience” was like a permanent daytime nightmare.

Most unfortunately father arranged that the same Psychiatrist treated me whom many years before treated my brother. She came up with the conclusion that my mom was mad (the reason behind her drinking) and that both my brother and me inherited her madness. According to her the only normal person was my father. She figured out that all three of us were suffering from a genetic PMD or manic depressive psychosis also known as bipolar disease.

Now I know beyond doubt that her diagnosis was wrong and that her degree was not worth the paper it was printed on but this has cost me my last ten years.

I was put on medication more precisely on Lithium Carbonate, which is given to people who have PMD. It was a nauseating substance, which always made me sleepy and sometimes caused muscle tremors. I am not taking it anymore since years I was also told that I am genetic reject full of madness genes and that even after several years of medication if I stopped then I would probably get mad again. She also told me that I will have to abstain from business activities otherwise I would get mad as well.

I was released after some three weeks or so.

From then on my life changed drastically. Although I went back to College and finished my degree and even though got second one I did not feel really happy afterwards. I felt like a third rate citizen, a genetic reject, a nobody. I felt very ashamed of what had happened and I was in a constant fear of my uncontrollable faulty genes that sooner or later would drive me mad again. Basically I felt like someone who is on a temporary leave form the closed psychiatric ward
(From among the pedophile murderers) and could get back there just anytime.

I was in the prime of my youth yet I felt so inferior, that I did not go to parties anymore, I did not date anyone yet I very much desired to do so (not even if girls wanted to date me) and followed a very restricted life. The only thing that I did for years was to lift weights, learn and sleep. I did not stay up at night from fear of developing insomnia again. Since the goddam Pshrink drilled in me that I was a genetic manic-depressive (manic-depressives either are extremely depressed or they are overly exuberant and these two moods alternate) I was constantly watching myself. Am I too happy-maybe manic? - Am I too sad-maybe depressed in the clinical sense? – On the other hand if I am mad how am I supposed to know whether I am normal or not? As a madman I cannot possibly assess myself. These where the questions I was constantly asking myself. I did not dare have a hearty laugh because that may start a manic phase. I did not dare to desire and fight for something for the same reason. I did not dare to be sad because that may the beginning of a depressive cycle. From the constant self-observation and self-control I became an outsider to life. I was just watching the grand game of life like a spectator, but did not dare to participate in it. How I wanted to set myself loose, and plunge in the middle of life again!
I did not dare to live because I was terrified of the consequences. I became mildly agoraphobic on the premise that what if I get mad in a public place? On one occasion as a reward of my good academic performance I had won a “Calouste Gulbenkian” scholarship to Portugal because Portuguese was may minor at the uni.. The night before I was supposed to go I became so scared of eventually going mad in a foreign country that at the end I did not go. Sometimes my overly active fantasy is a real curse: I saw myself being put on a plane the very same way bro. was: Like a Zombie. Fantasy always triumphs over reason. This was three and a half years after the hospital treatment

Mom still kept on drinking; the only difference was that every year she was taken to an alcohol rehab after which she stayed clean for another 9-15 months.


Essentially whatever I did I always had the collateral thought that I am not normal. I was always anxious that when will my little viciously functioning brain cells get me behind bars again. No matter what had I achieved academically, professionally or otherwise nothing could convince me that I am a sane person. My self-esteem was gone. Correction: You know loosing self-esteem is one thing. Loosing your human dignity is quite another thing

After six years of solitude I started a relationship five years ago which lasted for three years but I terminated it a year and a half ago The reason was that I had the role of the inferior servant. Despite having no self-esteem I could not put up with not having a man’s role.

Some four years ago I seriously began to make efforts to get a so-called MBA (master of business administration) degree with the ultimate purpose turning into a professional businessman and leave Hungary . Despite my strong humanistic background I had to learn maths from zero. After two and a half years of painstaking efforts I finally got accepted into two different MBA programs. One was top US program at the Case Western Reserve University and the other was a George Soros program. Both programs were partially delivered here in Budapest with the possibility of spending a semester abroad. I could have chosen from 5 different locations from around the world at top Universities.
Last year I started to learn at the latter program. I had a free tuition status plus a monthly scholarship.

After three weeks of attending the program I simply left school .I had left the program because I started feeling like shit , my agoraphobia which was mild up and controllable up until then became very strong. The university was located in an area where I was rather active during my mad days. I suppose it felt very scary to involve myself in business matters in that neighborhood. I guess I remembered the prognostics of ten years ago that should I involve myself in business then chances were that I would end up in a psychiatric ward again. I felt as if I was going to get mad again. Those nasty flashbacks.

I lost my scholarship. This was the point when I decided to look for a counselor and get rid of my fears for once and for all and finally be myself.

The counselor (an active clinical psychologist and this time a man) after analyzing my story for several months got to the conclusion that I never was a manic depressive in the first place (less of genetic origin). He told me that what happened to me was a normal consequence of the decade long extreme distress I had to live in. He also told me that anybody could be driven to a nervous breakdown given the proper dose of distress for a sufficiently prolonged period of time. After all 11 year old kids are not designed to live with an alcoholic mother who threatens everybody with a suicide.

As part of his therapy he brought me detailed case descriptions of nervous breakdowns. It was hair raising to read them. What had happened to me had had already happened almost in identical form to lots of other people before. The case descriptions were backed with statistics. The statistics clearly showed that manic depressive people have compulsive alternating moods whether they take lithium or not. Having alternating moods is the main criterion for being decreed as a bipolar. I have definitely never had alternating moods neither during the breakdown nor before or after. According to him the lithium treatment and the closed psychiatric ward was like shooting a bird with a cannon. The psychiatrist who treated me ten years committed a malpractice He says that all my symptoms of feeling bad and agoraphobic reactions are tied to a wrongly interiorized misbe! lief namely that there is something wrong with me (when in fact there is nothing wrong) compounded with a permanent self observation and shame. Further misbelief s are that if I do business I will get mad or that everybody remembers what happened to me or that people who saw me at that time start gossiping about me as soon as they see me now.

These days I am trying to speak with as many people as I can who were involved in my actions ten years ago. This is something very ambiguous. On the one hand it’s hard and shameful, on the other hand it’s a liberating experience. I am getting to the conclusion that people neither remembers what happened ten years ago or give a damn about the whole story. As part of my efforts to clear my past for once and for all I have even contacted the archives of the Hungarian Television Network. They promised to send me a copy of the mentioned TV show and give me the name of the producer.

I have also asked my Father that why was he pressing so hard with my brothers studies. He told me about his childhood experiences during world war two and what happened to his family after the communist takeover. The story starts with the father of my own father. My grandfather was a career military.
During the war around 1945 one of the subordinate officers of grandfather shot dead a Nazi officer who was in process of plundering a civilian home and raping a woman in Hungary. The Nazis wanted to exterminate everybody right away. Luckily grandpa out of the 9 languages he was fluent in could explain in a well educated German referring to Germanic martial law that they are entitled to a war tribunal in Berlin . (He could do so because he had been educated in the “Militar Akademie Wiener Neustadt” in the Austro Hungarian Empire.) This institution still belongs to the great military academies of the world like Sandhurst in Britain or West Point in the US . It is the oldest militray academy of the world in fact. Ervin Rommel (the desert fox) was also a member of this institution and the same age as grandpa. Grandpa was also a member of the Royal Spanish School of Equistry in Vienna. Even nowadays in constitutional Austria only the best jockeys of the best arsitocratic circles are allowed into this place , more so during the height of the Habsburg empire. As consequence the whole unit had to face Nazi war tribunal in Germany. The whole military Unit and their families were put in a bus and taken to Germany . While in Germany grandfather eventually managed to capture the bus, he had no choice but to break the Nazi drivers neck, dress in his uniform and save everybody on board. Although they were not Jews they probably escaped a death sentence by firing squadron in the best case and in the worst a no return visit to a concentration camp to be processed in soap bars and leather lamp covers. This happened during the last days of WW 2 Unfortunately he drove the bus back to Hungary , which shortly after was invaded by the Soviets who in many respects were worse than the Nazis.


Grandfather was an Aristocrat and a high ranking professional soldier in the Horty era. In fact Horty wanted to promote him to General but Granpa declined because at the time the war was almost over. (he started his career in the K.u K. -Royal and Imperial army of the Austro Hungarian Empire) in the era before the red invasion. As a consequence all their sizeable properties were confiscated and the AVO (Hungarian KGB) was constantly watching them. The only work grandfather could get afterwards was that of a dockman (at the age of sixty after having fought for his country in two world wars.). My Paternal grandmothers family were industrialists of Germanic origin. They had a large machine tool factory called the Lang Factory employing several thousand people and large real estate holdings. One of their holdings up to this day is the equivalent of Camp David and it is still used as the official Hungarian goverment retreat. They were considered bourgeois enemies of the people’s republic. As a consequence my father was sent on forced labor as ! an 18-year-old kid. He had two work in a coal mine for several years. He was not allowed to attend the university despite max scores.
Unbelievable as it sounds but his only chance of getting in a University was to make himself a member of The Hungarian Olympic team. Since grandpa was a soldier, dad was given fencing lessons ever since his early childhood. According to the rules of that time Olympic team members could go to the Uni, regardless of their ascendence. On a sheer rational decision after some years father made it into the Hungarian Olympic Fencing team! After doing so he did attend university while working in a factory upon recommendation of former Hungarian Olympian fencer Aladar Gerevich, a mentor of dad. Sadly enough his years in the mine and the subsequent sports training cost him half of his lung at the age of thirty. I remember that while we were in South America he defeated the Latin American champion of fencing in a friendly match in La Paz Bolivia in 1983 (a man of twenty something) at the age of plus fifty with half a lung in the oxygen poor environ of the high Andean mountains. It caused such a furor that came out in several Bolivian newspapers

I suppose his personality got twisted after all he has been through.

He told me that this is why he was so excessive on my brother’s studies. He desperately wanted to secure something he was brutally deprived of.

I suppose he became like his own prison guards who guarded him in the forced labor camp.

I asked him that why has he not defected to the west during the Hungarian anti Soviet revolution of 1956. He told me that at time his father made him promise not do so but to stay in Hungary and take care of his mother and little sister. Shortly after grandfather died of a wrongly done simple surgery.
I posed him the questions that then why on earth had we come back to Hungary from Iran or Peru . He said that he was not willing to take the risk with two kids and a wife. Finally he admitted that in his adult life he was always craving for secure situations. He also feared to get rich (which he could have easily done as so many of his colleagues did) since he though that then the commies would have retaliated him. He made his career despite not having joined the CP. Despite his combined aristocratic capitalist background. He achieved what he achieved thanks to his brains and stamina. After all not many Sovblock kids have visited places as diverse as Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, London, Paris Rome and a huge number of other cities all over the planet.

Well I think its time I stop blaming father and try to make the most of the rest of my life, and look upon every single day of my life as a gift. It will be not easy to get back to normal again but if I do not do it then all the pain my family had to endure was in vain.


PS: In the meantime I managed to get a copy of the goddam “TV Show” from the archives of the Hungarian TV. There was in fact a Historian under that name speaking in the TV show. There was a Logo in the background, but it was not an “H” company logo. It was the logo of a cultural program, which did have some similarity with an “H” company logo. In a further attempt to clear this shit, I have also written a letter to the Minister (now retired) and asked him whether my magnanimous business card and the newspaper idea has reached him or not. His answer was very kind but negative. I have also contacted a former classmate and my former philosophy teacher. Their answers were negative as well. So it is almost sure that nothing happened at all (apart from my unrealistic assumption. Well the only specific consequence apart form the nuthouse tour was that somebody did answer my calls for ! world peace by sending a fax to the Margaret Island Hotel. It was written in German and they thanked for my call suggesting to meet. It was not signed. Maybe a secretary with an overdeveloped sense of humor sent that fax. The other ting that occured that dad was summoned in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They wanted to make him a diplomat in Spain . Well even this latter happening probably had been a simple coincidence. After all he is fluent in 6 languages and he was no party member. Remember it was a country in transition.

To be fair the present essay pinpoints the negative features of my father. He also has many things in his favor. It’s probably not his fault that he is the way he is.

It is also very good to feel the shift of paradigm going on inside me. I am on the verge of overcoming my agoraphobia. Somehow I feel very sad for all those years wasted in unnecessary anxiety and seclusion. The time has come to finally be a fully mature person and to stand up and make my dreams come true. There are many proverbs, which moralize about the ambivalence of life with sayings like “a coin has two sides” or that
“ Every cloud has a silver lining” I frankly do not yet know about the eventual profit of all what I have just told you, but I am noticing that I have developed a king of seventh sense which somehow allows me to see through the masks people are wearing. I also feel much, much more experienced than people of my age group. Maybe this will help me to avoid pitfalls in the future which they are unable to see. It is also helping me to rephrase the very basis of what I think of life. I am getting closer and closer to base my life on a pure faith basis. I can feel with almost certainty that he who has faith can move mountains and accomplish things others just dream about. The thing is that regardless of whatever happened in the past or the state of the present the future is ours to shape at the extent of our realistic possibilities since the world we live in is the result of human action. Neither past nor the present guarantees the future. It is a very simple assumption but most people are unable to accept it (I haven’t yet fully accepted it myself but I am making serious efforts to do so) It is very possible to build up our dreams from the building blocks reality provides us!
The author can be reached under: cekonic@gmail.com