by Linda Grant
‘And that’s the problem,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘That nothing changes.’
‘What should change, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Everything. Life should change, all the time.’
‘Why do you think this?’
‘Look at you both, you and Daddy, you live here in this museum, this immolation.’
‘What is this word, immolation? I don’t know it. Your father and I came here as refugees, we made ourselves a decent life. What more do you want from us?’
‘How can you not want to live?’
‘To live? To live like him, that poor wretch, in his grave?’
‘I want to live,’ I cried, weeping tears of frustration.
‘And you will, of course you shall live. What do you think? That this is for ever, this period, this time of all the deaths? It’s just a moment, don’t you understand? It will pass and you will live, believe me, you will live.’ She leaned against the wall for a moment, then put down her stick beside her and used my shoulder as her crutch, to steady her as she kissed my face and stroked my shorn head with her hand.
Later that evening, I asked her to tell me all she could remember about Uncle Sándor in the days in which she knew him, before they left Budapest. She nodded.
‘He was a charming, dangerous man,’ she said, drinking a cup of coffee, ‘a man who makes girls laugh, who listens to them with sympathy, who penetrates all their secrets in order to take advantage of them. A man who did not understand anything about deep feelings, not until after the war; then, I think, he understood a little. Maybe in later life he learned more. Perhaps these thoughts came over him lately and he didn’t know how to handle them. I was very surprised when I saw that nice woman at the party. Not his normal type at all. He always preferred tarts.’
My father never said another word about his brother. He stayed quiet on the subject until the day he died, but my mother told me about the prison visits he had paid him over the years, to show him pictures of me leaving for York University, my graduation, my engagement to Alexander. He boasted about all my achievements, wanting him to know that he, the small, quiet, industrious, obedient one had made this, and look at him, the flashy older brother, sitting at a table in a prison visiting room. Still, my mother implied, my father always came home dissatisfied, as if Sándor had somehow managed to get the better of him, in ways my father couldn’t put his finger on.
I went back to the house in Camden Town and I decided to take my uncle’s flat and live there for another two months until the house grew too squalid to stay in any more.
After a few days, I found the keys to Claude’s room. Someone had come in and taken most of his stuff. The remains of the shattered fish tank lay strewn across the floor but the little bodies were missing. Only the clothes still hung in the wardrobe. His guard’s uniform and cap, his jeans, his T-shirts, his leather jacket.
The smell of the leather jacket was part of him, and of his young body. I turned it to look at it, the zips, the collar, the pockets. It swung round on the hanger. And then I saw what he had done. How he had found a way to defy me. He had gone to Camden Market, into one of the shops that does this kind of thing, and got them to put a pattern on the back of his leather jacket, a pattern of his own design, because I recognised it, the four arms rendered in metal studs, his own decorative swastika.
The Talmud says nine hundred and thirty kinds of death were created in the world. The most difficult is diphtheria, the easiest is a kiss. The kiss is what is called the mise binishike, which is how you kill the six people over whom the Angel of Death has no sway–such a person dies by the mouth of God. The nine hundred and thirty-first was created for my uncle. He died of his own eye.
My uncle’s story, in his own words
Should a man be hunted? Is a man to be beneath a dog? You beat a dog, maybe he turns back and bites you, this is my warning.
Yes, I am Sándor Kovacs, it’s me. The one you read about. That terrible person.
What were my crimes? Show me the sheet.
To act instinctively but with cunning? Yes. Guilty.
To count my personal survival above the survival of others? Of course.
And for this I was to be hated, hunted, misinterpreted, turned into a symbol?
Back in those days, 1964, just before I went to prison, they told a lot of stories about me in the papers, and even on the streets. Some of them made me laugh so hard I used to have to sit down to rest my chest, because since the TB my lungs have never been up to scratch and it didn’t help that in those days I liked to be seen with a cigar.
First they said I started out as a prize-fighter in Chicago. Or maybe I was stevedore in Poland, or a circus strongman in Peking. Then they went really crazy and I hear that I’m the lovechild of Joe Louis and Sophie Tucker. It’s a game now, to come up with the most ridiculous combinations–Benito Mussolini and Fay Wray, Joe Stalin and Wallis Simpson, Princess Margaret and Lobby Ludd.
Later they all tried to wriggle out of it, didn’t want to be taken for fools and said they were jokes I started myself, and got spread around by my associates. But how would they know anything about me? They say I never gave an interview for the papers. And you know why? No one ever asked me for one. That’s why.
The other people who wouldn’t talk were the ones they called my victims. Some victims! Only one person spoke to the press and he never even met me, that politician, that member of the high and mighty parliament, the Welshman, Clive Parry-Jones, the lone crusader, very nice they were about him, that frozen piece of shit with the boom-boom voice and the Jesus talk.
What I read in the papers about my properties was full of lies. He says–this Parry-Jones–that I kept West Indian families thirteen to a room, no kitchen or bathroom. He talked about rats. About cockroaches, crawling over children’s faces as they slept. He said a rat went for a three-year-old’s throat and tore it out; he said I paid the family off, arranged a funeral with a fine child-sized mahogany coffin and a band of Trinidadians in white tails and white top hats playing steel instruments, marching in front of the hearse through Kensal to the cemetery.
Nothing like this ever happened.
I got here, December 1956, from Hungary. I was worse off than them, the Negroes, I was a refugee and the iron door had slammed shut after me, nowhere to go but forward, no past for me, only future. I remember everything about that day, everything, how my brother came to meet me at the station, the insult he made to me. I walked the streets not hearing my language spoken, for six hours I wandered, up and down. I came to the river, the bridges, no one stopped, no one said a word to me, not a kind word or a harsh one. I was lonely in my soul, I was tired of walking, I wanted to give up. I had a mackintosh, a scarf and a leather satchel, that’s all. I saw men in bowler hats and women in fur coats, a shop that sold pipes and tobacco and cigars, theatres, and everything was cold and alien and strange and I was hungry.
Finally, I heard my own language; they took me to a place, a hostel for refugees. They gave me coffee, soup, meat, vegetables and a bed. This was it, I was here. London, my home. I have not got another one.
An immigrant is very different from a native-born person. Nothing is owed to you, you have no expectations. You have to take what you can, as soon as you see it. You can’t hang around. Not at my age, certainly. I was already forty year old when I got to London but my eyes had a very keen focus, and I could recognise a business opportunity. Life in the Eastern Bloc hadn’t squeezed those instincts out of me. There was no communist reeducation camp capable of indoctrinating me, Sándor Kovacs, with a love of the proletariat and my fellow man.
I came here with nothing and within weeks I started my business. People compared me to the Kray twins, those thugs, those cretins. They were just louts, men who liked to inflict pain, and that is not me. I don’t agree with suffering. It’s against my principles. The Krays had everything, they had a family, they had what they called a manor, their neighbourhood, where they
grew up. I never had any of that.
I remember when the warrant went out for my arrest, walking down the Strand to buy some cigars, a beautiful sunny spring day it was, like now, as it happens. Warm sun on your face, the trees green and starting to grow lush. I remember days like this from long ago, when you hated the sun for shining, you hated the fact that to others it brought pleasure, but you had to admit it brought pleasure to you too, and you hated it even more for that.
Where is Kovacs hiding? This is what it says on the Evening Standard placard. I’m laughing. Hiding? Where should I hide? A journalist is a born liar. He’s a man with an imagination, how else do you explain the rubbish they printed about me? They say I’m living in a stately home in Buckinghamshire, guarded by slobbering Alsatian dogs kept on short rations. No, no, says another one. I’m in a penthouse flat in Chelsea, with a steel front door. Did you hear about Kovacs, says a third? He’s holed up on a luxury barge moored in the middle of the Thames, upriver, somewhere around Chiswick or is it Teddington Lock? Anyway, they have to send special police boats to get him.
And one night on television, a man I never heard of, Kenneth Tynan, he is something in the theatre I think, anyway, he has degrees from Oxford University, he says I don’t live nowhere, I don’t exist, I’m a figment of the national imagination, like the Loch Ness monster.
This was the worst of all. I feel my soul shrivel when I hear this. And I hate him. But to this day I don’t understand why a man should say such a thing, and this is one of the issues I intend to raise. I have to get to the bottom of it.
When I came out of prison, a year ago, no one remembered me. I heard on the bus one time, someone discussing me. Didn’t Kovacs die in prison? No, no, he escaped, you know like the Great Train Robbers, like Ronnie Biggs and he’s living in fine style, somewhere in South America.
I wish it was true.
Because what it is, is that everyone just forgot about me. It was like I was a craze, such as the hula hoop or the yo-yo. What they call a Zeitgeist, which is a German word, I used to know that language. So maybe that Tynan was right after all, to some extent.
When you read about me now, which is very rarely, I’m just a slum landlord. The slums (so-called slums–they were beautiful houses in their day) I owned were pulled down and over them the government built brand new housing. Tower blocks of concrete. Very nice. They looked like slums to me even while the builders were making them. They were prisons, anyone who has been in a prison could see that.
This was King Kovacs’ condition. People talked about what I represented, but no one understood what it was to be me, Kovacs. How could they? In England they have here what is called the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, which is what I know. A government that believes in social progress, in rebuilding a man’s soul to make sure he is pure and healthy, not with a sickness inside him. We had this back in Hungary, too, after the war, when the communists came in, but they did it with tanks, and here they do it from the pulpit.
They say, oh, Kovacs isn’t interested in any of that. He is coarse and brutal. He is the impediment. You have to get rid of Kovacs if you want to build that Jerusalem they talk about, this fair, this just society.
There’s a Japanese paper game called origami I once saw, someone showed it to me in prison. You fold a sheet into any kind of shape you like if you’re dextrous enough: a bird, a bear, a dragon. That’s what they tried to do to me. But I am not paper, I am flesh and blood, and come what may I refuse to be folded.
Now when it comes to the manner of man I am in my private life, I acknowlege I was not a better son
I had not meant to spend all day sitting in my father’s armchair in the empty flat listening to the tapes, not eating, barely drinking. I hadn’t expected to hear once more after so many years that guttural accent, the pendulous lower lip trying to close on the words, his hearty laugh, his cynicism. I heard my own voice from thirty years ago, and was it my imagination, or did the accent sound a little different? Did I really talk like that in those days, was I actually what Claude called me, a posh girl?
The tapes contained the evidence of the enduring gift my uncle had left me: a past. He gave me my grandparents, the village in the Zémplen, the plum trees, the vines, the horse shit in the streets, the cafés of Budapest, my mother sitting with her stick in a café on the banks of the Danube, her brown hair around her face, her raisin eyes, her cleft chin. Whether they are true or false (and I have no cause to doubt them), this past is the only one I’ve got, there is no other available.
When I had finished, I packed everything up, put the tapes and the tape recorder in a cardboard box and left the flat, shutting the door behind me. I waited for the clanking gate of the lift to open, placed the box on the little leather stool while I descended. In the hall I removed the card with my parents’ name on it from above the brass plate of their postbox in the hall, and wondered how many last times there would be for me, and this building, this mansion block in red brick, that I could spend my whole life avoiding, trying to find a different route, another direction.
It was a sunny late afternoon, just after 5.30; long shadows, sirens in the distance, anxiety and excitement in the faces of passers-by. They caught a terrorist, did you hear? The city was still hot, nervous, febrile, people didn’t want to travel but they didn’t have a choice–whether it’s the tube or the bus, they’d get you either way. I walked round to Seymour Street, to the shop, carrying the box. The last customers were working their way through the sale racks with frenzied attention.
The spotlights on the ceiling illuminated her hair and cast sparks on her false eyelashes. I don’t know how she held that mask in place, day after day, the face of the professional sales lady for whom the customer is always right, even when she is obviously wrong and the dress she’s trying on is too tight, and you tactfully suggest that yes, that’s very good, but perhaps here is something better.
I admired her for her forbearance, for keeping a civil tongue in her head, for tolerating the timewasters, the ones who just came to look, but she told me once, ‘If a young person tries on a cocktail dress they can’t afford and anyway they never get an invitation to cocktail parties, I let them try. Because you see, you never know what life has in store for you, and one day this poor working girl could walk in with a diamond ring on her finger and she remembers the kind sales ladies who let her try on dresses when she couldn’t afford them and because of this she is not intimidated by the idea of cocktail parties. This is why selling is a profession, but tell that to the children they employ on Oxford Street, who turn away their heads at the sight of the customer.’
I watched her folding, smoothing, wrapping in tissue paper the day’s final purchase; her hands with the silver nails were still agile, but she massaged her elbows when no one was looking. I remember my mother making the same gesture.
‘So you came back,’ she said, when the last customer had left.
‘Yes, I have something for you.’
‘What’s this, what have you got in that box?’
‘Do you remember the tapes we made?’
‘You have them? Sándor’s voice?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sándor alive on them tapes! Oh, I’d give a lot to hear his voice again, that dear man.’
‘They’re all here, and the tape recorder too, and what he was writing, the day I met him in the park. His own words.’
Thank you,’ she said. ‘This means a lot to me.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Near enough to six,’ she said, and locked the door. ‘Wait, let me finish up, and then we’ll talk. You’re tired, girl, look at you. Sit down.’ She pointed to a yellow velvet chair with gilt-painted arms.
‘But you must be exhausted, you should sit.’
‘I sit when I get home. That’s when I sit.’
‘Do you want me to show you how to operate the tape recorder?’ I said. ‘It can be tricky at first.’
She stood by the counter checking her receipts. ‘I know how to do that, don’t
you worry. I understand little machines. I do all the credit cards with the new gadget, it didn’t take me a minute to learn how to do it.’
‘I listened to the tapes myself this afternoon,’ I said. ‘It all stopped, so abruptly, I never heard him explain how he came to be a landlord or what he—’
‘What they did to that man is a crime. That judge, he is one who should have been in prison.’
‘But he—’
‘Oh, but. Don’t believe what you read in the newspapers. I never pay any attention to that rubbish. A person who has the marks of a whip on his back, who has been a slave, like the slaves in Egypt, where his people once made their exodus from, is a king, in my opinion.’
‘The tenants, he—’
‘I’m going to the back to make a pot of tea, and when I come back, I’ll tell you about those tenants.’
‘Can I help you?’
‘No. Sit there. Don’t fidget, I’ll be back soon.’
I looked around the shop. She had turned off the spotlights and locked the door, put the closed sign up. It was a very small room in which to spend most of a lifetime–the eau-de-Nil walls which had been fashionable when it first opened, fifty years ago, the little velvet chairs, the glass-fronted display cases, the marble table bearing only a vase of early bronze chrysanthemums (a flower that even when it is growing looks as though it’s longing to be cut), the curtained changing rooms with hooks for coats and a shelf for handbags, old perfumes hanging in the air, a mingling of the scents of many women’s skin. Shalimar. Poison. L’Air du Temps. Magie Noire. Blue Grass. No 5.
All the time that Eunice had been serving in the shop with that charming continuity, so many things had happened to me, so many twists and turns and interruptions.
I had wanted to live, and I had lived. I had wanted to escape from Benson Court, and I escaped. I was in the Fountain Room at Fortnum and Mason eating an ice-cream sundae, I was at the table, all by myself. Opposite, drinking a cup of Earl Grey tea, my future husband looked up from his newspaper, saw me with a drip of ice-cream on my chin, spooning a red glacé cherry into my mouth and he burst out laughing. I turned my attention from my Knickerbocker Glory. What had he seen to cause him to laugh? It was my look of earnest concentration as I attacked the sundae and the white moustache of cream that flecked the dark hairs of my top lip. A black, serious creature with a child’s sweet, he said. A thin girl on her own in a café devouring ice-cream unselfconsciously. ‘And when you finished you took out a little pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette with those hands which look too big for the wrists to support them, rattling your matches in the box. I thought, now here’s a story.’