Temptation

  The soil, of which I was the rightful son, now seemed to slip from beneath my feet. I seemed to be walking a perpetual tightrope between Their Excellencies’ suite and the Újpest slums. I belonged neither here nor there, or rather where I did belong I didn’t want to belong, and where I wanted to belong, I did not belong. My soul was homeless, and in vain did I seek shelter for it. You couldn’t talk seriously with the Countess. After a few minutes, she was seized by a strange anxiety; I could see she felt uncomfortable and then she would gesture me to stop, flustered and tense.

  “Forget about all that. Let’s drink.”

  It’s not that she was stupid, far from it. She was clever, and not only with an animal intelligence. There was nothing catty about her, no; if I had to compare her to an animal, she was more like a leopard or a lion. But the truth is that, despite all her craziness, she was a clear-headed, well-read and surprisingly worldly person with a refined—a slightly over-refined—intelligence, independent and often original. Occasionally, towards dawn, when I thought she was already dead drunk, she would shed light on such dark corners of life with the occasional flare of a word or a casually dropped remark that I noticed them in awe and wonder.

  Women like her are usually labelled “crazy”, “sick” or—even more conveniently—“corrupted”. But these are just words. Now I know that she was no more corrupted than the class to which she belonged and the age in which she lived. When I think back now to what the great and the good wrote and thought in those days, I’m surprised to see the extent to which her outlook matched theirs. This was that post-war “disillusioned” world view, the view of the “lost generation”, the “neue Sachlichkeit”, and various literary isms, the whole of whose so-called philosophy essentially consisted of those shrugging and dismissive waves of the hand with which peasants, in their own rougher but truer language, used to say: forget it, son, nothing lasts for ever and there’s no use pissing in the wind. That was how the “disillusioned” thought; but when the wind turned, they turned with it, not rushing and randomly, but slowly and grindingly like a rusty weather wane, so no one would have anything on them. Because they were smart, cultured and enlightened, their clear-sightedness was not obscured by any kind of preconceptions—when it came to their own interests. They could see the writing on the wall, and the best of them even felt some remorse. They were like jaded, barren women who knew they had already eaten most of their bread and had only their past to look back on, a dubious past at that, and were therefore frantically searching—in a mood of abject Torschlusspanik—to bag a young man with a future. They slept in the soft beds of capitalism but they made fun of, and betrayed, them too—as one usually does with fat, rich husbands. They toyed with the idea of Marxism when that was the latest fashion, and something else when it was something else. Freudianism was their bible, it was this they used to explain everything, but deep down they didn’t believe in anything except French cooking and American dollars, and after 1929 they didn’t even believe in those. When the wind changed, they discovered “the little man”, about whom they knew as much as Her Excellency knew about me, and were about as close. “Social conscience” was the buzzword of their literature at the time, and their theatres, too, paraded poverty—mostly to the people causing it, because no one else could very well afford the extortionate ticket prices. The people buying the tickets liked “social conscience” because at that time they were all smart, well read and enlightened, and because writers, despite all their “social conscience” were never too harsh on their audiences. Their works were obscure, like places for secret rendezvous, and no less profit-seeking. The rich consumed their “social” dramas and novels avidly, whose “bitter taste” was just as appetizing as the bitterness of the almonds on their delicate pastries and cakes. If she had had any talent for writing, she would no doubt have had a glittering career: audiences would have been fascinated by her.

  I, too, was fascinated, no use denying it. I tried to imitate her, but at the same time there was some vague, unconscious resistance within me that I could not—and fundamentally did not want to try to—understand. I never quite believed her “truths”, though I was always convinced that she was right, and if you like, she was right in the end, at least in the relative sense that everyone is right who drills down deep enough on their own little plot to supply all their needs for oil with which—in one way or another—they can then motor on all the way to the grave. It’s just that I was a peasant, and peasants don’t believe in truth. Peasants only believe in their survival instincts, and my survival instinct rejected her wisdom like good blood rejects poison.

  As to why, I didn’t know at the time—how could I have known? You have to have lived a great deal, been passionate and disillusioned and passionate again, before one day noting—quietly and humbly—that the famous “human spirit” is actually just like cheese: by the time it matures, it’s already full of maggots. There’s a certain kind of wisdom, and not the worst kind, either, that can live only on rot and putrefaction, like a maggot. This is a kind of wisdom which is “deeper”, if you will, than the wisdom of the primitive productive classes but that it can no longer produce; it’s impossible to live by any more and all you can do is die with it, slowly, by degrees, like the very world of which it was born.

  Sometimes I’d spend weeks chewing over one of her comments, while the fact that they’d laid off another hundred and fifty workers in the Ganz factory, and that meant that almost everyone in our building was now jobless, didn’t interest me a damn. The range of my curiosity, like a failing organ, shrank day by day; in the end, my universe became so small that it could fit, with all its planets and all its stars, in her bed, covered amply by her blanket. My thoughts were paralysed like stroke victims; they could no longer leave room 205.

  I did sometimes feel that things couldn’t go on like this. I was struck by sick foreboding, vague ill omens that something “terrible” would happen, and I can remember chilling nights when I would suddenly start from my dreams after those wild nights and look at her sleeping form with the frozen terror of someone terminally ill who, waking from a fever dream, grabs the mirror and sees only death in it.

  •

  One night, Elemér came to the bar. He acted like he didn’t know anything, but he had always been a bad actor and I could see right away he knew everything.

  I had long known that I’d become the subject of gossip. Sometimes when I went into the kitchen, conversations would be suddenly dropped, and I could feel oblique glances following me around; I knew people were whispering behind my back. In the first few days, this still upset me deeply, but later I got used to it like a camel to its hump, and in the end I no longer paid it any attention. But I was afraid of Elemér. I was afraid of him in the most serious and most ridiculous sense of the word. As to why, I didn’t wonder too much—I simply convinced myself that I wasn’t afraid of him at all. If he found out, he found out—what did I care? It was no skin off my nose, and he could go to hell. But that was the funniest thing about all this—it really was “no skin off my nose”, and if he did find out then he’d find out, who cared; still, I was more afraid of him finding out than of the Devil himself, and though it was obvious that the rumours had reached him, too, I always tried to convince myself he didn’t know anything. Now that he was here, standing in front of me, I could see he knew all, and all my tough posturing—telling myself I wasn’t afraid of him—was in vain: I could feel the trembling in my knees.

  It must have been around eight; there was no one in the bar yet. The moment made me flush with heat, and I was irritated by the thought that I might sweat through my shirt. I did my best to appear open, but kept talking nineteen to the dozen and hardly letting him get a word in edgeways. I was playing for time, just like we’d done in school when we thought the Schoolmaster might spring a test on us. I was hoping that someone would come in sooner or later or that they’d call me away and send me off somewhere, but no one came and no one called for me—we were alone, and ther
e was no escape. There he was before me and, because he was so terrible an actor, even a blind man could see why he’d come. He was behaving like a bumbling small-town doctor the family had asked to pretend that he’d come by on a purely friendly visit because the patient was, unfortunately, far too stubborn to let themselves be examined, though it looked like there was something seriously wrong; please excuse them, doctor, they might not be all there any more. In the end, I had to admit that all this was in vain, and suddenly I switched to the very opposite of my loquaciousness: I didn’t say a word.

  Elemér treated me as if he were afraid that I really was not quite all there any more. He knew me, he knew I was difficult, and he was as cautious as a doctor in a sanatorium. He tried to “ingratiate himself” as they say, but he was far too direct a character and wasn’t very good at small talk. He overshot the mark, as the boys would say when someone was being too nice. He talked embarrassingly overmuch and even tried to make some jokes so I could see how cheerful and unsuspecting he was, how he didn’t know a thing, oh no, he just happened to be passing and thought he’d look in to chat a little about this and that, all perfectly innocent and above board.

  “Feeling better?” he eventually asked, clearly trying to steer the conversation in the right direction.

  But I wasn’t going to play along. I told him I was, a little, thank you, and then relapsed into silence.

  The conversation once more ran aground. I could see that Elemér was now out of ideas as to how he should drag the thing out of me.

  “Oh yes!” he said, having thought of something at last, and his face cleared. “How did you like the book on syndicalism?”

  But he was out of luck there, too. I told him I hadn’t read it yet, I’d been very busy, I’d try to get to it tomorrow or the next day.

  It went on like this for half an hour. Then the head waiter called for me from the kitchen, and Elemér of course knew that you couldn’t keep the head waiter waiting. In the rush, he suddenly dropped his role and said straight out, with his usual directness:

  “Look, I want a word with you. Would you wait for me tomorrow?”

  I must have looked pretty alarmed because he quickly added, before I’d had a chance to respond:

  “Just a little chat, you know. It’s been a while since we talked.”

  I concurred.

  “Some other time, perhaps. I’m very tired tonight.”

  “All right,” he said, because there wasn’t much else he could say. “Next time, then. I might try and look in at the end of the week.”

  But he didn’t wait till the end of the week; he appeared just two days later. This discussion was even more awkward than the last. For want of anything else, he brought up the book on syndicalism once more, and I didn’t dare admit I still hadn’t read it. I “winged it” like a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework, making up this and that. Elemér, who would always interrupt me straight away when I got something wrong, now listened to me, nodding away, as if indulging a quiet eccentric. In the end, he asked me again if I would wait for him in the morning, and I again replied, “Some other time, tonight I’m very tired.” Then Mr Saccharine walked in with an English guest and we, of course, had to cut our conversation short.

  “Let’s go down to the basement,” Elemér said, and I could hardly say “some other time, tonight I’m very tired” to that.

  I followed him anxiously. I knew what was coming, and I was afraid I was going to deny it. But as it happened, I didn’t get the opportunity. Elemér said, quiet and determined:

  “I don’t want you to respond in any way to what I’m about to say.”

  There was no one in the basement, there was only silence and a faint subterranean smell. Thick, rusty pipes ran along the unplastered wall, as if we were wandering through the belly of the hotel, among the exposed bowels of the building. Elemér didn’t say anything for several minutes. We walked side by side in silence in the yellowy half-light. Our steps echoed unnaturally under the bare cement vaults.

  “You were doing well,” he said at last. “Very well,” he repeated with special emphasis, and then added, without looking at me: “But now you’ve lost your way.”

  There was silence, I listened to our reverberating footsteps. Elemér looked at me.

  “Understand?”

  “No,” I replied curtly.

  “I can understand you,” he said quietly, turning away and adding awkwardly: “I’m your friend. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “That’s all it is,” he said. “I’m your friend, and I can understand you. And you’ll understand me too, we’ve always understood each other. What I want to say comes down to this: have no qualms—I’m not a prude, and I’m not a bourgeois. I don’t preach. I’m a Socialist. We can talk calmly and practically, the way conscious proletarians should.” He quickly added, because he had clearly noticed something in my face: “No, not now. When you feel ready. Then you can wait for me in the morning and we’ll go for a walk in Buda. All right?”

  “Yes,” I nodded once more.

  He pulled a book out of his pocket and told me to read it, and that we’d discuss it next time. Then he gave me his hand, as if nothing at all had happened, and left.

  A number of sentences were underlined in pencil in the book. Elemér’s books always had a lot of sentences underlined in pencil, but this had one I know he’d underlined specially for me. He had underlined it twice and put three exclamation marks beside it. It was a quotation from Montesquieu. I still know it by heart and there’s not much chance of me ever forgetting it. It went:

  All decent men have some memory in their lives that will make them blush to think of it in a contemplative hour.

  I felt a strange lump in my stomach when we parted. It must have been half past nine, the night shift at the bar was ready for its guests, the jazz band was practising a new song. I put the book away, shrugged and began to whistle—softly, disdainfully, the way I’d seen the gentlemen do it. But the lump in my stomach just grew and grew.

  By about ten o’clock, I felt sick. At first, I felt tiny, piercing cramps in my stomach, then constant, tearing pain. I’d never had stomach cramps like this before, though I’d lived, as you may remember, on the dog’s dinner. I couldn’t understand what had got into my stomach, because back then I was still writing poems about the Soul with a capital S, and I didn’t know that it could also give you the most merciless cramps, and that it comes not in the fiery chariot of grand visions, but on foot, sweating profusely, by the back stairs, mostly when you least expect it. It had arrived now, and because I was refusing to acknowledge it, it was through severe cramps that it announced that it had arrived, that it was here, still alive and kicking; that it had come again, perhaps for the final time, and if I didn’t listen to it now, it would once and for all give up on me.

  Needless to say, I didn’t listen to it at all. I was consumed by my stomach ache and by hating Elemér. I cursed him privately, wishing he’d go to the devil; why did he have to go sticking his nose into other people’s business, the arrogant fool, why doesn’t he mind his own damned business? But at two in the morning, when I was certain that she wasn’t going to call me, I decided from one moment to the next to wait for him in the morning.

  But that didn’t happen, either. The more I thought about the conversation we would have, the more I came to see that . . . what, exactly? I shrugged. What could I say to him, and what could he say to me? All he knew about women was what Bebel had written about them in Women and Socialism, and that wasn’t going to help me very much. What else? Well yes, of course. He’d tell me to leave her, that I had lost my way, that there was only one path for a conscious proletarian, and so on and so on. I could almost hear his voice, almost see his gestures, and I knew that what he was going to say would be clever and convincing, as always, and I might even—in the end—promise him everything, but that when she called me, I would break all the promises I had made.

  I did
not wait for him the next day—nor any other day—but in my mind, I was always at that missed meeting and I lived in the world like someone guilty of a grave sin, a murder perhaps, about which no one but Elemér knew. In time, I began to think of him as a sinister blackmailer who abused my constrained position. I hated him for everything that was hateful in my life, and that hatred grew within me day after day like a cancerous tumour.

  About two weeks later, one night when I was hanging around the kitchen, one of the junior wine waiters from the bar told me:

  “Go upstairs. Elemér’s waiting for you.”

  I answered without hesitation.

  “I can’t go now, I’ve got things to do.”

  But as I said it, I suddenly realized something. I knew that with this lie, I had hit upon the truth.

  “Want him to wait for you?”

  No, I was about to say, but suddenly stopped. I felt that something was about to be decided once and for all, without appeal, and I was unable to answer. Only sixteen-year-old poets can feel a moment so important and so flooded with symbolism as I felt this one to be. I looked at the wine waiter as if it had been Pontius Pilate himself standing before me, and he had asked: Who do you choose? Jesus or Barabbas?