Gyula

by Zary Fekete

“Why do you believe in God?”

His name was “Gyula”, a tricky Hungarian name for foreigners to pronounce correctly. The tongue must be placed just so. I tried to get it right. He said it was good enough. Gyula had just gotten out of class. The sidewalk was full of other students from his Catholic school next door.

It was tempting to turn my answer back on him. Why don’t you?

But Gyula’s was serious and still, and something about the moment made me want to give him a real response.

“I always have,” I said. “My parents brought me to church when I was three. The pastor talked about Jesus. Like they were friends.”

He sipped his coffee. “If you’re interested in God, you should see my father’s library.”

“Gladly,” I said.

Two days later, I took the subway to Gyula’s neighborhood. His parents’ apartment was in an 18th century mansion, converted and carved up into individual family units. There was a quote by Petofi, Hungary’s most famous poet, over the main entry, Will we be slaves or free?

The apartment was small but had high ceilings. Gyula brought me into a back room. At first, I thought it was a closet. Wood paneling stared me in the face. Then, I realized the entire room was filled with bookshelves. They were crammed so tightly together, we had to inch our way in sideways.

“My father’s collection,” Gyula said.

After a few twists and turns, we were on the far side of the room, where a window looked out onto a weedy patch of yard. Gyula bent down and pulled a large book off a lower shelf. He rested it on the windowsill.

“Take a look.”

I slowly turned the pages. The were dry and brittle. I couldn’t read many of the words.

“What is it?” I asked.

Gyula smiled and turned to the first page. He pointed to the first sentence. I recognized the Hungarian word Isten. God.

Gyula told me the book was an old Hungarian translation of the Bible. He didn’t know which one, only that it had been his father’s since before he was born. The pages were browned and flaking, the ink uneven, the Gothic-style letters pressed deep into the paper.

Gyula said his father used to read to him from the Bible at night. He said he had nostalgic memories about the book’s smell: dust and candle wax.

We stayed friends after that day. I met him for coffee after class; he told me about his dreams of studying abroad. He was curious about my own country, though mostly about why I still believed in God. Over time, his English grew better, my Hungarian a little more confident. He finished high school, then university. For my 30th birthday he gave me a pencil drawing of a glass of champagne. I kept it tucked away in my own Bible.

Years passed. We moved again. I hadn’t heard from Gyula in a long while when, one night, I came across a few old photos of him on social media. I wrote to him. He replied quickly, his message warm and brief: I have a wife now, he said, and a little girl. Do you remember that coffee shop? I still do.

I told him I had never forgotten that afternoon in his father’s library. “Yes,” he wrote. “My father died a few years ago…and now the book is in my house.”

I smiled and pictured Gyula with his little daughter. I wondered if he read the Bible to her, too.

BIO: Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary and currently lives in Tokyo. He has a debut novella Words on the Page out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social