by Peter Nadas
Coming through the gate and walking by the long row of garbage cans, whose lids the cats continually pushed off, allowing whole packs of rats to feast even during the day, one would probably not notice that the filthy, begrimed walls were decorated with the same simple, layered profile as could be found on the facade. Because of a burst pipe on one floor that went unattended for months, huge patches of plaster had peeled off the attractively arched ceiling and bare bricks, exposing live electrical wires that dangled from between the fraying stalks of plastering reed. The concierge, who was still a stripling when ancient Samu Demén had him brought up to the capital from Jászberény, looked up at the ceiling several times a day because, to be honest, he was anticipating a disaster. He feared that the loosened mortar between the bricks in the vaulting would not hold and the enormous, slowly rusting ceiling lamp would come crashing down.
First as assistant concierge and then as concierge, he has been taking care of this house for more than thirty years, and he’s been doing it with unsparing and passionate enthusiasm, as if he could not forget that his life would have turned out very differently if not for this job.
Mentally he was fit, aggressive, sly, and mean, but he had serious physical limitations; in his early childhood, in his own environment, he had been drifting dangerously toward a speedy end. Somehow he was in everybody’s way, useless for regular work in the fields, beaten by his siblings, kicked, knocked over, and neither his mother nor grandmother had spared him; if by chance providence hadn’t snapped him out of there he’d probably have ended up in the corner of the stable, an outcast. He had an exceptional relationship with animals. Since the death of old Demén he has lived as one who must work off a loan that providence gracefully has advanced him by tending to an inanimate object, this building.
Unexpectedly, in the last months, his enthusiasm has faltered, something was used up or exhausted in him, something snapped. There were no signs of illness, but he realized from one moment to the next that with his waning strength the deterioration was too far gone for him to arrest. And suddenly his adored daughters also became unmanageable; they drank, swore, did not come home at night. Total collapse was sneaking up on him.
Since the garbage man stopped coming every day and showed up only twice a week and sometimes not at all, this task too fell to the concierge and he didn’t know how to cope with it. He did not get any new cans, but he had somehow to store the building’s ever-accumulating trash when a week went by without its being collected. Pox on them all. He swore too, why not. He got hold of some rusty paint barrels, soldered handles on them by which he dragged them out to the curb. If the garbage people didn’t come, he’d drag the barrels back at noon. From other barrels’ bottoms, he made lids for the ones with handles.
He kept doing everything, of course he did, but in the meantime he thought that if the big lamp was going to fall out of the vaulted ceiling, let it fall and bring down the ceiling and the whole building with it. Let everything collapse, everything has to rot eventually. In the past, he wouldn’t have dared think such thoughts, but now it felt good to think this way, that’s what made him a free man. He still kept his eye on everything, but his helplessness, and his fury over his helplessness, spread wider and wider. He could not prevent the stench of rot invading the entranceway that Samu Demén had so lovingly designed.
Back then, horse-drawn carriages were the means of transportation for genteel folk, and Demén had designed a driveway that took into account larger baggage wagons as well. The finely proportioned, slightly convex, and sensible driveway, paved in insanely yellow ceramic tiles, was appreciated later by people who rode no longer in horse-drawn carriages but in automobiles, streetcars, and taxis, or who simply walked. It was obvious that somebody had taken great care to anticipate how all the expected movements in this space might take place unhindered and in easy comfort. He had even considered that horses had to urinate and that urine is yellow and must somehow drain away. Rats now used the small openings in the sewage pipes that were hidden under the wide stone ledges on both sides of the driveway; they were just the right size for rats. With long years of labor, they had chewed their way through the finely wrought brass drain-netting so they could reach the garbage cans unnoticed. In the old days, the wide stone ledges, useless today, served as a place where one could step from one’s carriage, and they were wide enough to keep the follow-up step steady as well. When the planner figured that there should be enough room to open the carriage doors on both sides without pressing either the passengers or coachmen against the wall, he was thinking of their dignity. Although no carriage or automobile has turned into this driveway for a long time now, the need for dignified behavior has been well guarded by the dimensions of this space.
The building received arrivals with a certain solemnity, as did the stairwell, separated from the driveway by an enormous windbreak. One’s first glance at the surprisingly well-proportioned stairwell, bathed in natural light on every floor, would be through the huge, colorful ground-glass surfaces of the windbreak. Its four panes survived the war, but during a nocturnal disturbance one was shattered. Such a large sheet of glass was nowhere to be had; the tenants complained about the draft, and the concierge replaced it with plywood. Still, the space preserved its beauty. One could step in here without fear of immediately bumping into the elevator door. Sometimes a whole group of people would arrive at once while another might be on its way out; in a genteel building one should take such possibilities into account.
And horses are not always patient; let there be enough space in the courtyard for them and their carriages to turn around comfortably. Demén extended the depth of the courtyard, but then brought the second-floor gallery a bit forward, thus optically recapturing the near perfect square.
True, the second-floor gallery blocked the sun from the concierge’s apartment on the mezzanine, yet the apartment was neither dark nor unfriendly. The light reflecting on the courtyard’s bright yellow ceramic tiles filled its kitchen and two other rooms. Although direct sunshine never reached it, the apartment had both strong illumination and pleasant colors. The insanely yellow hues alternately glittered and dimmed even when, as now, clouds were moving across the sky. But one could not see the sky from down here, even if pressing right up against the window. The concierge was doing exactly that now in his kitchen, where he had the best view of the roof, whence tiles were falling as if the wind were picking them up and hurling them down. What probably happened was that an already loosened tile slid down the roof’s incline, the next one followed it, and after that the job of each subsequent gust became ever easier: it simply reached under and lifted up the defective row and at the weak points heaved the tiles into the air. The concierge, whose name was Imre Balter, looked up again but could delay no longer; he grabbed his visored cap, the keys to the attic, and was on his way.
The tiles were sliding ominously, with long grating sounds, banging against the eaves, only to explode within seconds on the courtyard floor.
At another time, perhaps Balter would have made his decision faster.
A pox on it, he grumbled.
It was not likely he could stanch the ruination by himself.
And the elevator hadn’t been working for weeks. It took him a long time to drag himself down the wooden steps from the mezzanine, him with his dislocated hip. The dangerous courtyard and the three flights up were still ahead of him. The technician at the housing authority claimed that this elevator could no longer be repaired; it had done what it could and that was that. Everybody knew this wasn’t true. A pox on them. By the time he reached the courtyard, the tiles had stopped falling off the roof, but because the pouring rain continued, he hobbled on in the protective shadow of the second-floor gallery. As he passed over the entrance to the cellar, he looked down and even made his customary puss-puss call because today none of his cats had come outside, as if they were not hungry.
He had been able to keep cats from the time he realized that there was no longer any lan
dlord. Ten years had to go by after the general nationalizations* for that to happen, partly because the heirs were still living on the third floor and kept the concierge in line with their looks, glances, or stares, although they never said a word; whenever he took things into his own hands or violated one of the building’s regulations, they nearly skewered him with their eyes. At least that’s how he felt. Besides, you never know what will happen. In 1956, those heirs might have gotten their building back if the mayhem had lasted a little longer.
His limping shuffle echoed in the entranceway. He carefully pulled the windbreak shut behind him, passed by the officially dead elevator, from whose dark maroon depths the edges of the beveled mirror, like a rainbow, always glittered into his eyes, and then, firmly grasping the bannister, he began his climb upward.
After the death of Samu Demén, his two heirs did make alterations in this building that was so extravagant with its spaces; they made them in moderation and good taste, but in the definite hope of increasing their income; they proletarianized it somewhat. They supposed that the kitchens, pantries, and maid’s rooms could be a good bit smaller, and from the spaces retrieved from them they built two new apartments on each floor. They also redid and partially modernized the continuous front of the second floor, which Demén had designed for a small, short-lived national-conservative political party, after whose demise he’d rented it to the party’s surviving weekly paper. Destruction would better describe what the heirs did here. They had the fine wainscoting ripped from the walls and the marble fireplaces in every room thrown out. Originally, neither of the heirs intended to occupy any of the new apartments, the building not being in tune with their taste or their concept of modernity, but in the end Demén’s favorite grandchild, Erna, moved into the apartment her grandfather had left on the third floor, and Miklós, the other grandchild, who was already working for the illegal Communist Party, moved into a house on Aréna Road also built by their grandfather. All this happened in the 1930s, and after that, aside from Teréz Boulevard being renamed Lenin Boulevard and, in honor of the Russian Revolution, Oktogon Square becoming November 7 Square, not much happened to this house on Grand Boulevard.
There was very little turnover among the tenants. The stairwell was not painted, and no door or window saw a new coat of paint either.
Aside from its proportions, the stairwell had no ornaments. The unusually wide and unusually shallow steps, on which the concierge was now climbing upward, were buffed to a marble smoothness; a few months after nationalizing the house, by order of the Party the red coir carpet had been removed along with the brass stair-rods. The intermediate landings between floors were the stairwell’s true ornaments, along with the turning spaces at each floor, where well-proportioned wall sections were framed by Ionic profiles similar to those on the building’s facade and in the entranceway. These framed surfaces did not completely darken; or rather, one could see that originally the profiles had been painted white and the framed areas presumably yellow; and they had been careful to preserve something of the sun’s heat by mixing a bit of red and black into the paint, thereby throwing into relief the dazzling white of the apartment doors and highlighting the discreet but dazzling surfaces, the brass casings, knockers, nameplates, doorknobs, finely chiseled latticework of peepholes and doorbells’ oval ivory bearings.
The concierge kept taking small breaks, his deep-set eyes darting fiercely and rapidly in all directions, and he tried not to pant as hard as he needed to.
At times like this, the two poles of his self-deception touched each other.
He pretended that his eternal step-climbing was not tiring, even though on some days, even without the garbage cans, he could barely drag his lame lower body along. He also obstinately pretended to assign his tasks an order of priority, though he couldn’t have cared less about them and found any number of reasons why they could not be done.
He reached the third floor when the telephone stopped ringing.
Since the very first time he set foot in this building, the only change to this door had occurred when another nameplate was added to the original one. One said DEMÉN, in large roman letters. The other said DR. LIPPAY LEHR. He eavesdropped for a little while. Not out of curiosity; rather, it was the sweet instinct of natural laziness at work. If he had gotten here when the phone stopped ringing, why not stay a while, find out who called, from where, and who picked up the phone. He had a hiding place in his kitchen from which he saw everything while remaining unseen; he knew everything about everybody. He always knew who was at home, who had gone out, and he could guess who would be coming back when. For weeks, he hasn’t seen Professor Lippay, who is being treated at Kútvölgyi Hospital; from there they’ll take him to the cemetery, that’s all. And the younger Lippay simply dashed out of the house pretty early in the morning. He did not remember anything like this ever happening before. He knew that in the morning all the connecting doors of all the rooms were wide open; still, no sound reached him on the landing. A pox on it.
He decided it was because of the wind.
The professor’s spouse, whom for some mysterious reason everybody called Nínó or Aunt Nínó, which Balter could never understand, was just stepping out of the bathtub. Her bearing has not changed over the passing decades; her waist is almost as shapely as in her youth, but her hips, thighs, buttocks, and breasts, much admired by many, have immeasurably filled out. She has grown heavy; under her skin the fat is becoming granulose; this is the hard reality.
Whenever I look at myself, I feel like puking, she kept telling her female confidants, who idolized her for her bluntness. With which, of course, she expressed only a small part of reality.
She spent more and more time in silent, thoroughgoing personal hygiene. For she was becoming more and more aware of various intrusive, completely strange odors emanating from her body and permeating the air around her, and she felt helpless against them. But she never mentioned this to anyone. Had a stranger of refined taste caught a glance of her now, standing in front of her bathtub, he would have thought that, overall, this was still a very imposing body. The problem lay not in the disintegration of its shapes but with its irrepressible odors.
What has happened to me.
There was such a question in the world, though it sounded more like a statement. She had no idea where the scent of decay was emanating from, from her mouth, her loins, or her every pore. This decay had become her idée fixe. When getting out of the tub and, driven by the pleasure of painful self-torture, she could not avoid looking at herself in the hazed-over mirror on the opposite wall, neither statement nor question helped. As if she were asking, who have I become, while the answer was ready and waiting: this is not me, I don’t know this body. She quickly averted her face. So she would not have to carry in her limbs all day what she had just seen.
What she did take along was the changed, unknown odor concealed under her perfume. If she happened to forget it, however, or if she managed to ignore her reflection, and she tended to do the latter, then she exuded a determined, positively cheerful self-confidence, just as she used to when she was a girl.
The Italianate sound of her nickname originated with her little boy, Ágost, who for a very long time could say nothing else. He tried but could not. This was his one and only word, which meant both eating and mother. When his mother pronounced each syllable very slowly, puckering her lips to match the sounds, she practically chewed the words for him, as it were, listen, Ágó, listen, my darling, ma-ma, little Ágost stubbornly and with sly pleasure responded with a triumphant nínó. This became not only a nickname but also the unit of measurement of the young couple’s pleasures.
How many nínoes did you have, asked the young wife, stretching sleepily among the wrinkled bedding.
One hundred and one, answered the young husband bashfully.
Funny, I’ve had at least a thousand, replied the young wife, and maybe she wasn’t even exaggerating, though one tends to do that if only in the hope of a better future.
They would think nothing of taking their child into bed with them and doing various exercises for half an hour, because it made them laugh, their sides nearly splitting, writhing with pleasure, which of course the child also enjoyed. For them, however, this roughhousing was a preamble to submerging themselves in each other again. He said it instead of mama, he said it instead of papa, instead of kaka, peepee, baby, daddy, instead of everything. Listen, Ágó, my sweet, say mama, say it nicely, say daddy. The child really listened, but mainly to guess whether his parents would be laughing again. And as a result, he always gave the same answer.
Nínó.
Even without knowing anything of these matters, as indeed the case had to be with most people, no one could say the nickname was not apt. Lady Erna was considered a weighty personality among her friends and in her family, a person who had to be respected and who was not easy to evade. She had characteristics, though, that could not be taken too seriously. At this moment, for example, she has just overcome one of her angina attacks, which never fail to put her out of sorts physically. Now, she might also be upset about the telephone. She rarely allowed this to show, though she grumbled or fumed to herself. She has to be careful not to lose her temper, which could bring on another attack. Her little fits could not be anticipated or prevented because they never fully exploded. While she dried herself fretfully, and absentmindedly let her eyes stray several times to her reflection in the mirror, she felt that this was the last drop in her glass. Her own rashness.
Why am I gaping at myself.