Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  I was saying goodbye. I had never been as gentle before as in these days when I was preparing for murder. I stopped drinking. I gave every penny I earned to my mother and took most of my food home, to boot. I went hungry a lot, but not like before. Back then, I had been hungry because I didn’t have enough to eat. Now, it was a choice. I was fasting, like I had before Communion as a child.

  I liked being at home. I would sit with my parents out on the walk-way or in the room, beside the rickety table. I smiled when they smiled, nodded as they talked. They didn’t talk much. We had a lot of things to keep quiet about. Then, when we couldn’t take the silence any more, one of us would say:

  “Let’s have a game of cards.”

  We still had the cards, the pawnbrokers wouldn’t take them. Sometimes we’d play for hours without saying a word.

  Now, if my mother brought home some washing, my father would join her beside the tub, and I helped too. All three of us would wash on these hot, sultry nights, suffocating in the steam and dizzy with the heat. Sometimes, we didn’t have money for petroleum and the lamp overhead would go out while we worked. We laughed and kept on working. Our hands touched in the tub, and I would sometimes cry in the darkness. My parents, I thought, and the word was so heart-wrenching, it was as if no one had ever used it before me. My parents, and I, their son.

  One night, when I was alone in the flat, I found the marriage licence. It was lying on one of the shelves in the wardrobe. It lacked the duty stamp because, of course, those cost money. The wedding would have cost money, too—not much, it’s true—but we didn’t even have that. Shame, I thought. The police would be sure to ask for my documents.

  I went and sat in the window, staring out into the night. Shame, I thought. It’s a shame about a lot of things. If I could have kept on in school, I’d be finishing next year. Nothing would have happened yet, and everything would still be before me. I would be learning, preparing for life. I’d always been a good student, I would have stayed a good student. The Schoolmaster had always encouraged me by saying that if I got top grades for twelve years straight, they’d give me a free place at the university. Shame. It would have been nice. The world was full of wonders, and I did so want to see them. Shame, shame, shame. Not for me, but for the person I might have been.

  Might . . . might . . . might.

  One day, it would all be different—Elemér was right. But where would I be by then?

  The salty tears ran down into my mouth, and I didn’t bother wiping them away. The house was silent, the morning star winking red above the courtyard. Like a ruby, I thought, like a ruby in the mechanism of a watch, and at that thought, I trembled.

  What a mechanism! What a piece of clockwork.

  Who wound it, that it never stopped? What drove it, that it worked with such chilling perfection? We saw only a ruby up in the distance, a tiny cogwheel, an insignificant screw, but never the dial. It ticked on and on, day and night, right in front of your face, and yet you never knew what time it was.

  All you knew—and that only in moments such as this—was that it was all connected. That every screw, wheel and spring served the Work, with merciless efficiency. That every screw had its place, every star had its orbit, and that you—yes, you too—had your own place and trajectory, like the stars, the fish and the plants, or the bird up on the rooftop that does nothing but sing and then fall down dead. You came for some purpose, you were sent to do something, and now you’re standing there in the world like a small child their parents have sent next door with a message who, by the time they arrive, have forgotten why they were sent in the first place.

  I should have expressed something. I should have expressed something!

  There it was, in my heart, and I aborted it, like poor women did their babies. It was a simple poem, a fractured peasant poem, but it was my poem, and I should have been the one to write it. It might have been clumsy, and certainly wasn’t clever, but it came from the soil like the wheat I’d reaped and reached for the sky like everything that grows out of the earth. The earth and the sky rang in a single rhyme within me, smelling of compost, like freshly turned soil, fragrant like the flower that grew out of it, simple like the expressions of the animals, and mysterious like the faces of the dead.

  Yes, I suddenly knew. I understood for the first time what I had been born for, though I may not have been able to put it into words. I knew it in my blood and in my marrow, in my sinews, muscles, veins, in my guts, trembling with excitement, and in my skin, which got goosebumps at the thought. I have to express this poem. I had to express the poem—the rest didn’t matter. Happiness? Who ever asked a cog in the mechanism if it’s happy? Every cog has its function, and what are you worth if you don’t fulfil your function? Go, sing your poem, you wretch, and leave at least something fine behind you, a line that might echo for a while, like the organ after mass when the priest has long since fallen silent.

  9

  ON ONE OF THESE OCCASIONS, when we were quietly playing cards, just the three of us, there was an unexpected knocking on the door. It was late, it must have been around eleven.

  “Who can that be?” asked my mother, with an anxious twitch.

  She’d been uneasy all night. I’d hardly got through the door when she suggested we play cards, and she hadn’t said a word since.

  “I’ll go see,” I said, and went out.

  It was old Máli. She was a flat-chested, pot-bellied old woman, caked in dirt and full of honeyed words.

  “Praise the Lord,” she said with an ingratiating smile, because she was from near Szeged originally and there they praised the Lord even instead of saying “good evening”.

  She was devout, gossipy and unbelievably smelly—none of us could stand her. We never visited her, nor she us, though we’d lived in the same house since who knows when. I couldn’t understand what she was doing here. My face must have shown it, because her first question after praising the Lord was:

  “Come at a bad time?”

  “No, why don’t you come inside?”

  “Is your mother home?”

  “She is.”

  Old Máli and her smell came into the room. The devout woman praised the Lord on entering that as well, and then said to my mother:

  “I hear you were looking for me, my dear. I only just got home.”

  My father gave my mother a look of shock and my mother went red.

  “Um . . . ah . . . it was on account of the washin’,” she scrambled with a forced smile, “you know.”

  But no, old Máli did not know. She was a cunning old vixen, and she wasn’t deaf or anything, but you could see that she really didn’t know.

  “Washin’?” she repeated vaguely, looking in two directions at once, being wall-eyed.

  “Don’t you remember?” my mother wheedled in an odd tone. “Just the other day, you was saying that . . . um . . .” she gave the old woman a long look, “you wanted some washin’ done.”

  Máli suddenly understood.

  “Oh that’s right, that’s right, it went right out of my head!” she said, and gave a hideously throaty laugh. “Yes, that’s right, the washin’. ’Course.”

  My father looked from one woman to the other. He looked un usually agitated, and I, too, grew concerned. I knew what the old woman lived off, all the children in the house knew. Surely my mother wasn’t . . .

  “If you want,” my mother said, “I’ll come down with you now and take a look. Then we can fix a price right away.”

  “All right,” the old woman nodded with a cunning expression. “We can discuss it downstairs, dear. Praise the Lord.”

  And she was off, my mother in tow.

  “Back in a minute,” she said hastily, flustered, and was out the door.

  My father didn’t say anything and neither did I. The old woman was already shuffling along the walkway outside, but her smell still lingered. My father shuffled the cards distractedly, then smacked them suddenly down on the table, as if he’d caught someone sharping. H
e stood up angrily and hurried after my mother without a word.

  I could see a storm brewing and fled into darkness to avoid it. I turned out the light, undressed, and went quickly to bed.

  A few minutes later, I could hear the door opening outside. There was silence, they weren’t talking. My mother came into the room, tiptoed to the table and took the lamp. She paused a moment in the door, then slowly, carefully, closed it behind her.

  “He’s asleep,” she whispered.

  My father didn’t answer.

  There was the scratching of a match and the light of the petroleum lamp filtered in through the cracks in the door. Someone opened up the collapsible bed, there were steps on the stone floor, a quiet rustling, the familiar sounds of people undressing. A little while later, the bed creaked, one of them had got in it. The other poked about a little while longer, then the light went out and there was silence.

  The silence was so deep, I could hear the dripping of the tap clearly through the closed door. One-two . . . one-two. Two drops together, then silence, and then: one-two . . . one-two.

  “Mishka!” my mother said at last.

  “Yes?”

  “Is you angry?”

  My father did not reply.

  “Could you have gone through with it?” he asked after a long time, and his voice was dark as the room. “Could you really have done it behind my back?”

  “No, I swear!” my mother whispered. “I swear on the Virgin Mary!”

  “Then why d’you go see the old woman?”

  “I just wanted to talk to her.”

  “Didn’t I tell you that filthy old woman wasn’t to touch you as long as I live and breathe? So what the hell did you want to talk to her about?”

  “I don’t know. Just to ask her. After all, she is a midwife. I dare say a doctor would do it better . . . but when we ain’t got the money?”

  “You know we’ll have it. Weren’t you there when Rudi said he’d lend it to me?”

  “Yes, but . . . that was a while ago, and . . . you ain’t said nothing since, Mishka.”

  “What was I meant to do? I ain’t some old fishwife to go running my mouth all day.”

  “When did you talk to him last?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And what did he say? Will we get it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When, when?” my father groaned. “Next week.”

  “Next week?” My mother’s voice changed all of a sudden. “Well, that’s all right, then. Mishka,” she said, relieved. “Mishka, come on, don’t be angry with me.”

  “As if I had any right to be angry!” my father snorted. “All I do is lie to you. I was lyin’ just now.”

  There was a frightened silence.

  “You mean we won’t have the money next week?” my mother asked faintly.

  “Oh, the money was there yesterday!” my father replied furiously. “He was rubbin’ it under my nose, the bastard, like a whore’s tits.”

  “But he didn’t give it to you?”

  “Oh he wanted to. Only I didn’t take it.”

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause I didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Stop asking so many questions!” my father snapped. “Stop asking so many questions, damn it, ’cause I swear to God I’ll get out of bed right now and go fetch that money from Rudi, and then God help the whole wretched world!”

  My mother didn’t dare ask any further questions. They both lay in silence, only the tap said anything. One-two . . . one-two . . .

  It must have been another ten minutes before my father said anything. Then he was calm, frighteningly calm.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Why?” whispered my mother. “What happened yesterday?”

  “It wasn’t yesterday, or rather . . . It’s hard to explain. Something happened yesterday, too, only . . . how should I say . . . what happened yesterday started a long time ago. Back in America.”

  “Rudi was with you in America?”

  “That bum? Not a bit of it. I didn’t even know he was born back then. That was a long time ago, back when I was a sailor. What happened was, one day, we docked in New York, you know, what the people hereabouts call ‘Nooyok’.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, later that day, I’m walking down the street in Nooyok, when suddenly a car slows right down beside me. It was a fine car, with a fine gentleman inside. He looks at me, and looks at me, looks at me so hard his eyes almost pop out his head. Then he stops the car and right there, in the middle of the Nooyok street, calls out to me in Hungarian: Dappermishka? That’s my name, I says. Don’t you recognize me? he says. So I take a good look at his face, and then I cry: Dippymishka?”

  My mother laughed.

  “What?”

  “Wait for it, wait for it, all in good time. So the story was we were at school together, and he was called Mishka, and so was I, and so the boys—to tell us apart—started calling him Dippymishka. ’Cause he was a bit dippy, you know, sort of slow and whatnot. People had no more regard for him than for a pair of socks.”

  “Weren’t he the pig-herd’s son?”

  “That’s right. You know him?”

  “No, but they used to talk about him in the village, ’cause the story was he always sent his folks ten dollars at Christmas. They said he were a millionaire. Can you really become a millionaire out there drivin’ someone around?”

  “He wasn’t nobody’s driver. That was his own car. He had a ranch out there.”

  “A what?”

  “A ranch. Land. That’s what the Americans call it. He showed it to me and all, took me straight out to his ranch. Oh, you should have seen that!”

  “He really became a millionaire?”

  “No, he was no millionaire, Anna, he wasn’t even rich. But he lived better than a lord does here. He had everything. Good, rich land that grew anything—cows, pigs, chickens, whatever you can think of. There was a fine little white house out on the ranch, with three rooms, like a vicarage. And you should have heard the way people talked to him. Like a count! Mister this, mister that . . .”

  “What’s that, ‘mister’?”

  “It’s a mark of respect, like sir. And missus means madam.”

  “They called his wife madam?”

  “Out there, they call everybody madam.”

  “Even washerwomen?”

  “Even them.”

  “What a strange world,” my mother sighed. “What a wonderful, strange world.”

  “Well . . . as for wonderful, it’s not quite as wonderful as people here think it is. Because mister here or mister there, your bourgeois is still a bourgeois, and steps all over the poor. The only difference is that the bourgeois there have more money, so there’s a little more that makes its way down to the working class. Only I didn’t know that at the time, so Dippymishka’s farm blew me away. I says to him: how did you make all this? Just the same, he says, as anyone. I worked. What d’you do? Same as at home. Peasant work. And you got this rich off that? Oh, I ain’t rich, he says, I’m still making the payments on the ranch, ’cause I bought it on instalments. It don’t bring much, but it keeps the family. ’Cause he had a family, too, see, I didn’t tell you that. He married a Hungarian girl from out there, quite an eyeful. There were three pretty children running round the yard; I played catch with ’em all day, and then when it got dark, we took the cauldron out in the field, the way we used to when we were kids minding the animals. We made a goulash fit to make the angels weep. It was a good night, a very good night. There was a crescent moon in the sky; I still remember it, ’cause the moon there, when it’s crescent, ain’t the same as it is here for us, but the other way around. And that’s where it happened, under that moon. We ate a lot, and drank a lot, and we were in a fine mood. And then I almost burst into tears.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was th
e wind. It was a warm wind, a late-summer wind, bringing the smell of hay and soil at night. Hard to say it with words. You know, I was still a beardless youth when I escaped from the poverty at home. I’d been out on the sea ten years by then, wanderin’ the world, lookin’ for somethin’, I didn’t know what. And there, under that backwards crescent moon, with the wind bringin’ the smell of the earth, I suddenly knew that was what I’d been looking for. A bit of land. And everything that goes with it. A wife, and children, harvestin’—a good, decent, peasant life. Believe it or not, when I was alone in bed, I could feel the salt water flowing down into my mouth. You’d laugh at that, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, why would I? ’Course I wouldn’t. And, what happened next?”

  “Nothin’. I went sailin’ on. There were other cities, other seas, other worlds. Then the war broke out, and the peace, the revolution broke out, and the counter-revolution, everythin’ broke out. There was so much trouble, always, that I didn’t really have time to think on it, not till I got put away just now. There was nothing else to do but think on it there. I paced up and down in the cell and thought of that ranch. Then one night, when I couldn’t get to sleep, I suddenly sat up on my bunk, and I said to myself, Dappermishka, I says, is there anythin’ you can’t do that Dippymishka can? Well, to cut a long story short, that night I swore to myself I’d get the price of the crossing together and take you all out to America, no matter what. I’ll make you a missus and the boy a mister. We’ll have him educated, and send him up to university so he can write poems like Sándor Petőfi. And we’ll work for him, while we can; we’ll get on with our land and animals, and when we get old, we’ll sit in front of the house and look on that backwards crescent moon till our poet son comes and closes our eyes for good. That’s what I was thinking.”