Cayenne and Paprika by Caroline Gonda
One Sunday morning sometime in the 1970s – I don't remember the year, but we were sitting in the new kitchen alcove on those uncomfortable benches with the long cushion pads my mother had covered in nubbly burnt-orange fabric – my dad put cayenne pepper on his scrambled eggs instead of paprika. It was an easy mistake to make: all the spice jars in my mother's cupboard looked the same. Dad always put a lot of paprika on his scrambled eggs, so he was spluttering and gulping coffee and trying not to swear while the rest of us laughed at him.
Nobody else I knew had paprika on scrambled eggs apart from us. Nobody else had cinnamon sugar on toast, either, but that wasn't a Hungarian thing the way the paprika was. Dad didn't speak Hungarian any more, didn't have an accent (unlike Granny, who sounded like Zsa Zsa Gabor). He cheered for England, wore his Kent County Cricket Club blazer with pride. But he still liked paprika on scrambled eggs, and I still put it on mine. I make them the way my mother taught me, and I check the label on the paprika jar every time, just in case.
The second time I went to Budapest, I came back with proper Hungarian paprika for Dad, from a little shop in the basement of the block of flats where he grew up. There's a photograph somewhere of him, aged maybe five or six, looking down from the balcony and smiling. He looks shy but happy, not like someone whose life is about to be turned upside down.
I don't remember noticing the shop the first time, in 1988; maybe it wasn't there. The building took a bit of finding then, because the street names had been changed when the Communists came to power. I went to the research section of the beautiful central library in Pest and looked at an old map alongside the one from the tourist office: not Pannonia utca now, but Rajk Laszlo utca. In 2011, the government had changed it back to the address Dad remembered when he'd forgotten everything else.
I had to explain a couple of times what the packet was, and where and why I'd got it for him. He was already confused by then, though not as bad as he would become. Once he understood, he seemed pleased, and showed it to my mother when she came in with the tea. She wouldn't let me carry the tray, though her hands were shaking – another thing that would eventually have a name.
"That's nice, darling," she said, and took the packet out to the kitchen.
Put your pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas, Dad used to say, quoting Under Milk Wood. A joke, and not.
The paprika stayed in the cupboard, unopened. I found it the following summer, as I waited for the house clearance man. I left it there; only so much I could carry from the house where I grew up.
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Caroline Gonda is a writer of flash fiction, poetry, and occasionally songs. She teaches and writes on literature, gender and sexuality, with a particular interest in lesbian narrative and queer reception.
Twitter: @liederfollower