Temptation

by Janos Szekely

  “No!” I said so loudly that people turned around in the street. “No, no, no!”

  I was not a thief. I was not a killer. Why should I sentence myself to death? They’re the killers, and I won’t let them get rid of me the way they did troublesome witnesses. I’m going to live, I’m going to show them, and I will be an accusation and a proof, and I will never shrink from the fight till the eyes of the world were finally open!

  Don’t carry on so! my peasant’s common sense told me. What’s all this about accusation and proof and fighting? When you get very sleepy, you’ll go out to the park just the same, because a man has to sleep, and when you get very hungry, you’ll steal too, because a man has to eat. And you want to change the world? Please. Don’t be so childish.

  Was I being childish? . . . Who knows? The apple has always fallen off the tree, since time immemorial, and people always thought it natural—until someone came along, a certain Isaac Newton, and asked: why does the apple have to fall off the tree? Don’t be so childish, the sober and resigned told him, too. But today, what even the most serious and grown-up of physics teachers teaches is derived from Newton’s childish question.

  Well, dear fellows, I will not be resigned! Last night, you shook me out of the social tree and I should now, like a fallen apple, be rolling downhill like every other apple, to rot slowly in a ditch. But I’m a different kind of apple, ladies and gentlemen! I’m going to rebel against the tree and bite its rotten trunk and, if needs be, I’ll claw out its roots tooth and nail. You’re not going to get rid of me that easily. I’m not going out to the park to starve. I’m not going to steal. I’m not going to go to pieces.

  What, then? asked my peasant’s common sense, and there was a chilling silence. I stopped and stood stock-still for minutes. It was those few minutes that decided the rest of my life.

  Suddenly, I heard my own voice. I said:

  “Out, out of here!”

  I must have said it aloud, because someone turned around to look at me and laughed. Go ahead and laugh, I said to myself. You’re all so clever and so reasonable, you know everything, always looking at the facts. But I believe in something, and that’s worth more. I’m not going to rot among you. I’m getting out of here, because my home is where the Elemérs of this world walk free and the killers are the ones in prison.

  I walked faster and faster, scared I wouldn’t catch up to my thoughts. I walked for hours like this, practically in a trance. The sky grew bitter meanwhile, a shower pelted the streets, but I just kept walking. My fever must have been through the roof. I was sweating buckets, I was on fire, and I was chattering with cold. I had the feeling that my feet were not quite on the pavement, but a centimetre or two above.

  All at once, I found myself by the banks of the Danube. I stood there like a dripping tomcat in a storm, and stared, immobile, at the boat to Vienna. By tomorrow, it would be in Austria, and in Austria, there were other boats that went other places.

  If only I could get on it! . . . If only it would take me out of here! . . .

  I was struck by the raw, adventurous scent of the ship’s fumes, and I was once more consumed by that old, shivering magic that would come to me as a boy on summer evenings when the smell of the train smoke would float over on the wind. Go, go, go! the old desire piped up once more. Escape the fate I’d been assigned. To go look for the Easter egg of happiness, that some mythical god had perhaps hidden for me somewhere too.

  Words buzzed inside my fevered brain—strange, beguiling words, as if bees from another world were bringing me their sweet and bitter honey. I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, hadn’t eaten in twenty-four, I must have had a forty-degree fever, and instead of looking for a dry corner to hole up in like a sick dog, I just stood there in the wind and the rain and wrote a poem about the Easter eggs of happiness, that some playful god had hidden so that people had to keep on chasing and chasing them all the way to the grave.

  I had forgotten about everything except the poem when something unexpected happened. It struck me with the force of a miracle, though it was a very everyday miracle indeed. A paper boy ran up onto the boat.

  “Nyolcórai, Kurír, Magyarország!” he called, and the guards just let him by.

  I started running. I was borne by the will to live, desire, desperation or something else, something more mysterious, for which there are no words. I took all my money, bought some papers in the street, and hightailed it back.

  “Nyolcórai, Kurír, Magyarország!” I called too, and suddenly noticed I was on the boat.

  I shouted myself hoarse hawking the papers, trying feverishly to explore. I ran down the narrow, darkened corridors not knowing where. It was the first time in my life that I’d been on board a “real” ship, and I didn’t know what was where and what did what. I just kept trundling along, panting, heart thumping, along masses of stairs, corridors and decks, as if I really had been looking for the Easter egg of happiness. The boat seemed stunningly large, and yet I still couldn’t find a tiny nook in it where I could hide from a hostile world.

  The departure bell rang, and they chased everyone who wasn’t travelling off. I ran around frantically, trying to slip through, but in the end was collared by a boatman.

  “You deaf ?” he hollered. “Can’t you hear we’re going? Get lost!”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, but to myself, I said: “Fat chance.”

  As soon as he’d turned away, I turned too and ran like a rabbit from a hunter. Out, out of here! I cried inside. Out of here. I didn’t have enough money in my pockets to get me to the next village, but it seems it’s not only what’s in your pockets that’ll get you places. A wonderful feeling of certainty now came over me, that mysterious power and equilibrium of the soul that leads sleepwalkers safely along the edges of rooftops. It was a kind of sober drunkenness, some waking trance that I had only felt while writing poems. I knew now, too, that this was the moment, that I couldn’t stop while I heard the music, that I had to find the rhyme of my life before the fever and the magic passed.

  The third bell had gone when I reached the upper deck. I looked around. Not a soul. The slanting, heavy shower battered the deck loudly, and I had to keep holding on so I didn’t get blown away by the wind. The anchor was already clanking its way up in the bow, the captain might reach the bridge at any moment, and I knew that I’d stick out a mile here on deck. I was heading for the stairs to go back down below when I noticed that one of the stacks wasn’t smoking. My heart throbbed. I could see that it wasn’t a real smokestack but had just been put there next to the real one to make things look symmetrical. I almost shouted with joy.

  You might well smile. That night I, too, realized that many before me—rather too many, in fact—had discovered this little ruse of the shipbuilding industry, but at the time, I had no idea and climbed into the stack with the bliss of ignorance. It was narrower than I thought, I could barely squeeze in. I kept stretching my neck like a giraffe and panting for breath. A few minutes later, I had to pull my head in, too, because two hooded figures appeared on the bridge and the stack was right opposite them. But what did I care! I could hear the floor begin to vibrate beneath me. The siren sounded like a clamouring beast, and somewhere below someone struck up the “Rákóczi March”. The ship was off, and I was on board.

  I felt completely safe. After all that tension, my nerves relaxed completely and a heavy, dazed feeling of calm came over me. My fever rocked me slowly to sleep, and I slept safe for hours in the knowledge that no harm could come to me till Vienna.

  I woke with a start because I couldn’t breathe. Something heavy and large came tumbling down onto my head, blocking off the opening of the stack. My first instinct was to try and push it out, but I couldn’t move inside the narrow stack, and when I remembered my situation, I no longer dared to, either. I could feel that there was some kind of bag above me, and though I didn’t know much about merchant or other kinds of shipping, I knew enough to suspect that baggage wasn’t usually stored in the smok
estack. So who had put it there, and why?

  Was there someone outside, watching over it?

  I felt on the verge of suffocation, but I still did not dare move. I don’t know how long I must have spent like this—every minute is sixty calvaries at times like this.

  Suddenly, I heard footsteps.

  “It’s in here,” a man’s voice whispered just outside.

  “Take it out,” whispered back another. “Customs are bound to check in there. There’s a place in the kitchen where . . .”

  I didn’t catch the rest. The bag and the two men disappeared. I gulped the fresh air greedily.

  It was pitch black. The rain had stopped, but a damp wind that smelt of fish howled around the smokestack and the starless sky was black above me. Where were we? . . . By this point, I knew, of course, that I had to find a better hiding place before we reached the border. But how was I going to get out of here?

  I peeked out cautiously. The captain was pacing the bridge with his hands behind his back. I yanked my head back in.

  Minutes, or possibly hours, went by. Occasionally, I heard the captain’s voice as he called a command into the speaking-tube, and then there was silence once more. Beneath me the Danube growled, above me the wind was howling, and I had no idea where we were, how long I’d slept, or what time it was.

  Suddenly, the siren sounded and the boat slowed. Commands were barked, there was busy toing and froing, steps resounded on deck. We docked.

  “Gönyű!” a voice called. “Border control!”

  My heart stopped. I knew it was now or never. Either I got out of here and made it through the controls, or . . . I didn’t even dare finish the thought. Their dragging me back from here and having to start all over again . . . no, no, no! I’d rather jump in the Danube, or tear open the border guard’s throat, or . . .

  My attention was captured by something. The deck went quiet. I listened carefully for a while, then peeped out of the opening of the stack. The bridge was empty. Slowly, carefully, I stuck my head out. Silence, darkness, not a soul about. I climbed out of the stack, but my feet hadn’t even touched the ground when I heard voices from one of the steps.

  I threw myself flat on my stomach. There were steps on the other side, too, so I crawled quickly, silently towards them. I only dared look back when I’d reached them. Uniformed shadows moved along the darkened deck.

  I slipped down the stairs quietly. The stairs led to the bow, and I didn’t meet anyone there. But the corridor was pretty crowded, and I was shocked to find that everyone who passed me stared at me.

  I didn’t understand what they were staring at. I fled their curious gazes, looking for a little corner in which to hide, but I happened into a bright, first-class saloon instead. There was a mirror on the wall opposite, and I reeled when I saw myself in it. My face was covered in soot, my clothes were caked in mud, and my trousers had split, revealing the underpants below.

  The first-class citizens on their plush crimson divans looked at me with some astonishment.

  “Excuse me,” I muttered dimly and swooned out.

  Outside, I could no longer control myself. I was seized with panic and began to run. I ran down the first staircase I came across, fleeing the light—down, down, as deep as I could go.

  I found myself in the bowels of the ship, in a narrow, soot-encrusted, badly lit little corridor. Somewhere nearby, generators hummed, and you could feel the excited, burning breath of the boilers in the air. The narrow metal planks reverberated under my feet, and the hot steel handrail was throbbing in my hand as if I’d put my finger on the ship’s very pulse. No, there were no carpets and chandeliers and monocles and apathy here. Down here reality, that good old reliable reality, lay unveiled, birthing from its darkened womb heat, and light, and power.

  This was my world. I calmed down a bit. The machines clicked and hummed, everything rattled, wrenched and thrummed, but in some complicated way still seemed calm and quiet. I looked around. There was nobody nearby. The workers must have been on break—you could hear the clinking of plates from behind a door.

  I tiptoed on. There was no one in the machine room. I could see, when I went past it, that there was a water tap beside the door. I could have a quick wash, I thought, and looked around carefully once more. I couldn’t see anyone; there was only the constant hum of the machinery. I scurried over to the tap and poked my head under the water. At that moment, the door opposite me opened.

  A young machinist stood before me. He said something, but I didn’t understand what. He was speaking a foreign language. Of course! This is an Austrian ship, I remembered, and my instinct was to flee. But then the machinist smiled at me and threw me a towel.

  I looked at him in surprise. Did he think I belonged here? No, he can’t possibly think that, he’d know the other workers, and besides, they were all wearing uniforms. So why was he smiling?

  I dried myself, hurried and nervous. The machinist just stood there before me, smiling. He had a good, simple face, a simple smile. What was going through his mind? I wondered. He could surely see I was in trouble. Was he thinking, like Elemér, that the working class has to stick together? Or was he just smiling like Fish-face was smiling, and would he, too, turn me over to the police in the end?

  The machinist started talking again, but this time, I understood him, because his eyes, too, were speaking. He gave a quick, meaningful glance in the direction of the window in the corridor, and I followed his gaze with alarm. The Austrian border guards were coming down the passage.

  The machinist pointed silently to a side door, and I was off.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, and he whispered something back.

  I couldn’t understand what he’d said, just as he couldn’t understand what I’d said, but we still understood each other. It seems, I thought, it’s not what language you’re speaking that matters, but how you look at your fellow man.

  The door opened into a coal store. Inside, two grimy, half-naked men were shovelling coal. They looked at me but said nothing and I ran on in the labyrinth of cargo holds, equipment stores and corridors.

  I finally found the stairs. I ran up to where I’d come from, but almost ended up bumping into the Hungarian border guards.

  I was in luck. This happened in the bow, where two parallel corridors met. I was at the end of the right-hand one when I happened to spot a customs man’s trouser leg on the stairs as he was coming down off the deck. I sprang back just in time, and they turned into the other corridor. So they’d finished on deck, I told myself, and sneaked up the stairs.

  There was no one on deck, and I climbed back into the smokestack. It was only then it occurred to me that the Austrians may not have searched the deck and were bound to find me here. I wanted to climb out, but it was too late. I heard the sound of footsteps. I could already see myself between the armed men as they dragged me off the boat, when all of a sudden the siren above me sounded.

  “Cast off!” I heard the captain cry, and felt the boat moving.

  I peered out. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we were drifting away from the Hungarian coast. The quay commander saluted the ship, and then the lights in the tiny little border station went out.

  It must have been midnight. Hungary was sleeping. Europe, too, was sleeping. The world was sleeping. They’d been sung to sleep by Briand and Kellogg’s lullabies, sixty-two countries declaring formally that they would never again “resort to war”. The Reverend Söderblom received the Nobel Peace Prize, the number of jobless grew and grew, people kept writing operettas about Hungary, and the world, unaware, hummed “The Blue Danube”, which carried on washing the bloated corpses of its suicides down from the Black Forest to the Black Sea in three-four time.

  The ship turned slowly in the night. I thought of the smiling machinist. He must be standing before a metal handle now, just waiting for the order to release the steam. Yes, down below, people were already working away, and one day, the ship would go where they told it to.

  “Onwards!�
�� the captain called from the bridge. “Full steam ahead!”

  NEW YORK, 1947