“You’re stayin’ here,” he said.
“Leave me be,” Márika pleaded. “I don’t ever want to look at that toad,” she said, pointing at Herr Hausmeister.
“You’re stayin’ here!” my father repeated, because Márika had made to leave again.
“I’ll be back later,” she said. “Let me be for now.” She started crying. “I . . . don’t . . . want to see him . . .”
“All right, all right,” my father reassured her. “Come back in half an hour. It’ll all be taken care of.”
“Heaven pay you for your kindness, Mishka,” Márika sniffed. “Lord knows I can’t.”
With that she left, but she did not come back in half an hour. Nor did she come back in an hour—she never came back at all. We never even heard of her again, and to this day, I don’t know what happened to her. But we had no idea of that at the time.
When Márika left, my father said to Herr Hausmeister:
“I want a word with you. Come in here for a minute,” and pointed to Márika’s flat.
“I’m busy,” Herr Hausmeister replied curtly. “Some other time.”
“I want a word with you now,” my father said with menacing calm.
I suddenly understood why all of Újpest was frightened of him. He was terrifying as he stood there in front of Herr Hausmeister, though he still looked as calm, as spine-tinglingly calm as he had done in the morning when he went out to speak to the policeman.
“And when Dappermishka wants a word with someone,” he said slowly, emphasizing more or less every syllable, “then that someone will either have a word with him or never open his mouth again. Got it?” he screamed at Herr Hausmeister, and as if he’d sensed what the two Swabians were up to, spun suddenly round.
A knife flashed in Herr Hausmeister’s hand. It was a long kitchen knife; I don’t know where he produced it from—from among Márika’s things or his own pocket. I don’t know anything about what happened during those moments, because the two Swabians also produced pocket-knives, and I was whipping out my pistol and pointing it at them.
“Drop the knives!” I said, and gave them both a good smack in the mouth with the back of my left hand.
The Swabians obeyed and I kicked their knives down into the courtyard. The whole thing happened so quickly and so quietly that the people around me, who were watching my father’s duel, didn’t even notice.
It was only really at this point that I realized what was going on. My father had caught Herr Hausmeister’s wrist, it’s true, but he was no wallflower, and the blade kept dancing between my father’s chest and his throat. I knew that Herr Hausmeister could stab him through the heart at any moment and also—of course—that I had but to take two steps and he would drop the knife the second he saw the gun. But I did not take those two steps.
Where I came from, duels have unwritten rules—precise, strict, peasant rules. I knew that if I pointed my pistol at Herr Hausmeister, my father would beat me senseless and never forgive the shame I had brought upon him. So I had to stand there, gun in hand, not doing a thing but watching the flashing blade of the kitchen knife now pointed directly at my father’s chest.
Someone groaned beside me. I looked—it was my mother. She loved the man that another was now trying to kill more than she loved life itself and she was a strong-armed woman. If she’d grabbed Márika’s frying pan then, Herr Hausmeister would have spent the rest of his life a cripple; but she was a peasant woman and she respected the unwritten rules—so she did not reach for the frying pan. She just stood there, white as a sheet, her lips trembling, rooted to the spot, watching her man.
There was a collective hiss. Herr Hausmeister took my father’s legs out from under him so he almost fell onto the point of the knife. It was only at the last minute that he regained his balance, but then his anger redoubled his might. He twisted Herr Hausmeister’s arm so hard he yelped in pain like a wounded animal. The knife fell out of his hand.
“Well, well,” said my father with a smile, and slipped his left hand slowly into his pocket.
He pulled out a huge knife. It was a flick knife that produced a long, thin blade.
“You see,” he said to Herr Hausmeister, “I’ve got one too. Only I don’t use it. ’Cause when Dappermishka wants to stab, he stabs, and when he wants to talk, he talks. And now, I want to talk.”
With that, he handed me the knife and let go of Herr Hausmeister, who followed him without protest, silent, head bowed.
They went into Márika’s apartment. They were only in there for a few minutes, but when they came out, Herr Hausmeister told the Swabians:
“Take the things back in.”
The Swabians did as they were told and then cleared off, along with Herr Hausmeister, without a word.
Never had those walls seen a miracle like this! The house was drunk with the idea that a tenant had triumphed over Herr Hausmeister, for whom nothing was sacred, not even their wives. They snatched my father onto their shoulders and carried him around the corridor in triumph.
“Long live Dappermishka!” the basement, the courtyard and all three floors chanted. “Long live!”
I, too, rejoiced. I rejoiced the way people do in stories. After all, good had triumphed over evil, I told myself, because I was seventeen and had no idea of the evils we would suffer later for this “triumph”.
11
“ANDRÁS!” ONE OF THE OFFICE STAFF called into the heaving changing room. “The Major wants you.”
“Right away,” I called back, and was surprised at the calmness of my voice.
It was Sunday morning, 31st August 1930. So today’s the day, I thought with numb, hollow surprise, feeling basically nothing. I took my uniform out of my locker and started dressing mechanically.
It worked out well, it being a Sunday. The Constable always came in on Sundays . . . at least I wouldn’t have long to wait. I’ll go upstairs, get my marching orders from the Major, and . . .
I looked at Lajos’s watch. It was a quarter to eight. The Constable would definitely be in by eleven. Another three hours. A hundred and eighty minutes.
The changing room was crowded, the boys were gabbling loudly all around me. Antal was telling them about a “skirt” he’d taken to the Mauthner the night before, where . . .
“Oh ho ho, boys!”
The “boys” were listening to the filthy details, entranced, occasionally breaking into roars of laughter. If you only knew! I thought, and hiding behind my locker door so they wouldn’t see me, quickly slipped the pistol into my pocket.
I waited a long time in the Major’s anteroom. In the first fifteen minutes, I felt a strange angst, but then my exhausted nerves went limp and I was overcome with a sleepy dullness. I couldn’t think about anything. I just stood there, shifting from one foot to the other, staring at the electric clock on the wall. The big black hands stood still for sixty seconds and then jumped forward again and again with a dull click. Another hundred and thirty-five minutes . . . a hundred and thirty-four . . . a hundred and thirty-three . . .
At length the green, padded door opened and the head porter gestured for me to enter.
Mussolini was engrossed in some papers and didn’t even look up when I came in. His green, shrivelled toad’s face was fixed, expressionless, on the documents, the monocle flashing menacingly on his small, yellow eyes. In front of him lay a large inkstand made from the shell of a hand grenade, on either side of which two semicircles of pencils and pens lay in strictly regimented order. There were a great many pens and pencils, grouped according to size and colour in painstaking symmetry. Old Gábor had been this devoted to symmetry in the first stage of his madness, when the house had still admired him for it, the way the liberal press had marvelled at Il Duce for making the Italian trains run on time. Everything was so symmetrical in this regimental sanctum it was as if the position of all the furniture, paintings and files had been set with a compass and ruler. You got the feeling that the whole room was standing to attention and would do an im
mediate about-turn if the Major ever gave the order.
But the Major wasn’t saying anything. The Major was reading and did not acknowledge my presence. The office was as silent as a military graveyard; the only sound was the rustle of the papers whenever the great man turned a page. I stood there at attention before him, my hands on the piping of my trousers, as per regulation. The head porter, too, was standing to attention. All that was missing were some drums in the background.
It was a quarter past nine. There was an electric clock on the wall in here, too, but this one seemed to be slower. Another hundred and five minutes . . . a hundred and five minutes . . . still another hundred and five minutes . . .
Mussolini looked up at last.
“Well, how are we?” he asked, full of concern, treating me to a smile.
This was not, of course, what I was expecting. I stuttered in my agitation:
“F-f-fine . . . thank you, sir.”
The Major scribbled something in the margin of his document and then, without looking up, said:
“I hear you won the shooting prize.”
This was even more surprising. So he really did get reports from the trainers at cadet practice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very good, very good,” he said with soldierly approval. “Bound to come in useful in life.”
Much sooner than you think! I told myself, and the gun seemed to move in my pocket.
Then the great man interrupted his reading.
“I’ve called you here because . . .”
The telephone rang. It was some grandee or other; they arranged a rendezvous at the Officers’ Club for the evening. That took up another five minutes.
“Right,” he said absent-mindedly when he’d hung up. “Where was I? Oh yes,” he recalled, “the head porter tells me that the night shift boy is ill. Could you take over from him tonight?”
The question came as such a surprise that I was simply lost for words. Is that why he’d called me in here? . . . No, it can’t be.
“Well, why do you look so scared?” he asked. “Got other plans?”
“No . . . not at all. Yes, sir, I can, sir.”
“Good,” he nodded and started leafing through his papers once more. “In that case, you can go home and sleep a bit.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, still waiting for him to fire me, but the Major smiled at me and indicated that I could go.
I simply couldn’t understand what this meant; how could I have? The Constable had told me plainly that “The Major knows all about it”, so he also knew that I hadn’t turned in Elemér, and that . . . in short, he knew everything. And now, instead of firing me, he’s asking me how I am, praising me for my skills as a cadet, and having me stand in for the lift boy on the night shift. Why?
What have they got planned for tonight?
Why was the Major suddenly so chatty? And why was the Constable so silent?
I knew that something had happened, something I would only find out about—yet again—afterwards, something that . . . but what? What could it be?
I went home but couldn’t sleep at all. I waited for the evening, dazed and anxious.
•
Nothing happened till midnight. I stood there in front of the lift with nothing to do; sometimes there was no one for ten or fifteen minutes. Most of the guests had left after St Stephen’s Day, and the hotel was mired in the dusty, diffuse boredom of the low season. The restaurant closed an hour earlier than in high season, and the lobby was deserted by eleven. At midnight, they turned off the big chandeliers; quiet and semi-darkness hovered over the lifts like in a sickroom. I shifted my weight sleepily from foot to foot, because we weren’t allowed to sit down or walk around even at such times. The music came filtering through, but so faint and otherworldly that it seemed to be coming from another building, or another universe . . . I nodded off on my feet.
I woke with a start to find the door of the office opening. The duty manager stepped out of it, heading straight for me.
“András,” he said. “Go up to 205 and tell Her Excellency that His Excellency’s calling her from Geneva. We’ve been trying her for five minutes, but there’s been no answer. It looks like she’s taken the phone off the hook.”
“She might be sleeping,” I said, anxiously.
“Then wake her up,” he said. “I’ll cover the lift till then.”
“Yes, sir.”
My heart was in my mouth. Whether out of fear or joy, I couldn’t have said exactly. The whole thing had happened so unexpectedly—a moment before, I’d been dozing. I’d been dozing alertly—I was alert and attentive as I dozed as only people on the night shift can be. Reality now seemed far more dreamlike. I was getting to see her at last, talk to her, tell her . . . what was it, again? I realized with horror that I didn’t know. That I was no longer sure I wanted to talk to her at all. So much had happened since. In the last weeks, I’d grown so distant from room 205, and yet here I was standing once more before it. I heard myself knock.
Inside, a piano was playing, a gay cacophony could be heard. A woman’s trilling laugh. Was it her? . . . A dubious sweetness washed over me. Hope? . . . Or only memories?
I kept knocking for some time, but no one answered. In the end, I opened the door. The suite was full of guests, dancing everywhere—even in the entrance hall. Strange faces wandered around me in the smoke and darkness, women’s naked shoulders, flashes of dress shirts, gilt-embroidered dress uniforms, with—among them all—waiters holding trays above their heads like tightrope-walkers criss-crossing everywhere. They must have had a lot to drink; no one was quite sober. All about me, amidst dizzying clouds of perfume, couples danced, rubbing one against the other; in the crimson half-light of the bedroom, people started applauding for some unknown reason. Rippling laughter erupted somewhere as people whispered here and shouted over there, all this drowned out by the piano pouring out its rough, schmaltzy, artificially sensual dance music.
I couldn’t find her in the enormous crowd. They were doing a tango, and the lights had already been dimmed for “mood lighting”, but apparently not enough for some people’s taste. A lamp went out, the darkness in the salon grew, the night seemed to lighten behind the open windows. It was an amazing image, quite absurd. The mercury-silver of the moonlit Danube, the winding golden garlands of the lamps scattered on the hillside opposite, the pale marble lattice of the Fisherman’s Bastion, the greenish domes of the Royal Palace above, the sky, the stars; the whole moonlit landscape as it was framed in the windows and the way the couples danced and swayed before it . . . I’d only seen the like at the pictures—and I was quite overcome. Everyone simply danced around me, spinning and whirling, sweeping me up with them, stepping on my feet—a man snapped at me angrily, a woman laughed . . . At me? I felt like someone who’d wandered accidentally onto the stage instead of into the audience, with everyone now staring at them—someone who did not quite understand what was going on yet—but who was on the verge of realization; at which point laughter would erupt and scandal would ensue.
I spotted her at last. She was dancing in Exfix’s room, right at the back, in a dark corner. She was dancing up a storm with a captain of the Hussars who, with his gold-embroidered sky-blue uniform, heart-throb thin moustache, medals for gallantry, spurs, and face off a tooth-powder advert, practically reeked of celluloid. Greta Garbo danced with such unlikely Hussars, but she did it in period costume in films set at least a hundred years ago, preferably in St Petersburg on a winter’s night. The heart-throb must have had a lot to drink, because he was whispering away as they danced like fever patients, while she just laughed and laughed. Her copious loose hair flew all around her face, her breasts rocked as she whirled, occasionally flashing out from beneath the black satin. She was very beautiful and very drunk. I watched her, completely overcome. I could hardly speak.
“Your Excellency!”
She smiled when she saw me, and her smile made me weak at the knees. I knew that drunken smile of hers,
oh Lord, how I knew it! It was full of memories for me, memories to make me go weak at the knees—the memories of bygone nights when she would leave the bar, tipsy, around dawn, and I could feel, I knew that when she gave me that smile, she’d be calling down for me in a minute or two.
“Oh is that you, András?” she said, and touched the tip of my nose playfully with her finger, like in the good old days. “Well, what news?”
“H-His Excellency is calling from Geneva.”
“His Excellency?” she repeated absently, as if she didn’t know who I was talking about and then, with a light and familiar gesture, she smoothed back her hair and added sleepily: “Tell him I’m not home yet.”
“Should I have them put it through to my room?” the Captain asked softly, and smiled, his eyes full of meaning. “It could be important.”
She did not reply at once. You could see that she was thinking, and that she was finding it hard. Meanwhile, she kept her eyes on me, kept looking at me, just looking, and looking . . . was it only because she was so drunk? Or? . . . I flushed hot.
She turned away a little from the Captain and came closer.
“When the guests have gone, I’ll call,” she said softly, with a smile, touching the tip of my nose with her finger.
I went out into the corridor as if I, too, had been drinking all night. When the guests have gone . . . When the guests have gone . . . Who would they get to stand in for me if she did telephone? Could it be Franciska?
“Did they speak?” the duty manager asked.
“No, sir,” I replied. “Please tell him that Her Excellency is not yet home.”
The duty manager nodded and was off back to the office. But he hadn’t even closed the door behind him when a terrible thought occurred to me. Maybe that wasn’t what I was meant to tell him at all. Could I have misunderstood her?
When the guests have gone, I’ll call . . . Could she have meant she’d call Exfix? But then why would she have said it in a whisper? Could it be just that she was afraid her guests might overhear and misunderstand, thinking that she wanted to get rid of them? But then why did she look at me like that? Just because she was drunk? No! . . . Yes! . . . No! . . . Yes! . . .
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