Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “Where’s the other litre?” Herr Hausmeister’s wife asked.

  “Little Mózes had it,” Márika replied, looking the woman in the eye calmly, with steady defiance.

  Little Mózes was, by occupation, an infant. He must have been three or four months old at the time, and although he belonged to the “lower orders”, he still demanded to be fed with milk. He was the locksmith’s son, the same young locksmith whom legend had it had played cards all night with the watchman at the timber yard while his wife dragged home the wood they needed for Old Gábor to make their furniture with. But for this foresight, Little Mózes would have lain not in a crib but on the floor, because his parents had hardly grown richer since. The baby’s grandiose name came from his father, who had inherited it from his father. But the biblical name didn’t help Little Mózes much. His father, Big Mózes, couldn’t bring forth water from a rock—despite the name—and besides, Little Mózes wouldn’t have got far with that, even if he could. He insisted on milk and screamed when denied it. He couldn’t have his mother’s milk, because his mother’s breasts had dried up from permanent starvation, and cow’s milk cost money; and the locksmith’s wife was hardly starving because she was well supplied with money. Little Mózes once screamed for twenty-four hours non-stop. His mother got to the point of wanting to strangle him. It was pure luck she didn’t actually go through with it. Her husband had fled the house because he couldn’t bear to listen to the baby’s cries of hunger any more, but suddenly remembered—out on the street—that he had forgotten his keys, and went back. It was thanks to him that Little Mózes got to go on starving.

  Little Mózes’s mother, however strange this might sound, was a very good mother—she was crazy about her child. It was just that he cried day and night, and his mother knew full well it wasn’t beer he was after—as for milk, there was none in the house and a mother who can’t provide for her starving infant is capable of pretty much anything; if you don’t believe me, try it.

  Little Mózes’s situation caused a great deal of excitement among the women in the house, especially the younger ones. There hadn’t been a newborn in the house for a long time, but there were plenty of young women who’d been longing for a baby for years. Pregnancy, by that point, had become taboo for them and if one of them did become pregnant, she’d go running straight to Máli on the first floor, because Máli would do away with their embryos on credit. They knew they couldn’t actually have babies, and that knowledge, it seems, made motherhood even more appealing to them. Máli would scrape the growth out of their bodies, but their souls seemed to go on being pregnant. They grew and grew through some indestructible instinct, swelled and hurt, like a young mother’s breasts from which no baby sucks the milk. They had to give their pregnant souls to someone, and Little Mózes was the only baby in the building. He got all the love and tenderness that nature meant for his unborn companions. If his mother put him out on the walkway to get a little sun, the young women sprang forth from their dark bedsits like bears scenting spring. They gathered round the battered soapbox that served as a crib at the locksmith’s as if waiting for something. The locksmith’s wife, it seemed, knew what they were waiting for, because from time to time she would call out to one or other of the ladies:

  “Well, why don’t you pick him up? Can’t you see the way he’s lookin’ at you?”

  How those women were changed then! Their storm-tossed working-class faces suddenly grew beautiful, their hard lines softened, and their expressions grew sweet and warm, like mother’s milk.

  Sleep, baby, sleep

  The stars above are bright,

  And all the little sheep

  Are coming home tonight.

  Even their voices changed. They chirruped like birds, pecking heavily from the locksmith’s wife’s motherhood with their greedy beaks. They denied themselves their own milk—when they had milk to deny themselves—and took it to Little Mózes. It was only skimmed milk, of course, but they brought the watery grey slop as if it were holy water. They proceeded slowly, self-importantly along the walkway so the other residents, so the whole house, would see: Little Mózes was about to get some milk, and they were the ones that brought it him. They knelt before the soapbox and watched the baby snuffling and sucking down the watery milk as if it weren’t a soapbox they were kneeling before at all, but the altar in church.

  But Herr Hausmeister’s wife was not one to kneel. She was stingy like her husband, and cared only for her own belly. She was forever cursing bitterly about Little Mózes, but Little Mózes didn’t mind—it never spoilt his appetite. He drank his milk with gusto and Márika just laughed at the owl-faced woman’s yapping.

  “If you don’t like it,” she said, brimming with glee, “go tell your husband.”

  Herr Hausmeister’s wife, needless to say, never did tell her husband, but the next day she tried her luck instead with Rózsi. She fared no better. Rózsi, too, took two litres out of her money instead of one, and when Herr Hausmeister’s wife asked her where the other litre was, she too—like Márika—replied:

  “Little Mózes had it.”

  That was how Little Mózes carried on living, and that was how the life of the house also carried on. The amazing thing about all this was that these miserable pariahs, forced to live like animals, who didn’t always have enough for a crust of bread, still mostly managed to pay the rent. They may sometimes have run up several months of arrears, but—if they weren’t evicted in the meanwhile—they would eventually scratch together the money somehow. How? I don’t know. All I know is I was waking up more and more often to the sound of someone knocking on the kitchen door and a panting boy calling to my mother:

  “The coppers are comin’, miss!”

  They knew that that didn’t affect this particular Miss, or at least, it hadn’t in the past, but just to be on the safe side, they knocked on her door, too—you never knew in today’s world.

  There were no professional thieves or burglars in the house. There were only workers, and they were almost all decent people; but even the most decent of people will have enough of decency when they’ve been watching their children starve for months. A crying child is stronger than the word of conscience. It’s so loud that you have to run away from it, and people will run wherever they can. They were very modest in their stealing, when they had to steal, and mostly did it badly. They were hopeless thieves, and that was not all that made stealing hard for them. These unwilling amateurs dared only steal at night, but since the gates were locked at ten and only opened up again at five, Herr Hausmeister knew just who went out and who came in during those hours—and reported all that faithfully to the “coppers”. If something happened in the neighbourhood, the coppers would come for those people first, and that made the prospect of these night-time escapades pretty unappealing.

  That was how the basement window came into use. There was an old woman in the house whom everyone knew as Auntie Samu. She was known as that because her husband was known as Uncle Samu, and because she was a very mischievous old lady. She bent over her stick as if she was searching the floor for the final nail for her coffin, but in reality, she cared only for money, and was constantly coming up with clever little schemes. In winter, she would roast chestnuts outside Nyugati railway station, while in summer she sold fruit from a two-wheeled little cart, but all the while she did little “deals”, the nature of which the other residents discussed only in a whisper. Once, she had Árpád write a letter for her to the Post Office Savings Bank, from which it turned out she had some two hundred pengős, but she still sent her blind husband out begging and only dared cook hot food when everyone else in the house was in bed, for fear that people would start talking about her “riches”.

  She lived in the basement, and it was easy enough to climb out onto the street through her window; one day, she decided to share this information, in case anyone was interested. From then on, anyone who wanted to sneak out at night would knock on Auntie Samu’s door and the next morning, the copper
s would be scratching their heads. Auntie Samu was a very religious woman, it’s true, but she didn’t give up her beauty sleep purely out of love for her neighbours. She took a fifty per cent cut—people had to hand off half of what they’d stolen on the way back in. The house, of course, knew who was going in and out through Auntie Samu’s window, but there wasn’t a policeman alive who could have dragged it out of them. They had their quarrels, it’s true, but they stuck together against the upper classes like a family. Auntie Samu’s business flourished and grew, until there was hardly a single resident who wasn’t doing some kind of business with her.

  Yes, Márika was right: in the end, they all turned into thieves or “Commernists”, which had much the same result in Hungary. Both lots sooner or later ended up in jail, the only difference being that they only arrested thieves if they caught them stealing, whereas they arrested Commernists even if they weren’t Commernists at all. Anyone who got drunk and sang “The Internationale” one time would find themselves charged with incitement, and more than one innocent person ended up in jail because someone with a grudge against them had denounced them as a Communist. But there were some people in the building for whom being a Commernist came in handy. Take, for example, Mátyás’s story.

  One night, Mátyás’s five sons went out stealing coal. One of the neighbourhood children claimed they were delivering coal to the smelting plant at midnight, which sounded pretty far-fetched, but the five boys believed him nonetheless. They couldn’t resist the temptation, because Auntie Samu would give you half a kilo of bread for a bucket of coal, and they hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Plus, it was winter and bone-chillingly cold, so they could have done with a warm stove as well. But to steal coal you needed a cart, and there wasn’t one anywhere to be found nearby. They waited till two in the morning, then numb with cold, hungry and hopeless, they headed home. And then something incredible happened.

  The door to the corner bakery was standing wide open, not a soul inside. The wind blew the open door to and fro and carried the smell of bread out of the darkened store. It must have been about half past two and the boys were drowsy with exhaustion and hunger. It might have been that, or it might have been the religious upbringing Mátyás had given them, but Andris, the youngest, later swore in the dock at juvenile court that they thought there had been a miracle. But there was nothing miraculous in what had actually happened. The baker had gone across the road to a tavern and forgotten to lock the door. The bakery opened onto a courtyard, but you could also get out onto the street via the store, which is what the baker had done to save on money for the gate.

  The children, of course, did not know any of that. It was a fine white evening in Advent, the sort you hear about in Christmas stories. It was snowing, there was no one on the street, the bakery door was wide open with all the freshly baked bread inside. The children went in, grabbed a two-kilo loaf each, and were about to make off when the door opened and in walked the baker. He relieved them of the bread and gave each one of them a smack. Then he locked them in the flour store and went back to the tavern to fetch the policeman.

  The flour store was beside the bakery, and the bakery itself was full of freshly baking bread. The children hadn’t had any bread all day, or indeed anything at all apart from the smack the baker had given them, and a child—under these circumstances—is capable of many things—almost anything, in fact. If you don’t believe me, you can try this, too. I wasn’t there, I don’t know for sure how it happened, but what I do know is that when the baker came back with the policeman, Mátyás’s devout Catholic children were belting out “The Internationale” in the flour store.

  Arise ye workers from your slumber,

  Arise ye prisoners of want!

  The policeman, first and foremost, gave the children another hefty slap each, then grabbed the two eldest by the scruff of their necks and ordered the smaller ones to march ahead of them. And they did—right up to the third corner, where they were repairing the road (by day) and there were large piles of stone heaped beside the pavement. The three boys reached into one of the piles and, before the policeman could recover from his surprise, gave him a nice sharp bit of basalt to the head. He let the eldest go in fright and all five of them ran for it. They ran as fast as their legs could carry them, and even made it home—but that didn’t help them much. The baker knew them because they’d used to buy their bread from him when they had money to buy it with, so they were arrested that same night. They locked them up in the reformatory in Aszód for “Communist behaviour” and “assaulting an agent of the law” though their years could hardly—if you added all their ages up—have exceeded those of the judge who sentenced them.

  This was a great disgrace by middle-class standards, but Mátyás nonetheless went about the house as if he’d had an unexpected stroke of luck.

  “Ain’t they beating ’em?” my mother asked once, because everybody knew they beat the children in Aszód horribly.

  “Oh they are, they are,” Mátyás replied, “but they’re feeding ’em, too.”

  “That’s a piece of luck,” my mother admitted. “They happy?”

  “Happy? ’Course not!” Mátyás grumbled. “Little kids like that don’t know what’s good for ’em. The other day they sneaked me a letter full of complaints, makes your heart bleed to read it.”

  “On account of the beatings?”

  “That too, but that ain’t the main thing. They miss their freedom.”

  “ ’Course they do,” nodded my mother. “That’s the main thing, after all, freedom.”

  Mátyás took the cold pipe out of his mouth and spat heavily.

  “Freedom!” he mumbled under his breath. “You got to have some-thin’ to eat first, love. The rest comes after.”

  •

  The starving house huddled on the outskirts of the city like a dog whipped into a corner. It pulled its tail in, did Herr Hausmeister’s bidding, and was at the beck and call of the upper classes. It didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and didn’t give anything away. It was only in the dark depths of its bedsits that it ground its teeth—out in the walkways, there was order and quiet. The house was quiet—so quiet it sometimes gave me a chill.

  I have a frightening memory of that quiet. One night, not long before the elections, Herr Hausmeister made a speech to the residents. It was a campaign speech—a patriotic, rabidly nationalistic speech. For Herr Hausmeister, being an ethnic Swabian, was a rabid Hungarian nationalist—until Hitler came along and reminded him he was a German. His Hungarian nationalism included canvassing for the governing party—for a fee, of course. He proved, clear as day, that the Social Democrats were Jews, the Jews were Communists, and the Communists were murderers. Therefore, it was the duty of every self-respecting Christian Hungarian worker to vote for the governing party’s candidate—another great Hungarian patriot of German extraction, about whom even the youngest children in the house knew that he was one of the dirtiest enemies the working class had.

  But there was no way of telling that just by looking at the residents. The crowd corralled into the courtyard was as silent and still as a bunch of statues. They listened stiffly and impassively, their faces revealing nothing. Their minds were probably taken up with petty matters, such as where they could get hold of half a kilo of bread, while Herr Hausmeister was talking about big things. He was holding forth on the horrors of life under Bolshevism and the bloodthirsty Jewish ringmasters who’d locked up the cream of the nation’s youth, among them the governing party candidate himself. This irrepressible firebrand had languished three weeks in a Bolshevik jail on nothing but bread and water.

  A few of the crowd smiled at that. They smiled cautiously, in the cover of the person standing before them, so Herr Hausmeister didn’t see a thing. He finished up his speech and went back to his flat, pleased with his work.

  “Oh, the poor bourgeoisie,” Mózes the locksmith sighed then, and that was the first and last time I heard the house laugh.

  The laughter, t
oo, started cautiously. Barely a sound came out of their mouths, they swallowed the ticklish temptation. But on the stairs, one of the ladies burst into hoots and suddenly no one could contain themselves any more. The laughter grew and swelled like a river in flood, and by the time it reached the upper floors, burst its banks completely, loudly inundating the walkways. Even now, the house expressed no opinion, only laughed, laughed, laughed. The hard left-wingers had gone out so they wouldn’t have to take part in the meeting; it wasn’t them laughing, and that was what was frightening. It wasn’t politically motivated laughter, this, and it wasn’t mocking. It came from somewhere deeper and it cut deeper too. It was frightening laughter.

  “The poor bourgeoisie!” someone would sigh again, and the house, which had already begun to quieten, once again clutched its sides in hilarity.

  They couldn’t stop. Their laughter, which had started so cautiously, thirty minutes later had become mass hysteria. I have never seen or heard anything like it. The house, in the strictest sense of the word, had a giggling fit. People were swaying, panting for breath, slapping their thighs, grabbing each other for support, sweaty and red, as if they were about to have a fit. Their faces twisted, grew bestial, the veins in their necks stood out fit to pop, their eyes turned bloodshot.

  Their laughter gave me goosebumps. I remembered old stories from when we were learning about the French Revolution and the Schoolmaster told us about how vicious the masses had been. Back then, I had felt nothing but disdain for the “French rabble”, but now I pictured these familiar faces under the Jacobin hats and wondered about the kind of houses those people had lived in, and whether their children had had milk? And I wondered if Mátyás too, so devout, was capable of viciousness, and Árpád—quiet, clever Árpád—and Mózes, that good and gentle father? And the other fathers and mothers—could they, too, kill, steal, burn? I looked at the familiar faces as if I were seeing them for the first time and suddenly knew, knew with a terrifying certainty that yes, yes they could. All at once I knew that the day would come when they, too, would be the masses, and just as cruel as the masses always and everywhere, but at the same time, I also knew that no, no, no they weren’t cruel, not Mátyás, nor Árpád, nor Mózes and the rest, and that was the first time I suspected, in a confused, vague and frightening way that sometimes the killer is the victim and the victim is the killer.