by Peter Nadas
They began to talk right away, speaking as if the words had no meaning, only a place and a role to play.
I knew this older man by sight, a lawyer and confirmed bachelor. He lived nearby, behind the boulevard, in Eötvös Street, very close to the noisy maw of the Hunyadi Square covered market, in the so-called Podmanicky Palace, which had once been a very grand building, but the neighborhood was now considered one of the least attractive in the city.
They were playing exactly the kind of game I should have learned. They said nothing that was not ridiculously simple. First, they talked about the coffee, whether today it should be stronger or weaker, that’s how the game began. They were inexhaustible even on this simple subject, not because they had something valuable or new to say about coffee but because they observed in each other’s words and eyes new possibilities opened up by their lighthearted, carefree expressions.
As if with their words they could coax out of each other’s mouth this special, this elusive and secret something.
Then came the weather: today it will probably be like this or like that.
The wind was howling, raging, and they readily agreed it was raging, sweeping water out of gutters, tearing off roofs; the wind uprooted trees, and they said that it uprooted trees. The red flags and national tricolor flags were soaked in the rain, and the wind slammed the drenched rags onto flagpoles and electric cables.
Somewhere, the aerial cable of a streetcar had snapped, the lawyer mentioned in a whisper, and had electrocuted a number of schoolboys. I understood this happened at the National Museum, the site of the official ceremony. The boys were being led across the street on their way to the Museum Garden. Nobody knew how many casualties there were, but the entire area had been closed off. The official ceremony had been canceled.
The police are on a general alert.
According to a reliable source this might be considered a counterrevolutionary provocation.
I would never have ventured to talk about a topic that did not interest me or that irritated me, and that’s why I’d never lose my clumsiness. And how could I be sure that a stranger might be interested in something that depressed me or made me happy. And if, protected by their lighthearted words, they played with each other so cleverly, why didn’t they arrange a date immediately.
I didn’t understand that either.
They kept playing with secret challenges. I had never reached this point, so in theory jealousy should have been eating away at me. He stepped closer to the woman, who very quietly asked him something, hissing between her teeth, as if I weren’t there at all.
They took me for air.
Who knows, replied the lawyer a little more loudly, but seeing that fortune’s wheel keeps spinning around, today at least we are free.
As he spoke he plopped his big briefcase on the marble counter, and this movement also had something homely about it. He placed his hat carefully on top of the briefcase. As if, in the proximity of the woman and for however brief a moment, he was allowed to set up house. A worn old briefcase a little heftier than a doctor’s bag, a hat made of water-resistant rabbit fur. Now I didn’t have room to put my glass down. At any rate, continued the lawyer confidentially, all court cases have been postponed with no prior notice. And I mean every trial. Well, this also has an advantage, I could see your pretty face earlier.
They should have had a titillating little giggle at this remark, but the smiles meant for each other had faded.
I didn’t exactly understand that.
The tragedy at the museum must have been too large and the pervasive police presence too dangerous for everyone.
The man glanced at me, his look lingering; I must have seemed familiar to him from somewhere. And if he knew me from somewhere he must have been asking himself whether he should say in front of me what he was about to say. Or maybe his eyes were wondering whether I was that other kind of man. Men’s eyes often tried to catch mine, and that’s the question they’d ask themselves. Sometimes they looked at me for so long that I got red in the face. Men are very curious about that question when they look at young men or their own sons.
Now of course I remembered exactly from where I knew him.
And now I was getting in everyone’s way; many people with their paid receipts were trying to reach her to be served. I had to retreat with my glass. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hesitate. Anyway the others couldn’t understand what he was talking about or pretended not to understand.
For security reasons, everyone preferred to pretend they didn’t notice what other people did or said.
Anyway, take a look out there, you’ve never seen so many wet policemen. They were called out on a first-degree alert. Now there’s no use dreaming about a long trip abroad, for example. Even I couldn’t get a travel permit for your sweet person.
They allowed themselves a careful little laugh, and again, what became important was that they were doing something secretive in public.
This did not hurt, did not even make me jealous; I was admiring them.
I took no more sips of my hot coffee, but I ate the lump sugar, first one cube then quickly the other. I shall wait for her. I must prove my faithfulness to her. No matter what happens, however humiliating it might be, I shall wait until everybody is gone again. I was waiting for a single glance from her.
She could not have forgotten her promise to me so quickly.
I had waited for her for more than two months. Ever since they reopened this shop. It’s not possible that I wouldn’t have another opportune moment with her. It did not occur to me that her seemingly credible indifference only made our mutual game more serious.
Because it couldn’t occur to me that I was playing.
On this badly damaged block, this was the first store that after five years had reopened. Young people don’t count the years.
One simply went along observing that everything was slowly changing from what it had been, or thinking that everything had somehow been restored. This side of the boulevard had been completely destroyed in a single night in 1956 by Russian tanks firing from Oktogon Square. The entire row of stores was gutted by fire; their ceilings and the floors above them crashed down. They first restored the ceilings and the second-floor apartments, but for a very long time nothing happened behind the boarded-up shop entrances. The situation remained unchanged for so long that it no longer reminded anyone of anything. The buildings’ facades were painted; later the scaffolding was removed. Streetcars were running. A shoe store, a drugstore, a flower shop, and something else, maybe a tobacco shop, and farther on a woman’s fashion shop—their absence didn’t seem to bother anyone. I couldn’t remember what kind of store had been there before. Who cared that there was nothing behind the boarded-up entrances. Life was not much fun anyway. Very few things remained that still had meaning. And when you remembered something, what came as a surprise were the many things you had managed to escape.
Sometimes this sort of fleeting feeling made my walking around feel unbelievable. It was not plausible that I could get from one place to another just by taking one step after another.
As if I couldn’t completely convince myself that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and, with this peculiar activity, carry my physical weight forward.
This, more or less, is what memory, or oblivion, consisted of.
Because no one could have thought seriously that holed up in some unfamiliar cellar one would survive the night.
By midnight, there was neither electricity nor water. As if the bowels of the earth were on the move, everything was quaking, rumbling, booming, and trembling all at once. Saltpeter was falling from the bare brick ceiling. The way this became integrated into my life was that afterward I never wanted to go down to the cellar, but when I did these memories did not surface; it seemed advisable to forget even the associated anxieties. Explosive blasts first sucked in the candle flames and then extinguished them. Still, somewhere, there was always a new-lit candle. Everyone went deaf, eve
ryone screamed, yet people did not understand one another. They were stumbling around helplessly, groping in the dark, or running around berserk, driven by fright, pretending to have something urgent to take care of.
Someone must have thought that the cellar door should not be closed.
Men opened it and carefully barricaded the passage leading down to it.
Mildewed crates, ancient cupboards, ripped armchairs, and wobbly sofas were dragged out from the cellar’s deepest compartments. Not everybody helped, because some people were busy with themselves, with their crying children, with their families. The latter set up their own sections in the cellar, hoping that the wooden partitions would give them perfect protection. But neither laments and swearing nor the sound of running footsteps could be heard. I didn’t try to figure out why suddenly there were so many of us but instead kept watching the gaping and opening mouths set to scream in fright or hysteria. Still, news spreading in the cellar’s dark passages about contingencies and possibilities sounded sensible. However numb one may be in such a situation, one’s brain fills with speculations. Somehow, there were always more people who tied their feverish desire for action to the remnants of reason and some palpable hopefulness.
The problem was much too big.
It was a sensible idea to leave the cellar’s steel door open yet obstruct the entrance to it. Because if the house were to fall on us, rubble would make it impossible to move the door and we’d never be able to dig ourselves out. Who could count on outside help. Well, all right, the Americans were on the way. If the water main broke, on the other hand, having no exit, we’d drown in the water flooding the cellar. The earth was moving so violently that somebody must have thought of this too. We have no water because the main broke. And there was no way of knowing whether it was going to be over very soon or was just about to start in earnest. Through the flues opening into the enclosed courtyard, we could see that something was burning nearby. Two steep flues opened upward, not far from each other. The formidable sight before us was far beyond what could still be considered real.
Above the building’s high four stories, the red conflagration was reflected in the night sky.
It was like a gigantic shadow play, a licking of the sky.
While a few watched the mesmerizing reddish shadow of tongues of fire reaching into the sky, the cannons ceased for a while. Then one heard only one’s own deafness, which was perhaps more frightening than the noise. Later, from the depths of deafness, one heard machine-gun bursts, which was almost like peace returning.
And it seemed that the cellar walls were being pounded steadily.
The ones who ran out for fear of a burst water main began to smash the cellar’s rear wall in an effort to break through it in the direction of the buildings on Eötvös Street, parallel to us, which were less threatened. That night, people opened a veritable labyrinth under the city through the walls separating cellars, but I heard about this from Pisti only the following summer when we were at Wolkenstein House in the valley of Wiesenbad. The women remembered from the days when Budapest had been under siege in the Second World War, and they could tell the men where to break through the walls. Shortly, there was a huge explosion, and in the renewed cannon fire a fine coat of soot covered the faces of those standing under the flues, and then everything went dark as dense smoke filled the courtyard. It might have been the other way around, first the dense smoke and then the fine soot. In which case the cause of death would be not water but smoke, not drowning but suffocation.
Which is to say, backing away from suffocation. Fleeing from the bodies jostling one another.
And somebody must have thought about how and with what we should stuff up the flues before we all suffocated. Or that same somebody, while fleeing, must have found the right material. While it was still usable, while somebody was still able to do it. Newspapers arrived from the depths of the passageways. Everyone knew this made sense, even though it might not change the situation drastically. One hand passed it on, the other crumpled it, and somebody, in the ghoulish light of a flashlight, that revealed the serpentine streaks of smoke, holding her breath, grasping the grating and seeking the wall’s support, kept on stuffing and stuffing.
It was a tiny woman. I had never seen her in the building before and never would again. Such openings could not be stuffed up with newspapers. Until some thicker wrapping paper arrived, they made very little progress.
We were all gasping for air.
The coughing could not be heard, of course. As if not the smoke itself but the sharp odor of the smoke had torn the mucous membranes. There was no water to wet kerchiefs or rags with, which occurred to me just as it must have occurred to others too.
The ribbed wrapping paper with a waxy feel to it came from Diósgyőr and not in sheets; it had to be pulled off a large cylindrical roll on which one could read IGNÁC REICH, DIÓSGYőR; there was plenty of it, people were tearing and crumpling it. Newspaper was used to fill the smaller gaps. Of course, not to the point where all seepage could be stopped, that was impossible. Partly because everything was quaking, moving, and rumbling, and we couldn’t hold our breath forever. The paper rolls from Ignác Reich’s paper mill in Diósgyőr had been stolen from somewhere in the darkest days of the Second World War by Arrow Cross men, and then, just as senselessly, they left it in the building, in Balter’s care, whose daughters later used some of the paper for wrapping their schoolbooks and notebooks.
We’ll die of asphyxiation.
As if some sweetness had flooded my mouth, which the sharp stench nauseatingly rips open.
Someone stuck a flashlight into my hand when we first started to run away from the smoke, but then somebody found the newspapers necessary for a sensible defense. There was no longer any point in having a flashlight, yet everybody insisted that using it made sense. A small Bakelite lamp that fit one’s palm and produced electricity via rhythmically applied pressure. The longer and more steadily I kept pressing its corrugated metal plate, the sharper and stronger its beam became. Except it could no longer penetrate the smoke and, when it did, I couldn’t see because I was suffocating. Because of my fitful coughing, the light had not been hitting the spot where people doing the senseless work still insisted they needed it.
And then something peculiar happened.
Nobody wanted to escape from the cellar. The beam of my flashlight was jumping, flying in all directions, but somehow I managed to retrieve it, and it did produce some visibility when I kept pumping it. And there wouldn’t have been anywhere to escape to. It was only a matter of time before the smoke would fill every passageway.
Everybody was holding out, yet everybody was running at the same time.
One can hold out only until the last breath and not beyond that, and the physiological needs are uniformly unavoidable for everyone. I was only retching, but several people were vomiting.
The tiny woman also vomited.
She tore the checkered shawl from her neck as if it were choking her. My light slipped off her too, even though I stopped near her in the hope that at least the light would help her. While the light was on her, she could see that she had vomit on her pants and combat boots. Either she had vomited on herself or someone else had. If I’d continued to watch for another second as she wiped off the vomit with her shawl while still retching with only saliva coming out, I’d have thrown up too. I was fleeing with my own retches, though I empathized with her, wasn’t at all repelled.
The building held on decently too, it did not collapse on us. Actually, the buildings on the other side of the boulevard, which were being fired on, were the unfortunate ones, which was our good luck. Ours had to withstand only blasts produced by explosions. None of the survivors speaks of this needlessly, because they all know that no matter what, nothing happens the way one imagined it would.
I’ve never even asked anyone in the neighborhood what happened that night to the people on the other side of the boulevard.
Survivors are busy with themselve
s and I wasn’t interested in the lives of others either.
In the early afternoon hours, the shop became very busy and I knew there wouldn’t be another opportune moment. This woman not only made the coffee but also did the dishes and waited on customers.
One week she worked in the morning, the next in the afternoon.
When the lawyer finally made himself scarce, I managed to spit out that I’d wait for her after she finished.
Not here, she replied softly and quickly, as if she had to defend herself fiercely against me.
Luckily, she didn’t say that I shouldn’t wait for her.
Continuously, without letup, relentlessly, I thought of only one thing, that I had never seen such beauty and never would again if I left her even for a moment. Her eyes, the color of her eyes or her glance, I don’t know what, but it paralyzed me. Her scent probably had a part in this but I could reach only the edge of it because she took it with her, though sometimes she left thick clouds of it behind. Here eyes were not blue but not green either. As if I were looking down into the depths of unfamiliar waters. I did not understand the angry darkness, but the color of the water was throwing sparks at me. No human can have eyes of this color. There is no water of this color, no material of any kind. I didn’t even have a chance to ask her where, if not here, because her partner was looking at us anxiously, an older bespectacled woman with whom she always worked as a team, as she measured out candy, then fudge, and finally handfuls of jelly beans to an insatiable child.
It was very difficult to hide our cautious glances from her.
She listened as one who needed to know what was happening around her and mainly what transpired between the two of us.
Her thick glasses made it hard to follow her eyes. I’d say to myself, right now she’s not looking, and then she would be. On other occasions too. I could never, ever pretend that she was not a constant eyewitness. She very quickly discovered why I frequented the shop and what it was I couldn’t tear myself away from. This in itself couldn’t have been so conspicuous, and others too came to the shop just to see this woman or her beauty. There were always two or three of them hanging around the coffee machine, chatting, laughing, and not only men but often women of her age too. The older woman watched and observed; she watched everyone. Sometimes I had the impression that she knew everything before I did. More precisely, that she knew better than I how serious this was, while I presumptuously kept on deluding myself that it was merely a little adventure.