Temptation

  “It’s on syndicalism,” he explained. “I don’t agree with it, but—” His sentence was suddenly interrupted. I followed his gaze, and my knees began to tremble.

  It was the Constable with his suitcases and “batman”.

  “Snitch!” Elemér whispered with a sour expression.

  At that moment, it seemed inconceivable to me that I had ever meant to buy anything from the Constable. I’m a low, dirty pig, I thought, but at the same time I hated Elemér as if he were the low, dirty pig.

  He signalled me to follow him into the corridor.

  “Will you wait for me tomorrow?” he asked when we got there.

  “I don’t know yet,” I shrugged.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  He looked at me, surprised, and I, too, was a little surprised at myself.

  “I went to the doctor this morning,” I lied, “and—”

  “Are you sick after all?” he interrupted impatiently.

  “No,” I said, getting into it, “I’m just exhausted from all these nights. Doctor told me to sleep more. So I can’t meet you in the mornings for a while.”

  Elemér said nothing. There was an awkward silence. He was clearly waiting for something further, but I wasn’t saying anything.

  “You take care of yourself, then,” he said finally, extending his hand, his expressionless face not letting on whether he was talking about my physical state or something completely different.

  I stayed out in the corridor, pacing anxiously up and down. If he’d come a few minutes later, I thought with a shudder, then . . .

  At that moment, the telephone rang. It rang in the kitchen and I could hear Iluci’s voice.

  “Yes, Your Ladyship, as you wish.”

  I forgot about Elemér completely. Was she talking to her?

  No, it wasn’t her. It was only some lady ordering a couple of martinis. Tonight, she’ll order a bottle of champagne, I thought with a shudder, and the old, ragged, patched shirt seemed to burst into flames over my heart. What if I have to take my clothes off in front of her?

  “Two martinis to 503!” Iluci called out the door.

  “Two martinis to 503!” the barman repeated mechanically.

  I suddenly turned around, rushed into the bar like a novice thief trying to fence something for the first time and went, my heart beating anxiously, up to the Constable.

  That’s how it all began.

  2

  AS SOON AS THE CONSTABLE HAD LEFT, I withdrew to the toilets and put on some gentleman’s cast-off shirt and underpants. Well, well, I smiled, you just have to be a little bit clever. She could ring for me now! I could have undressed before a princess.

  I examined myself in the mirror, satisfied. I liked the shirt, the underpants, I liked the world, and the life some gentleman had cast off; but somewhere deep inside me on the outskirts of reason, the secret police of guilt were tiptoeing after my thoughts, hot on their heels. My old shirt, which had served so faithfully during my seven lean years of poverty, I tore into pieces and cast into the toilet. I watched it flush away with the water like a murderer disposing of the evidence, convinced that no one—any longer—could prove a thing. I was seized by some wild, frenetic cheer. I was whistling when I went back to the bar. From then on, I whistled a lot.

  The bar was still empty. I looked into the kitchen, had a glass of champagne and then ambled over to reception to see if she was home. She wasn’t—her key was hanging under her room number. I went back to the kitchen and had another glass of champagne. For goodness’ sake, I bet even Marx wore underpants!

  “Forever young!” I said cheerfully to Iluci, too cheerful to know what to do with my happiness, and told her a dirty joke.

  At last, the first guests arrived. The air soon filled with cigarette smoke, the band struck up their jazz, and the champagne started doing its thing inside my head. I calmed down. Champagne, jazz, smoke, the night—that all meant one thing: her. My fantasy, that crazy painter, coloured madly the random, skewed images of desire. In my mind, I was already in her bed; I could barely hear it when someone tried to talk to me. Every fifteen minutes I went out to check if her key was still hanging in reception, and about midnight, when I discovered that it wasn’t, I became so dizzy that the supervisor on duty asked me:

  “Something the matter, son?”

  “The air’s not so good down here,” I mumbled, and mopped the sweat from my brow.

  My heart was beating like the village bell in a fire. She’s home! She’s home! I ran back to the bar and waited for her call. I was constantly hanging around the kitchen door, and when the phone rang downstairs, my heart skipped a beat. My imagination was in seventh heaven, as more genteel writers would say. The truth, however, is that my head was full of very earthly things indeed. I know it doesn’t do to talk of such “prosaic” things when discussing love, but the fact remains that I was perpetually terrified of sweating through my shirt. I kept rushing to the bathroom to wash, but in vain—a few minutes later, I was sweating heavily once more. I had to keep rinsing my mouth, too, because the way God constructed man’s mouth, even the thought of the sweetest, most heavenly delights make it sour. I awaited my miracles sweating heavily, bitter-mouthed, and constantly worried about my body odour from all the sweat, or the way my breath would smell; but at the same time, the lines of a nascent poem were humming within me, because poems and miracles are born not with fragrant scents and midwives, but amid secret sorrows, like a poor peasant child.

  It was already one and she hadn’t rung for me. The phone kept ringing in the kitchen, more and more frequently, as it usually did between one and two. This was “cognac hour”, as the waiters jokingly called it, because it was the hour when gentlemen would apparently enquire in the back of the taxi home or during the last dance in some bar if “you wouldn’t care, dear, to come and have a cognac back at mine?” The cognac was really flowing that night, but room 205 ordered no champagne.

  By two, I was completely overwrought with excitement. The bar had started to empty out, people were ready to go home. There was only one smallish party left at one of the tables, and the waiters were starting to give them looks. I didn’t know what to make of her silence. Was she angry that I’d become so forceful at the end? No, that can’t be it, I told myself. If she really hadn’t wanted “it” to happen, then why had she told me to take my clothes off, why had she invited me into her bed?

  I hadn’t given that much thought till now. I had told myself that women always play hard to get. But now that I was going over the previous night, I suddenly knew that this was more than that. I saw again the revulsion on her face, I felt her once more kick, bite and scratch me . . . Why, why, why? I asked myself, clueless. For she had done things even Manci would never have done; why was she so put off by “that”?

  The more I thought about it, the less I understood. Would this be what the boys called a “perversion”? I’d heard plenty about “perversions” in the hotel, and had seen quite a few things through the keyholes, but this—or anything like it—never. It was only now that I understood the boys asking each other with a sheepish smile:

  “Say, old boy, has it ever happened to you that . . .”

  How I would have liked to ask! But who, who, who? Elemér was my only friend, and you couldn’t talk to him about these sorts of things.

  “You asleep?” the head waiter growled, because the guests were already making their way to the cloakroom, and I hadn’t so much as moved. “Perhaps you’d be so kind as to get back to work!”

  It was closing time. I went through the motions mechanically, then headed off down to the kitchen to watch the telephone till Iluci, too, closed up. I kept hoping, till the very last moment, that she’d call for me, but she didn’t.

  The telephone did not ring.

  I was confused. Had Exfix come home?

  No. Exfix was not home, as I established beyond a shadow of a doubt next day. He was in Geneva, at the League of Nations as a “government expe
rt”.

  She didn’t call me. Every night, I turned up at the hotel in a fresh shirt and underpants, and waited by the telephone in vain. The Constable, meanwhile, had delivered the new suit as well, and I had a necktie, handkerchief, socks and one of those silk whatsits. The only thing I didn’t have is the reason I got all the rest. I was hardly eating, hardly sleeping—I was barely alive. I used to wake with a start after an hour or two of sleep and spend hours weeping alone, like a starving infant.

  But one night, about a week after our night together, she came into the bar. She walked past me the way that mere mortals like myself cannot walk past even a dog. The only people capable of such perfect indifference are those whose ancestors have already spent three or four hundred years taking no account of “the staff”, and never would until the day they beat them to death. I kid you not, she didn’t so much as turn away—if only she had! That would still have held some message for me, something to remind me that I’m a person, too, a person who—for whatever reason—the other does not wish to acknowledge. She was with a big group and could have done it without attracting any attention—but no, why should she? She looked at me, and when I greeted her, she even nodded. Her gaze was neither “cold” nor “disdainful”, the way you often hear; oh no, not at all. She smiled. She smiled the way queens smile at adoring crowds, and from that smile you couldn’t so much as tell if she knew me or not. She was as impersonal as a lighthouse that projects its beam mechanically onto everything that comes within range and then sweeps on, high above the waves, stark and unapproachable; and as far as it’s concerned the human race could drown out there in the dark—what was that to it?

  They didn’t stay long in the bar. I spied after them when they left; I saw her get into the lift alone and was seized by some desperate hope that perhaps I had imagined it all and tonight, she would call me. I couldn’t accept the inevitable even after we’d closed. I sneaked back into the kitchen after everyone had left and watched the telephone till six in the morning. It was only then that I abandoned all hope.

  The next night, however, the head waiter called me over.

  “Um . . .” he croaked, a little flustered, “205 called for you. You’re to take up a bottle of champagne.”

  •

  She didn’t say a word as to why she hadn’t called for me, and when I asked her, she looked at me as if the champagne bottle were asking why she hadn’t ordered it before.

  “I don’t really know,” she said absently, as if she didn’t like to veer too far from the matter in hand, and pointed a little impatiently at her glass. “Pour, would you, please?”

  We drank, and everything turned out the same as last time. This time, too, she was in the living room when I came in, lying on the couch, smoking. The light was off; only the moon lit the room through the open balcony door. It was a warm, rich July night with a full moon, the sky was crammed with stars. She can’t have been home long—her ermine cape was still hanging off the arm of one of the chairs, fallen half to the ground, the way she had cast it carelessly aside. She was wearing a silver-studded evening dress and nothing underneath. I had a chance, later, to establish that beyond all doubt, but only by eye. She didn’t let me touch her, though she was drunk—perhaps even more drunk than last time. By dawn, she was full of such wild ideas that even the mere mention of them belongs more in a medical textbook, but she would not take off her dress. She only gave into my pleading when I was already half crazy with desire.

  “On one condition,” she said.

  “What?”

  She looked at me and was silent.

  “You know.”

  “Yes,” I nodded excitedly.

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  I promised her everything before we went into the bedroom, but in the end I still couldn’t keep my word. We once more ended up in a tussle and I had to force myself on her, in the strictest sense of the word. Afterwards, she went straight to sleep, and now here I was lying beside her open-eyed, hopelessly confused, and understanding just as little as before.

  Outside, it was getting light. The birds struck up in the nearby park, the early-morning cargo barge hooted on the Danube.

  She suddenly shifted.

  “Get up!” she mumbled grumpily and pulled the covers higher.

  “Are you angry?”

  She didn’t reply. There was silence, unbearable silence. Suddenly, I felt I couldn’t stand the tension.

  “Why is that you don’t want it?” I whispered.

  She didn’t reply to that, either.

  “For the love of God,” I begged, “tell me!”

  “I don’t want it,” she answered, terse and curt, “and if you’re ever that forceful again . . .”

  “I won’t be!” I swore, and leant over her, imploring. “Are you angry?”

  “Let me sleep!” she said and turned away.

  That was how we left it. I was convinced, when I stepped out the door, that I would never cross that threshold again. But that night, the very same night, the head waiter called me and, hoarsely, with a strange, beetling look, he once more said:

  “Take a bottle of champagne up to 205.”

  That night, I kept my promise, and everything was the way she wanted. But she didn’t call me for six days after that, and by then I was so wild that I couldn’t control myself. She threatened; I swore, once again; and from then on, that was how it went. For a while, I managed to restrain myself, and then I would once more break my promise. Then she would scratch and bite me all over, beside herself; I could barely control her. My body was constantly full of scars and there were often bloodstains on my shirt, like on a murderer’s just after the deed.

  The more I was with her, the less I understood her. She was revolted by what was, for me, the fulfilment, but when I tried to control myself, it seemed to get her even more het up. She wouldn’t rest until I was completely wild, and later I got the impression that she enjoyed it when I stopped being a man and behaved with her more like an animal in heat. But then why did she threaten me afterwards? I asked myself—there being no one else to ask—since I never got a halfway decent answer out of her. She was always drunk when I went up; she never called for me sober. Afterwards, she went straight to sleep, and I already feared her waking.

  She was unbearable when she awoke. She loathed me, herself, the whole world, and was full of revulsion and cruelty. Whenever I could, I sneaked out while she was asleep, but sometimes she started from her sleep and would chase me out of bed like a dog that had climbed in uninvited. There was so much disdain, anger and hatred in her eyes that more than once, on my way home, I said to myself: never again, never again! But when she didn’t call for me, I would have been capable of anything—in the very darkest sense of the word—even the deepest of humiliations.

  The worst part was I never knew when she would call. There were times when I was with her every night for a week, and there were times she wouldn’t call for two weeks in a row. I couldn’t call her on the phone—she’d forbidden that right at the start, and the idea of just going up to see her or talking to her in the corridor or the lobby was, of course, out of the question. At those times, I used to pace up and down like a fever patient, my heart beat wildly, I had horrible visions. And if, after these nightmarish days, already afraid of more of them to come, I would ask her when I could come again, she would always just shrug.

  “I don’t know,” she replied absently. Or she would say: “Maybe tonight. Maybe never.”

  I often felt she didn’t even really consider me human, that I was to her like Cesar, or even less: a household object, and nothing more, that she could pick up and put down as and when she pleased.

  My life consisted of waiting. By day for the night, by night for the call. Whatever happened between two meetings I lived in a sort of semi-dream, a narcosis, like an operation you just have to get through, somehow.

  My nerves were completely shredded by the constant waiting. I became unbearably tense, quick to a
nger, impossible to be around. Sometimes I wouldn’t say a word to anyone for days, and sometimes the words would pour out of me like some kind of emotional diarrhoea. Then I would talk for hours, yapping away at all and sundry. I became confused, rushed and distracted; I was totally unreliable. I didn’t care a fig for my work; that I didn’t get fired was only thanks to the midnight orders of champagne.

  My head was like a rubbish bin. It was full of the flashy rags of vanity and, deep down at the bottom, under the dust and ash, there were scraps of thoughts, decaying feelings and half-buried convictions in a hopeless mess, mixed with the broken toys of desire.

  I finally got hold of the English textbook that once meant Patsy, America and freedom, but now that I had it, I didn’t get anywhere with it. Patsy had passed, like childhood; I never thought of America any more and found it impossible to study. I couldn’t even read, and at that time, couldn’t write. My only spiritual sustenance was the cinema and the radio. I spent all my spare time at the cinema and would always sit beside the radio at the hotel when I had nothing else to do. I didn’t care about anything but her. I lived in a dreamlike state, whistled a lot, and was bored a great deal.

  I became a hideous glutton. I got a taste for sweets, and my pockets were always full of treats and chocolate. I was constantly eating, and yet grew thinner by the day. I was frighteningly pale, there were dark circles beneath my eyes, and sometimes, at dawn, I would feel strange tremors in my heart.

  I grew foppish and vain. I covered myself with perfumes and pomade, and indulged my body the way old ladies indulge their senile lapdogs. I lost all sense of proportion. I kept buying things, throwing money out of the window, though it failed to give me real pleasure.

  I was tortured by some vague sense of guilt all the time. As soon as I reached the poorer parts of the city, I was seized by a strange, incomprehensible anxiety. I was ashamed of my fine new clothes and was as embarrassed in the shops there as if I’d killed someone, or worse, and was now spending their money, though I proved to myself clear as day that I had no reason to feel guilty. I was spending my own money, and it was nobody else’s business. My mother didn’t need my income. I was keeping up with the Constable’s instalments, and if the others hadn’t realized I’d broken the boycott till now, it wasn’t likely that they’d realize in the future. As for the classless society . . . Well yes, there was that. I did still believe in it, just like before, only . . . was it my fault that they couldn’t make it a reality? I can’t change the world all by myself. You have to live somehow till the revolution comes, and why should I live badly, if I can live well? At this point, I would usually start whistling, softly, arrogantly, the way I’d seen upper-class gentlemen do it, but in vain—I couldn’t whistle my anxiety away.