“Could you give me a bit of money?”
My heart climbed into my throat.
“How much you need?”
She sighed.
“A lot. I can’t make up the rent.”
“You know I’ve got my instalments to pay.”
“I know,” she sighed again, “but it’s very bad this time, son. Herr Hausmeister wants to throw us out.”
How many times I’d heard that before, and yet the familiar words had not lost their menace. I glanced, involuntarily, at the lye bottle, and shuddered.
“He wants to throw us out?”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “We’re three months behind.”
“How can that be?” I burst out. “Father ain’t been gone three months . . . And he always had plenty of money . . .”
I fell silent. It was only now I remembered who I was talking about. There was silence. My mother stared, blanching, at her shoes.
“You know how forgetful he can get,” she mumbled. “He forgot to pay, and Herr Hausmeister didn’t tell him. He knew he was good for it, and besides, he was scared of him . . .” she burst into tears. “Now he don’t have nothing to be scared of ! Oh God, oh God, what we going to do?”
She slumped onto the footstool, buried her face in her apron, her whole body trembling with her sobbing. I watched her and felt like spitting in my own face.
“Couldn’t you ask Father for it?” I asked helplessly.
My mother went red.
“You father’s not in town,” she said barely audibly.
“Where is he?” I blurted out.
My mother glanced away, swallowed, and said:
“Somewhere in the country.”
“Couldn’t you write him?”
“No.”
I could have asked, of course, why she couldn’t write to him, and a whole bunch of other things, but I was afraid that . . . she might answer me. I quickly stuck my head back underwater and didn’t say a thing.
“Couldn’t you ask that man to wait just a little with your instalments?”
“You mad?” I snapped so loud that even I was shocked. “That man is a friend of the Major’s. It’s not been two weeks since they fired a waiter for not paying.”
That was true, but I was still lying. I could have tried, and frankly, I did have some little hope of succeeding. The Constable liked me. He used to chat to me, which he never did with anyone else; he used to take an interest in my affairs—he wanted to know all about me. Once, he’d said to the head waiter:
“This boy has more brains than three grown-ups.”
You like that sort of thing at sixteen, of course you do; I liked it, too. And yet I was still repelled by him from that first moment on. There was some vague, inchoate fear floating around inside me—as to why, I never stopped to analyse. Back then, everything inside me, not just this, was so undefined. I was terrified of the light, and fled into the shadows—I didn’t want to think about things. I was living like a newborn animal—I had only my instincts left. But they, whenever I got near the Constable, would say: careful, careful, careful!
“You could ask him,” my mother insisted timidly. “What harm could it do? At worst, he’ll say no, and there ain’t no harm in that.”
No, there was no harm in that; I was afraid of the opposite. I was scared he’d say yes, and . . .
“I ain’t that desperate!” I yelled hysterically. “Not yet, not yet!”
My mother looked at me, shocked.
“What you talkin’ about? I don’t understand you.”
I didn’t quite understand myself, either. I looked on in alarm at what was happening to me. I felt a terrifying trembling in my heart and the blood went to my head.
“I won’t hear of it!” I cried, and suddenly knew that I didn’t only mean it for my mother.
No, I was not that desperate, not yet!
4
WE DID MANAGE TO MAKE it past the first again, somehow. As to how, I have no idea. I suspected that my mother was once more washing for Herr Hausmeister’s “friends” for free, but I didn’t know for sure. My mother didn’t say a thing about it, and I didn’t ask. We kept quiet once more.
I still didn’t give my mother money, but I did take her home food every day. I bought the food in elegant stores downtown, but before I took it home, I would re-wrap it in newspaper so she’d think I was taking it out of my rations at the hotel, the way I’d done before. We didn’t talk about that, either. I put the packet of food on the kitchen table at dawn, when I got home, then went into the room and went to bed. By the time I got up, the food was no longer there. That was the only way I had of knowing that my mother had eaten it—there were no other signs. When I got home, she was still asleep—or at least, pretending to be, and when I got up, she was already out.
I had, it seems, alienated her even further with my questions. She was now literally avoiding me. In the evening, when she heard me get up, she would sneak out of the apartment and go to Márika’s. The only time she’d be home was when Árpád hadn’t gone out, but then Márika would come over to ours.
“I don’t want to breathe the same air as that toad,” she would say, because that was how she was referring to her husband by then; the husband she had once been so in love with.
My father’s disappearance had brought the roof crashing down on them, too. They had managed, till then, to get by somehow. The old man couldn’t pass Márika without slipping her a pengő or two, and I suspect he would occasionally give her larger sums as well. That source had dried up, of course, and at the worst possible time. The cleaning firm where Márika had worked went bust, like so many other businesses servicing the middle classes. Horthy’s fine, feudal society that had already sucked all the blood out of the peasants and the workers, now turned in its desperation to devouring itself; it started biting its own tail: the already weakened middle class. Engineers were now driving taxis, lawyers hawking this and that, civil servants selling vacuum cleaners door to door; there were even ladies who, having lost their husbands, sank so low as . . . keeping store.
But these were the exceptions. Most people decided to embezzle instead, or commit suicide rather than sink so low. The gentlemen of the middle classes looked down profoundly on anything other than office work. Whenever a middle-class woman opened a tobacco stand, the newspapers would devote several column inches to gasping at the fact, and the ladies and gentlemen of the readership would shake their heads sadly, wondering what the world was coming to.
They were already up to their ears in debt and moral decay, but they never let their petty prejudices slip an inch. At home, the owls of want hooted at them from every corner, but outside the house, they carried on with their showy lifestyles. “One has one’s social obligations,” they’d say. “One cannot live beneath one’s station.” But they had no problem with owing the starving cobbler money; and if the poor man ever snapped with impatience, they would call him a Communist and threaten to see he got his comeuppance.
Half the patrons of our bar were still from the middle classes, though few bars in town were more expensive. They didn’t drink much, it’s true, and whenever they could, they “forgot” to tip, but what they spent on Saturday night would have kept us comfortably for a week. As to where they got the money, that only came out later, in the court papers, or after the suicide of some “pillar of the community” or other. For the spate of suicides was increasingly widespread in society circles, too—there they used Veronal and Luminal which, I daresay, were more pleasant than drinking lye, but had the same effect nonetheless.
These days I know, of course, that even hardship is relative, like everything else in life; but back then, I must confess, whenever people talked about the suffering of the middle classes, it made me want to laugh. What they considered suffering was—for us out in Újpest—unimaginable luxury, even at the best of times. Every day, you read in the papers that some elegant couple had “chosen to take their own lives in the face of mounting financial difficulties” wi
th the eternal refrain that “the maid had found them dead in their bedroom in the morning”. But they could still afford a maid! I said to myself, failing to understand it all.
I thought of Mátyás’s family who slept seven to a room because they had to rent out the kitchen. Their nocturnal lodger paid four pengős a month and those four pengős were the family’s only steady income. When they got to eat, they ate whatever the children had managed to steal, since Mátyás didn’t know how to steal; all he knew was how to work. He simply could not, however, get a job. This despite the fact that he was a big man, strong as an ox and good-hearted, like a big bear in a children’s story. When I first came up to Budapest, he had been one of the best earners in the house. They had, rather extravagantly, lived in a bedsit overlooking the street, on the first floor.
Mátyás was a metalworker, outstanding and reliable at his job. He didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble, he didn’t go chasing women. On Saturday night, he would take his wages straight home and never missed a mass on Sunday. But a year and a half ago he too was laid off, and in that year and half, Mátyás’s coal-black hair turned white. He couldn’t find work, neither could his wife, and his children were all of school age. They moved from the first floor down into the basement and no longer only went to mass on Sundays—they now had the leisure to do so on weekdays too. But the heavenly authorities were busy and left their daily prayers unanswered. They failed to assign the family any work, and no manna dropped through the basement window. And, the lilies of the field notwithstanding, their clothing wasn’t seen to either. Mátyás knew that his pretty young wife occasionally slept with Herr Hausmeister for the rent; she, it seems, must have told him in advance, because Mátyás would always leave the house at such times—usually taking his five sons to church. Everyone in the building knew what went on at Mátyás’s during mass. The children, true to habit, would go spy on Herr Hausmeister and watch the alarm clock to see “how long it lasted”. In the end, Mátyás’s sons were so afraid of what the other children said that they didn’t dare show their faces. They hid in the basement like hunted rats. What could Mátyás have felt about all that?
“It’s easy for them,” said the middle class when discussing the “lower orders”; it was one of their favourite phrases, and I heard it often. “They don’t have needs.”
That’s how they thought about the “lower orders”, and that’s how they treated them. The judges, most of whom were middle class, were incredibly harsh with the poor. They showed even children no mercy if they stole bread when they were starving. “An example must be made”—that was the principle Their Honours crowed from the top of the dung heap that was the Hungarian justice system.
But how quickly all those ladies and gentlemen forgot their precious dignity when their own bread began running short. Then they complained that they were paid too little. Well, that may be true, but the “lower orders” still thought it a lot, because that little could have comfortably kept . . . two or three families of workers.
This “upper middle class” that dealt so brutally with the poor in the name of Christian principles, now—when it, too, got into trouble—let itself go far faster than the “lower orders” they so looked down on. The papers were full of their official scandals, embezzlement and fraud, even though when it came to “gentlemen” the papers tried to keep quiet as long as possible. At this point, almost everyone in Hungary was for sale—if not for money, then for a job, or directorship, or rank and status or political promises. Yes, when the chips were down, the gentlemen would do anything, and by this time, it wasn’t just the gentlemen.
There was a rather elegant little bar near the hotel whose proprietress, interpreting correctly the spirit of the age, specialized exclusively in the buying and selling of well-bred ladies. She ran only the most exclusive society women and wouldn’t touch anyone else—perhaps the occasional actress at most, if they’d made a name for themselves, but actresses had always been a case apart. We bellboys, too, so to speak, had our commercial ties with her. Whenever a rich foreigner made discreet enquiries of us, we would send them to her elegant little bar, which they would always find charming. I remember a British gentleman once saying:
“It’s unique!” with an admiring click of his fingers.
And unique it was. Everything was done in the most exquisite taste; one part of the clientele didn’t even know there was anything going on at all. Fanny, the proprietress, whom everyone called only by her first name, would occasionally conduct a lady, running late, to a table where a gentleman would be waiting, the way people generally did with ladies who’d arrived a little late. That was all there was to it, and what could be less objectionable than that? The conversation was polite and restrained; couples would talk theatre and books, the social whirl, have a couple of drinks, and then leave.
Nothing ever actually took place in the bar. Fanny was jealous of her reputation and would have no immoral goings-on in her establishment. Besides, she never kept her “goods” in stock—she worked only to order, like the finest tailors. Her place was frequented mostly by aristocrats, money men, politicians and captains of industry. Over a cocktail, they would discreetly enquire if Miss So-and-so was available yet. That’s how they would ask—whether she was “available”, because, being men of the world, they knew that a woman’s virtue was like fruit: it had its time. Fanny would find out. She knew the city’s orchards well and had excellent connections. The exclusive society women would rush to hers in their cars like firefighters to a blaze, all the while never hesitating to call the maid a whore if she got home after ten from her afternoon off, because needless to say they still kept maids and needless to say they still did not consider them people.
Oh yes, there was still always a maid and a dog in the household, and of the two, the dog had the better life. The maid couldn’t eat what she herself had cooked for the family—she got special “servants’ rations”; and as to what they were like—the less said, the better. In most households the maid had to get up at six, and if her employers decided to entertain till six in the morning, they had to stay up till six. They did not have days off, and had to make do with a Sunday afternoon instead; and they were still expected to be home before the gates were locked. Maids had to kiss their mistress’s hand deferentially; in some places, their master’s too. The older sons of the household would creep to their rooms at night, a fact tacitly acknowledged in most places, and there were even some households where the maid was more or less expected—during those testing times of the boys’ growing pains—to serve the family in this way, too. A favourite bon mot about the servants was that they were the “paid enemy”, and even after twenty years of service, people were convinced that the only reason their maid never stole was because she never had the opportunity. They locked all the cupboards as a precaution, including the larder, and if they still got suspicious, they would frisk their maids, to which by law—there was a special law for servants—they were entitled. Their wages, however, would not always be paid on time, and if a girl dared so much as open her mouth, there was hell to pay—they would immediately call her an idiot or a Communist, and if that didn’t work, strike her. The middle class, which was so proud of its much-vaunted Christian values, regarded this behaviour as normal and was—what’s more—absolutely convinced that their maids owed them a debt of gratitude.
Their masters had always looked on the peasants and the workers as a sort of domesticated animal that God had created for their service. They remembered the days of the Soviet Republic in the same way a coachman remembers a particularly wilful episode with his horse, and it never crossed their aristocratic minds to wonder whether it really was a coincidence that Communism had happened to come to this country in particular. They carried on taking no notice of the problems of the poor and carried on not learning from their own. Even now, when the capitalist elite had fleeced them for everything they were worth, they still stuck with them politically and voted exclusively for those who could best be relied upon t
o bleed the people white. They had always been the staunchest bastion of reactionary politics and now, in these unfortunate times, they turned even further to the right. They expected their salvation from some strangely Hungarian, gentrified version of Fascism and only had misgivings about Hitler (for a while) because his party was called the Arbeiter-partei: the Workers’ Party. Later, when they established the Nazi Party in Hungary, they left that word out of the name, because after all, that wouldn’t do—that was a bridge too far. Times may change, but God’s immutable law did not, even under Hitler: a worker was still just a dog, while even in hell, a lord was still a lord.
•
The typesetter and his wife, however, were no lords. They were the “lower orders” who apparently had no needs—but strangely enough, they still clung to an odd desire to eat. Every morning, they would cycle into town, going from place to place to look for jobs, but their situation did not improve—they only wore out their tyres. One morning, they could no longer patch them, and since they couldn’t afford new ones, and could no longer bear to starve, either, they had to sell the bicycle. They ate what they’d got for it in a matter of days, and then they were stuck, starving, with no money for the tram, three hours from the centre of town. Even sitting is no fun when you’re starving, let alone traipsing six hours a day. But the typesetter still traipsed into town every day because the authorities in heaven, it seemed, had given even typesetters souls, and his soul clearly could not accept that it should be not the Lord in heaven, but the lords and ladies down here on earth that would make him shuffle loose this mortal coil. His soul wanted to live; it wanted to perpetuate itself in little Árpáds, but the gods, sadly, had forced it into a human form and that form couldn’t take walking six hours a day on an empty stomach. To do that, it seems you have to have Dappermishka for a father and not a Salgótarján miner whose family inherited lung disease like counts inherited titles.
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