The child with no father in the record
The photograph of the baptismal register from Solovăstru reached me more than a century later. Almost the entire page had been covered with blue sheets, placed there by the archivists to protect the data of other families. Only a narrow strip remained visible, just wide enough for a single entry. On that line was the beginning of my grandmother's life.
On 25 August 1897, in house number 3 in Solovăstru, Maria was born. The priest entered her name in the spelling of the time: Maria Sierbenatiu. In the following columns appear two words without the slightest attempt at tact: illegitimate girl. Her mother was Rafila — written Raghila in the register — Șierbenatiu, daughter of the late Petru. The child's father is not named. I no longer have to imagine that blank: I can see it in the photograph, between the parish register's carefully ruled columns.
In our family we always called the name Șerbănați. The register now shows me an older spelling of the same name and confirms something I had known only in fragments: Maria, too, had come into the world without an acknowledged father, twenty years before she, in turn, gave birth to my father. In two successive generations, the same column was left blank.
Yet the document deepens another mystery. In 1897 she was Maria Șierbenatiu; in Budapest in 1917 she would declare herself Fola Mária. I do not know when or why she began to use the name Fola. Perhaps it was the name of her biological father, heard at home or in the village whispers. Perhaps it had another origin, one the documents have not yet revealed. What I was once tempted to tell as a certainty must now be left in its true form: a question.
The shadow from across the bridge
A few steps from Solovăstru, across the Gurghiu River, lies Jabenița, the old salt-mining settlement. The distance between the villages was small, but the boundary in people's minds was wide. In the stories told by my father and Maria, the bridge separated more than two banks: Romanian Solovăstru and predominantly Hungarian Jabenița, with different customs, different speech, and old suspicions.
Children sometimes fought with stones, young men came to knives, and women guarded their daughters from "those across the river." I do not know how much was fact and how much exaggeration passed from mouth to mouth; I do know that the image of the bridge remained alive in our family, as a boundary it was unwise to cross.
The name Fola occurred in Jabenița and elsewhere in the Gurghiu region. For a long time, this proximity led me to think that Maria's unknown father might have been a Fola from across the river. It was an alluring explanation: Rafila would have crossed the bridge, and her daughter would have kept the name of the man who never appeared in the register. But no document confirms this story. The 1897 register says only what the parish knew or could record: Maria Șierbenatiu, Rafila's illegitimate daughter. The rest, for now, belongs to my conjectures.
Even so, I find it hard to believe that the name Fola was chosen at random. Twenty years later Maria would use it officially in Budapest and give it to her son. It must have meant something to her. Perhaps it was the only sign left by the father she had never known; perhaps it came from circumstances the family forgot. Between truth and legend, for the moment, only the bridge remains.
Maria was enrolled in 1903 in the village Greek-Catholic confessional school, where the language of instruction was only partly Romanian, and the teacher had to master Hungarian, the official language of the Austro-Hungarian administration. By law, the school's name had been changed from Romanian School to Confessional School. At school, Maria did very well: in a small community, unforgiving toward children born out of wedlock, that stigma isolated her silently, but it did not prevent her from learning. Thus the fatherless girl, with a sharp mind and a vivid memory, learned to read and write and to speak Hungarian perfectly. She had a discreet beauty, blue almond-shaped eyes and a gap between her teeth that lit up her face when she smiled. But smiling was not a daily habit in Rafila's house.
After graduating from the six primary classes - only that much the Austro-Hungarian education system required -, the alternatives for a girl from a village of "inferior" inhabitants were few: field work, a job in the houses of the wealthy in Reghin, the city just 6 km from Solovăstru, or caring for older relatives. But Maria dreamed of more, and then she had good reasons to seek a different fate far away.
A girl storms the empire
By the age of 16, Maria was already a slender, hardworking young woman, determined in everything she did. Rafila may have pushed her to try her luck in a place with more prospects than Solovăstru, or Maria may have decided on her own to leave the village for the city. But not just any city: Budapest, one of the two capitals of the Empire. Many girls from Transylvania went "into service," either to Vienna or to Budapest, large cities with tens of thousands of middle- and upper-class homes. To do this, Maria stretched an invisible bridge between Solovăstru and Budapest: perhaps she had a relative or acquaintance there to help her, or perhaps she was hired through a domestic staff placement network, as existed at the time. In that era, agencies or intermediaries recruited girls for domestic work in the empire's great cities. Maria was one of those thousands of girls.
The journey to Budapest was probably her first departure from the little village. It was a long road, in a third-class train, among luggage, strangers and mixed languages. But Maria reached Budapest safely, with her rough working hands and a dignity that asked for no pity.
In Budapest, Maria entered a world where many languages were spoken and where the rules of the village no longer had the same power. There, in that big city, life could take unexpected directions.
Before the war, Budapest was a city of boulevards, bridges, and monumental buildings, but Maria must have seen it from the level of the servants' stairs. She washed, sewed, made the fires, dusted, and perhaps looked after other people's children. In exchange for her work she received wages, food, and a roof over her head — more than the village could offer her.
For a long time, I misread the address on my father's record. It was not 27 Váci Street, but 39 Váczi Street, in the spelling of the period. Baross Street 27, the address carried over into the Romanian copies, was the hospital where Maria would give birth. The Hungarian record clearly separates the two places: the mother's residence in one column, the child's place of birth in another.
Váczi Street 39 was no ordinary house. At the corner with Duna Street stood a four-storey apartment building erected by the wealthy merchant Lajos Takáts, owner of the shop known as "The Black Elephant." The commercial floors housed the Zsolnay factory's showroom and sample warehouse; Miklós Zsolnay had his office there and, according to some sources, his home. Several families could, however, live in the same building. The address does not yet tell me whom Maria worked for. It tells me only that she served in one of the most prosperous buildings in central Pest.
The record also gives me the word lost in the Romanian copies: cseléd. Domestic servant. Maria was not an incidental presence at that address but a woman employed in a household. Who her employers were remains one of the questions in my search.
After the outbreak of war, the city filled with soldiers, units in transit, and men on leave. Domestic servants sometimes had Sundays free, met in parks or at inexpensive dances, and encountered young men who might disappear toward the front from one week to the next. In such a city, a life could change direction in a single evening, with no way back.
It is possible that in such a context Maria met a handsome, agreeable young soldier, perhaps a good dancer. From the research I carried out more than a century later, one of the names that began to emerge from the mist of documents and DNA matches is Mihály Konfala, a young man from Spišský Štiavnik, in what is today northern Slovakia. I do not yet know whether he was that man. But his age, his place of origin, the military context of 1916, and the genetic links with the Kaczvinszky family make him the most plausible candidate I have found so far.
If Maria and Mihály Konfala met, they almost certainly spoke Hungarian. I do not know whether it was love, a closeness lasting a few weeks, or only one night. I do not know whether he ever learned about the child. I know only that Maria became pregnant in the autumn of 1916 and that, on 16 June 1917, she gave birth at the hospital at 27 Baross Street to a boy: József Fola. In the record, the father's column remained empty, just as it had in her own baptismal register.
Our family preserves another story. The child's father was said to have been the master of the house, or his son: a wealthy, older Jewish man. The DNA evidence does not support Jewish ancestry from such a close grandfather, while the matches point me more strongly toward Konfala. Yet the legend may have preserved a different kind of truth. Perhaps the older man was not the child's father but the person who protected Maria after she became pregnant. Over the years, the protector and the unknown father may have merged into a single character.
The house at 39 Váci Street
This is where the part that troubles me most begins. Maria was not dismissed. She remained in Budapest with her child for years. An unmarried domestic servant with a son whose father was not acknowledged stood in a precarious position. Yet someone allowed her to remain, to work, and to raise her boy.
My father told me that he began school in Budapest at the age of six. Later he insisted that I should begin at the same age: he had started at six "and had not died — quite the contrary." Born in June 1917, he must have entered first grade in the autumn of 1923 and completed it the following summer. He may also have begun second grade there.
He was an excellent swimmer and said that he had learned in Budapest. Maria had sent him for swimming lessons on Margaret Island, probably at the Palatinus baths, opened in 1919 and enlarged in 1921. This was not an insignificant detail. For a servant's child to attend school and swimming lessons required money, time, and a degree of freedom within the household in which they lived. Maria was not merely tolerated; she and her child appear to have been protected.
Who protected them? Lajos Takáts, the building's owner? Miklós Zsolnay, whose company and residence were there? Another family among the tenants? I do not know. Miklós Zsolnay died in 1922, and the company went through difficult years and reorganizations. This circumstance fits the gradual dissolution of a household, but it does not prove it.
At first I believed that Maria and Iosif had left in 1924, immediately after first grade. A detail in the record forced me to recalculate: my father's Hungarian birth certificate was issued in Budapest on 24 October 1925. Perhaps it had been requested precisely for the departure, a change of residence, or a school transfer. My father may have begun second grade and interrupted it, losing a year after the move to Solovăstru.
For now, 1925 is the most plausible boundary. One autumn, Maria closed the door of a house in central Budapest behind her and returned, with an eight-year-old boy, to the village she had left. I do not know whether the benefactor had died, whether his fortune or business had faltered, or whether an arrangement had simply ended. I know only that their Budapest life stopped, and Solovăstru appeared before them once again, with its bridge, its relatives, and its questions.
My father came from a Hungarian school and from a city of boulevards, shops, and swimming pools. The village must have seemed small to him. If he repeated a grade, or if the transfer interrupted his schooling, the registers in Solovăstru may one day tell us. Until then, I have only his words and the date on an old certificate.
Emigration to Bucharest
In that period, many Transylvanians, disappointed by the lack of opportunities in their native villages, were heading toward Bucharest, the capital of Greater Romania, a city in full development and cultural effervescence.
Even from Solovăstru there were many families who were closing their houses, loading their belongings on trains or trucks and moving to Bucharest. Among them was the Zehan family with their baby girl Virginia, newly born. Maria knew the Zehan family from Solovăstru and, more in jest, more in earnest, proposed Joseph as Virginia's future fiancé.
In the village, without land and without a house of her own, Maria had nothing to support her life. With a child after her, the daily work — in the field, in households, washing, caring — was not only little and poorly paid; it was also uncertain, and uncertainty, in a small community, quickly turns into humiliation. Bucharest, instead, offered something that the village couldn't: regular money and, sometimes, a roof along with the job. For a single woman, that could mean not ambition, but survival — and a chance for the child.
After a few years, in 1930, Maria decided to follow this migratory wave, hoping to offer her son a better education and future.
When she left for Bucharest, it was no longer only about her. The boy, born in 1917, had reached the age at which childhood ends abruptly: either you keep him in school and open a door for him, or you let him slide, naturally and irreversibly, into field labor and the accidents of village life. For a single woman, without land and probably without a house of her own, the village offered no foundation, only a succession of days to be somehow managed: work for others, help asked for with embarrassment, looks that remember you even when you wish they would forget.
Bucharest didn't promise happiness; it promised, at most, a form of continuity from Budapest. In the city, work could turn into money, and money — into rent, into bread, into notebooks, into a pair of boots for a growing boy. And maybe, sometimes, into a roof offered along with the job. If it was a choice, it was one made with her back to the wall: not out of ambition, but out of the instinct to keep her child away from the narrow destiny that poverty prepares, when it has no other way out.
With the savings gathered in Budapest and the support of some acquaintances, she managed to rent a modest dwelling on Arionoaiei Street in Bucharest, located in the Uranus neighborhood, a picturesque area with sloping streets, modest houses and a diverse community. Although today disappeared under the megalomaniacal constructions of the communist regime, Arionoaiei Street was then a quiet little street, where neighbors knew each other by sight and children played on the cobbled sidewalks. There, Maria resumed her activity as a housekeeper, adapting to life in the new capital and ensuring that Joseph benefited from the necessary education to build a promising career.
Through her hard work and dedication to her son, she managed to enroll Joseph in a school to finish his elementary studies, then in a professional school of accounting. Joseph, an intelligent and curious boy, quickly adapted to the new environment, being fascinated by the bustle of the city and the diversity of the people he met.
Despite the difficulties, Maria managed to create a warm and loving home for her son. In the evening, after a long day of work, she read him stories and encouraged him to dream of a better future. In the heart of Bucharest, far from the prejudices of her native village, Maria and Joseph found a new chance for happiness and fulfillment.
A name to forget
In 1938, at the age of twenty-one, my father completed the necessary formalities and, by royal decree, officially changed his family name from Fola to Șerbănați. I do not know what weighed most heavily in his decision. Perhaps the name Fola, which sounded foreign in the Romania of those years, had become a burden. Perhaps he simply wanted to return to the name under which his mother had been registered at birth. Today, after seeing the 1897 register, the gesture seems to me less a change than a return.
He thus closed the circle, finally linked the legal identity to the real one, and broke with an ambiguous inheritance, probably painful, and for others shameful. Thus the name Fola died out in our family — like a trail of smoke left by an old fire. An imaginary line that continued over two generations, drawing a family tree in which the paternal branches did not start from roots, but from the shadows of men.
A long farewell
The marriage of my father to my mother, in February 1943, was not an occasion of enthusiasm for Maria. Between her and my mother there was a silent tension, but not hard to understand in the case of an only son, to whom you dedicated your whole life and whom you see entrusted to another woman. Nevertheless, Maria participated with good will in the wedding, where she met all my mother's relatives and was received with sympathy.
After the wedding, my father moved into great-grandmother Lina's house, the newlyweds receiving a free room there. Maria remained alone, in the dwelling on Arionoaiei Street. She was 47 years old. She still felt strong, but she understood that she could no longer continue to work as a housekeeper, now that her son and daughter-in-law, both university graduates with degrees, belonged to another social class. Perhaps there was a discussion with my father, perhaps a tacit understanding. What is certain is that Maria interrupted her activity and continued to live on savings, supplemented by the regular help sent by my father, with my mother's consent.
When the isolated life in Bucharest became impossible to sustain, Maria decided to return to Transylvania. But not to Solovăstru, but to Reghin, where she still had a few relatives. There she received a modest little house with a garden on the bank of the Mureș. She organized a simple life for herself, working the land and occasionally receiving visits from relatives from Solovăstru, who were in Reghin for shopping or administrative matters.
The post-war years were hard for everyone, but especially for our family, left without income after the purge of my parents from the Planning Committee. Maria could not afford visits to Bucharest, especially as our home was overcrowded and she would have had nowhere to stay. Thus many years passed before I saw her again. I was about 11 years old when she came to visit. She stayed for a few days. We took some photos together. My mother behaved correctly with her, but the coldness between them had not disappeared.
I regret today that I didn't show Maria more affection, but for me, the real grandmother was Linica, my mother's mother. But perhaps also her nature, reserved, silent, with a kind of embarrassment in front of others, made closeness impossible. My father, instead, tried to strengthen my connection with her: one summer, he sent me to Reghin, where I stayed for a few days with my grandmother. She tried to make my stay as pleasant as possible, but what truly impressed me in that visit was the Mureș. There, in Reghin, the Mureș was already a wide river, of almost ten meters, flowing quietly at the bottom of the grandmother's garden, without any parapet or raised banks, solemn during the day, dark and threatening at twilight. I wondered what happens when it swells? Does it flood the whole garden? Does it reach into the house?
A few years later, my father died unexpectedly. He was only 45 years old. Maria came to the funeral. She was petrified by grief, with tears in her eyes, but without theatrical gestures, without noisy crying. She had bags under her eyes and swollen legs. Probably she suffered from kidneys, a disease that my father also had and that was passed on to me.
After my father's death, the survivor's pension due to the son was her only means of subsistence. She lived modestly, but with dignity. She survived her son for six years. I think they were hard years, of illness, of silence, loneliness and longing.
When I learned she had died, my mother sent me urgently to Reghin. I had finished university and was employed at FEA. During vacations, and later during my leaves, I sent postcards to Maria. I found them all carefully gathered at the head of her bed, like relics. I arrived too late for the funeral. A few relatives who had taken care of the necessary arrangements received me. They fed me, took me to the cemetery and offered me a few objects from the little my grandmother had left behind. Among them were two chairs upholstered in a floral fabric, in good condition, which I kept almost reverently until the day I was forced to sell my mother's house and gave them to a poor family.
Thus ended the life of a silent, brave woman, who had carried on her back not only a child, but also the burden of a name that came from the shadows. A discreet but profound line, one that binds me more and more closely to my Transylvanian roots.