But after that, she didn’t look at me again, and that sobered me up a little. Who knows, perhaps foreign girls smile at every boy. But it stayed with me. I was waiting for something—I did not know what.
Nothing happened till five. I was beginning to think she’d gone up with the other lift when all at once I spotted her at the end of the corridor. I got so excited I could barely close the lift door. We were alone.
“Say,” she said, “was father mine here?”
“I haven’t seen the gentleman yet,” I replied. “That was what you meant, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she laughed. “I again forget Hungarian. Every year I come and forget. Though I know when I little like this,” she said, indicating with her hand how “little” she’d been back then.
“Are you Hungarian, then, miss?” I asked in surprise.
“Oh no!” she laughed again. “I American. But father mine he bring every year when he come branch here . . . how you say? Wait.” She drew a tiny dictionary out of her bag. “Inspect,” she read. “Ours branch here. American company, see? Oil. Understand when I speak Hungarian?”
“You speak very nicely, miss,” I complimented her, even as I heard the buzzer sound angrily. The lift had stopped some time ago, but the girl did not get out. “I’m sorry, miss, but they want the lift, I have to go down.”
“I go too,” she replied cheerfully. “I wait for father mine. Is boring by self, you know?”
“Yes,” I replied dimly, because nothing better came to mind.
Downstairs, an old man was waiting angrily.
“Were you asleep?” he yelled at me. “I’ve been waiting five minutes!”
I wanted to excuse myself, the way one does in these situations, but I didn’t dare open my mouth because the girl was making such faces behind the old man’s back that I was afraid I’d start laughing the second I did.
“Monkey!” she said when the old man had got out. “Say, you like this work?”
“I don’t know,” I replied noncommittally. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t dare tell her the truth, either.
“Boring, no?” she asked. “Up-down, up-down, all the day. And lots of old monkeys. What you want to do?”
“Study,” I replied.
“What?”
“Everything.”
She laughed.
“Everything? All everything? You want to be wise man?”
“Yes,” I admitted, and felt myself blush.
Meanwhile, the lift had come to a halt. I opened the door, but the girl just kept on talking.
“I see that on you right away,” she said.
“What did you see, miss?”
“That you are . . .” She couldn’t find the word, she started thinking. “That you have plenty here,” she said finally, making it simple, and pointed to her head.
“Ah,” I muttered awkwardly, and blushed even deeper.
The girl took out a bag of sweets and offered me one. We chewed in silence for a while. I don’t know about her, but I couldn’t taste the sweet at all.
“How much old you are?” she asked.
“Just gone fifteen, miss.”
“I think you were more,” she noted. “Because of size. I thirteen.”
“I thought you were older, too,” I said, returning the compliment. “I thought you were much older.”
“Oh, here in Budapest, everybody thinks. Because I paint mouth. I hear if girl paints mouth here, they throw her out of school. Silly, no?”
I wanted to reply, but the words stuck in my throat. Her father was coming. Well, I thought, there’ll be hell to pay now. The old man must have noticed that his daughter was cosying up to the lift boy.
But to my great surprise, nothing happened. The “old man” smiled at me kindly, while his daughter had absolutely no intention of being embarrassed. She pointed to me cheerfully and explained something to her father, who didn’t speak a word of Hungarian. Her father smiled at me again, and when he got out, he pressed a pengő into my hand.
This was my first income. That night, when I got home, I put that pengő on the kitchen table along with the packet of food and didn’t say a word. My mother didn’t say anything, either—we were still not on speaking terms—but the next morning, I think, she didn’t go through my pockets. Or maybe it was just that I didn’t notice. I slept very deeply that morning, because I’d spent half the night awake. I kept seeing those playful eyes in the darkness and that upturned little nose, and they kept me tossing and turning as if in a fever.
I’d been in the hotel six months now, but nothing like this had ever happened. The ladies either didn’t talk to me or addressed me from such lofty heights, it was like a muezzin calling down to the people from his minaret. I had become so used to not being treated like a human being that I simply couldn’t understand what had got into this American girl. Is she in love with me? I wondered excitedly. But in the morning, I realized that was ridiculous.
She came home from the lido at five the next day as well. Again she waited for “father mine”, who arrived well after six. She came up and down with me in the lift, and when there weren’t any guests, we talked. Once, she said:
“Why you say me always ‘Miss’? I have name. Patsy. Spell like this. You have pencil?” I gave her my diary with the thin little pencil. She wrote her name down; I still have it. “See?” she pointed. “Now write name you.” I did so. “B-é-l-a,” she spelt it out. “No English name like this. But I like. Nice name.”
“There’s no Patsy in Hungarian, either,” I told her. “But that’s a nice name, too.”
She laughed.
“We have two nice name, yes?”
I laughed as well. We laughed for several minutes at that. Later, she asked:
“How much money you make, Béla?”
“Nothing,” I replied awkwardly.
She didn’t want to believe it.
“Then why you in lift?”
“Because later I might make some money.”
“How much?”
“That depends. Some boys make forty to fifty pengős a month.”
That did not satisfy Patsy at all.
“In America,” she said, “lift boy make more in dollars. And dollars worth five times pengő. And can study, too, if they wants.”
“Really?” I said, surprised.
“Of course,” she said. “You know, your country pretty, but not good.”
I felt a little hurt that she’d said that about Hungary.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “The people are decent, believe me. The problem is the way the ruling class treats them.”
“Why people put up with?”
I smiled. The question seemed terribly childish.
“What else could they do?”
“Throw out government!”
This time, I laughed out loud. She’s still a child, I thought.
“You can’t do that,” I replied like an indulgent schoolmaster. “The government is in the hands of the ruling class, the people have no say.”
“There problem!” Patsy replied passionately. “In America, if people not like government, they kick out!”
“Kick them out?” I asked, enthusiastically.
“Of course. They choose new. Why not? We are free country.”
“And are there no poor people?”
“There are.”
“And why don’t you help them, then?”
“Oh,” Patsy smiled, “poor have always been and poor will always be.”
That sobered me up somewhat. That’s not what the Schoolmaster had said. Or Elemér. But I didn’t say anything about that to Patsy.
From then on, she waited for “father mine” every afternoon, and I spent the whole day preparing for the hour that she spent with me in the lift. Later, she’d come home from the lido at four thirty instead of five, and sometimes she’d even come at four. Then she rode the lift with me.
The boys, of course, noticed this unusual friendship. They began to mak
e remarks, mock us and spy on us. They thought me a dumb peasant and couldn’t understand what a “lady” would want with me.
“Still waters run deep!” Antal once commented pointedly, and the nickname stuck.
From then on, I was Mr Still Waters.
•
Once, when she came back from the lido, Patsy said:
“Why not you come swimming with me once?”
I was so unprepared for the question, I didn’t know what to say. I thought she was joking.
“Don’t you want?”
“Of course I want to.”
“Then come.”
We knew each other quite well by then, and I was confident enough to joke with her. I said:
“All right. When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right.”
Patsy poked me in the ribs.
“Why you laugh? I talk to manager, and he let you go. You don’t believe?”
“Of course I do.”
“Let’s make bet.”
“All right,” I said, because I still thought she was joking.
But the next morning, the Major wanted to see me.
“Do you know the city?” he asked.
“Yes, sir!” I lied instinctively.
“Then you will now take the American girl and show her around.”
“Yes, Major.”
I could feel myself blushing. Fortunately, the Major didn’t look at me, because he was in the process of polishing his monocle.
“I don’t want any complaints about you,” he snapped. “Be respectful, understand? No overfamiliarity!”
“Yes, Major.”
“If you have any expenses, write them down. Do you have cash?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
The Major scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to me.
“Take this to the cashier. They’ll give you ten pengős. Tomorrow, you account for every fillér.” He inserted his monocle and looked at me severely. “E-ve-ry fill-ér!” he repeated menacingly. “Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir, Major.”
“Dismissed.”
The cashier gave me a ten-pengő note. I’d heard that such things existed, but had never seen one first-hand. It was a tantalizing sight. I didn’t know which pocket to put it in; I was petrified of losing it.
Patsy was already waiting for me in front of the lift.
“You see!” she said, and her big, playful eyes seemed even more playful now.
Out on the street, I asked her:
“What do you want to see, Patsy?”
“Yours silly face,” she replied cheerfully.
But I was serious.
“The Major said you wanted to see the town.”
“Really?” she said, surprised. “Who could have tell him that?”
We both laughed. We were wheezing with laughter and couldn’t stop.
“But where we going, actually?” she said, stopping suddenly.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Wherever you want.”
“You like beach Margit Island?”
“I’ve never been to Margit Island.”
“My God!” she said, shocked. “You live Budapest and you never go Margit Island? And I come from other end of world to see it. Most beautiful place on earth, trust me.”
And indeed, there was no reason to doubt that when I saw it—though to be truthful, I didn’t see all that much of it. The old traditional mansions and the luxurious new hotels, the hundred-year-old trees and the modern sports facilities, the ruins of the legendary monastery and the flashy pomp of the nightclub, the wild shrubs growing among the ruins and the artistic finesse of the flowerbeds, the endless lawn of the polo field and the rose garden fit for a fairy tale: the whole of this little paradise beside the Danube flowed into one for me like the blurred background of a clear portrait. I saw only her; the world was but a blurred and unreal background.
It must have been the end of August. The bloated summer, like a sated roué, snoozed in the gold-flecked shade of the portly trees. There was a warm breeze off the Danube carrying the scent of flowers and scraps of distant, dreamlike music. It was all a little surreal, as if the world had cocked its hat jauntily to one side.
We didn’t know what to do with our good mood. We’d break into a run for no reason at all, then drag our heels like a couple of lame caterpillars. Sometimes, we’d shout over one another, so desperately urgent was what we had to say; at others, we stayed silent for fifteen minutes at a time.
Patsy took my arm, but I didn’t even dare take her hand. At night, when I couldn’t sleep because of her, I pictured all sorts of things, but in the morning I was so ashamed of these thoughts, it was as if I’d been planning to murder someone. You could imagine doing that with Borcsa and other girls like her, but with Patsy . . . never! My blood was hotter than many eighteen-year-old boys’, but when it came to things like this, I was more innocent than most thirteen-year-old girls. I still considered physical and emotional love two completely different things. There were Borcsas and there were Patsys, I thought, and that was the way of the world. Patsy was my heart’s love, and the heart’s love was sacred and untouchable.
“What you thinking?” asked Patsy.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Margit Island really is the most beautiful place on earth.”
It was only when we got to the lido that I realized I didn’t have bathing trunks.
“You get over there,” she said, pointing to one of the buildings. “Change and we meet that bench. There, see?”
“Yes.”
But when I’d got some trunks and started heading for the changing rooms, Patsy was still standing where I’d left her. She was talking to a boy about my age. He was dressed all in white with white shoes and a white straw hat, a red carnation in his buttonhole. All at once, I was sorry I’d come. I can’t compete with this lot, I thought, deflated, and tried to sneak off. But Patsy saw me and introduced me to the boy.
“Count B—” she said. “Miki.”
I knew the name well: we’d learnt it in history at school. Not even our Count had come from such an old and hallowed family, though where I came from people had thought he was the Lord God Almighty. I got terribly flustered.
“This is my friend,” Patsy said, introducing me.
The Count looked at me and smiled condescendingly. He must have thought I’d brought some message from the hotel, and Patsy saying “my friend” was just some sort of American exaggeration. But when he realized that Patsy was serious, some strange, forced expression came over his features.
“How do you do,” he said. He said it in such a way that I would have given ten years of my life to be able to smack him.
He did not extend his hand. He exchanged a few words with Patsy and then left.
“You can’t do that sort of thing in Hungary!” I said.
“What sort?”
“Introducing me to a Count and saying I’m your friend.”
“You are not my friend?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“But?”
I drew myself up straight.
“I’m not a gentleman,” I said, almost antagonistically, and though I still didn’t know what it meant, I added: “I’m a prole.”
“And?” Patsy laughed. “You are too my friend. Forget Count. Now go change, silly!”
It was the first time in my life I’d worn bathing trunks. When I stepped out of the changing rooms, I felt completely naked. I thought everyone was staring at me.
Patsy was sunbathing in the sand. When I saw her in her bathing suit, I got so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do with myself. I could feel her looking at me, too, though I couldn’t see her eyes because they were covered by her dark sunglasses. There was an awkward silence. We couldn’t break it for several minutes.
“Warm,” she said at last.
“Yes,” I said. “Very.”
Then we fell silent again. The sun blazed down fearfully, the bathers th
ronged around us noisily. I closed my eyes and suddenly I was surrounded by a strange silence, as if I were lying on the bottom of the sea with warm waves breaking over my head. It’d be good to kiss her, I thought. At least her hand.
Patsy sat up. Not far from us, half a dozen or so boys were lying on their stomachs in the sand.
“Say,” she began quietly. “Which one of them is Count?”
I didn’t see what she was getting at. I looked at her in surprise.
“I don’t know.”
“You know why not?” she asked. “I tell. Because naked Count is just like other people. Or not even. Look at you. You are bigger than him. Stronger. You have more brain than three such counts. You see, silly?”
Oh yes, this I understood, and how! I drank in her every word like the earth drinks in water in a drought. But then . . . why doesn’t she talk the same way about the poor? If she thought about counts what she thought about the poor, then she should have said: “Counts have always been and counts will always be.” Why was it that she understood that so well? Was it only that they, too, weren’t counts? Yes, it was “only” that, I told myself, and all at once I understood something whose significance I would only fully realize later. But I didn’t say a word about that to Patsy.
She drew closer to me.
“It’s not good for you here,” she said softly. “Learn English and come America. There you have shot.”
“What?”
“A shot. Oh! How you say in Hungarian?”
She couldn’t think of the word. She dug around in her bathing satchel, but the little dictionary was not in it. She called over to the Count.
“Miki!”
“Yes?”
The boy came over.
“Say, how you say Hungarian a shot?”
“Opportunity,” he replied.
“Now you see?” Patsy said to me. “In America, you have opportunity. Not here.”
“Why not?” asked the Count, who clearly thought Patsy had wanted to draw him into the conversation.
“Because this not free country.”
“Why isn’t it a free country?”
“Because it isn’t. No democracy. Or are you democrat, Miki?”
“I am a Hungarian,” came the Count’s spirited reply. “And proud of it.”
“Why?” Patsy asked provocatively.
“Aren’t you proud to be American?”
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