Brecken

Uncle Fenrenc (fiction)

By Paul Lamar

I just saw my uncle Ferenc in a YouTube video, featuring Annie Fischer playing the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 back in the 1970s. It’s black and white, kind of grainy, but when the stage camera pans the audience, sure enough, there’s Uncle Ferenc, about two rows in, on the aisle. Wearing a jacket and tie. I never met him, but it’s him. In Mom’s photo albums there are numerous snapshots of Eva and handsome Ferenc and their kids, my older cousins, twins Raphael and Diana, at a beach in Hungary, where they lived before Eva brought the children to New Jersey to be near us after Ferenc died. In the video he’s sitting next to his girlfriend, Claudine, the woman with whom he busted up his marriage to my aunt. At one point in the third movement, Uncle Ferenc puts his hand up to his mouth and just leaves it there. Maybe he’s impressed with Annie Fischer, like he can’t believe her playing. Maybe he’s getting a little dry-mouthed about what he and Claudine are going to do the next day. They didn’t get very far, though, just a few hundred feet in the air, flying west to England, before the plane malfunctioned and went down, killing everyone on board and setting some farmer’s barn on fire.
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