The young man in the brown hat had said this in a slightly pontifical tone, absolving the unknown cook from Pest of his sins. Next, after licking the plate, he pulled a half-full bottle of red wine from the pocket of his jacket and placed it on the table. He pulled out the cork with his teeth, picked up a glass from the table – once a mustard jar, it seemed – and, after swishing some suspect liquid from it, poured himself a glass of wine. ‘I hate to drink from a bottle,’ he said playfully, as if someone had asked him. He then gulped down the wine and grimaced. ‘Bulgarian. Lousy.’
‘Excuse me,’ the poet said, bowing towards Mrs Pápai like a true gentleman. He crushed his cigarette on a plate and vanished through a door.
They were standing in a rather strange space in the heart of the flat. It was to Mrs Pápai’s credit that, towards the end of the Sixties, the walls in the middle of the flat had been torn down – through her own heroic efforts, with loose change scraped together and loans begged from all manner of people and places. They had done away with the always dark, narrow hallway to create one large space. Gone, too, was the wall which had coyly hidden the toilet and the laundry basket and, in part, the bathroom. The flat was suddenly denuded, its mystique stripped away, with quite a few unintended consequences. All of the remaining rooms – the two smaller rooms, the biggest room, the toilet and the bathroom – all opened onto this single space. Since they had cunningly lopped off even a corner of the kitchen, the result was a rather attractive space in the middle of the flat where a dining table had been put. But, because no money had been left to replace the green-and-white stone-tile kitchen floor with parquet, a little stage of sorts, a couple of centimetres higher than the main floor, had been created in front of the kitchen. If someone had something important to say, or felt as if no one was paying attention – and this regularly happened amid the cacophony that so often erupted here – he or she stepped onto that stage and took to loudly making himself or herself heard. Traces of the razed walls stretched along the floor, like wounds. The new kitchen wall had been put up crookedly by a drunk builder, giving the impression that the whole space was wobbling, and with it the whole flat, just as in the Budapest earthquake of ’56. By the kitchen was a protruding section of wall – a bricked-up chimney, that is, on which the hole for the stovepipe was still visible, stuffed with newspaper. A small cast-iron stove had stood once under that hole: in the Fifties, during the great colds, it was heated with coal brought up from the cellar. The kids had sat around it while they were being deloused, on little chairs made by their uncle, their scalps burning and their hair smelling of kerosene, and when darkness came, off they went, shivering, teeth chattering, and crawled under their great big goose-down quilts. During power cuts, which were frequent, they lit shiny oil lamps. They lived like nomads, wandering from one room to another in the increasingly cramped flat. The two girls were in the corner room, the two boys were right by the entrance, and the parents were in the biggest room; or, rather, this was how it was supposed to be, but it was not long before everyone was moving from one room to another. In a flash of inspiration, Pápai one fine day commandeered one of the smaller rooms for himself, for he wanted to work, to write an earth-shattering novel, or else he happened to be translating some book, whether about the history of China or the biography of Paul Robeson.
No, the flat was always in disarray.
One day, someone, thinking it was funny, had written ‘WC’ on a door, in big crimson letters, saving guests the trouble of asking. Behind the above-mentioned door at this moment the poet happened to be emitting monstrous belches, and moaning and groaning and sighing with relief: for a while nothing else could be heard. The guy in the brown hat, still sitting on the table, burst into shrill laughter.
The doors of the huge, chipboard closets built into the wall after the renovation had warped dramatically, and the clothes and bed linen piled up in great disorder inside gathered dust on what were, by now, slightly crooked shelves. Mrs Pápai hadn’t lived here for a long time. Citing her workers’ movement past, she acquired – at the cost of, as she was apt to say, ‘crawling on my bloodied belly’ – a three-room flat in a tower block at the other end of the city.7 Whoever stayed, stayed; whoever went, went.
Before long, another five or so guests arrived, but Péter was not among them. She wanted to speak to him about his passport application. Her two boys were to travel together to the land of their ancestors. A complicated matter. As for her daughter, because of a trip she had made that was deemed illegal, her passport had been revoked, and when she had refused to answer questions on being stopped one night and asked for her ID, the police had sprained her arm. Mrs Pápai had had to get her a new passport. She had arranged this with the local Party committee, but then the passport bureau issued an order revoking it again. She had to talk to them in person. She couldn’t understand why they didn’t understand.
* * *
At just about the same time, some eight hundred metres away as the crow flies, still in Buda but on the far side of Castle Hill, before the wondering eyes of Mrs Pápai’s younger son, Botticelli’s Venus lay on a wrinkled bedsheet – on a creaky, folk-Baroque wooden bed with a mattress that sagged in the middle – in the person of a blonde, radiantly beautiful Polish girl. The two were lolling about upstairs in this two-storey flat, the front door of which was never locked, just like that of the Forgács home, and anyone could come at any time and cut a slice from the dry loaf of bread that was invariably to be found on the kitchen worktop. The flat was in the throes of artistic disorder: children’s clothes drying on a taut length of twine; dog-eared novels that had been through a thousand hands; unrinsed tea cups; an open jar of peach jam with a spoon inside; an ashtray full of cigarette butts on a little Biedermeier desk with cracked marquetry and one of its graceful legs supported by a brick; an enamelled Parisian street sign beside a grandfather clock; Mozart and Schubert scores tossed about; the collected works of Marx and Engels on top of the wardrobe; family photos; children’s drawings; glass beads scattered about on the floor; an upright piano splotched with candle wax; a high-backed chair with just one armrest; a baroque sofa; and tubular-steel folding chairs. The group that frequented this flat was more or less the same one that could be found at the other flat – people who, as it emerges from the reports, 8 often crossed paths on the same night in various places in the city; because, with just one or two exceptions, public venues closed by 10.00 p.m.
Without becoming distracted for too long by this scene, it must be said that for a while now the words spoken most frequently in the bed in this flat were Tak czy nie?, and they referred to the boy’s willingness to penetrate the girl’s dewy loins. Tak czy nie? – Yes or no? The girl laughed, and they kissed yet again, for a long, long time. The girl’s breasts were slightly splayed, and she produced marijuana from a red leather bag hanging around her neck, and they smoked it, and it scratched at the boy’s throat and he had a coughing fit – but that’s all that happened. The phone rang a few times but they didn’t answer it. Finally they smoothed out the wrinkled bedsheet under their bottoms and pulled the prickly blanket over them, but it was too early, sleep eluded them, and when nothing better came to mind, they turned off the light, and then the wooden stairs leading to the second floor gave a creak.
A couple of days earlier, Mrs Pápai’s older son had picked up a Polish girl at the Castle Hill tunnel. About ten minutes later she was sitting in that flat at the foot of the hill in the crossfire of three happy, laughing faces: offering her food and drink, they gazed at this waif who’d wandered in and who sparkled like a flower’s dewy petal, and who by that night had moved in with them. She was given a room of her own, because Mrs Pápai’s older son had to leave on a trip that very night, freeing up some space, and so – unthinkingly, as it would turn out – entrusted his siblings with the bounty, leaving her with them as if handing his possessions in at a train station’s left luggage office, to watch over her until his return. And now, on returning, because he couldn’t
find her anywhere, he ransacked the whole town in search of the girl while his sister just shrugged and his brother had vanished without a trace. He tenaciously kept up his inquisition, question after question, until a strange presentiment led him to open the door of that forlorn flat, where, on the second floor, he was greeted by a certain image: the two of them, naked, a blanket drawn up to their chins.
On the top step he froze, petrified, before retreating to a deep couch, where he broke down and started to cry. He was more sensitive than people realized. One of the times when Mrs Pápai had crawled on her bloodied belly9 occurred because of him: his mother turned right away to the highest authority, the country’s all-powerful cultural czar, György Aczél, but this time in vain. The older brother could not know that it was only with the help of his inventive and worldly sister that his little brother, mocked publicly so often for being unversed in matters pertaining to the female sex, had been blessed with this undeserved miracle. Blood and tears and games. But what a good little sister she was.10
* * *
People kept arriving at the Attila Street flat, making themselves at home around the dining table, fetching chairs from the largest room. Some brought food, too, or a bottle of wine. Sitting in the armchair, springs bulging through its cover, was the taciturn poet, a bottle of Soviet vodka within reach. Practically all of him that could be seen from behind the table were his black eyes, since for some mysterious reason someone had sawn the armchair’s legs in half. He produced a shot glass from a trouser pocket.
There was no theatrical performance announced for that evening, but this didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be one – as if a performance might be summoned by the arrival of an audience. At times something happened, at times nothing – any random event could be called theatre, if only because an audience of acceptable size had gathered. Occasionally twenty or thirty visitors would occupy the flat, young and old: grey-haired or bald venerable-looking gentlemen, beatniks, bohemians, high school students, freshly released convicts and writers who’d had novels published in the West, actors, directors, college girls and fanatically religious mums with several children who earned their living as nude models at the College of Visual Arts. They dispersed about the rooms or else fell into spirited debate around the table near the front door about events shrouded in a milky fog: about Party decrees; police matters; a banned book that had been smuggled into the country; or the latest Bergman film. About everything at once, without stopping to take a breath. Great loves were born between midnight and dawn, and great fights erupted and then suddenly died out. Two girls read aloud a letter that had arrived by some secret route from Paris,11 while a boy went about the flat with his camera taking pictures from various angles, paying meticulous attention to ensure that the shots were symmetrical.
It must be added that not one of the flat’s residents was home, but no one seemed bothered by this.
It was already past midnight when – standing in the moonlight in front of this dark building on Attila Street, his arm wrapped around the slender waist of the Polish girl – the boy gave a whistle in the hope of luring someone to a window who might throw down a key with which to unlock the building’s front door. Meanwhile he kept murmuring into the dreamy girl’s ear, like some silver-tongued tour guide. Squatting down by one of the grated basement windows, they peeked inside: it was like a dungeon, a torture chamber. On the third floor, the windows were bright yellow. Perhaps it was because of all the hubbub up there that they hadn’t heard the boy’s call. Utter silence fell upon Tabán – this was the neighbourhood’s name – and the only car on Attila Street at this hour, a police car, slowed but then moved on. At any minute some neighbour might glance outside and chase them away.
‘You see,’ the boy said to the girl as the two of them stared into that dark basement window, ‘this was the washing room where my mum washed our things by hand once a week. And look!’ – he looked up high – ‘In the Second World War an aeroplane smacked right into this building and got stuck. I used to dream about it. It was flown by some poor German Fritz who took off in Vienna and was shot down just before making it to the so-called Field of Blood nearby. People came from all over town to admire the plane. What a sight!’
On 5 February 1945, one week before the taking of Buda Castle, a DSF-230 glider smashed into the block of flats next door to the bodyguards’ barracks. Much to the wonder of the neighbourhood’s residents, the plane’s tail and part of its fuselage protruded from the building for quite some time. The first item of interest found by those daring to emerge from their basements as the siege abated – found under the collapsed roof of a flat above Attila Boulevard – was the severed head of the young German pilot, which rolled onto the parquet the moment someone managed to open the cockpit using an axe. The pilot’s hand was still gripping the handle of the ejector seat. But the residents’ terror soon turned to delight when, in the DSF-230’s cramped storage space, they found several sacks of frozen potatoes, which the glider had been delivering to the German and Hungarian soldiers defending the castle. Along with other such gliders, which could carry nine men, this one had taken off in Vienna with the aim of landing on the nearby Field of Blood, as that military training field was called.
Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of umbel;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence.
The girl was the first to recite a poem, something by Mickiewicz, to prove to the boy that no lovelier language existed in the world than Polish. As for the boy, the lines above, from Arthur Rimbaud, were all that came to mind. Even as he spoke them, someone looked out the window and flung down the key, which, miraculously, he managed to catch.
* * *
It happened much earlier that one of the guests, who behaved in a somewhat furtive manner – a young man with delicate features and a sardonic smile who once upon a time had had flings with both of the resident sisters, which meant he had visited this flat back in the days when the parents lived here – had glanced over at the surly-looking poet, who kept taking disciplined sips from his drink, while lighting one cigarette after another. The guest with the sardonic smile had felt quite at home here running up the spiral staircase, as he did when he came to visit his own parents, who had had sharp disputes both between themselves and with the Pápais. While the parents argued, he’d given the works of Mao Zedong to the boys and seduced the girls. So this sardonic young man, on seeing the poet – who sat there with one of his groupies at his feet, a hard-to-acquire orange in her upturned palm – summoned the poet with a subtle nod of his head to join him in the girls’ room, which was beyond the bathroom and the view from which was obscured by a large chestnut tree. In autumn 1956 this window had been smashed by shrapnel ricocheting off the castle wall, precisely at the moment when Pápai, hungry for news, having returned to the flat from the cellar, leaned down to turn off the radio he’d turned on a couple of minutes earlier. The poet rose clumsily out of his chair, bottle of vodka, ashtray, lit cigarette and shot glass in one hand – a spectacle worthy of a circus act – while with the index finger of his other hand he exhorted his groupie, who was about to spring up after him, not to follow. To their astonishment, in the girls’ room they found, on the unmade bed with a bra in place of the pillow – under a Christ-ridiculing Bosch painting depicting evil faces and a self-portrait by Van Gogh embroidered with thick cotton threads (the incomparable work of the previously mentioned sister with bronze-red hair, a work that radiated sunlight) – a film director with brawny arms and a Buddha’s repose, as if he had been lounging there for centuries, toying with a woman’s headband woven through with strands of hair and simultaneously reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, who did not even bother to look up at the two conspiratorial gentlemen. Whether the director could see much in the dim light was debatable, but not out of the question. He was humming something to himself as an India
n sitar droned from a record player, so the gentlemen tactfully avoided switching on the light, and instead removed themselves, discreetly, over to the open window that looked out onto the chestnut tree, and spoke in hushed tones about a topic of concern only to themselves – namely, the forthcoming issue of a samizdat publication edited by them. The gas lamps were already lit on Váralja Street.
Meanwhile, Mrs Pápai had disappeared.
In the girls’ room, to the measured beat of a clay drum (which Pápai had brought home from one of his Middle Eastern trips, perhaps from Cairo), amid thick clouds of marijuana smoke that swirled in the air behind the window, which had been closed to muffle the sound, and surrounded by a sea of glowing faces, the two sons danced, like two Indians or two Arabs, sweat pouring from them. Around and around they twirled, in some unknown tribal dance, faces red-hot, as their little sister, under the window, wildly beat the clay drum. Across from her, sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, the blonde Polish girl gazed dreamily at the two brothers, who – their backs rigid, their feet bare, their motions strange – yielding to some unfamiliar force, pounding their feet hard upon the floor, circled each other.
Their mother never did find them.
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