Quiet Courage

It was a one-off phone-call, a voice from the distant past, and its kernel seemed to be:

“Do you remember, sir, telling us once in class that it can takes great courage to love?

That’s so true!”

I remember having said something like that at some time, but couldn’t recollect what

piece of literature we had been discussing. I was more surprised, I suppose, by the call

and confused as to what lay behind it— some deep heart-ache, some personal problem

perhaps resolved? No prophet I; I could not divine the caller’s thoughts, nor provide

her any pearls of wisdom. I had too few for myself!

It was a brief conversation. As I put down the phone, still rather puzzled, I reflected that

merely to live often requires great courage – for those battling dark despair, or those

facing terminal illness or coping with the effects of serious injury, for example. Indeed, I

thought, there are many kinds of courage, and too many of these we hardly consider as

such.

I was reminded of all this again just recently at a funeral.

The deceased was an elderly Hungarian woman I had become privileged to know. What

a life of danger, despairs and enduring courage had been hers: courage that the eulogy

barely acknowledged, let alone celebrated.

One has, perhaps, to be aware of the background of the times and places in which she

had lived to have any real appreciation of her courage.

She had been born in Hungary in 1923. It was a country that had been part of the once

mighty, now disintegrating Austrian Empire; a country which, because of its alliance with

Germany in the Great War, was paying the penalty of conquered nations, a penalty

made more severe by the vengeful demands of Versailles. Civil war had soon erupted

as it too often does in disintegrating countries, the situation worsened by Stalin’s

egregious interference. Imagine being a child in such turbulent times: times of desperate

poverty, unemployment, and terrible uncertainty.

Then, barely sixteen, her country was dragged into another world war, as an unwilling

ally of Nazi Germany. Towards the end of this war, deserted by its Nazi masters, it was

assimilated forcefully by the Soviets. In the midst of all this Suzanne married (life must

go on) and had a child, a son born in 1947.

Rakosi had by now imposed a harsh Stalinist regime on his fellow Hungarians and,

following a revolt against his regime, the Soviets invaded Hungary, cruelly subduing it

again. Now 33, Suzanne was living in a country under a most repressive regime, a

country in which she had never known real freedom or security. In 1961 she had

another child, a daughter.

In one of those strange twists of fate, she again met her first sweetheart who had been

snatched away in the events of 1939-40. He was now visiting Hungary from Australia,

to which he had migrated immediately after the war. It appeared that their love was as

strong as it had ever been. Now came a momentous decision: to leave family and

country on the one hand, or risk staying in a relationship she knew to be shallow in a

country she knew to be unstable and dangerous. It must have required great faith and

courage to take the step she did, to risk the attention, possible refusal and subsequent

persecution of the authorities. She succeeded in her application, however, and arrived

with her young daughter in Australia, a country vastly different from Hungary.

Here at last, she remarried and found love and a measure of freedom. A woman of her

times and culture, her freedom was still quite circumscribed by our standards. She was

totally dependent on her new husband; she was in a strange land, a land very different

from her native Hungary; she spoke little English. Though she could fall back on her

beloved Hungarian music and literature, read Hungarian language papers, and

occasionally meet with other refugees, she remained almost completely dependent on

husband and daughter for communication with this strange new people and culture. Like

many refugees, women especially, she never really fully integrated into her new country.

Courageous? She would never have considered herself so: she had never joined the

anti-fascist partisans in the early forties; she had never stood in front of Soviet tanks in

1956. But she had endured: she had confronted great deprivations, times of terrible

uncertainty and despair and tried to make the most of life. And she had had the great

courage to risk love again and, proud and courageous Hungarian as she remained, seen

life through to its end.

Nor does our story of courage end here. Over several years I had observed another

concomitant courage — the courage of a devoted daughter’s attention to, and care for,

her mother. This daughter, growing up in quite a different culture from her mother, freed

from the shackles of the old European expectations of family and of women, must have

found her own life circumscribed having to be her mother’s constant interpreter and

advisor, and then, when the husband died, having to assume, what had, to that point,

been his responsibilities. More recently during the years of her mother’s illnesses, she

had become her carer and constant companion. And in all this, no respite — for who

could speak with her mother, understand her needs, her way of thinking? Such constant

devotion, such love demands great courage—not the spectacular, impulsive kind of

courage we reverence, but the enduring, constant courage of living so restricted a life

and facing a mother’s drawn out death, a courage that mostly goes unnoticed.