Temptation

  I heard the sound of footsteps. I quickly pocketed my dinner and sharpened my ears, my heart thumping. Someone stopped in front of the door.

  No, there were two of them. I could hear them talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My heart skipped.

  The key turned in the lock. At first, I saw only a gendarme with his cock’s feather, but then behind him in the battered frame of the low door, like a vision, stood the Schoolmaster.

  I stood carefully to attention. My heart was in my mouth. I had never seen the Schoolmaster like this. His handsome, Tatar face was so stiff and cold, it was as if all human emotion had frozen off it. He didn’t say a word, just stood there with his ox-like build in the tiny door and looked at me. Then, after a seemingly endless silence, he turned to the gendarme and said hoarsely:

  “Looks like you did quite a job on him.”

  The gendarme didn’t reply. His face was as impassive as if no one had said a word.

  The Schoolmaster looked at me angrily.

  “Come!” he said curtly, and was off, without saying goodbye to the gendarme.

  I followed him. What now? I wondered, and broke out in a sweat. Where was he taking me?

  The Schoolmaster didn’t say anything, just walked ahead of me angrily down the bare, dark corridor. He stopped at the gate and showed the gendarme on duty a document, then turned around and gestured for me to follow.

  I didn’t understand what had happened. Was I free?

  Yes, I was free; I was in the street, I could taste the strong, snowy air and . . . I didn’t understand. It seemed so unlikely, so unbelievable. Both the fact they’d locked me up and the fact they’d let me out. I felt like someone who’d jolted awake and doesn’t quite know what they’d only dreamt and what they’d actually lived.

  I trailed after the Schoolmaster sheepishly, in a daze. He just kept striding in front of me with his great long legs down the snowy street as if I wasn’t even there.

  We reached the school. The Schoolmaster opened the door to his apartments without a word and I followed him in.

  My heart was beating like a mis-rung bell. I knew he had a fearsome hand, but right now it was not his hand I was afraid of, but his tongue. He was the only person I loved.

  No, I had never seen him like this before. At other times, when he was angry, he hit us and bellowed, but now he didn’t say a word, just paced up and down with broad, heavy steps, not so much as looking at me. The minutes swelled to hours in my mind. In the end, I wished he’d shout at me, at least.

  But he didn’t. He stopped calmly in front of me and drily said:

  “I fixed it with the gentlemen that nothing should happen to you. But you have to leave the village for good. Understand?”

  I shuddered all over, but I still stood as stiffly to attention as a soldier in front of his superior.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “I’ve wired your mother, and she’s replied. She’s coming to fetch you on the thirty-first and she’s taking you with her to Budapest.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  That was all I said, though it felt like they’d knocked the bottom of my world out from under me. What I’d been terrified of my entire childhood had now come to pass. My throat tightened up with sobs.

  The Schoolmaster went over to the window and for a while stared silently out into the street. Then, as if he’d read my mind, he said:

  “It’s still better than if they’d put you in a reformatory.”

  He didn’t even turn around, his voice was dry and neutral, and yet I still felt a comforting warmth pour out of him.

  “Thank you for your kindness, sir.”

  As I said that, the Schoolmaster turned around, his face scarlet as a turkey’s, and looked at me as if I’d said something unforgivably insolent.

  “Don’t think you’re getting off that easy!” he roared. “I hope you know they’ve hanged people for less. And I promised the gentlemen I’d give you a good thrashing. You’re to report to me tomorrow morning, when I’ll see you get what’s coming to you, got it? I can see they’ve given you enough to be getting on with for today.”

  They had, it was true. My whole body ached and yet I still felt that the gendarme’s rifle butt hadn’t done half as much damage as the Schoolmaster’s words.

  “If I hear another word of complaint about you,” he bellowed, “I’ll break you in half, so help me God! Got that?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Well, then.”

  With that, he tore open the wardrobe door so violently he almost sent the whole rickety affair toppling over, took out a pair of shoes, and slammed them angrily down in front of me.

  “Put these on!”

  I stared at him as if he’d gone mad. What had possessed him? First he tells me I’m fit to be hung, now he gives me a pair of shoes?

  “Didn’t you hear me?” he barked. “Put them on!”

  A little more softly, he added:

  “There’s footwraps in there too.”

  My hands were trembling so hard I could hardly put on the shoes. They were huge, with room enough for my feet twice over, but never has anyone been happier with a pair of shoes. They were warm as a kind word, caressed me like a friendly hand. I started to cry.

  “Come on now, you’re a big boy,” he growled at me. “Don’t tell me you’re weeping like an old maid. What’s done is done. The world’ll keep turning.”

  With that, he gave me a good hard smack on the rump. I’ll never forget that smack. I caught his big, hairy hand, the one he’d smacked me with, and kissed it all over.

  He pushed me angrily away.

  “Get out of here,” he shouted. “Or I’ll give you such a kick up the backside that your children’s children’ll still be rubbing ointment on it.”

  With that, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and tossed me out into the yard. But before he closed the door, he said quietly:

  “Wear them well.”

  14

  AS I STEPPED OUT INTO THE STREET, I was overcome by a strange joy. If I hadn’t feared for my manliness, I might have started jumping like a ram, and as it was I could only restrain myself till I got to the road at the outskirts of the village. There, I jumped into the deepest snow in my nice warm shoes, and ran about willy-nilly.

  Like a drunk, I was singing at the top of my voice:

  I’ll be leaving your village very soon

  Now I’ll be looking at a different moon

  My lungs burned with the rapid breaths of ice-cold air and my heart beat wildly. Panting, I propped myself against a telegraph pole.

  I couldn’t understand what had got into me. For it was true that I was glad about the shoes, and even gladder for those few kind words from the Schoolmaster, but I knew that in itself could not have caused this sweet delirium that was running through me. Half an hour ago, I was cursing the world and everything in it, and now it seemed so wonderful to me, it was as if God had made it anew, this time with no snakes, and out of candyfloss. No, I thought, that sort of thing isn’t about a pair of shoes; but as to what it was about, I didn’t have the foggiest.

  I was perfectly happy, though I knew full well that I had no cause to be. I even ran through in my mind, leaning against the telegraph pole, all the terrible things that had happened to me that day, but that crazy haphazard happiness just kept on singing within me, refusing to listen to any kind of reason. In vain did I keep repeating to myself that I’d stolen, was caught, locked up, that I was being sent away like a pariah, and that what I had always feared was now about to happen: my mother was coming to take me with her to Budapest.

  “Terrible,” I said aloud, and was perfectly happy.

  I was happy and I didn’t know why.

  I wandered around aimlessly. It was already dark and the village had drawn its eiderdown of snow up tight, sleeping under the twinkling stars. Great filigree snowflakes were falling, the road was virgin and white, as if no one had ever walked before me—as if God really had made the world anew, and
I was the first person in this great white paradise.

  All at once, I found myself at the station. I hadn’t been this way since the last time I accompanied my mother here. I could no longer say if I had avoided the station consciously, but the fact is that I had avoided it, the way people tend to avoid things—whether consciously or not—spending half their lives, more or less, obsessively and stubbornly avoiding something that, in the end, they can’t get away from anyway.

  The evening train was puffing away in the station, getting ready to depart. The raw, adventure-filled smell of its steam struck my nostrils and I was once more overtaken by that old, tingling magic that had enchanted me as a little boy whenever I saw a train depart. But this time, it drove me not to tears, but indescribable joy. On the thirty-first I, too, will be on that train, I thought, as the wheezing little coffee-grinder puffed itself up to move, and all of a sudden, I knew why I was so happy.

  “I’m going!” I said, but that word “going” didn’t just mean that I was “moving”, that my address and my destiny was changing: it meant something much more, something mysterious, some obscure, veiled and above all symbolic thing that I could not have put into words.

  Something had ended, I felt, and something was about to begin.

  But what?

  “Life!” I answered grandiloquently, and it sounded to my fourteen-year-old ears as if I’d said: happiness.

  The Great Adventure!

  That was my father’s blood talking, I now know. My father who had run away from home at fifteen and spent a lifetime wandering the great wide world. When, many years later, I asked him why, what he was after, what desires drove him on, he looked at me as if he didn’t quite understand the question, and I could see that he’d never really given it any thought.

  “Well, because,” he said, and could hardly say any more. “There’s people that sit quietly in one place till they come and put ’em in a coffin, and then there’s people that can’t sit still even in their mother’s wombs. And them, even if you lock the door behind them, they’ll fly out through the keyhole.”

  Was I that sort, too?

  Yes, yes I was. I didn’t even mind that I was going with my mother—all I could think about, trembling with joy—was that I was “going”. It’s also true that by now, I hated my mother more out of habit than anything else. That old, wild, unnatural hatred that I had felt as a small child had been decomposing in the cemetery of my consciousness for several years, and now that I brought it once more into the daylight, it simply crumbled to ashes like a mummy brought out of a pyramid. But I would have gone with her now even if I had hated her the way I’d hated her as a child. I would have gone with the Devil himself, I was so driven by my wanderlust.

  •

  I could hardly wait for the thirty-first. This impatience was partly because I still had my “reckoning” with the Schoolmaster to face, which he had so ominously promised. Manliness or not, I was terrified of this “reckoning” and, to tell the truth, my knees were trembling as I rang the Schoolmaster’s bell.

  It was Scarecrow who opened the door.

  “The Schoolmaster has gone away,” she said, “but he’ll be back by the thirty-first. He says you’re to come and see him then.”

  “Yes, miss,” I replied and was off, relieved.

  But in the afternoon, when I went past the school, I was shocked to see the Schoolmaster looking out of the window. I was stunned. I looked stiffly over his head, as if I hadn’t seen him; he could always call after me if he wanted to. But the Schoolmaster did not call after me.

  The Schoolmaster had lied, and today I know that I, too, would have lied in his place. He had promised the gentlemen that he would “reckon” with me, but in reality he knew full well who and what deserved to be “reckoned with”, for forcing a barefoot peasant boy to steal a pair of shoes so he could go to school. I didn’t understand any of that at the time, but needless to say, I accepted it easily. Looks like we’ve got out of that, then, I thought to myself happily, because of course I knew that any “reckoning” that came just a few hours before my departure wouldn’t be too severe.

  Packing was not hard. I could fit my entire wardrobe into my trouser pockets. It consisted of two ragged shirts I’d outgrown long ago; their collars had grown so tight I hadn’t been able to button them in years, and their arms were so short they only came up to my elbows. And then there were, to account for my other assets, my five prize books, about six dozen marbles, a rag-ball I’d made myself and the treasured lead whistle, a present from Piroshkamydear.

  I “sold” the marbles to a second-year for a needle and some thread, and the ball to a fourth-year for rags to patch my clothes with. Then I spent all day cleaning and patching my single set of clothes and the two fraying shirts.

  The boys gathered round and stared at me like I was some minor miracle. Since my spell inside, my stock with them had risen and risen. They all tried to assist me somehow. They bustled about me, one of them trimming my nails, the other my hair, while the third stole some soap to wash with. Sándor even cut the buttons off his own clothes so that I could sew them onto mine. In return, I had to tell and retell my Christmas horror story, from the moment I stole the shoes to when I ended up in the cell at the gendarmerie. They listened, mouths agape, faces burning with excitement. The thought that one of them, a ragged bastard child, could take such revenge on their towering Olympian superiors was enough to make them altogether drunk.

  “Béla showed ’em!” they went about saying nice and loud in the street for everyone to hear, and their eyes shone with pride.

  The old woman didn’t mention the affair at all. The boys told me that before they let me out of prison, the Schoolmaster had a long talk with her behind closed doors, and that must have been why she was being so considerate. Only when she saw that I was in a good mood would she look at me murderously, but she never said a word. She would mumble something under her downy moustache, and I would think: drop dead. Quite the pair we made.

  I slept naked the night before the thirty-first because I had washed both my shirts and put them under me, along with my other clothes, to “iron” them. This slightly unusual mode of ironing was very much in vogue with us, but only in summer, because there was no way we could sleep without our clothes in the freezing room. And it’s true that I didn’t end up sleeping much that night. My thoughts galloped about like scattered horses and even if—after much tossing and turning—I did manage to fall asleep, I would wake up after a few minutes as if I’d been stabbed: I kept dreaming I’d miss the train.

  I went to the school early in the morning to say goodbye to the Schoolmaster. But the Schoolmaster had organized another one of those “Royal Hungarian nights” this night too, and was unwilling to acknowledge that it was morning. The house peeped, shutters closed, out into the glaring snowy sunshine, and you could hear the Gypsy music and excited yells from inside. The door was wide open—you could have helped yourself to whatever you liked.

  I stood in the entryway among the damp, steaming coats, unsure what to do. I knocked on the door in vain, got no reply. Finally, after much hesitation, I opened the door and went into the parlour. There was no one there, either. The company was revelling in the next-door room. The door was ajar, tobacco smoke pouring out of it.

  I didn’t dare enter. There were six or eight men in their shirtsleeves swaying in the sickly yellow light of the petroleum lamp, drunk as lords. Coming from the sober daylight, they seemed ghostly in this artificial night as they hollered with bloodshot eyes in the clouds of tobacco smoke like the devotees of some semi-savage sect. The sweating, exhausted Gypsies were playing the Schoolmaster’s song.

  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.

  “A csárdás!” cried the Schoolmaster and sprang, glass in hand, onto the table, doing a frantic dance.

  “Forever young!”
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  He downed his wine and hurled the glass so hard at the mirror that it broke, crashing, into pieces.

  Nobody noticed. I stood in the darkened room alone and a deep, animal sadness gripped my heart. I knew that I would never get to say goodbye to the Schoolmaster, and I didn’t know what I was still waiting for. I just stood there aimlessly a while, and then sneaked silently out of the house.

  That was the last time I saw the Schoolmaster. Six months later, his sister died, and from then on, they say, he grew even wilder. One day they stripped him of his position, and even took his miserable pension. When I was last home, people in the village hardly remembered him at all. There were still some anecdotes about him doing the rounds, it’s true, of the sort that are impossible to verify—like the one about the Countess—but as to what an outstandingly knowledgeable and instinctively excellent teacher he was, even his own former students no longer remembered. He had become a tall tale and faded like the snows of yesteryear.

  The new schoolmaster was a big success. His superiors were very keen on him and he was very popular with the local gentry. The peasants didn’t like him much, it’s true, but they nonetheless gave him his due; and even they admitted that he was a decent sort. He performed his duties impeccably, never touched alcohol or cards, and on the rare occasions when he took a fancy to a girl, it was to the pleasure of the mothers eager to marry off their daughters. “A good catch,” they said, and it was true. He was a modest, well-to-do, industrious young gentle man, and everyone knew his family. He was distantly related to a well-known grandee in Budapest who—a devoted racialist and Great Hungarian—was needless to say of Schwäbisch descent. He had this connection to thank for his position as village schoolmaster, in which he only spent three years, as the grandee meanwhile was put in charge of the country’s schools, at which point the schoolmaster was moved up to Budapest.

  This upstanding young gentleman did wonders for the school’s reputation. His students knew their textbooks by heart and had no time at all to wonder about who owned the snow. And he was a fair-minded man, treating everyone the same. He punished the barefoot peasant boys and the young gentlemen in snow boots just the same if they didn’t turn up for school. His character and his uprightness were beyond question. His philosophical and emotional values mirrored perfectly that of His Hungarian Majesty’s Ministers of Education and Religion. He taught with Germanic precision, thoroughness and discipline. He went studiously through the prescribed curriculum, as laid out in the latest government decrees and guidelines. Anything that fell outside those decrees and guidelines he just as studiously left out. To cut a long story short, he was the sort of man of whom they’re bound to write, if one day—at the very end of human history—he does ever actually die, that he was an “exemplary schoolmaster and a gentleman of irreproachable character.” But in all seriousness, we should also add that our society has his sort of exemplary schoolmasters to thank for the fact that, despite the many millions of barefoot peasant children, it abides and, above all, remains exemplary.