Temptation

  Besides, the UFA was amazing. On warm summer nights like these, the roof of the cinema would slide open soundlessly so that you found yourself, suddenly, beneath the sky. I sat there underneath the stars and waited for the miracle. But you know how it goes. The pretty women always sit somewhere else. I would end up beside a fat old crone who smelt of mice and breathed heavily, or at best a very young girl pressed tightly to her beau. As if I didn’t have enough trouble. The film was always some German mush—cheap, sickly, and affected—and often I would leave before the end. I thought of Elemér, who had explained more than once that the cinema was just another form of numbing opiate the bourgeoisie stuffed into the pipes of the proletariat so they would never wake up to reality. He’s right, I would think guiltily then, and head angrily home to study Socialism.

  But one time, I did indeed have an adventure. She came and sat beside me mid-performance. They were playing a woeful sentimental German melody. She came into my life to a musical accompaniment, if you will, like the prima donna in an opera. She was young, she was blonde, and she seemed beautiful in the dark. My arm began a careful conversation with hers, and by the end of the performance, I was holding her hand. God how exciting holding someone’s hand in the dark can be when you’re sixteen, and as passionate a sixteen-year-old as I was! There was music, there was darkness, they were kissing up on screen, and the stars winked above us. The whole thing was as unreal as the film they were showing, and so fine, so much finer!

  Here was my Fateful Encounter, my long-awaited Great Adventure . . . until they put the lights on.

  She wasn’t ugly. She was quite a pretty girl, in fact, but . . . so different to the way I had imagined her in the dark. Suddenly, I didn’t want her.

  “Can I walk you home?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied with a blush, wobbling her head like a bird.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  I started begging, but in vain.

  “Anyway, I ain’t going home,” she said at last. She drew her mouth tight in an affected way and kept wobbling her head as she talked. “I’m meetin’ someone.”

  That made me angry. That was women for you.

  “I see. I shan’t disturb you any longer, then,” I said curtly.

  She didn’t move.

  “It’s a nice evenin’,” she said. “Proper summer. I wonder what time it is?”

  “Midnight.”

  “D’you want to get a coffee?”

  “I thought you said you were meeting someone.”

  She started to giggle.

  “Oh, I was just sayin’ that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t let strangers take me out, if you must know.”

  “Am I really such a stranger?” I asked sentimentally, but all the while I was thinking of poor Gyula and his Mysterious Woman, whom he had met in much the same way one night. She must be quite a piece of work, too, I thought. Getting touchy-feely with strangers in the dark and going to cafés at midnight. “Why aren’t you sayin’ anything?” I continued, just as sentimentally.

  “Don’t ask so many questions,” she said. “You’ll get old before your time. So, you want to go to a caff or not?”

  Caff! What a word. I bet she’s got syphilis, too.

  “I’m sorry, but I really am meeting someone,” I said. “How about tomorrow?”

  “I told you I don’t let strangers take me out!”

  There was an edge to her voice now, and she turned away moodily. I didn’t say anything. We were still standing in front of the UFA. The crowd was starting to disperse, the lights had gone off in the cinema.

  “You’re a strange one,” she said after a while.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  All this back and forth was irritating me.

  “So when can I see you?”

  She didn’t reply; I could see she wanted me to keep asking. So I didn’t. We were now alone in front of the darkened cinema. Workers came out from inside with ladders and tools to put up the advertisement for the latest film above the entrance. The girl looked at the big colourful poster.

  “Looks good,” she said. “I’m goin’ to come and see it.”

  “When?”

  “None of your business,” she said, flashing her eyes at me flirtatiously, and looking back up at the poster. “Tomorrow, I think,” she said, as if by the by.

  “What time?”

  “Ten.”

  “Here, in front of the cinema?”

  “Oh, you’re so pushy!” she snapped. Then she said, “Make it quarter to.”

  “All right,” I nodded, though I knew, of course, that at quarter to ten I wouldn’t be here at all—I’d be in the hotel’s bar.

  I was glad when I finally got rid of her, but by the time the tram got to Újpest, I was sorry I hadn’t gone with her. The “caff” may not, after all, have cost very much, and afterwards we might have ended up in the Mauthner. Margit Island was not so far from the UFA, we could have walked out there, with “a little chat, a little food, a little this and that”, and then there on the island, among the ruins . . . I wanted to hit myself. Who was I waiting for, anyway? The fairy queen? Now I had to go home all by myself. Damn it all!

  I determined to buy a condom the very next day, and be wiser next time. But I didn’t buy the condom next day and was no wiser the next time. I was waiting, once more, for my Great Adventure, that Fateful Encounter, and ended up skulking off home to study Socialism again.

  I slept barely three or four hours at such times because Manci was usually home by seven and I didn’t want to bump into her. It did happen, it’s true, that she was out for days at a time, but you never knew when that would be, and I was still very much conscious of those two terrible weeks when I would check, trembling, every half-hour, if there were any “signs”. So I went to the hotel instead and accompanied Elemér to police headquarters.

  It went on like this for weeks. Then the time came when I could no longer even read. I would struggle over a book for hours, doggedly devouring the letters, but digest them I could not. In the end, I switched off the lamp, lay down and tried to sleep, but I would just end up tossing and turning in the dark, and needless to say my mind was not on Karl Marx. The images kept coming back again and again, like the chorus of a song: the dusky bedroom . . . the bed . . . the nightgown . . . the steamy bathroom. Her adjusting her stockings in the lift and there being nothing else above for a long, long way, save for that electrifying whiteness and the possibility that she wasn’t wearing anything at all, not even drawers. Or her sitting in bed, leaning over breakfast with her breasts peeking whitely out of her nightgown as it fell forward, knowing I could see and not pulling up the covers.

  “What a handsome boy!”

  “Isn’t he?”

  And then the previous András again and again, with whom she’d apparently had an affair, only by the time it passed midnight, I’d dropped all pretence of “apparently”. If she’d been with him, why not me? After all, she’d even called to me once; I could still hear her voice:

  “András . . . is that you?”

  Oh, if I hadn’t been so foolish then, I would have gone in there, and . . .

  That’s how it always started and the most shameful thing was that by three in the morning, I was no longer thinking of her at all—anyone would have done, anyone, even Manci. I would decide to wait for her again and again, but by the time it grew light I’d sobered up. Surely I wasn’t going to ruin my life for a single hour? Sleepily, my head pounding, I would scrape myself together and go talk Socialism with Elemér.

  Then one morning, I didn’t go. I dreamt that I was with Manci, but she had red hair and slightly slanted grey eyes, and then it was no longer Manci at all, but her, and then Manci after all, and everything happened the way it had that morning when I came home drunk. It was past seven when I started from my dream. It’s too late to get up now, I thought. If she comes home, she’ll find me here anyway, and if no
t, then what was the point of getting up? Besides, it was hardly likely she’d come home, it was past seven. But if she did come home, and if it happened to work out that way . . . After all, I hadn’t caught anything last time.

  She did come home, and it did work out that way. Afterwards, I was scared and revolted again and swore never again. But I didn’t catch anything this time, either, and on my next day off, I waited for her again. I was scared and revolted, and then the week after . . . It started all over again.

  And then one day I did buy the condom, and from then on I wasn’t scared. I did feel revulsion, it’s true, but it was a different kind of revulsion. It was a grown-up revulsion, a wise revulsion: I knew that by the end of the week, I would stop feeling it again.

  There was an assistant porter at the hotel who’d got malaria in the war. His illness kept coming back from time to time, but the assistant porter was no longer scared—he’d got used to it, like a dog to barking.

  “Oh dear,” he’d say two days before, “here comes the fever!”

  He went home, lay down, took his medication, and then a few days later he was back at his post as if nothing had happened.

  It’s the same with physical desire, I thought. It keeps coming back like malaria. And if, towards the end of the week, I couldn’t get to sleep, I too could say to myself:

  “Oh dear, here comes the fever!”

  But I was no longer frightened of it now, either. I had got used to it and knew the cure. I was no longer a child. I was a man: I was wise and low-down. I slept with Manci once a week, and the next day I was back at my post as if nothing had happened.

  The regularity of this life calmed me. I could read again, sleep again, and the misty sensation of guilt slowly evaporated out of me. I can still be a good Socialist, I reassured myself. After all, Manci, too, was working class, and, when you thought about it, a victim of the bourgeoisie.

  Her Excellency, of course, did not fit so comfortably into the “Socialist world view”. I tried not to think of her, and I more or less managed . . . for six days. On the seventh, lying in Manci’s bed, what had happened that first, drunken morning always happened again, with frightening regularity. It began with Manci asking about her, but later I talked about her even when she didn’t ask. She was always with us, and Manci looked more and more like her from week to week, after I’d turned out the lights. There were moments—dark, sick, insanely beautiful moments—when Manci no longer even existed: only her, her, her! Every week, once a week, I slept with a woman I hadn’t seen in four months.

  And then one night she came into the bar.

  17

  THERE WAS A HEATWAVE, it was the depths of low season, only a few people were still hanging around the bar. The jazz band took half-hour breaks, the waiters played blackjack in the kitchen. The porter, too, was playing blackjack; I was replacing him on the door. There was a warm, hazy rain, the air was suffocating. It must have been about two. I was listening dozily to the drumming of the rain, nodding off for minutes on end.

  And then suddenly there was her car before the door. There were four people in it: her, Whitewash, the oyster-faced Viennese armaments manufacturer and a man I’d never seen before. They greeted me loudly, in a tipsy cheer, when I opened the door of the car. They must have been out partying already—they were all drunk.

  She recognized me.

  “Oh, is that you, András?” she said in that high voice of hers. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you, Your Excellency.”

  She must have had a lot to drink, too. She was lounging sleepily in her seat, but in her eyes all the Devil’s bastard children were at play. She was beautiful like this, with her hair loose, carefree, and excited from the alcohol. I had never seen her like this. My heart beat fast.

  Scarecrow and the arms manufacturer got out first. I held the giant umbrella over them, took them to the door, and hurried back to the car. The unknown man was whispering a story into her ear, and she laughed a loud, trilling laugh.

  I had to wait. The rain drummed on the umbrella, I could feel my knees trembling. Who was this man?

  “Wait for the Deputy,” she said to the driver, “and then you can go home.”

  They finally got out. She grabbed on to me under the umbrella, the parliamentarian on the other side of me. He was wearing a top hat, so I had to lift the umbrella high, but that meant that the rain fell on the lady.

  “Hold it lower!” she said, and as I drew the umbrella down, I knocked off the Deputy’s hat.

  The wind caught the top hat and the Deputy had to run after it, because the lady was dragging me in towards the entrance. I was already opening the door for her when the man caught up with us, muddy top hat in hand.

  “Idiot!” he snapped at me softly, and gave me an almighty slap.

  It was so unexpected that by the time I realized what had happened, they were gone. I was furious. I was going to beat him to a pulp, right before her eyes, I decided, but at the same time, the sober peasant inside me said: No you won’t. They’d kick you out, blacklist you, and in the end you couldn’t even give him a real beating. The staff would intervene to protect him, and then the state, the law and the whole wide world, and who would be on your side? They’d drag you down to the police station, beat you unconscious again with the butt of their guns, throw you in a cell, send you to the reformatory, because you’re just a penniless boy and they can do with you whatever they want. No they can’t! rebelled my pride, but all the while I knew full well they could, and my helplessness just made me angrier. Then I felt something warm on my face.

  I touched it—it was blood. At the sight of the blood, I lost what little common sense I still had left. It was my father’s blood, a thick, dangerous blood, and my mother’s peasant good sense was no good any more. I could feel that I was going to do something anyone in their right minds would never do, but as to what, I wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll pay their price,” I mumbled, the anger coursing inside me as if the Devil himself were spurring it on.

  Suddenly, I heard someone calling my name. It was the head waiter. I went in. He looked at me as if I’d run away with the hotel funds. He was a butlerish, bald, stocky man, a real “bicyclist” by nature, as Elemér would say. He kicked down and kissed up, and I—of course—was beneath him, right down under the sole of his shoe. He grabbed my sleeve roughly and drew me aside into a corner.

  “What happened?” he hissed.

  I told him. He shook his head as he listened; that he wasn’t shaking it on account of the slap was perfectly clear to me.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” he said ominously. “But for now go have a wash and get yourself to the bar. The Deputy wants to see you.”

  I should have gone, but I didn’t move. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. I was trembling with anger.

  “Frightened?” he grinned, showing his false teeth.

  “Not a bit,” I snapped. “I’d have gone to see him even without his calling me. No one goes around slapping me.”

  “Cut it out!” he growled at me softly. “You’ll be lucky if that slap is all you get. Or don’t you know who it was that slapped you?”

  No, I didn’t know. The head waiter told me, and manliness or no manliness, when I heard the name, I trembled. It was a terrifying name, and not just for me. For the Deputy, before he became a member of parliament, had been a professional murderer: one of the most blood-thirsty ringleaders of the White Terror. He murdered—and had others murder—innocent people by the hundreds, with Miklós Horthy, the Regent, Admiral, Supreme Warlord and Royal Hungarian Lord God Almighty’s highest blessing. He went after Communists and Jews, but as to who was a Communist or Jew, he himself decided; on the basis, what’s more, of how people paid—at least, that’s what they used to say in our village. For he’d been active down our way too: he’d made two hundred people dig their own graves in the nearby forest, and he’d buried more than one of them alive. We children had avoided the forest even eight years
later, because the villagers said invisible ghosts inhabited the trees, though by then they had long cleared away those two hundred graves, and besides we had had our “consolidation”, in case you didn’t know, which—in less elevated language—meant simply that the country had grown so weak from the blood it had lost in the war and three subsequent revolutions that there was no more need for such extrajudicial killings. We became a fine and civilized country, where people—rare though they were—who dared open their mouths were killed with the full blessing of the law. Their trials were held in public, and so that they couldn’t complain of mistreatment, our esteemed parliament had voted—both chambers—to legalize caning in such cases. With this judicially sanctioned caning, they could beat the accused until he signed a confession for which they could “legally” hang him. It was no empty boast of Horthy’s, later, that Hitler and Mussolini had learnt at his knee. He really had been ahead of both, and the all-powerful British and French statesmen at the time who treated the representatives of democratic Hungary like mangy dogs were just as friendly with him as they later were with Hitler and Mussolini. And the murderers to whom he owed his position got, instead of the rope, cushy, comfortable jobs; that was how this man, too, had become a member of parliament. In a secret ballot, he’d never have got ten votes, but in our “consolidated” country, they used to write, beside each peasant’s name, who they’d voted for and so even widows ended up “voting” for the man who’d murdered their husbands, for fear that if they didn’t, the candidate might come and kill their children, too. To cut a long story short, I’d really gone and picked my man.

  “What’s he want from me?” I asked the head waiter.

  “Well, I don’t think he wants to whisper sweet nothings in your ear,” he replied and flashed his false teeth once more. “All I’m saying is, keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you, and do as he says. Well, go on, then!”