Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “They will cease along with this society,” Elemér replied calmly. “Everything will change when society changes.”

  “The hell they will,” I grumbled. “Human nature isn’t going to change. They aren’t going to start hanging women for not loving a man back and men are still going to eat their own hearts out. Or won’t there be any love in the society of the future?”

  Elemér did not reply.

  “Not so wordy now, are you? Can’t answer me that, can you?”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I hate getting personal. You’re talking about love in general, but I know you have someone specific in mind.”

  “So?” I snapped, ready to jump.

  My anger now infected Elemér as well.

  “For the love of God,” he said, with unusual vehemence. “Do you still not see that you’re mixing things up? Love! Oh please. A bourgeois woman used you, that’s all. You were her András. She didn’t even bother to remember your name. The day before yesterday it was a Dezső being András, yesterday a Béla, today it’s a Franciska, and God knows who it’ll be tomorrow. What does that have to do with love? This is all just a symptom, too, a symptom, nothing else. A rotten little piece of the so-called Überbau that Karl Marx says—”

  “Karl Marx can go to hell.”

  Elemér stopped suddenly. I had never seen his grey, impassive face so angry.

  “Aren’t you ashamed?” he berated me quietly. “They might be torturing a comrade to death as we speak, now, at this very moment, because he dared stand up for Marx’s ideas. He’s dying for us, for you as well—yes, you! And you say Marx can go to hell and deny your own father for some rich whore. Do you know what Marx calls people like that? Lumpenproletarier. You’re acting like a Lumpenproletarier.”

  “And you’re acting like an old Jew rabbi!” I screamed in his face. “You want to explain life with Marx’s kosher Talmud. Volume Three, page 458, paragraph 12: Love. What d’you know about love? It’s like you’re made of wood—wood and paper—stuffed with ideals. Your head’s full of printer’s ink and there’s a Marxist gramophone where your heart should be. I hate you, d’you hear me? I always hated you. You and your Jewish Marxism can go to hell. Good night!”

  A tram had just stopped in front of us, and I climbed, swaying, on board.

  That was how it happened; I have nothing to add.

  •

  In the morning, when I came into the hotel, I could feel that something had happened. I thought of that eerie spring night when no one in the hotel said anything, and I only found out about Gyula’s suicide hours later. That was when I had felt this inexplicable worry, this strange, undefined anxiety.

  I felt an indefinable lack—I can’t put it any other way. I observed keenly, but could detect no difference. The shift was moving soundlessly in its course, like some refined alien star to which earth’s humdrum rules did not apply. There was no one in the basement. Silence and stale air, a dynamo humming monotonously in the distance, the walls reverberating in the yellow half-light.

  I suddenly stopped. I knew what it was. It was the sound of the boys I was missing, that cheerful, familiar cacophony that you could usually hear at this time—between half past seven and half past eight—from far off in the basement. Now there was silence, an incomprehensible silence, and my steps echoed with unnatural loudness beneath the bare concrete vaults.

  At first, I thought I was late. Had our clock stopped? I started running, but when I got into the changing room, I could see right away that our clock wasn’t the problem. The boys were all there, every one, getting undressed, changing and washing as usual, but in stony silence.

  I was watching them, stunned, when my heart skipped a beat. There was a short, broad-shouldered man in a bowler hat sitting in one of the corners, propped against the wall, reading the paper. He turned the pages absently, and it was so quiet you could hear the rustling of the pages.

  “Copper!” Lajos whispered without moving his mouth. He stole a glance all round, then added breathlessly:

  “He’s come for Pokerface.”

  We can’t have been more than ten feet from the “copper”. Lajos was standing in front of his locker, the open door of which sheltered him from view. My locker was right next to his; I opened it mechanically. Lajos stepped back, took a quick look at the “copper”, and then ducked back behind the door and gestured for me to come closer.

  “Watch out!” he whispered. “He’s tryin’ to get Antal to tell him who’s friends with Pokerface.”

  “I see,” I whispered, and peeked out from behind the door.

  Elemér’s locker was at the other end of the room. He was sitting in front of it on the bench, undressing. He betrayed no sign of emotion. He was taking off his uniform as calmly as someone who has finished work in the evening, is getting ready to go home and wondering what there is for dinner.

  I could see the bowler-hatted man watching him from behind his paper. He was a stocky man with a ruddy face and black moustache, a big pink plaster on the back of his neck, which was pudgy and strangely bare. He was again wearing that broad, double-breasted blue suit I had seen him in on the tram, his thick walking stick hanging off his arm. It’s got a sword in it, I thought, it must have. Something happened inside me.

  I had felt like this as a small child when I had stood up to the class, or when I threw the ink bottle in that gendarme’s face. And later, squeezing the Deputy’s hand, or when I stood in front of Franciska’s loaded revolver. These are the moments in life that you simply can’t explain. If I saw a short, broad-shouldered man in a bowler hat a hundred yards away on the street, I would turn off into the next side street and run, terrified. Now that he was sitting here ten paces from me, I felt no fear. There was only indignation and indescribable hate.

  “Stop starin’ at him!” Lajos whispered.

  I didn’t reply. I suddenly knew what I had to do. I closed my locker and turned around.

  “Where you going?”

  “Over to Elemér.”

  Lajos grabbed my sleeve.

  “You mad?” he whispered. “He’ll take you as well!”

  “So what?” I said so loudly that it caught everyone’s attention, and went over to Elemér.

  The peasant in me always came out at times like this. I walked as if I’d had boots on my feet, with a knife tucked in the top. I could see the bowler-hatted man following me with his eyes, and this gave me a strange satisfaction.

  I went over to Elemér and looked him in the eye.

  “You were right,” I said nice and loud, so everyone would hear. “You were right about everything, Elemér.”

  I will never forget Elemér’s face at that moment. When I think back on it, I am always reminded of those naive paintings of ugly ascetic saints in rural churches. His thin, weather-beaten, working-class face grew even paler than usual and his prematurely aged cat’s eyes seemed to reflect some kind of awkward emotion. The whole thing lasted no more than two or three seconds. Then, to my great surprise, he said:

  “Where’s that pengő, then?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “I told you when we bet you’d lose,” he added almost cheerfully, and I suddenly understood.

  That was him all over, that was Pokerface. He was still trying to protect me. And I had told him yesterday that there was a Marxist gramophone where his heart should be.

  I could feel myself going red. I fished a pengő out of my pocket, fumbling, and handed it to him. Elemér dropped it, and I could see that it had been on purpose. I leant down after it, he leant down too, and when our heads touched, he whispered:

  “Get out.”

  It was an order, and I executed it. I was suddenly standing in front of the changing room, without a clue what to do with myself. Opposite the changing room were the staff toilets. I went in, locked the door of the stall behind me, and lit up nervously. Thoughts came rushing through my head so fast th
at not a single one could make it out alive. They scampered one over the other, each trampling the last. Why am I just sitting here? I asked myself at once. What am I waiting for? Why don’t I do something?

  I jumped up. I’m going to go back in there, I thought, and . . . I had no idea what I was going to do. I wanted the “copper” to take me too, I wanted the devil to take the whole damned world.

  I charged into the changing room, but Elemér and the “copper” were no longer there.

  “Where are they?”

  “They left.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  I ran out. I ran as fast as I could, galloping through the long, winding basement, but I couldn’t see them anywhere.

  Suddenly, I came up short. In one of the bends, I spotted the first window onto the street, and I could see Elemér through the dusty glass as the “copper” took him away in handcuffs. The police van, the Green Bertha as it was known in Újpest, was standing there in front of the window, with a crowd of curious onlookers gathered round. They must have been office workers and civil servants on the way to work, and the early risers among the upper classes on their way to ride or play tennis. You could see that they’d had a solid breakfast, a leisurely read of the paper, that their maids had said a respectful farewell when they’d left home, that they were—in a word—a “better class of people” who had as little to do with this handcuffed fellow citizen as a Zulu native or an Amazonian head-hunter they’d once seen in the newsreel at the pictures. They watched this little free entertainment with moderate interest, bustling and smiling, asking what was going on; a man with a monocle was shaking his head, and a woman in tennis clothes was laughing shrilly.

  Elemér reacted to the curious looks with the complete indifference of a tree with a bunch of tourists gawping at it. It was a little tree, an ugly, bare tree, but it weathered the storm well. You could see that it had prepared thoroughly for winter and its storms, and it was now calm and unsurprised. He stepped into the police van like a civil servant into his office—a humble civil servant, decent to the soles of his feet, aware that he was doing nothing but his duty, expecting no reward.

  The “copper” locked the door of the van behind him and the Green Bertha made off. It was only then I noticed that I’d removed my hat and was standing stiffly to attention, bareheaded, the way we did for our superiors.

  8

  ELEMÉR’S ARREST HAD A STRANGE IMPACT on me. Now that I come to try and write about it, I am overwhelmed by that oppressive confusion a pilot must feel when his plane hits a patch of turbulence. In great moments of excitement, there is always something unattainably dreamlike, and you relate to them—even later—as you do to dreams. Only if you try and talk, or in this case, write about them, do you notice that there are turbulent patches in between events that you cannot fly through using the cumbersome notions of rational thought. In the moment of action, the person doing it sees even the most appalling action as natural. They do it because they have to do it, but if they try to explain why they did it, they start humming and hawing or dissimulating. They think of Freud or the alignment of the stars, reaching desperately for the words to make themselves understood, and all the while they can feel that it’s all in vain. The more words they try and use to get closer to the truth, the farther away they get, because they’re trying to explain something in the language of waking consciousness that happened on the border between dreams and insanity. So I’m going to record this without any explanation: I wanted to go to prison.

  The fuse just blew, there was a short circuit in my soul, and in the darkness, something happened for which there are no clear words. You must understand, I didn’t want to do anything for which I might later go to prison, I simply wanted to go to prison, like Elemér. That’s how it started; at the time, I wasn’t thinking of anything else. The idea of killing someone only came to me days later.

  One morning, Antal drew me aside in the changing room and took a pistol out of his pocket.

  “Buy it off me?”

  The question did not surprise me. The boys were constantly “wheeling-dealing” with each other and there was a roaring trade in pistols. We were all cadets, and the love of deadly weapons is inculcated early on in cadets. I was no exception—but where would I have got the money for a gun?

  “I don’t want it,” I said curtly, and thought that would be that.

  “Got a gun already?” Antal asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “you’d better buy it quick, my friend, because you’ll never get another one this cheap. I bought it for ten from someone in a spot, and now I’m in trouble myself. I’ll give it to you for eight.”

  I knew about guns, and I could see right away that this one was worth twice that. It was a five-shot revolver, a serious, reliable weapon. I liked it, but I had no intention of buying it.

  “What do I need a gun for?”

  “You never know when you’re going to need it. Take it for seven?”

  “I don’t have seven pengős.”

  Antal must have been trying to get rid of it for a while, and it seems he really was in a tough spot.

  “I really need the money,” he said. “If you pay cash, I’ll give it to you for five.”

  “Five?” I asked in surprise.

  “Yes. And I’ll throw in twenty cartridges, too.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I did have five pengős, but I had wanted to give four of them to my mother.

  “I’d have to try it first,” I said evasively.

  Antal thought about it.

  “If you lend me three pengős,” he said at last, “I’ll leave it with you till Monday and you can try it tomorrow on the range. All right?”

  That was an offer I couldn’t resist. We had cadet training on Sundays, and this was on a Saturday morning.

  “All right,” I nodded, and dug out the three pengős. “I’ll give you my answer on Monday.”

  I pocketed the pistol, and at that moment something was set in motion within me. I can only put it that vaguely: something was set in motion. It was as if some poisonous stimulant had got into my blood—from then on, I couldn’t calm down. My excitement seemed completely unreasonable, and yet simply kept on growing. I couldn’t get to sleep for ages in the evenings; I would drink half a litre of pálinka, but still start again and again from my sleep.

  The next morning, I was first out on the range. I went straight to the target and stopped at the ten-metre line. I looked around to check no one was watching and drew the pistol out of my pocket. Up till now, it had been just an object, but it suddenly came to life. When I loaded it and my finger touched the trigger, an indescribably great, almost perverse sense of security came over me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel defenceless. If it came down to it, I too, could do something, and not just have other people do things to me. I could defend myself, therefore I was. I started humming loudly.

  “You’d better watch out! . . .”

  The Constable’s threat had been terrifying me for weeks, but now when I thought of it, I suddenly laughed.

  “You too!” I said aloud, and in my mind took aim at the dark, twisted man.

  I could see his yellow, blinking eyes and told myself: right there, between the eyes!

  The bullet drilled into the centre of the target with a great bang.

  That was when I made up my mind.

  Was I trying to take revenge for Elemér? Or for myself ? Did I want to make amends for being the way that I was? I don’t know. Probably all three played a part. But even so, the question remained, why wasn’t it her I wanted to shoot? I have no answer to that, either. That was just the way it was.

  I didn’t think about the reasons, and didn’t care about the consequences. The need for revenge is frighteningly similar to sexual desire, and sometimes I really did think about the moment of committing the act the way a lover will think about the night they can finally satisfy their desires. I did, occasionally, thin
k about the short, broad-shouldered man in the bowler hat, the way lovers, too, sometimes thought of jealous husbands, but I was no more sober than those lovers. I was in love with this idea, obsessed with the feeling. After all my days of helplessness, I felt a strange liberation that at last, I too would finally do something and not die like a miserable worm, crushed by chance under an upper-class heel. I wasn’t going to give up that easily—I was going to make them pay the price. And then the “coppers” could come and get me, and the devil could come and take the whole wide world!

  Besides, he was bound to know by now that I didn’t want to give up Elemér, and it was only a matter of hours or days before he made good on his threat. Well, let him try. The day they sacked me from the hotel, I’d shoot him like a dog.

  This decision made me more or less calm. On Monday, I bought the gun, and waited.

  •

  For the moment, nothing happened. The Constable walked past me whenever he came to the hotel as if he’d never seen me in his life. He didn’t rush me or threaten me like before. He was incomprehensibly, frighteningly silent.

  I will never forget those silent meetings. I used to leave the pistol in the changing room, because I was afraid it would bulge through my tight uniform, but on the days I knew he’d be in, I always carried it with me. When I saw his car draw up outside the entrance, I would quickly reach into my pocket, pull up the safety, and wipe my sweaty palm unconsciously against my trousers, the way I always did at cadets before taking a shot. Right between the eyes!

  The gun warmed through in my pocket. It was feverish, it ranted and raved. I knew that it could happen at any moment, and so every second was imbued with a special significance. There was a scary silence within me. My thoughts were all on tiptoes, a fog descended on my heart, and the world filled with mysterious signs. Once, I remember, I read the following word on a poster: Beginning, and shivered. Once, someone said: Endless, and my knees trembled. Images that previously I had never even noticed could now move me to tears. My mother as she stood before the tub washing, or as she went out to work with her bundle in her hand, adjusting her kerchief before she left. My father leaning down for something and then throwing back his soft, greying hair in the way only he did as he stood up. A cloud in the sky. A boat on the Danube. The wheelwright playing the harmonica on the second floor. I stored these images within me like someone taking their leave of a town and capturing a few final scenes on their way to the station. That was it, that’s all. That little. That much.