By Anna Porter (page 1 of 6)

There are so many other lives I might have lived. Sometimes, I feel that I have merely borrowed this one. One day, I may have to return it.

There is the life I left behind in Hungary. It was not a terrible life, though there are aspects of it I am glad I have avoided. My Aunt Edie, for example, spent 10 years in jail because she was judged guilty of taking part in the '56 revolution. She had helped the British embassy staff escape to London. She may also have taken part in the attack on the national radio station.

She's had a hard life, my aunt. Her sons were raised in state-run institutions while she tried to appeal her fate. Her younger son, who is my age, spends most of his time training peregrine falcons. I think he must have watched the birds from his grated window at the orphanage. He is still unsure whether to forgive his mother for missing his childhood. My mother believed I would have been in that jail, had we stayed in Budapest after the revolution was lost. A childhood acquaintance was kept there until he was 18. Then he was executed. Communists prefer not to execute children.

During my childhood, I imagined I was a great Hungarian patriot. The stories I knew were all Hungarian stories. The thought that I would live somewhere else, speak another language, know other stories as powerful as mine, would never have occurred to me. I was, most of the time, in the company of my grandfather, who told riveting tales about our inherited history, loved magic, played cheater chess, fought duels with brass-hilted swords, had hundreds of friends all over Budapest, and knew every street corner, every bridge, the remnants of every castle wherever we roamed. My world was circumscribed by those shared stories.

My grandfather had been a publisher before the war - books and magazines. Above all, he loved poetry. Poets, he believed, could see the world more clearly than other men. He would recite long narrative poems while he shaved and I waited for us to walk to one of his favourite coffeehouses, where clandestine writers, former journalists and other enemies of the regime gathered and talked.

Because he was my hero, I wrote poems. Many of them were long, with galloping rhythms and very predictable rhymes. When I finished a poem, I would present it to my grandfather and he would read it, nodding in appreciation. Sometimes he read it out aloud, slipping around the rhymes, letting the rhythm take care of itself. He was terribly fond of me. I think, had we stayed in Hungary, I would have tried to be a poet - perhaps not a particularly good one, but I would have persevered.

Since the Iron Curtain was parted, I have returned for visits. In some ways, I have tried to reclaim a past and a history I had once imagined filled the world.

I travelled to my grandfather's birthplace in Bacska, now part of Yugoslavia, or Serbia, close to Hungary's southern border. I placed flowers on his parents' graves. In Budapest, I wandered along the Danube, following my grandfather's footsteps, skirting the castle, across the bridges from Buda to Pest and back again.

I climbed to the third floor of our old, rat-infested apartment building on Rakoczi Street and almost met myself leaping down the wide-angled stairs. I followed myself down to the basement where there are still woodpiles and coal mounds, but the man whose fingernails had been yanked out one by one doesn't speak to me any more. When I see him in my dreams, his hands are covered by darkness. He no longer frightens me.

In Toronto, there are no political prisoners whose nails are extracted, and very few people are beaten to death by the police. In Hungary, when someone went to jail, it was best not to mention him again. When my mother was in jail, we pretended she was working on the prairies; when my grandfather was jailed, no one asked about him.