My great-grandfather’s name, common in that narrow edge of north-east England, was the first I saw written on a house-door in Norway. But the coast town, small, quiet, in those days isolated and sound, not yet thumb-marked by vulgar wishes, where I was born and lived — yes, that at least was a life — was a Danish settlement, built over the charred wood of the huts they burned when they landed from their long ships. My remote ancestors then were Danes, and no very pleasant people. Nearer at hand, my father, a master mariner, my mother daughter of a shipowner, kept a certain coldness and harshness, not always in reserve. As for me, I am polite, deceitful, warmhearted, cold, unfeeling, betrayed by my strong feelings, placid, cat-nervous, etc. etc. A proper Northman.
*
Budapest stinks of violence and death. I almost believe that behind this façade of deep quick-flowing river, dolomitic hill, palace, superb street fronting the Danube, restlessly crowded cafés, is a vent from the cruelty rising in Europe. Abominably, the stones exude the smell of cruelty and violence. Nowhere else, not even in the Vienna I left yesterday, is it so much part of the air, bright, massive, of July, one breathes. Yet I do not feel that it is this town which will be murdered; nor that it is exhausted — there are seeds in this Danube country. It is more as if all the fresh cruelties gathering first in Berlin, then in Vienna, tomorrow where? in Prague?, had collected here in a stale stagnant pool. Strange — and not frightening. The blind creature in me, groping, which touches something wet under its fingers feeling along the wall, tastes it, and finds it salt and warm, may be afraid, but I don’t feel her trembling. Why need I? A shadow has nothing to be afraid of. What am I in Budapest except the farthest edge of a shadow, thrown by a life rooted at the other side of a continent and a cold sea?
There is no mistaking what it is one smells here — nor the after-taste of the finest bread I have ever eaten. Your perfect bread, my dear and handsome city, your admirable strong coffee, have the taste, when they have been swallowed, of cruelty and hatred.
How is it that I recognise it so quickly?
*
Each time I cross the courtyard, the wife of the porter makes friendly signs from her doorstep. She is a big woman, shapeless: her broad face with its high cheek-bones and dark narrow eyes, has been worn to a curious smoothness by life; her lips fold with a cynical good-humour all the secrets, discreditable to them, she keeps about other people. Nothing now will surprise her, not even an act of goodness and self-sacrifice. She refuses to quarrel with her bad-tempered husband: not that she has any fear of him, but her warm lazy blood has turned in her to a tolerance so lax that it is not even a virtue. Yesterday I saw her sitting, hands in her lap, looking across the river to Pest. Her smile, the soft amplitude of her body, were waiting calmly for anything the sewer-vent pours out. Nothing, unless it harms her family, can disturb them. When I was talking to her, in the sign language we use — she has a vocabulary of signs springing from her endlessly: a movement of her thumb, casual but deep image of her life, says infinitely more than a’ volley of words rebounding from its surface — a thin pregnant cat jumped on to her lap. Her fingers exploring, stroking its body, she talked to it in thick sly glances, sharing with it and me some appalling joke about our habit of conceiving and giving birth. Then with an effort — she had a few words of French — she said, “Je crois — quatre et pour cette nuit — ” in a voice which set in motion all the notes of a chord and abruptly muted them.
This morning when I came downstairs she was waiting for me in the yard. In one hand she held the stick she uses to wash clothes. She held up four fingers of the other, then covered her eyes, smiling; and slowly, like a Fate, poked the stick downwards four times.
*
She has two children, and indulges them as if they were grown up, only smiling when they behave badly. This being so, how am I to explain what I have just seen with my own eyes — or I would not believe? The little girl was playing in the open door of their room, springing and crouching with one arm stretched out. Her hand suddenly caught and swept on to the floor a cup which fell in pieces. The blood ran to her face. She was rigid for a moment, then with a movement as quick as the thought she pushed her brother, still almost a baby, and made him sit on the floor near the broken cup, giving him a stick to hold. She was barely in time. Her mother came back into the room, lifted the infant, and began with her laugh shaking her body to caress and scold him.
The other child as she watched was half sullen, half betrayed by her curiosity. Clearly she was still held fast by the moment in which her body and mind had acted together like an animal. But why the act? Where did the impulse come from? Her mother would have laughed at the accident. Vanity? Pride, was it? In a little girl of four? Or must I find treachery among our roots? But treachery is surely fear? — of what? … Suddenly, from the most obscure depths of my own life, a confused image of myself, my own brother, and some childish betrayal. The first? Probably not.
Two men who were crossing the courtyard had seen. They laughed, and one nudged the other. It was clear that they were seeing a quite different event from the one I had watched … and seen in it myself. And yet not seen. I can’t go back over the road I came by; I can’t reach to or remember the first tiny movement of fear and treachery, turning in the same instant to cruelty. And I have never moved away from it and cannot escape.
I walked, half closing my eyes in the warm heavy light, out of the courtyard, and looked for a place still in shadow where I could stand a minute. For some reason I found it an effort to breathe. Something, which has been growing in me since I was a child, with every breath, drawing its sap from all the veins and nerves of my life, had broken suddenly into a new and quite monstrous flower. It choked me. I felt it pushing against the roots of my eyes, tongue, nostrils. All the earlier and greener shoots of this tree of fear — the fear of being whipped, fear of losing or of being lost, of mockery, failure, of death, and the fear, until now seeming their only and sterile seed, of war — pressed up into this stifling growth. Their ferment rose in it; they had only, in their several shapes, prefigured it; perhaps each stamen of the new flower was one of them: but it was not like them, it had scarcely sprung up and I felt that it had always been there and like itself. I might turn to look at any moment of a past not my own, become any of the dead women in me — I should still be stifled by the feeling born in my mind this moment.
It occurred to me as I stood with my hand on the low wall that I could be killed by it. I made a movement to turn away. It was slight, almost unnoticeable, but I had made it, in the so brief instant when the image came into my mind of the café where with a newspaper — doubtfully, the waiter would offer me first the German papers, then the single French one he had — and cups of coffee with cream, I should spend the morning.
I had no idea where it would lead. Have I evaded something or accepted? All I know, and without words, is that a climax has been reached, and a decision — to accept or turn aside — taken. Which?
The stones, under my hand, were warm.
*
Though I have come so far, it is not to escape. In the middle years you can’t: life takes up less and less room and the past more, in the glass the traveller carries, one glass holding both. This morning I was drinking my coffee in the shabby café near the Francis-Joseph bridge when the church bells began to ring in English. At once, behind, under, over them the bells rang of the Parish Church of St. Mary in the air thinner and clearer than this, and a hundred and ninety-nine steps led from the harbour to the top of the cliff; my mother and I climbed them, slowly, turning half-way to look down at the harbour and the roofs, and up towards the church on the cliff edge, its roof (made by ships’ carpenters) and windows like the windows of cabins, the stone ship with its full cargo. The colour of this July sky paled, the air was filled with light flung back from the absent sea, it widened and flew upward with the gulls; without my willing it or hoping for it — I was not asked — the North Sea flowed over the waters of the Danube, bringing seaweed
to mark the tide. Her life is not continued, except for this phantom always out of reach, in mine which flows back through hers: I am not always sure which past I am touching. The endless summer days between cliff and sea are mine, the Grass of Parnassus is mine, and the return, shoes heavy with sand, mine. But the dyed Easter eggs, red, yellow, purple, and the voice echoing in the room with three windows — O dem golden slippers, and The Spanish cavalier sat under a tree. . . and if I should fall. . . fell for my co-un-tree and thee, love: …? What young woman stands in the frosty darkness pointing out to a child the magnificence of the Christmas shops, such small shops and glorious in their tinsel, and whose is this child’s heart excited by the miracle? The shuttlecock is mine, and it was I who copied and painted birds from the great bird book on to ostrich eggs, the smooth coarse surface warmed by my hand. But the tunes worn so thin they are almost tuneless? Hers, but who gave them to her? And whose, brought by this tide chilling silently the Danube, is this deep unappeased grief?
It is better not to go back, but to remember as it was the path along the top of the cliff— see, there are no houses like a mouth full of rotten teeth opening in the fields, there is only the springing turf at the edge, or the hay drying, and in May the bushes of yellow broom. . . . I am going to get you some. You will hold it with the absorbed pleasure you take from a beautiful thing, as though you are giving yourself a reward for having so long put up with what you knew was poor. . . . Here is the road to the pier — don’t say: Where are the mooring-posts? or notice what has eaten away the face of the pier houses. That tall old building has become — what you see. But, if I take you, you will come at the head of the stone staircase to the long wide room filled with books, with many windows, each with a table for readers, which look over the lower harbour, over the masts of boats, to the Parish Church: as you see, the librarian has a pulpit very like the pulpit of a church, and on cool days the fireplace holds a good fire where the oldest subscribers can sit to warm their hands; the rest must warm them at the books. A child is taking out the first Jungle Book and an old man three volumes of Froude. Don’t look any longer: I may not be able to keep the mirror empty for these to reflect in it — see, their breath clouds it — nor the quietness brushing with a gloved hand the edges of the shelves. And do not try, when you leave, to buy jet — it is paltry stuff now — until I have shown you what fine work filled these shops you can see only if you keep closely behind my eyes. I’ll take you further, to the toyshop not there, the small rooms honeycombed with shelves and every shelf crammed with toys, the cell-like drawers dripping toys, the rows of dolls’ heads, the hoops and skipping-ropes, and the beads for threading. The child touches them, and walks quickly up the steep staircase to the vanished upper room, then down into the narrow street, in the half-dark where the light crosses the light from the past.
Images follow the exile because no one else would trouble to keep them. Who else wants a wooden paling, covered by wind-beaten briars? Or would rather sit, shivering a little, in the cool north-east summer evening, listening to music played out of doors from an open bandstand, than covered in by walls sit thigh by thigh with other degenerates?
Is it only now, here, in Central Europe waiting to flow back when the bell stops, that I have you? Only when, the Danube becoming the North Sea, life becomes all memory? And all, all, the streets, the sea-weathered wood, the toys, the sand under the bare feet, lead to the same figure, the same voice under the voices, the same, and endlessly broken, silence. Which of us takes the steep street from the bridge, you who died and are now living, or I your still living child who is dead? Neither of us makes a sound, neither is noticed — except by this cool light darkening the roofs, and this horizon the colour of the sea.
*
When I was young I used to tell the others endless fairy tales. The price to them was three deeds a day. They did, three times, what I asked them. In return, I continued the saga. Quite suddenly I lost the knack. That must have been when I began reading the novels which came into the house, four or five a week: my mother glanced through them and sent them back; it was I who read them. How stupid parents are. If they must read the popular novels of their day, why can’t they at least keep them from their children as carefully as they would any other poison?
Today it was very hot. I sat — as always drinking more coffee than I should: after the second or third cup my heart beats frantically, like a metronome; I rather enjoy the sensation — drowsily, at the iron table, and watched the Danube moving, grey, massive, between its walls. It covers up its secrets — from the days when children were sacrificed to it as a god until now when last night’s suicide disappears as quickly as all those Jewish bodies, old and young, tumbled into it a few years ago. The sun’s paw, covered by cloud, was quite murderous this morning; I felt it drawn through my flesh to the nerves. I was almost asleep and did not at first realise that I was telling myself one of those forgotten tales. This is it, as I wrote it on the dingy sheet of paper the waiter gave me from his pocket.
It began with a girl, naturally a princess, sleeping in the garden where she had lived all her life. It was a charming garden, half forest, half smooth turf divided by a stream. The princess smiled in her sleep, and one tear rolled down her cheek, only one. When she woke she began to spin and weave — the usual life of a princess in these circumstances. But this morning an accident happened, the usual accident. Her bobbin sprang from her fingers and rolled quickly away into the deep forest; she ran after it for hours, and not until darkness fell did she realise she was lost, the trees closed round her, there was no path: she sank down weeping on a rock and slept. She awoke in the half-light before day and caught a glimpse of animals and birds disappearing among the trees, then the sun rose and she stretched herself and saw fruit hanging from the branch nearest her. Pulling one, she broke it open, it was full of juice and pulp, so bitter it set her teeth on edge, but she ate it and felt better. Now she saw beyond the trees a poor sort of house. She went to it and knocked, and found that a baker lived here with his wife and their son, a pleasant young man, except that he had a slight squint. They asked her if she were willing to work: when she agreed they took her in at once. The work was much harder than weaving had been, but she did her best. Only, every day she stole a little of the baker’s dough, and kneaded it into three tiny figures she baked in a dark corner of the oven. In the evening when she was alone in her attic she pricked her finger and let a drop of the blood fall on each. Then they came alive and would answer questions, until she asked how she could get home. At that they were silent.
All this giving away drops of her blood began to tell on her. She grew pale, and nothing did her any good. One evening the son, who suspected she was up to some trick or other, looked through a crack in her door and saw her talking to the loaf-images. Next day he asked her to marry him and give up this dangerous habit. In spite of his squint he was really very handsome, and she did not dislike him. She promised to think it over. That evening she made only one image, the image of a child, and asked it, “Shall I marry him? ” The image replied, “Yes, certainly, if you want to begin what will always repeat itself. Your child will have a child and she will have children and so on for ever. Is that life? ” The princess shuddered. “No,” she cried, “you shan’t any of you live,” and in her anger she broke the image and threw the pieces behind the rafters. She waited until all in the house were asleep, then slipped out and ran through the forest as far as she could, only stopping when she was worn out. Without knowing why — was it the thought of the young man with the squint and the grey eyes? — she began to weep. From her tears sprang a stream flowing down hill among the roots of trees; she followed it in the darkness, lower, lower, half thinking she knew it. It was something she should have expected. The sun rose and in the new light she saw in front of her a landscape so charming she would have thought it a painting if the bees had not shaken the flowers they sucked. And then her eyes opened in a still brighter daylight, she recognised her garden, which look
ed at her as if it knew her, and she saw she was lying in her bed of gold and marble, looking at the sky, her hands folded — the way a princess should sleep. The light pressed on her eyelids so heavily that she fell asleep, smiling and weeping one tear. It was as clear as glass; if you had looked into it you would have seen the baker’s kitchen, the young squinting man, and the child’s child’s child. As the old women say, one can’t have all of everything.
*
I met a German woman today, in a house in one of the secretive streets behind the Margit-rakpart. She is here on an undefined mission — she said she was studying child welfare.
“Here? ” I said. “In Hungary? ”
I told her what I had seen in the railway station. I heard a pattering of tiny hooves, the sound made by goats on a hard track. Turning my head, I saw a score of women, peasants, each carrying her belongings in a small bundle, being herded along the platform by an elderly man in shabby black. It was their bare feet as they scurried past had made the sound. Framed in dry yellow hair, their faces reflected nothing they looked at, none of the bustling objects of a main station. A little boy followed one of them closely. Running on brown sticks of legs, he tried to touch her with his claw, but she was always out of reach, as if she had forgotten him; there was room between her skirt and his hand for a wave of fear to lift itself and rush down on him. He met shock after cold shock, his eyelids kept closing, then stretching again in an attempt to see her and beyond her some place where they would rest. If I could have taken this look of his and placed it in front of the people who decide what is to be done with harvests, surely one of them would have recognised it and been ashamed?
The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 13