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7. The years of the 70s and 80s

In the 1970s, Hungarian society lived a closed social life: home
gatherings and house parties were still the fashion. Our new
small apartment, which we built attached to a communal villa,
with a forty-five square meter garage underneath, was a good
opportunity for this. On weekends, we organized music on the
tailoring table in the garage with giant speakers and everyone
came. Even the sons of our country, who had moved abroad,
attended our parties. In 1979-80, my wife was expecting her
second child, and as if they had agreed, she and her best friend
became pregnant almost at the same time. Our daughter was
born, but my wife's friend lost her child due to medical
malpractice, and after she recovered, she and her husband
defected to Munich. Friends have left the country before, but
their departure was shocking. We did not know about their plan;
such a thing was organized quietly by those who decided not to
return the homeland. Although before that I had a friend who
invited me to his apartment, and we spent the night drinking
before his leaving as a sign of goodbye. However, they did not
say anything, sold everything, including their apartment, and
hiding the money in the inner tube of a spare tire, left the
country with an official passport and sought asylum in
Germany. They sent a letter from the first safe place, saying that
they would not return home. The sense of shock and emptiness
that moved into our apartment that day was incomparable to any
such preceding defining feeling, and their absence was so
inescapable that whenever we got together with others of the
friendly company, our active social life fell apart. We could not
bear their absence in the form in which we lived before. With
two children in our family, we suddenly became adults. We felt
that we were left alone, and with the struggle of our slowly
forming social relationships and the accompanying loss of our
parents over time, with the emotional romances and small and
large disputes of adulthood, we knew and became convinced

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