Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “We’ll think of something!” he said, but he didn’t sound too confident.

  I didn’t say anything to my mother. She had enough trouble as it was. As soon as she could stand, she was up, and as soon as she was up, she went to work. And so it all started over.

  But one evening, she was very cheerful when I got home.

  “Guess what,” she said with a smile.

  “What?”

  “Your apprenticeship’s over. You’re gettin’ a position!”

  “How d’you know?”

  “The head porter told me. He says the rest is up to you. If you’re good, you can make two or three pengős a day.”

  Her face radiated hope. There was nothing for it, I had to tell her.

  “Muther, I’m afraid this post won’t come to nothin’.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s something wrong. The Major don’t like my shoes.”

  “What’s wrong with ’em?”

  “I don’t know. They were good enough for the Schoolmaster, and his little finger was worth more than the whole Major, monocle and all. Sorry to spoil your mood.”

  But to my great surprise, my mother said:

  “Well, if there’s no other way, we’ll just buy a pair.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “What about the rent?”

  “If what the head porter says is true, you’ll make the price of them shoes in three or four days.”

  “That’s true,” I said, relieved. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  I “skipped” an hour of the apprentices’ institute and went with my mother to buy a pair of shoes. It was quite the occasion. This is how I recorded it on one of the “Owed to” pages of my old diary: “18th February 1928. Mother, one pair shoes, 7 pengős 20 fillérs.” Then, below, in brackets, I put “Not worn, but brand new!” Indeed: I had a “brand-new” pair of shoes. They were beautiful shoes. People must have wondered why I was constantly staring at my feet. What I liked best about them was the way they squeaked good and loud. That may sound strange, but it isn’t at all. Only shoes someone hasn’t already worn in squeak, and I had never had such a pair of shoes before. So I was proud of them, very proud.

  I did end up getting the post, but much good did it do me. They put me in one of the lifts, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that no one tips lift boys in hotels. So there I stood in my fine, squeaky shoes, beaming at the guests, and all for nought. The most I ever got out of it is that the truly generous ones—occasionally—smiled back.

  The look my mother gave me when she found out, I thought she was going to faint again.

  “Jesus,” she said, white as a sheet. “And I spent seven pengős of the rent!”

  I’d never heard her complain when she didn’t have enough to eat, but she was constantly sighing about the rent. No one wants to end up on the street, obviously, but her constant terror of it was almost pathological.

  “While you’re starving inside four walls,” she used to say, “you’re still human. But if you ain’t got that, there’s nothing left but this,” she said, pointing at the bottle of lye.

  How many times I heard that, my God! I used to get cold chills down my back whenever I looked at the lye bottle.

  But we made it through 1st March somehow. My mother promised Herr Hausmeister she’d do his washing for free, and the great man gave us a stay of execution till 1st April.

  “But what’ll we do then?” my mother asked, and I had no answer.

  The 1st of April was my fifteenth birthday. Apart from me, of course, no one noticed at all, and even my mother forgot. The poor thing was preoccupied with the rent, rather than my birthday. She had ninety pengős to pay, the little diary tells me, but she could only scrape together thirty. It wasn’t a very happy birthday. All day, I was wondering what would happen if they evicted us, and every time I remembered the bottle of lye, my heart skipped a beat.

  The hotel was unusually cheerful that day: people were playing April Fool’s jokes on each other. I was born on a fool’s day, I thought to myself, so no wonder life was making a fool of me. The lift and I sped up and down, up and down, but all I could think about was that my mother might already be dead. I kept getting the wrong floor, and guests kept shouting at me—sometimes, I was afraid I’d strangle them. I could barely control myself by evening. I had to know what had been going on at home at all costs, and at the same time, I was scared of finding out.

  I ambled home slower than ever before. It was a cold, foggy night, and it was spotting with rain. I walked the deserted streets with my collar turned up and my hands in my pockets, and wherever I looked, I saw my mother lying on the metal bed, her eyes rolled up into her head, the empty bottle of lye beside her.

  It was getting on for midnight. The rain had seeped through my clothes and I felt like it was seeping through my skin as well, turning my bones to mush. I leant against a lamppost, my head dipped down onto my chest, and my eyelids drooped closed. The rain dripped in beneath my collar and ran, ice-cold, down my back. I let it. I simply couldn’t keep my head up.

  “Quite the birthday,” I mumbled aloud, and noticed that I was talking to myself, like Mad Wilma. But I just kept on talking: “Born on a crazy day, God knows that’s true. April Fool! They really made a fool of you . . .”

  Funny, I thought, but that rhymes. Did I read that somewhere? No, or rather . . . No, no, I hadn’t. Odd. I was talking in verse. I felt dizzy. I felt the way you do when you’re still half asleep, when reality turns fluid and melts into your dreams. It was some kind of sober drunkenness, some waking ecstasy.

  I remember these moments very clearly, the way epileptics must recall their first seizure, or madmen in moments of clarity, the first time they saw the Vision. That was when it started.

  I kept repeating these four lines, the way you keep humming four bars of an old tune you’ve long forgotten, or perhaps never even heard. These were mysterious moments, the moments of miracles and accidents, the victim of which can only recall them haltingly. It’s like sitting in front of the radio, twisting the dial blankly, looking for something, you’re not sure what, and all of a sudden you hear beautiful music. It’s familiar, frighteningly so, and yet you’ve never heard it before. What is this? you ask. Where is it coming from? Who sent it? It only lasts a few seconds, four bars, that’s it. The music disappears into the cacophony of the ether, and you hunt for it in vain. You keep turning the dial ever more anxiously, but all you get is a confusion of voices, strange incomprehensible signals, sent almost from some other world—a short, a long, a short, a long—and you have no idea what they mean. And then suddenly, there it is again. This time, you hear the tune distinctly, and you know what it means, yes, you know exactly what it means. But you still don’t know where it’s coming from, and you never will.

  I grabbed the diary from my pocket excitedly and started writing with the thin little pencil in the spitting rain. The paper still bears the traces of the rain, like the faded tears of women’s love letters. It was my first poem. I’m going to reproduce it here just as I wrote it.

  APRIL FOOL

  Born on a crazy day,

  God knows it’s true.

  April Fool!

  They made a fool of you.

  They told you you’d get mother’s milk

  Told you it was your due.

  April Fool!

  A rich man’s son drank it all away from you.

  They told you you’d get mercy

  Like every Christian child.

  April Fool!

  Even this, the poor will be denied.

  The rich take from the poor

  The milk, the mercy the Lord God sends.

  April Fool!

  Who knows how all this ends.

  Young masters, do you really think

  it will always be this way?

  April Fools!

  You’ll see, there’ll be hell to pay!

  I later deleted the last line. It seems I scared myself with my forthrightn
ess, which was hardly surprising, since the officially sanctioned poetry I’d read in school hadn’t had anything of this sort in it. I rewrote the sentence, but then crossed out the new version as well and put a dotted line under the original to indicate that it should stay as it was. Underneath the poem is the following, heavily underlined:

  I am not an upper-class poet, and I don’t want to be. There’ll be hell to pay!

  That’s what I wrote underneath my first poem. It’s what I’ll write under the last. Looks like I haven’t changed very much at all.

  •

  There was some good news when I got home: Herr Hausmeister had given us an extension till 1st May. It hadn’t been free: he wasn’t the generous type. My mother was now washing for free for three of the great man’s “friends”, which meant an extra nine pengős a month for Herr Hausmeister, or twelve, along with his own washing. But my mother didn’t care. She greeted me as if we’d won the lottery.

  It was St Hugo’s day, and since Árpád’s younger brother was called Hugo, they were celebrating. Márika had brought us a big piece of poppy-seed loaf and my mother put it aside for me. We sat down at the table, she eating my food and I her poppy-seed loaf. We sat there eating in the light of the good news like partners in crime who had just dodged the gallows.

  In the morning, when I left, my mother gave me a kiss, which she never did. In the evening, however, when I got home, she didn’t so much as reply to my hello.

  “Give me the money!” she snapped at me, just like that.

  “What money?” I asked.

  “You know full well,” she replied menacingly. “The money you made.”

  I looked at her astounded.

  “You joking?”

  My mother stood up and came over to me, her face flushed crimson.

  “So you lying to my face now?”

  “Who’s lying?” I shouted angrily.

  “You!” she screamed. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourself ? I were washing at the head porter’s today, and there’s all sorts of bloodstains on the clothes. Well, the old woman’s past that age, so I say, madam, I say, you ain’t havin’ me wash for other people now, are you? So she starts screaming at me, all how dare I, and how ungrateful I am, and how my son makes plenty at the hotel!”

  “Lyin’ old witch,” I screamed, beside myself. “That dirty, lyin’ tramp.”

  “It’s you that’s lyin’!” she yelled. “She wouldn’t dare make up some-thin’ like that. She’d have to be as cold-blooded as you are.”

  That was all I needed. I said terrible things to my mother. I don’t know what, exactly, and I think I didn’t even know at the time. We screamed at each other like sworn enemies. All that suppressed hatred that couldn’t find its rightful target now came bursting out of us. We were unpredictable, like hungry, cornered beasts of prey.

  “Shut your filthy mouths or I’ll fetch a policeman!” Herr Hausmeister called up.

  That sobered my mother up right away.

  “Get yourself in the room,” she said hoarsely, “before I wring your neck!”

  We didn’t speak to each other for weeks. At night, when I came home, my mother was already sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep. I still brought my food home and put it silently down on the kitchen table before going into the room to sleep. In the mornings I regularly woke to find my mother going through my pockets. Good luck to her. I pretended to be asleep and didn’t open my eyes till she growled at me:

  “It’s four. Get up.”

  Then I washed quickly and left without saying goodbye.

  That was how I lived in the “family home”. As if that weren’t enough, they moved Elemér to the night shift. There was no longer a soul with whom I could exchange a friendly word. I was once more as lonely as when I was young, and once more fled from reality into the world of daydreams. I made up friends to accompany me on the dark, frightening streets of Újpest, and I told them everything I couldn’t tell anyone else. Wild, rambling tales were born in this period, of which I was always the hero, the great, just and famous Béla who punished the oppressors of the poor, and like Sándor Rózsa robbed the rich to give to the poor. I’ve long forgotten these tales of adventure, but I do still remember a very bourgeois little tale, not in the least adventurous, which featured again and again among my daydreams. The “story” went that I was grown up, with a wife and children, and we lived happily in a three-room apartment. The “action” would usually begin with it being the dead of night and me coming home, tired, from work.

  My wife (her name was Erzsike and she was, of course, very beautiful) ran to meet me in the doorway and threw herself, sobbing, around my neck.

  “Oh, my sweet darling,” she’d say, half laughing, half crying, “we thought some harm had come to you! Don’t you know how much we’ve been expecting you? It’s past midnight, where have you been all this time?”

  “I walked,” I would reply, taking a little puff of my handsome porcelain pipe.

  “Walked?” my wife says, shocked. “In this weather? We’re not doing so badly that you should have to walk six hours a day!”

  “Not at all!” I reply proudly. “But I’m saving up for the family.”

  “But what good is money, darling one, if you run yourself flat? You can’t keep this up for very long. Swear to me, darling love, that you’re not going to do it any more.”

  “Life’s hard,” I would reply seriously. “A man has to think of his family.”

  On that final word, “family”, our children appear: five, to be precise. Three boys and two girls. They’re all legitimate children, breastfed for a full year. They all have fine, squeaky shoes, and wear galoshes even in the house so they’ll never catch cold. The boys all have the same suit as the “fine” young gentleman my mother nursed, and I’ve even bought them green hunting caps with tufts of wild boar bristle. As for the girls—they’re a sight to behold! They’re like little princesses. They both have little gold crosses round their necks and they catch a beating if they ever try and pawn them.

  So anyway, these five children now rush over and kiss me, begging me not to walk any more as well. Then the whole family accompanies me into the living room. It’s a beautiful room. There’s a crackling fire with a grandfather chair before it, the kind the Schoolmaster used to have, and I now settle comfortably into it. My eldest son pulls off my right shoe, the younger one my left, while their little brother runs to the bedroom for my slippers, because my feet have got very wet indeed in the rain (for I, unlike my children, do not have galoshes). The two girls, meanwhile, rub my numbed hands, the elder the right, the younger the left, so neither is neglected. Finally, Erzsike shoos them away.

  “Leave your father be,” she says, “he must be starving, poor dear.”

  “So I am,” I say. “What’s for dinner?”

  “Székelygulyás,” she says, naturally.

  “Not bad,” I say, just as naturally.

  “But that’s not all, darling!”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all. Why would I be? Anyone that works as hard as you has to eat well. I made cottage cheese noodles as well.”

  “Well,” I say, “this makes all that work worthwhile. Now come on, everyone, let’s gather round and say grace. For the food we’re about to eat . . .”

  The old Hungarian saying is right: when you’ve got no dog to bark at night, you’ll end up barking in its stead.

  6

  ONE OF THE PAGES of the little old diary bears this mysterious inscription:

  3rd July 1928, 8.42 a.m. P.—First time!

  I remember this “first time” very clearly. When the two new guests got in the lift, I was immediately seized by a strange excitement.

  “What are you staring at?” the manager accompanying the guests whispered angrily. “Third floor, hurry up!”

  I started the lift. British, I thought, or American, for I knew that this particular manager tended to deal with British and American clients. He oozed such charm with our A
nglo-Saxon guests that the boys used to call him Mister Saccharine. He was a pale, ginger, fattish young man, like a sugar-coated spider. He was a constant pest to anyone beneath him, but the way he talked to rich foreigners, you’d have thought he was trying to trap them in a web of sweet syrup. The boys had a term for this as well.

  “He’s working the geezer,” they’d say.

  This was what Mister Saccharine was doing now. The “geezer” in this case was a tall, blond man of around forty, but he was not what had caught my attention. I was looking at his daughter, the prettiest girl ever to get in the lift in the history of the world, or at least, as far as I was concerned. She must have been one or two years younger than me. She had shoulder-length, gold-blond hair, big, playful, dark eyes, a fleshy mouth that curved upwards, and the prettiest nose I’d ever seen. I watched her out of the corner of one eye, carefully, as if operating the lift were taking up all of my attention. That was how I always examined the “interesting” guests; it was a tried and tested method, and no one ever noticed. This time, however, something unprecedented happened.

  The girl smiled at me. At first, I thought she’d spotted something strange in my appearance, or had seen me staring. But when they got out, she smiled at me again, and this time I was sure it wasn’t out of mockery. It was a warm, friendly smile, a conspiratorial smile. I got so excited I forgot to close the door. I could hear the buzzer going, I knew people were waiting for the lift, but I just stood there and stared at the corridor. The corridor was empty, not a soul, only a lonely clock ticking on the wall as if to commemorate the historic moment. It was 8.42.

  In the next hour and a quarter, I must have got the wrong floor half a dozen times. Then they finally came again. The girl had changed meanwhile. She was wearing a light, colourful flower-patterned dress, and was waving a bag full of bathing things in one hand. When she got in the lift, she smiled at me, and to my greatest surprise, said hello in Hungarian.

  “Goomorning,” she said in her dreadful, endearing accent.