Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “What you crying for?” someone shouted. “Answer me, damn it, or I’ll tear your head off!”

  I started. A sleepy, moon-faced man sat opposite me, holding out Her Excellency’s ring in my direction. I looked at him as if I really had only just woken up from a dream.

  “What?”

  “Don’t what me, you little shit. Whose is this ring?”

  I told him. The sleepy little man was suddenly so awake, it was as if I’d said the magic word. He was a poor, pathetic little detective, a servant of the Royal Hungarian State, and there was not a single servant of the Royal Hungarian State who wouldn’t have liked to get to know Exfix. The poor man could hardly disguise his delight—he must already have been picturing himself being bumped up a pay grade. He wanted to know all about Their Excellencies, absolutely everything there was to know. Smacking his lips like a curious cow, he kept ruminating on completely irrelevant details while the clock on the wall just kept ticking and ticking. Six, six fifteen, six thirty . . . They’d be carrying out the coffin by now.

  Finally, he called the hotel, but no matter how he insisted, they wouldn’t connect him with Her Excellency. She had bigger fish to fry.

  “What time does she usually get up?” he asked.

  “Around eleven.”

  “So we’ll talk more then,” he said with an ominous smile, gesturing to the policeman to take me away. “Bring him back at eleven.”

  Eleven! . . . Jesus Christ! . . . Eleven!!

  The policeman shoved me into a little cell that stank unbelievably, crammed full of Hungary’s more modest class of criminal. There was an old woman in her seventies, grinding away at her rosary and mumbling, and there was a fifteen-year-old streetwalker talking about the practical and financial aspects of her trade with the dispassionate air of an accountant. There was a fancy bourgeois who, nose and trousers upturned, showed off his silk socks and superiority, and there was a half-naked ragged tramp covered all over in a black varnish of filth. There was a grave old worker, moustache flecked with grey, who just stood and watched this babbling mass in silence, and there was a loud-mouthed little hellraiser who’d pinched a couple of pengős out of another passenger’s pocket on the tram and was now acting as if he’d robbed the central bank. They were small fry who’d taken the bait through hunger, while the great whites pored over the civil code and devoured half the country with the connivance of the government.

  We were all waiting for questioning. The door would open from time to time, the policeman call out a name, and someone would make their way through the crowd and exit, pale. There was an appalling racket. Next to me, a young safecracker was arguing with two of his more senior colleagues. He was berating them for not moving with the times—you couldn’t do things that way any more, he’d said so right from the start. A whiny young woman with greasy hair was breastfeeding a baby on her shrivelled chest, there was some sort of gambling going on in secret at the back, while the prophet of some banned religious sect kept quoting from the Bible and promising an imminent Flood. Then there was the hell of a fuss, because one of the drunks started throwing up—everyone tried to flee the tottering figure—some woman got a fit of hysterics in the melee. She started battering on the door, foaming at the mouth and screaming for them to let her out, she was suffocating. A policeman came in, whacked her round the head with his truncheon; she stopped screaming.

  Slowly, it grew light. The light filtered through the window like sewage, a greyish-green. The safecracker fell asleep standing up and snored gently, propped against me.

  Suddenly, I had the unpleasant feeling of being watched. I looked around. On the other side of the cell were three lads who looked like apprentices—I hadn’t even noticed them in the general throng. When I turned to look at them, they snatched their gazes away, but from then on there was a vague, unsettling connection between us, though we didn’t look at each other again. It was some link you couldn’t put into words, an almost electric flow, like between antennas on the same wavelength. They were quiet, serious lads, the way you could be in your teens, especially if you’d been born working class in Hungary and they hadn’t beaten the wonder out of you yet. I kept sneaking glances at them out of the corner of my eye, the way I used to do with guests in the hotel, and I occasionally saw that they, too, were looking at me. Later, they conferred in a whisper and one of them came over.

  “Comrade?” he asked softly.

  The word coursed through me like a wave of warmth.

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  He gave me his hand, we smiled.

  “When did they get you?”

  “Just this morning, at dawn.”

  “Us too,” he whispered. “We were distributing flyers. You doing underground work too?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  I flushed hot all over. I’d never been so ashamed in my life.

  “I . . . um . . . a ring,” I muttered. “I needed the money, and . . .”

  His face changed so suddenly, I couldn’t even finish the sentence. The words stuck in my throat and stifled me—I couldn’t talk any more. He didn’t say anything, just stood there beside me for a while and then went back to his friends. I knew they were talking about me, and I didn’t dare look.

  I stood there like someone who’s just been sentenced. Till then, I hadn’t felt guilty, the way a soldier doesn’t feel guilty if he’s captured by the enemy. This was class war, and I was a soldier of the proletariat: at least, so I’d thought so far. All of a sudden, I woke up to the truth. A soldier of the proletariat?—big words, you stupid peasant, big words indeed. The reality was something smaller, more humble, something like these quiet, grave working-class boys who distributed flyers at night and put up with the humiliation, with prison, all the horrors, and went and did it again the next day. Yes, they were soldiers of the proletariat. They fought, they did something, but you . . . what had you done? Steal. They were in jail as prisoners of war, dragged from the trenches, but you . . . you were nothing but a common thief caught in the act, a run of the mill, pathetic, third-rate little crook. I despised myself, I despised them, I despised the whole world.

  “Get off me!” I snapped at the safecracker and shoved him off me furiously.

  Something had broken, I no longer knew what I was doing. The safecracker, of course, woken from his sleep, pushed back, and I punched him in the face so hard his nose began to bleed.

  At that moment, the door opened and the policeman called out my name. Your turn next, moon-face! I thought to myself. You’re going to get it, you’re all going to get it. None of it mattered now anyway.

  But moon-face greeted me, all smiles.

  “Here, you little crook, you’ve got more luck than brains, know that?”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at, and scanned his grinning face suspiciously.

  “Luck? What luck?”

  “That Her Excellency doesn’t want to get bogged down in a seedy little affair like this. She told me to turn you loose.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “You mean you’re letting me go?”

  “On one condition,” he said. “If you promise never to set foot in that hotel again.”

  “Yes, sir,” I muttered.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “All right, then,” he nodded. “You can go. But if you ever show your face in the hotel again, Her Excellency will have you arrested on the spot. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get out of here.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I got out of there all right, and went straight home.

  The closer I got to the house, the slower I went, and the faster beat my heart. The neighbourhood was deserted and the house squatted like a lonely camel in the desert of vacant plots. There was a cart outside the gate, packed with elderly, frail, swaying furniture. Three ragged little boys were busying themselves about the cart while a man, clearly their father, carried the dining table thro
ugh the gate. They were moving in. They were moving into our flat.

  “Who’re you after?” the smallest of the boys asked with the superior air of a resident. He must have been about five and consumptive.

  I didn’t reply. At that moment, I despised even this five-year-old. They were moving into our flat!

  “I live here,” declared the boy proudly. “Don’t believe me?”

  “Get lost,” I growled at him, looking anxiously to the gate to see if Herr Hausmeister was around.

  “I do live here, and all!” he insisted. “ ’Cause, you see,” he added gleefully, “the tram took mother’s leg off and they gave us three hundred pengős for it, so we’re rich now and don’t have to live out in the bushes no more. I’m sleepin’ indoors tonight! Don’t believe me?”

  “I do,” I mumbled, ashamed, still staring at the gate. “D’you know Herr Hausmeister?”

  “The big puffy one?”

  “Him. Go in and see if he’s around. Don’t say I sent you.”

  “As if,” he said with a conspiratorial smile and a dismissive wave, and went running into the house. A minute later he was back, panting, and said: “He ain’t there.”

  I sneaked up to the first floor and knocked on the Sabbatarian’s door. He answered, dishevelled and bleary-eyed, but when he saw me, he grew disconcertingly alert. He kept glancing around anxiously, and his face grew pale beneath his ginger beard.

  “Morning, Béla.”

  “Mornin’, Áron.”

  That was all we said. Then there was a silence. He was clearly waiting for me to start, while I just looked at his strange, anxious face and didn’t know where to begin.

  “Have . . . have you been to the hospital?” he asked at last.

  “Where?!”

  “It’s all right, calm down!” he blurted hurriedly. “She was still alive when they put her in the ambulance. I swear she was alive. I was standing right there beside her.”

  “What happened?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “No.”

  The Sabbatarian took a deep breath. Then he told me.

  “She jumped.”

  “Off the third floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Áron took me by the arm, sat me down and ran out to fetch some water. When he got back, I was on my feet again.

  “Is my father at the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Where is he, then?”

  “I don’t know. He skipped from the coppers.”

  “They wanted to get him?”

  “Yes. Herr Hausmeister reported him. We were all still dancing when they burst in. The copper was almost face to face with your pa when he flicked off the light. By the time we got it on again, he was nowhere to be seen.”

  “He doesn’t know about mother?”

  “No. That happened later. Suddenly, in all the commotion, there was this terrible scream, and . . .”

  Áron did not finish the sentence. He stared straight ahead, shaking his thin, Christ-like face in silence. You could hear, from outside, Herr Hausmeister shouting. He was arguing with the new tenant for having scraped the wall with his furniture.

  Áron looked at me.

  “Do you have somewhere to sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you can’t come here. Herr Hausmeister would get you too.”

  “I know.”

  There was silence once more. Áron went to the wardrobe, pulled open one of the drawers, and rummaged around. Then he came back and pressed two pengős into my hand.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” he said quietly. “It’s so hard these days. God bless, my boy.”

  “God bless, Áron,” I muttered, but just stood there, not moving.

  “You have to go,” he said. “They won’t let you in the hospital later.”

  So I went. My legs still worked, but my brain did not. I have no recollection of that journey. I don’t know how I got to the hospital—I didn’t know even at the time. But all of a sudden, there I was in the on-call doctor’s room, the same one I had waited in so long one early morning with my father. This time, I didn’t have long to wait.

  “She bled out in the ambulance,” the doctor told me. “You can go see her in the morgue, if you want.”

  “Yes, please,” I nodded, and started laughing loudly, as if he’d made some terrifically funny joke.

  Then I fainted.

  16

  WHEN I CAME TO, THE DOCTOR put a form in front of me. “Sign this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The form was a receipt for the “personal items of the deceased”. I had to acknowledge that I had received them in good order and had no further claims.

  The doctor handed me a tiny envelope containing the “personal items of the deceased”. A thin little gold necklace, a battered little cross. My mother had got it from her mother, my grandmother from hers, and my great-grandmother from . . . who knows? It was an old cross, a lot of people had worn it. Now it was my turn. They’d left me their cross, and I had signed for it. Did I really have no further claim?

  The doctor was getting impatient.

  “Well?” he asked. “Everything in order?”

  In order? . . . I didn’t reply. I tramped out with the cross. The cross grew warm in my hand, my hand clenching into a fist. No, Doctor, nothing was in order. Nothing, nothing at all.

  I looked at the better-dressed in the street as if they’d all, every last one of them, been my mortal enemies. There was my mother, lying dead inside, and out here the world belonged to her murderers. And I had no further claim?

  I stared viciously out at the city. It was a fine, bright day. The sky was blue, the grass was green, the dogs barked, the poor starved, it was all so neat and tidy. Whoever could take it, took it, and whoever couldn’t threw themselves off the third floor. Wealth paraded its fat backside, and the coppers’ white-gloved hands never wandered far from their holsters. It was orderly and quiet in the city. The system moved along soundlessly in its preordained orbit, like some exclusive, alien firmament to whom the earth’s prosaic laws did not apply.

  I looked out at this neat, upper-class order and thought of that blossoming spring morning when Gyula had severed his artery with the pig knife. The hotel, too, was steeped in just that kind of neat, upper-class order. Most people didn’t even know about Gyula, and the people who did never said a word, because anyone with any brains didn’t go around sticking their nose into other people’s business, and besides, why go looking for trouble with the big shots? They sneaked the bloodless corpse out of the back door and then went back to the guests, saying nothing. And they, too, were silent, even as the country bled to death.

  I shivered—I must have had a fever. I swayed onto a bench, trembling with cold. Behind me, on a café terrace, a group were laughing uproariously. I heard a familiar voice and couldn’t resist turning round. It was the Count from my village. Our gazes met, but the Count didn’t recognize me. The Count wouldn’t have recognized me even if I’d gone up to him, because the Count did not know his peasants. But I know you, I said to myself, I know you all right, you laughing Count. Berci died because you paid his father less for a week’s work than you’re about to spend on lunch. Berci walked barefoot to school in winter, and his stomach would rumble so loudly that when we wrote a test in class and it was quiet, you could hear it clearly. But you just keep on laughing—what was Berci’s life to you? Your conscience is clear. You know there isn’t a court in the land that would convict you. You’re innocent, and you laugh. Just you keep laughing, then. I can see your laughing head on a spike. I can see the new György Dózsa leading his peasants in revolt to the castles of the Counts. When that moment came, heads would roll, and . . .

  Hadn’t I heard that somewhere before? Heads would roll . . . Who was it who’d said that? Wait a sec. The Constable? No. Or rather . . . yes. He was quoting Hitler. Was I really saying the same thing as Hitler?

  There was
a frightened silence within me. The Gypsy violinist in the café was playing “The Blue Danube”. They wanted our heads and we wanted theirs. Good God, where would this end? Our hearts were ticking bombs, tomorrow they’d blow up the town, the country, the world perhaps, and this lot just sat there listening to the music, trying to digest their unbelievable apathy in three-four time. They’re murderers and don’t even know it. Or . . .

  I couldn’t keep my head up any more. It bobbed down onto my chest and my eyes closed. I woke to find a policeman shaking me by the shoulder.

  “You can’t sleep here!” he squawked. “If you want to sleep, go home.”

  “Home? . . .”

  I laughed.

  “What you laughing at?” he snapped.

  “Nothing,” I muttered, and slunk off silently.

  My teeth were chattering with the fever. Where was I to go? . . . They’d chased me out of the apartment. They’d chased me out of the hotel, too, and the police wouldn’t even tolerate me on a bench.

  Is this how it was going to be from now on? Yes, it was going to be like this, and worse. At least until now I’d had a roof over my head, a job, a purpose, a home, and even when I went hungry, I went hungry with my parents. But now? . . . My mother was in the morgue, Elemér in prison, and my father who knows where. Where did I have to go? Who did I have to turn to? The Constable? Well, yes, at least he was keen. They’d formed the National Socialist Party not long ago, and I could go far there. Only he, too, would soon realize that he’d overestimated my capacity for betrayal, and then he’d have me blacklisted and I would never get another job again—even if there were jobs to be had.

  What was there left for me? The Népliget, and crime, and slowly falling to pieces. What was it Menyhért had said? In a world like ours, you can only be two things. A revolutionary or a crook. If only they hadn’t arrested Imre . . . If I could fight for something better, finer. But now? It was all so pointless. I was seventeen and had already been locked up twice. I had stolen, and very nearly killed someone. What was I waiting for? Wouldn’t it be better if I threw myself off the third floor, too?