Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  It was closing time. The guests were flooding out of the bar, the world transformed around me. Brightly lit cars appeared, uniformed chauffeurs clicked their heels. Silk rustled, jewels flashed, clouds of perfume hung in the air. Wealth was parading its fat behind, and I was looking at it as if I was seeing it for the first time. These people paid twenty pengős for a bottle of champagne, I thought, while bowing to them with my regulation smile, and my hand made a fist. My mother’s life is hanging on five bottles of champagne! And was it just my mother? No. It was millions of people, millions, millions! My heart thumped with indignation.

  “Goodbye, sir!” I said with a rictus smile to a fascist English Lord, and I knew that I had once and for all said goodbye to their world.

  12

  MY MOTHER SKIPPED FROM THE HOSPITAL. One night, when I got home with my father, we found her standing there beside the tub. She was washing, just as she had been a week before and a year before, as always. She was indifferent to our greetings and hardly looked up from the tub—she kept working the clothes with a fixed expression.

  “I promised the newsagent I’d have it done for tomorrow,” she said, and went on washing as if nothing had happened.

  We, too, tried to pretend. We didn’t ask how she was—we could see she was poorly, anyway. We removed our soaking clothes without a word and got stuck into the washing. It was an unpleasant, rainy night, the autumnal wind whistling in the chimney, lashing the windows with rain and rattling the rickety door as if it wanted to come in.

  “Grim weather,” I said, just for the sake of saying something.

  “Aye,” my mother nodded. “Autumn’s coming on.”

  That was about all we had to say. My father started in on some chaotic tale of the high seas a little later, but when my mother poured the lye into the tub, he got all muddled.

  “Where was I again?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Hm, where was you?”

  None of us knew. There was a nasty silence. My mother leant well into the tub, her back wracked by soundless sobs.

  “Autumn’s early this year,” my father said, as if he hadn’t noticed, and looked at me flatly.

  I knew what was coming next. He went over to the kitchen cupboard and took out the ginger tin where we kept the money.

  “Look at this,” he said loudly to my mother, sticking the tin box under her nose.

  There were fifteen pengős in it. My mother looked at the tarnished silver coins as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.

  “D’you kill somebody?”

  “We worked for it,” my father said haughtily, and you could see he was pleased with the effect.

  The fifteen pengős had their effect. My mother’s face lightened with hope.

  “My God,” she sighed, “if we could keep this up!”

  “Why couldn’t we?” my father asked nonchalantly. “Manci owes us another five at the end of the month. That makes twenty. And today’s only the fifth.”

  “You made fifteen pengős in five days?”

  “We did.”

  That wasn’t true. We got seven for the gun, and three more I had taken out of what I’d been saving up for my current instalment. My father had talked me into it.

  “It’ll sound better,” he said. “She’ll be happier this way.”

  “But what if I have to take it back?”

  “Why would you? I’ll have made it five times over by then.”

  He was completely convinced of that—which must have helped him feel better, but did not improve our situation one bit. If he was lucky, he made a pengő a day, which he had to put into the ginger tin each evening because my mother would count our funds at the end of each day.

  “Tomorrow,” he’d say, when we were alone, and then the next day, “tomorrow,” he’d say again.

  The days passed. My father tried everything—running around town from dawn some days, but in vain. There was no work to be had. There were crowds of the jobless hanging around outside the factories waiting, waiting for they knew not what. The management put up huge posters saying there were no vacancies, but they still came each morning and didn’t shift from outside the gates till night. The ones who were homeless didn’t have anywhere to go anyway, and the people who did still have somewhere to live couldn’t bear to sit there watching their children starve. Outside the factory they could at least hope, hope that something would finally happen someday—that one of the workers would get his hand caught up in a machine, or get arrested by the police, or that the proletarian revolution would break out, or some philanthropic American millionaire would buy the plant.

  My father’s prospects were even more unrealistic. A metalworker could hope that there would, eventually, be some need for a metalworker and that for some mysterious reason he would be the one they’d pick out of all the multitude of unemployed metalworkers. But what could a sailor hope for? Every company, even the smallest workshop, office or shop, could choose from thousands upon thousands of skilled workers. The only people with a chance were the ones with long records of service, and even they were treated with suspicion without letters of recommendation, which were nigh on impossible to get, since people were primarily concerned with finding positions for their kith and kin.

  I tried to find him something at the hotel. I talked to the head porter, abasing myself to him. I told him my mother was sick, that we were going to get evicted if he couldn’t find a job, but the old porter just shrugged.

  “Could be me in a year, you never know,” he replied. “You know full well they’re laying people off.”

  That was true, but the only people who make a living from the truth are judges. Two thirds of the rooms were empty, and I was glad if my tips covered my instalments. Every night, I hit the town, looking for extra work late into the night. Often, I would check which docks they’d be unloading during the day, then run straight there after work at the hotel. I would happily have handed over part of my earnings to the longshoreman or anyone else who got me work, but I wasn’t the only one with that idea, and I was generally left empty-handed. Only once did I get work at the docks, and that was by accident. A dockworker I knew, whose wife had been in labour for two days, asked me to stand in for him while he went to see her in hospital. He promised me forty fillérs, but ended up giving me only half—having drunk the rest in his joy at the baby that had been born meanwhile.

  I was out of luck. I criss-crossed the city, but in vain; the starving packs of jobless always beat me to it. They had all day and would start queuing for the evening shift early in the morning; and they didn’t tolerate any “amateurs” like me in their ranks. I once got a hiding for going down to the docks early in the morning when the goods ship came in and offering to take an old merchant’s goods down to the central market. It was no use telling them I desperately needed the money, the ragged men just shrugged.

  “With fancy clothes like that?”

  What could I have said? I stopped going to the docks.

  •

  But one day Lady Luck did nonetheless start flirting with me. It was only a brief dalliance, but at the time, I thought it would last for ever—or at least until we’d paid off the rent. I had Lajos to thank for my day in the sun, or rather the fact that Lajos was in love. He was in love with Eszter, the pretty little chambermaid from the second floor that Her Excellency had once slapped so hard she bled. Not all the guests were so hard on her. One of the attachés at the Italian embassy was just the opposite. He used to give her unusually large tips, and one night while making the bed, Eszter found out why. Lajos, who was waiting in the corridor for her, heard her scream, the result of which was that instead of Eszter, it was the attaché who ended up laid out on the bed. He couldn’t get up for three days, but on the fourth he hobbled down to the office and Eszter and Lajos were both dismissed.

  Lajos, as I found out, was engaged not only in courting Eszter, but also supporting a family. His father was unemployed, his three younger brothers were still in school, and his moth
er had been bedridden for years. Lajos never said a word about any of that. He was one of those Budapest working-class boys who had heard so much crying since their early childhood that all they could do was laugh. They lived in the jungle of the city like hungry foxes on the prowl, and Lajos was one of the most cunning. He was proud of his cunning. He would talk loud and dirty, all high and mighty, but at heart he was a sensitive lad—a fact of which he was ashamed, and something he hid like a physical deformity. We worked together for three years and had always been friendly, but had never met outside the hotel. He got thrown out in spring, and I didn’t see him after that. But then one night, when I was trying my luck as a baggage porter in front of Keleti station, he suddenly called out to me:

  “Well, well, what you doin’ here?”

  I was ashamed to tell him the truth, so I said:

  “Weather’s nice. Thought I’d come down and hang around a bit.”

  “In that case, we can have a bit of a catch-up,” he replied. “Sit down, old son. I’ve still got another half an hour to wait.”

  “Who you waiting for?”

  “Eszter.”

  “What train she on?”

  “No train, she’s havin’ dinner.”

  “At the station?”

  “That’s right.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Why there?”

  Lajos grinned.

  “ ’Cause there’s nothing to eat at home.”

  “And they’re handing the stuff out for free at the station, are they?”

  “If you know what you’re doin’,” Lajos winked, and leant closer, grinning. “What a scheme, old pal!” he whispered, and showed me his fist. “There’s a what-d’you-call-it,” he told me, “one of those charity things. Bored old bourgeois bags determined to protect the virtue of single lady travellers. You know what I mean, old chum, you get the idea. As we speak, Eszter’s playing the little lady travelling on her own. She’s got an old suitcase, she goes into the old hags with that, playing the lost provincial maiden for ’em so you’d burst your sides laughing. She tells ’em someone made off with all her money on the train while she was sleeping . . . you get the rest. A bit of ‘oh, dear’, and ‘you poor thing’, and then the teary confession that she’s hungry, ‘oh madam, I ain’t had a thing to eat since . . .’ ’Course that don’t require much acting on her part, ’cause the poor thing’s been so hungry lately she’d eat the nails out of a horse’s hoof. The old bags can see that, too, but the old bitches won’t give her money, ’cause what good would that do a starvin’ working-class girl, eh? Morals is the main thing . . . But Eszter’s cryin’ real tears by that point, and the old bags can’t take it, so ‘there, there’, and off they go to the station buffet. She’s been eating there for a week.”

  “Haven’t they caught on?”

  “How would they? Goes to a different station every day, at different times. This ain’t my first time at the circus, old pal. I know exactly when the old bags change shifts. Thing is, they’re only good for another four meals. Pretty neat, ain’t it?”

  “Grand,” I replied.

  We laughed. How we used to laugh at things like that! The laughter poured out of us like steam out of an overheated engine; we rocked to and fro, screaming with hilarity—we just couldn’t stop. A fat old man looked at us and panted:

  “It’s good to be young, eh?”

  “Piss off,” Lajos said when the old man had gone, and spat.

  It was a nice evening. The weather had turned summery again and a warm breeze was fluttering the girls’ skirts, as the stars paraded up in the sky. We were sitting on the steps of the station, wishing that we, too, were old and fat.

  “How’s Eszter?” I asked.

  Lajos shrugged.

  “How would she be? Job zero, funds likewise, some fat butcher desperate to marry her, her old folks are up in arms about me, but otherwise we’re fine. You?”

  I shrugged.

  “Much the same.”

  Lajos pulled a thin, crumpled cigarette from behind his ear.

  “You got one?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He broke it in two and gave half to me. We puffed away in silence.

  “If only she weren’t so pretty!” he said after a while. “They all keep on at her all the time—pretty girl like you could do a lot better—and who knows, old pal, maybe they’re right. All the men are after her, people in cars stop her on the street, that butcher’s promisin’ her the moon, and this is how I take her out to dinner. How long is any woman goin’ to put up with that?”

  What could I say to that? I said nothing. Lajos threw his cigarette away.

  “Oh no, my friend, it ain’t good to be this mad about a woman. I can’t stand the constant jealousy, it’ll be the death of me; I’m a complete wreck. Want to hear something funny? Every night, I walk her home, and every mornin’ the postman wakes her with a letter from me.”

  “You write to her every day?”

  “Every day. Got to. Can’t get no rest otherwise. What d’you make of that?”

  “I get the letter,” I said, “but not the stamp. How’ve you got money for all those stamps?”

  “Don’t use stamps.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Simple. I write my own address on the letter and put Eszti down as the sender. Get it?”

  “No.”

  “God, you’re green. If there ain’t no stamp on a letter, the postman takes it back to the sender, and since Eszti’s the sender, they take it back to her. Simple, no?”

  We had a good laugh about that, too.

  “Life’s just a big con, my friend,” Lajos mused. “And it don’t do to be too fussy. These days, of the Ten Commandments only the eleventh is still valid: survive. If you’re working class, you either learn that or starve to death. I’m startin’ to learn. D’you know I found myself a job?”

  “No. How?”

  “That’s a story in itself. I’ve got an uncle, see, a dreadful sort, stiffs his own mother, even though he’s lousy with the stuff. He’s the manager in a decent little bar and my mother begged him to take me on, but it looks like the old bird feels the same way about me as I do about him, ’cause he told her he hates me and I can go starve, ’cause I’d only end up on the gallows, anyway. Well, when she came and told me that, I upped and had a word with the old man. ‘Clear off !’ he screams. ‘I ain’t talkin’ to you!’ ‘No need,’ I says, ‘I’ll do the talking. D’you want to make fifty pengős a month? ’Course you do! Well then put me on the payroll and I’ll give you all my wages.’ He liked that all right, the bastard. ‘But you’re still an apprentice,’ he says. ‘Yes,’ I tell him, ‘but does the owner have to know? I’ll sign the receipt saying I’ve collected my wages and keep whatever I get in tips.’ And that’s how it was, my friend. The old man makes fifty pengős a month off my back, while yours truly here gets thirty or thirty-five. Disgusting? You bet it is. Still, beats starving to death.”

  He carried on telling me about his old scoundrel of an uncle, but I only heard the half of it.

  “Hey,” I said suddenly. “Get your uncle to hire me. I’ll give him my pay, too.”

  Lajos looked at me in surprise.

  “You get kicked out and all?”

  “No,” I replied. “But I really need the cash.”

  Lajos knew what that meant and didn’t ask any questions.

  “I’ll have a word,” he said succinctly, and we said no more about it.

  But he introduced me to his uncle that evening, and I got the job. During the day I worked at the hotel and in the bar at night. This blessed state lasted four days. Then the cloakroom woman, who wanted to bring her son in instead, reported me to the guild, and if the cunning old uncle hadn’t hired some relative of the guild secretary’s quickly, I’d have lost my job in the hotel to boot.

  •

  That was the end of my glory days. I couldn’t find any extra work, and the tips at the hotel just kept drying up. In the end,
I had to take back the three pengős out of the ginger tin to make my instalments. My mother realized that night. I didn’t know what to say—in the end it was my father who came to the rescue.

  “He’ll put it back next week,” he said with beatific calm, and gave my mother a knowing wink as if to say that there was an affair of the heart at hand, and my mother had best not get involved.

  That would have been more or less enough to reassure my mother, but a few days later, there was more trouble over the ginger tin. One evening, when we were washing in the kitchen, a filthy old woman came round and without any ado said:

  “I’ve come for Miss Manci’s things.”

  My mother went as white as a sheet.

  “She started renting a bed someplace else?” she asked, distraught, but the toothless old biddy shook her head.

  “Oh, no, no,” she shook her head. “No, it’s her bed they’ll be rentin’ now.”

  “She get married?”

  “No,” she answered. “Not at all. She’s had a bit of luck. They’ve taken her in a brothel.”

  So we lost that money, too. Manci still owed us a pengő or two and said she’d come by on Sunday to pay it—but my mother waited for her in vain. She didn’t come and we never saw her again.

  Her bed remained empty. People who worked wouldn’t rent it because they thought the electricity too dear, and we wouldn’t rent it to anyone without a job. Besides, it was still warm outside, and the poor, if they had any money, used it to buy food and slept on benches or in Népliget Park, under bushes. The Népliget back then led a double life, like gentlemen thieves in the pictures. During the day, it was full of jolly petit bourgeois, children, nurses, and ambling couples, while at night it was colonized by the homeless, and often even the police wouldn’t dare go in there, because anything could happen in the darkness among the bushes. It was its own little world, a separate society. Entire families used to camp out among the bushes, generations of them, from grandparents to newborns. The quiet and the cicadas were interrupted by snoring, crying babies, copulating couples, the elderly groaning, the moaning of the sick, sudden angry shouts and the flash of blades. The ragged masses fought and made love, prayed, swore and did their wheeling-dealing. But in some of the bushes, there were serious political and literary debates to be heard, too—thin, nervous young men reading poetry to other thin, nervous young men; banned religious cults gathered around their long-haired, barefoot prophets, and beggars, thieves and burglars bought and sold “tips”. Ominous deals were made there, the underworld did a roaring trade. The gold standard there was bread, and you could get anything for it there, anything in the nastiest sense of the word. Little girls would go from bush to bush at night, offering themselves to the men in thin, schoolgirl voices, men whose faces they could not even see in the dark.