Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  One early morning when I left the hotel, I saw a short, stocky man in a bowler hat on the other side of the street. He was standing propped on his walking stick, apparently waiting for someone. I caught only a glimpse of him and didn’t even realize that my eye had fixed his image like a camera. My mind only developed the negative days later, one terrifying night, without any warning. It was my day off and I was heading home on the tram. All at once, I got the uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching me. Then I seemed to spot him.

  Was it really him? I could have sworn to it at first, but later I developed doubts. I’ve begun seeing things, I thought angrily, and tried to dismiss the thought. But when I got off, he got off too.

  They’re watching me! I realized, and ran, panting, through the dark, abandoned plots. I didn’t dare look back for ages—I just ran, the sweat streaming off me. In the end, I did turn around, but by then, I couldn’t see him anywhere.

  From then on, I always had the feeling that he was following me. I shuddered whenever I heard footsteps behind me, and I was forever stopping in front of shop windows or pretending to retie my shoelaces so I could steal a backward glance. If I spotted a short, broad-shouldered, bowler-hatted man at the other end of the street, I would immediately turn off into the first side street and run, terrified. Or just the opposite: I would get after him to see if it really was him or not. It wasn’t, but then ten minutes later I’d spot another bowler hat, a broad set of shoulders and a thick walking stick, and my knees would begin to tremble.

  I was afraid, with a dark, inhuman fear. Like a savage beast in a trap, I wanted to howl in fear. I drank more and more each day, though I could no longer stand the smell of the stuff. I hated it, I was repulsed by it, but I still needed it, like a convulsive needs painkillers.

  That was my mental state when one night, she came into the bar. At other times, I wouldn’t have dared so much as look at her, but now I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wanted her to look at me, to feel what was going on inside me, to read the supplication in my eyes. She must, indeed, have felt something of that, because she looked away more quickly than usual.

  She was with a big party; they drank a lot and laughed a lot. I just kept watching them from beside the telephones and did something in my desperation that I would never normally have considered. I wrote to her. If I remember rightly, what I wrote to her was:

  I absolutely must talk to you. I beg you, please call for me.

  I folded the paper up very small and, around midnight, when I helped her into her coat, I slipped it into her hand. She didn’t so much as blink an eye. She kept chatting and laughing and then, without looking at me, left with the others. I watched her go and saw her get into the lift.

  I waited. It was a long, long night, followed by a hell of a dawn.

  She didn’t phone. After closing, I went out onto the riverfront promenade and looked up at her windows from the other side of the street. It was still light in the living room. Maybe she has guests, I thought hopefully, and sneaked back into the kitchen. I sat for hours huddled in the darkness, because I didn’t dare put on the lights lest they attract the night watchman. All in vain: the telephone did not ring.

  At around four in the morning I went back out and looked up at her windows again. They were dark. I felt so helpless, I burst into tears. I slumped down on a bench, wracked with sobs.

  The promenade was empty, the trams were no longer running; only the angry growl of the Danube was audible in the windy dawn. It was still quite dark. Down on the water, a moored rescue launch bobbed up and down, its lights casting greenish sparks onto the white crests of the waves. They’d introduced this sort of motorboat to help fish out suicides from the river; this was what they’d done instead of unemployment relief. There was a policeman sitting in the motorboat. From where I was, he looked like a big black doll. His head hung dozily down onto his chest, lolling from side to side with the boat. He was asleep—death was without its watchman.

  She might not find out for weeks, I thought, looking up at her darkened windows. Then I thought, I should have been in school, where I belonged.

  The wind was driving smoky clouds, the sooty moon galloped on above me. Suddenly, as if I’d lost my mind, I roared into the wind and darkness:

  “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

  Then I threw myself down on the bench and wept in helplessness.

  •

  The next night, when I went down to the kitchen to have dinner, Iluci drew me aside, agitated.

  “Well, what’s up?” she whispered. “Tell me! What happened?”

  I looked at her in surprise.

  “Who says anything happened?” I muttered. “Nothing happened.”

  Iluci was having none of it.

  “Oh come on,” she said, and nudged me with an elbow. “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes! Then why is Franciska taking your place?”

  “What?” I panted in disbelief. “What d’you say?”

  “Didn’t you know?” she asked, surprised.

  “Know what?”

  “You’re being transferred to the day shift.”

  “And Franciska’s taking my place?”

  “That’s right, and . . .”

  “And?” I asked impatiently, but Iluci did not finish the sentence.

  She took a long look at me, and her look seemed to have a note of pity in it.

  “Tell me,” she said in a strange voice, “do you really not know anything about all this?”

  “No, I swear. Why, what have you heard?”

  “No,” she answered weakly, “I just thought . . .” She didn’t finish that sentence either. “Strange,” she said, shaking her head, “strange.”

  “What’s strange?” I asked, getting more and more anxious.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged, and then repeated: “Strange.”

  I couldn’t get anything else out of her.

  I went up to the bar. It was still early; a woman was polishing the dance floor, the waiters were laying the tables. When I came in, the conversation stopped; only the tinkling of the cutlery and glasses could be heard in the sudden silence. I could feel them watching me. So it’s true, I thought, and all I cared about now was my rep.

  The head waiter called me over. He could never stand me, but since I’d been taking the champagne to room 205, he hadn’t dared get out of line with me. He was a cowardly man, so he swallowed his anger, but he couldn’t digest it. It hardened inside him like the stones in his gall bladder, and now it seemed he wanted to hit me over the head with it. His yellow face glittered with glee, and he grinned at me so hard his false teeth almost fell out.

  “Well, dear boy,” he said, relishing each word, “from the day after tomorrow . . .”

  “ . . . I’m on the day shift,” I said, finishing his sentence for him, smiling as I did so.

  The tetchy little man could not disguise his anger. He had been rehearsing for the role of Fate, and I had stolen his great speech. His liverish face now looked all green. He looked at me like a mouldy carp.

  “How did you know?” he gulped.

  “I just know,” I said, still smiling.

  “And you know who’s taking your place?”

  “Of course,” I nodded. “Ferenc.”

  “And?” he asked with gloating hatred. “What do you say to it?”

  “What am I supposed to say? I hope you’ll be very pleased with him.”

  “Well, he’s industrious, so they say,” he grinned, glancing quickly at the others. “I hear he’s particularly popular with the ladies.”

  Idiot! I thought. You trying to make me jealous with a queer?

  “More like the gentlemen,” I corrected him with knowing superiority, but no matter how well informed I was, none of it could reassure me.

  I could feel that they all knew something here about which I knew nothing at all.

  •

  I got blind drunk that night; I have no idea how I got home. All I remember is
that it was raining and I stood in front of the hotel for a long time after closing, looking at the five darkened windows on the second floor. The balcony door was open, the wind occasionally blowing out the familiar curtains, as if waving a shawl in the darkness, but not for me—not for me. I was weeping loudly. Then a policeman appeared in front of me. He said something, I said something in reply and then cleared quickly off into the side street. What happened after that, I have no idea.

  I slept a day and a night. I did wake up around seven in the evening, as usual, but when I remembered I didn’t have to go into the bar, that I never had to go in there again, and when that wasn’t all I remembered, I started drinking once more. And then it was Monday morning.

  The boys grew awkward and tense when I came into the changing room. They know, too, I thought anxiously, and tried to look unconcerned. I said hello, and asked them how they were, and they said hello and asked me how I was, and we chatted and blathered with nervous laughter and we knew that what we were talking about was not the subject at hand at all.

  It had been almost a year since I’d left them, and a year is a long time at that age. They’d grown, got stronger and hairier—their long, simian arms protruded from the sleeves of their outgrown jackets. In some cases, even their voices had changed, growing as strange and unfamiliar as a ventriloquist doing Ali Pasha for the children. Other than that, things were still much the same—they still smuggled women, spied on people’s bedrooms and took their “bit of skirt” to the “Mauthner”, where:

  “Oh ho ho, boys!”

  Yes, everything was the same as before, and yet everything had changed. The “boys” were like twins of themselves: they were their own spitting images, and still somehow different. A lot of the old guard had gone, new boys taking their place. But they had adopted our habits and mannerisms so closely that there was something terribly familiar about their unfamiliarity. They’re aping us, I thought angrily, when I noticed the extent to which they’d adopted our special, gently nurtured slang as their own, in which every collocation, every innuendo and rakish twist had its own special origin. We, the old guard, had assisted at the birth of all of these, but the new boys simply took them ready-made, fully grown and faded into clichés, and I looked upon the new lot as impostors and interlopers in just the same way the boys had looked on me three years before.

  One of them, a big-mouthed, Gypsy-faced boy with curving eyes, they introduced by saying:

  “He’s Gyula.”

  Yes, we had a new Gyula now, too. When someone said “Gyula”, they were no longer thinking of that kind, lanky, freckled teen we’d all thought of for years as a heartless womanizer and breaker of young girl’s hearts, while secretly he dreamt of a fifteen-year-old virgin whom he was to betray—along with the happy Muses—one fragrant spring morning by severing his artery with a butcher’s knife. His handsome young body had surely rotted away by now, and what a year ago all the “skirt” had been panting for was now a stinking, putrefied mass of hideousness. Now this new Gyula had come and killed his memory. There was nothing left of him. I had taken his place, and now my time was up, too. Was I to follow once more in his footsteps? . . . I started whistling, for fear of bursting into tears.

  The new boys looked me over with interest. Their looks showed that they knew “all” about me, as I had once known about the previous András. They examined me with a sly mixture of revulsion and awe—for now I was the Legend, birthed on the straw of whispered words in this filthy, stuffy manger, beneath the ill-omened stars of their puberty. When she walked past them, they, too, undoubtedly tried to picture me, the way I had once tried to imagine the previous András; and now they must have been thinking that there was nothing so special about me after all. If I could do it, then why not them? That was something they’d spend a long time struggling over—they would grow grumpy, absent-minded and short-tempered; they would come in each morning with rings around their eyes, and if that red-haired lady ever did glide by them, they would flush hot as if a fiery wind blew from beneath her skirt.

  They didn’t even know my name was Béla.

  I was introduced as “András”.

  That appellation had become completely natural in the bar. There, I had been András from the start, Their Excellencies’ András, who took the champagne up to room 205 at night. But these boys from before had met me as Béla, and suddenly I wanted to cry when they, too, called me András.

  I dressed wearily and with a headache. Usually, I would be undressing at this time. I had been sleeping through the day for a year, and now, when I was back once more among the babbling boys after what seemed like an eternity, everything that had happened in between seemed so chaotic and dreamlike, it was as if I’d been asleep that whole year, or drunk, and it was only now that I was waking up to the fact that . . . what? That I had lost my name. That I had lost myself.

  These were uncanny moments. I hadn’t looked in the mirror by day for a year and now, catching a glimpse of myself while combing my hair, I realized that it was not only my name that had died. No, this wasn’t Béla at all. Looking back at me was a pale urban dandy with rings around his eyes, an empty-headed, vain, big-city pansy. András. Their Excellencies’ András.

  Where had Béla gone? A year ago, he was preparing for America; he had faith, and will. He worked, and studied, and when there was no other way, he’d scratch together the English he needed from the head porter’s dictionary. His bags were full of dreams that would change the world, the bells of Easter and Resurrection rang in his heart, and poetry seemed to flow from him always and everywhere. Now, he was no more. I had buried him alive. He had rotted away, like Gyula.

  I watched the door nervously. Elemér wasn’t here yet, and I was expecting him as anxiously as if he were no less than my judge and jury—as if I was about to have to answer for everything I had done during the last year. I hadn’t seen him for months—I’d been avoiding him like the plague. I’d even chased the thought of him out of my head, but in the devilish witches’ bonfire of my subconscious, it was still he who stirred that murky, awful, amazing brew that is a seventeen-year-old boy’s conscience. The less I thought about him, the more concerned I was with him. He swelled within me, developed a form of emotional elephantiasis, and slowly, imperceptibly, morphed into a symbolic monster riding its broomstick through the haunted nights of my teenagerhood. Now he was about to come, in the form of a hotel bellboy, and make me account for my sins.

  “Hello, old son!”

  It was Antal who joined me in front of the mirror, our resident expert on head-over-heels love, whom a year before I had found so ridiculous when he would start dreamily whispering, eyes gleaming, about Flóra, the third-floor chambermaid. Now he was the only one here I could take seriously. Maybe I could talk to him, I thought, I’m sure he’d understand. I moved closer and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “How’s Flóra?” I asked him softly.

  Antal looked at me agape.

  “That lousy tart? Dear oh dear, pal,” he said, dismissing her with a wave of his hand, “where are the snows of yesteryear? Got a fag?”

  “Sure.”

  We lit our cigarettes. There was a burst of laughter from one corner. We both looked over. Gyula, the new Gyula with the upturned eyes, was holding up a little pair of pink panties to show the boys.

  “Greenhorns,” Antal muttered dismissively. “I tell you, old man, these new boys aren’t worth a damn. Oh yes,” he added, taking a big puff of his cigarette, “they’re not the same as back in our day.”

  “Yes,” I said, and took a deep puff of my own cigarette. “Do you remember our Gyula?”

  That’s how I said it, our Gyula; Antal nodded sympathetically.

  “Did you know his successor works in the boiler room here?”

  I didn’t understand.

  “What do you mean successor?”

  “I mean the fellow who married his fiancée.”

  “Katica?” I asked, far more loudly than I had intended. “Katica g
ot married?”

  “Yeah. Why’re you so surprised?”

  “I’m not surprised, it’s just that . . .”

  It’s just that I had a picture of Katica before me, shaking with sobs in the dark, deserted park, sniffling—I could hear her thin, failing voice clearly—“Oh God, I think I’m goin’ to go mad with all this!”

  So she didn’t go mad. She got married instead to a boiler man. Someone else now had Gyula’s fiancée, the way someone else now had his locker, his uniform and even his name. It was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What about Elemér?”

  “What about him?” Antal shrugged. “He’s still the same as always. Now it’s this lot he’s trying to induct into the mysteries of Socialism.”

  Yes, he must have found a new boy with whom to walk in Buda, I thought, and was seized by some wild, childish, stifling jealousy, though I would rather have gone straight to hell than to Buda with him.

  “Does the Major still hate him?”

  “Hate him!” Antal repeated somewhat testily. “For four years it’s been all the higher-ups hate Pokerface like the plague, and now,” he could hardly disguise his jealousy, “believe it or not, they had him standing in for the head porter last week! Does that make any sense to you?”

  “No,” I said, because it didn’t. “So you mean he’s still up there?”

  “Oh yes,” shrugged Antal, yawning as he combed his hair. “I hear that’s where you’re headed too.”

  “Reception?” I gasped.

  “Yes,” he nodded with equanimity, being so occupied with his hair he didn’t notice my anxiety. “So you didn’t know it was all over between me and Flóra, eh? Oh ho ho, old boy,” he gave a low whistle, “I could tell you things about that filthy tart that . . .”