No Live Files Remain

by Andras Forgach

  He didn’t wait for an answer or offer an explanation. But that didn’t matter. The word flittered before the eyes of the boy, like a butterfly. It was beautiful.

  ‘My mother’s family didn’t want the marriage. They said, “This Friedmann is a sick man. He has tuberculosis, besides which, he’ll never have offspring.” Offspring. Yes, they liked this word, because to make things worse, he was beaten up once in a brawl in a pub and lost one of his balls – luckily not the one that produces semen, but the other ball, the one that stores semen, you know, the one that’s always a bit colder than the other one. Did you know that? Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here and looking at me with your blue eyes, my dear little son. And you know, I remember my dad: I had to go right up to his deathbed, and I was terribly afraid, especially of the silence – yes, I shall never forget that terrible silence. And then my dad put his hand on my head, and his hand was so heavy, my son, so heavy, I never thought a hand could be so heavy. Never.’

  Under the Buda Castle

  She must speak to them.

  When she finally reached the second floor, which, counting the mezzanine, was actually the third – after climbing the steep spiral staircase, where it was advisable to stay close to the wall, because the steps became dangerously narrow towards the centre – Mrs Pápai, gasping for breath, found the door open. For a moment it seemed closed, swinging back and forth almost imperceptibly in the breeze. The door had three windows of frosted glass: the uppermost of which could be locked from the inside with a small latch, but it was open now. As Mrs Pápai peered through that little window, a draught blew the flat’s musty odour right into her face. Not wanting to press the buzzer, with the tip of her shoe she nudged the door, which, creaking and groaning, opened slowly before her. An elegant black plate above the letterbox still held, in gold letters, the name Marcell Forgács. As if on a gravestone. The lukewarm air generated by the flat’s central heating, several days of mustiness and the sour scent of spoiled food struck her at once, and no one answered her sharp, loud, impatient cry. When she now gave the door a good kick, a fire engine, siren blaring, whizzed over the parquet floor. She had to sneeze. She took two uncertain steps forward and, with a big sigh, picked up the little red toy and put it on the table. She opened a window. Judging from the objects scattered about, the inhabitants must have been home not long before – yes, maybe they just popped out somewhere for a little while, whether to the shops, the chemist’s, the post office, or the playground. Through the wide-open window the heat from the radiator streamed out into the cold autumn afternoon.

  A mother yearns for the manifestations of love. When her grown-up children receive her with cigarette butts, unwashed dishes, unmade beds, dirty laundry strewn on beds, on chairs, on the floor, rotten and withered food in the fridge, spoiled milk in the plastic bags it came in, a dirty floor, strands of hair all over the place, a toilet bowl spotted with desiccated faeces, the smell of unflushed urine, and books thrown about everywhere, and not the love and filial warmth she yearns for, the manifestations of love and care she so longs for – well, something sinks in the vicinity of her heart. Or in her head? For she has just arrived home (her home?) from work or a visit to the hospital (which she’s been doing for four years almost without interruption), and how good it would have felt to be greeted by signs of care and love, and not with a [sic] dirty, smelly, mucky, messy rooms. How much good it would have done her, a clean, made bed, a good cup of hot tea, a few warm words. The absence of the tenderness or the selfless goodwill a mother yearns for from her grown-up children can’t help but raise the question: where did she go so wrong that this desire for love yields only a knot of pain in the vicinity of her heart or in her head? Is she being served the dish she cooked? She cooked and concocted poison? And fed it to her young children, and now, twenty years later, this is the result? The poison? I lied! I denied my depression. It seems I should have stripped myself totally bare, opened myself up, revealed myself howling away, so ‘mum’s depression and its cause’ would have slashed its way into my poor children’s souls. Would this ‘honesty’ have brought more understanding kids into the world? Would the yearned-for love have then been given?

  A petty (!)

  mother.

  The boys’ room looked out on Buda Castle, the royal palace, whose grey rear façade belonged to the flat every bit as much as the furniture gifted or lent by friends and relatives but never given back, one piece so different from the next and yet, over time, starting to resemble each other in a strange way. The three-part castle wall, which faced Naphegy, that leafy residential hill, comprised a row of projections, balustrades, loggias, black gaping windows and walled-up arches, and in the middle of the grey façade six Corinthian columns supported a huge terrace, with six blackened statues, half-dressed female figures, swimming in the air above it. The elegant dome that crowned the castle had been blasted away: the royal palace had been more ornament than a fortress to be defended and had taken on its final form exactly at a time when royalty had for all practical purposes lost its historical significance. The Austrian emperor had sometimes slept there when he happened to be in town, and then later so had Horthy, the regent, who likewise was no king. Roaring lions’ heads looked down from the pointed arches of burnt-out lancet windows; the façade was pockmarked with chafes and holes, compliments of machine-gun and mortar fire; and here and there along the foot of the castle wall were enormous shattered crossbeams and heaps of rubble a storey high.

  The whole of this monumental grey pile, this colossal structure swimming in the moonlight, was like a faded postcard on a wall or an impossible-to-open closet in the corner of a room. It towered there above the buildings, empty and fit for nothing. The green horse. On a platform, above the scraggly bushes and thin trees sprawling forth from the cracks in the supporting brick wall, right across from the boys’ room, stood a prancing green horse – though it seemed more to be floating there, who knows since when. The horse was every bit as green as the castle’s caved-in dome. A fairy-tale horse that had thrown off its rider. Truth be told, it had not thrown off its rider – though it was not as if the boys could have known this. In fact, on the far side of the beast – the side the boys could not see from their window – was not a horseman but, instead, a mere horseherd, a kind of Hungarian cowboy, the sort who wears pantaloons. Yes, there he was, trying to tame that unruly green horse in front of the former Royal Riding School. Now, the boys had never seen this nameless horseherd – they didn’t even know he existed, even though he was none other than the Horse Tamer who’d wound up there in 1901 after appearing at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and had later survived both world wars. Ladies strolling up or descending from Castle Hill were partial to having their pictures taken next to the pedestal of the frisky horse, which must have been a sensitive spot in the castle-hill, because in the winter of ’44 the square had been guarded by a scared and sulky SS armoured division. From the boys’ window, however, nothing could be seen except a heap of rubble – entering the grounds of the castle was strictly prohibited. There, in a wooden booth, sat a security guard whose job it was to keep people away from the shut-up building, and whenever he spied children, he’d emerge, flailing his arms and shouting and scaring them away, and as the children ran off, only the green horse remained there, standing steadfastly in its place.

  Even as she got off the tram she was full of grim foreboding. With a careworn expression she approached the block of flats, and had no desire to encounter acquaintances.1 Hurriedly she passed a snow-white cluster of statues: a peasant leader, who had been burned on a fiery throne, stood there alone, in the centre, with colossal muscles, a corselet of chainmail draping his trunk, mace in hand, and – as seen from the pavement – looking at least a head higher than the castle façade. Behind him, a serpentine road led up to the castle. Here, up until the late Fifties, before a low and humble wall, as if carved from the stones of that wall, stood the monument to the artillerymen of the First World War: six horses in two
rows, their heads bent, with all their might dragging a heavy cannon stuck in the mud, a helmeted artilleryman seated on three of the horses, and inscribed on the wall of the memorial, among other things, were the names of the cities torn from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon. The regent, Horthy, who had a penchant for erecting monuments, had inaugurated it himself in ’37: a wreath for every city, twenty-nine of them hung all about like lifejackets on an ocean liner, but then this ocean liner had sunk, and after the war children played hide and seek by the feet of horses that had had their heads torn off, horsemen whose heads were blown away – the children saw these harnessed beasts as lions, not horses. And, further back, a relic of the palace of the great Renaissance king, Matthias, stood a single, time-gnawed granite column, like the denuded trunk of a tree.

  The tram no longer passed by their building, rattling like a toolbox being shaken, rousing the residents from their deepest dreams at dawn. The stop had been moved a hundred metres to the far side of what had once been a fountain and was now a meadow of flowers – closer to Naphegy, full of the bones of fallen soldiers, unexploded mines, the remains of unfired cartridges and magazines, and mysterious caves reeking of piss and shit. There had been a time when one of the rougher kids from their building would step from the front door, leap right onto the steps of the moving tram’s rear platform, not even bothering to unlatch the iron railing, wave exultantly at those he’d left behind, and then, after a bumpy little ride to the top of the slope, jump off the steps right in front of the little neighbourhood cinema and buy tickets to the evening show. The whole thing had the atmosphere of a village. In summer the ice-man came, fine shards flying in the sunlight every which way as the garrulous chap chopped away at the blocks with a hatchet, using a cramp iron to pull them from his wagon down into the buckets of the locals who’d quickly gathered around it. Coal arrived on lorries, the coal-dust scintillating and its smell wafting through the air as soot-faced musclemen shovelled the briquettes or coke into large woven baskets which they carried inside on their backs or else poured right into the coal chute beside the furnace, so that once a week, on Saturdays, there would be hot water in the building. An army of freshly painted blue-red tin soldiers, smelling sharply of acetone, were drying outside on the windowsill of a basement flat. The painter, the wife of the deputy concierge, doled out fried dough dabbed with sour cream through the window railings to the kids crouching there. It was the concierge’s job to keep the furnace burning: through the peephole of a grey, armoured basement door, one could catch a glimpse of his shiny, sweating face, lit up by the flames. As if the entire building were a great big ship. And there came the hawker and, yes, the knife-grinder. Old nags from a fairy tale standing in front of a rickety wagon scratched at the bumpy road with their roughly shod hooves, and the sweet aroma of honey cakes emanating from the ancient honey-cake shop pervaded the air. The window was full of large glass jars filled to the brim with honey cakes; the door jingled as one entered and was greeted by two kindhearted, smiling, white-haired old ladies.

  Ani lo yoda’at. I don’t know. No, I don’t even know if they’re home.

  She recoiled for a moment as she stepped into the building’s deep, box-like lobby. She prepared her face in case she should bump into an acquaintance. Ever since she had moved away a couple of years ago, coming back had not been easy. They knew her as a person who only smiled, and though she played this role day and night, even now, she was always aware that she was only pretending to be a person who only smiled. She wore her cheerful mask in vain, for at every moment she could see herself, and she knew that it was a lie. And now she was in no mood to smile. The memory was too strong.

  It was exactly from here that she had stepped out one summer’s day at dawn in 1958 when she’d run off with Tom, the English soldier she’d fallen in love with back in Palestine, who’d come to visit her along with his wife and two children, traversing half a continent, and she’d run off with him to Lake Balaton. She’d had to go. Fate could not be denied.

  And it was here, too, where Pápai had stood, holding his red-haired little girl, listening to the radio broadcast that could be heard through the wide-open windows, in October ’56, when some insurrectionists, cockades pinned to their chests, wanted to hang him on the first lamppost they could find.2 And here, too, it had happened that Pápai, agitated, pressed for time as ever, left home late one day with his older son and daughter, and, stepping out of the building, looking neither right nor left, wanted to rush across the street, pulling his kids behind him, when a Csepel lorry screeched to a halt in front of the building, nearly running them over. Pápai let loose a volley of invective at the driver, who simply hopped from his cab and slapped Pápai hard across the face, sending his spectacles flying right off his nose. But Mrs Pápai never heard of this slap. It was only in the memory of the older son that the image of Pápai’s defenceless, speechless, stunned face burned itself inexorably.

  It was presumably around the same time that an inscription appeared on the building – who had written it? The insurrectionists or those who’d later locked them up? – in green paint, all in capital letters. PEOPLE’S IRON RULE! The letters had by now faded away; only those who had once seen them could make them out. Still, that inscription had become the building’s lucky charm. When Mrs Pápai’s younger son came home from school, making his way down the steep steps of Naphegy, he always read it, without fail, and never understood a word of it, and never asked a soul what it meant.

  SCHMITZ, SCHMITZ, LITTLE SCHMITZ, YOU WON’T EVEN GET TO AUSCHWITZ. There was an inscription of this sort, too, somewhere. Mrs Pápai had come face to face with it in those revolutionary days, what a slap that had been, too, and she knew she must leave this land, and yet she had stayed.

  What has passed, has passed.

  Looking neither right nor left, she headed inside with determined steps, into the building’s cool lobby with its ashlar floor. One dark stairwell opened to the right and another to the left, and in front of her a glass wall shone brightly onto the castle and the building’s inner courtyard with its abundant flowers. The concierge’s booth seemed abandoned, its curtain drawn to. Ever since the residents had been given their own keys to the front door, the concierge-couple had been mostly holed up in their basement flat, to which steps led down from the glass booth. And yet the woman was standing there now, besom in hand. She swept once, twice, the sound alarming Mrs Pápai, who looked her way.

  ‘How is your dear husband, Mrs Forgács?’

  Mrs Pápai mumbled something in lieu of a proper answer, and then, once the question had been repeated, broke into a wide smile and, in her melodic voice, repeated, louder now, what she’d mumbled before: ‘Getting better, doing his best, Mrs Lénárt!’ But Mrs Lénárt took no pity on her, no, and did not let her pass. ‘Poor Comrade Forgács,’ she said, ‘this really isn’t the fate he deserved.’ She made a couple of strokes with her broom, sending dust up into the air. ‘I saw him not long ago, and that man is in horrible shape. Like someone broken in two. No, this really isn’t the fate the comrade deserved.’

  Mrs Pápai felt as if she’d been stabbed. Was Mrs Lénárt mocking her or did she mean to console her? More likely the former. She was about to move on when Mrs Lénárt’s harsh voice blared loudly, like a warning shot, again stopping her.

  ‘Just sayin’, but yesterday the police was here. Not that I heard a thing, but someone was making a commotion in there, there was a racket, and even after some other tenants called out five or six times and the neighbours knocked on the ceiling, pounded on the walls, the noise went right on. You should have a word with your children, Mrs Forgács. I haven’t the faintest idea who called the police, but if I’d heard what was heard then, I’d do the same, I would. After ten at night some female, maybe your daughter, was shrieking out the window, and on my life they were still coming after midnight, lots of folks, slamming the front door all the time, they were, yes, the whole building rocked, believe me, I was scared out of my wits that the glass in
the door would shatter. Oh, I understand young people, I do. I was young once, but this sort of behaviour really shouldn’t be allowed after ten at night, ain’t I right? Working people live in this building, Mrs Forgács, as you know full well.’

  ‘Working people.’ Mrs Lénárt had taken care to pronounce the word as befitted the 1950s. Memories of bygone words bubbled up inside her, including ‘gendarme’ – in fact, she had almost said ‘ÁVÓ’, but caught herself just in time.

  ‘And it’s not good for anyone if the gendarme comes out here so often. That ain’t proper, is it?’

  Her tone suggested that she might be gloating: finally she could rub Mrs Forgács’s nose in what she herself had feared under the communists. Perhaps that was why these strange words now came to her lips. Because these Forgácses were that sort too. No, not bad people, exactly, but commies, and for some mysterious reason one had to be scared of them – even of that big buffoon, the potbellied Comrade Forgács, who’d never passed by her without blurting out some stupid compliment or giving her a tickle. A spry plump man, he was, Comrade Forgács! He didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, but he was a scoundrel, he was!