an open photobox
her and me
that little bit of housekeeping, my husband says
Photograph: 02.05.2025
I have carried this image around within me for years: my grandmother sitting on top of a cloud with her legs dangling. She is looking at me from up there.
I think my grandmother always worked a lot. The shelves in the pantry were full of home-made pickles, compotes and delicious jams. She collected the fruit from beneath overgrown fruit trees. Grandfather, grandmother and us children regularly went out with baskets and canisters to collect plums and apples, to look for mushrooms, or into blackberry country as we called it, from where we always returned home with canisters full of fruit.
We regularly spent our summer vacations with her and grandfather at their dacha on Lake Balaton in Hungary. She cooked and looked after the whole family of six from morning to night for almost six weeks.
Every morning she would poke her head through the door of the children's room - we called it the wooden room because the walls were paneled with wood - and ask: “Would you like a little breakfast?” Then she would serve either a sheet cake from the day before or a portion of poor knights.
During the war, she collected old pieces of bread and made bread soup from them. She never threw anything away. No food went to waste.
Everything was reused and put to good use.
When the milk was still sold in plastic tubes, she cut the tubes into strips after the milk had run out and wove very ugly, but also very sturdy shopping bags out of them.
Every now and then she would sing me a German pop song “Das bisschen Haushalt, sagt mein Mann”:
"That little bit of housekeeping, my husband says. That little bit of housekeeping is no work at all, my husband says. That little bit of housekeeping can´t be that bad, my husband says. It is beyond comprehension how a women can complain about this at all, my husband says."
After her husband's death, his urn stood on the shelf in her house and she got herself a budgerigar called “Spatzi Jókay”. Grandma seemed to flourish, the adults said.
My father gifted her a baroque flute when she was well advanced in years, and she played it so much that it broke within months and the manufacturer asked if the whole family had played it.
She could sing beautifully.
Grandma originally came from Bavaria. Her name was Ortrud Silbernagl. My grandfather worked at the Hungarian consulate in Munich, they met, got married, had two sons, Zoltán and Huba, left Nazi Germany by 1942 and moved to Budapest.
There, Ortrud Silbernagl became Mrs. Dr. Zoltán Jókay. She spoke Hungarian with a heavy accent until the end of her life.
During the war, I was told, her apartment got a hole in one of the walls, and once when she was out shopping, a German soldier came, walked into the apartment and he snatched the children's picture books. Back home, she rushed after him, grabbed the soldier by the collar, scolded him with her energetic Bavarian and he returned the stolen books.
After leaving school, I went out to see the world. Without parents. With my girlfriend. Years went by. I saw my grandparents maybe another two times before they died. First my grandfather died. I didn't go to his funeral. I no longer had a special bond with my grandmother. I didn't accompany them in their old age, I didn't say goodbye to them.
Last week, my stepmother gave me the embroidery above as an unexpected gift. Grandma had made it for my birth. She embroidered my date of birth on it: 19.02.1960.
She must have put her love, her hopes and her wishes for me into it. That moves me. I am touched.
Thank you.