Temptation

  As for the Schoolmaster, the village thought that his firing hadn’t made much of an impact at first. He had to hand over the apartments on 1st September 1930, and on the evening of 31st August he had himself such a ball—Gypsy music and all—that it was all the village could talk about. The next morning, when the new schoolmaster showed up to move into his apartments, he was left ringing the bell in vain: no one answered. In the end, he had to fetch the gendarmes and have the locksmith open the door. They found the Schoolmaster on the couch amid shattered glasses, bottles and puddles of wine, his chest covered in blood. The district doctor, with whom he’d been revelling till five that morning, could do nothing for him. The Schoolmaster had been an outstanding shot, and had found his heart with the utmost accuracy.

  15

  BUT ON THE MORNING OF MY DEPARTURE, the Schoolmaster was still hollering loud enough to be heard out on the street. I stood in front of the school and didn’t know what to do. I had taken care of everything else—all that was left was to board the train. But the train only left at two twenty, and at that moment it seemed unbelievable to me that it would ever be two twenty at all. My mother had written that she would arrive at eleven thirty, and that I was to wait for her at the station, because she wouldn’t set foot in the old woman’s house.

  I looked up at the village clock. It was a quarter past eight. Another six hours, I thought, and life begins. I wandered around aimlessly to kill the time. A sentimental poem from my literature textbook kept ringing in my ears:

  Farewell, village of my birth, way back when;

  I wonder: will I e’er see your streets again?

  I, too, am leaving the village now, I thought, and tried to be suitably moved, in the spirit of the National Treasure who’d written those lines; but I couldn’t. Being a baser soul, I told myself that the whole thing was a lot of nonsense, because how on earth could you say farewell to “the” village? Was I meant to say farewell to the houses, perhaps, whose thresholds I’d never been allowed to cross, because little bastard boys weren’t welcome? Or the shops in which I couldn’t buy anything, because no one gave me money to buy things with? Or was I meant to knock on strangers’ doors, those who didn’t give a damn about me? Or was it the junior officer in the gendarmes I was meant to say farewell to?

  Then I remembered Sárika. In some vague, complicated way, I still cared. Not that I was in love with her. Time had blown away even the ashes of my childhood love, but the embers of my earlier hatred still smouldered within me, because hate, it seems, is an even stronger bond than love. I wanted to see her one last time. As to why, I couldn’t have said, because at fourteen you don’t yet know that when it comes to taking stock in life, all that really matters are your experiences, and that it’s better to have bad experiences than none at all.

  So I walked to the high street and peeked into the shop. The an aemic winter sun shone through the glass door at an angle, flooding the bulging sacks on the floor with weak, sallow light. Sárika was standing behind the counter, fixing her hair in a little hand-held mirror. She’d grown a lot since I’d last seen her. She’d become a gaunt, lanky teenage girl, freckles crowding over her pale white face. I looked at her and knew I didn’t hate her any more. I didn’t hate her, and I didn’t love her. She’s nothing to do with me, I thought, and felt a pang in my heart. I didn’t understand why—how could I have? It takes a long time until you understand that it’s still better to hate than to feel nothing at all; that it’s better if you have someone who hates you than if you belong to no one at all. All at once, I realized that there wasn’t a single soul in this godforsaken village to whom I could now happily go and say, “I’m off now, brother, God bless you.”

  Who was there to care that I was leaving when no one had cared for fourteen years if I lived or died? If I were to drop down dead now, here in the snow, they might as well send the knacker for me because, God knows, no one but the Schoolmaster ever treated me like a human.

  But I wasn’t going to die that easily! I grumbled to myself. I’ll show you who you’re dealing with! I’ll show you! I repeated, and my childhood daydreams were all of a sudden resurrected. I saw myself riding into the village on a fine horse, to the joyful acclaim of the villagers: the just, the famous Béla, who dispensed justice to the oppressors of poor children, bread to the needy, and made the last first.

  “I’ll show you!” I mumbled aloud and stared at the passers-by with my chin pressed down against my neck like a little bull, ready to charge.

  As I passed the gendarmerie, I spat heavily out of the side of my mouth, and with that, I considered my fond farewell to “the” village over and done with.

  My send-off at home was not much more emotional. The boys were jealous, and if there was some more tender emotion lurking in their breasts, they didn’t show it. They were debating the practical details of my journey, where I would leave the local train and pick up the “big” train, which route that train would take and when it would get to Budapest, checking it all excitedly on their school map. Mr Rozi didn’t lunch at home, so I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. But he didn’t matter anyway. He was just a moving piece of furniture; we were used to him, and didn’t pay him much attention. He wasn’t bad to us, though he wasn’t good either. He wasn’t any particular way. He only cared for the fish. The old woman acted as if she didn’t even know that I was leaving, while I spent the whole time trying to disguise my burning excitement so that I could take my leave calmly and with dignity—as a serious young man should.

  But there was still some strange flicker of emotion within me when, after lunch, with my things wrapped under my arm, I stood before the old woman, and it was as if she, too, were moved. Her eyes were strange, unusually clouded, and a shy, awkward little smile played in the troughs of the tangled wrinkles around her mouth. But in the end, all she said was:

  “I hope you better behaved in future.”

  And that was how we took our leave, after fourteen years.

  The boys all wanted to come and accompany me to the train, but I didn’t want them to be there when I saw my mother. So I made my way to the station alone. I still had plenty of time, so I walked leisurely down the high street and thought about that far-off evening in late June when Istvány, too, had walked this way to catch the train—except that he had his father, with his heavy moustache, to hold one hand, and his tiny mother the other.

  I stood beside the rails when the eleven-thirty came in, but I couldn’t see my mother anywhere. I pushed helplessly through the throng of noisy passengers, my mouth dry with the excitement. It had been eight years since I saw her last, and it was now in vain that I tried to conjure up the image of her face—I couldn’t. Maybe she hadn’t recognized me either, I reassured myself, and sat down, a tightness pressing at my throat, on a bench. Once the passengers have gone, we’re bound to find each other, I thought. But the station was unusually crowded because of the holidays. The gilded youth of the village were out in force, young, frost-bitten faces shining beside the railway line, the lads in mischievous high spirits and the girls giggling as if someone were tickling them. I just sat there all alone in this great collective good humour, examining the people, heart thumping, one after the other.

  Which of them was my mother?

  Whenever a woman who looked like she might be from the big city glanced at me, I instantly thought it was her, and my heart skipped a beat. But the women moved on, and I wondered, terrified, what would happen if I couldn’t find my mother, and after all those farewells I would be faced with the humiliation of staying.

  Around two, they backed the train into the station. There was a good deal of commotion, and the passengers rushed the carriages, as the rest gathered under the windows to blurt the usual idiocies up to the people setting out. A woman in a brown coat, with a black kerchief tied around her hair, moved agitatedly up and down through the crowd, and I suddenly knew that this woman was my mother.

  I was seized by a terrific excitement. I could see her heading to
wards me, but I didn’t move. I stared straight ahead, looking bored, as if I hadn’t noticed her, though I could hear the sound of her footsteps as she approached as if each one had been a hammer blow. She was now standing before me, but I still didn’t look up. I could only hear her voice, as if it came from another world.

  “Are you Béla R., little boy?”

  I jumped up and stood stiffly to attention, as you did when talking to your superiors.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied crisply.

  The woman just stood there and looked at me.

  “Don’t you know your own mother?” she asked with a weak smile.

  “You didn’t know me neither,” I replied, not looking up, and tried to smile, too.

  The woman looked at her shoes silently. You could see her anger flaring, but in the end, all she said was:

  “Well, you’ve grown a lot.”

  We didn’t have much more to say to each other. We just stood there in silence. Now it seemed that I did remember her, yes, I definitely remembered her. How old she looked, I thought. An old woman. Now I know that she was thirty-one at the time.

  “Let’s get on, then,” she said at last and headed for the train.

  We boarded. Around us there was a cacophony of farewells, some people crying, others laughing, but we just sat impassively like an ageing couple, staring out of the window. It was snowing once more.

  “Hard winter this year,” said my mother.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Very.”

  That was the totality of our conversation. She didn’t ask, and I didn’t say, anything. We stared out of the window.

  The conductor blew his trumpet and the train started. I was seized by such excitement that I forgot all about my mother. I pressed my face hard against the window and stared at the passing landscape, temples throbbing. These few streets, these few hundred houses that the train now sped past in a couple of minutes had been, for me, for fourteen years “the” world. In vain had I learnt about other villages, other towns and countries—they were no more real for me than the pictures out of the Arabian Nights. They were a fairy tale, a neverland. Where the land touched the sky at the edge of the village was for me, despite all the geography I had learnt, more or less the end of the world. Everything happened within that frontier, everything that represented palpable and verifiable reality, all joy and pain, everything beautiful and everything revolting, my whole childhood. And now, as I looked out of the carriage window, I could see how ridiculously small this village, that had been my entire world, was.

  The Schoolmaster had told us a story about the “Easter Eggs of Happiness”. God—so the story went—had hidden away people’s happiness in scattered spots around the great wide world, the way you hid painted eggs at Easter, and people now ran from city to city, from country to country, by train and ship and aeroplane, searching incurably for their happiness. I thought of that story now, and it suddenly seemed incomprehensible, terrible and shameful that I had wasted fourteen years in this cursed little village, when I had so much urgent searching to do in that great wide world. I could see the school globe before me, on which the name of our village didn’t even feature, on which even Hungary was just a tiny pink dot within Europe, and Europe itself was not so much bigger compared to the size of the world itself.

  Where was my happiness hidden?

  Where would I find it? In which city, which country, over which lands far, far away?

  In the story, the poor boy at the beginning said: “Now or never, do or die, I’ll go find it where it may lie.” And I, too, made the same promise to myself.

  Now I felt that Budapest, too, was to be just a station on the long road on which I had set out that day with the two-twenty local, and perhaps not even a much more important one than the station where we would change from the local to the “big” train.

  I was seized by such sweet impatience and such deliciously painful curiosity at the same time that I would have liked to whip the train on, bawling like a drunken coachman. I felt I had not a minute to lose—happiness was waiting for me somewhere, and I had urgently to make up for those fourteen years that I had so unforgivably allowed to pass me by.

  My mother woke me from my thoughts.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to change trains.”

  •

  Something happened on that other train. Nothing big, and at the time, I paid it no attention, but today I know that in a certain sense it influenced the whole rest of my life.

  As the train pulled out, a dumpy, broad-chested lady pressed her way through the crowded carriage, accompanied by a boy of about my age. When my mother saw her, she jumped out of her seat, ran over to her, grabbed her hand and kissed it zealously all over. The lady, too, pasted a benign smile onto her face, but I nonetheless got the impression that my mother’s outpourings bored her. Later on, they called me over and my mother introduced me to the lady and her dolled-up little gentleman of a son.

  “Look,” she said breathlessly, “I was this fine young gentleman’s nurse when you was born.”

  I looked the fine young gentleman over, but didn’t find him very fine at all. He was such a lanky, dull sort of boy that you could have made two of him from me. So this was the boy who’d drunk my mother’s milk away from me.

  The lady looked around the carriage disapprovingly.

  “Come over to second class for a minute, dear,” she said. “It does smell so here in third, it’s simply unbearable.”

  It definitely smelt better in second class, that’s for sure. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I set foot in the carriage. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. The seats were covered in red plush, like the Schoolmaster’s grandfather chair, and the walls were decorated with beautiful pictures.

  “Well, then, have a seat, dear, and tell me all about yourself,” the lady said graciously, and sat back so comfortably on the soft padding that her horrible great breasts almost popped out of her silk dress.

  My mother, too, sat down, only she sat down so modestly at the very edge of the seat, it was as if she were afraid that the delicate upholstery would take it as a personal insult if she interloped too far with her lower-class behind.

  We two boys remained outside in the corridor. The “fine” young gentleman was dolled up as if he were going to—at the very least—some kind of festivity. He was wearing a fur coat, like the Count, a red tie with white polka dots, and a green hunting cap with a tuft of wild boar fur on it. But the thing that awed me most was his shoes. They’d thrown me in jail for trying to get my hands on a pair of worn-out old shoes so I could go to school, while this little dunce was wearing two pairs of shoes, one inside the other. The inner ones were yellow, and the outer ones sort of polished patent-leather black. I found out later they were called galoshes.

  It was only as I stood beside this fancy young man that I really felt what a ragged beggar I was. He must have thought the same, because the way he looked at me got my blood up. If he’d looked at me that way in the village, I would have smacked him in the mouth; but here, I just mumbled something, like an idiot. I smiled and the anger boiled up inside me, because when it came to my rep I was deadly serious. This “fine” young gentleman was annoying me, and since I couldn’t smack him, I tried to deal with him by other means. I steered the conversation round to school, on the theory that even the finest hunting cap couldn’t help you there; there, you had to know things, and know things I knew I did. I started quizzing him with that sly peasant craftiness that feigns stupidity that not even Galician Jews can outdo. By the end, I was more or less cross-examining the boy, because I wanted to know if they’d dolled him up as fine on the inside as they had on the out.

  The results were shocking. He was in the fourth year of secondary school, but despite the fact that I was only in the sixth year of primary, and apart from a few scraps of Latin and other things you only learnt in secondary, I was better than him at everything. He barely knew a thing about geography, had no clue about history,
and just kept shooting his mouth off, humming and hawing, saying that they taught things differently in secondary school. Two and two is still four, even in secondary school, I thought, since that was the sort of error the fine young gentleman kept making.

  I had never been a great fan of the upper classes, but I had nonetheless thought that they were different from us poor people, the way expensive cloth is different from cheap. I could see the difference now, all right.

  And these are the people, I thought, who take everything away from us, even our mothers’ milk?

  Why? Why? Why?

  By what right?

  My mind is keener, my knowledge greater, and my fist . . . I almost laughed out loud. If I started on this “fine” young gentleman, that painted, broad-chested mother of his would be picking up the pieces in a sheet.

  I could compete with the likes of him any day, the devil take his kind.

  If ever I’d been afraid, that fear now disappeared, like chaff blown by the wind.