Temptation

  “What d’you mean, playing with me?”

  “Playin’ hard to get. Not givin’ it up.”

  “What d’you take me for?”

  “Well, then, what you doing in this state all by yourself ? You said you were at hers.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But?”

  “Her husband was home. There. So now you know.”

  “Aha,” said Manci, but I couldn’t tell from her voice if she believed what I’d said or not. “She old?” she asked.

  “Younger than you! And what a woman . . . ooh, brother!”

  “You’re pretty smitten, dear.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “And her?”

  “Well, she isn’t with me for my money.”

  “What, then?”

  “For the carnation in my buttonhole.”

  “Well, she’s got taste. I like your carnation, too.”

  She wasn’t laughing now. We’d put the cigarettes out some time ago. It was completely dark.

  “It’s hot in here,” she said, and I could hear her pushing her covers off in the dark.

  I was struck by a smell. It wasn’t a bad smell, but I was overcome again with disgust. It was a woman’s smell, no better and no worse than that other, the one on the lacy, salmon-coloured slip, only that one drove me crazy, and this one filled me with revulsion. But you don’t really think too much about that when you’re sixteen.

  Besides, it only lasted a few minutes. After that, I smelt only that other smell, so close and so completely that it was as if it were that other woman lying in bed beside me, and then she really did appear, a gift of the borrowed reality of dreams; whether it lasted seconds or hours, I couldn’t have said.

  Then I heard Manci’s voice.

  “You asleep?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “Come . . . lie down over here . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “No . . . you just lie there . . . I’ll do it . . . Like that . . .”

  “ . . .”

  “Is that nice? . . . Does it feel nice? . . . Say something!”

  “Shut up!” I snapped, because when she talked, I could no longer hear her voice, that high, slightly sing-song voice that was now quite close to my ear, whispering indescribable secrets.

  13

  THAT EVENING, WHEN I ENTERED the hotel, I could feel that something had happened. There was an undefined uneasiness in my overstretched nerves, though I couldn’t say why. Nothing had changed in the hotel; the shift moved silently in its normal course like an elegant alien star to whom mere earthly laws did not apply. The hotel’s thick carpets might have muffled even death’s heavy footsteps; everything was so quiet, cool and elegant that you got the feeling that nothing out of the ordinary could ever happen here. And yet there seemed to be something in the air, something that—like the air itself—was impossible to see or touch.

  I paid heightened attention. My head was still blurry from my drunken night, and Manci and the hors d’oeuvres had unsettled my stomach; I was beginning to think whatever was wrong was wrong with me. But then two members of staff whispered together, or the draught slammed a door somewhere, and I was once more overcome with anxiety. Something had happened, I told myself.

  I didn’t see a familiar face anywhere. The boys had gone home, and the bar was empty. There was only an old, distracted waiter playing patience at one of the tables, scratching a spot on his bald head.

  “Good evenin’,” I said, and thought: maybe now I’ll find out.

  But the old man didn’t even look up from his cards.

  “Evening,” he mumbled, and yawned.

  “What’s new? Anything going on?”

  “Yes,” he said, scratching his spot. “A cow jumped over the moon.”

  He yawned again, took out a pocket mirror and examined the spot sleepily.

  “Broke a leg,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The cow.”

  He laughed, wheezing dozily, and his voice—like a cracked pot—reverberated in the empty space. The bar was like a corpse in an elegant dress. Yesterday, it had been a beautiful woman. You’d danced together and felt her warm, excited breath, her eyes, hair, shoulders driving you wild—and now here she was, lying inert before you in her fancy frippery, fake breasts on display.

  I left and sat down in my place. There was a sleepy silence and a sleepy semi-darkness. I stared at the wall vacantly and without interest, watching a fly nap and scratch itself with its front leg. It was a very old and very tired fly, and maybe it, too, had a spot on its bald head.

  Suddenly, I heard my own voice.

  “Never again!” I mumbled, but I didn’t quite know what I was referring to: Manci, or the whole female sex, drinking, or something completely different and much more important.

  The fug in my mind was turning my stomach. I wanted to throw up on everything in the entire world, but most of all myself. I think I had never hated anyone as much as I hated this strange boy in the red uniform who bore my name. I wanted to wriggle out of my skin, like a snake, so that I could immediately start a new life in some temptation-free paradise.

  It suddenly felt unbearable in the room; I had the feeling that all the air had been pumped out of it. I called in to the bar.

  “Can I go stand by the door a bit?”

  The old man shrugged.

  “For all I care!” he said, scratching his spot.

  The bar opened onto the riverfront. It was a fine, warm night, and the Buda hills were alive with the early signs of summer. Up there, on their peaks, the spotlights were just going on, flooding the Citadel, the Royal Palace, the Fisherman’s Bastion and the lookout tower in faint illumination. The morning star was up too, examining itself in the Danube together with the waterfront lights, but the sky still hung opaquely, painting colourful scenes upon the river. You could hear music coming from the riverside places, the wind occasionally mixing the Gypsy and the jazz and wafting a strong smell of lilac from the park. The flood of passers-by rumbled colourfully past the throng of musical cafés on the promenade. The women were already wearing summer dresses under their expensive furs, and the gentlemen were mostly without their coats. Everything was full of colours, lights, scents and music; everything was full of spring, spring! I watched the walking rich and sighed. How wonderful this city was—for them!

  A hoarse hooting shook the air, and I flushed hot. The boat to Vienna was just leaving. My God, to get on board one of those and to get out of here—out, out, out!

  And then all of a sudden, with no transition, my heart was filled with a pure, childlike joy. I thought: it’ll be summer soon, and summer meant Patsy, and Patsy meant happiness. Summer was coming, and happiness, and Patsy. I don’t know why, but I was absolutely convinced that everything would be all right once Patsy was around. Everything! Life itself. I would confess to her about last night, I would confess to her about everything—you can’t start a new life based on lies.

  I was overcome with a lofty festive feeling, a great, clear sense of calm. I suddenly felt that my life so far had merely been some kind of phase, that I had been waiting for my train in some dusty little station, and maybe it didn’t matter at all what I had spent my time doing as I waited: who I’d talked to, who I’d kissed. Life was only just beginning, and life was beautiful; life was full of wonder.

  The door opened behind me. A young girl came out of the bar; she must have been fifteen or sixteen. She was a pretty, nondescript little thing, a working-class girl dressed up in her best. She was wearing a frilly, starched, light dress, white net stockings and black patent-leather shoes. Her smooth brown hair was gathered in two large ponytails on her shoulders, a pink ribbon in each, and she had a little gold cross around her neck. What was she doing in the bar? I thought.

  The girl looked at me and stopped hesitantly.

  “Are you Master Béla?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied in surprise.

  “The waiter inside sai
d you’d be here.”

  “Yes.”

  She stared ahead of her awkwardly. It was only now I saw how distraught she was.

  Her face was ashen, her eyes red and puffy. She was silent for a space, then looked at me once more.

  “Has Master Elemér gone home?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I came to bring him greetings,” she said in a strangely excited voice, and avoided my glance. “And for yourself as well.”

  I didn’t understand a word of what was going on.

  “From who?” I asked.

  “From Gyula,” she said, and I could see her lip was trembling.

  “How is he?”

  “How . . . how is he?” she said, looking at me in shock, and you could see that she was about to be overwhelmed by sobs. “Ain’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “It’s in the papers and everythin’. All the evening papers.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said anxiously. “What’s in the papers?”

  The girl started sobbing loudly. I could barely understand her.

  “It’s over! Over! He died at once.”

  “What?!” I panted. “Gyula’s de—” I couldn’t even bring myself to say it. “For God’s sake, what happened?”

  “They let him go, poor thing,” she sniffed. “You know they let him go?”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently. “And?”

  “And, well, he came to get his papers today, and . . . said goodbye to everyone and . . . he went down to the kitchen to say goodbye too, and . . . he grabbed the kitchen knife, the biggest knife, yes sir, and . . . he stabbed himself through the heart, and . . .” I didn’t catch the rest—it was lost in a flood of tears.

  So that’s what’s happened, I said to myself and stood, frozen, helpless, beside the weeping girl. We’d started to attract looks from the passers-by. I touched her arm.

  “Come to the park with me,” I said. “We can talk in peace there.”

  She followed obediently.

  The park was dark and quiet, a heavy scent of lilac in the air. We sat down on a bench. That was when it occurred to me that I didn’t even know who this girl was, or rather . . .

  “You Katica, miss?” I asked.

  “Oh! I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t even introduce myself ! I feel like I’m losin’ my mind. Oh, God, who’d have thought it? Only just last night . . .” she suddenly left off the sentence and looked at me. “How d’you know who I was?”

  “Gyula talked about you, miss.”

  That silly, sir-and-madam way of speaking the poor adopt when they want to sound “refined”, the way they put on their Sunday best when going to a feast, had rubbed off on me, too.

  She was silent for a bit.

  “What’d he say about me?” she asked softly.

  “That you were engaged.”

  “And . . . what else?”

  She said this in such a pleading voice that I took pity on her.

  “That he loved you very much, miss. That he’d never loved nobody else.”

  I hadn’t actually heard Gyula say as much, but I still felt I was telling her the truth.

  Katica started to cry.

  “Then do you understand all this, sir?”

  “What?”

  “All this. What he did.”

  “My God!” I said, and sat looking out at the park, because I suddenly realized that there was nothing much more that I could say.

  Katica, too, was silent for a bit. Then she turned to me.

  “Do you know what was wrong with him?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “So you knew too, miss?”

  “Not at all,” she shrugged. “He only told me in the letter. You know, sir, the one in which he sent your greetings, too. And he wrote, even there he wrote, that he’d never loved nobody else, and . . .” She started crying again, “and that he’ll be waiting for me in heaven, and . . . So how could he, then . . . tell me that!”

  “Oh, miss!” I sighed, and felt very, very old all of a sudden. “Believe me, the two things have nothin’ to do with each other. That in itself means nothing to men. Believe me, I speak from experience. You love someone, but you still go with someone you don’t love at all. Why? I don’t know. You just have to. Or rather, you don’t have to, and yet sometimes, you still do. It’s hard to explain, miss. You’re young still, miss. Believe me, Gyula had nothing to do with that woman, really.”

  “Nothing to do with her?” she looked at me. “Well you listen here, Master Béla. Gyula wrote that he’d only been with that,” she swallowed hard, “that woman only once. But he’d known me since I was a little girl and apparently he loved me and I couldn’t imagine my life without him, and I still can’t, and I’ll never be able to, but . . . but what was that all worth? He died of that. And then you go tellin’ me he had nothing to do with her?”

  I wanted to answer her, but the words stuck in my throat like a deadly fishbone. It was a suffocating thought. A murderous thought. That was the first time it occurred to me, and I couldn’t be free of it again.

  I broke out in a sweat. Yes, I thought I had nothing to do with Manci, and now it might turn out I had more to do with her than with anybody else. The seeds of death she’d sowed the night before might already be germinating in my blood, too. And then there will be no Patsy, no America, no nothing. It’ll all be over before it’s begun. Why, why, why? What did I have to do with her? One word from Patsy meant more to me than the whole of that other body, the whole of that other woman, than all that . . . hideousness. I had nothing, nothing, nothing to do with her! I was just waiting for my train in an insignificant little station, and someone had gone and poisoned me in the waiting room.

  “Terrible!” I almost shouted. “Terrible!”

  Katica sobbed, and then there was silence for a long time. The Gypsy music drifted in from the promenade, the colourful lilac bushes bowed gently in the wind, and everything was full of colour, scent and music—everything was full of spring, spring! And soon it would be summer, and . . . Suddenly, I felt Katica’s hand on my arm.

  “You crying too, sir?”

  I was terribly ashamed.

  “I have to go, miss,” I said quickly, nervously. “They’ll be looking for me. It’s very late.”

  “Yes,” Katica replied in her thin, obedient little voice. “I hope you don’t mind my disturbin’ you.”

  She stood up, I stood up too. But when I wanted to go, she came closer and looked at me like a frightened pup.

  “Master Béla!” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I’m to blame as well?”

  “Why would I think that?” I looked at her in surprise.

  “That’s what Böske said. Böske’s my friend, you see.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, that . . . If I’d been with Gyula in the same way as that woman . . . you see, Böske’s that way with her fiancé, and . . .” she started sobbing. “Oh God, I think I’m goin’ to go mad with all this!”

  I didn’t know what to say. Was it possible that what Böske said was true? Maybe. But then the devil take her and her truth!

  “Böske’s plain common,” I said harshly, wildly, with genuine hatred. “A common slut. She’s worthless! And you shouldn’t be friends with people like her. Understand? Men do want clean and innocent women, women like you, miss.”

  “But then they go to someone else, who . . .” Here, she grabbed my arm and almost shouted: “Why? Tell me why? Why?”

  “Because we’re animals!” I burst out. “Understand? Animals! Filthy, dirty, ugly animals. Worse than animals, in fact.”

  I hadn’t noticed till now that I was shouting, but I was unable to stop. I don’t know what I said, I don’t know how I took my leave of Katica, whether I even said goodbye. All I remember is that when I got to the hotel, I ran straight to the first toilet to check if you could already “see the symptoms”. You couldn’t. But then I remembered that Gyula had on
ly noticed it two weeks after, and I spent so long in there alone, crying, that by the time I got back to the bar, the jazz band was already playing.

  Why, Mr Stux, what’s this,

  You know it’s wrong—

  Have some patience, sir,

  The night’s still long.

  •

  I didn’t dare go home after closing, because I was afraid of finding Manci there. So I slept in a nook in the basement, the way poor Gyula used to do, tossing and turning sleeplessly till the boys arrived. Then I went and joined them in the changing room, and listened—shuddering—to the tale of Gyula’s suicide which, the way they told it, became a sort of cheap horror story.

  The truth was, they didn’t know anything either. None of them had seen it, and the few members of staff who really did know something decided it was best to keep their mouths shut, because the management was merciless in these matters. “Indiscretion”, as they called it, was grounds for immediate dismissal. As for the papers, which in these cases were always paid off, all they wrote was a brief news item saying that in “one of the elegant riverside hotels” an apprentice (name, age, and address such-and-such), had committed suicide, and that the reasons for his actions were unknown. Despite that, or maybe precisely because of that, there was barely a boy in the changing room who didn’t know some suspiciously dramatic detail of Gyula’s death. Antal, for example, told us that Gyula, with the kitchen knife sticking out of his heart, staggered into the lobby and, covered in blood and in the midst of his death throes, screamed at the flabbergasted guests:

  “The management’s murdered me! Boycott this hotel!”

  Lajos, on the other hand, had heard from the girl who washed the dishes—the one Gyula had once been keen on—that our late friend had bled out in the toilets beside the kitchen, where he had severed his artery with the pig knife.

  “My blood is on his hands!” he was supposed to have said, and when they asked him who he meant, eyes rolling back in his head, he croaked: “Franciska!” and died.

  These big-city smart guys, who’d seen it all before, and who in normal circumstances would have dismissed stories like these straight away with a simple wave of the hand, now listened to the contradictory, penny-dreadful details of these tales with grave and serious faces. No matter how corrupted they’d become, they were nevertheless partly children still and for most of them, this was their first experience of death; after what had happened, nothing seemed quite impossible. Poor Gyula was already on the road to reincarnation: he had become gossip, a thrilling old wives’ tale.