“Perhaps.” He looked back. She was watching him. She was small and had a dejected look about her. Serve her right, he thought. Let her go in and sit on her own for the rest of the evening, waiting for her friend who isn’t coming. But the picture of her, drooping and small, stayed in his mind, and four days later he went into the shop just before lunch and suggested they eat together.
It was in November, after countless evenings of coffee in Friedrichstrasse, a few lunches, and some visits to the cinema, that she finally consented to come to the apartment in Savigny Plate and eat with him there. He could hardly believe after all this time that he had finally won and he was surprised to find that all the excitement and anticipation of the evening ahead had gone, vanished into gallons of coffee and dozens of formal farewells outside her apartment. He bought all the same things as before, except for the candles. He felt the time for obvious seduction props was past and he thought the candles might make them both nervous.
She was nervous anyway when she arrived. He helped her off with her coat and wished, not for the first time, that she wasn’t wearing the white blouse and navy skirt. She didn’t smile at all. She looked rather the way she had the first time they met, very cool and disdainful, a worthy companion to Lisette. She sat and smoked, not even trying to talk while he darted round the screen that separated the sink and the gas ring from the rest of the room and tried to open the bottle of wine.
“Shall I do that for you?”
“No, of course not. I can manage.” He wrestled and felt the corkscrew bend under his neurotic pressure.
“Oh, dear! You’ve pushed the cork into the bottle!”
Enraged, he stared at the cork fragmenting into the wine. Then he poured it into their glasses and tried to remove the cork from hers with a fork.
“It’s all right. I like it with cork in.” She raised one eyebrow slightly, disdainfully, and he drank his own wine noisily and filled the glass again.
She ate very little, picking at the food he had bought as though each morsel were smothered in aphrodisiac. Several times he tried to speak and gave up under her cool, analytical stare.
She drank sparingly, also, and finally she put her fork down and said, “Shall I make some coffee?”
“No!” he shouted. The composure left her face and she was suddenly nervous again. “I’ve spent weeks sitting with you drinking coffee when all I’ve wanted to do is bring you back here. For God’s sake don’t start making coffee now in my apartment! I’ve had enough coffee to last me a lifetime!”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“You’re not sorry! You know very well why I wanted you to come here, and you’ve done your best to spoil it. And you have! I don’t know what’s so different about me. Why you can’t treat me like all the other men you’ve known? What’s wrong with me that I’m only good enough to drink coffee with? Is it because I’m Jozsef’s little brother? Is that it? Because I’m a joke? I don’t understand about men dressed up as women on a stage? Is that what’s wrong with me?”
She began to cry, curling back away from him into a corner of the armchair.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked again, disconcerted and a little ashamed of himself. “If you don’t like me, why have you gone out with me?”
“I do like you.” She muffled the words with her hand. “I do like you, but—”
“But what?”
She raised her face and stared anxiously at him. “I’d like to be the same as Lisette, but somehow I can’t seem to be. And you all think I am, and I’m too ashamed to let you know that I’m not.”
“What?” He tried to follow her through the labyrinths of explanations.
“You obviously thought I was wild and daring and... everything that Lisette is. That’s what everyone thinks. When you didn’t understand the cabaret and you were sick outside I thought it would be all right with you. You didn’t understand about how necessary it is to be fashionable in Berlin. I thought you would be happy if I was just... ordinary, not fast or exciting. And when I realized that you did want me to be like Lisette, I didn’t know what to do.”
Her pale eyes were huge under the ragged hair. Her thin small hands were trembling and he was sorry for her, sorry and also a little repulsed. She had seemed so self-possessed, so mature, and suddenly she was a nervous, unhappy little girl, asking his pardon.
“I’ve spoilt it all, haven’t I?” she asked tremulously. “You don’t like me any more, do you?”
“Of course I do.” He just wanted to get her out of his apartment now. She seemed to be growing tinier every minute, tinier and more helpless and dependent on him. She was making him feel mean and dirty when all he had wanted to do was to be a man, like Jozsef.
“You won’t want to see me again, will you?”
“Of course I shall.”
“I shan’t always be so—dull. I’m sure it will be different later on.”
“I expect so.”
“I’ve spoilt the evening, haven’t I?”
“Of course you haven’t. But it’s getting late now so I’ll take you home. We’ll both feel different in the morning.”
She allowed herself to be comforted and talked into her coat and beret. He walked her back to her apartment and all the time she was talking, clinging to his arm and humiliating herself, asking him to continue seeing her, offering half promises of her body in the future. He kissed her cheek very gently when they reached her home and she suddenly stopped talking, staring up at him with her pale eloquent eyes.
“Good-bye, then, Leo,” she said quietly. “Good-bye.”
“There’s no need to say good-bye.”
She was already walking away from him. She closed the door of the house and didn’t look back at all.
He never wanted to see her again.
25
When he went home for the winter vacation it was like stepping back fifty years. He’d never realized how old-fashioned Hungary was and how out of date the members of his own family were, even Eva who prided herself on being the harbinger of current fashions and trends. Good heavens, she was still referring to herself as moderne, which alone was enough to date her terribly.
Hungary, even Budapest, had a stately, old-world feel about it and a sense of constriction caused by the censorship of press and politics. Berlin, capital of a new republic, with its heady air of freedom, made Budapest seem restrictive and the Hungarian people oppressed. A world war, a revolution, and a counter-revolution seemed to have made little change in the iron-handed methods with which his native land was governed. There wasn’t the vibrant sense of events that there was in Berlin. Everyone seemed sleepy and slow, and in addition Papa and David Klein were worried and depressed about the Wall Street crash.
He spent his vacation commuting aimlessly between David and Malie in Budapest, Mama, Papa, and Jozsef in the town, and Eva and Adam at the farm. And everywhere he was struck by the smallness of their worlds, their parochial attitudes. Even Papa and David Klein, worrying over the stock markets, were more concerned with what it would do to the credits and debits of their particular banking concerns than with its effect on the world. He had come from Berlin where the crash was already beginning to make itself felt. In Budapest it was the same: more poor, more unemployed, longer queues at the soup kitchens. Two students who had begun with him last October had already been compelled to drop out of their courses because their parents could no longer afford to give them an allowance. He watched his family. There was Malie—whom he loved, yes, he really did—happy and complacent with her two sons, her luxurious Budapest apartment, and an adoring husband. What did Malie know of suffering? And Eva, indulged not only by her husband but now—as mother of a son, heir to the Kaldy estate at last—by her mother-in-law also. What did Eva care for the hungry and unemployed?
He raged in silence, and when he could be silent no more he tackled Jozsef on the subject.
“Don’t you see, Jozsef? Don’t you see how wrong it all is, that we don’t care? Everyone concerne
d about where they will go for their holiday, and Mama still buying dresses like a girl, and none of them thinking about all the people in Budapest and Berlin who haven’t enough to eat!”
Jozsef blinked and lit a cigar. Since he had become an employee of the bank, he had adopted man-of-the-world ways. He sported a walking stick too, which he swung most professionally on his way to and from work. “I remember all that from my first year as a student,” he said, bored. “It was quite the thing when I first went to Berlin. I suppose it still must be. Do you have discussion groups about it?”
Leo wanted to hit him. His anger was all the more pronounced because he had been going to the discussion groups.
“It’s that kind of attitude that produced the Russian revolution,” he blazed. “People like you... and ‘Let them eat cake.’”
“Surely that was the French revolution, old fellow?”
“It’s the same thing! Unless we do something now there’ll be another bloody revolution. It’s poverty, not politics, that makes bloodshed!”
“Oh, but look here.” Jozsef flicked ash from his cigar. “No one wants to see people hungry, but how can we stop it? We just go on working, all of us. It’s not our fault if the system breaks down every so often. And anyway, if you feel this strongly about it you shouldn’t be taking an allowance from Papa. If it’s middle-class bourgeois money you’re angry about, why are you having such a good time on it in Berlin?”
He was so angry and ashamed he had to turn away. All the time he had been aware of his hypocrisy, raging about the unfair division of money when he himself was enjoying the fruits of that unfairness. In Berlin he had been swayed by the fiery logic of Communist agitators. He knew there was something wrong with the world, and sometimes, not always but sometimes, their doctrines seemed to make sense. Deep in his heart he carried conflicting memories that grew worse as he got older: memories of Uncle Sandor being killed by a group of ragged beggars, one of whom he thought he knew; memories of Janos Marton, trying to defend his father from attack and, again Janos Marton, walking through the snow to school, thin and poorly clothed with sacking wrapped round his feet; memories of the woman, his mother, humble and supplicating, asking a place for her son at school. All these things bothered him more and more as he grew older, when by right they should have bothered him less. He felt sick and angry when he saw fear in a peasant’s face as an overseer went to strike him. He hated the ragged, thin children and the pregnant women carrying those same children to school When the snow was too thick for unshod feet. And yet communism was what had killed Uncle Sandor. He was desperate, searching for a cause he could espouse that would ease the unhappiness he felt when he saw poverty and misery around him.
He saw the boy, Janos Marton, once that winter. He went into the kitchen of their town house and the boy was waiting by the door, standing to attention, his cap in his hand.
“Oh... er... hello.”
“Good morning, sir,” the boy said tonelessly.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
“I’ve brought the shoes, the repaired shoes.”
“I see.”
In the old days he and the boy had always glared at each other, blue eyes blazing at brown whenever they met. But they were older now and had learnt to dissemble. Now there was embarrassment and tension between them, an embarrassment made worse by the fact that Janos was wearing an old jacket of Leo’s. He was surprised at his own reaction to that. The jacket was patched and thin and indeed no longer fitted him, but he had to fight a longing to leap forward and tear it from the peasant boy’s back.
“How are you enjoying school?”
“Very good, thank you, sir.” Up at the farm he would have addressed Leo as “excellency,” but three years of school in town had already removed deference and humility from his manner. In another three years he probably wouldn’t even call Leo “sir.”
Marie bustled back into the kitchen and gave the boy some money. “That’s for your uncle, for the shoes,” she said. “And here. The mistress found an overcoat for you, and also some more of Mr. Leo’s old schoolbooks.”
“My schoolbooks!” How dare Mama give his old books away? She had no right to go through his school chest and sort out his things.
Marie looked surprised. “Why, yes, Mr. Leo. She didn’t think you’d have any more use for them.” She held out the bundle. Most of the books had one or both covers torn and they were battered and ink-stained. “Third Year Mathematics,” she said doubtfully. “The Structure of Hungarian Grammar. Your mama thought you wouldn’t have any more use for these, Mr. Leo.”
He forced himself to laugh. “No, of course not. Thank heavens I’m through with all that nonsense. If they’re of any use to young Marton here, he’s very welcome to them.”
“Thank you, sir.” The voice was humble, a little afraid, but the blue eyes glared resentment.
“Off you go then, Janos Marton.... Here, wait.” Marie waddled over to the stove and took a piece of hot strudel from the top of it. “Take this.”
The boy hesitated. His tongue came out a little and moistened his lower lip. He picked up the bundle from the table and walked back to the door. “No, thank you,” he said distantly. “I’m not hungry.”
Marie stared, astonished. “What are you saying? Boys are always hungry!”
“No, thank you!” He opened the door and left.
Marie faced Leo, puzzled and slightly hurt. “What of that, Mr. Leo? He’s never refused food from me before.”
“It must be as he said, he’s not hungry.”
“Pah!” She shrugged and returned to the sink. “You’ve only to look at him to see he’s hungry. He doesn’t get much to eat at his uncle’s. He’s a mean man, the cobbler. He only gives the child enough to keep him from starving. Still”—she shrugged—“he’s a peasant child. He’s used to being hungry.”
He left the kitchen, disturbed because he hated the thought of Janos Marton wearing his old clothes and using his old books. And disturbed too because his presence had prevented the boy from accepting a piece of strudel.
It was cold when he returned to Berlin. There was thick snow that turned quickly to slush in the streets. It was disagreeable to go out and he found more and more that he was shutting himself in his room, studying, thinking, growing depressed about things he couldn’t quite sort out in his mind. And finally, not really knowing why he did so, he went to the bookshop off Friedrichstrasse.
Hanna wasn’t there. The manager told him that she didn’t work for him any more, and he looked uncomfortable when Leo asked why and mumbled something about “changes.” She wasn’t at her apartment either. That was in the possession of two large, handsome young men with S.A. armbands on their sleeves. The room, which he had never seen before, was full of papers and files and there were two desks and a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. He couldn’t imagine how it must have looked when she was there.
He finally found her, through Lisette, in a lodging house in the Centrum district. She was much thinner and her hair had grown out a little.
“Oh. It’s you.” She held the door open just enough to show herself, but she made no attempt to ask him in.
“I—I wondered where you were. I went to your apartment, and to the shop.”
“I lost my job,” she said in a hard, unpleasant voice. “Business has been so bad Herr Gruber said he couldn’t afford to pay an assistant.”
“Where are you working now?”
She hesitated; then her hand suddenly fell from the door handle and she leaned wearily against the wall. “I don’t have anything at the moment. Most of the shops are cutting down on staff, not taking more. A friend of Lisette’s told me they were taking waitresses at the Garten, but I didn’t get anything. There were too many out-of-work waitresses for a shop assistant to stand a chance.”
She looked very small, very vulnerable. He felt a wave of emotion, a gentle protectiveness, the same that he felt whenever Terez, Eva’s little girl, put her hand in his. He placed
his hand against the door and gently pushed it
“Can I come in?”
She sighed, then shrugged her shoulders again as though she didn’t care any more.
The room was horrible, tiny, damp, and dark. There was a bed, a chair, and a cupboard. Under the window a brown fungus flowered into a Frankensteinian creation. She followed his eyes and said apologetically, “It comes back. I keep scrubbing it off but it comes back.”
“Don’t you have any money? I mean, why did you give up your other apartment and come to this terrible place?”
“Don’t be stupid!” she flared suddenly. “Don’t you know anything about money or earning a living? The other apartment cost me forty marks a month. This one costs me sixteen. If I’m lucky I’ll find another job before my money goes.”
She had seemed so cool and self-possessed before, except for their final evening. She had seemed older than he was, groomed, self-assured, able to take care of herself in a way that he, with his over-protected, middle-class background, was incapable of doing. The pale eyes with the long dark lashes were enormous in her white face and when he looked down at her hands he saw they were quite still, the blue veins standing out vividly. He reached out, touched them, and found they were icy.
“Come and have supper with me,” he said, and saw a spurt of greed in her eyes. “We’ll go to the Vienna. It’s not luxurious, but the food is good and we can talk there.”
Watching her eat he thought of the boy Janos again. Food... food... what a difference it makes, he reflected. There are really only two kinds of people in the world, those who have enough to eat and those who don’t. He saw a faint flush of colour creep back slowly into her cheeks as the hot meat and soup settled in her stomach. Her tiny face was almost bird-like, and for the first time since he had knocked on her apartment door she smiled at him, the funny smile that began in her eyes and barely touched her mouth.
“How long have you been out of work?” he asked.
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