I changed externally, too. I grew so fast my father said you could hear it. I was now one metre eighty, and with the spring my face—just like the bushes in the park—had also burst into new life. It was full of spots and overgrown with hairs like weeds.
“Why don’t you shave?” the Major snapped at me one morning at inspection. “You look like a widowed monkey.”
From then on, I shaved every day with my father’s razor. By my sixteenth birthday, I was the proud proprietor of a moustache—a scrappy, thin little moustache, it’s true, but black enough to disguise its flaws as far as others were concerned; generally, people took me for two years older than I actually was.
Women looked at me differently than six months before. The young chambermaids rarely passed me without comment—they teased, giggled and flirted with me; one or two even rubbed up against me, and they all looked at me as if they had a secret they were burning to tell. It’s possible that my dangerous rep also attracted them, for I had a terrible reputation, though to this day I don’t quite know why. Lajos once asked me, to the great amusement of the boys:
“Tell us, Mr Still Waters, are you taking the maids to the Mauthner alphabetically, or do you make them take turns and draw their names out of a hat?”
The truth is, nothing had happened with any of them. I would occasionally, it’s true, feel them up a little if the opportunity presented itself, but I never went any further, not for a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the girls. They all thought I was seeing one of the others, whichever one they’d seen me with last, because of course it didn’t occur to any of them that inside this big, devil-may-care young man was a scared and confused little boy who—despite his moustache, his strength and his venereal malaria—was still secretly dreaming of a fourteen-year-old American girl, and for whom the rest wasn’t to be taken seriously at all, because it was only a symptom of his illness, all just fever-talk.
•
Yes, it seemed this spring was driving everyone wild. My parents were acting strange, too. Something changed at home. There was something in the air, something strange and unnerving. I could feel it the way a rheumatic feels a change in the weather, but I couldn’t have told you what, exactly, it was. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that bothered, either. You’re so concerned with yourself, in the spring of your seventeenth year, that you don’t have too much time to think about others. They’re acting strange, I said to myself, and left it at that. But sometimes I thought something had happened to them.
My mother had changed externally. Her face was fuller and had some colour, and I only rarely heard her cough. Her body was more shapely now, her gait easier; she looked inexplicably younger. Her face lost that dreary bitterness, the apathetic, almost sleepy hopelessness that had made me so sad even as a child. Her eyes grew gentler, her lines grew softer, and she emanated a strange good cheer. She smiled a lot and, it seemed to me, with a bit of mystery—as if she knew something she wasn’t telling anyone.
At first, I thought it was all down to better quality of life, but then I saw that I was wrong. It was her hair that gave it away. One day, I was surprised to see that she had a hairstyle. Until now, she’d always worn a kerchief which she only rarely took off, and only at home, like most poor women. Her greasy black hair stuck flatly to her scalp, ending in a shapeless straggle down the back of her neck. That straggle was now gone. Márika had cut it off, after lengthy and detailed consultation, and from then on, my mother had a hairstyle, like a lady. Her hair was no longer sticky and greasy; her blue-black locks curled gently around her head, and suddenly I became aware that she had nice hair.
Next, I discovered her legs. She started taking up her skirts, and all at once it turned out that she had nice legs, too. Whenever my father was out, she was constantly operating on her clothes. She would amputate the long, worn-out sleeves, cut valleys into shirts once buttoned to the collar, attaching new buttons and neat little home-made collars, and even add the occasional little playful flourish here and there. Her post-operative shirts showed off her fresh, surprisingly shapely breasts, which I had never before noticed—just like her legs or hair. Until now, I had considered her some genderless creature, but I was now forced to notice that she was a woman. That fact—I didn’t know why—filled me with a strange disquiet. There were so many women out there; you only had one mother. I felt uncomfortable each time I looked at her. A mother shouldn’t be a woman.
Before, when she got home from work, she’d grab a bite to eat and then go straight to bed. Now, it was as if this was the real start of her day. She locked herself in the kitchen and spent an unbelievably long time washing and dressing. She put on a clean dress, freshly washed and ironed, pulling her skirt up to the waist before she sat down so as not to crease it. It used to make me laugh, almost. I knew that if my father had happened to come home just then, my mother would have sat on her freshly ironed skirt without a second thought, trying generally to behave as if she, too, were just as untidy and devil-may-care as him.
I looked at these changes askance. My mother must have realized what was going on inside me, because she, too, felt uncomfortable when we were alone. We didn’t talk much whenever that happened. I would study my English and she would sit, and sew, and wait. If my father wasn’t home by ten, she used to start pestering me to go to bed.
“Look at your eyes, they’re like pins,” she said, and was visibly relieved if I replied:
“Yes, it’s getting late.”
Then she would go out into the kitchen and carry on sewing. I could see through the cracks in the door that she kept burning the lamp, which she had never used to do before. That, too, made me angry. If he wanted to see her, he should have come home earlier, and if he didn’t want to see her, then why the hell was she waiting for him and burning all that precious petroleum? She should have been saving up for my English book instead.
My father would sometimes only come home at dawn. I would always wake with a start on these occasions, because he used to come in whistling and would talk loudly. My mother never asked him where he’d been. She made as if she’d been expecting him just at the hour he’d happened to arrive. They chatted happily, joked and laughed as if they were strangers altogether to trouble. In the end, they went to bed and then that blasted creaking would once more begin, growing wilder every day.
My father was forever cheerful. He left whistling in the morning and came home whistling at night. As to what he got up to in between, I think my mother had just as little notion as I did. He didn’t work, but it appears he lived pretty well, for he was always in fine fettle, simply radiating health. He smoked Extra cigarettes, some forty or fifty a day. How he could afford all this was a mystery, known only to himself and his Maker.
I had a strange relationship with him. I liked his strength, his cheer, his determination, the way he took everything that happened to him in his stride—or rather the way he took no notice of it at all. He bit into life like an apple, the sweet juice almost spilling over out of his mouth; if there happened to be a worm in it, then—to hell with it!—he spat it out and kept on chewing. I liked his homespun peasant wisdom that had broadened and deepened during his many wanderings without losing its original shape and flavour. I liked that he was a man, and treated me like one too, and though I didn’t dare admit it, my mood always soured when he didn’t come home. I liked to spend the evenings with him, but the next morning I would usually find myself angrily judging his every word. The suspect charm of his being both attracted and repelled me so strongly that in the end I didn’t know how I felt about him. He was irresistible. He was a charmer.
“Treats your mother like the apple of his eye,” Márika noted once, and I had to admit that it was true.
People in Újpest treated their women the way my father treated my mother every day only in the headiest heyday of their wooing. He was always kind to her and never threw his weight around; and I was pleased about that, very pleased—on the one hand. On the other hand, I was seized by an anxious confus
ion when I saw him all over my mother. I would have liked him to behave the way other fathers did. A father shouldn’t be all over your mother.
Everything had changed since he’d come to live with us, even the apartment. Before, it was neat and sad, like my mother, and nothing ever happened there. Its corners were webbed in by the grey spider of trouble and our days, like dead flies, hung in those webs. Now, it was as if there was a constant flow of air. There was something in the air, something strange and unnerving. As a young poet, the way I put it at the time was: My father brought the scent of life with him. I liked this phrase, but not the way my father lived, because back then I had only very vague ideas about the “scent of life”. I didn’t know—or I didn’t want to know—that the earth gives off not only the warmth of the sun and the freshness of the winds, but also the smell of dung and putrefaction, and that the strange mystery I felt around my father was, in part, the mystery of fertility, and in part the mystery of life itself.
I wanted to find the solution to this mystery at all costs, and couldn’t understand my mother, who acquiesced to everything without asking any questions. This isn’t going to end well, I thought, and when there really was trouble, I told myself she deserved it, because at sixteen you don’t yet know that it’s better for a woman to have to pay for her happiness than not to have happiness in her life at all.
The first scandal erupted one evening in early spring. When I got home, the woman from the tavern downstairs was in the flat with my mother and I guessed it wasn’t to bring her beer. She was a made-up suburban “lady”, blonde, dumpy and attractive in a vulgar way. She must have been about thirty or thirty-five and talked with her mouth sucked in to sound refined. Her eyelids drooped down as she talked. They were sitting at the table, stiff and anxious, and when I arrived, they smiled stiffly.
“Go into the kitchen, son,” my mother said, and I immediately suspected that it was something to do with my father and that there would be trouble.
I stopped in front of the door and, with the delicate artistry they had so perfected in me at the hotel, put my ear to the door to listen. At first, they talked so softly that I could hardly hear a thing, but then the proprietress of the bar got “carried away” as they say, and in a few minutes I knew that it really was about my father.
“And then that good-for-nothing says to me, Karolin, he says, you know I have a family, and we can’t keep this up for ever. Well, ’course we can’t, I knew that, but why didn’t he tell me that before he goes turning my head? Because, like I say, he didn’t say a word, I swear. The next morning, he told me, it’s true, but by then . . .” The sentence remained unfinished, and there was the sound of someone crying softly in the room. “I swear,” the woman sniffed, “and I confessed everything to the priest, and I prayed and I lit candles, but in vain. I couldn’t leave him. I was bad, I’d sinned, I admit it, but what can I do? I’m just a helpless woman. He drives me wild. There’s evil in that man, oh yes. He whips ’em on and drives ’em wild with his eyes. He’s the Devil incarnate, he is. But it’s you I feel sorry for, my dear. And when he left me, I went to church and swore to the Virgin Mary that I wouldn’t rest till I’d atoned for my sins. I worked night and day, but I’ve done it, yes this time I’ve done it. Cost me eighty-five pengős, but strike me down if it isn’t true.”
“You gave the church eighty-five pengős?”
“Not the church. The detective.”
“What detective?”
“The one that investigated him.”
“Who?”
“Him! Don’t you get it? The lying dirty pig told me ever so sincerely he was leaving me because he was a family man. Well, now the truth is out about this family man. And you know what that truth is, my dear?”
My dear said nothing, but the woman told her the truth anyway.
“He’s shacked up with another woman,” she hissed. “A nobody. Some little tramp. That the earth don’t swallow him! She’s all of eighteen, one of those little tarts with the button noses. A chambermaid with some baroness. I even know her name. Want me to tell you?”
“No,” my mother replied firmly.
There was silence.
“Well . . . I understand,” the woman said, more quietly. “The important thing is not who they’re cheating on you with. The important thing is they’re cheating on you. I just wanted to right my own wrongs. You know what it says in the Lord’s Prayer: and deliver us from evil. Well, I’m going to deliver you from evil. I won’t let him lie through his back teeth to you. I’m going to stay here and tell him the truth to his face. When’s he usually come home?”
“Oh, it depends.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the woman said encouragingly. “You can count on me, dear. I’ll stay till dawn if I have to.”
“Don’t,” my mother said curtly.
“Why not?”
My mother was silent for a few moments and then said a little hoarsely:
“Because, with respect, it ain’t any of your business.”
“Is that so?” she burst out as if someone had stepped on her corns, and I heard her stand up.
I quickly sneaked away from the door so they wouldn’t notice I’d been listening. I sat down at the kitchen table and waited, but inside, the conversation started up again. I couldn’t hear what they were saying from where I was, but I didn’t dare go back to the door. I only caught the occasional, disjointed word. You could hear the Gypsy music drifting up from the tavern, it being Saturday night, and there always being Gypsy music down there on a Saturday night.
I don’t know how long I waited like that. At the time, it seemed a very long while. Suddenly, there was shouting from within.
“How dare you!” the woman shouted. “I’m a respectable lady, who—”
“Who sleeps with other people’s menfolk!” My mother finished the sentence for her. “You can talk to me about the priest and the Virgin all you like. What you’re after you won’t find in the Bible. Truth is, Mishka’d had enough of you and that’s what all this is about—the rest is just hot air.”
“Ha ha ha!” the woman cried, without actually laughing. “Ha ha ha. You make me laugh. You really think he’s in love with you? Or he’s with you for that pretty little face of yours? Ha ha! He’s a pimp, my dear, nothing but a common pimp. He’s with you because you keep him.”
“Maybe that’s what he’s with you for,” my mother retorted, “but he ain’t never got money from me. I ain’t never given him nothin’ but a bed, which is what you wish you could give him!”
“Is that so?” the woman hissed again. “Now I see. You’re in it together.”
“What?! We’re what?”
“You’re in it together. You put up with him being with other women, and he gives you the cash. You probably robbed me too, and—”
She didn’t make it further than that “and”. A tremendous slap put an end to that sentence. Then there was screaming and bestial yelling, and by the time I tore open the door, they were at each other’s throats.
I got between them. The barkeeper made a spirited attempt at murdering me, too, in her anger, but I caught both her hands with a quick movement and slung her out of the apartment.
Outside, she was greeted with raucous laughter. Every child in the building old enough to stand on their own two feet was gathered in front of our place, enjoying the show. The furious barkeeper stuck her tongue out at them and pulled her skirts up from behind.
“Higher!” the children shouted. “Higher!”
The adults didn’t want to miss the fun, either; the walkway was full of them. Whoever had gone to bed had leapt back out and stood, half naked, staring out of their windows and doors. Everyone was desperate to know what had happened, they were all talking at once, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d have thought you’d landed in the middle of a madhouse.
Áron, the Sabbatarian, was running to and fro, trying to bring the scandal-hungry people to their senses. But all his talk of loving thy neighbour and huma
n dignity was in vain—the curious crowd paid him no attention at all.
Herr Hausmeister was screaming in the courtyard.
“Quiet down or I’ll fetch the police!”
The barkeeper was screaming on the stairs.
“Other people’s money, that’s what they’re living off, other women’s money! Thieves! Murderers!”
But not even that was as unbearable as the silence when everything at last fell quiet and you could once more hear the Gypsy music from downstairs.
We hung around the flat in silence. What was there to say? My mother merely mumbled:
“That’ll give ’em something to gossip about.”
I replied:
“Don’t pay ’em any mind.”
And that was that.
My mother went out into the kitchen, washed, changed, came back, sat down and waited. This time, she didn’t pull her skirt up before she sat down and she wasn’t sewing, either. She just waited.
The door opened at last and in walked my father.
“Evenin’,” he said, tossing his hat, as was his wont, across the room onto the hook.
“Evenin’,” said my mother.
“Evenin’,” I said.
Then we relapsed into silence. My mother went into the kitchen, and I pretended to study.
“English?” my father asked.
“Yes.”
“How’s it going?”
“All right.”
He looked at my notes.
“Hard language, English.”
“Yes,” I said. “Quite hard.”
And there our conversation dried up completely. We were silent. We waited.
My mother brought in the dinner and put it on the table. There was quite a lot on the plate, because as well as the food I got from the hotel, I always added a little bit of the food I bought for myself. My father and I didn’t usually eat on these occasions, because we’d both had dinner before we got home, but my mother nonetheless laid out plates for us both every night. At other times, we would just have a bite or two for her sake, but tonight, neither of us dared refuse the food. We ate in silence, forcing each bite down, avoiding each other’s eyes. We ate slowly, unbearably slowly. None of us dared to stop.
Temptation Page 33