Temptation

  “No, tell him not to,” I replied, and suddenly felt deadly tired, like a murderer who—after denying everything for the longest time—finally cracks and confesses his crime.

  I had chosen Barabbas.

  3

  ONE DAY, MY FATHER VANISHED.

  It was a strange day, and it began strangely—I remember singing loudly all the way home. I was coming from hers, the Saturday moon was still high over the Danube, but the dawn had lit its fires behind the hills and Sunday was floating towards town with the reddish clouds. The streets, as always at such times, were overrun with lovers. Shadowy forms pressed together, swaying in the bluish gloaming as if blown by the wind, a strange wind from someplace else. You could hear nervous female giggling from the parks, cars with curtains drawn sped past on the abandoned Ring, kissing couples shimmied in doorways, and all this—beneath the reddish clouds—was like something from a poem.

  There was a couple kissing in our doorway too. I had noticed them from afar as I was crossing the vacant plot, but it was only as I got closer that I realized it was my mother and father. They were both a little tipsy, but so charmingly and playfully so that after a few minutes, their contagious good mood had got to me too. They were waiting for Herr Hausmeister, because the gate was—of course—still locked, and Herr Hausmeister did not like to rush. My father gave the gate a rattle, accompanying it with an appropriate tune:

  Darling, open up the door!

  My mother was in no less good a mood, so she joined in softly, just at the perfect moment:

  I won’t, I won’t, they’ll hear next door!

  And then the old man let loose his fine, deep baritone and sang:

  If they hear, then let them hear—

  They already know both far and near

  That it’s you alone I love

  I love

  You I’ll be always

  Thinking of.

  The morning wind cartwheeled over the vacant plot, sweeping up the litter, carrying it along and stirring it on high; but under the reddish clouds, even that rubbish looked glorious—the world was so young, everything suited it.

  “How is it,” my father wondered, “that you can’t help singing on mornings like this? I remember I was always in a foul mood if we had to stand watch at night, but when the sky went red like this, God knows why, but all of a sudden, I felt I had to sing.”

  Meanwhile, he’d mischievously kept his finger on the bell, occasionally adding the odd snatch of serenade:

  Baby, open up the door!

  Herr Hausmeister, at last, came shuffling out. His rumpled slippers resounded sleepily on the uneven stone floor, and his nightshirt and long trousers protruded from under his half-donned jacket. My father raffishly threw him a pengő.

  “Forever young!” he called with great conviction and patted the sleepy Herr Hausmeister chummily on the behind.

  Upstairs, he opened a bottle of red wine and we sat around the table, humming and drinking. They grew more cheerful with every glass, while I slowly—though I don’t know why—grew more and more melancholy. I felt so old beside them, and youth seemed so unbearable. I wanted to tear it off me, the way people fleeing a fire will tear off their burning clothes, but I knew that I had locked the door and there was no escaping this fire. I’m going to burn up, I thought, as I sipped the wine.

  My “folks” didn’t notice that there was anything wrong with me—they were pretty caught up in each other. My father was humming:

  I walked in the quiet forest glade

  I saw a bird there in the shade

  And a nest made just for two

  How I fell in love with you

  “You know when your old man learnt that song?” he asked, immediately answering his own question with a dreamy little sigh: “The night I first laid eyes on your mother.”

  “Yes, you’ve told us before,” my mother chided, but you could see she was enjoying his forgetfulness.

  My father laughed.

  “Now look at her,” he joked. “Old as the hills. You’d never know she was young and pretty once. But she was, oh how she was! Believe it or not, it wasn’t a bit hard, fallin’ for her.”

  “You never fell for no one in your life!” my mother answered back tipsily, because she always got cocky when she drank. “You didn’t love me at all, did you?”

  “As if you loved me, back then?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “What d’you want me to say?” my father said, turning his wine glass round and round. I could see his thoughts were wandering far from the hearth. “Back then, I was just marvellin’ at all you girls,” he said. “I didn’t have a clue about love!”

  “And now you do?”

  “Wish I didn’t!”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you start clinging to one skirt, it means you’re gettin’ old.”

  My mother laughed harshly.

  “Who’s clinging to one skirt here?”

  “This here man,” my father said, slapping his hand to his heart. “Devil take it all!”

  “Flatterer,” grumbled my mother, all the while cramming herself with his ingratiating smile the way people cram a winter trunk with necessaries half an hour before their train departs.

  “Why’re you so quiet, eh?” asked my father. “Pinin’ for your girl?”

  “I ain’t pinin’.”

  “Well, and don’t you start!” he threatened. “I don’t like it. Leave the long faces to the horses. Where’s my wallet?” he said, flashing me a glance and pointing to his waistcoat, which he’d thrown on the bed when we got home.

  “How much is in there?”

  “Thirty pengős.”

  “Go live it up!” he said. “Never going to be young twice, are you?”

  “You mad?” my mother yelled at him, deadly serious this time. “Is that what you want to teach the child?”

  “He’s no child. I just did the maths, and he’s the same age you were when I met you.”

  My mother looked like she didn’t want to believe it. I could see her counting in her head.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, and her eyes clouded over. “How strange,” she sighed. “My God! My masters seemed so old then, though they can’t have been older than we is now.”

  “And? If you don’t want to get old, best go hang yourself. Well come on, then, you old maid, come to bed,” he said, poking my mother gently in the ribs. “And don’t you go lettin’ yourself get all down in the dumps. So we’re getting a bit worn, well, so what of it? That’s the way it is, with boots the same as people. But anyone who leaves a lad like him to fill his boots ain’t got worn down in vain, take my word for it—and take my word for it you can, I got it straight from the mouth of St Peter!”

  He was so carefree, so calm and confident, that it was as if he really had sorted everything out with St Peter already; as if he’d sown, and reaped, and found his harvest good.

  “G’night, son!” he said with a smile, putting his arm around my mother’s waist the way he used to, and before he went out, looked over his shoulder and gave me a wink.

  That was at dawn, around five in the morning. Around seven o’clock that evening, he left the house and didn’t come back.

  •

  As to why, I had no idea. My mother didn’t bring it up, and I didn’t ask. We kept quiet about it, the way only peasants could.

  Later, I would often think back to that final dawn. Did he already know he was going to go? Or did something happen between five in the morning and seven that night? What could have happened? What went on in the kitchen while I was asleep in the room? Or did he himself not have any inkling when he left home, and whatever happened only happened later? But what, what, what could have happened? Was it yet another woman? Or? . . .

  I stopped there. I didn’t dare take things any further. As if I care, anyway, I shrugged. It’s their affair. What’s it got to do with me? They don’t exactly break themselves in half over me. I tried to drive the thought away, but i
t kept coming back like a ghost in a fairy tale, and kept me in a perpetual state of turmoil. My fingers shook whenever I opened the paper: I was looking for my father’s name. Only now did I notice that from the very first moment I’d known him, I’d thought him capable of anything, both in the most abject and in the most noble sense, capable of the worst and the best deeds, but now—of course—it wasn’t the best of deeds I was worried about. I thought of his shady, mysterious “deals”, the incredible sums that had flowed through his fingers like water, and . . . No, I didn’t dare go on. I shuddered. Is that why my mother was keeping so quiet?

  Or did she, too, not know anything?

  I noticed that she was avoiding me. In the early mornings, when I came home, she always pretended to be sleeping, but later, when I went to bed and was quiet in my little improvised bed, I often heard her crying in the kitchen. In the evening, when I woke up, she was generally out, and when she was home, she made sure she was never alone. Márika would be sitting in the kitchen with her in excited, sotto voce conference, and if I came in, they would fall awkwardly silent.

  These were suffocating days. Our unspoken words seemed to have crept into every corner of the flat and took wing in the dark like bats, while I tossed and turned sleeplessly.

  One evening, something strange happened. Around six thirty, I woke to find someone banging on the kitchen door. He must have been banging away for a while, because he was banging hard enough to set the glass rattling. I pulled on my trousers and rushed out to open the door.

  A strange man entered, very het up. He was a huge, thickset man with a scar on his big bald head, and pockmarks and stubble on his rough, bony face. He kicked the door closed behind him, looked me up and down with his sharp, piggy eyes and, instead of a greeting, yelled at me:

  “Why didn’t you open the door?”

  “I was asleep,” I replied, frazzled.

  “You Mishka’s son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother not home?”

  “No.”

  He pushed me aside and went into the room. He stopped, looked around, and then said, a little more quietly:

  “I’ve brought a letter from your father.”

  “I see,” I nodded, excited.

  He produced the letter.

  “Give it to your mother,” he said, turned on his heel, and left without saying goodbye.

  It was only then that I came to from my shock. I tore open the kitchen door and called after him:

  “What should I say to mother, who called?”

  He looked back, but did not respond. He hurried, silent, into the staircase and quickly vanished.

  I looked at the crumpled envelope, heart thumping. Now we’ll see, I thought, and quickly turned the key in the kitchen door. I went into the room and carefully opened the envelope along the gummed edges. The letter was no more than five or six lines in all; they were hurried, agitated lines, and you could tell they had been written in a hurry, on the fly—the letters skipped excitedly up and down within the crooked lines. There was no date or place, and the text itself did not shed any more light on where or when these lines had been written. They didn’t shed much light on much of anything else, either, really, but there were two lines in it that set me terribly on edge. It said something like:

  I still don’t know anything. It may be that by the time these lines reach you I, too, will be home, but I also might never see either of you again.

  I read and reread the letter, but was still none the wiser. Now I understood everything even less. So he does want to come home, and he might even be home soon, but . . . “I also might never see either of you again.” Why, why, why? What did all this mean?

  I must have been lost in thought for a while, because when I looked at the clock, I was horrified to see that it was past seven thirty. I dressed hurriedly, gummed the envelope back down and placed it just inside the kitchen door before I left, so my mother would think someone had slipped it under the door when no one was home.

  I couldn’t get those two sentences out of my head. In the morning, when I got home, he might already be there, I thought, and from then on, I was always waiting for him. I would start from my sleep whenever someone walked past our window and turn, startled, in the street if I heard someone whistling behind my back.

  I didn’t want to think of him—and thought of nothing else. I had wild, scrambled dreams. Cars bristling with machine guns chased him through dark alleys as he climbed up belfries like a cat, or jumped easily and gracefully from a tall building and then sauntered casually off as if nothing had happened. It seems that even in my dreams I couldn’t imagine any harm actually befalling him. Whole packs of people came at him, knives flashed, guns flared, but in the end he always came out on top. He always won, he always had the last laugh. He had his fine, strong teeth, he drank his wine, made up to my mother, and I could hear his raw, rich baritone sing that life was good, that it was good to be alive. Or, it would be morning and I could hear his cheery whistling from the kitchen as he shaved, half naked, before that scrap of mirror, and in my dream I was no longer angry about the naked woman tattooed on his chest, with the real hair—and not just on her head.

  In my waking moments, however, I was not nearly so forgiving. I cursed him and God Almighty for lumbering me with a father like him. I thought of him with disdain and unflinching hatred, but at the same time, I missed him terribly. It was as if the spirit had gone out of our apartment since he was no longer with us. My mother, once more, kept meticulous order, everything gleamed with cleanliness; there was no one, any more, to make it untidy. It was the order and quiet of the cemetery. Sometimes, when I came into the empty flat, I almost had the feeling that no one lived there any more. The apartment was dead, its corners webbed up by the grey spiders of care, and our days hung in those webs like flies.

  The memories of our brief “riches” quickly disappeared. The wardrobes emptied out, the flat grew bare, and even the gilt-framed mirror disappeared from above the sink. One morning, when I came sleepily home, I simply couldn’t find our bedding. That, too, had gone, and I didn’t ask where. I slept once more on the bare floor, because Manci was frightened of my “illness” and had asked me not to lie in her bed.

  Only my father’s clothes were left in the wardrobe. My mother didn’t sell his things; she left everything just where it was. His ashtray, however, strangely disappeared. It was a worthless, battered little thing, without any value whatsoever. I didn’t understand where it could have got to. But one evening, when I reached into my mother’s drawer, I found it there, to my surprise. There was a half-smoked cigarette in it. Dappermishka’s last cigarette? I don’t know, I never found out. My mother, who was otherwise so compulsively tidy, kept this half-smoked cigarette in her drawer till the end. It lay there among her obsessively arranged boxes like a dead body someone just didn’t want to bury.

  Then one day, his clothes vanished, too. The flat was now like a bare tree in winter; the fish-faced pawnbroker wouldn’t have given us ten pengős for it.

  My mother was in a terrible state. She was drying out before my eyes like a plant whose roots have rotted away. She grew thin and wrinkled and started greying heavily. She aged almost overnight. She barely resembled that fetching young woman who’d sung along with Dappermishka under the reddening clouds . . . how long ago, exactly? A few weeks before. She let herself go, regressed to her peasant past, and became a spinsterish, burnt-out case. The transformation was as sudden, from one moment to the next, as that of the fields after a hailstorm. Her life was once more lying fallow, weeds seemed to have overgrown her soul. Only her eyes still reminded me of the old her—her deep-set, dark little peasant eyes, which were now forever red and swollen from crying.

  I suspected—no, I think I knew—that she was starving. I had to have known, for I could see that there wasn’t so much as dry bread in our kitchen. And yet I didn’t give her any money.

  Not because I didn’t have it, either. Back in those days, I always had
a few pengős in my pocket, and it wasn’t that I begrudged her those. I was more afraid that if I gave her money once, I would have to give again, and that she would ask for more each time—until we were back to the way things had been before. And I was not having that. She often sent me out for this or that and, needless to say, the shops did not give me things for free. And, to be fair, she always told me to go ahead and take money out of her purse, but the problem was that . . . well . . . she told me that even when I hadn’t spent any money on her.

  It had begun that first morning. I was too drunk, at the time, to see what she was getting at, and later—when I was sober—I thought she’d just said it because she was drunk. But I soon realized that was not the case. The invitation was often repeated.

  “My purse is over there,” she would say casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Take some cash.”

  I was overcome with savage anger whenever she said it. I was always scared I’d end up hitting her. But I didn’t dare say a word. I pretended not to have heard and gave her purse a wide berth. We never talked about it, and I still don’t know whether she even noticed that I never once took money out of her purse. But since I didn’t take money on those occasions, I couldn’t take money on any other, and so I ended up paying for everything out of my own pocket.

  That was why I didn’t give my mother any money. The thought that I’d have to reach into her purse one day after all on account of my mother was more terrible to me than the knowledge that she was starving.

  Yes, that’s how I was by then. Once you breach that narrow barrier your conscience draws before your actions, there’s no stopping—the tide drags you on. Only the first murder is a crime. The second, the third, the hundredth—those are merely consequences.

  •

  One evening, though, my mother did say something, after all. We were alone, it was about seven in the evening, and I was washing at the tap. My mother paced up and down beside me for a long while, arranging this and that, before all of a sudden saying: