Temptation

  “Drop dead!” I said aloud and started swearing once again. I cursed my mother, from whom I only learnt years later that she hadn’t received my letter, because they’d discharged her from the hospital just before Christmas. I cursed the old woman, I cursed the boys, I cursed the entire world, and I cursed the angels out of heaven. And then, like pus from an angry wound, the tears and sobs burst out of me.

  •

  The next day, I woke as if I’d drunk too much the night before. The other children were still asleep. Beside each of them lay their much-anticipated packages from home. Some had more, some less, but everyone had got something. Sándor, the first-year who’d dreamt someone was going to steal his present, was sleeping in a brand-new woollen hat, and “my shoes” protruded from under Demeter’s horsehair blanket. I started crying.

  The children breathed steadily in the half-light. Sniffling, I wrapped my feet in newspaper, tied the bits of wood under them and shuffled out. The weather had grown a little milder, and it was snowing heavily. I was greeted by a white, scary silence. The house was still sleeping, and only Ilona was up, boiling the milk, in her underskirts. We had breakfast together at the kitchen table.

  “I put your supper aside for you,” she whispered, winking, as was her wont, with her watery blue eyes. “You ain’t going to leave it for that old witch, are you?”

  I didn’t answer. I was too tired even to open my mouth. I had cursed and cried myself out, and there was nothing left in me save a great, purposeless emptiness.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I answered testily, wrapping up my supper in newspaper.

  I knew the other children would soon be up, and I instinctively fled their Christmas cheer. I put my wrapped-up supper in my pocket and headed off, purposeless, into the snow.

  The village, slowly and sleepily, was starting to wake. The street was deserted and I was walking through virgin snow. I didn’t think of anything, I didn’t feel anything. I was as empty as a clock that’s had its mechanism removed. Why am I walking, why am I breathing, why is my heart beating at all? I walked like a sleepwalker, not knowing where to or why. The priest peeked out of the window of the rectory, but I didn’t say hello. I turned my head moodily away.

  There was a group of ragged people standing in front of the village hall. They were so ragged that if a stranger had seen them, they would have been bound to think that all the habitual vagrants in the county had fixed a rendezvous. But not a single one of them was a beggar at all. They were massive, strong peasant men, almost all of them employed, working from sunup to sundown on the Count’s estates throughout the summer. The fact that many of them were nonetheless standing around barefoot outside the village hall on Christmas Day was attributable to that well-known and generally accepted tenet of the Hungarian economy, whereby a pair of halfway decent boots cost twenty-five pengős, while the Count paid less than a pengő a day for fourteen hours’ work.

  I spotted old János in the group, the swineherd who’d told me five years before that there was such a thing as compulsory schooling. Him I said hello to right away, nice and loudly.

  “Well, my boy,” the old man asked, patting me affectionately on the shoulder. “What did the Baby Jesus bring you for Christmas? I can see it weren’t a pair of shoes!”

  “Brought me this here load of thin air,” I replied, “and the eye of a needle, only with no needle, to save me doing myself an injury.”

  “Whoa there, whoa,” the old man smiled. “You sound mighty bitter.”

  “That’s all right, brother János,” I said, “the Count’s happy enough for both of us—he’s got nice shiny boots on his feet.”

  “Well, per’aps, per’aps, but just because he does don’t mean they’ll get him very far!” János twirled his great, greying moustache, and his small, piggy eyes glittered slyly. “Question is, my boy, which of us gets the last laugh.”

  So we talked. I found out that people were waiting for Christmas charity parcels. They’d been standing in front of the village hall for a whole blessed week now, because the parcels hadn’t arrived due to the heavy snow. The gentlemen tasked with distributing them had said they’d let everybody know when the delivery arrived, but the poor came every morning anyway, on the principle that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Yesterday, they’d finally announced the parcels had arrived, and told the people they’d start distributing them at nine o’clock this morning. It was not yet seven, but there were already some fifty people gathered there, and more than a few had been waiting in the freezing cold since five.

  “You just go and join the line, my boy,” the old man counselled. “There might be a pair of shoes in it for you.”

  It was good of him to say. Some tiny kernel of hope sprouted once more inside me, and since I didn’t have anything else to do anyway, I joined the queue. János’s kind words had softened me and I felt at home among the ragged and poor. With them, I didn’t have to feel ashamed. They, too, were ragged, and cold, and the Baby Jesus had left them, too, off his list. I had begun to think that I didn’t belong anywhere at all, but now, with a sudden warmth in my heart, I felt that I did, after all, have a place.

  It was still snowing. The newspaper on my feet had soaked through. The others, too, were cold, every one of us hopping about in a coachman’s dance. From time to time, for want of anything else to lift our spirits, someone made a joke, and we laughed, and swore and somehow passed the time. By nine, there were so many of us that we could barely fit into the square, but they only started distributing the parcels at eleven, two hours late. But the people weren’t restless. They’d got used to waiting; they’d done nothing else for the last thousand years. They waited their turn calmly, and whoever had got their parcel hurried quickly off with it, so that their families, too, would have something to be happy about at Christmas.

  But many people, for unknown reasons, got nothing at all. They did not, however, leave the square. They formed a group in front of the village hall and grumbled. Not too loud, just a little, and only under their breath, because by then, the gendarmes had turned up to patrol in front of the building, bayonets fixed.

  “They’re only handing ’em out to people that voted for the government,” an old peasant next to me mumbled, and spat heavily.

  The village had known for some time that that was how it went when they distributed the packages. There were similar abuses elsewhere, too; the opposition deputies kept making speeches about it in parliament, and each time, the Minister would very properly promise to initiate a thorough investigation, and each time, that thorough investigation would reveal that there had been no abuses. The house accepted the Minister’s reply, the newspapers wrote three lines about the affair, the peasants just shrugged their shoulders and muttered under their breath, and everything went on as before.

  The bells were ringing noon by the time it was my turn. Behind the parcel-laden table stood a blond young man, hair slicked back with pomade.

  “What d’you need?” he snapped at me irritably, and yawned.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” I began with the abject humility bred into the Hungarian peasant over the last thousand years, “I need some shoes, ’cause I can’t go barefoot to school no more. Makes no difference if they’re old or . . .”

  “Name and address,” the young man interrupted impatiently.

  I gave him my name and address. The young man leafed through his book and then drily proclaimed:

  “You’re not in the book. Move along!”

  After me came a fortyish, beefy peasant called, if I remember rightly, Balog. The youth with the pomaded hair told him, too, that he was “not in the book” and to “move along”.

  But then something happened; something that left its mark on the whole rest of my life.

  This Balog, or whatever his name was, when told to “move along”, didn’t. He just stood there in front of the pomade-scented young man and with ominous calm asked why he wasn’t “in the book” when he
had five “little ones” and a wife “what’s sick in the lung” at home, no criminal record, and had spent four years fighting for his country. At first, I thought he was drunk. When sober, peasants didn’t usually ask gentlemen why; they just said, “begging your pardon, sir”, and if they were told to move on, moved on quietly. Mostly, they just cursed once or twice out of earshot—the more fiery ones might go home and beat the wife. I had never seen anything like this Balog, and it looked like no one else in the room had, either.

  A frightened hush fell over the stuffy, overcrowded room. All eyes were on Balog. They watched him, mouths agape, blinking, as if he were some freak of nature. The blond boy didn’t know what to say, either. He tapped his pencil nervously on the table and kept huffing gutturally over and over:

  “Move along! Move along!”

  But the man didn’t move. He stood there like an old, weather-beaten tree that could be cut down, but never moved. He had asked his question, he was waiting for an answer; you could tell that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  At this point the young man with the pomaded hair remembered that gentlemen, when they don’t have answers, resort to shouting.

  “You’ll get answers from the gendarme in a minute!” he cried. “If you don’t shut your mouth.”

  That didn’t help, either. The man just stood there, immobile.

  “I ain’t some old woman who can’t stop flappin’ her mouth,” he said, a little hoarse but calm. “And if I weren’t scared of no Russians, young man, I ain’t going to soil myself for no gendarme, neither.”

  At this point, someone giggled in the stony silence. Mocking laughter burst up from all around and barbed comments hummed like carrion flies. The order of the queue broke down, and everyone pressed excitedly towards the table. Only Balog remained miraculously calm.

  “Just because you don’t vote for the government, sir,” he said dispassionately, “that don’t mean you ain’t a God-fearin’ Hungarian.”

  This quiet, unassuming sentence was enough to prick the suppressed emotion in the room.

  “That’s right!” people cried from all around. “That’s right!”

  Eyes flashed, arms flailed, feet drummed and an unholy cacophony broke out. The blond young man’s voice was lost in the tumultuous clamour, his mouth flapping as if he’d been shouting from behind a window.

  In the great throng, I couldn’t see what was happening in front, because the others were a good head taller than me. All I remember is that at a certain point the crowd surged forward, and people fell over each other and grew entangled, as if someone had stirred them with an enormous ladle. Then there was a scream, a second, a third, and the gendarmes’ bayonets waving about in the crowd, twisted faces, people doubled over. A man with a gendarme’s feather in his hat threw himself at Balog. Balog fell onto me, and I fell under the table, where I could see only legs: legs struggling, kicking and stepping all over each other, like the limbs of some horrific prehistoric monster.

  I didn’t even have time to feel scared. On all fours, like a cornered animal, I backed away under the table, and suddenly noticed that I was inside the ringed-off part of the room, where the blond young man had been standing moments before. The charity packages lay scattered on the floor around me: underwear, second-hand clothes, worn hats and . . . shoes! Shoes!

  It’s hard to explain what happened next with hindsight. In such moments of danger, you’d think that all you could think about is saving your skin, and would never notice that . . .

  Well, I noticed. Who knows, perhaps the need for a pair of shoes had become an obsession with me, or perhaps I simply wasn’t aware of the danger I was in. Suffice to say that all at once, I was clutching a pair of shoes and making my way to the exit.

  At this point, a hand grabbed me. In the tangled crowd, I could only recognize it by its smell: it was the boy with the pomade. With a desperate, clumsy motion, I tore myself from his grasp and ran for the door.

  “Thief !” he screamed. “Stop that thief !”

  I recall the rest only like some jumbled dream. A gendarme marching me down the high street. People rushing out of their houses.

  “What’s goin’ on, Sergeant?”

  Much shaking of heads, sharp looks. Words that cut straight to the bone.

  “Can’t you see? One of Rozi’s boys.”

  “What’d you expect of his sort . . .”

  Then I was standing in the guardroom face to face with a moustachioed junior officer in the gendarmes.

  At this point, my memory fails me completely. Did he ask me something? Did I reply? I don’t know. All I remember is that at some point he shot up from behind his desk and gave me an almighty slap.

  I no longer knew what I was doing. With all my pent-up bitterness, misery, humiliation, my whole oppressed little life, I hated this man, this hard-handed gendarme, as if he, and only he, were responsible for it all. There is no spirit that can make you as drunk as hate. Everything was swaying within me and I no longer cared about anything. I picked up the enormous inkpot from the desk and flung it with all my might into the junior officer’s face. I could see him totter, his face covered in ink, and then there was a massive blow from behind—someone had hit me in the back of the head with the butt of a rifle; the world went black before me.

  •

  I came to in a small lock-up smelling of mice. The bells were ringing . . . or was it just my ears? . . . “Silent night . . .” Two pairs of shoes under the Christmas tree . . . The smell of burnt pine . . . Well, my boy, and what did the Baby Jesus bring you? . . . The junior officer tottering about, his face covered in ink . . .

  I staggered to my feet uncertainly. A dull, aching pain shot through me. There was a strange, alien trembling in my guts. What had happened to me?

  I looked around. The windows were barred. Then this must be . . .

  Suddenly, I remembered everything. I’d been stealing. They’d caught me, locked me up.

  “Appallin’!” I muttered aloud, but without all conviction. “Appallin’,” I repeated, but Squirrel just started to laugh. I didn’t understand.

  I’d been stealing. They’d caught me. Locked me up. I knew that what I’d done was “shameful” according to the grown-ups, or even “wild”. I felt not the slightest morsel of guilt. Instead, I saw the moustachioed junior officer totter, his face covered in ink, and a broad, complacent sense of satisfaction came over me. Squirrel twitched his tail triumphantly.

  “He got his, all right!” I mumbled to myself and laughed softly.

  Strange, I thought, they’ve put me in jail and here I am laughing.

  But when it came down to it, I’d got my lumps too. I went over my body with my hands. I was pleased to find there was nothing really wrong. There was a goodly bump on my head, it’s true, and my chest and back ached, but I knew that dull, deep ache well from my days as a hired fighter. My injuries were, so to speak, the usual ones, and after the unusual events of the day, I found that almost reassuring.

  “It’s all right,” I said aloud.

  Though there was . . . a lump on my back as well. It seems they’d kept on beating me while I was unconscious. Or was it merely from the fall?

  As I was feeling myself like this, I suddenly discovered that the wrapped-up Christmas dinner I had pocketed in the morning was still with me. Then I was gripped by a great, soothing, wonderful feeling—after the worrying and incoherent monologue from the confused and shifting soul, the body, refreshingly succinct: I’m hungry! Of course you are, I thought simply, you haven’t had anything since morning. I set about opening the package. There was a decent-sized piece of meat, cold potatoes, a thick hunk of bread, a slice each of poppy-seed and walnut loaf. A really fine Christmas dinner, the kind you only got once a year. I could almost taste it in my mouth. I bit into the meat hungry as a wolf, but nonetheless still with a sense of embarrassment and almost shame, like someone who knows that what they’re doing is not appropriate to their current situation and that it is—in some vague and ill-def
ined way—against the rules.

  But my stomach took no notice of all that. I was a healthy, sturdy peasant lad and loved to eat. My stomach now happily switched into gear, my teeth tore at the meat joyfully, and my jaws set to their favourite work with passionate devotion; various waves of exciting, powerful juices coursed through me, and my body was filled with the steady truth of flesh and blood, the powerful, sweet certitudes of pure physical being.

  Strange, I thought, I’m sitting in jail, enjoying my meal.

  And it was strange. I saw myself like an outsider. As if my body and soul had been split into two by some strange magic and there were now two of me sitting there, and I was conversing with myself. So . . . so now I’m a thief. A real, proper thief, the kind the newspapers and penny dreadfuls write about. And they’re going to take me to the county town clapped in irons, like Kelemen last summer, and try me.

  “They might even hang me!” I muttered to myself, and carried on munching the poppy-seed loaf; next thing I knew, I caught myself humming—yes humming aloud—that silly tune that goes:

  If I die, I die

  Angels’ll sing my lullaby

  If I croak, I croak

  The Devil take me in one stroke

  The sound of my voice frightened me.

  Was I really a gallows rat, like the old woman used to say?

  ’Course I wasn’t! Why would I be a gallows rat?

  Because I stole? All right, so I stole! Berci didn’t steal. He was a good little boy. He went around barefoot instead, oh yes. And he ended up coughing his lungs out last November. Well, I wasn’t going to cough my lungs out! I wasn’t going to croak. No sir!

  And if that was a crime, then let it be a crime, and if poor boys had to croak anyway, then it was all the same whether they died from pneumonia or on the gallows.

  At least I’d given that moustachioed officer something to think about, the devil take him and all his kind!

  If I die, I die

  Angels’ll sing my lullaby

  If I croak, I croak

  The Devil take me in one stroke