Temptation

  What did I have to lose?

  Nothing.

  I had the world before me.

  Aprés moi le déluge!

  TWO

  Me and Her Excellency’s Dog

  1

  BUDA WAS AS WHITE AND UNREAL as a Christmas story. There was no wind in the snowy streets, they were stiflingly calm; it was as if the whole city was holding its breath. The great snowflakes, shimmering like diamonds, descended slowly, like in a dream in the yellow halos of the elaborate streetlamps, and my overjoyed imagination pictured incredible palaces in the twinkling fog. Mysterious vehicles swept by behind the glittering curtain of snow: silent, gleaming, aristocratic motor cars, noisy little taxis on the hunt, enormous, flat-footed buses and even a sleigh, with its silvery tinkle, straight out of a fairy tale. Light and music poured out of the cafés, and an old man dressed up like a general opened the doors of the motor cars, bent double, in front of a place covered in coloured lights.

  “Happy New Year!” he intoned, though there was still some time to go till midnight. “Happy New Year!”

  Porcelain-faced ladies in toothpick-heeled slippers tottered out of the cars on the arms of their elegant beaus. Snow glittered in their hair, diamonds in their ears, and smiles on their faces. They were as beautiful and unreal as the city itself and I thought of Elek Benedek’s fairy tales, because I had never seen anything like it in real life.

  The Danube was still and white, like a highway under snow. Only when we got closer did I see that sheets of ice floated in the middle, with pitch-black water roiling beneath. My mother stopped under the illuminated arch of a great bridge.

  “Look at all that!” she said, as if the whole city were hers and she was trying to sell it to me at great profit. “They say,” she said proudly, “even the Prince of Wales was speechless when he saw it.”

  I don’t know about the Prince of Wales, but I really was speechless as I saw the two cities meet, their long, illuminated bridge-arms touching over the Danube. I turned my head this way and that, not knowing where to look first. On the sides of the hills, like a reclining woman, Buda presented itself from beneath a white eiderdown of snow, while on the other side, flat and sly, Pest winked like a man with its myriad lights. Mysterious rays glowed here and there in the milky fog, flooding a building or a statue in fantastic light. Up high, almost swimming in the clouds, a ruined castle glimmered above the city and a little way off, on top of another great hill, stood a dreamlike building with lots of turrets; I simply had no idea what it was.

  “Fisherman’s Bastion,” my mother explained. “And that over there is the Royal Palace.”

  I stared in awe, mouth agape. In the fog and the beams of the spotlights, the snowy Royal Palace looked so unreal that I couldn’t imagine at all that anyone lived inside. It reminded me much more of the icing of a fancy cake, as its snow-capped dome poked into the sky on top of the hill. I leant against the railing of the bridge, heart thumping, and my eyes were moist with happiness. How great, I thought, that I get to live here! How great to be alive! How great . . .

  “What you doing loitering there?” croaked a harsh, hoarse voice.

  I turned around in fright. A heavily moustachioed man in a black uniform and silver helmet stood before us. There was a sword hanging by his side, a holster on his belt, and icicles on his moustache. With his daintily gloved hands—like a little girl at First Communion—he roughly pushed my mother away from the railings.

  “Move along, move along,” he mumbled. “You can’t loiter here.”

  My mother took off in fright, and I panted after her.

  “Why’d the soldier chase you away?” I asked when we’d got out of range.

  My mother smiled.

  “That weren’t no soldier. It was a policeman.”

  “Policeman, then!” I muttered angrily, because I felt my reputation had been damaged. “Why’d he chase you away?”

  “Must have thought I was going to jump in the river.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Same as all the rest. So many people are jumpin’ in the river these days, they’ve taken to guardin’ the bridges. The papers say ain’t nowhere in the world with more suicides than us.”

  We were on the Pest bank by then, walking past the big hotels. Wealth flaunted itself here like a pheasant at mating time. Huge, illuminated motor cars thronged the red-carpeted hotel doorways. White shirts and jewels flashed in the night, silk dresses rustled beneath furs, and the generals who held the doors were bending double, bowing before the motor cars.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Good evening, Your Excellency.”

  “Welcome, Your Ladyship.”

  “How do you do, Your Honour.”

  “At your service, Mr Chairman.”

  I had never in my wildest dreams imagined that there were so many ways of addressing someone, or so many furs and jewels. Clouds of scent filled the air and the porcelain-faced ladies tottered on their tiny legs like birds more used to flying. What did these people want to jump in the river for?

  My mother slowed her pace, dawdling at the sight, and I thought we were home.

  “You live here?” I asked.

  My mother smiled again and I wondered irritably once more what my mistake could have been.

  “We live in Újpest,” she said.

  I remember, I was very pleased by that. Újpest! I repeated to myself and was overcome by curiosity. If the old Pest was this beautiful, what could this new, új Pest be like?

  We got on the tram. That sounds simple, but for anyone who’s never ridden a tram before, it was anything but. I had heard of these contraptions, it’s true, but it’s one thing to have heard of something and another to have seen it, especially at fourteen. Picture a railway carriage that, no joke, went and separated itself from its locomotive to wander wherever it pleased; that, at least, was more or less how it seemed to me.

  It took us quite a while to reach Újpest. The farther the tram went, the darker and more deserted the landscape became. The pretty upper-class houses quickly vanished, faded ugly apartment blocks lining the badly lit streets; and then for a good long time there was nothing but warehouses—plain, granary-like buildings—the odd lonely hovel, and finally nothing but snow and darkness, and the occasional jaundiced streetlamp.

  “This is Újpest?” I asked, disappointed, when we got off the tram.

  “Yes,” nodded my mother.

  We crossed the road. On the other side, next to a scrap metal yard, there was a lonely shack leaning heavily in the snow, like the great, uneven heel of a shoe. Inside, in front of a smoky petroleum lamp, a gaunt, dishevelled man with an odd face sat watch, a battered tin clock on the wall behind him. My mother glanced at the clock and swore fiercely.

  “I lost all track of time,” she mumbled. “Come on, or we’ll never get home before they lock the gate.”

  “They lock up the houses here?” I gaped.

  “Yeah, at ten.”

  “And they don’t let you in after?”

  “Only if you pay. Ten fillérs a head, twenty after midnight.”

  We crossed a bumpy empty plot where the snow stood a metre high. There was only a thin little trodden path across it, and it was so narrow that we had to walk in single file. It was only now I realized how cold I had got. All I needed was to have to spend the night out here. No, thanks!

  “Ain’t you got twenty fillérs?” I sallied.

  “I do,” she said and sighed briefly. “I was going to get you some milk with it in the mornin’.”

  “Let’s run,” I said.

  My mother broke into a run, and I ran after her. At last we saw the house. It was a strange house, narrow and tall like a huge brick turned on its side. It stood there alone among the snowed-in vacant plots, in the white wilderness with just the chimneys of a few factories silhouetted in the dark, and even those far, far behind. There was a ragged little tavern on the ground floor, Gypsy music spilling out of it.

  “N
ow if we meet Herr Hausmeister,” my mother panted as she ran, “be polite to him, ’cause . . .” She broke off the sentence and cried excitedly: “The gate’s still open!”

  We sprinted. Before the gate, my mother grabbed my arm and sneaked me into the house like a thief. It was only on the first floor that she stopped to catch her breath. We lived on the third, because in Pest—my mother explained—the higher up you lived, the lower the rent, and we only lived on the third floor because there was no fourth to live on.

  When we got up there, my mother stopped on the stairs.

  “I’m going to go do my business,” she said. “Wait for me, and you can do yours after.”

  There was only one toilet on our floor; I later found out it served twelve families. We only had one outhouse at Rozi’s, too, but what was that compared to this? There, the old woman had me scrub the planks white every Saturday, but here archaeologists would have discovered layers of filth dating back to the Stone Age underneath all the encrustations of subsequent generations. The toilet opened onto the courtyard; the water had frozen, and the stench was so unbearable that it stunned even my hardened nose.

  My mother, meanwhile, had gone into the flat. There were twelve flats on the floor and I couldn’t find ours in the dark. In the end, I called out to my mother, and one of the doors finally opened.

  “Stop yellin’, will you!” my mother shouted at me. “You’ll upset Herr Hausmeister.”

  Her voice sounded very angry, but on her face a smile played, and she indicated with her eyes that it was all just for Herr Hausmeister’s benefit. Then in a strange, awkward voice, she said:

  “Come on in then, son. Welcome.”

  That was on 31st December 1927, at ten o’clock at night, when they were locking the gate, three and a half months before my fifteenth birthday. It was the first time I crossed the threshold of what—in better circumstances—people call the family home.

  •

  The “family home” consisted of a single room and a kitchen. The kitchen was very narrow and very long, and I would have taken it for a windowless corridor but for the stove and dishes. My mother had lit the stove and a big metal pot was simmering away on top, filling the apartment with the heavy smell of cabbage.

  We went into the room. The unvarnished floorboards, full of splinters, were still a little damp from a scrubbing and the entire room had obviously had a thorough clean. The flat was very neat and very sad, though I couldn’t say exactly why. The room was quite large, at least by my standards, and I even liked the furniture when it came down to it. There was a bed in the middle of the room, which for me was already a sign of luxury, and above it, in a broad gold frame, there was a colour lithograph: the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus. There was also a sink in the room, a pitted white tin sink that wobbled on two legs beside the bed, because its third did not reach down to the uneven floor. A little way over, a stern, dumpy wardrobe squatted, staring angrily at the battered, lopsided dresser huddled beside the door like a poor relation. Above it on a pale pink ribbon hung a gingerbread heart; someone must have bought it years ago at a fair, the icing had peeled off all over. In the middle of the room there was a table with a wax tablecloth and a petroleum lamp with a green shade.

  “But there’s electric, too!” My mother boasted, and to show me she was telling the truth, she put the light—hanging on a black wire—on for a moment. “It’s a good invention,” she noted practically, “but it ain’t for us poor folk. It’s very dear, we don’t use it much.”

  I didn’t understand why she was using the plural.

  “Someone else live here?” I asked.

  “Only Manci now,” she replied. “Before, I had someone else rentin’ a bed, too. Paid four pengős a month, imagine! Though he only slept in the kitchen on the camp bed. Good man, he was, Antal. That was his name. But, anyway,” sighed my mother, “I had to send him away on account of you.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Where was you going to sleep? Manci rents the bed and Antal, like I says, slept in the kitchen.”

  “What about you?”

  “On the floor here. Now I’ll sleep in the kitchen, an’ you can sleep here in the room.”

  “With Manci?”

  I could feel myself blushing, but my mother didn’t notice.

  “She’s a good girl, Manci. Got a good heart. She didn’t mind. If she don’t come by the last tram, you can have the bed.”

  “The bed?”

  My heart beat faster. I had never slept in a bed before.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve, she probably ain’t comin’ home.”

  “She stay out often?” I ventured.

  “When she’s got a late client. You know, she’s one of them girls, but long as she pays, what business is that of mine? Now hang on, I’d better go before your supper burns. Know what I’ve made you?”

  “What?”

  My mother winked meaningfully.

  “Székelygulyás.”

  My mouth watered. If I hadn’t feared for my rep, I might have yelled for joy. As it was, I merely said, manfully:

  “Not bad.”

  But when my mother went out of the room, I did a handstand in joy, and not just metaphorically, but actually. Well blow me down, I said to myself, I’d never have thought it. I get to sleep in a bed and get székelygulyás for supper. If I wrote them at home, the boys would think I was telling tales.

  The Gypsy music drifted up from the tavern. They were playing some sad, melancholy tune, but it seemed terribly cheerful to me. I could barely wait till my mother finally called:

  “Come on then, Béla, your supper’s ready.”

  The székelygulyás was already steaming away on the kitchen table in the big metal pot, and my mother put a portion in front of me so large it would have been enough for Mr Rozi—and there was pretty much no one on earth who could eat more than he could.

  I started sweating, I ate so hard. My God, what a székelygulyás that was! Pools of soured cream floated on top, the soft tenderloin melted in my mouth, and the cabbage—Lord, what cabbage! You could tell my mother had cooked it that morning, or perhaps even the night before, because only when you cook it twice can cabbage be that good. I was moved: for the rich, food goes only to their stomachs, but for the poor—it goes to their hearts. I stole a glance at my mother. She can’t be too bad, I thought. Here was that good old Antal and she sent him away from one day to the next so her jailbird son would have somewhere to rest his head. And she makes székelygulyás for supper when she has no more than twenty fillérs. I leant low over my plate so my mother wouldn’t see my emotion.

  “How much did this székelygulyás cost, then?” I asked matter-of-factly.

  “How much?” My mother started calculating. “Well, I paid eighty fillérs for the meat, ten for the cabbage, sixteen for the cream, and then there’s that bit of lard and herbs and so on. I don’t know, probably one pengő ten for the lot.”

  “That’s a lot,” I noted.

  My mother didn’t reply, but I could see she enjoyed the acknowledgement. But that wasn’t why I’d said it. I had a little diary that Scarecrow had given me to write down the names of anyone who was misbehaving in school. I took it out, pulled a little pencil from the side and started writing very seriously. I still have that little diary, and this is what I wrote under “Outgoings” in the “Owed to” column: “31 Dec. 1927. Mother, one portion székelygulyás, 55 fillérs.”

  “What you writin’?” my mother asked.

  “The price of supper.”

  “What for?”

  “To keep accounts. ’Cause I’m going to pay you back, down to the last fillér. You’ll see, I’ll be better than old Antal.”

  And I proceeded to add in my little notebook: “Mother, one month’s rent 5 pengős.”

  The way my mother looked at me, I thought at first she didn’t understand. But she did. Her eyes went all moist, and she turned away.

  “It’s nice of you to think of it,” she said a little hoarse
ly, “but forget all that scribblin’. You ain’t a stranger here.”

  I, too, turned away, because those few words “you ain’t a stranger here” stuck in my throat like a bone. I thought of Istvány. Maybe one day he, too, would come up to Pest, and we’d meet in the street, and he’d ask: “Where you living, Béla?” “Where?” I’d say, “At my muther’s.” I’d say it offhand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I ain’t a stranger no more, Istvány.”

  My mother was studying her empty plate, and I the water pipe, from which a lethargic drop would—at regular intervals—fall into the crooked sink. You could still hear Gypsy music from below. They were playing a familiar tune, and it was good to hear it. My mother leant her head slightly to one side and hummed casually.

  A little room—who needs more?

  Darling, we’ll fit, I’m sure,

  Won’t we? We’ll never fear

  God’ll bless our poor lives there.

  The violin wailed, the zither chuckled, the flute whispered, and the double bass grumbled away. It was warm in the kitchen, the excellent meal spread through me like a blessing and my eyelids grew heavy. I leant back, satisfied.

  “I ain’t a stranger no more, Istvány.”

  •

  All of a sudden my mother said:

  “There’s somethin’ important I want to say to you, Béla.”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  My mother crossed her hands over her belly, as poor women do when they have something important to say.

  “I got you a position in a hotel.”

  “Hotel?” I looked at her in surprise. “What for?”

  “To work,” she replied. “It’s a good position, we’re very lucky. I know the head porter, been washing for him for years. Well, when I got that letter from the Schoolmaster, I went to him and said, read this, sir, read this. The Schoolmaster wrote about my son that he’s going to be somebody, says it right there, look. And I thought, maybe, seeing as how he’s coming to Pest, maybe you could get him a place at the hotel, sir. I ain’t asking for no favours, sir, I said, I’d do your washing for free long as he’s there. He liked that, the little man. He didn’t show it, though, ’cause that’s his way. He kept going on about this and that instead, how it ain’t that simple, but in the end he said: all right, then, Anna, I’ll take a look at him. So we’re going to the hotel tomorrow for you to show off all your studyin’, so you don’t make a fool of me.”