I was foolish and in love, and everything happened just as I had planned. The old woman died and I went to London. Show me that second photograph! Yes, that was my virile Greek, dearest. He taught singing in London, in Soho. He was a real Greek, down to his fingernails, and could flash those beautiful, fiery, dark eyes of his. He could whisper and swear and, when roused, show as much of the whites of his eyes as that Neapolitan tenor we saw at the concert the other day.
I felt very lonely in London. London is a huge, stony desert: even boredom feels endless there. The English have become connoisseurs of boredom: they know how to deal with it. I went there as a maid and quickly found employment. At that time foreign maids were in demand the way African slaves once were. There is a city in England called Liverpool that, they say, is built on the skulls of black men—not that I know that for certain. I couldn’t stand being a maid in London for long, because the job was quite different in London than it had been in Budapest. It was better in some ways and worse in others. It wasn’t the work so much. The fact that I had to work was no bother. I could barely speak the language, which was a serious concern, but what was worse was that I didn’t really feel like a maid in the house, more just a component. A component, that is, not in an English household with an English family, but in some kind of big business dealing with imports. I was an imported article. On top of that it wasn’t a real English family I had joined but a rich German Jewish family living in London. The head of the family had fled Hitler to England, bringing his family with him, and was producing warm woolen underwear for the army. He was a thoroughly German Jew—that is to say, as much German as Jewish. He wore his hair close-cropped, and I think—though I don’t know this for certain, it’s not impossible—had had a surgeon apply some dueling scars to his face, hoping he’d pass for someone who had been a proper card-playing German student. That’s what I kept thinking when I occasionally looked at his picture.
They were good people, though, and played at being English with more enthusiasm than the English themselves then wanted or had means to do. The house was lovely. It was in a green outer suburb of London. There were four in the family, plus a staff of five and a daily charwoman. I was on the door, responsible for letting people in. The staff included a cook and a manservant as back at home, a kitchen maid, and a driver. I thought this was all perfectly proper. Very few of the grand old English families were employing such specialized staff by this time. They’d sold the great family houses, or had them rebuilt, maintaining the obligatory minimum staff in the few grand households where people still preserved old customs.
We all looked out for ourselves. The kitchen maid would not lift a finger to help me in my duties. The manservant would sooner have cut off his hand than help the cook. We were all simply components to keep the machine ticking over. Do you know what made me nervous in all this? It was that I never understood the machine we were serving. We were all components, both masters and servants, but was the machine an accurate Swiss watch or a timed explosive device? There was something unsettling about this quiet, refined, ultra-English mode of life. You know, the way everyone kept smiling, like in English detective fiction, where murderer and victim continue to smile even as they are politely discussing who is to kill who.
And it was boring. I wasn’t good at putting up with this fully heated, fully laundered, dry-cleaned, English form of boredom. I never knew when it was proper to laugh. In the parlor, of course, I could only laugh inwardly because I had no right to laugh when my anglicized employers told each other jokes. But it was the same with laughter in the kitchen. I was never sure when it was safe. They liked their jokes. The manservant subscribed to a comic journal and over dinner would read out the incomprehensible, and to my mind idiotic, English jokes. Everyone burst into loud laughter: the cook, the chauffeur, the kitchen maid, and the manservant, all of them. And, as they did so, they craftily watched me with one eye to check whether I understood their marvelous English sense of humor.
Most of the time I only understood enough of the charade to know it was beyond me, and that it wasn’t really the joke they were laughing at, but me. The English, you know, are almost as hard to understand as the rich. You have to be very careful with them, because they are always smiling, even when they are thinking the most terrible things. And they can look at you so stupidly you’d think they couldn’t count to two. But they are not stupid, and they are remarkably good at counting, particularly when they want to put one over on you. But of course they carry on smiling even then, even as they are cheating you.
The English servants regarded me, the foreigner, of course, as a kind of white Negro, a lower life-form. But even so, I suspect they didn’t look down on me quite as much as they looked down on my immigrant employers, the rich German Jews. They looked at me with pity. Maybe they felt a little sorry for me because I couldn’t fully appreciate the sparkling humor in Punch.
I lived with them as best I could. And waited … what else could I do?
What was I waiting for? For my knight in shining armor, my Lohengrin, who would one day leave home and hearth and rescue me? For the rich man who was still living with his rich wife? I knew my time would come, that I just had to wait.
But I also knew that that man would never make a move by himself. I would eventually have to go for him, to grab him by the hair and drag him away from his life. It would be like saving someone from drowning in quicksand. That’s how I imagined it.
One Sunday afternoon I met the Greek in Soho. I never found out what his real occupation was. He told me he was a businessman. He had rather too much money and even a car, a car being a much rarer sight then than it is now. He spent the night in clubs playing cards. I think his only real occupation was being Levantine. The English were not surprised that someone could make a living simply by being a Levantine. Smiling and courteous, humming and nodding, the English knew everything about us foreigners. They didn’t say anything, just hissed a little when someone offended against their code of good manners. It was, of course, impossible to discover what the code actually was.
My Greek friend was always up to something just off center. He was never jailed, but when I was with him in a pub or a classy restaurant he would take the odd glance at the door as though he were expecting a raid. He kept his ears open. Oh, do put that photograph back with the other one where it belongs. What did I learn from him? I told you: I learned to sing. He discovered I had a voice. Yes, you’re right, that wasn’t the only thing I learned. What a donkey you are! I told you he was Levantine: forget the Greek part.
Don’t interrupt. I just want to get to the end of the story. Tell you what about the end? That it was all in vain, that secretly I never stopped hating my husband. But I loved him too, loved him to distraction.
I understood that the moment I was walking over the bridge after the siege and met him coming the other way. How simple it sounds when put like that … There, you see? I’ve said it and nothing has happened. Here you are in a bed in Rome, in a hotel room, puffing away at an American cigarette with the scent of coffee from the Turkish copper pot wafting around you, it’s almost dawn, your head is propped on one arm, and you’re looking at me like that. Your lovely shiny hair is tumbling over your brow. And you’re waiting for me to go on. Isn’t life extraordinary with all its changes? Well, there I was crossing the bridge and suddenly who should I see walking toward me but my husband.
Is that all? Was it as simple as that?
Saying it now, I myself am astonished how much can fit into a single sentence. For example, just saying something like “after the siege.” One just says it, right? But there was nothing simple about the siege. You will know that at the end of February the big guns were still booming away in some parts of the country. Towns and villages were burning, people were being killed. But in Pest and Buda by that time we were—in some ways—living like people in great cities normally live. But at the same time, we had another life. We were like nomads before time began. We were wandering Gypsies.
By mid-February the last Nazis had been defeated in Buda and Pest and gradually, with the ever-fainter sound of thunder, like real thunder, the front moved on, each day a little farther away. People started emerging from cellars.
You, of course, were out in Zala County, where there was no fighting: if you could have seen how things were in Pest, you’d have thought we had all gone mad. And you would have been right if you judged by appearances alone in those weeks and months after the siege. It was everything you could possibly imagine. Appearances won’t tell you what people feel, how people talk when crawling out of the rubble, when they’re still humiliated and terrified. You can’t smell the foul stench they’ve had to get used to: the dirt, the lack of washing, the lack of water. We were emerging from filth, from close human contact. I think I’m remembering this all topsy-turvy now, the way it is lodged in my memory. A lot of things get confused when I think back to this time. It’s like when the reel breaks in a movie, you know … suddenly you lose the thread of the story, dazzled by the flashing gray patterns on the screen.
The houses were still smoking. Buda with all its pretty detail, the Bastion, and the old quarter, were one great dying fire. I happened to be in Buda then. I didn’t spend the siege in the cellar of the house I’d been living in, because that had been bombed in the summer. I’d moved to a hotel. Then, once the Russian army had surrounded the city, I moved in with a friend. Which friend? You’ll find out in a minute.
It wasn’t difficult finding accommodation in Pest then. People usually spent the night elsewhere, anywhere but at home—I mean people who could easily have stayed at home, who didn’t have to hide—but everyone was caught up in a great tide of emotion. We were like mythical creatures left over at the end of some festival. People felt they had to hide because it wasn’t impossible that some dark force should be out looking for them, pursuing them—the Russians, the Communists—who knows? It was as if everyone was in disguise, guests at a macabre masked ball to which everyone was invited. Persian soothsayers and master chefs, complete with false beards … the cast list was uncanny.
But that wasn’t the whole story. At first sight it seemed everyone was dizzy with the drink the Nazis had stored in the cellars of hotels and restaurants and had no time to drink on their stampede to the west. You’ve heard the stories survivors tell of major airplane disasters or shipwrecks, how they find themselves marooned on some mountaintop, then, after three or four days, the supplies run out? Soon everybody—all those ladies and gentlemen with proper manners—is sizing each other up, speculating on each other’s edibility. You know the film The Gold Rush, where that little funny man with the toothbrush mustache—Chaplin, I mean—is being chased round and round the cabin in Alaska by that enormous prospector because the big man wants to eat the little man? There was that kind of madness in people’s eyes, the way they looked at things, the way they talked about there being a bit of food here or there. That was because they had made up their minds, like the survivors of a shipwreck, that one way or the other they would stay alive, even if it meant eating other people. They stowed away whatever could be stowed, wherever they found it.
I had a glimpse of reality after the siege. It was like having a cataract peeled away with a penknife. It took my breath away for a moment, it was all so fascinating.
The Bastion was still alight when we staggered from the cellar. Women were dressed like crones, in rags, covered in soot, hoping to escape the attentions of the Russian soldiers that way. The smell of death, the corpse smell of cellars, rose from our clothes, from our very bodies. Everywhere you went, however near or far, great fat bombs lay by the sidewalks, belching smoke. I walked down the wide avenue past corpses, fallen masonry, and useless, abandoned armored cars. I saw the frail skeletons of wingless Rata planes. I made my way through Krisztinaváros toward the green at the Vérmező. I wasn’t quite steady on my feet, because I was dizzy with fresh air, with winter sunlight, with simply being alive … But I plodded on like ten or twenty thousand others, because there was already an improvised bridge over the Danube. It was a hump of a bridge, a camel’s back. The Russian military police had rounded up a group of workers to build the bridge in under two weeks, under the direction of Russian engineers. At last, we could move between Buda and Pest again. Like everyone else I rushed to cross the bridge to Pest, because I had to get to Pest at any price. I could not stand being where I was anymore, not the way things were.
What was it I couldn’t stand? Was I desperate to see my old house? Of course not. I’ll tell you what.
The first morning the bridge was up, I rushed to Pest because I wanted to buy nail-polish remover at my favorite old drugstore in the city center. No, I’m not mad. It was just as I told you. Buda was still in flames. The tenement blocks of Pest were full of gaping holes. I had spent two weeks rotting in a cellar in Buda, along with a crowd of men, women, and children, with people starving and screaming around me, where one old man died of fright, and where everyone was filthy because we had no water. But in all of that, in all those two weeks, nothing tortured me so much as the thought that I had forgotten to bring my nail-polish remover into the shelter. When the last air-raid warning sounded and the siege began, I moved into the cellar with my nails painted bright red. And there I stayed with scarlet nails for two weeks, while Buda was falling around me. My scarlet nails had gone quite black with dirt.
You should know that even back then I had scarlet nails. I was a proper girl-about-town. I know men don’t understand this, but what I was most worried about during the siege was not being able to hurry over to my favorite old drugstore in Pest where they sold good peacetime-quality nail-polish remover.
The psychiatrist who charged me fifty pengő per visit for the privilege of lying on a couch in his surgery three times a week and talking dirt—I did it simply because I did everything befitting a middle-class lady—he would most certainly have explained to me that it wasn’t filthy nail polish I wanted to wash away, but uncleanness of another sort, the dirtiness of my prewar life. Well, maybe, but all I knew was that my nails were black, not scarlet, and that I had to do something about it. That’s why I hurried over the bridge at the earliest possible opportunity.
Once I reached the street where we used to live, a familiar figure hurried past me. It was the plumber, born and bred in the district, a decent older man. Like many others at the time, he had grown a gray beard so that he might look like a proper granddad, someone on his last legs, hoping this might prevent him being carted off to forced labor in Russia, as far as Ekaterinburg. He was carrying a big parcel. I was delighted to recognize him as he was passing. Then suddenly I heard him shout to the locksmith who was living in a bombed-out house on the other side of the street:
“Jenő, run down to the Central Market Hall, they still have stuff there!”
And the other man, the lanky locksmith, shouted back, croaky with enthusiasm:
“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!”
I stood at the edge of the grass of the Vérmező for a while, gazing after them. I saw the old Bulgarian wino who used to supply the richer houses with firewood for the winter. He emerged from another bombed property and carefully, almost ceremonially, lifted up a gold-rimmed mirror the way the priest raises the host when we celebrate the resurrection. The mirror flashed in the sparkling late-winter light. The old man was proceeding along reverentially, raising the mirror in such awe, you’d think the good fairy had given him the finest present of his life, the thing he had secretly longed for ever since he was a child. It was obvious he had just stolen it. He walked through the ruins in perfect peace, the one great winner in the lottery of life, spotted in the very moment the prize was announced. His stolen mirror made him the luckiest Bulgarian in the world.
I rubbed my eyes for a second, then an instinct took me over to the ruined building he had just left. The door was still there, but instead of the stairs a pile of rubble rose toward the next level. Later I heard that this old Buda house had been hit by over t
hirty bombs, shells, and grenades. I knew some people who lived there—a seamstress who occasionally worked for me, a vet who looked after my dog, and, on the first floor, a retired high-court judge with his wife, with whom we had sometimes had tea in the Auguszt, the old Buda patisserie. Krisztinaváros, unlike the other Budapest districts, was always more like a small provincial Austrian town than a suburb. People spent years there in cozy security or moved there in search of cozy security. Once there, they made their quiet, gentle vows—vows without any ulterior motive or even meaning—to be respectable members of the class of pensioners and middle-class families who had struggled their way to this haven of modest prosperity. Those who found their way here from below adopted the restrained, respectful manners of the older residents, including the plumber and the locksmith … Krisztinaváros was one big law-abiding, well-spoken, middle-class family.
The people who lived in that house, the house from whose ruins the Bulgarian emerged clutching his stolen mirror, were like that. He hurried from there, just as the plumber and locksmith had done. They were all encouraging each other to get busy, because the party wouldn’t last forever, because, for now, Buda was in flames and there was no police, no order. And somewhere down at the Central Market Hall there might still be something that hadn’t been pinched by the Russians or the rabble.
“Glad you told me. I’ll get straight down!” The words rang in my ear. It was like a song, like the voice of a street urchin or a cry from some seething underworld. I entered the familiar house, climbed the pile of rubble to the next level, and found myself in the apartment where the judge and his wife had lived, in the middle room, the parlor. I recognized the room because my husband and I had once been invited by the old couple for tea there. The ceiling was gone, a bomb having fallen through the roof, dragging the upstairs apartment’s parlor with it. It was an utter mess—roof beams, tiles, fragments of window frames, a door from the apartment above, bricks and plaster … then pieces of furniture, the leg of an Empire table, the front of a cupboard from the Maria Theresa period, a sideboard, lamps, all swimming in a shallow dirty liquid.