Temptation

  He led me into a large changing room. The walls were lined with grey tin lockers. He opened one of them and took out his civilian clothes.

  “You’re very kind, sir,” I said shyly, and I could feel myself blush.

  “Don’t call me sir,” he replied. “I’m a proletarian just like you. Call me Elemér.”

  “I’m Béla.”

  We shook hands. I was dying to know what a “proletarian” was, but I didn’t dare reveal my ignorance. I started undressing silently.

  “Don’t you have trousers, either?” he asked in surprise.

  I shrugged.

  “It ain’t so cold.”

  Elemér didn’t reply, but his eyes flashed strangely. He stood and stared in silence for a while, and then said quietly:

  “And that lot up there think things can go on like this?”

  “Yes,” I nodded, because now I did know what he was talking about. Our eyes met. We would have been friends back home, I thought.

  Elemér removed his waistcoat, then his shirt, and handed them to me.

  “Put these on, too.”

  “What about you?”

  “Can’t see it under the uniform. Can you tie a tie?”

  “Never had one,” I admitted.

  He took his tie out of the locker and tied it under my collar. Then he looked me over again.

  “Those shoes won’t do, either,” he said.

  This really did surprise me.

  “They’re very good shoes, those,” I said, “they were the Schoolmaster’s.”

  “So I see,” said Elemér. “But you’d best put mine on anyway.”

  We swapped shoes, and he took me over to the mirror. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In his nice blue suit, I looked like a young gentleman.

  My mother, too, was surprised when she saw me.

  “Whew!” she said, her eyes glittering beautifully. “Bless my soul, I’d never have known you!”

  Even the head porter was pleased with me.

  “So you knew them, eh?” he asked Elemér, when he found out I’d got the clothes from him.

  “Never seen us before in his life,” my mother replied and looked gratefully at Elemér. “He’s a real gent, he is, to the bone.”

  “Very well,” said the head porter. “I’ll talk to the Major.”

  “The Major’s the head of personnel,” Elemér told us quietly once the head porter had left. “He’s as White as the driven snow, if you get my drift. Prays to Mussolini every night before bed.”

  I didn’t understand that, either, but I could have sworn it was true. This Elemér told it like it was.

  We waited a long time for the head porter, at least an hour. It was only later I found out that this stern Santa Claus was as terrified of the Major as we were of him, and it was only the thought of the free washing that had steeled him to the task.

  Finally, I too was introduced into the presence of the Major. He sat behind a big desk and looked at me in a way that gave me the impression that, just to be on the safe side, he was about to drill a hole in my skull. He was a dry, spare man, whose mouth curved down in constant revulsion. He wore a round glass in his right eye, the kind you found on pocket watches. Why? I wondered to myself. His hair, parted in the middle, stuck glittering to his scalp. It must once have been black, but now it looked more green from all the dye. His moustache, too, was also green, and his face, too—or at least it seemed that way to me.

  I was standing to attention, my hands on the seams of my trousers as per regulation. The head porter was also standing to attention. All that was missing was the beating of drums.

  The Major looked at me for what seemed like an eternity, like a coper looking over a horse. Then he took the watch glass off his eye and began to talk in bursts.

  “Name?”

  I told him my name.

  “Date of birth?”

  I told him that, too.

  “Father’s trade?”

  That I couldn’t tell him. I could feel myself blushing. There was an unbearable silence.

  In the end, it was the head porter who saved the day.

  “He’s dead, sir,” he said with an apologetic smile.

  “Let the boy speak!” the Major rebuked him.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “How many years of schooling have you got?”

  “Six.”

  “Do you have your reports?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I handed them over. The Major put the watch glass to his eye again and started studying my reports. To dispel all doubt, I said crisply:

  “Never got a ‘C’ in my life, sir.”

  The Major smiled faintly. Drop dead, I thought to myself.

  “Were you a cadet?”

  “Yes, sir. Won a prize for marksmanship.”

  He liked that, I could tell. He turned to the head porter.

  “So you know his mother well?”

  “Yes, Major. She’s poor, but respectable.”

  “I can see she dresses her son properly,” the Major said, and then added cantankerously: “Different sort of people in the villages, say what you will, not like the rabble here in Budapest!” He looked at me. “Just watch out and make sure these Red dogs don’t get to you.”

  “Yes, sir!” I replied, though I hadn’t the faintest clue what he was talking about.

  “Very well, then,” he said. “Go see the Chamber of Commerce with your mother about signing up as an apprentice. Kálmán’ll explain.”

  “Yes, Major!” said the head porter and clicked his heels.

  I, too, clicked mine. Our audience was over.

  When my mother heard they’d taken me, she started crying with joy.

  “No one’s ever washed the way I’ll wash for you!” she sniffed, and kissed the head porter’s hand.

  I changed back into my own clothes and we left. Elemér had explained where the staff exit was, it’s true, but we got lost, what with all the stairs, and found ourselves again in the marble-pillared lobby. My mother was zigzagging to and fro in panic on the frighteningly soft carpets and kept bumping into people.

  “Oh God, just get me out of here,” she whispered, “or we’ll ruin everything.”

  We made it safely out of the lobby, but the poor woman had forgotten to include the front doors in her supplications. The porter recognized us.

  “How dare you sneak inside!” he screamed. “Where were you?”

  My mother, instead of responding, ran for it as if she’d been caught stealing, and I, of course, ran after her.

  “Don’t let me see you here again, you rabble!” the porter yelled, and the passers-by looked at us as if we really had been up to no good.

  I would have liked to jump at them and scratch out their judgemental eyes. Were we nothing but mangy dogs, that everyone treated us this way? I was haunted by shame and fled into the rainforest of my childhood fantasies. I was still fixated on my old plan of organizing the poor folk into gangs of grown-ups, the way we’d organized ourselves into gangs of children, and the thought that when I grew up, I would rob the rich of their treasure, like Sándor Rózsa, and distribute it to the poor. You have no idea what I’m capable of ! I said to myself. I’ll show you who you’re dealing with! Once, long before, the Schoolmaster had told us the story of the Trojan Horse, and this now came back to me. Yes—I, too, would smuggle myself into the bastions of the enemy now, donning their uniform and serving them impassively, but one day I’d come bursting out of the Trojan Horse and then God help that world of gentlemen thieves, because that, that would be the Day of Judgement. Then there’d be cannon in Mária Valéria utca, and I would come, sword in hand, riding . . .

  My mother laughed quietly. I looked at her in alarm. We were in Vilmos Császár út by now, and my mother, in her happiness, had forgotten all about her fright of not long before.

  “My son the head porter!” she said with a girlish giggle and slapped me merrily on the shoulder. “I can just see you now, with your waxed moustache and your fancy u
niform, people hardly able to get in and see you, and you gettin’ one over all them poor folk.”

  “The only folk I’ll be gettin’ one over on is the rich folk!” I answered gravely. “And I won’t spare them one bit, you can bet your life on that!”

  “Aw,” my mother shrugged, “That’s what you think. By the time you’re head porter, you’ll think different, too. The poor always forget the poor if they make it among the rich, it’s the way of the world.”

  It wasn’t with sadness that she said this, but with a pensive smile; she even laughed. But then her coughing got hold of her. It was a nasty cough—poor Berci had used to cough like that. I’ll buy her bacon as soon as I have money, I thought, good, thick bacon, and litres and litres of milk, and not that strained kind, but proper milk, full-fat milk to help fix her lungs.

  “Well, slap me on the back, then, go on!” she said, because her coughing just wouldn’t stop.

  So I slapped her back, though I wanted to stroke it instead. I slapped her back and thought of the guns that would one day ring out in Mária Valéria utca. Then I would take her work-calloused hands, lead her into the marble-columned lobby and say, loud enough for all the upper-class gentlemen to hear: “Your finest room for my darling muther.”

  3

  SO IT WAS THAT I WAS TRANSPOSED, overnight, from among the poorest to among the richest people in the world. There was nothing in between these two extremes. Till then, I’d seen peasants working from dusk till dawn for less than a pengő a day; now I saw gentlemen spend three times that on a packet of Egyptian cigarettes. My mother got up at five, worked till late at night and didn’t make the price of the breakfast that ladies at the hotel, still bleary-eyed, would have sent up to them in bed at eleven o’clock in the morning.

  My baffled young spirit just couldn’t accept it. At the sight of these two extreme polarities, my outrage burst out of me like an electric spark. In Újpest, people ended up in prison, hospital or the morgue over tiny, insignificant sums, while here the pounds, francs, dollars and pengős flowed for the smallest things. In the mornings, when I would arrive from Újpest and enter the marble-columned lobby, I really did feel as if they’d smuggled me behind enemy lines. I despised this refined international crowd numbed by ennui. I hated them for everything: for my mother getting thinner every day, for my not being able to go to school, for the world being the way it was.

  But the truth is, I had it good. The head porter had assigned me to Elemér, and he treated me like a brother. The food was outstanding. I’d never eaten as well in my life. But I still felt lost. They’d treated me terribly in the village, but I had belonged somewhere. The peasants would beat you harshly if they caught you stealing their fruit, but ask you how you were doing next time they saw you. Here, no one beat you, either in word or deed. They simply didn’t notice you. They looked through you like a pane of glass. They reminded me of the goldfish in the hotel conservatory—it was as if they, too, were walled off by a sheet of glass. I could see them, I lived side by side with them, but they were completely out of reach. If I were to drop dead right in front of them, I thought, they’d just keep on smiling, politely and uncomprehendingly, as if they were blind. Someone might, perhaps, remove his monocle, go over to the telephone with a look of utter dispassion and—in a careless, nasal tone—call down to reception. “I say . . . there’s a stiff here. Send up the manager, I wish to make a complaint.”

  Even the other bellboys did not accept me as their own. They were big-city boys, and looked down on peasants. They found my accent, behaviour and outlook ridiculous; indeed, the very fact of my existence, too. They were dyed-in-the-wool, right-wing nationalists: “bicyclists”. They kissed up and kicked down, like all the rest of “Royal Hungarian” society. The system in which they lived gave everyone a rank or title, and since there was no rank so low that there was no one lower, even the most miserable pariahs could console themselves in thinking that they, too, had someone beneath them to kick. This was the case in the hotel as well. Passing through, we would have Mr Chairman, Mr President, Mr Vice President, Mr Director, Mr Deputy Director, and various heads of departments; and in the same way, there was in the hotel Mr Head Porter, Mr Porter, and even Mr Assistant Porter, and God help you if you called them by their surnames instead of their titles.

  “Oh the fools!” Elemér once said. “When someone higher up gives them a kick, they immediately kick someone below instead of getting together and in a body kicking out the people who invented the system in the first place.”

  But he only said things like that when we were alone. He was generally silent in front of the others, and on the rare occasions when he did say something, he thought twice about it first. The bellboys had a strange, almost unfathomable respect for him, but later I was surprised to learn that they didn’t like him, and called him Pokerface behind his back.

  They were a corrupted lot, those boys. They aped the elegant guests—some even took on their mannerisms when they spoke. They were constantly eavesdropping, sniffing around and gossiping, and they were only really happy when they could stick their noses into something morally dubious. They were like bruised young fruit; they hadn’t even ripened yet and had already begun to rot.

  The sweet smell of putrefaction filled the entire hotel. I could smell it through the French perfume, though I didn’t know it myself at the time. All I knew was that I suspected—I could smell—something that from the very first moment was horribly repulsive and at the same time terrifyingly tempting.

  It all seemed so mysterious. Take the boy with the girlish face who had been so rude to my mother when we’d first come to the hotel. His name was Ferenc, but after the first few days, I noticed that they all just called him “Franciska”, like a girl, behind his back. I asked Elemér why, but he didn’t answer. He was a prudish boy who blushed easily, and he blushed at the question.

  “It’s nothing,” he mumbled awkwardly and shrugged.

  If he hadn’t behaved so mysteriously, I would simply have assumed that they called Ferenc Franciska because of his girlish looks, but as it was, I knew that there was something else going on, and I became more curious than ever.

  Then one day something odd happened. The head porter asked me:

  “Where’s Ferenc?”

  “He’ll be right back,” I replied, because Franciska had said that he was going up to room 302, and I knew that in the hotel, we only got short commissions and then either went straight back to the lobby or reported where we’d been sent.

  But when the head porter had left, Antal, one of the bellboys, snapped at me:

  “You mad?”

  “Why?”

  “Telling him he’ll be right back.”

  “He said he was just goin’ to 302.”

  “Well, quite. Which means he won’t be right back.”

  “Why not?” I gawped.

  “Why not,” Antal repeated mockingly and, instead of replying, gestured dismissively, as if to indicate that there was no point wasting his breath on a hopeless case like me.

  But Franciska really wasn’t back right away; he was more than an hour in room 302. I didn’t understand. If there had been a woman, I could understand, I said to myself. But room 302 belonged to a man: a rich, older German, the Budapest representative of a chemical company from the Rhine. Fancy that.

  Yes, it was all so mysterious. There was plenty of gossip about Elemér, too. I was consumed with curiosity, but the boys didn’t let me in on their secret. I only caught the odd sentence here and there.

  “Boys,” Lajos declared one morning. “Listen to this: my old man bumped into Pokerface at three o’clock in the mornin’. Didn’t I tell you he goes to underground meetings?”

  And another time, when Elemér had given him a dressing-down for something, he grumbled to the other boys:

  “Look at him, all high and mighty, the Communist!”

  Needless to say, I didn’t believe that. Elemér wasn’t a Jew and, besides, I thought he was a decent boy. But I
, too, didn’t quite understand him. I was always suspicious that he was only saying half of what he thought. He was never happy, he was never sad. He was Pokerface. He talked as dispassionately as an old man, and he was as dry and fair as a rule book. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he lived, what he did when he took off his uniform. He never talked about himself, and if I tried to ask, he dodged the question.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t like me. He watched over me and trained me like a cat does its young, though it can’t have been easy for him. Understanding upper-class ways does not come easily to peasant boys, but it was as if he liked even that about me. Whenever I wanted to thank him for some kindness, he always just shrugged.

  “Nonsense,” he’d say. “We’re proles, you and me, we’ve got to stick together, that’s all there is to it.”

  This slang version of “proletarian” was the first foreign word I ever learnt. I still didn’t know what it meant, but I thought it was the nicest word in the world. For me, it meant that Elemér considered me an equal, and that I, too, belonged somewhere.

  •

  Whenever I got home, my mother’s first words were always:

  “Did you bring any money?”

  “No,” I replied in shame, because for the moment I was only an apprentice and they hadn’t yet given me any of the sort of work that came with tips. My mother didn’t say anything, just stared straight ahead.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I tried to reassure her, but the next day I would come home empty-handed again.

  The weeks passed, 1st February was approaching, and my mother grew more and more anxious by the day. On 1st January she had only managed five pengős towards the rent and Herr Hausmeister had told her that if she didn’t pay all of what she owed on 1st February, he’d have her evicted. She owed seventy-five pengős, but she’d only managed to scrape together twenty-two, and I have no idea how she even managed that. She made three pengős a day when she was working, but she didn’t work much more than fifteen days a month. The rest of her time was taken up looking for work, and that cost a lot of money because “ladies” lived in Pest, and my mother wasn’t up to walking. She was coughing more and more each night under her faded brown coat, which had now taken the place of the duvet. I slept in my clothes, but the poor thing just couldn’t get used to it. She grew thinner every day and her small black eyes sank so far into her pale face, it was as if they were trying to hide from her troubles.