Temptation

  On 1st February, when I got home, she seemed so agitated that instead of saying hello, I said:

  “We gettin’ evicted?”

  “Not yet,” she replied. “But if I don’t pay it all off by 1st March . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but broke bitterly into tears. “Even if you’re starving, if you’re starving inside four walls, you’re still human,” she sniffled, “but if you lose that, there ain’t nothing left but that,” she said and pointed at the bottle of lye. People like us would often drink lye when they couldn’t take any more of life.

  I wanted to console her, but what did I have to console her with? I just sat beside her, helpless. We didn’t say a word all night.

  The next morning, when she woke me up, I looked at the clock in surprise.

  “Why you waking me?” I asked. “It’s only half past four!”

  My mother looked at her shoes, as she always did when she was embarrassed.

  “Béla,” she said quietly, “I ain’t got money for your tram.”

  “That’s all right,” I replied. “How long’s the walk?”

  “Three hours, if you hurry.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “Ain’t no one ever died of that.”

  But my mother just stood there, staring ever more intently at her shoes.

  “There ain’t milk, either,” she said.

  “So what?” I shrugged. “I hate that watery mush anyway. Give me some bread, I’ll eat it on the way.”

  “There ain’t no bread, neither!” she said, breaking down into tears. “We ain’t got nothing but misery.”

  So I left the house on an empty stomach at half past four. It was pitch black, a nasty morning. The wind blew through my ragged clothes so hard my limbs went numb. I had to run at the end, but I made it in on time. In the evening, though, it was a slower process. I was unbelievably tired. I would rest now and then on a bench or the side of the road, my head sinking down onto my chest, and I would find myself dozing off. It was midnight by the time I got home.

  That was how it went from then on. I walked six hours a day. I was tired all day, incredibly tired, but what was worse was the constant need to sleep. If my fairy godmother had asked me back then what my greatest wish was, I would have said: to sleep. I was perpetually sleepy. In the apprentices’ institute, where I had to go twice a week, I would hide behind the back of the person sitting in front of me and sleep, sometimes through the entire lesson. And my favourite drill in cadets was also sleeping. Whenever possible, I would sneak off to the lavatory and sleep. And in the hotel, too, I would disappear whenever I could and secretly snatch a bit of sleep.

  My mother could barely wake me in the mornings. It was with the jaw-grinding anger of the tired that I faced my three-hour walk in the mornings, shivering, my stomach rumbling. How I despised those dead, soulless Újpest streets, which on these pitch-black early mornings were peopled only by drunks, prostitutes and burglars. Even policemen didn’t dare show their faces round there at that hour. I only met one the entire time, but it was a meeting I could have done without.

  “What are you wandering round the streets for?” he shouted at me. “Children ought to be in bed at this hour!”

  I didn’t reply. What could I have said? I agreed with him wholeheartedly. But my silence just made him angrier.

  “Where are you going?” he bellowed.

  “To work,” I replied.

  “At this hour?”

  “It’ll be morning by the time I get in,” I assured him.

  “Don’t you have money for the tram?”

  “No.”

  “Show me your pockets.”

  He turned my pockets inside out and even frisked me.

  “Well, if your mother and father don’t mind,” he mumbled at last and spat, by way of comment on their parenting.

  •

  We got a plentiful lunch and dinner in the hotel, but no breakfast. So I worked on an empty stomach till noon, and by ten o’clock I was faint with hunger. Around me, waiters came and went with silver platters of breakfasts fit for a lunch, and I watched the tantalizing food go by, my stomach rumbling; food I could never taste: fish, fruits and a tenderloin steak for the fascist English lord who ’most every morning would send it back, saying that it was either too rare or too dry.

  I watched them, fists clenched. I had to walk six hours a day for want of forty-eight fillérs, but here in the hotel, I heard the foreigners saying they found Hungary ridiculously cheap. And for them, it was. They got twice as much for their money as they did at home, and lived twice as high on the hog. There was an endless flow of pounds, francs, dollars and marks, but for me, this didn’t extend even to the price of a tram ticket.

  “It looks like,” I said to Elemér once, “Hungary’s the poorest country on earth.”

  “Oh, there’s a few more like it in the neighbourhood,” he replied. “No one bothered about them before 1914, either. Even back then their thinking went, what’s it got to do with us? Just let them bash each other’s brains in. But then there was the war and the bullets started flying past their own heads. Remember room 108?”

  I didn’t understand what room 108 had to do with it.

  “The one with appendicitis?”

  “Him,” he nodded. “Take him. He was rich, he was powerful, not a care in the world. So he thought. Then he got those cramps and three days later—finished.” He came closer. “Do you know how big an appendix is? Like this. Well, Hungary’s about this big, too, compared to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world pays it about as much mind as a healthy man pays his appendix. But if these appendix-countries get inflamed one day, you’ll see, the whole world’ll feel the cramps. D’you see what I’m getting at?”

  I didn’t fully understand, but I could have sworn that it was true. Elemér told the truth, and besides, he was a prole. My mouth was bitter with hunger.

  “If only it were here already!” I grumbled. “This upper-class world could do with a bit of appendicitis.”

  4

  THE BUILDING IN WHICH WE LIVED was like a terminus. This is where people who had nothing left ended up, and from where people who had nothing yet started out. There were, among us, young working-class couples who were more or less still children and who believed in miracles, and large, storm-tossed jobless families who no longer believed in anything. More than a few of the younger people were unemployed, but over forty, almost everyone was. As for what these jobless families lived off, they themselves often didn’t know. Strong, capable working men spent entire days lounging inertly on the walkways in the courtyard, waiting to see if their fifteen-year-old apprentice sons or daughters could get their hands on some dinner. More than one family was supported by canny children like that. Apprentices, after all, did get a bit of work on the side or a tip now and then, and if they didn’t, being unable to watch their little brothers and sisters starve, they’d go out and steal. There was no lack of employment in the juvenile courts and the police were also not short of men. Hardly a day went by that someone didn’t come tapping on the glass of the kitchen door:

  “Police!”

  Or:

  “The flatfoot’s coming!”

  “The coppers are comin’!”

  That’s what the younger generation called policemen. There were ordinary coppers and there were “double-deckers”, which is to say mounted policemen. When the coppers took someone away, people would just say:

  “Poor thing. He’s for it now.”

  Not that this was some sort “nest of criminals” on the outskirts of town. Most of the residents were workers—upright, decent people whose only crime, more or less, was being alive and wanting to support their families.

  Next door to us, there was an old carpenter the house knew simply as Old Gábor. Old Gábor was well respected in the house, though everybody knew he was “funny”. He was a tall, handsome man, strict-faced and dignified. He walked so upright he looked like he’d swallowed a rod, and he was particular about his appe
arance. His faded trousers were always beautifully ironed, his patched shoes polished to a high shine, and you could tell just by looking at his big, white military moustache that he wore a moustache net at night to look after it. He was a widower, but lived with three others in his little one-room flat. He rented the room to three young female workers, and slept in the kitchen. Once, he’d had his own workshop near Budapest, with three apprentices. Old Gábor had made coffins, and anyone investing in death will never lose. He put together quite a little fortune for himself, and had eight thousand koronas in the cooperative. Then the war broke out, they conscripted him into a militia and he had to shut the workshop. Then the revolution came and the Reds declared the old currency worthless. This was followed by the counter-revolution, when the Whites declared the new money worthless. Then there was inflation, and suddenly both currencies were worthless. So there was Old Gábor, left with absolutely nothing in his old age, and suddenly all this history got to him. He became obsessed with the idea that today’s mournful coffins were contrary to the Christian spirit that said, as we all know, that the next world would be better than this one, and so—went his thinking—what cause was there for sorrow? He began making cheerful coffins. But the mourners did not take to this innovation and Old Gábor got fed up with his town. He came up to Budapest to develop his ideas; but he couldn’t open a workshop for want of money, and couldn’t find a job, either. Thus he, too, ended up joining the populous camp of the unemployed.

  Of this he simply took no notice. With his remaining tools, he set up a workshop in his kitchen and carried on working the way he had before. He rose at five on the dot, started work at six, downed tools at the stroke of noon, and went off to look for work in his “lunch break”. He never found any, but he didn’t let that discourage him. He went home, took off his good clothes and went on working till six precisely. What was he working on? Well, to begin with, he furnished the one-room flat beautifully. He painted the furniture in the national colours—for he was a great patriot and made no secret of it. There were three little beds in the room, each a little masterpiece. They were beautifully carved, and painted in red and green on a white ground. At the head, two red angels held up a white heart with the name of the person renting it in green: Sári, Bözsi or Borcsa. If Old Gábor spotted a scratch or a faded patch on any of the furniture, he ran straight for his tools and fixed it then and there, because as well as the cheerful coffins, he’d become obsessed with tidiness as well. The girls weren’t allowed to move anything out of its place, not even the chairs, the correct position of whose legs were marked by four red-white-and-green little circles on the floor.

  If someone in the neighbourhood needed furniture, they’d bring Old Gábor the wood and the other necessaries, and he would make it for them, quickly and with great care. People would pay him something, or not; more often not. But recently, even with these easy terms, he’d had trouble finding work because the people in our neighbourhood didn’t even have enough for firewood, let alone anything else. But Old Gábor wasn’t discouraged. He kept on working on his own account. As to what he was working on, he never said. You could hear him banging away all day, and when it fell silent, we knew it was six o’clock.

  Once, my mother sent me over to borrow a hammer, and then I found out what he was working on. He was making a coffin. It was a cheerful coffin, with a little angel sticking out his tongue on each of the four sides, cocking a snook at the world.

  “That’s nothing!” Old Gábor assured me. “Just wait till it’s finished. But that’ll be a good few months yet.”

  “Months?” I asked. “Who’s the coffin for, then?”

  “Me,” he replied.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not a bit of it, son,” he said, very seriously. “I don’t have no work down here on earth, so I’m working for them up there.”

  That was the kind of man Old Gábor was. All the building liked him, but he had only one real friend: Áron, the Sabbatarian. The two men liked each other very much and were forever arguing. Old Gábor would have turned the whole world upside down to regain Hungary’s lost territories, while Áron, the Sabbatarian, despised war and believed only in the Kingdom of God. The Sabbatarian was a strange, spare man. His thin, Christ-like face was topped by a mane of hair and covered with a thin, scraggly beard. His long, pointed nose was unbelievably thin and almost transparent, like vellum. He must have been about fifty-five or sixty, but he looked much older. He was a night guard at the scrapyard nearby, the one we’d passed with my mother on New Year’s Eve. I still saw him there each night on my way home from work, muttering his way through the Bible in his shack.

  “If it weren’t for him,” Old Gábor said once, “this house would’ve gone a long time ago.”

  “How d’you mean?” I asked. The old man explained.

  That was how I found out why our big three-storey building stood all alone among the vacant plots all round. Once, he told me, this was all working-class housing, but during the inflationary period, a company had bought up all the buildings because they wanted to build a factory on the site. They demolished the buildings one by one, and the residents ended up on the street from one day to the next because at the time, there was such a shortage of housing that even the rich had trouble getting a roof over their heads. The residents in our building, too, got their notice, but Áron, the Sabbatarian, declared that he wasn’t going to move. He had a contract, he said, and they couldn’t evict him. The company took him to court, but the hard-headed Sabbatarian was in luck: the judge trying the case was a refugee from Kolozsvár. The judge had been chased out of Kolozsvár by the Romanians when they’d taken the city, and the old man had fled to Budapest with his sizeable family. There, he’d spent eight months living in a railway freight car, like so many other Hungarians from Transylvania. Those eight months, it seemed, had stuck in the old man’s mind, and so the Sabbatarian won. Ever since, he’d been shrouded in myth and legend, and he was treated with respect by everyone in the neighbourhood.

  The truth is, he’d been lucky. The company appealed, but then deflation hit and the inflationary company went bust. The planned factory came to nought and the building, with the rest of the liquidated company’s assets, ended up in the hands of a big bank. Barely four or five of the bank’s hundreds of employees knew that the building even existed, and of them only one had seen it, once, when he took possession of the liquidated assets on the bank’s behalf. Herr Hausmeister took them the rent on the first of every month, and someone in the bank credited a number to an account. The building became an item—an insignificant little item, of no concern to anyone.

  So Herr Hausmeister was master of all he surveyed. He was all-powerful, and could throw out whoever he wanted; and since you couldn’t find a flat for love nor money, anyone he didn’t like literally ended up on the street. Herr Hausmeister knew this and took no end of perverse pleasure in his position.

  He treated the residents like galley slaves. He was a beefy, un believably rough man who could barely read and write. He had been a sergeant in the army, staying on for fifteen years after his compulsory national service; there, they had perfected his talent for torturing his fellow human beings. An army sergeant was not only a rank in Újpest at the time, but far more. When we said someone was a real “army sergeant”, that didn’t necessarily mean he was a soldier. There were people like that in every field of civilian life. These working-class men who no longer belonged to the working class, but had not yet joined the bourgeoisie, were far harsher with their fellows than the most bloodthirsty of capitalist exploiters.

  It wasn’t easy to get a position like Herr Hausmeister’s. Applicants had to be deemed “absolutely reliable”, which is to say cut from roughly the same cloth as Herr Hausmeister. In addition, though, and this was the rub, the owners of the buildings used to ask for a large deposit. Herr Hausmeister had his wife to thank for his, and she her money to thank for a husband. For she was a thoroughly repulsive woman; it was difficult even
to look at her, let alone share a bed with her. She’d been cook to a priest in Vác for twenty-five years, and he’d left her his money when he died. She was a goggle-eyed, owl-faced bag of bones; I’d never seen a cook as thin as her.

  “But she’s got consumption,” Herr Hausmeister would wink when he was drunk, to let people know he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

  He looked forward to his wife’s death the way other people do to winning the lottery. Whenever they argued, which was several times a day, we children would settle in outside Herr Hausmeister’s flat and listen to them going at each other with great delight.

  “I ain’t givin’ you the satisfaction of dyin’!” the woman would howl. “I’ll outlive you, you filthy Kraut, just to watch you squirm!”

  The “filthy Kraut”, however, didn’t squirm. He took from other people’s wives what he didn’t get—or didn’t want—from his own. He liked the very young ones, and since the attraction wasn’t mutual, he simply blackmailed them. If a young woman didn’t pay the rent on time, he’d go up and see her when her husband wasn’t home and, without beating about the bush, would say:

  “Well, sweetheart, you either give me the rent, or . . .”

  “The ‘or’ is coming!” the women would say when they saw him go up to a young woman’s apartment when her husband wasn’t home.

  We children would say the same thing, and someone would run off to fetch the alarm clock from the kitchen so we could see “how long it lasted”.

  He must have been driven by some sick collector’s need. When he’d had a woman, he usually never looked at her again and was immediately off after someone else. Down in the tavern, he would just shrug if someone mentioned them.