Temptation

  “Oh yes. You can start writin’ out the receipt.”

  “For how much?”

  “What do you mean, how much?” my father snapped. “I told you you’d get your eighty-seven pengős, and when I say something, I mean it. Got it?”

  Herr Hausmeister didn’t get it, you could tell, but he nonetheless wrote out the receipt and handed it to my father. My father reached into his waistcoat pocket and, with a casual motion, took out eighty-seven pengős and threw it down in front of Herr Hausmeister. He threw it down the way a card player throws down a packet of cigarettes if someone asks him for a smoke in the middle of a hand. Then he went right back to shuffling the cards.

  Herr Hausmeister’s eyes bulged like a carp’s. He counted the money three times over, but you could tell that he still didn’t understand what was going on.

  “Will there be anythin’ else?” my father asked pointedly.

  “No,” Herr Hausmeister answered awkwardly.

  My father put down his cards.

  “No more free washing?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Herr Hausmeister went red—and when a pock-marked man goes red, it’s a sight to behold. Small, white, egg-shaped spots shone out on his face, as if they’d been painted on.

  “I never asked her to do that!” he declared hastily. “She offered. It was just a little favour.”

  The man was clearly afraid that my father would now start asking for the monthly twelve pengős back, and really got his back up, as they say. His pock-marked face was like a cornered dog’s, and he, too, wanted to bark and bite. But he was a cowardly old dog, so he kept quiet.

  My father looked at him for a while, not without taking some pleasure in the situation. Then he laughed.

  “You’re a dirty dog!” he said, and patted him cheerfully on the shoulder. “But don’t think I’m one to hold it against you. It was a low trick, no doubt about it, but it ain’t your fault Anna fell for it. You’d have to be a fool not to take what’s offered to you. That’s not it, my friend. But see here: this woman is Dappermishka’s woman now, and if you hold your life dear, you’ll remember what that means. So listen here, my friend. I’m going to let the past be the past, but if you ever forget the present, I’ll smash your face in. That’s all. Now let’s have a drink. We friends?”

  “We are,” Herr Hausmeister grinned, making a sweet enough face, but all the while surveying my father suspiciously, as if he were afraid there was some cunning ploy behind all this.

  But there was no ploy. That’s just how Dappermishka conducted his business. He was a determined man, a show-off, and terrible when angry. If someone angered him, he’d take care of him then and there, but he never held a grudge. I’m just as certain that all his anger towards Herr Hausmeister had already gone as I am that he really would have knocked his block off if he’d dared so much as look askance at my mother. Now, he was cheerful and plied this man, whom he’d just put through the wringer, with wine and dirty stories. Then, when he got bored, he simply came out and said:

  “Off you go to bed, then.”

  As to where he’d got the eighty-seven pengős from, I never found out. My mother, instead of asking him, snatched up his hand the second Herr Hausmeister was out the door, and kissed it, right in front of me. My father put his arm around her waist and said it was late, and time for bed, and I got to lay there for hours listening to the creaking of their blasted bed.

  •

  As if everything was always and everywhere about that; as if nothing else in the world had existed. It was what the pimply bellboys were talking about in the changing room, what the naked couples we spied on were whispering about in the bedrooms, and it was what my parents were now mumbling about in the creaky bed, a few paces away from me, behind the worn-out door. That was what I saw in the hotel, that was what I saw at home. That was what I saw each evening on the park benches, behind the bushes in the woods and the woodpiles on the outskirts of town. It was what I saw beneath the darkened arcades of the Fisherman’s Bastion, in the ruins of the monastery on Margit Island, down in the rowboats drifting gently along the Danube, up on the secretive slopes of the Buda hills, behind the windows of suspect little houses, in the depths of parked cars, in the semi-obscurity of doorways, at the dark ends of alleys and, at night, even in the cemeteries.

  “This spring seems to have driven everybody wild!” I would say, and I said it mockingly, with a nervous laugh, never noticing—not wanting to notice—that I was the wildest of them all.

  Sometimes I almost mewled with desire, like a tomcat stretching on a moonlit roof. I looked around me and sniffed the air in heat, but I never actually pursued the cats next door. I was a virgin. I knew nothing, though I’d seen everything. I had watched black masses through the keyholes, I had seen other people’s sexual acrobatics, but I myself was a virgin—still just a virgin. I bore my virginity like some torturous growth that gave me fevers and chills, but I never spoke to anyone else about it; I was ashamed, the way people usually are ashamed of such diseases. I wanted to be free of it. Every day, I left home thinking yes, today was the day, but in the end, I always baulked at the operation.

  I was clean of spirit and at the same time very much corrupted. I would lie, in secret, in Her Excellency’s bed, I made love to her negligée, but when what usually happens in such circumstances came to pass, I was seized by a brutal guilt and a horrible hangover and felt like spitting in my own eye. I swore “never again” and thought only of Patsy . . . until I went wild again.

  My mind was like a badly exposed photographic plate onto which some lunatic had exposed images over and over again. Individually, each one may have been all right, but all together they had no meaning. Once, a long, long time ago, a few months ago, everything had seemed so simple, with Elemér’s talk of “workers’ solidarity”. I felt I belonged somewhere, and knew where it was that I belonged. Now, I felt a suffocating confusion and belonged nowhere. I saw that Elemér was right when he outlined his thinking, but I also saw Her Excellency was right, with her fine, easy life, the outspread wings of wealth spiriting her above all those things that seemed insoluble problems in my own life. And they were not the only ones I thought were right. There were all those papers, magazines and literary journals that I read cover to cover at the hotel. Those, too, were purveyors of “truths”, truths that were tempting and fine like fake jewels in a bazaar, and I went through an enthusiasm of a few days or a few weeks for almost all of them. I was like a pregnant woman: I had cravings for everything which in the end nothing could actually satisfy. I wanted to be a “proletarian” and a “bourgeois” at the same time, a Sándor Rózsa robbing the rich to give to the poor and a magnate surrounded by scraping flunkeys, a rebellious György Dózsa to deliver the peasantry from their dire lot and a refined poet locked in his ivory tower.

  My poems, too, became confused, like a river in flood. I was constantly writing about Love, like that, with a capital L, but my poems remained just as unconsummated as my loves. My notebook was full of half-finished poems and my heart was full of half-finished feelings. Everything was only half done within me, everything was vague and undefined. I dreamt of a girl and was kept awake by a woman. The girl was halfway across the world and the woman in a different firmament, while I floated, like Muhammad’s coffin, between heaven and earth, in the void.

  Yes, this spring seemed to have driven everybody wild.

  12

  ONE MORNING, A SCANDAL BROKE OUT in the changing room. The subject of this scandal was the communal towel and the participants Franciska and Gyula. Franciska seemed to be in the right. Gyula had used the shared towel though he himself had said, when he’d got ill, that he would only use his own from then on. Franciska was not rude to him; this pretty boy with his girlish face was only rude to people he knew were weaker than him. All he said was:

  “Gyula, please don’t use our towel.”

  So there was no real cause for scandal. Gyula was, in any case, far too careful since he’d found out wh
at was wrong with him, and there was no question that he had only gone and used the towel by accident. The poor boy had clearly forgotten his trouble, something that happened to him far too infrequently. You could see, or at least I always thought I could see, that he thought of nothing else. He became so closed off and silent that we couldn’t understand why he still stayed in the hotel till the morning just to see us. It seems he didn’t have many friends besides us, or at least not ones he could talk with about his trouble. Not that he talked much about it with us, either. He mostly just sat there, head bowed, smoking one cigarette after the other in silence. He’d never been combative by nature, and since “it” had happened to him, he had grown eerily quiet. None of us, therefore, could comprehend his behaviour now. Instead of taking the warning to heart, he continued defiantly towelling himself with the communal towel, just for the sake of it.

  “You got a problem with me usin’ it?” he asked threateningly, going up to Franciska belligerently. “Look here,” he said, “I’ll use whatever towel I please.”

  We knew he wasn’t right, of course we knew that, and yet we nonetheless, strangely enough, took his side.

  “Stop buggering him about,” Lajos told Franciska.

  “I’m buggering him about?” Franciska protested. “Do you want us all to catch it from him?”

  He was right about that, too, of course. He was right, and maintained a matter-of-fact, almost polite tone. Gyula was wrong, and was aggressive about it to boot. So why did we still take sides against Franciska? After all, it wasn’t as if we were desperate to experience the joys of syphilis, either, and were exposed to the dangers just the same as him. I might have said of myself that I wanted to take revenge for his having been so rough with my mother, but the others had no personal axe to grind, and they still turned against him. There was something in his voice, his look or his manner, and I couldn’t say exactly which, but there was something that made your hands curl into fists. There is a certain type of person from whom even the truth is infuriating and we, it seemed, had instinctively detected that Franciska was of that type.

  “I know I’m wrong,” Gyula said unexpectedly. “But it’s still better to catch syphilis from a woman than to be kept by a man. Got it?” he shouted at Franciska, and grabbed him by the front of his shirt.

  Franciska let out a scream like a hysterical spinster.

  “Stop screaming,” Elemér snapped at him. “They’ll hear you.”

  “Then let them!” Franciska screamed, wheezing like a chicken. “At least everyone will know. And you can get your syphilitic hands off me.”

  Fortunately, Elemér jumped between them at this point.

  “Let him go, Gyula,” he cried. “And you, shut up.”

  Gyula pushed Franciska away.

  “You’re right, Elemér,” he said. “It ain’t right to hit a woman.”

  The “woman” didn’t say a word, just gathered his uniform under his arm and left the changing room half dressed. But when he got out into the corridor, where he felt secure, he turned back.

  “Ugh!” he cried, spitting heavily. “Syphilitic pig.”

  Gyula went after him, but Elemér blocked his way.

  “D’you really want everyone to know and have that little creep laughing at you?”

  Gyula saw the truth in that. He shrugged silently, as if to say: well, yes. What can you do? He reached absently, with a mechanical gesture, for his cigarettes, lit up distractedly, took his hat and left without saying goodbye.

  We thought that was the end of it, but of course it wasn’t. It had only just begun in earnest. As to what exactly happened, no one was sure. But the fact was, Gyula got fired the next day.

  We were all convinced it was Franciska’s doing and wanted to get revenge on him. We were just wondering how when Elemér entered the changing room and told us he did not agree.

  “It looks bad for him, I admit,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean anything. Looks can be deceiving.”

  He was a strange boy, Elemér. I knew he didn’t like Franciska. He had never, of course, admitted that to anyone, but I had noticed in the very first weeks of our acquaintance that he really kept his distance from Franciska, and if anyone could understand that, it was me. The strange thing was that he seemed to feel kind of guilty about it, and it appeared to me that this was behind what he said now, too.

  “Where would we be if we all just followed our emotions?” he asked with unusual passion, and then signalled to us to come closer. He dropped his voice and said in a near-whisper: “Listen. In a few days, I’ll find out what happened, and if what you say is true, I’ll join you. All right?”

  “How are you going to find out?” Antal asked.

  “I’m going to ask a comrade,” Elemér replied, but it seemed he regretted it at once, because he blushed to his roots.

  That’s how we learnt that he had a “comrade” among the senior management of the hotel, but as to who that was, he didn’t say.

  The boys eventually accepted his “motion” and we all went about our business. It was morning, an ordinary, normal weekday morning, the same as usual, the same as always, and the last thing that crossed my mind was that this incident would affect me, too, intimately, or that it would lead to a big change in my life.

  But that was, in fact, what happened. In the afternoon, the Major sent for me and asked me kindly—inexplicably kindly—if I wanted to take Gyula’s place. Naturally, I said yes, because poor children in Hungary in those days learnt early that there were certain questions from the upper classes to which you only answered yes. And since the Major knew this just as well as I did, I simply didn’t understand why he was beating around the bush so much. He repeated several times that I didn’t have to take the new shift if I didn’t want to, and even if I did, he would only give me the position if my parents confirmed in writing that they had no objection to my being assigned to the night shift. Then he said something to the effect that he liked me and wanted me to make a bit more money. For in the bar, in case I didn’t know, people tended to drink at night, and alcohol did wonderful things to both the heartstrings and wallets of gentlemen. Needless to say, I had no objection to that; it was just the Major’s “paternal goodwill” that unnerved me a little, because among other things, I had also learnt that the poor had better have their wits about them when the rich start feeling “paternal goodwill” for them.

  As to why he’d been so inexplicably kind, I only found out a year later, when I’d left the hotel far behind. That was when I first found out that there had apparently been some law or directive that prohibited children my age from working at night. I didn’t get any further into it, and so I still don’t know whether that law really existed or not; but that doesn’t really matter anyway because even if it did exist, it did so in name only, like so many similar protections in Hungary.

  The truth is, I wouldn’t have been glad of a law like that at the time anyway. I was sixteen, and even more tempting than the fat tips was that mysterious “other”—night-time—world the boys talked so much about. So I wouldn’t have needed much convincing. I didn’t play hard to get. The next day, I reported happily to the Major that my parents had no objection to my working the night shift. So began a new chapter in my life.

  •

  For the first few days, I felt like I was living in foreign climes, in a new, exciting, adventurous world with new weather and new customs, and where everything was more or less back to front. I put on my uniform when the others were taking off theirs, and by the time the bar really got going, three-quarters of the city was fast asleep. When I woke up, I would say “good evening”. When I went to bed, I said “good morning”. I lived in the same city as the others, and yet I lived under different skies, somewhere where the sun rose at midnight and went down at dawn, in a country whose denizens lived for, or off, love, where there was nothing else besides.

  That was what it was all for. The bars and the brothels, the fancy nightclubs and other “establishments”, the run
-down inns notorious for stabbings, the various dives in constant fear of police raids. That was what kept the fancy hotels along the riverbank awake, that was what sustained the bachelor pads rented together by friends, the rooms with their own “separate entrance” for those “visitors”, all those clubs, meeting places and “massage parlours”, not to mention the rooms at the Mauthner hotels. That was behind the smiles on the faces of the porcelain-skinned ladies, the streetwalkers on the corner and the tired waitresses on subsistence wages. That was why the porters dressed like generals bowed and scraped, as did the portly maître d’s in the various “locales”, the innkeepers, bartenders, the little old ladies selling flowers and the taxi drivers hunting for amorous couples. That was what made the evening-gowned chanteuses and the famished provincial crooners sing. That was what the “proles” and the “ladies and gentlemen” danced for. That was what the jazz bands, coat-tailed Gypsy violinists and amateur bands played for. That was what made the violins cry, the saxophones chortle, and that was what drove the drummers wild. That was why men bought roses and mournful, melancholy tunes full of longing for pretty women. That was what music, song and dance were for, what the whispering, champagne and semi-darkness were about. That was what hands and feet searched for under tables. And that was why the streets were so silvery on the moonlit nights when I would hold the door for exiting couples who all seemed to be going to the same place: to some mysterious Mecca of love.

  Yes, that was what it was all for, and that was all I needed.

  •

  It “happened” the very first night.

  There was an insalubrious little space bathed in obscurity between the bar and the cloakrooms from where the toilets and the telephone booths opened. That was where I was standing—or rather sitting—guard in my fancy, gold-trimmed uniform, between the ladies’ toilets and one of the telephone booths. My responsibilities were just as obscure and dubious as the place I was haunting. I answered the phone, came and went with messages, and would stand in from time to time for the porter, the cloakroom girl and anyone else who needed standing in for. But I was also the one they sent out to the pharmacy for condoms at three in the morning, and I was the one calling up husbands and wives with their spouses’ lame and pathetic lies. I was the clerk who telephoned home to the wife to say that the conference might stretch on till dawn, and I was the driver who informed husbands that their wives would not be home till morning because the car had broken down along the highway. I even “played” a policeman once in order to inform the district attorney’s wife that the suspect still hadn’t confessed, and it might be morning before he cracked.