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FROM THEN ON, I WON THE SCHOOL PRIZE every year on St Peter and St Paul. I was past fourteen and had five finely bound prize books, but not so much as a pair of shoes. In other years, I had always got some sort of footwear, even if it was on its last legs, but this year, Advent had come and I was still going around barefoot. My mother had been laid up in the Rókus hospital since the autumn, and our village, which had been desperately poor to begin with, had grown so impoverished in the last few years that even the farmers were glad if they had something to put on their feet. Back then, in those parts, there was no pair of boots ragged enough to convince their owner to part with them.
It was a dark winter, though we were knee-deep in snow. It snowed so hard that we were cut off from the world for months. For a while, even the train stopped coming, but that didn’t cause much upset in the village, for who had the money to travel? The heady days of hyper inflation were behind us. Even the better-off farmers were struggling. Where were all the banknotes breeding zeroes like rabbits, all the furniture, pianos and gramophones bought up so hastily and haphazardly from the gentry? Farmers used to talk of those times like some legendary Canaan from a hundred years before.
“Oh, them good old days of infation!” they’d say, sighing wistfully.
The poor peasants had no such golden age to long for. For them, “infation” had meant nothing but trouble, too, as had the war and all those other upper-class escapades. The only difference was that during “infation” they could still wear the uniforms in which they’d come back from the war, but later they, too, became ragged and worn, like so much else in the last twenty years. The war had passed, and so had the monarchy, then the Republic, the Soviet, and the White Terror.
“Ah,” shrugged the poor peasants. “They all go the way of the rest.”
They had already, from the beginning, resigned themselves to it all, and already, from the beginning, believed in none of it. The only time anyone ever bothered with them was during the elections, anyway, and even then it was mostly the gendarmes. Though it wasn’t as if they had much to do round our way. The poor never expressed an opinion, partly because it was wiser to speak no evil, and partly because: why bother? There were, it’s true, secret religious peasant sects, but most of their adherents were people who had already been driven slightly mad by history. Most people didn’t even bother to go to church, and if they still thought about anything at all, it was mostly about how to fill their stomachs. The next village was now in a foreign country, and in-laws, friends, sons and daughters who spoke not a blighted word of that country’s language became foreigners from one day to the next. It grew so you couldn’t so much as spit without a visa, because likely as not it would land over some frontier. But even this was discussed with nothing but shrugs, because along with everything else, even the irredentism had passed. Everything had passed in our blessed little village: the roads and people’s souls were covered with snow, but come the spring, that, too, would pass.
There was peace and quiet, that much is true. An eternal-rest sort of peace and quiet. The peasants, like hibernating bears, withdrew into their little shelters with the family, and whoever didn’t have to didn’t set foot outside at all. What for? All that walking would only make you hungry. The stove and the oven stood empty in most houses, and there wasn’t much to stop the children asking: what’s that for, Muther? And that despite the fact that not a quarter of an hour’s walk away the Count had such extensive forests that even a half of them would have been enough to keep the village chimneys smoking for a century. But those belonged to the Count, whose ancestors had got them for handing over the country to the Habsburgs, while the peasants’ forefathers had gone off, in their simple-minded way, to die for it instead—without demanding anything in return.
In any case, when the first winds of autumn came, the peasants would stuff up the windows with newspaper and rags and not open them again till Easter. Because however amazing gas and electricity are these days as a source of heat, there is another, even more amazing: the emissions of humans. There was more than one house where they slept six or eight to a room, and in those houses they made so much of this wonderful heating source that they could have sold the excess to the Ministry of Public Health. The peasants couldn’t even afford matches. If a chimney in one of the houses began to smoke, all the neighbours would immediately head over and borrow an ember or two. As for lighting lamps, that simply went out fashion. By five or six in the afternoon, the village was as dark and deserted as an enormous cemetery. The peasants slept through the winter like the seeds under the snow, but while the seeds would bring forth shoots in spring, the only people to benefit from the peasants’ winter slumbers were the angel-makers.
Lady Luck forsook even the old woman. Now one, now another, of the boys’ mothers lost their jobs and the little pink slips delivering their monthly postal orders started growing less and less regular. Her lands, too, barely brought in anything at all. The price of everything fell; only taxes rose. The old woman reduced our portions, though her pantry had never been more full than in that year, because she’d hardly found buyers in the autumn. But:
“This not those times!” she said, and in the end the tastiest morsels ended up going to the pigs, because everything went mouldy over that long winter in the damp pantry.
But the children didn’t complain much when their mothers came to visit them on Sunday. They knew there was no point. They kept quiet, and whenever they could, filched something from the pantry.
All that was old news for me. I had already been through this school of misery in the “good old days”, so now I just smiled like an old veteran as the children cursed the miserly old woman’s unchaste ancestors.
I was not the only boy that year to be without shoes. But the others simply didn’t go to school in winter. The peasants said that if the Minister didn’t like it, then he should send their sons a pair of shoes, and that was that. There were days when there were only six or eight of us knocking around the schoolroom.
The old woman forbade me, too, from going to school, but I still went, no matter how cold it was. That I didn’t die of pneumonia despite that was thanks to two things: my ironclad constitution and the Hungarian press. Not that the press took too much of an interest in the fate of poor children like me—I would never have expected that of the Hungarian press, for I had learnt in my first year in school that it was the upper classes that wrote the papers, and the upper classes were one thing, and peasants another; but every morning, I would wrap my feet in newspaper, and newspaper—no matter what’s printed on it—is an excellent insulator. Under my soles, I put two pieces of wood whittled for this purpose and then tied the whole bundle with string—and that’s how I set off for school in the metre-high snow.
The days went by as if they weren’t going by at all. You got the feeling that time had stopped; that it had got stuck in the snow, along with the local train.
It was only around Christmas time that the apparently defunct village stirred a bit. There was a frail, timid expectation in the air, but maybe that was something only we children felt. In the mornings, we would watch excitedly for the postman, to see if he’d brought any presents from our mothers. When he did bring them, we never knew who they were for because he used to deliver the parcels to the old woman, who would then hand them over to their rightful owners. But we nonetheless gathered round the limping, grumpy postman each morning like a flock of crows, and tried to guess, at the top of our lungs, who the parcels were for and what was in them. Our excitement grew day by day. Once, I remember, a first-year shouted so loudly in his sleep that we all woke up.
“Don’t touch my packet!” he screamed. “My ma sent me that!”
I was not nearly so convinced that my own “ma” would send me anything for Christmas. My “ma” was not beholden to such traditions. It had happened in the past, it’s true, but that was a long time ago, and I thought of Christmas presents in the same way that peasants thought of snow in M
ay: it might, they used to say, be possible, but it’s hardly likely. I hadn’t seen her in eight years, and her image had faded within me, like that of someone long departed. That was, in fact, the way I thought of her—as someone long dead. I expected nothing of her.
But the human soul works in mysterious ways. It doubts, like Thomas, while it can, but when push comes to shove, it starts believing even in the unbelievable, because—it seems—you have to believe in something. That must have been why, two or three weeks before Christmas, I wrote my mother a letter and asked her to send me a pair of shoes. It took me a while to commit to the undertaking, but I was in quite a bad way, and could see no other solution. Winter had come early, it was freezing by early October, and I was still walking to school barefoot and without long trousers, in the fraying clothes I had outgrown long before, through which the wind passed like water through a sieve. My poor diet didn’t help. I felt cold even in our room, and my head was so blurry that I could hardly learn my lessons. I knew that if I didn’t get a pair of shoes for Christmas I, too, would give up the fight and stay off school. I would hang around at home like the other barefoot peasant boys, growing dull in the bestial stench of our room.
So I tore two sheets out of my language notebook, designated one as letter paper, and folded the other into an envelope, sticking it together with flour paste. I got the flour and the stamp from Ilona, the dull-eyed maid whom I had—wisely and with foresight—“got into my debt”. For I had noticed while studying in the outhouse at night that after the house had grown quiet, a male spectre appeared, climbing over the fence and sneaking into dumb little Ilona’s room; it seemed she was not so dumb after all. When I told her I knew about all this, she winked at me with her watery blue eyes and told me meaningfully that if I could keep my mouth shut, I wouldn’t regret it. I kept my mouth firmly shut. Meanwhile, the affair had passed, the lad hadn’t been since the autumn, but the debt—as debts do—remained, and it cost dull-eyed little Ilona a twenty-fillér stamp.
Having thus seen to the technical aspects of the undertaking, I set about writing the letter. First, I made a draft, dividing my message into three parts, as we did in school: introduction, argument and conclusion, going on to expound my desperate situation in the longest and most complex sentences possible (any dunce could write short sentences). I explained, elaborately and with much beating around the bush, that I was not a shameless child wanting to force his mother into unnecessary expenditures, and that all I was asking was for her please to find me a pair of shoes, any shoes, in which I could keep going to school. It didn’t matter if they were ragged, or too big, the main thing was that they be shoes. To lend my request weight, I even fibbed a little. I wrote that I had caught a devil of a cold in the bitter winter conditions and the doctor had forbidden me to go to school without shoes. As for what a pity it would be for me to neglect my studies, my outstanding half-term report was the proof. I went on to “take the liberty of attaching it here to support my request”. By the time I’d finished, the whole thing was more like a formal request for a hardship grant than a young man’s letter to his mother.
But I was terribly pleased with it. I thought it impossible for my mother to refuse me once she’d read it. Even if she was sick, even if she had no money, I was sure she could get her hands on some old pair of shoes in that great big city when she found out that her son was going around barefoot in winter. I had heard that she had lately become a washerwoman, and therefore assumed that she had access to the upper classes; and the upper classes did not wear ragged shoes, but gave them away, and why shouldn’t they give them to their washerwoman? To cut a long story short, all seemed to augur well for the shoes. The closer we got to Christmas Eve, the more sure I became of getting them. So I too started sniffing round the postman with the other children and looking forward to Christmas like never before.
On the morning of 24th December, I did not wrap my feet in newspaper. I think I wanted to suffer in the bitter cold, even more brutally than usual, so that I could revel more fully in the wonder of my warm shoes that evening. After lunch, when Rozi and Mr Rozi locked themselves in the front room to decorate the Christmas tree, I ran out barefoot to the snow-covered edge of the village like a lunatic.
It was frightfully cold, so cold that the snow couldn’t fall, with merely the odd flake or two floating in the air, so that you couldn’t tell if it was falling from the sky or if the wind had just blown it off the branches. The cold marred my skin like acid. But I just thought of the sparkling Christmas tree, and I could see “my shoes” so clearly, so definitely, among the presents that I could almost touch them. My feet won’t be cold any more this evening, I thought with emotion and knelt down, as I never otherwise did, before the snowy tin cross.
“Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ,” I said aloud, “who brings poor boys shoes at Christmas.”
I went home singing. It was as if there had been a miracle in the windows of the houses, and the lights had all gone on tonight and the chimneys started smoking, woken from the dead.
“Silent night,” I sang, and my eyes grew wet with joy.
When I got home, the other children were all crowding round the door of the front room. Whoever had Sunday clothes had put them on, and they had all made an effort to scrub up. The excitement, as they say, was at fever pitch. We could hear mysterious noises from the front room, the shuffling of feet, unintelligible speech, the shifting of a piece of furniture, something falling to the floor. Then the bell rang inside and the door opened.
My mouth was bitter with excitement. In the middle of the room, the candles on the Christmas tree guttered and spat in the swaying, pine-scented obscurity, illuminating suggestively the presents in their festive arrangement. They’d even lit the stove in honour of the festival. The high-legged miniature iron stove glowed red-hot in the darkened corner. It was stiflingly hot. The old couple were standing ceremoniously beside the tree. Mr Rozi wasn’t wearing a tie, but he had donned a terribly high, and—it seemed—very tight, stiff collar, which made his face so red and puffy it looked like he had toothache. The old woman was top to toe in black like the dolled-up horse on a funeral cart. Her dress was of some heavy, stiff silk that rustled with each step like an autumnal shrub when the wind blows its desiccated leaves. You could see that she was in her element. She stood before us gracefully like a woman bishop, and, full of pompous self-importance, her eyes turned to heaven, struck up a sentimental carol. We all sang along, but secretly we were all constantly stealing glances at the presents, glittering mysteriously in the light of the flickering candles.
I saw immediately that there were two pairs of shoes among them. One was brand new and just the right size for me; I knew at once they weren’t mine. But the others were down-at-heel, aged, massive great things; those are the ones my mother sent, I thought, and my heart skipped a beat. What a pair of shoes! I rejoiced. Their soles were as thick as my finger. Aren’t they far better than those teeny-tiny children’s shoes? As far as I was concerned, from now on it could freeze till Easter. I was perfectly happy. I looked upon those sad, wrinkled, shoes like a sentimental lover gazing upon his sweetheart.
We finished singing at last. The old woman went over to the table in her rustling silk dress and called the children to her one by one. Today, she called them not by their Christian, but their family names, evidently to underline the festive and significant nature of the occasion. I, since my name began with R, was last in the household alphabet, but the old woman would have called me last even if my name had begun with an A.
The new shoes really did go to another boy, who—amid triumphant whooping—sat down right there on the floor and tried them on. There was an appalling cacophony. The boys, as if drunk with joy, went off jumping and screaming with their presents. Just Demeter to go, I thought, since he was the last but one, and started heading for the table. But then something took my breath away. The old woman gave the shoes to Demeter. My shoes! I thought I’d pass out.
“You not get noth
ing,” said the old woman, her tone a mix of mockery and gratification.
I couldn’t move. I stood there, empty-handed, in front of the bare table, alone. Maybe I was waiting for a miracle, or for it to turn out that there had been some mistake and the shoes weren’t really for Demeter, or maybe I was just waiting for someone to say a kind word, that it would all be all right somehow. I don’t know. What is for certain is that nothing like that happened, and there was no miracle. The others didn’t even notice when I sneaked out.
I closed the door quietly behind me and stood in the empty room. I was overcome with a strange weariness, the kind you feel in a dream when you’re running desperately towards some distant goal, only to get there and realize you can’t remember what you wanted to do there.
The carols started once more in the front room: “Silent night! . . .”
“Holy night?” I muttered. “You mother’s holy you-know-what!”
And I saw myself kneeling before the tin cross and tearfully thanking the Lord for the pair of shoes . . . Demeter had got.
“Baby Jesus, it seems, also plays favourites,” I grumbled. “Even though his precious little Demeter failed religion.”
A perverse, nasty laugh was brewing in my throat. Grumbling, I felt my way out into the yard through the darkened kitchen. It was a windy, moonless night with a heavy frost. I ran barefoot through the snow and into our room, so cold and foetid it could have been a refrigerated latrine. They hadn’t even cut a chimney in this room, lest someone—in a momentary fit of madness—took it into their heads to heat it. I threw myself down into the straw fully dressed and climbed shivering under the rough threadbare blanket that had absorbed the mouldy moistness of the floor so deeply, I shuddered whenever it touched me. My head burned, my teeth chattered. In the great silence, you could make out clearly the sound of their solemn singing: “O come, O come, Emmanuel”.
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