Temptation

  I was only interested in the class struggle and the revolution from this standpoint. I held both to be necessary evils that we had to have done with, the sooner the better. I’m not so young any more, I thought, I’m gone sixteen, how much longer did I have to deal with these anachronisms like, for example, capitalism? What would I say to my children? They would think of the period before the revolution the way we think of the heathens today, or prehistory. They’ll be bored at school when they have to learn it, they’ll find it ridiculous and unbelievable, and they’ll look down on their ancestors who lived like this for centuries.

  This imagined world now became for me reality. Reality itself seemed merely to be a kind of fleeting Carnival masquerade whose Ash Wednesday was just around the corner, when people would throw off their masks and costumes and head, finally, after the stars, like the Three Kings: towards the manger of peace, love and purity.

  This was how “poetically” I pictured the future, this was how simple it all seemed to me. These were good days, and it’s good to think back on them. I felt old, while the world was so young, barely past seventeen. The lilac bloomed in the winding streets of Buda, pianos played in the little single-storey houses, and the future seemed as fine and simple as “Für Elise”.

  15

  MEANWHILE, MYSTERIOUS THINGS were happening at home. One night, when I came into the kitchen, my mother was standing in front of the mirror in a silk dress—yes, that’s right, a silk dress, painting her mouth.

  “Your father’s taking me to the theatre!” she chirped. “You know, the one with the real live actors.”

  I don’t know what I said to that, probably nothing. I knew that the theatre was an impossible dream even for well-paid workers, and that only ladies wore silk dresses. What had happened? Had they won the lottery? I wondered anxiously, because, to be honest, I had other suspicions.

  I didn’t dare ask any questions while my father was around, of course. Instead, I observed them in silence with a strange tightness in my stomach. My father, too, was dressed in brand-new clothes. He was wearing a beautiful blue suit, and you could see he hadn’t bought it second-hand, the way people generally did in Újpest, or rather used to do, because they no longer had the money. Dressed like this, he looked even more handsome, even younger, even more attractive. He sat at the head of the table kicking his heels, and his fine, skirt-chasing blue eyes were filled with full-blooded good cheer. You could see he was pleased with both himself and the world. He was humming a fashionable little ditty and absently playing with his gold watch chain, because he was suddenly so well off he even had a gold chain for his watch.

  My mother, it seems, must have guessed what I was thinking, because all at once she grew flustered. Recently, I always felt that she got flustered when we met, which was rarely enough. By the time I got home, they were out, and when they got back, I was deep asleep. Sometimes, half asleep, I could hear them coming and going in the room, but mostly they were just changing and would go out again soon after. Almost every evening they had an “engagement”, as they put it, and that was how they put it, all fancy, though among ourselves we still spoke in our old peasant manner. And on the rare occasions they happened to be home, I hardly got a chance to talk to them because I would read for so long before going to sleep that I woke up late every evening and had to rush to make sure I wasn’t late for work. Besides, we were all caught up with our own affairs. Me with the future and my mother with the present which—I now know—must have been as wonderful for her as the future was for me.

  But at the time, I didn’t think of that. When a child has to wear the kind of rags I did, he doesn’t have too much compassion for his mother when she’s in a silk dress. I was seized by an ugly, jealous rage. My own parents! I said to myself bitterly. There’s a laugh. I looked like I could have been begging from them in the street.

  Something similar must have occurred to my mother, too, for she now blushed.

  “Mishka,” she said suddenly, turning to my father, “could I take your brown suit and adjust it for the boy? You know, the one you don’t wear no more.”

  “What the hell for?” my father asked chirpily. “I’ll buy him a new one if he needs one.” It was only now that he looked at me, and I could see that he was almost shocked. “Why you letting him go about looking like that?” he asked my mother indignantly, and I’m certain his outrage was genuine. But that was what he was like. He simply hadn’t noticed until now how ragged his son looked. “You might’ve said something before!” he grumbled, and looked at my mother reproachfully.

  “Before?” the word echoed inside me. Yes, it seems, this hadn’t happened overnight. Looking back, I now realized that my mother hadn’t mentioned the bottle of lye for some time, and that I had seen other signs of change, too, only . . . I hadn’t noticed them. The future, that wonderful Future with its capital F, had occupied my thoughts so thoroughly that, like a horse with his blinkers, I could see only forward. As to the things that happened around me, I could see nothing; or if I did see it, I didn’t take any notice.

  I now started paying attention and grew more and more uneasy by the day. Where was all this money coming from? I wondered. My father’s lifestyle hadn’t changed, my mother was working less than before, and if they really had won the lottery, I’d have heard about that, by God!

  One evening when my father wasn’t home, I asked my mother straight out:

  “Where’s all this money coming from suddenly?”

  “Where?” my mother looked at me. “Your father makes it.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “Business.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “Don’t know. All sorts.”

  “Who’s he working for?”

  “No one. He does his own things.”

  “Does he keep a shop?”

  “Oh, no, he ain’t the type for that.”

  “An office, then?”

  “ ’Course not.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” I said.

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “The whole thing, to be honest. You either work for yourself or you work for other people. There’s no third way.”

  My mother, it seems, had not considered that, because she looked somewhat taken aback. But then she shrugged and merely said:

  “Well, this is how he does it. An’ you can see for yourself he’s doin’ well.”

  That was the end of the conversation. It was past seven and I had to get to work. My mother was wearing yet another new dress. She was waiting for my father—they were off out.

  I could feel that something wasn’t right and tried to convince myself that everything was. Besides, I thought, what business was it of mine? They didn’t spend too much time worrying about me.

  I became as alienated from my mother as I had been when I was a little boy. I was sixteen and couldn’t understand—how could I? I just watched with the mercilessness of youth, hostile and stunned. What had become of that sober, straightforward, decent woman? A few months ago, I used to laugh to myself whenever she tried to imitate my father’s easy-going manner, but now, it was no longer a case of imitation. She learnt fast, scarily fast.

  Once, I found her still in bed about noon, when I got home.

  “You sick?”

  “Not a bit of it!” my father replied for her. He himself was still only half dressed and just shaving. “We were out till dawn,” he told me chirpily. “Only got home about six.”

  “And your father didn’t let me go to work, either,” my mother said, yawning, and sat up in bed. “Listen,” she asked, “could you ring up that lady from the hotel?”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “What d’you want me to say?”

  The lie she came up with was so complicated I was ashamed in advance of having to produce it. But in the end I didn’t have to, because when the lady heard who was calling, she started screaming down the phone and didn’t let me get a word in edgeways.

  “That’s the fourth
time she’s done this to me!” she yelled. “Well, there won’t be a fifth. Understand? You can’t treat me like that. That kind of woman isn’t welcome in my house! You tell her that . . .”

  I didn’t hear the rest; I’d put the phone down.

  When I told her about the conversation, my mother’s expression changed for a few minutes and she was her old self again, the frightened, grave peasant woman I had known since my youth.

  “You see!” she turned to my father. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “So what?” laughed my father. “We had a good time. The hell with her, anyway!”

  “Easy for you to say,” complained my mother. “Soon I’ll lose all my places.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” My father put down his razor and went, just as he was, half-shaved, and embraced my mother. “I won’t have you working much longer, anyway,” he said with a swagger, and started humming in her ear:

  I’ll build a room all in glass

  For my baby her time to pass

  On Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

  “Oh cut it out, you clown,” said my mother, pushing him away, but as I went into the next room, I could hear her singing along.

  Yes, she had completely lost her head. She was either singing or crying, and that is not poetic licence. If I didn’t hear her singing in the kitchen, I would always notice afterwards that her eyes were red from crying. At first, I thought she was worried about the same things as me, but later I realized that there wasn’t a bit of truth in that. She was wracked with jealousy. She had clearly realized something was going on—and who knows how many times these things had gone on before?

  One evening, I woke to hear her sobbing, complaining to Márika in the kitchen. It must have been about a woman, because Márika kept comforting her that:

  “He’ll get bored of her too. He got bored of all the rest. You’re the one he really loves, after all.”

  “Yes,” muttered my mother bitterly. “Me and the whole rest of the female sex.”

  She said that, but you could hear in her voice that she didn’t believe what she was saying, though there was a lot of truth in it. Fortunately, not even she realized just how much. Sometimes I had the feeling that my father really was, in the strictest sense, in love with the whole female sex, and as passionately, to boot, as most men love only a single woman. He couldn’t pass a woman without making sure there was some physical contact, even if only the slightest. If he couldn’t do better, he’d grab their hands on the pretext of shaking hands, but he grabbed plenty of other things, too—mostly other things, in fact, and he couldn’t contain himself even in front of me. The extraordinary thing was that he was not only interested in the young and the beautiful. I saw him with women whom perhaps no one, aside from him, had ever wooed. Even if they were too young or too old, if they wore a skirt, Dappermishka wanted to know what was under it. To be fair, it wasn’t too hard for him—women were crazy about him. He had, it seems, some overarching masculine charm that women found impossible to resist—especially my mother.

  Now I understand her, of course I do. Dappermishka was the kind of man a woman would follow into the depths of hell if she was curious about heaven. How strange women are! I thought at the time, but now—past sixteen—I know that they’re not so strange at all. Because like it or not, in life you have to know what you’re doing, and it stands to reason that the only people who really know what they’re doing when it comes to love are people like Dappermishka, for whom it’s a full-time occupation. Other men can be perfectly wonderful, outstanding husbands and exemplary fathers, but when it comes to love they will forever remain amateurs, and wherever possible, of course, it’s best to turn to a professional. It’s a hard truth, I know, but it’s true nonetheless and there’s nothing I can do about it. I know it’s the amateurs that shed the real tears, but it’s not what the public’s looking for. They need an actor, an honest-to-God actor, and a real actor always plays a part: they know the method and impact of their work. But it’s still of them that people will say: “That’s an evening I’ll never forget.”

  Dappermishka was just such a player. Yet I can say, and I’d be lying if I said any different, that my mother couldn’t have hoped for a better husband. “Husband” is, of course, an exaggeration in this case—and not only in a legal sense—since I for one have never seen a husband be as attentive, good and affectionate to his wife as Dappermishka was to my mother. Where he got to during the day, and what he got up to, I don’t know, though it’s more than likely that he was quite a long way off the straight and narrow, but it was always my mother he took out in the evening, and he took her out the way a lover takes his sweetheart. He showered her with compliments and gifts, treated her like the apple of his eye and demanded that others do the same. Is it any wonder, then, that this poor woman lost her head, this woman whom everyone, throughout her life, had always treated like a rag? Now they were handling her with kid gloves because everyone was scared of Dappermishka’s famous fists; and they knew he pulled no punches when it came to his woman.

  Once, I remember, my mother had complained in tears that an Andrássy út lawyer (a nobleman with two titles to his name) had called her a thief because his shirt had apparently gone missing in the wash. My father pretended not to have heard, but afterwards, he went over to Andrássy út and gave the aristocratic lawyer the beating of his life. My mother only found out about the whole thing when the summons came—because the lawyer was suing my father for grievous bodily harm.

  I was at the hearing. I had a day off and my father told me he’d take me shopping for a suit afterwards.

  “And besides,” he said, “it don’t hurt to know your way around these situations. In life, you have to know how to handle women and judges. Besides, it’ll be a laugh, you won’t be bored.”

  It was, indeed, a laugh. The lawyer wasn’t doing too well in the way of witnesses because my father, it turned out, had staked him out early in the morning when there was no one in the office and thrashed him one-to-one. His assistant and the secretary, who arrived only after my father had left, could only state that the office was “in a terrible state”, that there were signs of a struggle, and that the lawyer had shown them his injuries. As to where he’d got those injuries, of course, they couldn’t say, and since the lawyer had no proof other than the doctor’s report, my father could have easily won if he’d denied everything. Three out of four “respectable” people would have done so, but the roguish Dappermishka did not. Why not? It seems it wouldn’t have been enough of a “laugh” for him; he was an actor through and through, and he wanted a chance to perform. You could see he was preparing for his role, and I have to say he gave a sterling performance. He stood before the judge the very figure of upstanding decency, the model citizen, the famous “simple, God-fearing Hungarian” you heard so much about back in those days. He gave a speech that went something like this:

  “Your Honour! I’m a simple man, but even I know the law won’t convict you without proof. But I hold justice even higher than the law, so I’ll tell you plain and simple that I did give that man a beating, and a terrific one at that. I’m sorry that, in doing so, I was forced to break the law, but since—as I say—I hold justice even higher than the law, I’ll tell you straight that if he was to go around insulting my wife again, I’d do the same all over. Because, Your Honour,” he said, his voice hitting a sudden crescendo, “the kind of man that don’t stand up for his woman is the kind of man that don’t stand up for his country, and I’m the kind of man that stands up for both, and if you need proof, you have before you a plaintiff with a face full of bruises and these here medals.” He laid out three medals for bravery (one of them gold) in front of the judge.

  The lawyer interrupted sardonically:

  “That woman isn’t even your wife!”

  “I’d stand up for your wife, and all!” my father retorted. “Because I’m a God-fearing Hungarian, and a God-fearing Hungarian will stand up for every woman. And anyone who won’t,”
he shrugged with a smile, “is the kind of ‘man’ the plaintiff is.”

  The audience began to giggle, and the judge called them to order twice, but I deeply suspect he was tempted to laugh right along with them. Yes, Dappermishka was playing his part well—he had already made his opponent ridiculous.

  But the best was still to come. The judge asked the lawyer if he really had called my mother a thief. The lawyer denied it furiously, but his maid, whom my father had called as a witness, swore that he had indeed called her a thief, though the shirt had later turned up. This the lawyer admitted, but continued to protest the word “thief”.

  “How do you know what I said to the laundrywoman?” he snapped at the maid. “You weren’t even there when the whole thing happened.”

  “Weren’t there?” said the pretty maid. “You trying to say I’m lying? You’d better watch it, sir, ’cause I’ve got a fiancé too!”

  There was loud laughter.

  “Silence!” cried the judge, but you could see he was on my father’s side.

  In the interests of historical accuracy, I should say that from a conversation I happened later to overhear, I found out that the maid really had not been present when the argument took place. As to why she swore to the opposite and sacrificed her position to do so, I don’t know, but it’s also best not to ask. The fact is that my father had “talked” with her ahead of time.

  In the end, thanks to the “attenuating circumstances”, he got off with a fine of just a few pengős, which made my father very angry, but not on account of the money. Something else was bothering him.

  “If I’d known the whole thing was going to be this cheap,” he told me when we were finally alone, “I’d have bashed his brains in, so help me God.”

  Then he did an impression of the judge, the lawyer, and above all himself in the role of the “God-fearing Hungarian” that had my mother and me in stitches. I’ve met a lot of people who could do impressions of other people since then, but no one, not anywhere, ever, who could do such a merciless impression of themselves.