Temptation

  “I do,” I replied, and suddenly remembered what Menyhért, the sailor, had told my father. In a world like ours you can only be two things. A revolutionary or a crook.

  Yes, it looked like you had to choose between the two. Don’t get me wrong, there were fine, upstanding crooks too, like—for example—my father, just as there were prissy ones like Franciska, and the grand and glorious ones, like His Excellency. How were they different? In the end, it was all the same. When push came to shove, you were either a crook or a revolutionary. You either ran with the pack or you stood up to it.

  “Yes,” I said, and my voice was almost festive. “I think I’ve learnt a lesson for life.”

  Elemér put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You’d make a good Socialist, Béla.”

  “Really?” I asked with childish greed.

  “Yes,” he nodded, and I felt like I had at the prize-giving at school when I’d been given my book.

  Dear Lord, I thought, finally to belong somewhere! To pull myself out of this fog, this mess, to find myself and my place in the world!

  “Tell me,” I asked excitedly, “you’re a member of the Party, right?”

  “Yes. I work in the youth wing.”

  “Could you get me in, too?”

  “Yes,” he replied pensively. “But I’d wait a bit, if I were you.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t know enough yet.”

  “But the others are just apprentices, too!” I rankled. “Do they all know more than me?”

  “Not at all,” Elemér said. “But they’re not as talented as you. Talent can be dangerous, Béla. And what with you being a peasant, to top it all—the bourgeoisie keeps the peasants in complete darkness. I’m afraid the light might be too much for you all at once. Especially since even Franciska made you so angry you almost killed him. And that’s nothing compared to what you’ll see if you join the movement! Oh yes,” he said, giving a wave of his arm. “Wait a bit, Béla. Study.”

  “How am I going to study if I’m not in the movement?”

  “Read.”

  “As if I had money for books.”

  “I’ll bring you the books,” he said, and reached awkwardly into his pocket. “Here’s the first one.”

  He pulled out a dog-eared book that had been read to death, entitled The ABC of Socialism.

  Looking at the plain yellow paper covers, I felt discouraged. I remembered the English language book on Vilmos Császár út. That said anyone could learn English in six months with “no teacher required, in the comfort of your own home”. This was only an ABC. Where was the rest? I wanted to ask how long it took to learn Socialism, but I didn’t dare because I was afraid the learned Elemér would laugh at me. But I did decide that the second he left, I would start in on this book and not move from where I was till I’d finished it. I’d show him how quickly I could learn Socialism! And one day, I’d put even him to shame.

  “If you want,” he said, “you could always wait for me in the morning like this. We can skip out a bit and discuss your reading. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But don’t say anything to the others,” he said. “Not about me visiting Franciska, or that . . . Anyway, just don’t say anything. We maintain the boycott. From now on, you won’t be talking to him much, either, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll be off,” he said, standing up.

  He stood up like a good, conscientious employee who’s managed to convince the client of the quality of his material and the firm’s bona fides. There was something ridiculous about him, and something wonderful. I watched him, and I was suddenly so grateful I didn’t know what to do. My God, I thought, how much I have to thank him for! First, he lent me his clothes, then his heart, and now his mind.

  “Thank you, Elemér!” slipped out of me.

  “What for?” he said in surprise.

  His face was expressionless. He was Pokerface once more.

  “The book,” I said, and tried to remain expressionless too, the way a good Socialist should.

  •

  The two weeks were up, and there were still no signs. I started to relax. Everything around me went quiet, too. We sent a wreath for Gyula’s funeral, and then quickly forgot all about him. A new boy came in his place, Boldizsár, and one day Franciska, too, came out of hospital. I watched him suspiciously for a while, but then realized I had nothing to fear from him. When we met, he made as if he’d never seen me before in his life, and I of course did not try to remind him. The boys really did boycott him, which was fine, but not at all difficult, because Franciska avoided us so fastidiously that we wouldn’t have had a chance to talk to him, boycott or no boycott. There were no visible signs of his “car accident”. He was as handsome, fresh and perfumed as before, and his effeminate baby-face was all smiles. Gyula’s uniform fitted Boldizsár so perfectly that not even a button needed adjusting, and he settled into the post the same way—you could hardly notice the difference. He wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t smart; he was as neutral as Switzerland. After a week, we no longer even noticed him—he was part of the furniture, part of the hotel. The shifts carried on in their prescribed way, and our days were grey as donkeys, trudging uneventfully along their beaten paths.

  I had been avoiding Manci like the plague ever since. I didn’t go home after closing for fear of meeting her. Around dawn, I would crash in some corner of the basement, sleep till eight thirty and then walk with Elemér to police headquarters. That was how it was, day after day. When Elemér was done, we would usually walk down to the river, or “play hookey” in Buda among the little one-storey gingerbread houses where Biedermeier and geraniums in the window were still the style, and the young ladies practised “Für Elise” on the piano.

  They were lovely, those quiet morning walks. Elemér must have been eighteen at the time, I was sixteen, and it was summer. The lilac was blooming, the winding little streets were full of scents and piano music, and we talked of putting the world to rights.

  It was a strange friendship, ours. We were together day after day, we were attached to each other in the way that you can be at that age and no other, but we never spoke of intimate things, not once. Elemér continued to be impersonal, never talked about his private affairs—even by accident—and never asked me about mine. He kept strictly to explanations of the “Socialist world view”. He really did start with the ABC and guided me through the jungle of this strange science with the dispassionate care and precision of a professional big game hunter. He brought me the dog-eared books that had been read to death, and I devoured them like a wolf. There were weeks when I would read one almost every day.

  I really did have a wolf ’s appetite. My unquenched thirst for knowledge threw itself on Marxism like a starving beast. I swallowed its heavy fare half chewed, and more than once had trouble digesting it. Gradually, I learnt the secret slang of its technical terms and began bandying foreign words when we would “discuss my reading” with Elemér, but internally, not to put too fine a point on it, I somewhat simplified Socialism for myself. The whole thing seemed so Sándor Rózsa-like to me—taking treasure from the rich and distributing it to the poor. Of course that was the thing to do, there could be no doubt about that. The thought did not seem novel at all. Sándor Rózsa did the same thing, and I was an old disciple of the famous outlaw. As for helping the proletariat organize, I felt I had already got the key to that as a child when I wanted to organize the poor into gangs, the way we children had organized ourselves into gangs. The difference is just, I thought, that the Socialists didn’t want to organize the poor of a single village, city or country into gangs, but the poor of all five continents, and that was quite right: workers of the world, unite!

  That was all fine as far as it went. That was all good, it was all exciting, and I was passionately keen about that. But when it came down to the details, there were plenty of things I secretly despised. First of all, I couldn’t understand what all that complic
ated intellectual mumbo-jumbo was for. Of the fact that poverty is a bad thing there was no need to convince the poor, and there was no chance of convincing the rich. The rich were behind the whole crooked enterprise and they’d have to be mad just to hand everything they’d stolen over centuries back to the poor when asked politely. Power had to be wrenched from their hands by force, like Marx said. By force—which is to say, the only way possible.

  “So why don’t they do that?” I asked Elemér.

  “Because we can’t yet,” he replied. “The bourgeoisie’s still too strong. The right historical moment hasn’t come.”

  Initially, I more or less accepted that, but later, when I started reading the foreign affairs section of the newspapers more attentively, I started having alarming doubts. I could see that the Party (which for us always meant the Social Democrats) already held power in many countries—there were Social Democrat ministers and prime ministers, and yet everything remained the same.

  “Why?” I asked Elemér.

  “Because they haven’t taken power yet,” he replied.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why haven’t they taken power, if they’re in power?”

  “Because the right historical moment hasn’t come yet,” came the eternal refrain.

  No, I couldn’t understand that at all. I suddenly dropped the scientific tone.

  “Rubbish!” I said. “When’s this historical moment goin’ to come if not when they’re in power?”

  Elemér always avoided the question. He would say something like:

  “These are difficult questions. We’re not there yet.”

  Or: “Don’t bother with that for the moment. Get the basics straight first.”

  Well, basics or no basics, I just couldn’t get this into my peasant’s brain and I told him so. Elemér sometimes looked at me the way a doctor looks at a patient with worrying symptoms. At other times, I had the feeling that, deep down, he liked my questions, though for some reason he avoided them, and that confused me even more. You just can’t tell with Pokerface, I thought.

  I remember one debate we had in particular. He was talking about Mussolini, who was a demigod in Hungary at the time—even the democratically minded press kowtowed to him. Elemér said he was the arch-enemy of the workers’ movement. He said he was a Judas who had betrayed the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, and that the Party had to focus all its energies on the fight against Fascism. I had just read how powerful the Party had been in Italy after the war, and I couldn’t understand how they’d let Mussolini come to power.

  “They didn’t let him!” Elemér said. “The King appointed him, and they’ve got the guns.”

  That seemed clear enough; that I could understand. The argument only started when Germany came up. Elemér was saying that Hitler was even more dangerous than Mussolini, because if Fascism triumphed in Germany, then all Europe would turn Fascist and that was it for Socialism for the foreseeable future. Here was something else I couldn’t understand at all.

  “But there ain’t no king in Prussia,” I said. “The Party controls the police. Why don’t they just take care of this Hitler?”

  “Because Germany is a democracy,” he replied, “and in a democracy, everyone’s free to do as they like.”

  “But Hitler wants to do away with democracy, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” he nodded.

  “Well, then,” I said, looking at him. “What are they waiting for? For him to go ahead and do away with them?”

  Elemér grew a little tense.

  “You’ve got to understand,” he said, “that the rules of democracy guarantee full freedom for all political parties. It’s not as simple as you think.”

  “ ’Course it is! Democracy or not, if someone wants to do away with my family, I shoot him like a dog. And whoever doesn’t is either a coward, or stupid, or probably both.”

  Elemér wanted to avoid the question again, but I didn’t let him. Finally, when I had really forced him into a corner, he said:

  “Look, I don’t agree with everything the Party says, either, but there isn’t another workers’ party in Hungary, and . . .” He suddenly left off, and I could see he was sorry about what he’d said.

  Well, I thought, if that was all those wise gentlemen could come up with, I would stick to my peasant common sense, thank you very much. If they put me in charge of the Prussian police, I’d show them what to do with that Hitler and his movement.

  I was back in the same place as when I had knocked the Browning out of Franciska’s hand, but this time Elemér couldn’t convince me he was right. All he’d accomplished was that I tried to avoid arguing with him, because I was afraid that if I proved too recalcitrant, he wouldn’t bring me into the Party and that was more important to me than anything. For I was absolutely convinced that all I had to do was join the Party and I would soon take over leadership, the same way I had done at school.

  That’s how, over time, two distinct kinds of Socialism developed inside me. One of them was the one Elemér used to present to me, and the other the one I myself imagined. It was a strange sort of fantasy, chaotic and wonderful, crazy but beautiful. The childishly naive mixed with the instinct for good within me the way it only could in a sixteen-year-old peasant boy’s imagination.

  Elemér’s moral doubts did not worry me at all. Power had to be seized, I told myself; as to how it was done, that didn’t matter. War is war and all is fair in war. That there’d be blood? Yes, of course there would. In what war wasn’t there? Thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands would die, but millions had died in the wars the bourgeoisie had made. And for what? They told my father to kill the Italians because they were our worst enemies, and they told me to adore them, because they were our best friends. Sorry, patriots, there’s been some mistake, forget what we told you before—all those bodies in Piave and Isonzo no longer count.

  If you could send millions to the slaughter for “mistakes” like that, then why should I have moral doubts when we were fighting to ensure that “mistakes” like these were never made again? We were only at war with war in trying to topple this half-crazy world order that couldn’t live without it. And when we won, we would create a classless society in which there would be no more rich and no more poor—only people who could at long last love their fellow human beings, because they won’t have any more reason to hate them. Everyone would find their place in the world, every people and every person. There wouldn’t be oppressors, and there wouldn’t be oppressed, there wouldn’t be luxury and there wouldn’t be misery. We’d live simple, clean lives and pay for them with work instead of money. This obligatory daily work would take no more than five or six hours, and then—I told myself—everybody can turn their attention to higher things. There would still be competition—not to see who could be the most cunning in taking the bread out of the other’s mouth, but rather who could do the best for the community. And there would still be wars, yes, but only against stupidity and evil, illness and death.

  So why would I have had moral doubts? This end justified all means, even the most merciless. Anyone who shied away from this kind of war had no right to talk of morals. I thought of Petőfi:

  And all of you are good for nought

  who won’t die for your country, when you ought

  I would occasionally move myself to tears picturing my own death. I fell in the heat of battle, of course, beneath fluttering red flags on a dark and stormy night, just before the final victory. The whole city turned out for my funeral, the factory sirens hooted, traffic stopped.

  “Pres-eeent arms!” came the order, and the red flags were lowered over my coffin.

  I could see the workers’ battalions standing to attention, I could hear the muffled mourning drums, I pictured my statue on the village square, and my grave, carved upon which were the words: He died so liberty could live.

  But mostly I pictured myself alive. I could see Béla, the celebrated young soldier of the revolution; Béla, greying at
the temples, a pillar of the classless society; and Béla the aged veteran wandering past old Rozi’s house bending on his cane. The state would long since have taken over her house, the old woman having died well before of old age or revenge from the boys. But the boys there, the sons of this new world, would be standing at the gate, well fed in squeaky new shoes, whispering in awe as I passed.

  “If it weren’t for him,” they’d say, “we’d still be little bastards—hungry, ragged, abandoned children that people called after on the street from behind the bushes.”

  No, no one would be calling after them from behind the bushes any more. Every single person in the world would be equal. That’s how it’ll be, and I’ll make sure of it, I swore to myself. So help me God.

  While this shameful world continued, humanity’s true history could not begin. Humanity could not be humanity while it was fighting for such unworthy causes as its daily bread, its rent, its rags. Humanity’s true history would begin when each person could “turn their attention to higher things”, and their “eyes and their ears”—as I put it in one of my poems—“were opened to the miracles”.