Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “Wait. I’ll call headquarters.”

  He called them, but they had no more information. We ambled home, not knowing what to do. When we reached the tavern, my father said:

  “Come on, let’s call the ambulance people.”

  We went in, and I repeated my little speech.

  “Please wait,” said a voice.

  We waited and waited. Suddenly, we were disconnected; we were out of money. My father swore.

  “Maybe she’s home by now,” I said, trying to reassure him, and ran up to the apartment.

  She wasn’t home. I took some money out of the ginger tin and ran back down to the tavern to call the ambulance service again.

  “Yes,” replied a sleepy voice. “We took a woman by that name to the Rókus this evening.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I’m sorry,” the voice said, “I can’t give you any further information.”

  “Just tell me, is she alive?” I begged.

  “Ask the hospital,” he said, and hung up.

  We ran out of the tavern. The trams weren’t running yet, so we headed into town on foot. It was a warm, late-summer night of pure silver, the empty streets populated only by the crazy spirits of the moon, hunger and horror. We were going as fast as our legs could carry us and the pale, sleepwalking houses seemed to gallop alongside. We did the three-hour trip in two.

  When we got to the hospital, they directed us to the duty doctor. The doctor on duty was handsome, and he was on the phone. With his carefully slicked-back gold-blond hair, his lilac silk tie, monocle, signet ring and Junker hound-dog charm, he looked more like a German film star than the duty doctor in a Hungarian public hospital. The way he was talking into the phone, too, with his soft, fluting staccatos, reminded you more of the leading men in cheap, sentimental German pictures.

  “But, darling!” he was whispering as we fell, panting, into the room, and was not the least bit bothered by our arrival. There were some chairs near the door, and he gestured for us to sit down. Then he said “But, darling!” again.

  She must have been an odd sort, this darling, a very timid sort, for she was apparently scared to see the doctor.

  “But why not?” he probed in a suggestive baritone whisper. “What are you afraid of, dear? Didn’t you say he wouldn’t be home till the day after tomorrow? . . . Well, then? . . . So what if they see? What would they see? That you’re going to the hospital. Do you know how many hundreds of people go to the hospital every day? . . . Oh please, how could you ask something like that? Why do you think people go to the hospital? You’re visiting a girlfriend . . . all right, not a girlfriend, then. A maid, let’s say, a faithful old maid, your old nurse, say . . . Come on, darling, don’t be like that! . . .”

  My father couldn’t take any more. He jumped up and went over to the doctor.

  “Just tell me if she’s alive!” he begged, but the dandy doctor waved him off angrily.

  “Excuse me one moment, darling,” he whispered into the telephone. He put his hand over the receiver and his Herrenvolk eyes flashed menacingly at the ragged Magyar. “This isn’t the village fair!” he snapped. “Wait your turn!” He was on the phone for a good quarter of an hour more.

  My father started grinding his teeth listening to the doctor’s sweet, fluting chatter, and kept wanting to get up to go at him.

  “Use your head!” I whispered, gripping his hand. “Use your head!”

  If I wasn’t there, he might have strangled the man, and anyone who’s been through a quarter of an hour like ours would not, I can tell you, feel a drop of sympathy for the doctor.

  Darling finally gave in. The handsome doctor put down the phone and graciously agreed to hear my father out. Then he looked in a little book and told us in a tone of utter boredom that yes, my mother was here, the ambulance had brought her in that evening; she’d collapsed on Horthy Miklós út, and she was on such-and-such ward.

  “She’s alive!” my father muttered quietly, hoarsely, and his face went so soft with release after the prolonged tension, he looked like an old drunk. His expression was fixed and hollow, and it must have been a good two or three minutes before he asked:

  “What happened?”

  The doctor consulted the book once more.

  “Miscarriage,” he said absently.

  I didn’t understand the word. I stared dozily at the handsome doctor, who was rubbing his monocle with his handkerchief and, it seems, thinking of his darling, for a lascivious little smile was playing around his lips. The room was very silent, until my father broke the quiet and said:

  “Your brother’s died, Béla.”

  That’s what he said—word for word. The doctor must have thought he was drunk, and at that point he wasn’t altogether sober.

  “He’s died,” he muttered again and again, nodding stiffly. “Is it any wonder?” He gave a wave of his hand as if to say that there was no use talking about it, but his mouth kept on moving, empty and silent.

  “And mother? How’s my mother?” I asked the doctor.

  The handsome doctor turned his monocle this way and that pensively.

  “Pardon?” he said, starting at the question. “Yes, of course,” he said, coming to, and smiled politely. “The patient is in quite a serious condition.”

  “Could she die?”

  “Yes.”

  My father turned, without a word, and headed for the door with large, heavy strides.

  “Wait!” I called after him, because I wanted to talk to the doctor more, but he didn’t stop. “Where you going?”

  “To see your mother,” he said, and kept going.

  “What do you mean?” the doctor cried after him. “Going to see a patient at this hour? Come back tomorrow and get permission!”

  My father didn’t respond. He didn’t even look back. He left the room without saying goodbye and slammed the door behind him.

  He’d reached the stairs by the time I managed to catch up with him. He was charging upstairs, taking them three at a time.

  “That ain’t the exit!” I called after him, but he just kept going.

  I rushed after him, blocking his way when we got upstairs—I could see he wanted to go into the ward.

  “You know you can’t!” I whispered. “For the love of God, don’t make a scene!”

  My father didn’t even look at me. He pushed me aside without a word and opened the door. He suddenly froze in the open door, rooted to the spot.

  An icy, fearful silence emanated from the bluish half-light of the massive ward, with its smell of carbolic. Nothing moved—there was just the occasional stifled groan here and there, but these served only to deepen the silence. My mother was in the fourth bed on the left. She was lying on her back, barely covered, stiff and immobile. She was sleeping. Her mouth was open like the dead, and her nose stood scarily white between the dark valleys of her open mouth and closed eyes. She was only eight or ten steps away, and yet I felt like she was very distant—as distant as happiness itself.

  “Anna!” my father groaned, his voice failing, his eyes filled with tears.

  The ward went blurry for me too.

  “Muther!” I heard myself say, and shivered.

  My mother didn’t move, but suddenly, out of nowhere, a nurse appeared in front of us. She was a shrivelled, mean-eyed old woman with a heavy moustache beneath her long, thin nose.

  “Who are you looking for?” she whispered angrily.

  “My wife,” father whispered back, pointing at my mother.

  “Have you lost your mind?” the old woman sniffed. “Coming to see a patient at this hour? Get out!”

  “In a minute,” my father said, never taking his eyes off my mother, merely gesturing to the nurse to wait, he’d be going soon.

  “Not in a minute,” the nurse insisted, “now!”

  She wanted to shut the door in our faces, but my father put his foot in the threshold, sending the old woman into a hysterical rage.

  “What is the meaning of th
is impertinence?” she snapped at my father. “Get out of here before I have you thrown out!”

  My father looked at her at last. He looked at her as if he’d just woken from his sleep.

  “Who’s goin’ to throw me out?” he asked hoarsely, his suppressed bitterness boiling up out of him. “What do you take us for? Ain’t we human? You’d best watch yourself, damn it, before I say something that’ll blow that cross right off your chest.”

  The old woman flapped to the telephone, squawking loudly. I grabbed my father’s arm.

  “Come on,” I begged, dragging him towards the stairs. “Come on, for the love of God!”

  My father started to curse loud and strong. I suddenly heard my mother moaning from inside the ward.

  “Mishka!” she groaned in her weak little voice. “Mishka, my dear!”

  Luckily, my father didn’t hear her, because he was still swearing loudly. The tears, meanwhile, kept flowing from his eyes, but he didn’t even realize he was crying.

  I was glad when we finally got out into the street, but my relief did not last long. At the second corner, he suddenly turned back.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Where you going?” I asked in alarm. “I’ll come with you.”

  “I said wait!” he growled at me, brooking no opposition, and rushed back towards the hospital.

  I didn’t dare try and stop him, but when I saw him disappear behind the hospital building on the corner, I ran after him. I ran only as far as the corner—there, I froze. There was a large crucifix in front of the hospital chapel, and in front of that crucifix knelt my godless father. I looked away as if I’d caught him doing something dirty, and wandered back to the corner.

  It was getting light. It was morning, Sunday morning; the bells of the Basilica were ringing for mass. Almost time for work, I thought.

  13

  THAT MORNING, I HAD TO DELIVER an unusual letter.

  “It’s confidential,” said the Major. “You’re to hand it to him personally.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied and went over to the desk to take the letter.

  The Major did not hand it to me. He held on to it absently, and then suddenly looked at me.

  “There’s something I want to say to you. Close the door.”

  The door to the outer office was open, so I went and closed it. The Major lowered his voice.

  “The others don’t need to know where you’re going,” he said, giving me a strange, close look. “Understand?”

  “Yes, Major.”

  “If anybody asks, tell them I’ve sent you to the railway station.”

  “Yes, Major.”

  There was a brief silence. The Major removed his monocle and started wiping it on his handkerchief.

  “I hear you’re a patriot,” he said slowly and with particular emphasis, his toad’s mouth curving into something resembling a smile.

  “Yes, sir,” I managed.

  The Major was still smiling.

  “Keep it that way,” he encouraged me paternally, handed over the letter and added mysteriously: “You won’t regret it.”

  I glanced at the envelope and my heart missed a beat. It was addressed to the Constable.

  I didn’t have much time to wonder, though. The Constable lived nearby, and barely minutes later I was outside his flat, on the third floor of a house in Aranykéz utca.

  The hound-faced batman opened the door.

  “Wait,” he barked, before I could tell him what I wanted, and disappeared behind a door, cat-like, silent.

  I looked around the darkened entrance hall anxiously. I’d heard a great deal about this flat—numerous stories circulated about it in the city. They said that during the heyday of the White Terror, when life was cheap but real estate all the more expensive, the previous owner had been dragged off to a Freikorps basement in the middle of the night, where the “Doctor” took him under his care—like so many other political patients—and, before removing him once and for all from the property ladder down here on earth, made him sign over the deeds, for he was a pedantic sort and hated disorder. The incident did not make great waves in Budapest—people discussed it the way they did moderately titillating theatrical gossip. A lot of things went on in the Freikorps’s basements at that time: in a slow news week, when there was nothing more interesting to print, even the foreign press would be horrified by them for a while. A British MP even raised the matter in parliament, where they heard him out politely and promptly moved on. But it’s one thing to hear about this sort of thing in parliament, and another to think about it standing in the entrance hall of one of these apartments, especially if you happen to be neither British, nor a Lord, and are perfectly aware that no one would make the slightest noise if you happened to disappear without trace.

  I could feel my knees shaking. This latest incident came, on top of the drama of the night before, on an empty stomach, and my belly was beginning to rebel. All the acid was starting to gnaw at my insides; my throat constricted and I was overcome with dizziness.

  Hound-face was still in the other room. I listened like a pointing hunting-dog, but all I could hear was the gurgling of water from the bathroom, whose door opened into the entrance hall.

  Eventually, the valet came back.

  “The Doctor will be right with you,” he said, without so much as looking at me, and retreated with his silent cat’s tread to the kitchen.

  The minutes passed slowly. Someone turned off the tap in the bathroom, there was silence. I could hear someone climbing into the bath. Later, I could hear humming. It was a deep, pleasant voice, a woman’s voice. Who could that be? I wondered. The word at the hotel was that the Constable had been seeing the wife of a far-right member of parliament for years, but I had always had my doubts. She used to come to the bar with her husband; she wore her hair up in a bun, no make-up, and was the patroness of a League of Patriotic Women. Surely it couldn’t be her?

  It must have been a good quarter of an hour till the Constable appeared. He was wearing maroon brocaded silk pyjamas emblazoned with a five-pointed crown, for the Doctor was of noble blood, and—it seemed—afraid of forgetting it in his sleep. He stepped through the door with a smile, but when he heard the woman’s voice, his face twitched angrily.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still here?” he shouted angrily into the bathroom. “Didn’t I tell you to go home?”

  “Like this?”

  The door opened wide to reveal the patroness of the League of Patriotic Women bare naked. When she spotted me, she screamed and slammed the door, but she can’t have been too upset, because she was giggling as she called out from inside: “Hand me my clothes, Bunny.”

  Bunny did not reply. He headed for the living room, shaking his head, and gestured to me to follow him.

  “Wait,” he said when we got into the room, and headed for the bedroom.

  In the bedroom, it was still night. The closed shutters watched over a stuffy, untidy mess of women’s clothing. The Constable picked up the clothes grudgingly and took them to the bathroom.

  There was a muffled exchange from outside. The door was closed, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. But suddenly, I pricked up my ears. They seemed to be talking about me. Or was I just imagining it?

  No, there it was again! Bellboy—I heard that clearly. It was the woman who said it, but I didn’t know in what context. I tiptoed to the door and started listening. I could only catch the odd, louder, word, but nonetheless, I slowly got the gist. The Constable, it seems, had told the woman to leave before I’d come, because he was expecting an official visitor, a state secretary from the Foreign Office. She had either not believed him and stayed on or simply lost track of time, and had only got suspicious when she saw me. As to what she was suspicious of, I couldn’t make out. The long and the short of it was, she wasn’t going to go.

  “Where’s this state secretary, then?” she kept repeating, agitated. “Where is he?”

  “Do you want him to find you here?” the Co
nstable snapped at her.

  “Don’t worry, he won’t see me in the bathroom. I’m staying and waiting for him here.”

  “No you aren’t.”

  “Because he’s not coming, is he?” Her voice buckled with emotion. “Are you at it again?” she shouted. “What do you want with this boy?”

  “Shh!” the Constable hissed at her. “Shut your mouth or I’ll slap you!”

  But she wouldn’t stop shouting, and the Constable, it seems, made good on his threat. Suddenly, there was a tremendous scream. Then there was silence, an incomprehensible silence. I was listening with bated breath, but couldn’t hear a thing.

  Ten minutes must have gone by. Then a door opened, and another—whispering, footsteps—someone was approaching the room. I jumped away from the door and tried to look uninterested.

  It was hound-face. He hurried silently across the room into the bedroom. He reappeared with a lady’s hat and disappeared once more. Outside, another door opened and there was the unmistakable clicking of a woman’s high heels. She had clearly come out of the bathroom, but now she was quiet, incomprehensibly so. There wasn’t a single word said. The high heels clicked along the entrance hall, then the door closed behind them, and a minute later, the Constable appeared.

  He was as calm as if nothing had happened. He took the letter, crumpled it absently into his pocket, went over to the bookshelf with a yawn and produced a bottle of pálinka. He poured himself a glass, drained it, and repeated the procedure twice in quick succession. Was he really such a book lover? Or had they belonged to the previous owner?

  I was standing carefully to attention, my heart beating wildly. After the third glass, the Constable made a little noise from the back of his throat and shook himself like a wet dog. Then he lit a cigarette and turned to me.

  “Sit down,” he ordered.

  I sat down. He remained standing. His face had gone red from the alcohol, his eyes were bloodshot. He examined me stiffly.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “The . . . the Major told me to deliver that letter,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything better.