Who IS Holgar?

My landlord says things like, "I escaped Hungary to get away from this Socialist, internationalist bullshit, but now all I hear is how everyone is [here he switches to a simpering, mocking tone] 'afraid to hurt anybody's feelings'..." He tinkers and repairs and maintains the property out of the gigantic warehouse in back of my little place, with Rush Limbaugh blaring from his van, and thinks that if Europe wants to know how to really be in the world, they should follow Bush's lead in foreign policy. He's an electrical engineer with a few patents under his belt, including some sort of anti-hijacking device. He speaks multiple languages--aside from Hungarian and English, Japanese (after hosting Japanese friends in Hawaii, and brushing up on his Japanese, he is thinking of being a tour guide for Japanese because, among other reasons, "they tip really well.") and Spanish (upon hearing I use Spanish in my job, he once disoriented me by switching to Spanish in mid sentence, but with the same thick Hungarian accent that he uses in English, so I wasn't sure *what* language I was hearing.) So, you know. He's a smart cookie with a fierce point of view. What kind of life adds up to this character?

I heard the This American Life show on supers this weekend, as in, superintendents. Landlords, like. In the first one, a colorful, crabby Brazilian super amuses his residents with outlandish tales of, for instance, how there is an exception in the Brazilian constitution for him such that he could even kill the Brazilian president & not be prosecuted. Hah hah hah, funny old man. Then it turns out that he was, in fact, Brazilian secret police and had been in cahoots with the owner of the building to do crime, have people killed, etc. Woah, what?!? It's a great story, produced by Jack Hitt. Give it a listen sometime.

It made me think of an ominous statement that Farmer D said many months ago. Farmer D, you'll recall, is the foreman of the commercial, chemical-friendly farm across the street. The farm across the street and my colorful, foreign-born landlord have a history of feuding, about which I only know bits. Like Holgar fought the farm for neighborhood access to the public beach ( a worthy and righteous struggle, which he eventually won), but did it with such vigor & vitriol that he is now banned from walking the farm roads the rest of the neighborhood is free to traipse. Last fall the farm's irrigation reservoir was choked with something like duckweed, a green coating over the whole surface of the lake that then turned rusty brown. Farmer D lamented that because of it, the mallards wouldn't come to hatch their duckies (since then, they haven't, thoug hthe pond is now clear) and told me that area botanists identified the choking weed as nothing local. Where did it come from? Farmer D was sure Holgar had planted it out of spite. It's gotten that far, their mutual disregard and suspicion.

One time, in telling me about his previous difficulties with Holgar, Farmer D said, "He's not even a citizen of this country, did you know that?" I didn't; Holgar had met his current sweetie at the flea market 25+ years ago, so I know he's been in this country for a long time. How did Farmer D know this? "One time," Farmer D said, "he had a little trouble with a gun, you know know, brandishing it , but he had immunity and the authorities couldn't touch him." I admired the outlandishness of this statement so much that elected not to soil it with follow-up, so I don't know what the story behind *that* story is. But still, after hearing the TAL piece this weekend, I wonder what immunity means for Holgar, and what brandishing a gun means. I wonder what was going on in Hungary that my landlord had to escape.

Spooky, huh?