Temptation

  The Schoolmaster looked once more at his sister, smiling this time.

  “What’s that you’d do?”

  “Work it off, if you let me, sir.”

  “What would you work off?”

  “That bit of learning, sir.”

  Scarecrow burst into laughter at that. Oh, go drown yourself, I thought, because it made me incredibly angry that she was laughing at me. Of course, it was easy to take a poor boy’s labour for nothing when their masters hardly paid full-grown adults anything at all. But I had a counter-argument to that, as well:

  “If you won’t let me work, sir, I’ll get ’em to write me a letter to the Regent, sir, to Horthy himself, I’ve got it all in my head, sir, it’s just a case of writing it out, and it’s such a fine letter that it’s bound to touch the Regent’s heart, and he’s bound to pay for my schooling, sir.”

  The Schoolmaster, too, burst into laughter. Oh, go drown yourself, too, I thought, but all I said, very humbly, was:

  “Please, sir, I ain’t expectin’ him to give it to me for nothing, neither.”

  “Is that right?” the Schoolmaster guffawed. “And just how are you planning to pay the Regent, then?”

  “Well,” I explained, “by joining up later, or serving the country some other way, and then the Regent could take it out of my wages.”

  By now, both of them were in hysterics. Damn the pair of you! I said to myself, and something slipped out of my mouth in my anger that I hadn’t rehearsed at all.

  “Begging you pardon, sir, but surely no Christian can envy a poor boy like me a scrap of learning!”

  But they just kept on laughing like a pair of lunatics. I burst into tears.

  “Come here, my boy,” said the Schoolmaster then and put me between his knees. “So you want to go to school, come what may, is that it?”

  “Yes, sir!” I bleated between snivels. “Please, sir, have pity on a poor boy.”

  “All right, then, stop crying, will you!” he muttered kindly, patting my face. “Go tell the old woman to come see me tomorrow morning before school.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “I can’t tell her that, sir!”

  “You can’t?”

  “No, sir, she’d flay the hide off me.”

  “Flay the hide off you?”

  “Yes, sir!” I snivelled, the salty tears flowing into my mouth.

  The Schoolmaster puffed at his cigar, which was drawing poorly, then made up his mind and stood up.

  “Well, in that case, I’ll go and see her,” he said. “Wait here a minute, my boy.”

  With that, he went into the other room and put on his coat and hat, and a few minutes later, we were walking up the muddy high street together towards the outskirts of the village.

  I walked along, sly and uncertain, beside the long-legged ox of a man. What sort of a man is he? I wondered. Why is he doing this? What’s he up to? If he’d said, very well, you can work off your schooling, but you’d better work hard, like a dog, because in this life nothing comes for free, then I would have understood. But he asked for nothing. He was playing nice, as if he wasn’t one of the upper classes at all, tramping all the way to the end of the village in the rain, in the mud, on account of a bastard child without so much as a proper shirt on his back. Why? I was afraid of this mysterious man. I decided that I’d best be on my guard.

  Fortunately, the old woman hadn’t gone to church because she’d been suffering from her rheumatism for days now and could hardly move her swollen joints.

  “I want to talk to her in private,” said the Schoolmaster when we reached the house. “Wait here in the yard.”

  I hid behind the hedge and waited. The rain had stopped and there were only the drops of water falling now and then from the branches of the bare trees, like weak-eyed tears from an old man’s wilted lashes. There was a great, Sunday-morning silence in the yard. The house was sleeping like an enchanted castle in a fairy tale. It’s possible that a hundred years had passed since the Schoolmaster went in, and it was possible I’d only see him again on Judgement Day. The minutes sped by, but time had stopped. I shivered.

  All of a sudden, the house broke out in ear-splitting shouts. I listened with bated breath, but couldn’t make out what the old woman was shrieking. All I could hear was the Schoolmaster swearing horribly. Then the door sprang open and the giant of a man burst out into the yard, his head purple with rage.

  “Now you listen here,” he bawled at me. “If you’re not in school at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll tear you limb from limb. Understand?”

  My God, did I? No kind word had ever meant as much to me as this threat. I clicked my muddy, bare heels together and shouted like a soldier:

  “Yes, sir!”

  My eyes grew moist, like a young girl’s freshly engaged to her secret love, and I really felt that happiness had come to claim me for her own. But then I got such a cuff from behind that it made my nose bleed. I knew the old woman’s hand and didn’t even turn around, running for the hills. I ran out into the field, springing about like a wild horse.

  “I’m going to school!” I screamed. “I’m going to school!”

  Yes, on that morning, I got engaged to happiness.

  •

  And how fine it was, charging along laden down with books on autumn mornings, debating the happenings in school at lunch in that mysterious slang that was no longer a mystery.

  How fine it was to wake knowing that school awaited and to go to bed feeling that the day had not been wasted.

  How fine it is when you’re not mourning the passing of time! When you drive your days gently before you, as if hurrying to a wedding feast, and you wait with the tender impatience of the bride. In the autumn I said: if it were only winter now, I’d know my alphabet. In the winter, I said: if it were only spring, I’d know how to read and write! In the spring, I said: if it were only summer, I would have finished the first grade.

  Perhaps no child has ever studied with greater, more passionate devotion. I pictured knowledge as a mythical horse that, if I could tame it, would fly me out of the abyss of my miserable existence into the magical land of fabled promises.

  I even stopped spying on the girls undressing by the riverbank. My precocious agitation ceased, as if by magic. I cared only for school.

  I was the best student, though I could hardly say I learnt easily. Mine was a stuffy, peasant brain, hard to open, but once I’d learnt something, it became so much a part of me, it was like a ring in the trunk of a tree.

  I could only study at home on the sly. I had to work in the afternoons, because the old woman didn’t let me off work even now, and in the evening, “children belonged in bed”. Woe betide anyone she found awake after eight o’clock—and she particularly had it in for me. So I pretended to sleep until the house grew quiet and then I would sneak out, laden down with books and notebooks, to the outhouse. My little money I now spent not on bread but on candles, and sometimes I would study half the night in secret, like some lonely conspirator.

  I remained suspicious of the Schoolmaster for a long time. I didn’t understand why he was being good to me. Why would anybody be good to a little bastard? What could he be after? I wondered, suspecting something evil, and when I realized that he wasn’t after anything at all, I was even more unsettled. I thought him slightly crazy, and at the same time, I was convinced that he was the wisest man in the world. I was mad about him, and yet I kept him at arm’s length. I didn’t understand why he did what he did, though, to be fair, neither did other people. People in the village either thought him a lunatic or a genius, and there are strange stories told about him there to this day.

  He came to us from a tiny village in Zala county. His father was a landless peasant and he himself had never been out of the country, but he spoke four languages, took French and British journals, and taught us—in our godforsaken little village—in a way of which any model establishment in any capital in the world could justly have been proud. He ploughe
d, sowed and weeded our tiny, uncultivated minds with the same age-old patience and humble gravity with which his ancestors had ploughed and sowed other people’s land. Even his poorest student was a match for the best in the neighbouring villages, but that was nowhere near enough for him.

  “I want to educate you, you dunderheads, not just teach you things!” he used to say, and those were no hollow words. He knew every boy’s joys and sorrows, their conditions at home, and if he smelt trouble with any of us, he would take that boy aside and quietly say:

  “Come by my house this afternoon.”

  There, over coffee and a sweet loaf, he’d have a talk with us. Subtle as an examining judge and kindly as a confessor, he would tease out of us our insignificant secrets and, with a sure and gentle hand, he would right the disrupted balance of our tiny lives. But if he got angry, he forgot all about his educational principles and the old peasant came out in him. He’d beat us black and blue, cursing nineteen to the dozen. He always repented afterwards. Once, I remember, he smacked one of our classmates unjustly. We all knew that the boy was innocent, but none of us dared say a word. About six months later, when we’d forgotten all about the incident, the boy really did do something he shouldn’t have, but the Schoolmaster didn’t touch him. He asked him in front of the whole class:

  “Do you know why I’m not going to smack you now?”

  “No, sir, I don’t,” blubbered the boy.

  “Because, my dear boy, the smack you deserve now you already got six months ago. So we’re quits.”

  Once or twice a week, the Schoolmaster would organize “afternoon chats”.

  “Only come if you really want to,” he would say then, but there weren’t many of us who didn’t want to go to his chats.

  These “afternoon chats” had nothing to do with school; or at least, so we thought. We used to walk out to the edge of the village, humming and singing all the way, and then gather round to sit about the Schoolmaster and “chat”. He always started with something funny. He told us such funny stories that the peasant boys would be simply bursting with bright, sparkling, youthful laughter. And then slowly, playfully, without our even noticing it, he turned to more serious things. He would ask what one or another of us thought about this or that topic, and he would listen to our opinions as if we’d been his peers. Everyone was free to say what he thought. He never cut anyone off, was interested in everyone’s opinion and would tell us his own only once we’d said our piece. He liked to hear us argue. He was all for, and visibly enjoyed, our unsophisticated duels of opinion and made sure that everyone took part in the debate. He fired up and encouraged the more timid boys and would listen to even the most insipid truisms with grave seriousness. He took us all seriously, and the result was that we could argue and not hold anything back. In school he was strict, but on these afternoons, he gave us free rein. We could be as loud as we wanted. He would wait patiently for the end of the debate and then give us his opinion calmly, in simple, clear sentences.

  In this way, over time, he managed to instil in us his whole world view, which was just as strange and dualistic as he himself. He was of the most extreme nationalist bent, at the same time professing himself a disciple of György Dózsa—his beliefs were almost revolutionary. He despised the great capitalists and landowners, the Jewish bankers and media barons, the slippery Christian middle class, the political elites and the whole heel-clicking “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” system as a whole. I think he despised everyone who wasn’t either a peasant or poor. The land belonged to those who worked it, power to those who owned it, and all the land from the Carpathians to the Adriatic belonged to Hungary: that was his philosophy. He managed to translate this into childspeak, and explained it with such wonderful simplicity that even the first-years understood it.

  “Tell me, children,” he’d ask, “have you ever thought about who owns the snow?”

  Loud laughter.

  “No one!” one boy shouted.

  “God!” cried another.

  “And if someone makes a snowman out of that snow, who owns the snowman?”

  “Whoever made it.”

  “Hm,” muttered the schoolmaster. “And if someone makes a wheat field out of unworked land, by ploughing it, and sowing it, and taking care of it, then who does that field belong to?”

  “Whoever ploughed and sowed it.”

  “Really?” nodded the schoolmaster. “Say, Péter Balogh, your father ploughs and sows and harvests, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir, he does.”

  “And how much land does he own?”

  “None, sir.”

  “Really, now?” the Schoolmaster wondered, as if he hadn’t known that all along. “Then there’s something wrong there, isn’t there, children?”

  There was indeed, we realized, and listened in silence. The Schoolmaster pretended not to understand, either, looking quizzical and scratching his stubbly chin.

  “What do you think, children?” he asked. “Is that right?”

  “No!” we chorused, because even the dullest child knows that this isn’t right.

  “Well if it isn’t, then shouldn’t we change it?”

  “Yes!” we said.

  “But how?” wondered the Schoolmaster. “How is this going to change?”

  About that, of course, we didn’t have a clue. So the Schoolmaster raised his voice, and almost ceremonially said:

  “The only way to change this, children, is for you to go out and change it when you grow up!”

  These were the sort of things he taught us in the very heart of Horthy’s Hungary, with its bellicose crowing of National Renewal and merciless gendarmes. The more genteel people in the village avoided him like the plague, but didn’t dare pick a fight with him, because the nature of this ox of a man was such that if he got angry, he would have set about the Minister for Religious and Educational Affairs himself.

  For the peasants, he was like the Trinity: they didn’t understand him, but they worshipped him. They even nominated him for parliament once, and there are still legendary stories about that in the village. The Schoolmaster, they say, gave such a fiery speech in one of the neighbouring parishes that he ended up getting dragged off the hustings by the gendarmes. The governing party’s candidate, a great nativist Hungarian—of Saxon origin—called him a Red rat, and in the end the gendarmes had to drag him off the hustings too, though in his case it was because the peasants were getting ready to lynch him. Despite that—because miracles like this did occur in our village—the governing party candidate ended up winning the election. They wanted to bring charges against the Schoolmaster, but in the end the gentlemen changed their minds because they were afraid that if he had nothing left to lose, he might open his mouth about their electoral miracle. That’s how they tell it in the village: whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. The fact is, a few years later they stripped him of his job.

  The day after the election, he told us:

  “Not to worry, children. By the time you grow up, it’ll be a different world in Hungary! True enough, I’ll be a doddering old fool by then, and might even be tempted to stand for the governing party. If I do, you can all come and spit in my eye, so help me God!”

  That was the Schoolmaster; at least, in part. On the other hand, when something came over him, he forgot all his morals and got so stinking drunk that sometimes he couldn’t teach for three days straight. It happened that at eight in the morning, when we got to school, we could still hear the Gypsy music and revelling from his apartments. When that happened poor old Scarecrow tried to herd us into the classroom, eyes red from crying, and you could tell that she was ashamed even in front of six-year-old children. I heard her knock on her brother’s door once.

  “Sándor, dear,” she begged, “it’s morning, and the children are all waiting for you.”

  “There is no morning this morning, my dove! Horthy’s cancelled it,” the Schoolmaster called. “It’s still night, a Royal Hungarian night! Send the c
hildren home to bed.”

  His poor, lanky old spinster sister burst into tears in front of me. But the Gypsy music had piped up again inside, and you could hear the Schoolmaster’s wonderful, deep baritone. He was singing his favourite song, the one that goes:

  I’ve got a purse, but no money in it,

  My throat’s so parched and dried!

  I’ve got a horse, but no saddle for it,

  How I long to ride!

  A good horse needs no saddle,

  It still walks with pride.

  My sweetheart’s married to another man,

  But still keeps me by her side.

  There was a story to go along with that song—as for how much of it is true, I’m not sure. They say in the village that the Schoolmaster, who detested the captains of industry and the landowners so thoroughly, was secretly in love with the wife of our Count, with his thirty-thousand acres. He watched her ride out each day, passing her as if there was nothing at all in it, but secretly staring after her like a besotted youth, because he didn’t even know her to say hello. One day, it seems, he got fed up with this hopeless state of affairs and decided to act. He therefore proposed in the village Cultural Circle that they organize a “charity cultural benefit” in aid of the Regent’s wife’s anti-poverty drive, of which the Countess was to be the patron. The gentlemen liked the idea, and a delegation, led by the Schoolmaster, was despatched to the castle. The Countess agreed to be the patron and promised to attend. The Schoolmaster spent three whole months preparing for this fateful meeting. He went up to the county town and ordered himself evening clothes at the finest tailor’s. There was no greater sacrifice he could have made, including laying down his life, since a village funeral was far cheaper than evening clothes in town, and a dead Schoolmaster doesn’t need to worry about making the repayments.

  But it seems that strokes of luck also come in pairs, like Siamese twins. This was at the same time that they nominated the Schoolmaster for parliament, and these two bits of luck simply couldn’t live side by side. A few days before the benefit, when the costly evening clothes were already hanging in the Schoolmaster’s closet, the Cultural Circle wrote him a terribly polite letter in which they asked him to resign from the organizing committee, because “the fact that” the Countess was the patron of the evening was not compatible with that other “fact that” he, the Schoolmaster, one of the evening’s organizers, had attacked His Lordship the Count in his stump speech. The Schoolmaster resigned—what else could the poor man have done? But he nonetheless still donned his evening clothes that fateful night and went . . . to the inn.