In reply Mrs Pápai only made a face, pursed her lips, and went on. She walked across the inner courtyard, advancing as in a chess game between the flowerbeds towards stairwell D. She felt as if watchful eyes were following her even from the dark windows of the basement flats.
The block of flats had arisen in place of an entirely different sort of building whose traces, which it still preserved, must explain its architectural oddities. It had been the bodyguards’ barracks before the war: the men had lived in the narrow rear stretch of the U-shaped, double-towered structure, which had an arched entrance, comfortable balconies and a spacious roof terrace; and the officers had lived in large, pompously – but not sumptuously – furnished, high-ceilinged flats looking onto Attila Boulevard. How pleasant and secure the officers’ jobs must have been. They met to chat and have Coffee every day in a different flat.
After the war, the bombed-out, caved-in barracks on both sides of the little square under the castle were replaced by two characterless cubes, twin blockhouses, and it was into one of these that the young Pápai had moved with his wife. ‘The battle has begun for a higher living standard,’ he wrote of this success in a triumphant English-language letter to his wife, who was then preparing for exams and pregnant with their first child.3 It was a special, highly personal English. Even a year after arriving in Hungary the two of them still spoke Hebrew or English together – until one day someone reported Mrs Pápai for using a foreign language while riding a tram, for which she received a warning at her workplace, a nursery school. The building’s courtyard – to which steps lined by a stone railing led up from the garden, and which was girdled by a wall built of roughly hewn rocks and ornamental bricks and decorated with arrow slits – had originally been built as a soldiers’ exercise yard. There, the privates of the bodyguard regiment had conditioned their muscles. Later it became a football field where the kids from the building would kick a ball until darkness fell – kids who, in the earliest of those days, had fought a war of attrition with a gang of youngsters from another block, and while their battles unfolded mainly when the wild chestnuts were ripe, sometimes real bricks whizzed through the air, too. Just why this tribal warfare broke out from time to time, who was to say, but eventually there came a day, in the late Fifties, when it, too, ended.
Two grey cubes on opposite sides of Dózsa György Square.
Not a trace was left of either the bodyguards’ barracks, with its marzipan-cake-like cupolas, or the First World War artillerymen’s monument – both of which, during the siege of Budapest, the Americans had taken care to bomb the hell out of before the Russians came along to shell them to smithereens from their positions on Gellért Hill. The bodyguards, in the form of halberdiers stationed in front of the royal palace – wearing egret-feathered metal mitres on their heads, thick linen shirts trimmed lavishly with torsades, vests embroidered with traditional Hungarian folk-motifs and with little tassels hanging from them, and, moreover, with knee-high leather boots likewise ornamented with embroidery, not to mention sabres at their sides – were little more than a guard of honour, and hardly equipped to defend the castle from any serious assault.
It was in early 1949 that the young staff member of the prime minister’s press office, with his modest bundle of possessions and his firstborn little daughter – not yet Pápai, but no longer Friedmann, either – moved into this brand-new flat, which had seemed imposing at the time. His career, after so many twists and tumbles, now appeared to have suddenly, and finally, settled onto an arrow-straight path.
* * *
She didn’t even take off her jacket. The coat-rack by the front door seemed ready to burst off the wall, swollen so much with all sorts of clothing that she could barely even squeeze by it, and there was no place there for hers. She avoided the mirror. In the grimy kitchen, the smallest burner on the hob was glowing red-hot; on it was a kettle whose water had long boiled away, and beside it was a cup topped with a filter full of tea leaves. Mrs Pápai quickly turned off the burner: the switch was sticky with grime, and on the white enamel hob there were blackened, cracked splotches of burnt porridge and other food that had run over the sides of pots. She had no idea what to do: clean up or leave things as they were? Mrs Pápai put the kettle under cold running water. Hissing steam shot up into her face. Absent-mindedly she looked into the dimly lit pantry. The shelves were empty except for a jar of dried-out mustard, a few potatoes that had started to sprout and some forlorn-looking, wilting onions. One day, back in 1963, she too had managed to set fire to the place – the day she’d left the iron plugged in. Pápai had been in hospital, and she was rushing off to work at the Red Cross. Someone in the neighbouring building noticed the black smoke billowing out of a window and called the firemen, who couldn’t get into the flat, and – because it wouldn’t have made any sense to drag the hose all the way up the winding stairs – aimed the jet of water from the street right through the kitchen window. The parquet floor was soaked, the sooty water flowed down the spiral staircase, and the onlookers applauded. Fifteen years later the pantry door was still blistered from that fire, its surface like matzo. It had been painted to cover up the damage, but moon-like craters could still be seen underneath.
She heard a stirring from the biggest room. Only then did she realize that someone had put all the chairs in there.
The flat’s prettiest piece of furniture – a small oval glass table standing on Grecian columns and a bronze-plated pedestal – had been pushed into a corner and the lion-legged writing desk pulled over to the radiator. It was in this antique desk that Pápai, then a member of the Workers’ Militia, had kept his service revolver and its brass-coated bullets, not to mention all the brochures and family papers scattered in the drawers. In the room, as if in a theatre’s auditorium, stood two rows of chairs of every variety. The large, threadbare Persian rug had been rolled up and leaned against the wall, on which, next to the rug, was a curled-at-the-edges black-and-white photograph of Mrs Pápai’s youngest daughter, who – wearing Pápai’s shiny grey suit, white shirt, tie and huge sunglasses – was delivering a huge favourite among the homemade productions put on in the flat: a long, frenetic monologue from a famous Italian film in which a top police detective kills his mistress only to later lead the investigation into her murder himself.4
It would be best not to enter, to turn around and leave this place.
The shutters were half closed. Something held her back, but then she couldn’t take it any longer, and with quiet steps walked into the room she’d slept in for a quarter of a century, in the hardest of times, sometimes in one corner, sometimes in another, on sagging, rattling beds, alone. Pápai – either when he came home at dawn, at the end of his shift at Hungarian Radio, or else when he stirred, moaning, in the middle of the night – had to scurry over on tiptoe to her on the far side of the huge writing desk if he wanted something, and often he did want something. Harried by his restive heart, he wanted something even when she didn’t, as long as he thought that their two youngest children, who slept in the same room, were sleeping like lambs. Though he could never be sure. Silently they made love, with restrained sighs, only the bed creaking unashamedly. Pápai then sidled back to his lair. They never had a room of their own. Once, when they might have had one, they chose instead to take on a tenant at a meagre rent to help cover their household expenses, but then the tenant did not pay, and it took some doing to rid themselves of the squatter. At other times a down-on-his-luck relative would move into one of the smaller rooms, and throwing him out was not so simple either. The only place where Mrs Pápai could sleep in comfort was the sofa with the green cover, which they’d bought in London, and which could be transformed into a bed with a single motion, and which, back then, all the relatives had gazed at in wonder.
The sound of quiet laughter. A half-naked blond boy was lying on a mattress on the floor – or, rather, he was almost sitting up, a pillow stuffed between his back and the wall, long hairy legs extending beyond a Bedouin blanket, a guitar
resting on his belly as he softly strummed a tune. On seeing Mrs Pápai, he turned cheery all at once. ‘How do you do, ma’am?’ he said, as a child might have in the stairwell, and smiled mischievously. When she saw how thin he was, Mrs Pápai’s first thought was that he must be fed. ‘What were you playing? Bach?’ she asked, just to ask something. ‘Was there a performance?’5 she added, but she did not dare step further into the room. And yet, even as she was suddenly beset by a terrible exhaustion, she had a deep-seated desire to give this dishevelled young man, her son’s friend, something to eat; to put the chairs back in their places, to sweep the floor, to make the beds, to air the flat, to vacuum the rug, and, generally, to set this maddening disarray in order. But, no, she didn’t have the strength. She collapsed wearily into the nearest chair. As if preparing for a long conversation, the blond boy now politely placed his guitar on the parquet floor, and this elaborately slow movement, which required him to lean over the mattress, brought Mrs Pápai’s attention to the motionless body lying beside him under the sheet; which is to say, to all she could see of this body: the dirty soles of two feet.
‘Yes, Bach, The Well-Tempered Klavier,’ and the boy was about to complacently reach once again for his guitar when Mrs Pápai’s question stopped him in his tracks. At the same time, her heart began beating wildly. ‘Did you put on the kettle?’ Nothing better came to mind. In lieu of a reply, the boy raised the embroidered amulet hanging on a leather strap around his neck, which he’d been given six months earlier by Mrs Pápai, who, on completing one of her embroideries, was in the habit of presenting it to the first person she met. It depicted a bird of paradise. ‘I still have it, Aunt Ria!’ the boy exclaimed. Knitting his brows, he added, ‘I heard Péter out there in the kitchen earlier.’ ‘You should have turned it off all the same,’ she said. ‘Consider me gone!’ he replied, springing out from under the blanket and pulling on his trousers. His haste suggested an effort to distract Mrs Pápai from the motionless body under the blanket. It can’t be, thought Mrs Pápai. Impossible. It can’t be that it’s him lying there, and even if it is, what does it mean, and why would I even think such a thing? At that her heart beat even more loudly, like a bucking horse that wants to escape its corral. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ was the question she had in mind as her eyes fixed on the contours of the sleeping body, but to her great surprise she asked, ‘Don’t you know where András is?’
The front door gave a sudden creak and was then flung open, and from the echoing voices in the stairwell it sounded as if several people, a whole gang of people, had arrived at once. A moment later, strident laughter and spirited conversation could be heard. Someone switched on the light. There were only three of them, and her son was not among them.
Darkness fell.
Mrs Pápai, who had turned away from the boy, wasn’t the least bit surprised at the sudden deluge of strangers – no, she’d spent her whole life getting used to it: anyone could arrive at any time. Just as in her parents’ home when she was a child, when anyone who showed up was fed and given a place to sleep in a corner: a beggar woman, an Arab delegation on its way home from Moscow to Tel Aviv or passing through on the way from Beirut to Moscow, distant relatives, an aunt, a niece, a tenant who couldn’t be thrown out, Armenians, Brits, French, Italians, a neighbour who came by for salt or flour or potatoes or perhaps brought a fresh watermelon, or the postman with a telegram. But, no, it was never friends, for they had no friends. Or when the white-haired chieftain arrived, the vice president of the World Peace council, Mrs Pápai’s papa, from Tel Aviv or Moscow or Stockholm, and the whole family gathered around the glass table in the largest, otherwise barren room, its parquet scuffed to a shine. Everyone was in his or her Sunday best, for a group picture, which, in the minutes it took to compose, meant that hatchets had to be buried along with the ugly strife which tore the family apart – the reproaches, the jealousy, the spite which can be found in every family, but which here all swirled around that magic word, ‘Israel’. Evil conqueror or under perfidious attack? Aggressor or defenceless victim? From the moment in 1965 when the Israeli Communist Party, which wasn’t big to start with, had split in two, the arguments unfolded with an ignominious fervour that would have put the religious wars of the Middle Ages to shame. They perceived this as they would have a global catastrophe or, say, the advent of the Weimar Republic. Sneh, Mikunis, Sneh, Mikunis – these two names were constantly thrown about. Yes, they were the secessionists and the heretics, they were the traitors who’d turned against Moscow. Alongside Sneh and Mikunis, the names of the new party’s Arab stars also flitted about: Habibi and Toubi, Toubi and Habibi, Al Ittihad and Zo Haderekh. The relatives pressed Hebrew- and English-language articles clipped from newspapers under each other’s noses, and screamed about imperialism and genocide, and all this only intensified after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the break in diplomatic relations. Yes, by then the divide was deep. Then came Sasha, the ever cheerful and fragrant Arab communist, who regularly stopped in from one of his raids with a carton of Marlboros, at which Mrs Pápai, a clumsy Sunday smoker, lit up demonstratively at once. So too came the Armenian Christian communist oil merchant from Beirut, who to the end of his days sent postcards from all over the world to his adored Bruria. But when the white-haired, blue-eyed chieftain arrived, the family seemed momentarily whole: newborns and older children alike were brought over, and even those who would have suffocated one another on a spoonful of water could be found smiling at each other.
Her son was not among the three young men, the most boisterous of whom had sparkling blue eyes, a brown hat tipped rakishly over his forehead that he never removed, and a mouth always breaking into a smile – a cutting and yet not at all sneering smile, like that of someone who savours what he is about to say even before formulating the words inside his head, someone who takes pleasure at the very thought of the witty pronouncement he is about to make. Resting on his nose was a pair of thick glasses, and the words spilled effortlessly, melodiously from his mouth, as if he were acting in a play he’d written himself. Meanwhile he didn’t really pay attention to the bearded poet with the pockmarked face whom he happened to be talking to – no, he just said what he had to say, and if the other interjected, he squashed it immediately, and yet in the same breath he could express his admiration for him. These two – the banned poet and the writer sacked from his job – were a bit like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Inseparable. Floating around on the periphery was a third figure, evidently not a close acquaintance of theirs but someone who had presumably attached himself to them in another flat or pub or, say, at the Young Artists’ Club. There were a few such wandering figures in the night who dropped in on one party after another, without warning, without invitation, departing unexpectedly, just when, no one could say.6
On noticing Mrs Pápai, the brown-hatted young man fell at once to his knees. ‘Oh, rose of Hebron!’ he cried with a cheeky grin and yet charmingly. With dramatic flair he kissed Mrs Pápai’s hand – intimately, sincerely. Whenever Mrs Pápai entered a place, the mood somehow became more lighthearted: her exceptional beauty shone through even her tired, worn-out face. The same beauty radiated from every nook and cranny of this dilapidated, disorderly flat – from all the objects and pictures, glass vases and embroideries, books and reproductions – and it was this that the men and boys who now and again invaded the flat – mostly artists and university students, friends or casual acquaintances of Mrs Pápai’s children – could not resist, even if they had never heard of her. The legendary performances put on by Mrs Pápai’s youngest child – that girl with the bronze-red hair and resonating voice, that girl ever ready for any adventure, that girl overflowing with passion and intellect – were only excuses for their visits. But, now, even she wasn’t here.
‘Hi, Bruria,’ said the poet by way of greeting, meanwhile looking for a chair on which he might sit down, for at this time of day he was more inclined to sit than stand. There was no chair. Hastily he lit a cigarette.
Whatever s
he might otherwise have thought of them, in the eyes of Mrs Pápai, to whom art was religion, these visitors were, after all, her children’s friends, so they were saints, too, no matter what they did. Being a nurse, she did not discriminate among people. She could appreciate a joke, too. She glanced inquisitively at the third visitor, who was silent. ‘You don’t even know what Hebron is,’ Mrs Pápai said in a hushed, somewhat sad tone to the young man in the brown hat. ‘It’s an occupied Arab town.’ He wanted at once to eat his words. ‘Sorry, sorry!’ Truth be told, he was just about to say more on this sensitive topic, but, instead of speaking, his glasses gave a flash, closing their discussion before it began.
‘Péter?’
‘He’ll be here soon. He met some Italians on the street.’
‘Brits,’ the poet interjected.
‘Well, excuse me,’ said the brown-hatted boy. ‘Yes, with some Brits. It’s all the same. But they were Italians. They’re here in front of the building, and they’re singing.’
‘They were Brits,’ said the poet. ‘But he didn’t meet them here, it was at Déli railway station.’ He crushed his cigarette and lit another one.
‘All right, Brits, then. They’re Italians, but it doesn’t matter. But we’re here for his little sister. We have something important to talk to her about. Is she here?’ Without waiting for a reply, he picked up a fork and began devouring a plate full of leftover pasta. Someone’s half-finished lunch stood there on the dining table, abandoned in the middle of the flat, without the chairs. As if it was something that must be got right, he announced, his mouth full of pasta, ‘Just because they spoke English, they could have been Italians.’
‘Italians don’t even speak English,’ the poet countered.
‘I know you know everything better, but they were Italians all the same. Did you know there’s a shop in town where you can get real Parmesan?’ Suddenly he sat on the edge of the dining table, surprising even himself, as he often did. The tip of his nose had tomato sauce on it. ‘You see, it’s just this sort of thing that should appear in the Journal I have in mind,’ he said smugly. And he went on: ‘Tart and ripe Parmesan, rock-hard Parmesan, fragrant Parmesan, Umbrian and Tuscan Parmesan! But this is Trappista, our nation’s version of Port Salut. In the socialist reality that exists for us, Trappista is Parmesan.’ He added, in a stentorian voice, ‘But no big deal, we forgive you, no matter who you were, you who made this sticky pasta, you ignorant kitchen-hand from Pest.’
No Live Files Remain Page 9