by Magda Szabo
* * *
In those days I still clung stubbornly to the pattern of life I had as a girl. On major festivals I would even go to church twice, as I had done whether at home or away at boarding school. If Emerence caught sight of me at these times she would stare contemptuously as I scuttled off down the street like a guilty schoolgirl to avoid the same unvarying harangue, that people who went to church had nothing better to do. Apart from everything else, this wasn’t true, because the fact was I never had time for anything. Every night I had to make up those hours spent away from my typewriter. Writing isn’t an easy taskmaster. Sentences left unfinished never continue as well as they had begun. New ideas bend the main arch of the text, and it never again sits perfectly true.
Anyway, I managed to persuade the priest that Polett was an elderly soul with an unblemished reputation. He might at least eulogise her richly since she was being given a pauper’s burial. As it was, anyone making that last journey with her to the Farkasrét cemetery would have been pretty surprised by Emerence’s final farewell. Instead of adding a wreath to the few modest flowers, she set a pot of flowering geraniums tied with a cream-white funeral ribbon in pride of place beneath the urn. It bore the message: Here loneliness ends. May you rest in peace. Emerence. The urn was of the cheapest sort, the grave badly sited, the mourners few, and the service quickly over. We went off to visit the graves of people we knew, but Emerence stayed there, in front of the little plaque, while they sealed up the urn. Some time later, as we strolled towards the exit, we met her again. She had obviously just concluded her own private obsequies. Her eyes were full of tears, her lips swollen. I’d never seen her so utterly crushed.
That evening, she came for Viola. The dog was as depressed as she was. There was none of his usual jumping around for joy at a walk. When she brought him back she sent him off to his blanket, and he went to sleep without protest. I was sorting out a cupboard, but turned to face her when she called out:
“Have you ever killed an animal?”
I said I had never killed anything.
“You will. You’ll put Viola down. You’ll have him injected, when the time comes. Try to understand. When the sands run out for someone, don’t stop them going. You can’t give them anything to replace life. Do you think I didn’t love Polett? That it meant nothing to me when she’d had enough and wanted out? It’s just that, as well as love, you also have to know how to kill. It won’t do you any harm to remember that. Ask your God — since you’re on such good terms with him — what Polett told him when they finally met.”
I shook my head. Why was she always getting at me? This was hardly the time for silly banter.
“I loved Polett,” she repeated. “I don’t know why I bother telling you what I just have. You’re so stupid you haven’t understood me yet again. If I hadn’t loved her, I would have stopped her. When I shout at people they listen. She avoided me because she knew that if she disobeyed me she’d be in trouble. Do you think anyone else told me stories about Paris, and the cemetery where they always take flowers for some woman; and the place where the Emperor is buried so that you have to look down to see him? Who else but Polett could tell me things like that, while she still saw some point in living? How else could I have thanked her for teaching me so many things? When I saw that she was beyond help, I had to give her the courage to have the last word herself, rather than someone else, or the ever-increasing misery, the pain in her spine, and the constant humiliation.
“Sutu never really liked her. She looked down on her, because of all that had happened to her. I haven’t told you about this — it hardly matters now, poor thing — but one of her ancestors was some sort of thief or criminal, who finished up on the scaffold. The whole family were on the run. They emigrated, and that’s how they ended up in Hungary. Polett wasn’t ashamed of it, she talked about it openly. Only, Adélka kept on and on about what sort of people they were. I don’t know what she’s got to be so proud of — her father did time for a stabbing, and for breaking and entering. They didn’t string him up, but he wasn’t that much better than Polett’s relation. When she heard that he’d had his head cut off, Adélka just laughed. But she’s stupid as a pumpkin, and she didn’t like Polett’s stories either. She’s killed enough chickens, she should have grasped that if you do it right the head comes off straightaway — you don’t have to hack it off. Polett swore that her ancestor wasn’t a criminal, it was just politics that brought him here. They got caught up in it and carried away. I believed her, and so did Sutu, because there really are people like that. How many innocent people have been killed here in Hungary? When I was only a girl, engaged to the baker, they didn’t just cut his head off, they tore him limb from limb. You don’t believe me? Well don’t, then. The mob ripped him apart. He hadn’t done anything wrong. All he did was open the shop after the commanding officer ordered him not to sell bread to anyone but the soldiers. But he felt sorry for the people, so he shared out the bread, but they didn’t believe him when he said it was all gone, so they dragged him out and killed him. They tore him apart, like a loaf of bread. When the mob sorts you out, it takes a while. It’s a slow death.
“Well, I’m off now. I wanted to tell you this. If I had a bed, I’d lie down on it tonight, for once. But ever since they got the young people out, and Éva was rescued, and the Grossman grandparents drank cyanide and I found them dead in their bed, I’ve only been able to sleep in an armchair or in the lovers’ seat. So, g’night. Don’t give Viola anything more to eat. He’s scoffed quite enough already.”
I sat out on the balcony overlooking the garden, gazing at the flowers and the sky. In the fragrant evening, time stood still, the silence was absolute. Polett the Huguenot. The baker Emerence was to marry. Gradually they settled into my consciousness, alongside the unknown Grossman grandparents, whose nerves could no longer take Hitler. The chickens at the foot of the guillotine, watching how death happens. A pervading smell of yeast.
Emerence never referred to the baker again, but years later I saw his picture on the dressmaker’s dummy. It took me a while to work out who it was.
POLITICS
Emerence never spoke of Polett again. It was as if she had never existed. She, on the other hand, spent more time with us than ever. I think she would have preferred to be only with us, and with us all the time. The bond between us — produced by forces almost impossible to define — was in every way like love, though it required endless concessions for us to accept each other. In her eyes, any work that didn’t involve bodily strength and use of the hands was loafing, little better than a conjuring trick. I had always recognised physical achievements, but had never rated them above mental ones, and if ever in the course of my life the philosophy of Jean Giono had prevailed too strongly, those years of the Personality Cult would have freed me from its influence. Books formed the basis of my world, my unit of measure was the printed word, but I didn’t think of it as the one salvation, as she considered her standard to be. Without consciously arriving at the concept herself, or being aware of and using the phrase “anti-intellectual”, she was the thing itself, an anti-intellectual. Her feelings allowed her to admit a few exceptions, but her idea of a professional person was of a ruling class of gentlemen in suits. As far as she was concerned, anyone who didn’t finish a job with his own hands, but had someone else do it instead, qualified for the term. This applied equally to the past as to the present, when fresh upheavals in the social order were creating an upper echelon of the rich and powerful. Her own father, who at the turn of the century had been a well-to-do craftsman, she thought of as working with his hands because she had a fixed image of him surrounded by wood shavings, despite the fact that he owned a house and land, a store of valuable timber and expensive tools. Not for the world would the old woman have uttered that shameful word, “bourgeois”, but she was the embodiment of what it stood for. The countless places she had worked in had taught her fine manners but had done nothing for her mental outlook. In her eyes, men who didn�
��t handle tools, however important their function — the Lieutenant Colonel was an exception, he kept order — were all parasites; and their women, whatever fine phrases they might embroider their speech with, just empty mouths needing to be fed.
At first, I was included among them. Emerence looked with suspicion on every piece of paper, every brochure, every book or writing desk. It wasn’t that she didn’t know Marx; she never read anything, not even a newspaper. I believe she tried to look down on us too, as chronically work-shy, but living alongside us somehow undermined her, something softened her hostility the moment she crossed our doorstep. She seemed to have persuaded herself that what we were pounding away on was a machine of sorts, and that there was some small merit in the way we earned our bread.
This anti-intellectualism hadn’t prevented her from seizing job opportunities that arose out of political changes which gave her line of work a rarity value and guaranteed her complete security. From each of her employers she had learned something, without altering her opinion of any of them. She glanced at our books for only as long as it took to dust them. Things she’d learned by rote in her three years of elementary school had long vanished from her head, under the laval flow of time, and one verse remained, the Mother’s Day greeting. Her literary instruction, since that moment at the farmyard well, had been shaped by her various employers, and by life itself. The decades of her life in Hungary had exposed her only to the rhetoric she so hated, and which had drained away any interest she might have had in poetry. By the time she might have heard something different, she had lost the desire to enrich her mind. They had torn the baker to pieces during the Aster Revolution and then, as she told me later, the hero of her great love had vanished before her eyes and his worthless successor had robbed her. Emerence never knew that in some ways she had reached the same position as Captain Butler in Gone with the Wind. Like the unscrupulous hero of that novel, she had no wish to lay her heart on the line, not for anyone or anything. After the Second World War a limitless horizon lay open before her. She could have cut herself as large a slice as she wanted. She had a good, coolly analytical mind, and her logic was flawless. But she had no wish to cultivate or advance herself, or work for the collective good, whether by obeying directives or joining in campaigns. She made her own decisions about what steps she would take and why, how far she would take them, and for whom. So she remained in the sphere of christening bowls and multicoloured cats. She never read the papers, or listened to the news, and the word “politics” was banned from her world. No tears came to her eyes, and no self-conscious quaverings filled her voice if she chanced to utter the word “Hungary”.
Emerence was the sole inhabitant of her empire-of-one, more absolute than the Pope in Rome. At times her total indifference to the wider public life led to some lively scenes between us, and a stranger who witnessed us might have thought we were performing a cabaret. On one such occasion, though my family goes back to the Árpáds, I was endeavouring — driven almost to tears with rage — to persuade her of the significance of everything that had happened in Hungary since the war, the redistribution of land, and how the working class — her class, not mine — now had endless opportunities opening up for them. Emerence replied that she knew the peasant mentality; her own family were peasants. They didn’t care a straw who bought their eggs and their cream so long as it made them rich. The worker would fight for his rights only until he became the boss. She wasn’t interested in the proletarian masses (she didn’t use the word, but she described the thing), and above all she hated the idle, lying gentry. Priests were liars; doctors ignorant and money-grabbing; lawyers didn’t care who they represented, victim or criminal; engineers calculated in advance how to keep back a pile of bricks for their own houses; and the huge plants, factories and institutes of learning were all filled with crooks.
By now we were really shouting at each other; myself, like Robespierre, representing the power of the people — although it was in those years that they were doing their best to drive me to the point where I could no longer work, and send me to the ghetto I’d been assigned to with my husband (who had himself been so harassed and humiliated he couldn’t work at all) in hopes I might decide just to go away, either by changing what I did or the way I lived, or by leaving the country; though it was only my rage that kept me on my feet, rage because I had always known that the people harassing me were concerned only with their own shabby little careers; but I clung to the thought that the country was still writhing in the pangs of birth, it couldn’t help the fact that such dishonourable midwives had been sent to its bedside, or that it had brought forth a world of Sparafuciles, placing power in hands so filthy they would have been cut off in St László’s day because their owners were worse than thieves, people who decade after decade had robbed the country of all credit.
Despite her years, Emerence too had all those opportunities, or at least she did have at the time of the Great Change; but she had nothing but scorn for the twists and turns of history, and told the party “educators” to their faces that she didn’t want speeches from anyone, on any subject. The place for sermons was in church; she’d been set to work as a cook when still a child, and no-one asked her then if she minded; by the age of thirteen she was a menial in Budapest, so her visitor could go straight back where he’d come from, and he could start by getting off her porch; she worked for her living with her hands, not her mouth, like the propagandists, and she didn’t have time to listen to rubbish. When the real crackdown came, it was a miracle that she wasn’t locked up. There was something monstrous, deformed, in the contempt she heaped on everything. Those propagandists must have lived through the most agonising moments of their lives when Emerence acquainted them with her political philosophy. In her view Horthy, Hitler, Rákosi and Charles IV were all exactly the same. The fact was that whoever happened to be in power gave the orders, and anyone giving orders, whoever it was, whenever, and whatever the order, did it in the name of some incomprehensible gobbledegook. Whoever was on top, however promising, and whether he was on top in her own interests or not, they were all the same, all oppressors. In Emerence’s world there were two kinds of people, those who swept and those who didn’t, and everything flowed from that. It made no difference under which slogans or flags they staged national holidays. There was no force that could overcome Emerence. The propagandist, shocked to the depths of his heart, gave her a wide berth thereafter. She couldn’t be fended off or stopped in her tracks; he couldn’t take a familiar or friendly line with her, or even make simple conversation. She was fearless, enchantingly and wickedly clever, brazenly impudent. No-one ever managed to persuade her that even if one granted the absurd distinction she insisted on, that merit depended on whether one swept or not, it was up to her alone whether she wanted to join those who didn’t sweep themselves but got others to sweep for them, because now, in 1945, the state was offering her that choice. Her final trump card, if all else failed, was to play the poor old lady for whom things of this world had become too much, and stare dreamily into space, as if it had all come too late for her. The hopeful young activist would insist: “All roads are still open to you, my dear madam. You come from peasant stock; how could it be too late for you? They’ll take you off to study, or send someone here to explain where you should present yourself. They’ll assess your aptitudes, which are clearly exceptional. You’ll catch up in no time at all. You’ll qualify, and be an educated person.” Educated? That was the torch that ignited the oil-well of her anti-intellectualism. Those exceptional qualities of mind became instantly apparent when she gave vent to her hatred of the written word. She was an orator of real stature, a natural.
Emerence could barely read. Her writing was crabbed. Addition and subtraction she managed with painful difficulty, and they were the only arithmetical skills she retained. Her memory, on the other hand, worked like a computer. On hearing the radio or television blaring out of people’s windows, if the tone was positive she immediately contradicted it, if ne
gative, she praised it. She had no idea where any particular place might be found in the world, but she related news to me about various governments with impeccable pronunciation, reeling off the names of statesmen, Hungarian and foreign, and always with a comment: “They want peace. Do you believe that? I don’t, because who then will buy the guns, and what pretext will they have for hanging and looting? And anyway, if there’s never been world peace before, why should it happen now?” She dismayed the representatives of a number of women’s groups when they tried to get her to their meetings, or at least shake her hostile indifference. The street committee and the local council treated her as an Act of God, and the priest was entirely in agreement. Emerence was a born Mephisto, utterly perverse. I once told her that if she hadn’t fought non-stop against the opportunities she’d been offered, she might have been our first woman ambassador or prime minister; she had more sense and intelligence than the entire Academy of Sciences. “Good,” she said. “It’s a pity I don’t know what an ambassador does. The only thing I want is the crypt. Just leave me in peace, and don’t try to educate me. I know quite enough already. I wish I knew less. Those who want something from the country are welcome to have it, since you tell me it’s so full of opportunities. I don’t need anyone or anything. Understand that once and for all.”