Temptation

  “I was only havin’ a piss!” Herr Hausmeister protested indignantly, having timed his entrance perfectly.

  “No shame in being sick!” my father reassured him. “What’s it matter if it comes out up top or down below? Makes no difference. Now, are we friends or are we not?”

  “We are,” Herr Hausmeister reassured him. “So get on with the story.”

  “Hear! hear!” several others chorused. “Go on, Mishka.”

  “All right,” said my father and sat down on the table. “Where was I?”

  “The Italians had just torpedoed the boat!” Herr Hausmeister prompted.

  “No, we’ve heard that!” interrupted a man with scars on his face. “What happened when you were on your own in the lifeboat?”

  “That’s just it!” my father replied. “Nothing happened at all. Spent two damn weeks tossing about in that lifeboat, and nothing happened. Not a single boat on the horizon, not a soul anywhere. No food, no water, nothing. Just the ocean, and me, and the sharks. Lived off raw fish, like a seal, whatever I could catch. Well, Mishka, I says to myself, if you get out of this alive, you’ll know what it’s like to be livin’ on borrowed time.”

  “How’d they fish you out, then?” asked Herr Hausmeister.

  “I can hardly recall,” my father said. “I was completely round the bend by that point. Cruiser picked me up and I slept for thirty-six hours straight. And that was when the real fun started!”

  “How d’you mean?” asked Scar-face.

  “I mean, my friend, that was when the revolution broke out, because all this was in October 1918. It was the sailors that started it, they were the first to revolt. One day, they just stopped obeying orders, took the ship into port and went off up to Budapest to make a revolution. What a fine time that was, oh yes, what a time! The people were drunk on that brand-new peace, they were hugging each other in the streets, and everyone was sayin’ new times were coming, better times. And what did we get? Damn all. They carved up Hungary like a slaughterhouse carcass. The Italians took the sea, and where there ain’t a sea, there ain’t a navy, neither. There were no more Hungarian ships, and they didn’t take me on the foreign ones. Told me they had plenty of people of their own out of work. So I came on up to Budapest, but things here were even stranger. Here was our Admiral, that Horthy, acting like he was Lord God Almighty. But he was a funny sort of Almighty. During the war, he’d been telling us to go out and kill the Ities and die for the King, and now here he was kickin’ out the King and thick as thieves with the Ities. That fat-head Mussolini was his new best friend and no one mentioned our sea any more. Well, I says to myself, that was worth it! The poor were even poorer, the rich were even richer than before. They just sat on all their money and didn’t put it to work at all—why would they? The stock markets paid far better! Even skilled workers couldn’t get jobs, so what chance did I have, not knowing anything about anything other than sailing? It was just like being back in that lifeboat: no food, no water, nothin’—nothin’ but three medals, and they don’t give you nothin’ for them down the pawnshop!”

  “So what d’you do?” Scar-face asked.

  My father shrugged.

  “What could I do? I did the same thing I did on that lifeboat: tried to stay afloat. Couldn’t find work, so I tried to get by without it. I had a very good pal, Menyhért was his name, he’d been in the navy, too. Then he became a big revolutionary. And this Menyhért, he says to me, he says, Mishka, he says, in a world like ours, there’s only two things a man can be: a revolutionary or a crook. Well, I wasn’t going to turn to revolution. Ain’t in my nature. And I’d promised myself on that lifeboat that if I got out of this alive, I’d never be miserable again. And I never was. If my food weren’t good, I thought of the raw fish, and when I had nowhere to sleep, I thought of that little boat. That’s how I got so cheerful. I ate when I could, I kissed girls when there were girls to kiss, and I never asked who they belonged to. I stayed alive any way I could, and it wasn’t anybody’s business but mine. Gentlemen, the main thing is to remain cheerful. We’re all alone, all of us are out at sea, and you do what you have to do to survive. That’s the truth, and everything else is just rubbish. You have to stay afloat, the rest don’t matter. Everybody’s right, because everybody wants to stay alive, so if you think about it, no one’s right at all. But that don’t matter, either. It’s the same thing as war. Some people win, others lose.”

  “And some people get taken prisoner!” Scar-face added knowingly, and the others fell about laughing.

  “This kind of talk ain’t fit for you,” my mother said, loud enough for the others to hear, and shooed me out into the kitchen.

  It must have been about two. I was dead tired. As soon as I sat down, I was overcome with sleep, but the yelling kept waking me up again and again. My mother kept pacing to and fro in the kitchen, muttering angrily.

  “Damn their bellies!” she snapped at length. “They’ve gone and had Manci’s bacon!”

  At first, I couldn’t believe it. Manci’s bacon was sacred and inviolable, and we never touched it, even when we were starving. And now this lot had gone and eaten it all? They had. My mother pointed to the nail on which the bacon had been hanging. All that was left on it was a bare piece of string.

  “Bunch of crooks,” she muttered, and tore open the door violently. “It’s two o’clock!” she shouted. “The boy has to get to bed!”

  They simply took no notice of her.

  “You deaf ?” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Mishka! Get over here.”

  My father went over to her, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying with all the noise. Suddenly, he jumped up on the table.

  “Closin’ time!” he called jauntily. “We’re shutting up shop. Time to go, gentlemen!”

  But the “gentlemen” had no intention of leaving. They broke into a rousing chorus of:

  No, no, no! No, we just won’t go!

  We’re staying, and there’s no doubt,

  Till the owner, yes! the owner,

  gets a stick and throws us out.

  “Well, I may not have a stick,” my father remarked and jumped, laughing, off the table. “But I’ll chase you out with my bare hands, if it comes to it.”

  With that, he grabbed two of them by the scruff of the neck and hurled them out the door. Then he did the same with all the others till the flat was empty.

  “A fine evening,” he said, happily. “Come on, Anna, let’s drink the boy’s health.”

  But my mother didn’t drink.

  “Where’d you get the wine?” she asked suspiciously.

  “It ain’t from the pharmacy, if that’s what you’re thinking. Won’t kill you.”

  My father extended a glass, but my mother pushed it away.

  “Yesterday you said you had no money.”

  “Who needs money when you’ve got credit?”

  “People round here don’t give credit.”

  “Maybe not to you!” laughed my father.

  “D’you get it downstairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  My mother went beetroot red.

  “Ain’t you ashamed of yourself ?” she said hoarsely. “Shacking up on your first day with that whore of a barmaid who’ll take anythin’ in trousers!”

  My father just smiled.

  “Who’s shacking up with who?” he asked calmly.

  “You with that whore!” my mother replied. “Don’t play the fool with me. You ain’t that smart. That tramp don’t give me credit!”

  My father winked mischievously.

  “You ain’t Dappermishka.”

  “Dappermishka be damned!” my mother burst out bitterly. “We’re starvin’ and you go eat all of Manci’s bacon. Ain’t you ashamed? Dogs take more care of their children than you do! Not so much as a word for sixteen years and now you make yourself at home? You ain’t comin’ here to live off me, you hear? If you can get yourself wine, you can find yourself a room. I never want to see you again. Get your thing
s and clear off!”

  But even that failed to ruffle my father’s calm. He finished his wine, pocketed his cigarettes, had a stretch and stood comfortably up.

  “Well, so long, my boy,” he said, and clapped me cheerfully on the shoulder. “We’ll talk tomorrow. No use trying now, your mother’s in a mood. G’night, then.”

  “G’night.”

  I was left alone in the room. Out in the kitchen, they continued to argue. Every insult in the Hungarian language, my mother treated my father to them all. She was blaming him for all the ills, wrongs, and sufferings of the last seventeen years, and she cursed the day she ever met him.

  I could barely stand up any more. I lay down and fell straight asleep. Strangely enough, my mother’s shouting didn’t bother me at all, but the second she fell silent, I woke up. I could hear the same whispering and panting and creaking of the bed as last night, but this time, I was even more surprised. I didn’t understand them at all. I’d gone to sleep to the sound of my mother cursing my father, and had woken to find her whispering sweet nothings in his ear. I was disgusted by her, I was disgusted by him, I was disgusted by life.

  Nonetheless, the next morning I did not climb out of the window. I went out into the kitchen as always, and washed at the tap. My father was shaving, shirtless, in front of the little scrap of mirror. There was a woman tattooed on his wide, hairy chest, a naked woman, hair billowing in the wind, legs apart. The area around the tattoo was shaved, but not all over: the naked woman had real hair, and not just on her head. It was an amusing sight, but I was not at all amused. Well, I said to myself, you chose yourself a hell of a father!

  But he didn’t have any idea about all that.

  “A fine good mornin’!” he boomed, and went on shaving, whistling all the while.

  But my mother blushed beetroot. She started poking at the fire furiously, though there was absolutely no need, and didn’t so much as turn around while I was in the kitchen.

  That night, Manci came back with the last tram and my father now slept “officially” beside my mother. I felt it, I knew it as soon as I entered the darkened kitchen, but to dispel all doubt, my father wished me a loud good night.

  “You shouldn’t have,” I heard my mother whisper as I closed the door behind me.

  “Why not? I’m his father, after all, or somethin’!”

  “Still. Must be strange for him.”

  “So? He’ll get used to it.”

  He was right. I got used to this, too, with time. There was someone sharing my mother’s bed at night, and in the morning he would shave, bare-chested, in the kitchen. They told me this stranger was my father.

  Yes, I got used to that too, because there is nothing in life that you don’t—with time—get accustomed to, and you survive everything that doesn’t actually kill you. As for death, that doesn’t come so easy.

  9

  I WAS A TOUGH LITTLE MAN, but a man nonetheless, and man—it seems—was not made to work morning till night on an empty stomach at fifteen, walking six hours a day on top of it. I got so weak that on the way home I had to keep stopping to sit down on the kerb because my legs, stubborn as they were, simply refused to carry me. One wintry Advent night I fell asleep as I sat and if a streetwalker hadn’t woken me, I might have frozen to death right there on the pavement.

  The spectre of accidental sleep was constantly haunting me at the hotel, too. It sometimes happened that I nodded off standing right in the middle of the lobby. I knew that if they caught me, it would cost me my job and I fought sleep bitterly, but in vain. Sleep haunted me permanently, the way apoplexy haunts the corpulent.

  I couldn’t stand the cold the way I had before, either. I’d gone without a coat in winters before, and in shorts instead of trousers and had never been the worse for it. This year, the frost ate away at my whole lower body.

  “What’s with you, you got lice?” the head porter snapped at me once. “You’d best be careful—if they see you scratching, you’ll be out of here so fast your feet won’t touch the ground.”

  In any case, I knew that scratching didn’t help, but the knowledge that I wasn’t allowed to scratch now and then almost drove me mad. And all the while, I had to be careful not to let my face show the torture, because the Major wouldn’t stand for long faces: bellboys had always to smile, like ballet dancers. Sometimes, when there weren’t any passengers, I stopped the lift in between two floors and whined like a wounded animal. But only rarely did I let myself go like that and, even then, never for long. A few minutes later, I was back, standing to attention for the guests, and smiling my regulation smile.

  It was willpower, like an iron beam, that held me together. Learning English was harder than before, but I kept at it, angrily, out of spite. I visited the Teach Yourself English book faithfully every night. It was still there in the window, and that reassured me no end. Two pengős twenty wasn’t the end of the world, I told myself, and one day it would be mine. Then I would learn English in six months, and leave for America. The papers at the time made a lot of a thirteen-year-old stowaway who’d hidden himself so well aboard an ocean liner they’d only found him in New York when the passengers were disembarking. Ever since I’d read that, I’d stopped worrying about my fare. If I can just get as far as the harbour, I told myself . . . and get there I would, even if I had to go on foot.

  On summer evenings, I would stand around beside the Danube, watching the boat to Vienna preparing to set off. In the morning, it’ll be in Austria, I thought to myself, and Austria is that much closer to America. One day, I too would smuggle myself on board a boat like that, and I was bound to figure out some way of continuing on from Vienna. When the boat left, and I saw the blue light on its stern, I was seized once more by that old, trembling wonder I had felt as a child watching the red light on the back of a retreating train. “Go, go, go!” the old desire piped up within me. Go look for the Easter egg of happiness, and don’t stop till you’ve found it.

  I thought about the New World the way believers think about the next world. I was absolutely convinced that all I had to do was make it out to America and everything would be all right. That there were poor people there as well and according to Patsy “poor will always be”, I didn’t think about. America grew ever finer in my mind, eventually becoming a sort of earthly paradise. All I had to do was get there, I told myself, and get there I would—if it was the last thing I did.

  But one day, I caught a chill and started coughing terribly. The chill passed, but the coughing did not. It was a dry, nasty cough, the sort of cough poor Berci had had. Each time I was gripped by a heavy fit, I thought of that morning in early autumn when we buried Berci.

  “It was poverty that killed him,” the Schoolmaster said beside the open grave, “and I say we show the killers no mercy. The coughing of a poor child is a cry for help, and anyone who doesn’t want to hear it is an accomplice to the killers.”

  The truth is that back then, we children hadn’t really heard it much, either. Berci’s coughing was as much a part of our dark winter mornings as the lamplight or the ringing of the bell for school. I myself only really heard it when he stopped, poor thing. There was an unbearable silence then in class, and now I always thought of that silence whenever I was woken by my own coughing in the night. My God, I said to myself, what’s going to become of me? Yes, my coughing, too, was a cry for help, and there was no one to hear it in my case, either. I was as alone as the very first man, and I knew that my rib would become not a helpmeet, but just so much rubbish in the operating room where they cut it out, like they did Berci’s.

  I knew that, yes I knew it, but I refused to accept it. Bitterly, stubbornly, I tried to resist. I had the most extraordinary ideas. For example, I stole a roll of toilet paper from the hotel and wrapped it, instead of trousers, around my chilblained thighs. I packed my shirt, front and back, with newspaper and pressed my palms to my mouth to “warm” the air. When I got very cold, I started to run, breathing carefully through my nose. I took less
food home for my mother; but the little I took for myself didn’t help my stomach very much, while it hurt my conscience all the more. I knew that my father was out of work and I knew also what that meant. My mother was in a bad way, even worse than me, and I felt sorry every time I looked at her. As for her, she didn’t notice any difference in me, or if she did, she never said anything. I would never have complained to her anyway; the poor thing had enough trouble as it was. I knew that there was no one I could count on.

  And Patsy didn’t write. I couldn’t blame her: how could I? I was the one who hadn’t replied. But how was I supposed to reply if I didn’t know her address? And even if I did know her address, I added bitterly, where was I supposed to get the money for a stamp?

  It all seemed so hopeless. The days passed and nothing happened, except that my strength got a little less and my coughing got a little worse. I was powerless, observing this ominous process. I was now covered in sweat in even the severest cold, and there was a heavy fug in my head—I was constantly afraid that I would faint.

  One evening, I became unwell on Vilmos Császár út. I had strength enough only to sit down on the steps of the Basilica, and then I passed out. I came to a few minutes later, but I could feel I didn’t have the strength to move on. I dragged myself inside. In the incense-filled semi-darkness I saw only a few figures kneeling; the draught fluttered the candles, and it seemed to me that the whole church was swaying. I slumped down on the first pew and fell asleep straight away.

  I woke to words humming round my head: strange, magic words, as if otherworldly bees were bringing their bittersweet honey home, into me. I could barely keep my eyes open, but my mind worked with unnatural clarity. I took the diary out of my pocket, pulled the little pencil out of the side and quickly began to write. It was a poem. I reproduce it here:

  CONVERSATION WITH A CARPENTER

  I don’t know if you really lived,

  Or how you made it through,