by Miklós Vámos
On the new shop sign it said: Straub & Csillag, since he thought dropping the well-established name would have damaged the firm’s reputation. He offered the Straubs the chance to continue to manage the shop for a fee that was so high they could not refuse. Soon the attention of mothers with marriageable girls was also attracted to the ambitious young man, who was regarded as a good match. He, however, spent little time in Pécs, despite having also purchased the house in Apácza Street. The rumor was that he was busy wooing some aristocratic lady in his home town, which they took to be Homonna; some spoke of a baroness, others of the daughter of a count.
Sándor Csillag took every opportunity to visit the capital. He maintained a permanent suite at the Queen of England Hotel. Nightfall generally found him in houses with red lights. His generosity was suspended in the case of the ladies of the night, whom he paid only as much as he absolutely had to. He was rough with them.
“This one scratches and pinches, like a scorpion,” one of them complained to the madam.
“You would die if that were true,” she replied. A romance set in South America was doing the rounds in that house.
In the mornings Sándor Csillag would sit in the Hotel Bristol, staring at the Danube and the bridge arching over the gray waters, over which carts trundled on their way to Buda. It was the month of November; snow fell in a soft drizzle. He ordered yet another Viennese coffee. He shook his head when the blue-uniformed young waiter brought the plate in his left hand, grasping the handle of the jug in his right. “Just one hand,” he ticked him off strictly.
He was reading the Books of Fathers for the umpteenth time. It was time to start writing his own section. From Gorove and Partner’s stationery shop he ordered an album in a large format, which even came with a tiny little lock. As soon as he bought it, he carried it with him, for a while wherever he went. He kept the key in the watch fob of his waistcoat. He spent days caressing the pristine white pages with deep satisfaction. There is something sublime in the fact that they are all blank, he thought. He kept putting off the day when he would disturb their blankness and was himself surprised when he asked for pen and ink at the Bristol.
Let the third one begin. I wish Sándor Csillag and his descendants that only joyful matters should grace these pages.
PRAYER
If only I had enough strength not to squander my abilities on lowly enjoyments. These shake my whole being, yet the greater the ecstasy, the emptier I become. I must conquer my mortal passions, otherwise they will conquer me. My task: to kill the miserable, inferior being within me, so that, being purified, my spirit might guide me to the world of rationality.
My clan possesses the exceptional gift of memory, a privilege that belongs to the first-born; sometimes even the gates of the future open before us. But whither have we got by means of this? Our fate has been no easier, our life has not been better; we have not managed to spare either ourselves or our loved ones from an evil fate. It is wiser to concentrate all our strength on today, for yesterday has gone and perhaps even the future is foreordained. As Horace says: carpe diem.
As long as the Straubs were spared the assaults of gout, the travels of Sándor Csillag had little effect on the trade of the Straub & Csillag shoe shop. But later they had little strength to spare for the supervision of the newly recruited employees. These were not as loyal to their masters as the former owners; their sticky palms and nonchalance had a cumulatively damaging influence. Sándor Csillag could observe this whenever he ran his eye over the books, yet he showed little concern. The cost of my way of life is amply covered by the shop. Why should others be denied their share? he thought.
In the life of the nation Gyula Szapáry had now been replaced by Sándor Wekerle as prime minister and it was preparing to celebrate the millennium, a thousand years since the first Magyars arrived in their homeland. The face of Budapest was being made up like those of girls at their coming-out ball. There was a lively debate in the newspapers about the construction of a viaduct for the tram to run on the Pest side of the Danube. The majority thought that such a long viaduct would disfigure the corso, the prime venue for the citizens’ strolls. Yet without a viaduct, the tracks would have to be laid along the quayside, which was prone to annual flooding. Sándor Csillag backed the viaduct. “One must keep up with the times!” He adored every form of transport.
New Year’s Day 1896 found him staying the night in Pest, the carillon of bells that rang out in honor of the millennium long reverberating in his head. A few days later he traveled to Venice. He took the tram to the Western Station and boarded the fast train to Trieste; this left at eight in the evening and arrived in Venice at two-thirty in the morning. At night, after the bed had been made up for him, he stood for a long time in the corridor, smoking a cigar and staring out at the landscape shrouded in darkness. He had a flash-forward of a sudden: in a hundred years’ time, people would travel on this train just as today, though-oddly-the journey would take only an hour less than it does today, even though it will be powered by an electric engine that belches neither smoke nor soot. Is that credible? An electric engine? Where from? How? Ach… stuff and nonsense.
Despite his best efforts and resolutions, in Venice, too, the hectic in his blood drove him to women of easy virtue. Not only to the downmarket type hovering around the Rialto, but to the courtesans, who here held court on a small island, whither the gondoliers would carry you for a hefty extra fee. Sándor Csillag penned ever-new pledges and oaths and vows in The Book of Fathers about self-restraint, a pure and spiritual life, and a sedulous life. And when he failed to honor these, he added remorseful, repentant lines to his text.
He had a sudden craving for complete peace and solitariness: from the albergo near the Accademia he moved to the Lido. This summer resort was almost entirely deserted in January; only one hotel was open and even that had only half-a-dozen occupied rooms. As he found out in the dining room, most of the guests had come for a salt cure, recommended for weak lungs by some doctors.
Sándor Csillag forgot that he had come here in order to be alone the moment he heard the sound of Hungarian being spoken in the room. Bowing as he clicked his heels-something he had learned from old Miksa Straub-he presented himself at the table of his compatriots. The Goldbaum family-father, mother, and two young girls-burst out in vibrant laughter in four different pitches when they learned that the person bowing before them was none other than the second element of the Pécs firm of Straub & Csillag.
“We have been buying our footwear from you for years,” said Helene Goldbaum, the mother.
“Come over and join us!” urged Manfred Goldbaum, the head of the family. “How long have you been in these parts?”
As they partook enthusiastically of coffee à l’italienne, in the course of the rambling conversation it transpired that the Goldbaum family lived in Beremend, half an hour’s ride from Pécs. Manfred Goldbaum had begun as a trouser cutter and taken over as owner of a clothing firm employing fourteen qualified tailors and cutters, working for him on foot-treadle sewing machines imported from Germany. The daughters, Antonia and Ilona, were of marriageable age with-and at these words Manfred Goldbaum gave a knowing wink-substantial dowries. Sándor Csillag’s mouth drew itself into a smile.
Perhaps it was divine inspiration that these two beauties should cross my path. We spend much of our time as a threesome. I would happily marry either of these girls, but preferably both of them… what an impossible notion! Our trio grows daily more carefree and melds more and more into one. But the tension keeps growing. I wonder if I can be honest with them both? I fear that if I reveal my true feelings it would spoil everything. Therefore, I must somehow cut the Gordian knot myself. For this decision there remain but three days, until their departure.
Antonia was twenty-one, muscular in the manner of a young dog, black as coal, introspective, willful. Ilona was twenty, gentle like the chestnut trees, brown as a fawn and as easily startled. It would be difficult to imagine two sisters less like each
other. Ilona was like her mother. And a little like her father. Antonia most resembled, perhaps, Hami. This made the choice both easier and harder.
On the afternoon of their last day, Sándor Csillag asked for the hand of Ilona Goldbaum in marriage. The couple heard him out with faces impassive. Then Manfred Goldbaum said: “You may certainly have Ilona’s hand. But first we must marry off Antonia. As soon as there is a ring on her finger, you may have our little Ilona!”
Sándor Csillag resigned himself with some sadness to the uncertain duration of his engagement. He had not counted on Antonia Goldbaum presenting her fiancé to her parents that very month, in the person of Imre Holatschek, only son of the apothecary at Beremend.
My ship has sailed into port. With this respectable marriage I hereby renounce the days of my feckless youth. My young bride is the first woman I have encountered whose company brings me joy at any time of the day or night. In her parents I have found a true father and mother. My egg-shaped fob-watch, my father’s sole bequest to me, I presented to my father-in-law on the night of my stag party, in a sudden access of generosity. Though I was highly intoxicated, I don’t regret it for one moment. I know that this timepiece dates from the age of my ancestor Kornél Csillag, who chose later to be known as Sternovszky. To the best of my knowledge, it was found in the mud by a bandit called Jóska Telegdi. At the time it was broken, showing October 9, 1683, that is, it stopped on the day of the battle of Párkány. What an amazing coincidence! It was on that battlefield that the father of that bandit died! Telegdi, who was killed at the scene, left there all his possessions, and that is how the timepiece came into my ancestor’s hands and has ever since, having undergone many repairs, always been passed on to the first-born. The chain of ownership was not broken by Fatimeh’s thievery; on the contrary, it was she who righted matters when they were out of kilter as a result of Otto’s murder. It is no bad thing that this valuable relic leaves my possession. I never wore it myself. It fits Manfred Goldbaum’s waistcoat pocket far better; may it therefore bring him good fortune always.
The Goldbaums did not observe the religious customs or the dietary regime of the Israelites, nor did they go to synagogue; rather, they saw themselves as Hungarians, considering their ties to their homeland more important than their ancestry. Manfred Goldbaum went so far as to contemplate changing his surname, and if only he could have come to an agreement with Helene over their new name, they would now long have been called something resoundingly Hungarian like Garay, or Gárdonyi, or Garas. In the end the double wedding was held in the Pécs synagogue, the two couples married by Chief Rabbi Lipót Stern, who turned out to be distantly related to Sándor Csillag and invited him round for tea. Sándor Csillag gladly accepted, but never kept his promise.
After the wedding both couples moved into Sándor Csillag’s house in Apácza Street, though Antonia and Imre did so only temporarily. Imre Holatschek wanted to make a career in Harkány, where he thought the warm spa waters offered sure-fire business opportunities in the curative and recuperative sphere. He used his dowry to make an offer for the local apothecary’s shop, and when this was declined he opened his own chemist’s in the building of a public house that had closed down long before. At the same time he set about building a house of his own.
Ilona regretted that the foursome would not stay together in the longer term-it would have been most agreeable to share with her sister the mysteries of married life, of keeping servants, and of discovering the world of cookery. The two Goldbaum girls continued to behave like sassy girls, their peals of unrestrained laughter rose high in one room or another, in the postage-stamp of a garden, ringing out through the windows and along Apácza Street, even reaching the neighbors. “The laughing ladies” they were called in the area. His wife’s joy-filled peals of laughter, an octave higher than Antonia’s, were music to Sándor Csillag’s ears. He would not have minded his brother-and sister-in-law staying with them forever. This would be one way of achieving his ideal of living with both the Goldbaum girls at the same time.
Antonia never gave any indication that she resented Sándor Csillag for choosing her younger sister. “I love you both!” was her eternal refrain, accompanied by a gentle, dreamy smile.
Not long after the wedding Sándor Csillag had a burning desire to see Budapest again. He knew it was no longer acceptable for him to set out on his own, though that, above all, is what he truly desired. So he tricked out this trip as a birthday present for Ilona. Ilona clapped her hands in joy. “Can we go to the Opera? Can we take the viaduct tram? Can we ride on the underground railway?”
Sándor Csillag had told her many tales of the capital’s wonders: the underground train that had opened last spring, and the recently completed Comedy Theater. But there were things about which he told no tales. Ilona jumped up around her husband’s neck landing kisses wherever she could. Then she grew sad: “And…”
Sándor Csillag knew precisely what she meant. He gave her a gentle caress. “We’ll take them, too. Why not?”
The two couples took rooms in the Queen of England Hotel, their two suites opening onto a single reception room. The very first night they clapped their palms raw at the Opera, where the contemporary Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida was performed with the chief roles sung by György Anthes, Mesdames Gizella Flatt and Itália Vasquez, and Rikárd Erdös, to whom the audience gave a particularly warm welcome, those in standing room pounding the floor with their feet as well, a thunderous noise that frightened Ilona and Antonia. The orchestra was under the baton of Henrik Benkö. The cast list and the tickets were retained as a permanent souvenir of the event in the ladies’ embroidered evening bags. The box seats cost ten crowns each. In the intervals they consumed champagne and caviar, served in the boxes by the staff. Imre Holatschek repeatedly offered to contribute to the costs of the evening but Sándor Csillag would not hear of it. “This is my pleasure.”
Other visitors to the capital at this time included Kaiser Wilhelm II, accompanied by Apostolic King Franz Joseph. All the papers were abuzz with this news. The Emperor found the city on the Danube most pleasing, but desired to know why there were so few Denkmaler in Budapest, that is, statues and other memorials. Sándor Csillag agreed. It occurred to him to launch a collection for the edification of the city. Though perhaps he should have urged the embellishment of the streets and squares of Pécs, which he saw more often, and where, too, there was no plethora of Denkmaler. They had returned to their house in Apácza Street when he read in the newspaper that the Apostolic King Franz Joseph had donated 400,000 crowns of his private funds to erect ten historical statues in Budapest. A very noble gesture, thought Sándor Csillag.
Though he devoted little time to the affairs of the footwear shop of Straub & Csillag, this was more than made up for by Ilona’s contribution to the family business. At first she would go in only to pass the time of day with the Straubs, but gradually she took over the reins and in due course held them very tight. This proved increasingly a test for Miksa Straub’s character. He was used to having to answer to no one but himself, but Ilona’s doe-like gentleness proved to be allied to a steely business will. When the old couple had finally had enough and threatened to leave, Ilona did not stand in their way and took over the running of the office, whose drab furniture it was her first task to exchange for something bright and new. “Well, how do you like it?” she asked her husband as she showed him round.
“Hm,” said Sándor Csillag, uncertain.
“Go ahead, tell me!”
“It’s like a… boudoir.”
“That’s right!” said Ilona, squirting a diluted fragrance into the air. “At least the gentlemen I have to haggle with feel relaxed and uninhibited.”
Sándor Csillag was not sorry. Let Ilona play with the shop. Without noticing it, they had exchanged roles. After breakfast it was not the man of the house who went off to work but its lady. Sándor Csillag’s goodbye kiss was every day accompanied by the words “I’ll drop in!” but he avoided honor
ing his promise whenever he could. He was much happier dealing with the running of the house. He found less joy in browsing the business ledgers than in planning the menu for lunch and dinner. This capacity of his the two women and Imre Holatschek never tired of praising, and in only one respect was he sometimes criticized: he allowed the cook too free a hand in the matter of red onions.
His taste in decorating the rooms was exquisite: he readily lavished money on Japanese vases, Brussels lace, exquisite clocks, and antique weapons. He also devoted his attention to the minuscule garden, demarcating with his own hand the place of the flowerbeds and bedding down blood-red geraniums, while along the stone wall he planted four box trees, which, once they were established, the gardener trimmed into amusing shapes on his directions. The topiary took the form of a dog kennel, a helmeted German soldier, an Egyptian obelisk, and a fat python.
Thus from the house in Apácza Street there would be two people departing of a morning: Mrs. Sándor Csillag and Imre Holatschek. The latter was awaited by a trap and pair that trundled him to Harkány or Beremend. Ilona waved after him, then walked slowly along Apácza Street and crossed the main square, and as her high heels were heard on the cobbles of Király Street, men ran out of the shops to greet her in suitable fashion. The pointed comments-that at the Csillags’ the woman wore the breeches-were made only behind her back.
Ilona fell pregnant almost on her wedding night. My son Nándor was born on December 7, six weeks early. For a long time his skin had the color of the yolk of a duck’s egg, which it was impossible to wash off. Once he was bathed and wrapped in his swaddling clouts he was handed to me and I was overcome by that fever of joy, unlike any other, that is the essence of fatherhood, and which made both body and soul tremble as never before. I remembered that this was something that all my ancestors lived through, when they took their newborn child into their hands. This breast-swelling joy must be the driving force that commands us, mortal creatures, to take on the yoke of family life, this is why it is worth struggling and living.