My Neighbour Jozsef Franko
My Neighbour Jozsef Franko First Edition Copyright Š Julie Lauritzen 2014. All rights reserved. A Handmade Publication. Cover: Painting by Jozsef Franko. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
I never believed palm reading or anything psychic. But 48 years ago I had a revelation in Hammersmith. I felt champagne bubbles, hundreds of them go up my spine and I was anxious to find out what it was. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
The chapter is saying that God is not going to punish you if you fornicate, because the sex desire is the biggest desire when you’re growing up. Because the generation must go on. It’s in the bible. I was really flabbergasted and surprised. In the bible!
If you’re haunted and you call an exorcist, he has to be really good. Our body works with electricity and chemical reactions. So the medium or exorcist is supposed to have higher capacity and they can plug in and communicate mentally. If the electricity everyone has within themselves is drawn out, because it can be drawn out, you collapse and die.
I love this house. I’ve lived here fifty years now. I know almost every brick in the house. I had a very good polish fella who painted the house, and he was very generous not to rob me.
My wife decorated the bathroom. I knew her spirit was going to come back, because I didn’t take her ashes back to Hungary like she wanted me to. So after three months, some of the flowers from this vase were down on the floor. I put it back in the vase. Two days later a bigger batch of flowers was on the floor. Two days later, there is an umbrella stand next to the door; one umbrella was out of the stand and lying on the floor. I still waited.
Have you seen Star Trek on the telly? Beam me up Scotty! And not just beam me up, not just a voice, but the picture is on the phone now! It’s unbelievable. We live in a very nice age.
I usually get up at six. I have a cup of tea, a slice of brown bread, and a little bit of jam on one side. When I finish my breakfast I go out to get the newspaper, read the newspaper and I have my one meal a day. It is potatoes and veg almost every day. I eat it with the last two sides of brown bread from breakfast, a glass of water, and a piece of fruit. When I go food shopping I guy the same things roughly every 8th day.
I was never a wanted child. My family was never an affectionate one, who hugged and kissed the children. I never had a kiss when I was young. But what you never had, you never miss. My father’s father had a shotgun marriage, a forced marriage, because he more or less raped another woman. His wife to-be. And she had to marry him because she was pregnant with my father. So my father was always unwanted, and not just that, my grandfather always told my father “you are the one who made me marry my wife, I never wanted it!� This was a life-long punishment for my father. And then he became a hard person.
In the dining room there is an upright piano, and on top of that is a very heavy vase with ceramic flowers in it. Coming down to the dining room one morning, the ceramic flowers were spread out nicely on the floor, and the vase was next to them. It’s a very heavy vase! Then came the noise. I was reading a newspaper three days later in the kitchen. There is a gas boiler there. Suddenly there was a tremendous noise, like someone was hitting the gas boiler with a sledgehammer. I went to the post office the same day, paid £580 and sent her ashes in a parcel back to her relatives in Hungary. Instantly: no more haunting. That was ten years ago.
My first wife and I travelled to Africa, Turkey, America, and Thailand. Thailand was fabulous! In Bangkok we went to the park, saw elephants, listened to music and did some dancing. If you go far East that’s the best thing. We went to Greece after our trip to Rome. There’s nothing there! Compared with Rome, which was 100%, Greece was 2%. They’ve got the statues, but nothing else! You must go to Florence, Naples and the city of Pompeii, who’s got the people that got burned.
I worked in a factory for 4‌ 5 years. One year I worked nights to save money, and I met this Hungarian lady, a very strong catholic, in the Hungarian reformist church in Barons Court. So I left the factory around 1960’s to work with computers and wires, bought a house, and married in the Catholic Church. I retired at 57.
Forty years ago, I went to Finchley to see Mir Bashir, a very good palm reader. I read his book The Art of Hand Analysis, and I consulted him about it. I paid £30, he made a palm print of my hand and I hardly had a side line, because I was still learning and the knowledge is registered in the side line of the palm. He told me that I was going on a long journey, so the next year I went to Thailand on a holiday with my first wife. But he didn’t tell me anything major. I didn’t mention my love affairs, because they usually lasted one or two days, and it has to be one and half year to register in the palm, or even longer. The heart line is your emotional feelings partly, and how you react to the things around you. The head line is your intellect. Between the heart line and the head line is a clause. It develops, so when you get new information or knowledge, it gets registered in your palm. The palm is showing you what you are learning in life.
I finished school at the age of fourteen and started working as an apprentice at a uniform shop in 1940 for a four-year apprenticeship. The owner of the shop where I worked was a Jew. He was a good man. You know, there are good men and bad men in all kinds of nature. We hid him in the flat where I was living. In the larder, where food was stored, we dug a hole for him to hide in and then we covered up the hole. He had two bottles with him, one for drinking water and one for urine. We told him to be careful and not to mix up the two!
I was instantly attracted because she was forty years younger. Our relationship was very, very affectionate for years. After a while the affection faded, as it does sometimes. To me, it was a little bit of heartache, but then she started hording things. I hated it. We are going to get divorced – hopefully.
The train went from the eastern railway station to the border. There wasn’t any conductor, so anyone could get on. We were five boys and one girl leaving Hungary. At the border and there were about fifty men waiting for us. We gave them some money, and they took us over the border. They were sorting us out in Vienna. We had the opportunity to go to Germany, America, Canada and England. The ones I left Budapest with were all around 18, and I was 28. One of the younger boys and I went to England.
My father was in the communist army and left Budapest in 1918, to escape the Hungarian army. He lived in a Russian village for about nine months, working as a tailor. He was a spy for the Red Army and one day he almost gave me away to the Russian security police because he thought I could provide them with information about the ship I was working on. My brother was an alcoholic and worked in a warehouse. Every night he would take sleeping pills or something like that, and one night he took too much. Pshh! He wasn’t sick. But he drank too much and it was affecting his system. He started drinking during the war. Everyone was drinking then. One rotten apple can spread to its surroundings you know.
It’s easy living if you have work. Don’t smoke; don’t drink, save the money. And of course you try to live a decent life. Before you marry, every relationship should be about 6 or 7, maybe 8 years, to get to know the person. That’s average. You know I’m getting a divorce. Now I’ve got a third missus friend in my life. It’s going famously. As long as my second wife disappears from here, she’s going to move in here. I don’t expect any problems in my life, I can live off my pension you know. I saved a lot of money.
How this book came to be I have known Jozsef for 138 days and since then he has read my palm 32 times. The lines in my palm does not change, but he seems to use it merely as a tool to remember things about my personality, like being shy or having a short temper. When recollecting his lost trail of thought in our conversation, he uses his regained knowledge about my personality or emotional qualities to return to his story where this piece of information was relevant, or to just start a new one where it is relevant. Since I moved into the house in Bouverie Road, I had been curious about the next-door neighbours. From our garden you could see their sanctuary with class front facing their garden. Through the glass you could see boomerangs, mirrors and numerous paintings leaning up against each other. Wind chimes in different shapes and sizes hanging from the ceiling and a large telescope raised in the middle of the room amongst plastic bags and cardboard boxes. A person that possesses so many different extraordinary things in one space must have lived an equally extraordinary life. That turned out to be more correct than I ever expected. We officially met when Jozsef knocked on my door five minutes after the delivery man had left a parcel in my care. It turned out to be his, and after figuring out that I was a photographer Jozsef invited me in to his house to look at his paintings. If he was anything else other than a sweet and kind looking 85 year-old man I would have made an excuse. But I decided to risk it and get to know my curious case of a neighbour. There are around 140 painting in his house, most of them hanging on walls or leaning in stacks against a wall in almost every room. He doesn’t paint anymore, but he talks enthusiastically about how they are inspired by the daylight and sunlight, and which techniques he used to get the light onto the canvas. During our conversations which resulted in the text throughout the book, Jozseph kept jumping back and fort from subjects, stories and thoughts.
He is not the kind of person who will tell his stories in a chronologically and structured manner, but rather in a slightly messy and disjoined way as he always remembers something else he will want to tell in the middle of it. As a man who is naturally curious, outspoken and genuinely interested in other people, I have learned that these qualities have led Jozsef into many interesting scenarios and that they are precicely what led him in my direction. Despite a tough upbringing, he is a very outgoing, social and contant man who is more than willing to approach strangers on the street or tube to have a chat about anything. In a large city like London it is quite rare to know ones neighbours. People rush from home, to work and the pub without saying more than a ‘hello’ if that. It is interesting to see how minimizing your comfort zone will effect your orbit in the world. Who knows. It might result in a great story and a book.