Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “Got any bread?” they whispered, and the next day, they didn’t even know who they’d slept with.

  That was how children became whores, workers criminals, and desperate men murderers.

  That was the fate awaiting us. That was the fate my mother wanted to kill herself to avoid, and that was why she got more and more desperate each day. Despite our best efforts, she slowly cottoned on to our well-intentioned ruse.

  “While I were gone,” she said, “you said you made three pengős a day. But now . . .” she pointed to the ginger tin and burst into tears.

  My father kept insisting that we’d have the money by the first, but he could no longer convince my mother.

  “How?” she kept repeating. “How?”

  One night my father finally lost his patience.

  “Don’t you worry about that!” he snapped at her, banging the table. “I’ll get it, come hell or high water.”

  My mother looked at him, het up as he was, in fright.

  “Mishka,” she said quietly. “D’you remember what you promised me?”

  “I do,” my father muttered, pacified.

  “You still keepin’ that promise?”

  “I am.”

  But even that wasn’t enough for her.

  “You swear?”

  “Yes.”

  “What on?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “My life?”

  “Yes.”

  My father swore and miraculously kept his word. He didn’t flinch from even the most inhuman work. He wore himself out, starved and went about in rags, but I still sometimes got the strange feeling that this, too, was a role that he was playing, like everything else in life. He couldn’t take penury seriously—it was just a guest appearance as far as he was concerned, but nonetheless a role he tried to play as well as he could. He was playing a beggar but acted all the while as if he were negotiating for the part of a king, with only a few more minor details to clear up . . . He was more determined than ever and just as haughty—he didn’t give an inch of the Dappermishka spirit. Funnily enough, he started to resemble those great, greying actors that young girls tend to dream about. He was handsome, he was charming, he was cheerful, and he was always up for a laugh. Sometimes, at night, when he’d come home, he’d be almost too tired to speak, but in the morning, I would always wake to find him whistling in the kitchen, and sometimes he’d reply to my good morning as if he’d won the lottery the night before.

  “I’ve got a new idea!” he’d tell me, full of excitement. “Worth a fortune, my son, it’s brilliant!”

  He’d drop mysterious hints, smile meaningfully, and whenever my mother left the kitchen, he’d say:

  “She won’t have to go to work tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  That was his dream. If he’d had his way, he would have had my mother lie in bed all day, eating and drinking and waiting for her son, because of the fact that his unborn child was a boy he was just as convinced as of the sure-fire success of his scheme.

  “It’ll all be settled by tonight,” he said before he left home, and you could see he truly meant it.

  And then it was the evening, and he’d come home and wouldn’t say anything. He’d dig fifty or sixty fillérs out of his pockets, a pengő at most, silently and submissively drop it into the ginger tin, undress and climb into bed. At those times, he was like a schoolboy who’d done badly on a test and didn’t dare look his parents in the eye. But a few days later, he’d have another brilliant idea, and one morning, he said again:

  “It’ll all be settled by tonight.”

  Sometimes he really did have brilliant ideas. The only problem was, they were impossible to execute. It would have taken a little money, a little time and a few connections, but we had neither time, nor money, nor connections. We had to get hold of the money by 30th September, and the contents of the ginger tin did not give much cause for hope.

  “What we goin’ to do?” I would ask my father when we were alone, but he always gave me the same answer:

  “We’ll have the money by the first.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you worry about it.”

  He was still absolutely convinced that today or tomorrow he’d have an idea that would fix everything in one fell swoop.

  “You have to keep trying till you succeed,” he said, and kept on trying things out with the devotion of an alchemist.

  One night, he came home beaming.

  “I’ve got it!” he said, full of excitement. “This time I’ve really got it!”

  “What?” my mother asked.

  “The solution to joblessness,” he announced studiously, with the pride of an inventor. “It’s so simple,” he said with a superior smile. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. You just have to think scientific, that’s all there is to it. Why can’t the locksmith get a job? ’Cause there’s too many locksmiths. Why can’t the carpenter get a job? ’Cause there’s too many carpenters. It’s obvious, ain’t it? Everybody knows. It’s just that nobody thinks about the logical conclusion. Last night, when I realized, I got so excited I couldn’t get a wink till morning. Then I ran straight to the city library to study the employment figures.”

  “The what?” asked my mother.

  My father explained what the employment figures were, but that only added to my mother’s surprise.

  “What the hell did you go and study them for?”

  “Don’t you get it?” my father said. “I was looking for a field where there’s a lack of skilled workmen.”

  “Is there any such thing in this day and age?”

  “Yes there is. I didn’t even have far to look. I found it right under ‘D’. Go on, guess what it is.”

  We couldn’t guess.

  “Diver!” he announced triumphantly. “In Hungary, there’s a shortage of divers.”

  “Ain’t no one else noticed?”

  My father laughed.

  “Even if they have noticed, where’s that got ’em? Your Budapest lot’re a bunch of landlubbers. Ain’t one of them knows a thing about diving.” You could see he was amused by my mother’s doubts. He scooped her up playfully and sat her in his lap. “Well, ma,” he asked cannily, “what’d you say to that? Good, ain’t it?”

  “Yes,” my mother answered dubiously, “but how’re you going to get a diving job here in the city?”

  “Already have,” my father replied calmly. “Start tomorrow.”

  “You could’ve told us!”

  “I’m telling you now, silly,” my father laughed, shaking his head like a chess player who doesn’t understand how their opponent could ever have doubted their victory once he’d made his fantastic gambit. “Thinking’s the main thing,” he explained with deep satisfaction. “Got to think scientific, you see, love.”

  “Yes,” my mother replied happily, though you could see she didn’t understand a thing.

  The next evening, they called me to the telephone in the hotel. One of the managers at the shipyard informed me that my father had had an accident, and told me to come at once.

  I raced desperately to the shipyard. I found my father in the first aid room; he was lying on a couch in a small white room that smelt of carbolic. He, too, was white, scarily white, with bloodied compresses and bits of cotton wool scattered around him. Apart from that, there were no signs of his accident.

  “What happened?”

  My father laughed, as always when he seemed scared.

  “Nothing special,” he said dispassionately, “my nose started bleedin’ underwater, then my mouth, and my ears an’ all, and that’s all I remember. They tell me it was touch and go.”

  I listened to this cheerful account, horrified.

  “Whose fault was it?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The bad thing is, they don’t want to give me my day’s wages.”

  This I couldn’t understand at all.

  “Why not?” I asked, incensed, but he just kept on
shrugging.

  “Scoundrels,” he muttered.

  No, I couldn’t understand any of it. Eventually, a vague suspicion took root in me that he might have been somehow to blame. He can’t have been diving for a long time, I thought, maybe he was out of practice. But since I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, I kept skirting the issue.

  “Father,” I probed gingerly, “where were you last underwater?”

  “Me?” he laughed. “In my mother’s belly. Looks like I’ve lost the knack since.”

  But the experience must have made him think, because a few days later he said to my mother:

  “This ain’t right, Anna. You get three pengős for a big wash, and I’m lucky if I make one a day. Why don’t you work from home? Then I could help you wash all day and I could make three times as much.”

  “I’d thought of that myself,” my mother said. “But only people with no laundry room give you the clothes to wash at home.”

  “And if we were to do it cheaper? For, say, two pengős instead?”

  “Two pengős?”

  At first, my mother was horrified, but my father once more brought out his “scientific thinking” to prove, clear as day, that with greater turnover even a smaller profit margin would bring more return.

  “I can try,” my mother said at last, and did.

  The idea worked—at least in so far as she brought home mountains of laundry. No one, I think, apart from us, was willing to do a big wash for two pengős; we soon realized why. Partly, the money went on electricity, and you needed a huge amount of wood to heat the water, as well as more soap and petroleum, none of which was free. They worked fourteen to fifteen hours a day and I, too, joined in in the evenings. We had to take it in turns working round the clock to put aside anything at all of the two pengős.

  Meanwhile we went hungry. While my mother had gone out to wash, she’d got food as well as her three pengős, so she would at least get a square meal ten or fifteen times a month. Now all three of us were eating what I brought home from the hotel. And though my father and I kept fibbing that we’d already eaten in town, my mother would divide the food in three and wouldn’t touch hers till we’d eaten all of ours. So all three of us went hungry.

  That kind of life is no good for anyone, especially not a pregnant woman. She could barely keep the little she ate down as it was—she was sick three or four times a day, and since there was not much inside her, she threw up mostly bile. She was skin and bones and used to cough so hard she turned blue. Her womb was full of life, but her lungs were full of death; and she lingered somewhere between these two great eternal forces in the awful dullness of some liminal state. She no longer cried, no longer complained. She washed and she was silent. She would occasionally hiss with pain as she worked, reach for her back or her heart, her face distorted with agony. At those times, instead of resting, she would lock herself in the room and pray.

  She became religious, frighteningly so. Before, she had only rarely gone to church, but now she’d go two or three times a week and take Communion every Sunday. Whenever she had a free moment, she’d retreat to a corner of the room to do her rosaries. Sometimes we even saw her lips move in prayer while she was washing. She hardly ever said anything any more in which Jesus or the saints didn’t figure. Back in the village, the peasants were not much given to mysticism, and her Jesus was not much of a mystical figure, either. She talked about him the way a peasant child might talk about an uncle in America, who once, before their time, had lived in the village too, had been poor like them, a landless peasant or perhaps even a carpenter, but who now lived up among the clouds, on the hundredth floor—and if he was a good little boy, and always behaved, he might one day help him out or even send him tickets for a passage so he could go live with him in America. That was how she thought of Jesus, and whenever she talked about him to me, I had the impression she pictured him in tails or a Hungarian dress coat, like the lords and magnates in the illustrated magazines. Yes, there was no other way she could picture the Lord but as a lord, a very great lord, a greater lord even than Horthy himself, and the only thing mystical about the whole thing for her was that there was a lord greater than Horthy and that he would deign to speak to her and to take her part. The Lord was the only lord in Hungary who showed the slightest inclination to do so, and the only one who considered her—a washerwoman—just as much of a person as the newsagent or the Secretary of State’s wife.

  “Even though I barely gave a thought to him!” she would repeat guiltily, her eyes welling up.

  My father kept pestering her to lie down and rest, telling her he could do the work all by himself, but in vain—my mother wouldn’t leave the tub.

  “Think of the baby,” my father would plead. “You can’t take much more of this.”

  My mother would reply:

  “I can if the Lord wills it. And if he don’t, it don’t matter anyway.”

  Then she’d cross herself and go on with the washing.

  •

  One night, I was woken by my father shaking my shoulders.

  “Get up, Béla,” he said anxiously, “I don’t know what’s going on with your mother.”

  I had heard what he’d said but couldn’t make sense of it at first. Starting from the deep, comatose sleep of the starving, my father’s face was like an apparition as he leant over me with the petroleum lamp. I stared blearily at his huge, swollen shadow as it fluttered unsteadily on the ceiling above. I shivered with tiredness and cold.

  “What’s happened?” I mumbled.

  “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “She ain’t come home.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly two.”

  “What time’d she go?”

  “This afternoon. She took the washing for the Captain’s wife. Said she’d be home by eight.”

  I looked at the clock. I remember it was ten to two. I scrambled up. We stood there, confounded, the clock ticking in the darkness like the timer on a bomb.

  “I don’t know what to think any more,” my father said and reached for his hat, very pale. “I’m going to go call the Captain.”

  “Wait,” I said, pulling on my trousers. “I’ll come with you.”

  We ran down to the tavern. It was the early hours of Sunday, the Gypsy violinist was still at it. Swollen-faced drunks tottered in the smoky fog of the bar, reeking of stale beer. A blonde girl was dancing on one of the tables. The owner, too, was drunk, clinched tightly with some beardless youth. When she saw us, she broke free of the boy awkwardly, though there was no need—my father hadn’t even noticed.

  We closed the door of the phone booth behind us and waited anxiously. The number didn’t answer for several minutes. I was about to hang up and try again when I heard a soft click.

  “Who is this?” asked a woman’s sleepy voice.

  I told her.

  “Who?” she asked testily, “who?”

  I put on my most ingratiating manner.

  “Forgive the intrusion, madam, I know it’s late,” I said, “but we’re terribly worried. My mother went to yours this afternoon and hasn’t come home.”

  “How is that any of my concern?” the good lady screamed hysterically. “How dare you call me at this hour?”

  “Begging your pardon, madam,” I pleaded. “I just need a little information . . . please understand . . . it’s about my mother—”

  “The devil take your mother!” she interrupted, her voice choked with fury. “Waking people up at this hour! Riff-raff!”

  With that, she slammed down the receiver and we were left, helpless, with the silent telephone.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Let’s go down to the police station,” my father grunted, cursing an assortment of the lady’s extended family.

  The police station wasn’t far. It consisted of two dirty little rooms. There was no one in the first, so we went into the second.

  “Ever heard of knocking?” a fat, bald, scarlet-faced police sergeant be
llowed, clambering out of bed. “What do you think this is, an inn?”

  My father knew what was expected of him when addressing the authorities.

  “Sorry,” he said with what was, for him, unusual deference. “We’ve come on an urgent matter, officer.”

  “What’s this urgent matter, then?” the sergeant asked and, before my father could respond, went into the toilet. He left the door open, we could hear him pissing. “Well, go on, then!” he said. “You said it was urgent.”

  My father told him what had happened. The sergeant came back, buttoned up his trousers, yawned, sat down, lit a leisurely pipe, put on his spectacles and opened a large book. He started browsing through it.

  “There’s been no report,” he said at last, officiously, and was back off to bed.

  We stood there, in front of the desk, completely at a loss. We knew we had to go now, but had no idea where.

  “What we supposed to do now, poor thing?” my father asked, helpless as a child despite his size.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  At that moment, either the Holy Spirit took hold of the sergeant, or he remembered his own wife, because he clambered out of bed, saying: