by Peter Nadas
Strangely enough, I was the one who had these images, which that other someone hadn’t thought about since then, and if he had, he thought it best to forget them quickly.
Now too I had to reach those six steps that led up to the ground floor. In this building, because of those six steps, the ground floor was not called the ground floor. From the list of tenants, I wanted to ascertain whether my piano teacher still lived there. Or I was deceiving myself with this transparent alibi. As if I had some business there. I shouldn’t be doing this, I’ve no right, I’m ridiculous. Still, I won’t go away, I’ve nothing to fear, nothing to lose, whispered my unappeasable imagination.
One could get to the courtyard, paved with insanely yellow ceramics, from between two squat pilasters, and on one of them, on a white enamel plaque in old-fashioned blue letters, there was my childhood’s most mysterious word: mezzanine.
No doubt about it now, this was the building. A memory of quiet anxiety filled with anticipation was attached to this place.
It became a star-marked building; my piano teacher had to move out of it. When Budapest was liberated, she could move back in because it was no longer star-marked.* I never dared ask anyone what the star mark meant. I sensed from the adults’ voices that this too was part of the profound horror we had just survived and in which many had perished. Just as I didn’t dare ask what mezzanine meant. I wanted to be a famous pianist and did not want to reveal my ignorance to the adults; I was also afraid that because of my awkward question I might hear other terrible things. From certain signs, I concluded that mezzanine did not mean ground floor. Because sometimes my piano teacher asked me to go down to the Pálóczkys’ before we began the lesson and give him the piece of paper on which she had written what she wanted from the Garay Square market. When I cautiously asked her if she wanted me to take the note to the ground floor, she looked at me incredulously, not understanding what I hadn’t grasped, and asked, where else could you possibly take it, my angel, if not to the ground floor. But other times she didn’t say ground floor and didn’t say what was written on the enamel plaque, but something similar; luckily, though, she didn’t notice how bewildered I was. I wanted to learn what mezzanine was but also to be clever about avoiding the great horror.
Before you go, would you drop this key at the Pálóczkys’ on the mezzanine, she asked me once. These Pálóczkys are really angels, just angels. If he’s not there, you’ll be sure to find him in his workshop in the basement, and don’t be afraid of the cats, my angel. This mezzanine sounded almost like what she shouted when she wanted me to play a little stronger, a little softer; listen to me, my angel, this is mezzo forte, listen, this is mezzo piano now, my angel. Or should I have dropped off the key on the pianino. I was constantly looking for some acceptable solution, how to get to know more about the meaning of things without letting the horror—with all its details appearing unexpectedly—touch my skin. Uncle Pálóczky stayed in the star-marked building because concierges had to be real Christians, not converted ones. That I managed to understand from the hints. Another real Christian, my piano teacher, had to move out, but only a real Christian could be concierge, and therefore Uncle Pálóczky had to stay with the Jews. That I didn’t understand. There was this word in the building that almost meant ground floor and yet seemed to refer to the strength of a musical sound or an unknown musical instrument. Uncle Pálóczky, as he himself told it, became a living witness to how the old Weisz couple was taken away. Probably everyone but me understood the connections among these things.
Maybe I thought this building was classy because there was a better chance to see unfamiliar things than in our buildings, and maybe that’s why I didn’t notice how depressingly pathetic a place it was. People living here talked much more than in other buildings, they yelled more freely between floors and in the courtyard. Or perhaps my idea about its being classy was shaky, since I thought classy meant exceptional and alien, mysterious, and not linked to wealth or poverty. Mezzanine seemed grand to me because there was no such thing in any other building I knew. I also had to consider my piano teacher as very classy because she used a beautiful cane and limped a little. People said it was a congenital hip dislocation; this was no less exceptional than the mezzanine. That is how I thought about things. Probably decades must go by before one manages to free up certain concepts from one’s childhood imaginings. Just as I hadn’t noticed poverty, given the sparkling cleanliness and order, I paid no attention to our prosperity either. I did not know what it fed on or how unstable it was. With my grandparents, we lived on Stefánia Boulevard, where no one mentioned such qualifications, much as one speaks of breathing only when one is breathless. Earlier, my parents’ apartment on Aréna Road was no less spacious, calm, or well cared for, and neither was my maternal aunt’s apartment in Damjanich Street or that of my paternal aunt on Teréz Boulevard. Nobody talked about this, because they all considered spiritual values more important than the material world, and even when looking after their finances the reference points were spiritual ones; such allusions were part of the going bon ton. I did not sense the falsity of this for a long time, since I barely knew another world, which is to say I didn’t notice the differences. And because I had no idea about the criteria of wealth or poverty, it didn’t occur to me for the longest time that a place or neighborhood in a city had any particular meaning. And by the time I might have understood the connections among the various quarters and districts in the city of my birth, their social structure and architecture had been so extensively altered that the traditional labels had lost their meaning. There were no fancy or rich sections, and the concepts designating them sank into oblivion too.
Of course, I had a very clear idea of what was not proper.
The concept of good manners, strangely, lasted much longer than the social qualifications for bourgeois life. I could not judge the nature of bon ton, but I was free to decide what was classy. As if, for lack of a better qualified person, I had been entrusted with the decision, and indeed I behaved as a judge. Propriety, however, was set up with geometrical prescriptions coupled with draconian rulings. One had to avoid certain things at all costs, and one had to obey certain rules come hell or high water.
As to the issue of what was classy, one simply had to weigh things; no one hindered one in making the assessment. My mother’s kid sister, for example, in her infinitely large, airy, and sunny apartment looking out on the inner gardens of the always shady Damjanich Street, did not live in less privileged conditions than we did. Her rooms opened into one another and the windows reached down to the floor—French doors. That they were French was very classy too. Streetcars ran on the streets outside, yet I knew that although I lived with my grandparents on Stefánia Boulevard in a kind of provincial seclusion, if the need arose we could get to the city by taxi, and perhaps that was the reason we were exceptional. But for a long time the yellow streetcar was for me much classier than the taxi, though our secluded provincial life was classier than the noisy city. Which meant that sometimes disadvantages made someone classy and sometimes advantages. Or, put the other way around, it’s not advisable to look for the advantageous in everything if one wants to stay classy. It’s also possible that what is disadvantageous today will be very advantageous tomorrow. This was an important rule; no wonder people did not discuss it in public. You had to be two or three steps ahead of your nose to be able to judge your own position. There was some secret instruction by which not only the mere fact but also the degree or temperature of grandeur was determined. It didn’t have to do with the number of rooms, certain objects, or the condition of a given building.
Intellectually, Nínó on Teréz Boulevard had a very classy position in the family hierarchy while my aunt Irén in Damjanich Street, by dint of her person, as it were, also enjoyed a high position, since her beauty unfortunately swept everybody off their feet; yet because of her husband, she was not considered one of the refined or truly grand members of the family. Her husband was fabulously rich, peop
le never stopped talking about it because somehow he could not get used to being rich or preserve his affluence; he was a common, uncouth man. On his hairy fingers he wore several jeweled rings and one particularly ugly signet ring of which his daughters were very afraid. He would slap them in the mouth with those ringed fingers. And the girls were no less ill-mannered. My grandmother said that my aunt Irén paid no heed to their upbringing. It would have been hard to say exactly what my aunt Irén did pay attention to. She picked the objects of her attention capriciously, making everything around her constantly move and change. The disorder in their apartment was always great; one had the impression that they were about to move out or had just moved in and had had no time to unpack. A radio was always blasting somewhere; they had several of them; they did not disturb the girls listening to the gramophone or whistling or even playing the violin at the same time.
When visiting them, Grandmother preferred to keep her gloves on and always made sure the taxi waited for her; thank you, my dears, but I’m staying only another moment.
I thought my mother was the classiest of them all, because she was the only one among us who dared openly to betray everyone, to just up and leave; she had no problem betraying the entire family, and she abandoned me without a word. I have almost no memories of her. More like a few sentences that others whispered in my presence in a way that I couldn’t understand. Regarding my mother, I can’t separate my real memories from my desires and imagination. Not only did she settle in Paris—this would not have been startling, considering her personality—but she lived in the woods of Vincennes, where the window of her bedroom gave on a lake with the fortified castle of the French kings on the far side. I knew these kings had been beheaded. I also knew that except for her name, Mother had nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing. People spoke of her with trepidation, about how she was impoverished and, save for that certain woman, had nobody and nothing, but absolutely nothing. I imagined her still wearing the same white linen dress with the red leather belt in which she had escaped on the last train. It was in the summer, a very hot summer. I knew her shoes and her bag had been red.
That certain communist woman with whom she left had come to Budapest for the World Youth Festival.
I understood the essence of these things, no matter how much they tried to hide them from me; she had run away because of the woman and she lived in this communist woman’s house at the edge of the Forest of Vincennes.
From inadvertently dropped words which I sometimes misinterpreted, I formed a picture of her in which everything had to be classy.
She was a ruthless mother, not even worthy to be called a mother, but I never believed this, no matter who said it. In classiness and strictness, she resembled my piano teacher. People also said to me, little boy, don’t even think about her, it’s not worth it. She was living in austere grandeur with someone, somewhere in a distant and alluring strange land. They said this was a moral slough. Which made me think of a puddle with pigs wallowing in it, snorting with pleasure. At other times, I imagined classiness as something like the dignity with which my piano teacher endured her lameness; she never complained. Or as the threatening act of destiny that will reach me too with its fury and one fine day strike me down.
In connection with the two women, people repeated a very beautiful word, which I also failed to understand or to remember. It was exactly the sort of word that mezzanine was. Only much later did I realize that I’d known the word for some time; of course, mezzanine meant intermediate floor. If that other beautiful word could reach and touch me, I’d become as classy as my mother was or that certain woman, who was a physician. The women in the family giggled when they talked of this, a woman physician should know what she’s doing, they said, laughing. Whenever they used that word in connection with anyone, they could barely control their squeals and giggles. The word might have referred to a specific pathological condition that the woman physician could treat as she liked. Or that Mother might have contracted this condition because she had left us for that certain woman. I did not understand why this was morally reprehensible if she’d had to do it because of her illness.
And how could she have known that a few weeks later they were going to take away my father and I would be left all alone. She couldn’t have foreseen this when she left, and when she learned of it she could no longer come back, sick as she was, to fetch me.
No matter how beautiful this word sounded, contagion and disease clung to it so strongly that in my fear I was unable to memorize it. Nevertheless, I could not withdraw my dreaded longing for my vanished mother. I kept excusing her any way I could, because I craved a mother of any kind. Sometimes I tried to imagine what if things hadn’t happened as I’d been told; what if nothing had happened, as was the case in most families. My body shuddered at the thought, I cried at the sheer happy thought that I hadn’t lost either of them; I cried a lot, but only in secret. I wanted her to come back one fine day; I even wouldn’t have minded if they’d arrested her and taken her away for what she had done. And I always worked up a fever with my constant shuddering—as I did while searching the streets for my father, whom one day, unexpectedly, I did discover.
I took after strange men on Teréz Boulevard, I walked in front of them, showed myself, maybe they’d recognize me.
The only time that I truly felt I was with my mother, that I was truly hers and nobody could take me from her, was when, to punish me, Grandmother locked me in the winter garden, full of tropical plants, where the smell of wet soil made it hard to breathe. I could endure the punishment without crying, but then I’d develop a temperature. The crying had to do with missing my mother, and it had to remain my deepest secret. I had no greater secret than this longing for my mother—until in this building in Dembinszky Street, because of Ilonka Weisz, fate finally caught up with me.
I had no idea how much time had passed.
It was hard to remember how much time might have passed, and counting from what point.
My last reference point was the bell of the Terézváros church marking eight o’clock. I couldn’t say when I’d come up these six worn steps and how long I’d been standing here, not as a child, in front of the roster of tenants. Pálóczky was gone, but on the second floor I found the name of the piano teacher, or at least her name was still on the list. And on the fourth floor, I could see the Weiszes’ name, and that meant Ilonka Weisz could appear at any moment.
In those years, young men like me tried hard to figure out what they should do to give some meaning to their complete and absolute hopelessness. I, however, was busy with the question of whether my entire life was anything but a peculiar hallucination.
I seem to exist, though in reality I have never existed, nor do I exist now and will exist only if I kill myself.
As if I could decide more reliably, given the positions of the watch hands in relation to the numbers, whether what I judged to be about an hour since the last ringing of the church bell had really and truly elapsed. I could not decide how much of that hour I had spent here, I had no reference point for that. As a saving idea, I remembered that the bus that ran in front of this building had gone past twice. The mind fixes occurrences like this, and one’s ears seem to hear them at will. But I couldn’t be sure whether the bus had really passed twice or I was only thinking it to reassure myself or to figure out what it meant if the bus had indeed gone past two times.
My mind broke everything down into tiny pieces but then left me to myself with the unconnected details. Something was happening or had already happened in the world that, without knowing the connection between the pieces and details, I could not understand.
As if feelings and emotions were not followed by value judgments and I was leaving behind periods whose duration or contents my memory could not account for.
This did not happen because my memory was faulty. Or because I remembered things randomly. My memory worked well and I remembered things not randomly but simultaneously: everything occurred to me at once. Eve
rything was together in my mind but with no internal connections. Whatever this was, I could neither survey it nor measure its extent. It was too much and too frightening to be in the midst of a past that is all in the present. No sooner did I begin to sense or have some inkling about how things were connected in my life, and which of them were inconsequential, than paralyzing waves of emotion rushed hotly to my face. Anger and hatred for the two of them. Fear for myself. Klára Vay. Their names were right there on the nameplate. József Simon Hetés. Now I know. They lived on the third floor, in the apartment overlooking the street, above the piano teacher. And now I also know that the woman lied. They aren’t married, I know that too. It was as if I rose to the surface for a brief moment, and then timelessness quickly reclaimed me. To restrain myself, I used the fear I felt for myself and also the anger I felt for them. I had lied to her, but she’d been lying too. A half hour must surely have passed since I’d been standing here halfway between their apartment and their car, maybe only twenty minutes.
I knew perfectly well why they weren’t coming back out, and that was more important.
What a raving idiot I am. And I didn’t want to see what they were doing, as if I could possibly shoo away the image. I saw the half-open door of their bathroom, just as if I were peeking; I saw them pressed against the sink in the bathroom. Klára’s body shining in a short black slip. Ultimately, one perceives many things that never, or perhaps only later, register in one’s mind. I understood the man’s shameless and provocative winks above the glittering car roof. The dry lines on his face running together because of the deeply concealed sarcasm.
He knew why he was going upstairs.
They made each other moan and howl, just like the men on Margit Island.
While, like a dog, I was supposed to guard his car for them.