april 1968.
The date is deduced from the pictures - the big cherry in the backyard is in full blossom.
Feri with wife and daughter decided to visit us. While it was near impossible for Hungarians to travel abroad, there was an exception for socialist countries, and then this is 1968 when there was this general feeling of thawing, the Prague spring etc, so contrary to the doctrine from forties and almost into sixties, when the eastern bloc considered us to be a capitalist country, or at least aligned with the west, now we were considered a part of the family of socialist countries. So they came.
The daughter was as much a chick as I expected - well, we met last fall, she couldn't have changed much - but the lack of common language was too much of an obstacle. She learned russian at school, most probably, but that language is much closer to me. To Hungarians all european languages are quite foreign. I kind of remember that Veljko came a few times and translated as much as he could, but that's for adults.
I have no idea what we did and where we went with them. Of course, there was food and drinks, and we must have gone to a few places, but there's none of that on the photos, and the photos aren't much either (see this one, how unevenly it developed... and that's among the better ones). The pic is typical - in parting, dad escorted them a few km out of town, had a couple of parting shots, then goodbye. Now how did a Hungarian acquire a bug (which we called turtle then, by its looks)? True, most of the cars in the bloc were bloc made - the moskvičes and volgas, trabants and wartburgs (and he did come with a wartburg next time, an older model which somehow looked better than the later ones, finishing was better, upholstery, silent, cozy, the neat fit of the doors etc), but a certain number of western cars always found its way over the border. Well, Feri was a mechanic, so he probably had someone who gave up on a car for which it's near impossible to find the parts, fixed it up, used it for a while and then sold it.
There is a whole set of stories, real urban legends, about such majstors, who buy an impossible car and make it like new. Some relative of our music teacher (her father, possibly) bought a written off cadillac from the american embassy, polished it up and then gave up on it, sold it (and I think I've seen the car on the street). Why? „The amount of gas it uses just to warm up the engine suffices for my fića to ride to Belgrade and back“. Some other stories have such a car with broken engine, which the guy then replaces with one from a tractor...
And yes, this spring I had headaches at times, so I complained to mom. The probable cause was, they suspected, the eyes, to they took me to an ophtalmologist (in dispanzer, I guess). The guy ran me through a series of lenses, and finally didn't push one of them into the frame properly, so I couldn't converge my eyes on the test board. I guess it was something weak that I got, perhaps 0,5, and the headaches stopped even before the spectacles were made, as it took a few days then. I wore them for 3-4 weeks and then just forgot, and then also nobody mentioned them, good. I didn't want to acquire the image of the spectacled guy, so not wearing them suited me the best.
The same month the relatives from Vršac also came for a weekend, by train. The Fabrika station is about a kilometer away, and there's a good picture of it, here. The building hasn't changed much, just that the terrace now has its own roof. This uncle is the younger brother. He was soon somebody important in the city, director of something. They had a house in the main street, something from the previous century, and I think he just bought it - couldn't have inherited it, as his father (granma's sister's husband) was just a peasant. I think this was the last time they came by train; the next time he sported a tristać.
Mentions: Ács Ferenc (Feri), dispanzer, Fabrika station, fića, majstor, trabant, tristać, Veljko Hlače, in serbian