Anna Edes

by Dezso Kosztolányi

  Mrs Vizy, whose nightmare it was that she would end up as a beggar and starve to death, saw that she was much richer than she had thought. There were still more surprises. From beneath a wardrobe Anna produced her long lost sky-blue skirt, and the salmon-pink silk blouse she thought she remembered giving to a Swabian woman in the course of a previous clear-out. They found cotton reels, buttons and various scraps of leather which Mrs Vizy had fanatically stored away. She wasn’t unusual in this. The last two bitter years had taught her that human life was worthless: it was things, the stuff that you possessed, that really mattered. After all having read in the newspaper that the Austrian army’s estimate of a man’s value – heart and brains and all – was, at thirty-six gold crowns, far lower than the value of a fully equipped horse, why shouldn’t she of all people draw the appropriate conclusions as to what was valuable and what wasn’t? Matter was omnipotent: she gave it her rapt attention. She inwardly swore to be even thriftier henceforth.

  From beneath the elder tree in the courtyard she dug up the copper mortar she had secreted there before the various requisition orders arrived. This copper mortar, the pride of her kitchen, had narrowly avoided being turned into cannon fodder. Rescued from the storms and buffets of the troubled century, it emerged tarnished and muddy from its temporary grave.

  Upstairs, the flat had to be returned to its former condition. They pulled aside the cupboards which had been moved for protection against the dreadful people billeted on them. The mess grew the worse for it. The furniture began to roam. An armchair which appeared to have wandered out by itself stood marooned on the landing gazing longingly down the stairs. The wall clock lay on its back on the floor, its pendulum benumbed in its wooden case along with the blade of a whipping fork. Tables made excursions to the yard below where cane chairs and divans were already sunbathing together with the couch, now divested of its red coverlet.

  From morn till night Anna strove in an aureole of dust. She spat black and sneezed grey. She thrashed the mattresses as if she had a furious grudge against them. She dashed upstairs into the flat and downstairs into the yard on a hundred occasions. Window-panes streamed with water, filthy water swirled in the pail, rags slopped and squelched. She polished the windows while perched on crude scaffolding. Then she was scouring the floorboards, applying a pale coat of beeswax, dancing on brushes strapped to her feet, polishing the parquet, sliding, gliding, stooping and kneeling as if at church, engaged in some interminable act of prayer. Glasspaper scraped along rusted locks. She brought hidden carpets down from the attic, unwound them from their naphthalined cocoons, and belted the dust out of them on the carpet-stand. Quickly she rearranged the furniture: a chair here, a table there, the piano a few feet forward. Then to finish with there was the chandelier to re-hang with infinite care in case anything got broken, a few new light-bulbs to screw in, and lastly the cream-coloured curtains to be attached to the smoky gold curtain rods and sewn to the curtain rings, then all was done.

  By the evening they had finished. Within an hour the hall which had served as a temporary dumping ground was also shining.

  Mrs Vizy took her husband’s arm and led him ceremoniously through the flat. ‘Look!’

  ‘I say!’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘This is more like it!’

  ‘Isn’t it just?’

  ‘It looks much more welcoming.’

  It was certainly transformed beyond recognition. The pale sickly flat, which for long years had been covered with a patina of historical dust, had suddenly regained its health. Vizy trod the Persian rug in the study. Curiously he examined its pattern of cherry-coloured little birds perched on branches.

  ‘Which rug is this?’

  ‘You see, you don’t recognize it. It’s the one which used to be beside your bed. She cleaned it up with sour cabbage.’

  It was like receiving a pile of new presents. The living room was a well-stocked bazaar: pots and vases glistened, city ware and country ware, preserved by God’s grace from generation to generation. The cigar cutter twinkled on the chess table. All the clocks were discreetly ticking, their mechanisms supported by porcelain hares or hidden in the bellies of bronze horses. Ancestors returned from their long exile. Vizy’s late father in a black cape and silver-fringed tie reassumed his place on the wall, as did his wife’s relative, the Bishop Camillo Patikárius, with his lilac sash and his yellow smile spread across gracious clerical lips, and one of her great aunts, Terézia Patikárius, with the swans’-feather fan that she used to sport at balls.

  Vizy adjusted one of the pictures. He rubbed his hands together. He stayed in that night.

  Mrs Vizy raised her finger. ‘This girl is clean. That’s what I like about her, she is so clean and clever.’

  It was undeniable that she felt more trapped by Anna than by any of her previous servants. For the time being she couldn’t leave her side. But it was equally certain that Anna was not to be mentioned in the same breath as the others: she was a jewel and it was worthwhile spending time with her, educating her, polishing her to perfection. She had even begun to eat. She was slowly working her way through the various food substitutes left over from the war, the chicory coffee, the saccharine and the margarine: she was certainly no glutton ever hungering for fresh bread, she wasn’t fussy. She woke at dawn at half-past four and didn’t go back to bed till her business was done. She didn’t talk back or pull faces. You were never aware of her, only of the results of her work. She was the original good fairy. What more could one want?

  And every blessed day would herald a new miraculous discovery of which Mrs Vizy would hasten to inform her husband. ‘Come here for a minute. Just for a minute. I want to show you something.’

  The copper mortar had regained its place of glory on a wooden hook in the kitchen. Meat axes, cake-moulds, whisking-bowls, frying-pans, casseroles and biscuit-cutters sparkled along the wall. Without bidding she had covered the stands with blue paper cut into fancy shapes.

  Occasionally Mrs Vizy would carry some trophy into the study and place it wordlessly on his writing desk.

  ‘Plum conserve. She made it herself. Look at that beautiful sweet liquid. It’s like rubies. She is certainly keen. She has a natural feel for it.’

  They were eating strudel.

  ‘Well, what do you think? The pastry is wonderfully light. It melts in the mouth. She’s a first-rate cook. This girl has made good.’

  Vizy was softening but refused to cave in completely. This was curious since he always used to defend bad servants in order to calm his wife. Now he took on the role of an opposition party, keeping a benevolent but wary eye on the government. He allowed the praise to die in his ear. He niggled away with tiny objections. That the girl was a little graceless. That she was never in a good mood and might even be said to be a little sour. And that she hardly ever opened her mouth.

  Mrs Vizy assured him he was mistaken. After all there were times when the girl actually smiled. What else should she do? What reason had she to be downright cheerful? A servant that is always working obviously takes some pleasure in what she does. She’s just shy. Would we prefer her to be as cheeky as the rest? Heaven forbid!

  Everything was resolved now but for one cloudy issue, the most important, the most delicate of all: theft. Did this paragon of virtue steal? It was a most difficult matter to check.

  Theft is underhand and unexpected. It is like a haemorrhage in the night. Something disappears, some wholly insignificant thing. It may merely have gone astray, one thinks one may have misplaced it, or lost it perhaps; but that’s not the truth, the truth is that it has gone, simply gone. What a dreadfully numbing conclusion to come to. One begins to worry about other things, even those one still has. Each silver spoon, each sugar cube, each handkerchief. How many did one have? Where are they all? Has one locked them away? Mrs Vizy locked everything away in any case. She wasn’t going to give up easily though. She experimented quite scientifically.

  One evening she left a R
ussian twenty-five crown piece on the table. The money was still there in the morning. Once, as if by accident, she let a blue hundred-crown note flutter to the ground. The next day it was back on her bedside table. She left a ring on the divan. Anna found it while she was clearing up and personally gave it back to her.

  Then she tempted Anna by leaving the wardrobe open, having first carefully stacked and counted her handkerchiefs on the shelf. Not one went astray. The groceries were next: coffee and sugar, which servants particularly liked to pilfer. She didn’t lock the pantry. She didn’t even check for a whole week. When she did take her candle to do a proper stocktaking she saw that every grain of coffee, every cube of sugar was in its place.

  So the girl did not steal. She said so to herself but did not quite believe it. Later she did not bother to say anything but wholeheartedly believed it, as did her husband. This one needed neither money, nor jewels, nor spices.

  ‘You know what this girl subsists on?’ she asked her husband, and answered in the words Ficsor had used earlier. ‘Work, nothing but work. I’ve never seen anyone like her.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Vizy concurred. ‘Nobody has ever seen anyone like her.’

  Both felt a great sense of release. Vizy lived his official life at the ministry, and when at home, whatever else he might do, he did not spend his time complaining. Mrs Vizy could go out again. In the mornings she would walk down to the medicinal spring in Buda, near the bridgehead of the Erzsébet Bridge, and drink a glass of warm sulphurous water which she found was good for her stomach. She went to the dentist and had her teeth put in order. She busied herself with charitable work at the Krisztina Institute, distributing clothes to the children of poor local salesmen.

  She even had some time left over. She popped in to visit the Tatárs in Úri utra, where handsome high-spirited young men paid court to the two beautiful Tatár girls. She began to entertain a few old friends. She had no really close friends since she tended to meet only the wives of her husband’s colleagues. Her relatives, the various Patikáriuses, lived in Eger. Even her husband had only one female relative in town, a divorced woman, the pathetic Etelka, who went from house to house selling fake Egyptian cigarettes, tried to cadge money from people, including the Vizys, and was quite depraved. They hadn’t met for years. Vizy would cut her in the street.

  Now it was brought home to her that she really had no one, and that the day was long. She had Piroska’s grave restored and took a fresh bunch of chrysanthemums down to the cemetery every week. On Wednesdays she resumed her visits to the spiritualist circle, whose meetings were held in a villa on Rózsadomb hill, in Áldás utca.

  It was a stiff ceremonious place with doors that pushed open and walls hung with silk rugs, where classicist paintings mingled with classicist sculptures. The host, a wealthy self-employed businessman, greeted his guests with a handshake of complicity. Everyone knew that his son had been paralysed sixteen years ago and that he inhabited a solemn room somewhere in the remote depths of the villa.

  A general of the infantry was the spiritual leader of the circle. They summoned the spirits of soldiers who had died heroic deaths. Their fathers and mothers were anxious for news. Next to Mrs Vizy sat an ailing circuit judge and a Catholic priest in ordinary dress. The medium was a highly strung girl who threw her head back in a trance and spoke in German. Invisible strands of the spirit world converged here from every corner of the universe. Piroska’s soul had travelled from Jupiter. Using the medium’s hand she scrawled in a childish hand Mamma Mamma across several sheets of paper. On one occasion she materialized on the breast of the medium in a grey marshlight, her form compounded of milky fog.

  When she made her way home on Wednesday evenings, Mrs Vizy no longer felt her heart pounding, she was no longer haunted by the old nightmare of finding a ransacked flat on her return, with forced doors and empty wardrobes ripped open. Everything at home was in order. She left her money out without counting it first. Those days were gone when she stalked the rooms with her hands behind her back as if handcuffed, worrying about the maid’s next move.

  Anna moved among them silently. And when she went out conversation tended to drift to her. They were now united in her praise, in their general sense of wellbeing. The praise tended decidedly to worship, it was prayerful, it was an uncritical piece of idolatry: they had got a remarkably useful bargain and felt distinctly proud that she was theirs and only theirs. Once in the privacy of their bedroom they would talk in whispers about the events of the day, all of which witnessed to her conscientiousness, her unselfishness, her infinite capacity for work. They encouraged and assisted each other in the magnification of her virtues, they trumped each other’s descriptions of her, imitated her, sometimes even mocked her with a superior smile as if it were amusing that someone should be so simple and good hearted, so exemplary in her sturdiness, so uniquely undemanding; then they would laugh, self-consciously at first, then ever more loudly and outrageously. This was the beginning of an idyllic period for them when they lived in constant awareftess of their good fortune. It was no delusion. The ridiculously impossible had come true: they had found the genuine article they had been dreaming about for years.

  Occasionally they felt an ironic urge to embrace her and thank her for her good deeds, or to smuggle her down to the photographer one night under cover of darkness and have a photograph taken of all three of them together, as if they were a family; but they were dissuaded from this course of action, this mischievous and extraordinary joke of an idea which flashed across their minds for a mere fraction, a mere thousandth of one second then disappeared before they could properly think it through and laugh at it, by their bourgeois sobriety, and the knowledge that they were after all talking about a mere domestic servant.

  9

  A Debate about Sponge Fingers, Compassion and Equality

  Things were getting better. True, there were still problems. There was runaway inflation. People eyed each other nervously in the oppressive atmosphere. They denounced their neighbours in anonymous letters. Those who once refused to recognize their friends as ‘good Communists’ now hastened to offer them this long-denied recognition and readily handed them over to the authorities.

  It was as if a plague of locusts had devastated the place. Consumed and exhausted, the town lay on the rubbish heap. The expensive porcelain shelves in the window of the baroque konditorei displayed a single desolate scone. Trams which had been painted under Communist rule were still to be seen in their revolutionary scarlet with revolutionary slogans daubed across them, dashing suicidally through town like refugees from a mental asylum.

  But there were also encouraging signs of improvement. Middle-class passengers on the tram were no longer afraid to stand up to the bullying conductress who addressed them rudely. They took pleasure in reminding her that this was no longer a Bolshevist state. Men once again began to give up their seats to ladies. It was a new and glorious flowering of the age of chivalry.

  Once again Viatorisz stood at the door of his shop and greeted his customers. This was a sure sign of the times. Viatorisz always knew precisely which way the wind was blowing. When the war first broke out he merely nodded, later it was the customers who greeted him. He accepted this as his due and once the Bolsheviks took over he didn’t even notice it he was so busy. Now he offered to have the goods delivered to Mrs Vizy, all she had to do was to give him a ring on the telephone.

  The Vizys’ flat became a venue for informal parties. One afternoon it was the Tatárs who dropped in. Druma joined them together with his wife, and so did Mrs Moviszter. One by one the lights were going on in the worn chandeliers of middle-class life. At first the light revealed some wear and tear as well as shortages of one kind or another, nevertheless after so much suffering it felt good to be able to socialize again. It was like the good old days.

  Tea was fairly cheerless. Mrs Tatár took head of place at the table, her laced bosom swelling before her. They tried to brighten the atmosphere with a few counter-revol
utionary jokes but they were damp squibs. From his pocket Druma produced an orange that had been smuggled across the Italian border by a client of his. They hadn’t seen one for a long time and passed it from hand to hand. They talked about food, the various ways of obtaining it and where one could get cheaper flour or potatoes. Councillor Tatár, who was renowned as a cook, waxed lyrical about a paprika fish stew he had prepared as a lad from catfish, sturgeon and carp on an open fire by the shores of the Tisza. He went into such details and told it all with such relish that it filled their mouths with saliva. Then he too lapsed into silence and fell to eating, chewing vigorously, stuffing the food into the aperture between his delicate pink mobile lips festooned with the shaggy fur rug of his grey moustache and beard.

  The conversation ground to a halt.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Druma dropped these words into the general silence, ‘I had quite forgotten about Anna. Where is Anna? I haven’t even seen her today.’

  ‘She’s out in the kitchen looking after tea.’

  ‘Is that the new servant?’ enquired Mrs Tatár, ‘Is she a good girl? Is she clever? The flat looks marvellous. And is she trustworthy? She doesn’t steal, does she, my dear?’

  Mrs Vizy did not deign to answer, she simply gave her a straight look.

  ‘Don’t you know Anna?’ marvelled the other women in chorus.

  ‘No, I don’t. I have not had the good fortune to meet her. We have not been introduced,’ joked Mrs Tatár, secure in her position as lady of the manor.