Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  Her eyelashes gave a flutter; she opened her eyes with difficulty.

  “It’s over there on the dresser,” she mumbled sleepily, and said something else I didn’t understand.

  “What is?”

  “My purse,” she repeated a little tersely. “Take some money.”

  “How much?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  I obediently got out of bed, but when I put my foot on the floor, it wobbled under me. I grabbed the headboard of the bed, but the bed, too, was wobbling, the walls were shaking, and the room turned slowly, heavily, on its side. How unusual, I thought. Must get to the bottom of that. I thought about it for a long time, and finally realized. Aha! Of course. I’m drunk, that’s all. All right, come on, where’s that dresser?

  The floor by the dresser slanted steeply. Hadn’t noticed that before. Strange. I had to keep holding on to the furniture.

  The purse really was on the dresser. I picked it up, looked at it, pondered. Then I suddenly realized I didn’t understand at all.

  “What am I supposed to do with the money?” I asked.

  She did not reply. Was she sleeping? I felt my way to the bed, purse in hand.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing it to her.

  “Let me sleep,” she groaned, turning angrily away.

  I looked at the purse, confused. What did she want with it? I wondered. What does she want with me? Here I was, and I didn’t understand a thing.

  But she’s my lover! I thought suddenly, repeating the word to myself with the same obsessive effort with which you try and fix the memory of a dream at the moment of waking: my lover! It sounds impossible, I thought.

  There she lay, naked, spreadeagled; I had slept with her last night, had just got up from beside her, and yet I still could not believe it. I watched her like someone spying on a woman in the building opposite through binoculars, a naked woman lying on the bed, her legs apart. She seems so close, and yet you know that she’s so far away: over there, over there.

  I was drunk, and sixteen, and couldn’t let it rest. I leant closer to her, closer, ever closer. I could feel her breath, but it was as if the distance were still the same. It was in vain that I approached, I couldn’t get close to her. I saw a mouth that was silent, two eyes that remained closed, I saw arms and legs, breasts and loins, pretty, indecipherable hieroglyphs that told me nothing. She was a woman, and she was beautiful. That’s all I knew.

  “Terrible!” I said, frightened by the sound of my own voice.

  She didn’t move a muscle. She was sleeping deeply, calmly, infuriatingly close. The light illuminated only half her body—her face remained in shadow. Her hair looked almost black on her head, but lower, where the light hit, it burned a golden red, like a fiery exclamation mark with no point beneath, a sweet, ominous warning. She’s beautiful, I thought, with a shiver. Beautiful and terrible. I must make sure they don’t see me in the corridor.

  I felt my way to the bathroom. My face looked so alien when I spotted it in the mirror as I was dressing, I seemed to be seeing it for the very first time. I stared at my reflection in alarm. There was something I hadn’t learnt, I thought anxiously, and something I had. Oh well, I shrugged, you could only say it in a poem anyhow. The important thing was that they didn’t see me in the corridor.

  No one saw me in the corridor. I did, however, bump into Franciska on the service staircase. Drop dead, I thought, but otherwise the incident made no impression. I knew Franciska’s memory would serve, and he wouldn’t forget his “car accident”.

  Just don’t let Elemér see me like this! I prayed, because Franciska reminded me of Elemér and at the thought of meeting him, I trembled. I knew, even in the state I was in, that he was the only one I could trust completely, that he was the only one who would never—under any circumstances—rat on me, and yet I was still afraid of him, afraid only of him and no one else, and the strange thing about it was that I didn’t find that strange at all.

  I listened for a long time before I went into the changing room, because I was afraid I’d find him there. But there was no one in there. Little puddles glinted on the floor; I noted that the boys on the day shift had already washed and dressed, which is to say it was past eight o’clock. The problem was, I didn’t know by how much. I usually met up with Elemér at half past eight, and I was afraid he was waiting for me at the front door. I dressed incredibly slowly to kill the time, though, as it turned out, there was no need. It was well past eight thirty by that point, and there was no one waiting at the door. This made me so happy that I started singing in the street, pretty loudly, too. I got plenty of looks from passers-by, but what did I care for them? I wasn’t afraid of them. I wasn’t afraid of anyone of woman born—and even of the Son of God, all I asked was that he let me sleep a while. But that of course meant getting home first, which turned out to be quite a complicated business.

  The problem was the trams. There were lots of trams in Pest that morning. If you wanted to go home, you had to select, from that multitude, the one that happened to be going where you wanted to go. The prospective passenger, in order to achieve this, had to be equipped with reason, decent eyesight and presence of mind, but also with a little luck—without which, of course, the whole enterprise was doomed—they’d manage to get through it. That was not the hard part. The problem with public transport was that at a certain point you had to get off the tram you had invested so much time and energy in getting on to, and what’s more, you had to get off at a specific stop. There were lots of stops in Újpest on that morning, and the careless conductors would mostly only wake you at the terminus, spitting distance from the end of the earth, where even hedgehogs only went to sleep. In other words, you had to get off, and then get on again: and that seemed an impossible task. It was, I think, merely a happy coincidence that—despite all that—I managed to make it home.

  The “folks” weren’t home. I went into the room, where I faced a further set of difficulties. The shutters were closed and I couldn’t find the light switch in the dark. It wasn’t in its usual place, though I clearly remembered it being there the day before. This latest complication got me downhearted. I swore so hard that the light turned itself on in fright, which—what with everything else that had happened—surprised me not one bit. Besides, it wasn’t entirely impossible that Manci had put it on, because Manci was home, as she almost always was at this time, and that did, after all, surprise me a little.

  “Isn’t it odd?” I shook my head.

  Manci giggled infuriatingly.

  “Well,” she said, “looks like you’ve been at the bottle, dear.”

  “Got a problem with that?” I asked menacingly.

  “On the contrary!” she assured me, and went back to bed. “Come on.”

  “What d’you want?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Just the opposite of what you want, dear.”

  That was too complicated for me. All these complications!

  “I don’t understand,” I muttered, “but I don’t care.”

  “Well, then, come on.”

  I went, and threw myself down on the bed, but Manci was not satisfied.

  “Take your clothes off,” she said.

  “Leave me alone,” I growled. “I’m so sleepy!”

  But Manci insisted I take my clothes off. I was fed up with these constant complications. I even thought I might take my clothes off, after all, but then I kept forgetting about the thing over and over again because meanwhile I would doze off. Finally, Manci got out of bed and started taking my clothes off for me.

  “Excellent solution,” I said, and snoozed on.

  But Manci was insistent.

  “Stand up,” she said after a while. “I can’t get your trousers off like this.”

  All right. I stood up. But then she said:

  “Now sit down.”

  Suddenly my eyes were wide open. Nothing’s easy today, is it? I thought.

  Manci pulled down my trousers. I looked on in amusement.r />
  “Hey, you’re not blonde at all!” I said.

  “You only just notice?” she giggled.

  “I didn’t understand before,” I replied gravely. “But I understand now. None of us dare to be the way we are.”

  “I can’t get your shirt off like this,” she said. “Lift up your arms.”

  “Wait,” I gestured. “I have to think something through. Yes. Of course.” I examined her body attentively. “You see,” I said as I guided my hand down her body the way the Schoolmaster had used to on the map when he was teaching us about mountains and rivers. “All this you can understand. You can understand you, Manci. If you go closer to you, then you’re closer, and if you go far away, you’re far away. You dye your hair, and it’s easy to know why. Everything’s plain and simple.” I gave her cheeks a fatherly pat. “Maybe it’s better if a woman’s not clever,” I said. “But then again,” I wondered aloud, “who knows? Trees are also not clever, if you look at it that way, and yet we don’t know a thing about them. What do you know about trees?”

  Manci seemed annoyed by the trees.

  “Don’t ask such difficult questions,” she said. “What am I? A scientist?”

  “Scientist!” I waved dismissively. “They only know what they can see. Or what other people have seen before them, you know what I mean? But as to why things are the way they are, and how it all started, and how it’ll end . . . what do they know about that? Hey, leave me alone!” I snapped, because she was pulling at my shirt again. “Where was I again? Oh yes. That scientists only know what they can see. Well, there it is, you see. What can a single person see, even the wisest person? Only hieroglyphs, Manci, only hieroglyphs, and nothing else. Life’s written in hieroglyphs. Remember that, Manci, it’s very important. Everything you see, it’s all hieroglyphs. Some you can decipher, some you can’t, and the scientists have a little breakthrough every now and then, but a few years later it turns out that the text is incoherent anyway. Now I know, now and then you do decipher a line or two, and start to get a vague hint of what it’s all about, but that’s so little, Manci. So precious little, and yet it’s so much you can’t even say it with words. It’s more like music—you feel the rhythm. You see? The rhythm, like with a line in a poem. Yes!” I said, jumping up, “I think I’m finally on the right track. You can feel that life wasn’t written in prose. It has a strict metre, like a classical poem, and it has unbreakable rules and laws. It’s all a poem, Manci, a great big poem! And the lines rhyme. D’you see?” I grabbed her hand. “They rhyme!”

  “All right,” she said, with an unfathomable calm. “They rhyme.”

  “But with what?” I asked, getting caught up in the moment. “Don’t you get it? The other line is missing. It’s missing the rhyme. The rhyme, Manci!” I cried. “Now do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “Of course,” she nodded. “Your mother told me you write poems. Now be a good boy and lift up your arms. That’s it. At last!” she sighed, because she’d finally managed to get my shirt off. “Go on and lie down, dear. Move over a bit, leave some room for me. That’s better.”

  With that, she switched off the light and lay down beside me. It was dark, it was quiet, it was unbearably hot, and it smelt of our bodies. I was still thinking of The Great Poem. Manci, however, had something else in mind. The minutes passed. Suddenly, I noticed something about myself.

  It was a physical phenomenon, a well-known and not at all alarming phenomenon, but I observed it like a panicked researcher who has just tested an experimental serum on himself and has realized—from some apparently minor symptom—that something’s gone wrong with the experiment and the conclusion runs counter to the theory. Could my body really do it? I wondered in revulsion, and I fell to thinking the way only wise old scientists and young poets can. But I don’t want her, I told myself, not even my body wants her. I’m disgusted by her, I’m thinking of someone else. So who wants me to want her? Is it “nature”? What does “nature” want? What does it want from us people? What does all this mean? Where is the corresponding rhyme?

  “No!” I yelled at Manci and drew away in disgust.

  Manci didn’t pay much attention to such protestations, and it was fairly indifferently that she asked:

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t,” I said softly, but it seems there was something in my voice that shocked her.

  She let me go.

  “Hey,” she asked me in a changed tone. “You ain’t got some disease, do you?”

  I was about to say “no”, but then I remembered Gyula and I thought, if I had what he had, or at least said I did, then . . .

  “Is that a yes?” Manci said, more as a statement than a question, and when I still did not respond, she snapped: “Tell me!”

  “Yes,” I finally spat out.

  “The clap?”

  “Yes,” I consented.

  Manci sat up.

  “Her Excellency?” she asked mockingly.

  “Fool!” I snapped and wanted to slap her. But the anger cleared the fug of alcohol from my head, and I was suddenly sober—frighteningly sober. “I caught it off one of the maids,” I said quickly, hoarsely. “Works at the hotel.”

  “And what did Her Excellency have to say about it?”

  The question hung in the air as if suspended on a wire. I didn’t respond. I had been lying for months that she was my lover, and now, when it was finally true, I couldn’t say a word about her. It was as if my blood, too, had drained away with my drunkenness, and I lay cold and lifeless on the bed, dying of shame.

  “Manci,” I said, “what I told you about that woman, it’s . . . not a word of it is true. She really does live in the hotel, but . . . I can tell you now . . . I . . . don’t even know her. I’ve never so much as spoken to her.”

  “You don’t say!” Manci laughed. “You really think I swallowed all that? Come on, dear. If you’d made up some fallen lady or some old, rich crone . . . But the wife of a minister, a real lady . . .” She began to laugh once more. It came from the heart, without mockery or malice, the way you laugh at some innocent youthful misdemeanour. “I’ve heard it all before!” she shrugged, and her voice was almost maternal. “It’s the only way some people can get off,” she explained, and began recounting “cases” with the chilling detachment of which only doctors and prostitutes are capable.

  I listened, appalled, my head woozy, and suddenly a word came to me: stars. She’d said something about the stars . . . but what? It had been so pretty.

  Manci was telling me about a brothel in Kiskőrös, where . . .

  I fell asleep.

  •

  I dreamt something terrible. Her Excellency had noticed that I had no underpants. It was in the bedroom; I was undressing hastily in my excitement. The wind outside was howling, the rain lashing at the windows. She was lying in bed and talking about the stars. I began to think I’d got it wrong and had imagined the whole thing, but when I tried to get into bed beside her, she pushed me away in disgust.

  “Did you think I hadn’t noticed?” she asked in that high, singsong voice, and snatched up the receiver, eyes flashing. “Get out!” she screamed, “or I’ll tell the Major!”

  I pelted down the stairs, but spotted Elemér in the bend, and . . .

  I woke with a start. The shutters were now half open; Manci must have opened them when she was dressing. I blinked sleepily in the half-light. Outside, it was still day, the late afternoon light glowed red on the window opposite, and the sky peered into the courtyard with bloodshot eyes. Manci must have been off somewhere in town, my parents weren’t home yet, and the flat was empty and quiet—you could hear the dripping of the kitchen tap.

  I sat up. There was a chair beside the bed; on it lay my shirt. Even its patches were patched and I had outgrown it so badly that it didn’t come down to my navel. It was my only shirt. I looked at it and wondered, terrified, what would happen if one day I really did have to get undressed in front of her . . . one day? Perhaps tonight!


  I jumped out of bed and started digging around in the wardrobe. My father had brand-new underclothes—I tried on a shirt and some underpants. Lately, we’d acquired a big, gold-framed mirror above the sink. My father had bought it from Márika and Árpád when they got down on their luck. Later, whenever I remembered that afternoon, I would always hold that mirror partly responsible for what happened. It started here, before it; as to what, exactly, I did not yet know. At the time, it was just a shirt and a pair of underpants. That’s how the part of my youth which I still cannot think of without blushing began.

  Don’t get me wrong—I could see, even without looking in the mirror, that you could have got two of me into the shirt and the underpants. But in my eyes, the fact that I was wearing underpants at all was a big thing, and that my shirt did not stop at my navel. But something happened within me when I looked in the mirror. I was no longer seeing myself through my own eyes, but through hers. I could feel the sharp, critical gaze of the grey eyes, and could see that strange, wide mouth stretch into a mocking smile, and the thought that this could actually happen that evening made me completely lose my head. I swore to myself that come hell or high water, I would buy a shirt and underpants that evening. At first, I thought of asking my father for money, but then I realized it would be no good. Clothing shops closed at six, and it was now half past. I didn’t know what to do. That’s when I remembered the Constable.

  It’s not easy to explain just who the Constable was. When he had first come into the hotel, Elemér had glanced after him in shock and said, quietly and a little taken aback:

  “But that’s the Constable!”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The Constable,” he repeated. “That’s what all the workers call him in Angyalföld.”

  “Why? Is he a detective?”