JÁNOS SZÉKELY (1901–1958) was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of eighteen he left his native city for Berlin, where he became known as Hans Székely and wrote scripts for silent movies. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States, where, as John S. Toldy, he wrote screenplays for Hollywood films, winning an Academy Award for Best Story for Arise, My Love in 1940. His novel Temptation was initially published in English translation in 1946 under the pseudonym John Pen. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Székely spent several years in Mexico with his family before returning to Berlin in 1957.
MARK BACZONI was born in Budapest and raised in London. He read history and history of art at Cambridge. Among the books he has translated from the Hungarian are Alexander Lénárd’s Stories of Rome and Jenő Rejtő’s The Fourteen Carat Car.
TEMPTATION
JÁNOS SZÉKELY
Translated from the Hungarian by
MARK BACZONI
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Original text copyright © 1946 by János Székely; copyright © 2016 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
Translation copyright © 2020 by Mark Baczoni
All rights reserved.
First published by Creative Age Press, Inc., New York, in 1946.
This translation first published in English by Pushkin Press in 2020.
Cover image: János Vaszary, The Morphinist, 1930; image courtesy Hungarian National Gallery
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pen, John, 1901–1958, author. | Baczoni, Mark, translator.
Title: Temptation / by János Székely, translated from Hungarian by Marc Baczoni.
Other titles: Kísértés. English
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2020. | Series: New york review books classics | Copyright ©1949 by János Székely. | Translated from Hungarian.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019039477 (print) | LCCN 2019039478 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374376 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681374383 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Budapest (Hungary)—History—1872–1945—Fiction. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans
Classification: LCC PH3351.S7575 T413 2020 (print) | LCC PH3351.S7575 (ebook) | DDC 894/.511332—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039477
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019039478
ISBN 978-1-68137-438-3
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
ONE
Me and the Fine Young Gentleman
1
MY LIFE BEGAN LIKE A REAL THRILLER: people were trying to kill me. But since this happened five months before I was born, I didn’t upset myself too much about it. Although, if what they say in the village is true, I had every right. My life dangled by the hair of a peasant’s head even before the five fingers that now hold this pen had had a chance to form.
My mother was sixteen at the time, and if the indications are to be believed, neither her soul nor her body wanted, one day, to have me call her “mother”. And fair enough—it’s not a blessing widely looked for by sixteen-year-old girls. But what my mother got up to—they tell me—went beyond all bounds. She revolted against motherhood as if she’d had the very Devil inside her. She resorted to the most shameful means, all the while doing the rounds of the churches, by turns kneeling and praying, then cursing the saints out of heaven. She ranted and raved, determined, come what may, not to have to birth me.
“If I’d loved that lousy father of his!” she said. “But I only saw him the once. Ain’t seen hide or hair of him since.”
And that was, indeed, the case. She’d met Mihály T. on the feast of St Peter and St Paul, seeing him neither before nor after. But the damage was done, though my mother wasn’t the sort of “slutty tramp”, as they used to say where I come from, who didn’t care, who would have gone with anything in trousers. But I don’t want to sugar-coat the thing, so let me tell it the way one of the women in the village, old Rozi—more about her anon—told it to me some time later.
According to her, “poor Anna” was no worse than the other young village girls. She was a quiet, neat girl with pale skin and black hair; she was beautiful. I remember her eyes most of all. She had unusually deep-set, small, black eyes, the sort that were always a little suspicious, always a little askance; a peasant’s eyes peeking sharply out at the world, and yet with something of an old, gentle sadness. She lived with her stepmother. Her father had died when she was young, and she’d never known her mother. They were crushingly poor and she worked the fields. As young as fifteen, she worked her fingers to the bone on the Count’s estate. So she more than deserved the little feast given for the labourers at St Peter and St Paul, where she met Mihály T.
He was renowned, Mihály T.—Mishka for short. Among themselves, the girls used to call him Dappermishka, all in one word, the way I’ve spelt it. Dappermishka had been born in the village, but left some ten years or so before. He was a wild-blooded adventurer by nature, and had left home as a teenager to go and see the world, like a boy in a fairy tale. Exotic stories had been doing the rounds about him ever since. Some folk said he’d become a ship’s captain, others a pirate on the high seas. In fact, he was neither ship’s captain nor pirate, but it’s true he was a sailor on an ocean steamer, which was in itself a great destiny in a peasant’s eyes. So Dappermishka had come home after ten years to show himself to the village, to let them see what had become of him. He was dressed carefully, with a genuine English briar pipe between his strong, fine, porcelain-white teeth and a little green cap he wore at a jaunty angle that he had bought—as he showed everyone—in Buenos Aires. He was a hot-blooded lad, strong as an ox, who swaggered, quarrelled and swept the girls off their feet. He strutted down the village streets like a cock pheasant, and was to be seen out by the haystacks with a different girl each night.
Anna didn’t know Dappermishka, but had nevertheless heard plenty about him. When on that memorable summer evening of St Peter and St Paul she finally set eyes on him, she was dismissive, to say the least.
“You’re all head over heels about that?” she said, good and loud for everyone to hear. “You’ve no damn sense at all.”
The other girls, loyal to a fault, lost no time at all repeating this to Dappermishka, but—as so often in life—this had the very opposite effect to what they’d wanted, obviously, to achieve. All of a sudden Dappermishka appeared, without a word, at Anna’s side, grabbed her by the waist and swept her into a csárdás, dancing with her again and again. What happened as they danced we’ll never really know. They say my mother swore afterwards she only danced with him for effect, so that all them slutty tramps would be green with envy. The fact remains, though, that she danced with Dappermishka till dawn and didn’t so much as look at anyone else.
It was a good, plentiful summer, the summer of 1912, and there was great excitement on the feast of St Peter and St Paul. His Lordship had provided enough stew for the village to stuff itself to bursting, secret stashes of wine flowed, they had a Gypsy band to play the csárdás. They say it was so hot that night that even at dawn people were covered in sweat, though they danced outdoors, in the open air. There was a small breeze sometime after midnight, it’s true, but it served only to set the tricolour paper lanterns on fire, and brought no relief. The wind itself was as hot as if it had come from a fiery oven. So they stamped the flaming lanterns out, leaving only the moon and the stars to light them from the sky. B
ut that was enough for the young folk, or perhaps too much even, for couples began slipping off one after the other to secret corners.
Dappermishka asked my mother:
“Got a favourite song?”
“ ’Course. Everybody does.”
“What is it?”
“An old one. The Gypsies don’t play it now.”
“Oh really?” Dappermishka replied roguishly. “Well, tonight they’ll play nothin’ else!”
With that, he drew out a ten-pengő note, spat on it lustily and, like a carousing nobleman, stuck it on the bandleader’s forehead. The band struck up the tune right away. It was a corny old tune, my mother’s song:
I walked in the quiet forest glade
Saw a bird there in the shade
And a nest made just for two—
How I fell in love with you
And it was just as Dappermishka had said: the band played nothing else till dawn. The leader had, once or twice, screwed up his courage and tried to play something a little faster, but Dappermishka was there in a flash, setting about the band like a pack of wild dogs. So what could they do but play that slow, melancholy song until the break of dawn; and at a certain point Dappermishka crooned into my mother’s ear, so that the other girls all fairly burst:
“How I fell in love with you!”
It was a crazy night, and there was hardly a soul sober in the village. The free-flowing wine had had its effect, as had the all-too starry sky and the slow, steady music—and what generally happens under such circumstances happened that night too. All at once, Anna found herself lying on a haystack with Dappermishka. It was only for a few minutes, the poor girl recounted later, and she barely even knew what had happened when he was already reaching for his watch, crying out as if skinned alive:
“I’ll miss my damn train!”
With that he was up and across the open country before she’d adjusted her dress. He sprang off the end of the platform and leapt onto the end of the final carriage, a sight painful to watch, as the stationmaster recounted the day after.
So that’s how it happened. It was no great love affair, not by a long shot. It was just folly, and such things happen; stranger things having happened on St Peter and St Paul in years past. The next day, to hear old Rozi tell it, my mother shrugged it off. She had a headache from the wine and went round humming moodily. It wasn’t that she thought ill of Dappermishka, but she didn’t think well of him, either. She took the whole thing the way you usually take such foolish things. It had happened, and that was that. She was none the poorer for it.
And perhaps she had already forgotten Mihály T.’s famously beautiful eyes by the time she realized one day that she was in trouble. She ran straight to the wise women, of course, but by then it was too late. Old Rozi, who was one of these wise women, claims there was something not quite right with my mother’s womanly affairs that had stopped her noticing sooner. And of course she was young, too, and inexperienced in such things. Suffice to say that I was past three months by then.
Under normal circumstances, village midwives wouldn’t have shrunk from a three-month case, but there were good reasons for them to do so with me. About six months before, our chemist’s assistant had bled to death at the hands of an old quack in the next parish. It had become a nationwide scandal and the gendarmes had arrested a dozen women in our own village. There was much weeping and wailing, excitement and even a trial—the newspapers were full of it. After that, much to Anna’s dismay, the obscure but flourishing guild of angel-makers suddenly got very careful. There wasn’t a single one in the village who would help her.
My mother tried everyone, driven almost from her wits with desperation. She hitched a lift on every cart headed for a neighbouring parish, she tried all the neighbourhood midwives, quacks and old women who specialized in this sort of thing. They didn’t help her either; they just kept stringing her along. They gave her all sorts of mysterious creams, teas, pills and, of course, plenty of advice. They told her to take such scalding baths, poor thing, that her body was covered in blisters for weeks. Those didn’t help. The silver-tongued old ladies merely took the poor farmhand’s hard-earned savings and told her, always regretfully and somehow managing to keep a straight face, that they couldn’t help her at all:
“You come too late, dear!”
So Dear took her Sunday shawl, for this was around Advent time, and threw herself in the river. There was snow, the river had big blocks of ice floating on it, and yet the little peasant girl didn’t die. They dragged her out and she was absolutely fine—she hadn’t caught even so much as a blessed cold.
It seems I was a tough customer even as a foetus. The icy river couldn’t freeze me, the scalding baths couldn’t kill me, and the various creams, teas and pills didn’t do anything to hurt me. I was born, I lived, I was as healthy as can be. I was almost five and a half kilos at birth, the village had never seen anything like it. I bellowed so loud with my brand-new lungs, they say, that I put the herdsmen’s bugles to shame.
“Hideous,” my mother said succinctly when they showed me to her. With that, she turned to the wall and didn’t look at me again.
Well, I thought, if I’ve survived the icy river and the scalding baths, I’ll survive her judgement, too. And so I did. I grew, and gained weight, and developed muscles, though I don’t fully know how myself. People paid more attention to stray dogs than they did to me. I grew like weeds and brambles, and was just as hard to get rid of, that’s for sure.
They say the first word I uttered was bugger. I picked up mother much later. Unhappily, this was due not so much to my mischievous nature as a sad reflection of how often I must—even as an infant—have been called by that juicy epithet; and how little, by contrast, I must have heard that gentler word that people down our way had such a wonderfully sweet way of pronouncing: “muther”.
My own muther took up as a wet nurse in Budapest two weeks after I was born. She visited me in the village at most four or five times a year. It’s hard to say, after all this time, why she came so infrequently. She may not have been able to get more time off, or maybe she couldn’t afford the rail fare, or perhaps she still thought me so abominably hideous. Most likely, it was a combination of all three. Suffice to say that I did have a mother and I didn’t, and I mostly didn’t rather than did. And that good, wholesome milk that the very law of nature had set aside for me was gobbled instead by the premature offspring of a Budapest textile merchant, coddled in swaddling like an ailing silkworm.
So much, then, for the law. It seems even the laws of nature, ancient though they are, exist for people to try and get round them whenever they can.
2
SO I STAYED IN THE VILLAGE with old Rozi, who despite having such a charming name, was the most disreputable old woman there. When she’d got too old to pursue her original profession, she devoted herself to bringing up illegitimate boys like myself—if you could call what she did to us an upbringing.
They say she was once a great beauty, a blonde and blue-eyed Slovak girl. At the age of fifteen, she became a maid in the household of the Count; it was he who’d brought her here from the Slovak lands. Rozi served three years as a maid before giving birth to a bouncing baby boy. The child’s father was almost a child himself: the Count’s sixteen-year-old son. They kicked Rozi out the moment they saw her belly filling out, but they couldn’t get rid of her that easily. She was cunning, the pretty little Slovak girl, and knew what she was doing. She kicked up such a fuss, quarrelling and wheedling, threatening them with lawyers and who knows what else, that her master eventually opened his wallet. With his money, she bought the little house at the edge of the village in which I, too, was later brought up.
Six months after her severance from the Count’s household, Rozi’s baby died. His death was very unexpected, and to this day, the rumour in the village is that she had helped along his demise. That may, of course, just be village gossip, but knowing old Rozi as I do, I wouldn’t rule it out for a second.
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By that time, she was receiving regular visits from some local potentate who would always drive in from the neighbouring parish in his trap. He was married and had a family and could only come on Saturdays; and since there is more than one day in the week, Rozi made sure over time that she had visitors those other days as well. In the end, she was measuring her love out for sale the way others measured out wheat.
She was a thrifty soul and saved the money she made from her embraces assiduously. Soon, she had the rickety house put in order, a new fence built around the yard, and later bought a good deal of land. She prospered so visibly that the entire village was eaten up with jealousy.
Then one day something that so often happens to women like her—who want men only for their money—happened to her too. She fell in love with a man who wanted nothing from her but her money.
He was a big, dim fellow with bovine eyes, and I could never understand why, of all the dozens of men she’d known, she fell for him specifically. When I was home last, I ended up asking her. She herself couldn’t really explain it.
“Well, he never was what you might call handsome, you see,” she reflected in her strange, slightly foreign accent, “but the girls, they mad about him!”
So he wasn’t even handsome, that fellow, and I know from extensive first-hand experience that he certainly wasn’t clever. Besides all that, as old Rozi told it, he was poor as a church mouse, so poor that when he first came to the village, you could see his backside through his trousers. He was a ragtag sort of wanderer, of the sort girls usually didn’t give a second thought.
“I was consumed with curiosity, you see,” old Rozi admitted, “as to what his secret could be, this nothing man.”
But “secrets” like that tend to stay secret for ever. A nothing sort of man comes along, a ragtag sort, not bright, nor handsome, or even rich, and yet the local women tear themselves apart over him. Even though, if what old Rozi told me is true, he wasn’t too bothered with the ladies, they all ran after him as if possessed.
Temptation Page 1