“Two months.”
“Can’t your parents help you, or don’t you have any parents?” He was slightly shocked to remember that he had been contemplating going to bed with her and he’d never even bothered to find out if she had parents.
“They live in Hamburg. My father worked in the shipyard. In my mother’s last letter she said he had lost his job and could I send some money home.”
“I see. Couldn’t Lisette help you? She has a good big apartment and plenty of money—” He stopped, realizing that the way Lisette earned her money was not likely to appeal to Hanna.
She smiled at him and patted his hand. “Lisette has been very kind,” she said. “She would lend me money if I asked. But that’s not fair, is it? I could earn money that way too. It isn’t fair to take Lisette’s money when I won’t earn it myself.”
Ethics, principles; his head was pounding with the problems of poverty and pride. He’d left Hungary believing he could get away from the confusion, and now he was involved again, emotionally involved when all he wanted to do was approach the problem in a clear, abstract, impersonal way.
“I could stay in her apartment if I asked,” she continued, “but it would be awkward for her. She needs the room for herself.”
“You can’t stay in the place you have now.”
“What else can I do?”
“Come and live with me,” he blurted out, astonishing himself with the suggestion. “It’s only one room, but it’s a big room.”
“No,” she said bitterly. “I’ve not come to that yet. If I do I’ll let you know.”
“There’s the couch,” he continued. “You can have that, and if you like we’ll fix a sheet round it so that you will be private. You can clean and wash my clothes instead of rent, and if you do the cooking I will buy the food.” He was doing something, at last he was doing something instead of talking and theorizing about poverty and the masses. Oh, yes, he would still be taking bourgeois money from his parents, but this way he would at least be sharing it, helping someone who otherwise might starve. He knew a fleeting regret for the things he wouldn’t be able to do if the allowance had to support two of them, and he also felt a deeper regret because his freedom would inevitably be curtailed. What kind of relationship they would have, he didn’t know, but it was obvious he couldn’t behave exactly the way he wanted if Hanna was there all the time.
But these things were minor compared with the fact that, for the first time since returning from Budapest, he felt constructive and conscience-free. He was doing something about the world.
“What do you say?” he enthused, and then fell silent when he saw that Hanna was crying quietly into her coffee.
In March, for the very first time, he encountered political violence. He was listening to a speaker at the Red Student Group of the University when there was a commotion at the back of the hall and suddenly several brown-shirted men burst in screaming, “Avenge Horst Wessel!” He just had time to pick up a chair when the fight was all round him. He thrust the chair into the stomach of a S.A. man, who doubled over and tried to slide round the edge of the chair. He jabbed it again, viciously, because he saw that the S.A. man had a club in his hand and was about to use it. Then he raised the chair over his head and brought it down hard and the S.A. man rolled onto the ground screaming for his comrades. The chair was the worst thing he could have done because suddenly they were all on him, clubbing him down and kicking, screaming, shouting, swearing: “Avenge Horst Wessel! Kill the bastard Communist.” He felt blood in his mouth and by some superhuman effort managed to rear up like a wounded beast in the middle of the clump of S.A. men. “Gunther! Otto!” he shouted, and then there was help, six or seven or them bashing and fighting and bloodlust finally taking him over so that he screamed with delight every time his fist smashed into a Nazi mouth or belly. In the distance he heard the police horns and sensed, vaguely, that the fight was thinning out, but not for him: blood, pain, the crunch of wood on bone, whose bone he wasn’t sure. Bastards! Nazi bastards! Screw their legs off and beat their brains out with them!
There was cold water, a jet of it, and they all went sprawling on the floor where, one by one, they were picked up by the police and taken to the vans outside. The police made a mistake and put an S.A. man in the van with them, and the fight started all over again until they came and pulled him out. At the police station he was charged, and then a doctor came and looked him over, strapped up two ribs, and pulled out the rest of a broken tooth. He was still flying high on excitement and pain and the sense of comradeship with his young fellow students. There was Gunther, good old Gunther, with two rapidly closing eyes and a hand bound up in a splint. And Lajos, a Hungarian like himself, with blood streaming from his skull and a smile of maniacal delight upon his face.
But in the morning he was ill, very ill. His body hurt and when he coughed saliva and blood came up and his chest was an agony to him. At about ten a policeman came down and unlocked the door of the cell. They were taken upstairs and then—surprisingly—thrown roughly out of the yard onto the pavement. He staggered along drunkenly for a few paces, leaning against the wall, and with relief saw Hanna running towards him.
“Oh, God! Leo!”
“Give me an arm, there’s a good girl,” he croaked.
“I’ve been so worried! I couldn’t think where you’d been all night, and then I heard what had happened at the meeting and I came straight here.”
She propped her small shoulder under his and he winced as it jerked his chest.
“Sorry,” she said nervously, and then, “Do you think just this once we could afford a taxi?”
At home she helped him into bed, and then brought a bowl of hot water and washed the blood from his body. His mouth was swollen to several times its normal size and from the waist up his body was one livid bruise.
“Oh, God! How awful!” she kept saying while she was washing him. “How awful! How could they do it? How could any of you do it?”
He knew he couldn’t bear it if she began to cry, because he felt so ill he might cry himself. He’d tried to joke instead.
“At least they didn’t hit me below the waist,” he mumbled. “They’ve left the important bits unharmed. They couldn’t have known about the curtain.”
“Oh, Leo!” She laughed a little, but the sight of his injured body had shocked her too much. She covered him over with the blanket and then went out to buy some aspirin for his pain.
A week later, when he was tossing and turning one night, reliving the battle in his mind and sweating with the effort of fighting it again, he heard her leave the couch and cross the room. Then he felt her bird-like body slipping softly into bed beside him.
For him even the ecstasy of loving for the first time was double-edged; every time he moved too violently the pain in his ribs forced him to stop, catch his breath, and begin again. It was, altogether, quite a poignant sensation.
He didn’t go home that summer. He managed to get a job doing a few translations for a press agency, French, English, and Hungarian. The agency was run by a middle-aged Jew called Heinlein whose obsession, to the point of paranoia, was hatred of Hitler’s propaganda paper, the Völkische Beobachter. At least once every week he would get Leo to translate a section of the paper into French, Hungarian, and English, together with an editorial written by himself. Whether or not the editorials were ever used Leo did not know. He found the pieces he was forced to translate so crudely and blatantly anti-Semitic, so over-dramatic, that he didn’t see how anyone could take them seriously. He dismissed Herr Heinlein’s fanatical opposition to the paper as the obsession of an unhappy Jew whose own journalistic career had ended in a second-rate translation agency. As he explained to Hanna, no one of any intelligence could possibly take the screaming editorials of Völkische Beobachter as anything but cheap journalism, appealing to just a few illiterate thugs, the thugs who had beaten him up in March. He was shocked and slightly alarmed when, in the September elections, Hitler’s party returned 107 seats to the Rei
chstag. How could so many people vote for a party that was unbalanced and had no economic policy at all? The following week at a meeting of the Red Student Group he got up, for the first time in his career, and made what he considered to be a rather well-planned speech on the best way to educate people against Nazism. He received moderate but well-selected applause and was feeling pleased with himself with the door burst open again and in came the S.A. again.
His group were more prepared this time. They had formed a fighting unit of their own, armed with truncheons and staves. This time he came out of it with no more than a black eye, and that night he and Hanna bought a bottle of wine and celebrated what they decided was their anniversary. The S.A. had brought her to his bed in the first place, he remarked wryly; therefore this second attack could be considered a sentimental reminder of a happy occasion.
The ripples from the Wall Street crash spread wider and more devastatingly. On May 31, 1931, the Kreditanstalt, Austria’s largest bank, collapsed and, like current travelling along a wire, sent disaster to the German banks and thence to the Hungarian. A panic—controlled, but still a panic—spread through the financial quarters of Budapest. When he arrived at the Pannonia apartment on his way home that summer it was to learn of disastrous family news. David Klein broke it to him, quietly and with a distant restraint, as though the catastrophe was an inconvenience that had occurred on the other side of the world.
“I am telling you, Leo,” he said softly, “because your father is still a very proud man. Once before he failed his family—or considered he had failed them—by his financial losses. This time he is older and not so resilient. I think if he has to tell you himself it will break him.”
“But what—how—what will he live on? He and Mama, and Jozsef too; Jozsef works for the bank. What will Jozsef do for a living?”
“We can salvage a little. By some judicious... rearrangement we can preserve your father’s interest in the bank and protect Jozsef’s position there. Amalia and I will be giving up this apartment.”
“Giving up the apartment! But why?”
Malie, who had said nothing until now, moved across the room and placed her hand on David’s shoulder. She didn’t look shocked or strained, not as strained as David did. She looked, extraordinarily enough, contented and cherished.
“We are going back home, Leo. We shall live near Papa and Mama. David—” She smiled down at her husband’s head and then raised her hand and stroked his hair in a gesture so affectionate that Leo suddenly felt his throat constrict and a longing for Hanna, for the comfort and affection she gave, swept over him. “David has come to Papa’s rescue again. He thinks he can manage to ease Papa’s situation if we give up this apartment and reinvest in the town.”
“But—but surely,” stuttered Leo, “your business is here, in Budapest. Surely—”
David smiled, a rather wry, self-deprecating smile. “I’m afraid that I too have sustained losses, Leo. Large ones. You look surprised? Yes, well, I was aware that for many years you all looked upon me as the financial genius of the family, but I am afraid that your genius has betrayed you. Most of my international investments have crashed, and my interests here in Budapest have only just survived. What, at the moment, seems to be unimpaired is the money I spent twelve years ago to save your father. I invested heavily in the town’s factories and steelworks.” He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “My altruism has been rewarded.”
“But why go back? You know you will hate it. You and Malie, in a provincial town? Oh, no, you will hate it!”
David frowned. “Many things are happening that people hate, Leo. People will hate being unemployed, will hate to starve because they have no work. We are fortunate because we can still live in some kind of comfort.”
“But surely—all right, so you cannot afford to keep this apartment, but there are less expensive places in Budapest.”
“The reason we are returning, Leo, is because David is good and generous and kind,” Malie said very loudly. “If we sell this apartment we can buy Papa’s house—he must sell it to someone—and he and Mama can remain there. We shall turn it into two apartments; it is far too big now anyway. We shall live in one, and Papa and Mama can remain at their old address. Remember how Mama was always so adamant about a permanent address?” She smiled a little. “With what David can save for Papa, and with our own financial interests in the town still reasonably intact, we shall be able to see that they live in not too changed a manner.”
“I see.” He was beginning to see a great deal, chiefly that David Klein, who appeared to be no more than a worldly wise sophisticate, was doing more for his father-in-law than could possibly be expected of him. He was doing more—far more—than Zsigmond Ferenc’s own sons were able to do.
“Why are you doing all this, David?” he asked quietly. “Why are you going to live in a provincial town that you will hate, merely in order to save my father’s pride?”
“Because they are my family. Because your father is also the father of my beloved wife.”
The longing for Hanna struck him afresh, and the longing brought loneliness; even if Hanna were here, their relationship wouldn’t be like that of the two people in front of him. He was envious and his sense of isolation grew. He felt he had no one in the world to whom he could reach out. He used to cry for Malie when he was a little boy, but now Malie, even though she still loved him, was welded into intimacy with this gentle, sardonic, good man. One can only give completely to one person, he reflected, and Malie’s being was given to David. She wasn’t “his” Malie any more.
“There’s one more thing, Leo,” she continued softly. “The farm. The farm has to go.”
“Oh, no!”
“We have no choice, darling. But it will not be too bad. There is still Eva and Adam’s farm; we can go there, any of us, whenever we wish, and you always liked it there with Adam. You spent a long time with them when you were ill; you were very happy there. You can always go there again.”
She spoke calmly, but he knew that of all the losses this one would hurt her most. She had loved the farm as much as he had.
Later, when David was absent, he spoke to her about it again. “Is there no way the farm could be saved, Malie? Is there nothing else that can be sold?”
Slowly she shook her head. “David tried. It is not possible. He knew how much I loved it, how much it meant to the family. It was the reason I married him. Did you know that, Leo?”
“I heard Jozsef mention something once.”
“Oh, that wasn’t the only reason. But he held the deeds to the farm and I couldn’t bear to let it go. So much had happened there. We were all so very young and happy at the farm. You wouldn’t remember it all, Leo; you were too young to remember how it was before the war, the picnics and parties. Eva was silly about Felix Kaldy in those days, and I—” She paused and stared out of the window, smiling a little. “I suppose I was silly too, and I suppose I wasn’t happy a lot of times. Papa was stricter then—oh, so much stricter!—but you wouldn’t remember that either.”
“Yes, I do,” he said quickly. “I remember the day when war broke out and Papa came and you were with Karoly.”
She turned away from the window and looked at him. “How strange you should remember that. You were such a little boy then.”
He remembered, and now, because he was grown up himself and in love and concerned about the person he was in love with, he asked, “Was it very bad, Malie? When Karoly was killed, was it very bad?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes, Leo, it was bad. It’s always bad losing someone you love.”
“How could you bear to marry someone else then?” he blurted out. “I don’t understand. If you loved Karoly then, how can you be so happy with David now?”
She smiled, a little wistfully.”I didn’t love him at first, but he was kind, and he held the deed to the farm, and I didn’t know what else to do with my life. Karoly was dead and I knew I would never fall in love like that again. But when you live with someone every
day, and grow to know them, then something happens to you. One day I found that because I lived with David and shared his friends and tastes and life, I was happy with him. You’ll understand when you live with someone, Leo. You’ll understand how living with someone is nothing to do with falling in love.”
He nearly told her then—about Hanna. Sometime, soon, he was going to have to tell the family about Hanna because he had one more year at university and at the end of that time he couldn’t possibly leave her. He had fully intended this summer to break the news to the family that he was “engaged.” He had prepared himself to withstand the family’s shock when they learned that a Ferenc son was going to marry the daughter of an unemployed German shipyard labourer, but the financial disaster blocked his efforts. How could he say he wanted to get married—to anyone—when he hadn’t even begun to earn his own living?
Papa, over sixty now and trying to hide his humiliation behind coldness and disapproval, had an embarrassing talk with him.
“I had hoped, Leo, when your studies were finished, that David and I would be able to find a niche for you in one or another of the businesses. Literature and languages—well, you know how disappointed I was when you elected to read those subjects instead of something a little more useful, but nonetheless I hoped we might find something for you to do. However”—he looked tormented for a moment—“at this time I can see no prospects for you. I can just manage to see you complete your course, but that is all.”
“That’s fine, Papa.” He wanted to say that nothing on earth would have dragged him into the family combine. Long ago he had decided he didn’t want to join the comfortable, dull, financial set-up in which they all lived.
“In fact, Papa, I already have a job in Berlin, translating for a press agency. I can manage without my allowance next year.”
The relief on Papa’s face was obvious, even though he tried to hide it. “Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.” And why did he not tell Papa his reasons for refusing the allowance? He had decided on this course of action before he knew anything of the financial crash. Why did he not tell Papa that his new principles forbade him to accept bourgeois money that had been earned at the expense of others? He had rehearsed his speech all the way home from Berlin but now, hypocrite that he was, he let Papa think he was refusing the money for the sake of the family.
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