Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  But that pale little Jewish girl cut me to the quick. There was no longer any need to call after me from behind windows and fences, now I heard that taunting question everywhere, and I could no longer run from the answer. The question ran along with me, like a shadow with its body, forever echoing in my ear: old Roz-ee’s son, where’s your faa-ther gone?

  I developed a nasty, bitter hatred for my mother. I blamed her for everything. It was that unknown servant girl who’d ruined my life, it was because of her I’d become the village mongrel, with whom even a little Jewish girl refused to play. “Just you show that shifty mug of yours round here again!” I threatened her in my head. “You’ll get what’s coming to you from your loving son!”

  I didn’t have long to wait. Two or three days after the fight, the usual postcard arrived from the capital. At other times, I would be terrified days before one of my mother’s visits, but now I could hardly wait for Sunday. I was reeling with hatred. Now we’ll have it out, I told myself and waited, gnashing my teeth.

  As soon as we were alone, without any kind of build-up, I asked:

  “Why don’t you ever tell me about my father?”

  My mother looked at me as if she’d been paralysed. First she blushed, then she paled, which gave her face, usually an earthy shade, a strange yellowish-green tinge.

  “Your father?” she asked blandly, and looked around as usual, to make sure no one could overhear us.

  “Yeah,” I answered stubbornly.

  We were sitting under the old peach tree, on the rickety little bench. My mother shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “What d’you want me to say?” she asked with feigned ease, but her voice was halting and uncertain.

  “What’s with him, and everything?” I replied mercilessly.

  I could see that she didn’t know what to say, and I was cruelly enjoying her discomfort. Her small black eyes blinked in alarm, a vein swelled on her forehead and she didn’t know what to do with herself. Mechanically, she opened her battered little handbag, fished out her handkerchief, pressed it to her perfectly dry nose, and replaced it, closing the bag with a flourish. Finally, as if facing the inevitable, she gave a deep, old-womanly sigh, and said:

  “Well, he died, poor thing.”

  “Died?” I asked, astounded, because I was ready for anything but this.

  “That’s right. God rest his soul.”

  A long, awkward silence followed. The yard was full of noise, the mothers on their Sunday visit chattering volubly with their offspring, but around us there was silence. The silence was so palpable it was as if it had come to sit between us on the little bench. I didn’t know what to say. I had done nothing, from Friday to Sunday, but prepare mentally for this discussion. I had been ready for every possible, and impossible, response—except this one. Nonetheless, I didn’t believe what my mother had said for a moment. I knew, I could feel, that she was lying.

  “Ain’t what they say in the village,” I said, noticing that my voice was somewhat hoarse.

  “What they sayin’ in the village?”

  “Somethin’ else. Somethin’ different.”

  My mother’s voice trembled with indignation. She gave me such an angry look, it was as if it was all my fault that everything was the way it was. That just drove me even wilder.

  “Oh!” the pent-up anger burst out of me. “You know full well!”

  “What?! What do I know?” she screamed at me, suddenly not caring if the others heard or not. “How dare you talk to your muther that way?”

  I didn’t reply. I just stared stubbornly ahead of me and savoured my mother’s anger. My feigned calm made her even angrier.

  “You ungrateful dog!” she hurled at me, trying to keep her voice down, because it seems she’d remembered meanwhile that there were others besides us in the yard. “I work my fingers to the bone for you day and night, I slave and I toil, I send you all that precious money, and this is the thanks I get?”

  I listened to her with a cold and unsympathetic heart. I hated her to death at that moment. I remembered the old woman’s words, when she’d told me in front of the other children to “tell your whore mother not to make herself child if she not pay for it!”

  “It’s your job to pay for me, Muther,” I replied insolently.

  “That so?” she jumped up. “You’ve got a damn nerve!”

  And she gave me such a slap that I fell right off the bench. My mother had big, bony hands, and the slap hurt like the devil. But I still wouldn’t have cried for all the world. I didn’t feel sorry at all—just the opposite! Just then, I needed to have it out, and maybe I needed the slap too. My overstrung nerves soaked up the electric atmosphere of the coming storm with perverse gluttony. I was no longer quite sober. My humiliated childish soul was dizzy with the heady intoxication of revenge. I longed for some apocalyptic cataclysm to blow everything sky high and turn the whole world upside down.

  “Who was it told you that, you little brat?”

  “The old woman said so!” I replied with devilish glee, as I clambered up off the ground. “An’ she said plenty more besides!”

  “Is that right? Plenty more? What’d she say, then?”

  I almost took pleasure in saying what I said next:

  “That you’re a filthy whore.”

  “What?!” she cried with all her might. “What did that old whore say?”

  “Just that!” I replied, and felt a hideous, animal satisfaction.

  By then, we were surrounded by the mothers and their children gaping at us, and even Ilona, the maid with the bovine expression, had rushed out of the kitchen.

  “What happened, dear?” they asked my mother. “What’s the matter? Go on, tell us!”

  My mother did not reply. She shoved the curious onlookers roughly aside and headed, eyes blazing, for the house.

  “I’ll wring the old tramp’s neck!” she screamed. “Wring her neck!”

  Everyone ran after her; they forgot all about me.

  It was only now I realized what I’d done. I, too, started to run, but not towards the house with the others—no, I ran in the opposite direction. People started gathering in front of the garden gate when they heard all the shouting, and I could see that I could no longer get out into the street. There was a cart full of hay in front of the stables; I climbed up onto that, quick as a flash, and disappeared inside the hay like the proverbial needle.

  There was an unholy racket in the yard. Screaming, cursing, the pounding of feet running about. I could hear them looking for me. I peeked out, holding my breath. I could see from behind the hay my mother, the old woman, the entire band of mothers running towards the stables.

  “Where that lying gallows rat?” the old woman seethed. “I scratch his eyes out!”

  “No use you shoutin’ like that, the boy can’t make up somethin’ like that on his own!”

  “No?” the old woman screeched, and stopped in front of my mother, hands on her hips. “You think I lie, that it? You shut filthy mouth, dear, or they carry you out of here in sheet! So you don’t send money, but you call names, that so? What you shout before in yard, eh?”

  “The boy can’t make up somethin’ like that all by himself,” my mother repeated stubbornly.

  “I say, what-you-shout? Un-der-stand?”

  My mother didn’t answer. Tears were running from her eyes and she was trembling with the chills.

  “Now you not so loud, eh? You coward worm! Who whore here, eh?”

  “Ain’t me!” my mother faltered. “I never took money from a man. I work my fingers to the bone day and night for that boy.”

  “Oh no, no, no!” the old woman squawked, waving her index finger under my mother’s nose. “Don’t you go put on air, devil take you! I know all about you, dear. You can’t come Virgin with me! You never want to birth mangy son of yours. Running like madwoman to get rid of him. You just want your bull, but not his calf ! And you still don’t pay proper, like other girls. Little bastard starve to death for a
ll you care, whoring round Budapest!”

  “What d’you say?” my mother asked hoarsely, suddenly scarily calm.

  “I said what I said,” replied the old woman, looking my mother in the eyes defiantly.

  For a moment, there was deathly silence. Then my mother threw herself at the old woman’s throat with a bestial scream.

  “You dare say that to me, you?” she screamed loud enough to burst your eardrum, as she and the old woman collapsed onto the ground. “Old whore! Village slut!”

  “Murder!” the old woman cried. “Muuurde . . .”

  Her voice faltered and became a rattle instead.

  Unconsciously, I shut my eyes. I wanted to stop my ears as well, but I couldn’t move, and even if I could have, I may not have had the strength. I was trembling all over.

  When I opened my eyes, the old woman was lying unconscious on the ground and my mother was nowhere to be seen. People were running around weirdly, in terrified, wailing confusion. Three of the mothers were trying to revive the old woman all at the same time. They were rubbing her with vinegar, putting cold compresses on her heart and sticking something under her nose. One of the girls ran to the inn to fetch Mr Rozi, another wanted to fetch the gendarme, but someone stopped her. My mother, it seemed, had scarpered in the confusion.

  The old woman came round at last. The poor, wretched peasant girls, who hated her just as much as my mother did, now made good use of the occasion to ingratiate themselves with her.

  “Dear old Rozi! . . . Poor old Rozi! . . . Where’s it hurt, Rozi?”

  They called her all sorts of endearing little names, they fussed over her and played up to her. Five of them helped her off the ground, dusting her off and comforting her, showing her endless sympathy, hobbling off towards the house with the limping old woman as if they were bearing the consecrated host.

  Everything turned silent. The unexpected silence was frightening after all the shouting. Once, when I was five, I watched an old day labourer die in the fields. That was the first time I saw a man wrestling with death, but even his eyes as they glazed over, his twitching limbs and endless death rattle didn’t scare me as much as that indescribable moment when the dying man’s mouth tautened and there was sudden quiet. It was this silence I remembered now, and I lay on that hay cart as if it were a coffin.

  I’d had plenty of frights in my childhood, but I’d never been afraid like this before. So far, I’d only had to fear beatings and hunger, but now I had the additional fear that the old woman would chase me out of the house and I would have to go and live with my mother in the capital. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, though it’d be hard to say why. Life could hardly have been worse for me in Budapest, but even if my mother had promised me an earthly paradise where I could spend my days skating on a lake of lard in a golden suit, I would still have begged to be left alone in hell on dry bread and water.

  “I’d rather die!” I grumbled, though ever since I’d seen that old day labourer expire, I’d been petrified of death.

  I didn’t dare move. Like raindrops through a leaky roof, the minutes dripped down onto me, deathly slow.

  The yard was empty. No one was looking for me.

  Soon it grew dark around me. I heard the loud farewells of the visitors, the melancholy moos of the cows coming home, the countless creaks of the garden gate, the muffled clink of the knives and forks at supper and the distant noises of the boys going off to bed. Then I was alone with the silence.

  Nothing now was moving, but I still heard noises—scratching, mysterious, terrifying noises, possibly from some other world; noises that could neither be identified nor described, because only little children can hear them at night, when the moon is full and the shadows dance, and terror seems to ride across the rooftops on its broomstick. At times like that, I would sit up, hold my breath, and listen. Then the spell would be immediately broken. It was just silence—ordinary, everyday silence.

  The world was dead, dead, dead. A cold and malevolent full moon grimaced in the sky. The garden was silver and black like the tomb.

  I vomited with fright. I got the chills and started saying the Lord’s Prayer, teeth chattering. Then it was as if I, too, had died.

  I fell asleep.

  11

  I HID FROM THE OLD WOMAN for days. At dawn, before the house woke up, I sneaked out of the gate and only sneaked back home at night when everyone was in bed. I collapsed in the straw half dead with fatigue, but couldn’t sleep. I was tortured by fear and hunger, and the night was full of ghosts. Two scary green eyes stared in through the moon-drenched window and a hanged man patrolled the yard in a billowing sheet. If a bat swished past beneath the trees or the wind rustled the bushes, I thought the old woman was coming to chase me out into the night. I waited with chattering teeth, but the days went by and she didn’t come. She would have sold the Holy Spirit itself for money and my mother owed her a lot. So she didn’t throw me out. She kept me as collateral instead.

  I was almost faint with hunger when one morning the boys reported that the night before, the old woman had had Ilona serve dinner because she was “havin’ another of her prayin’ fits”. So I went to the front room and knelt down beside her, and this time I, too, said my prayers as dispassionately as a magistrate on the third reading of an ordinance on grazing rights. The old woman forgave me again, but as it turned out afterwards, not purely in the name of Christian charity. Ilona told me, most confidentially, that a postal order had arrived from my mother and the old woman had replied by letter that “the boy” could stay as long as she paid on time each month, but that my mother was never to set foot in her house again.

  My mother, it seems, accepted this ultimatum and didn’t seem too put out by it, because from then on for the next eight years, she made no attempt whatever to see me.

  I still don’t really understand why. It’s a fact that she wasn’t crazy about me, but I was still her son after all, her flesh and blood, bound to her by the laws of nature. But then, can one judge things according to the laws of nature in a society where the social norms are—to put it mildly—unnatural?

  I can neither accuse nor defend. She was my mother, and she was the way she was. She hadn’t brought herself into this world, nor had she brought this world, in which she was constrained to live, into being. Who knows what went on in the soul of this poor, vulnerable peasant maid during those eight eerily long years, years of inflation and deflation, of political hysteria, wretched heartache, back-breaking work and the inhuman degradations of unemployment? And besides, “What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?”

  Eight years is a terribly long time in the life of a child. The years, which flowed innocuously past, erased the image of my mother in me, to the point where eventually I hardly remembered her at all.

  The old woman had clearly noticed how terrified I was that she would throw me out, because she never missed an opportunity to threaten doing it.

  “You keep that up, gallows rat!” she’d say. “I kick you right out and you go live with whore mother in Budapest.”

  And so my mother came to play roughly the same role in my life as the bogeyman or the wicked witch in the lives of other children: she was a threat. I ended up with little else to tie me to her emotionally, and as the years passed and the children, as they grew, began to doubt the existence of the bogeyman and the wicked witch, so I eventually developed the vague sense that perhaps I didn’t even really have a mother, that she had died long ago and they just hadn’t told me so they could carry on scaring me with her.

  I never admitted to anyone, not even myself, that I, too, could have done with a bit of that—for me—still slightly alien, florescent feeling that grown-ups called motherly love. I’d noticed that, for a little while now, I’d been developing strange symptoms. On Sundays, when the other children’s mothers would come, I just couldn’t bear to be around the house any more. I was beset by some sick, inchoate frustration. I would sidle off immediately after lu
nch and come back only in time for supper, when the visitors had already left.

  “Stinks of mothers,” I would grumble in revulsion and give the boys who’d had a visit from their mothers a cutting look. The boys swallowed my asides along with their dinner, because they knew there’d be a fight otherwise, and they knew full well it wasn’t a good idea to try my patience at times like that.

  No, I just couldn’t stand that “mother stench”. In summer I fled from it, but in the winter I could hardly spend too long outdoors. My wardrobe, to put it mildly, was somewhat rudimentary. I wore my summer clothes in winter too, my soles always had holes in them, and as for an overcoat, that was something I had only heard about. What could I do? Like a snappish dog chained to the doghouse, I threw myself into a corner of the house and watched the touching family scenes in furious silence. Now and then, one of the mothers would take pity on me and come and try to talk to me, but I only gave them curt, dismissive answers before turning on my heels and leaving them cold. I hated them. Sometimes even to the point of nausea; my stomach would turn queasily. That “mother stench” made me want to vomit.

  I detested those long, dark, winter Sundays. I remember that sometimes, in the course of the afternoon, I would already have picked a victim from among the boys showered with gifts and affection, and in the evening, as soon as their mother had left, I would give them, for no reason whatever, a good hiding.

  “Aw, there, there, don’t cry, sweetheart,” I’d say between smacks. “Mummy’ll come and change your nappy for you, little one!”

  There was a boy called István whom I particularly liked to beat up on these long winter evenings. This István, or Istvány, as we liked to call him, was a quiet, good-hearted lad, and I was angry not at him, but at his mother. His mother was the craziest of all the mothers who came to call, though we had all sorts there. Some of them were the effusive sort who simply melted when they saw their little offspring, but Istvány’s mother outdid them all. I’ve not met a woman since who was as crazy about her son as that little peasant serving girl. Secretly, Istvány, too, was mad about his mother, but the poor thing didn’t dare show it in front of me. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he would cover her in kisses and endearments like a lover. They made up the most impossible little endearing nicknames for each other. Istványkám, Pistuka my love, my dove, my darling blossom, the little serving girl would blather constantly, and the boy—when he thought I couldn’t hear him—used to call his mother Motherdarlingdear. I was disgusted by them. I could have just about forgiven Istvány, for he was only a child, after all, and she did give him lots of presents, but as for his grown-up, darling mother, I thought she was simply crazy—and not in a euphemistic way, but in the original, clinical sense of the word.