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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Gift Of Margit, A Servant Of God

How the faith and love of a Hungarian cleaning lady lifted me out of the miry clay
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I posted a version of this on my subscription-only Substack on Thanksgiving. I found myself thinking of Margit this morning (that's us above, from Summer 2021), and thanking God for her friendship and witness, when it occurred to me that I could and should share this with you readers of my blog. I hope it blesses you.

We are almost at Christmas. This has been a terrible year for me and my family, with the divorce, but also some other awful things that have come to light within my Louisiana family, and that has made the brokenness just about complete. How very, very far we have traveled from those happy, hopeful days of late 2011, when my wife and kids and I rolled into St. Francisville to start our new life. It is very easy to pity myself, so far from my children, two of whom have been estranged from me by circumstances beyond their control or capacity to understand. I pray morning and night, and throughout the day, for reconciliation and restoration. It will come, I have faith, but it’s not here yet. I am advised by people wiser than I to have patience. At least my son Matt will be moving over to Budapest to live with me later this winter, and start grad school next year in Europe.

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A few days before Thanksgiving, I was reading in the Book of James, and saw this in the first chapter:

That gave me strength. But after a particular day I had on Thanksgiving week, I was back in the slough of despond.

I have a cleaning lady who comes every two weeks, Margit Fodor. She is a Hungarian from Transylvania, and she is a wonder. She speaks pidgin English, and is as good as gold. When she can’t find the word, but is trying to convey something loving, she will sometimes just throw her arms around you and squeeze tight. I got to know her in the summer of 2021, when her services came with the apartment I rented. She came back to me this fall, when I moved here to Budapest. I love her. She works very hard, and really cares about the people she serves. She brings the poor bachelor American soup. How can you not love a friend like that?

Last summer, through her very broken English, I learned some things about her life. She grew up under Communism for the first two decades of her life, a Hungarian living in Romania, where Hungarians were badly treated under the Ceausescu regime. Her father was assaulted by Romanian police one day walking home from mass. They broke his leg in three places.

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Later, her husband walked out on her and their two little children. She had to raise the kids on her own, cleaning houses to put food on the table. “I smart, I educated,” she told me. “But I have to work. Clean house. I no choice.” She showed me photos of her two children, now adults, on the day they graduated with college degrees. Now they both have great jobs. Their mother sacrificially did it all on her own. She’s so proud of her kids.

When she arrived that recent morning, I let her in then stepped out for coffee. When I came back, she must have seen that I was down. She asked how I was doing. “Not well,” I said. “This year has been cursed.”

She drew back quickly, stood with her back straight, pointed her finger in the air as if to teach me a lesson, and said firmly, “No! No curse! No!”

I can approximate her broken English here. It’s more effective than if I rendered it in normal English. You have to imagine this incredible woman, this feminine force of nature, struggling to push the words out.

“You know about my life. I told you. Communism, very bad. My father, cancer. Died. My sister, cancer. Died. My husband leave. Work hard, very hard. My sister, her eye” — Margit pantomimed something piercing her left eye — “bad, so bad. Life very hard. It never stop.

“But, religion!” she said, grasping her heart. “God. I tell him, thank you, I carry my criss.”

“Cross?” I asked.

“Yes, cross,” she said, picking up my prayer rope from the table and pointing to the cross. “I tell Jesus thank you. Life no problem. This is my path.”

She shrugged, and smiled at me.

“You not curse!” she said, emphatically. “No! God is with you. God love us! I tell you! Believe it!”

This is how Margit talks — in exclamations.

I crossed myself and thanked her, truly. I felt ashamed for complaining, to be honest, given the hard life this cheerful, faith-filled cleaning lady has had. I went to sit down in the living room and write, while she finished cleaning the bathroom.

After ten minutes or so, she rushed over to me, thrust her phone in my face, and showed me what she was able to type:

I tell you, I just about cried. I hugged her, and thanked her with all my heart.

This brave, strong, fierce Hungarian woman has been one of God's greatest gifts to me this hard year. Funny, but I was just thinking about Angela, the Palestinian cleaning lady from my Jerusalem hotel, who saw that I was in distress, six days after my wife dropped the bomb on me, and gave me the cross she wore around her neck. I still wear it, and will until it falls off.

What mercy God has shown me through these women! I'm in tears this foggy morning in Budapest thinking about it. And also through a couple of little Hungarian kids, Piri and her brother Örs, the children of my friend and colleague Anna. Anna and her husband Ormos brought the kids over to my place earlier this week to receive their presents from Rod-bácsi (Uncle Rod). Watching Örs, who is five, I think, jump up and down with joy, waiting on his dad to open the Lego set I got him, was like a shot of love, straight into my veins. Here's the angelic Piri struggling to haul the Christmas loot out:

They're just little kids, these two, but man oh man, the joy they bring me, just by being happy little kids. It's hard to put into words. Until I have grandchildren of my own, I have Örsi and Piri. It's one of those beautiful mysteries of life that children, who have nothing material to give, nevertheless have the greatest gift of all to impart: pure love.

I had dinner last night with a friend here in Budapest, who asked, as everybody does these days, with a furrowed brow, "How are you doing?" I tell them the truth: that I'm doing way better than I have a right to at this first post-divorce Christmas. It's all from God, and through His servants Margit and all the others. The gratitude I have for the love and care shown to me by so many people, including the Hungarians who welcomed shipwrecked me into their country and lives, has filled the space that could have been the resting place for bitterness and self-pity. It's all grace, you know.

I'll be leaving very early tomorrow morning for England, where I'll meet my son Matt at Heathrow, flying in from Louisiana, and we'll make our way to Cambridge, where our friends the Orr family have opened their home to us for the holiday, and will welcome us in for feasting, carol-singing, watching the King's Christmas speech, and all manner of good Christmas-in-England things. At the end of this year of immense loss, I am strangely rich with gifts of love. Again: it's all grace. This year I am living out one of my favorite lines from the poetry of Auden: "Life remains a blessing, though you cannot bless."

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Bogdán Emil
Bogdán Emil
Good luck pronouncing Örs. Think "Earth" and say Ursh? That's pretty close, but not quite.

For me, it has been a slight bit of curse to be from Transylvania, ending up in Pennsylvania, with good people nonetheless asking me if the place is real, where is it, what kind of village is it, what about Dracula, etc. It was supposed to be an exotic locale in Stoker's time. Like Metternich said, Asia begins at the eastern gates of Vienna.

So you're in Asia, Rod, and so is Transylvania, and Stoker even said, erroneously, that Vlad Dracul was a Székely. That was literary nonsense, Vlad was a Romanian nobleman in real life, and the Székelys are a Hungarian ethnic group on the eastern borders of Transylvania, on the slopes of the Carpathians. They're my family. We're not vampires, we're Huns. That's what the legends say.

That's why the Magyars love us. Naturally, those who name their capital after Buda, those who name their children after Attila and Csaba, those who claim eternal brotherhood with Huns, well, they deeply adore and respect us.

Meanwhile, for the mainstream Western audience, if they're even aware of Hungarians, Transylvania is a phantasmagoric pageant of vampires, werewolves, golems and so forth. But if it's actually real, then it should be a stronghold of genuine empire-breaking and empire-forming 5th century Attila the Huns.

For real, seriously? Could that be true? Yup, sure. Hunnish remnants survived out of all that multitude, later on we reunited with the conquering 9th century Magyars, and we still live on happily until this very day, fully aware of ourselves. I'm one of these people, these Transylvanian Hungarians. Half of us are ethnic Székely. That means pure-blooded Hun.

So, I'm from Transylvania, but I'm not Dracula, and vampires aren't real, but Huns definitely are, and who are my brothers, the ogres?

The answer: yes, naturally. The word "ogre" is rooted in Magyar, Hungarian, the French still call us "hongrois." Huns and Magyars melt together in the foreign conception for a reason. That's how we become HUNgarian. The Magyar brotherhood is very, very tightly knit.

None of this is a coincidence.

Now, if Transylvania -- a veritable Eastern Switzerland, and the most historically significant province of Romania -- could only stop being a weird joke in the minds of intelligent people, if only good people could undo the reputational damage that has turned the place into a comic book character, somehow...

A guy who liked sadistically impaling people by the thousands -- his own servants, as well as Turks -- started it all, in a way, and a lurid gaze was formulated in the mind of a speculative author, who then presented it skilfully to a mass audience in a crucial moment and it spread like wildfire. The Dracula phenomenon is inextinguishable. I recognize that.

Fighting that permanent propaganda-campaign against Transylvanian dignity by trying to elevate Attila the Hun over Dracula is my genius idea. All others are welcome.

Anything it takes to restore the good name of Transylvania, to somehow erase the clownishness so regretfully attached, I will do. I will do my part. Because it just happens to be an amazing place.

German name: Siebenbürgen. Seven fortresses. How cool is that?
schedule 1 year ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    Eric Flint's latest (and last as he died this summer) entry in the alternate history 1632 series is called The Transylvanian Decision and is largely set in that country in the 17th century. It's a gold mine of info about what the place was like under the Turkokratia.
    schedule 1 year ago
    Frans
    Frans
    Le Comte de Saint Germain and the legends/mysticism that surround him and the house of Rokoczy come to mind to me when I think of the place.
    schedule 1 year ago
Hal Freeman
Hal Freeman
Thank you for this article. I need to hear her words as well. Since my wife's death last year and struggling as a single American father living in Russia, I have some times felt "cursed" in the miry clay as well. Her words were a great reminder that I'm not.
schedule 1 year ago