It was like a historical cesspool. Under it all I spotted the fringes of an Oriental carpet and a photograph of the judge, the photograph framed in silver, the old man posing in his frock coat, his hair pomaded. I stared at it in awe. It was like being confronted by a religious icon. There was something saintly about the old stiff figure, something dynastic. But I soon grew tired of looking and pushed the photograph aside with my foot. The bomb had wrecked more than one apartment here. Something had turned the flotsam of history into a heap of garbage. The tenants hadn’t yet emerged from their cellar. They might have died there. I was about to go back down when I realized I was not alone.
Through the open door linking this room with one of the neighbor’s rooms, I saw a man crawling on all fours. He had a box of silver cutlery under his arm. He greeted me without embarrassment, perfectly politely, as if he were merely visiting. The room next door was the judge’s dining room: it was from there he emerged. I recognized him as an office worker, someone I knew by sight because he was local too, one of the honest burghers of Krisztinaváros. “Ah, the books!” he sighed in sympathy. “What a shame about the books!” … We climbed down together to ground level, me helping him to carry the silverware. We talked freely. He told me he had really come for the books, because the old judge had a substantial library full of literature and legal textbooks, all nicely bound … and he so loved books. He thought he’d try to save the library, but the books were beyond saving, he told me with real regret, because the ceiling next door had also fallen in and the books were so badly soaked they had practically turned to pulp, the kind used in paper mills. He said nothing about the silver cutlery. He had picked that up almost as an afterthought, instead of the books.
We chatted on while we clambered down the pile of rubble on all fours. The office worker gallantly showed me the route down, every so often holding on to my elbow and guiding me round the more dangerous, gravelly edges. We rested a moment in the doorway and said good-bye. He ambled down the street with the box of silverware under his arm, the perfect, respectable neighbor.
All these people—the Bulgarian, the plumber, the locksmith, the clerk—were busily going about their work. They were the kinds of people who would later be described as “the private sector,” self-employed maszeks. They thought there was time enough, if they hurried, to save whatever hadn’t already been stolen by the Nazis, our local fascists, the Russians, or such Communists as had managed to make their way home from abroad. They felt it their patriotic duty to lay their hands on anything still possible to lay hands on, and so they set about their work of “salvaging.” It wasn’t just their own effects they were salvaging, but other people’s too, stowing them away before everything disappeared into Russian soldiers’ packs or the Communists’ pockets. There were not that many salvagers but they were remarkable for their industriousness. As for the rest, those nine million or more others in the country—you know, those they call “the people” now—they—that is to say we, were still paralyzed and looked on passively while the properly interested parties went about stealing in the name of “the people.” The fascist Arrow Cross had been robbing us for weeks already. Salvaging was like a highly infectious plague. The Jews were completely stripped of their property: first of their apartments, then their lands, their businesses, their factories, their drugstores, their offices, and, finally, their lives. This was not private sector maszek work but the state itself. Then came the Russians. They too went about looting for days and nights on end, going from house to house, from apartment to apartment. Then, when they left, came the Moscow-trained Commies with their handcarts. Now they had really been taught how to bleed the people dry.
The people! Do you know what that is? Who they were? Were you and I “the people”? Because today, everyone is heartily sick of them claiming to do everything in the name of “the people”: “the people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat.” I remember how surprised I was when one summer, a long time ago, at harvest time, my husband and I were staying on an estate and the landlord’s boy, a little boy with blond curls, rushed in at dinner and enthusiastically bellowed: “Mama, Mama! One of the proletariat has just had an accident—the harvester has chopped off one of his fingers!” Out of the mouths of babes, we said patronizingly. Now, everyone is a part of the masses—the proletariat, the gentry, even people like us.
Mind you, we were never so united, “the people” and the rest, as in those few weeks when the Commies first arrived, because the Commies were the experts. When they stole, it wasn’t theft but restitution. Do you know what “restitution” means? “The people” had no idea. When the progressives brought in laws that told them “What’s yours isn’t really yours: it belongs to the state,” they simply stared. There seemed to be nothing that was not the state’s. It was hard to get your head around that.
The people felt less contempt for the looting Russkies than they did for those enthusiastic purveyors of social justice who one day “saved” a painting by a famous English artist from a foreigner’s apartment and next day took possession of an old family’s collection of lace, or some class-alien grandpa’s gold teeth. When they set about stealing in the name of “the people,” everyone just stared. Or spat out of the side of their mouths. The Russians went about ransacking with po-faced indifference. We expected that. They had been through all this once back home, on a really large scale. Russkies didn’t argue about restitution or social justice: they just robbed and stripped.
Ah, you see! I am all hot and bothered just thinking about it. Pass me the cologne, I want to splash some on my brow.
You were lying low in the provinces, so you couldn’t know what life was like in Budapest. Nothing had happened, and yet, as if by magic, at a whistle from some fairy or demon, the city came alive, just like in those tales where the wicked wizard vanishes in a puff of smoke and the enchanted, apparently dead leap to their feet. The hands of the clock start moving round again, the clock ticks, the spring bubbles up. That war drifted away like a wicked demon: it tramped off westward. And now, whatever remained of the city, of society, sprang to life with such passion, fury, and sheer willpower, with such strength and stamina and cunning, it seemed nothing had happened. The weeks when there was not a single bridge, not even a pontoon bridge, over the Danube, we crossed by boat, as people used to do two hundred years ago. But out on the boulevard there were suddenly stalls in gateways, selling all kinds of nice food and luxury items: clothes, shoes, everything you could imagine, not to mention gold napoleons, morphine, and pork lard. The Jews who remained staggered from their yellow-star houses, and within a week or two you could see them bargaining, surrounded as they were by the corpses of men and horses. People were quibbling over prices for warm British cloth, French perfumes, Dutch brandy, and Swiss watches among the rubble. Everything was up for grabs, for offer, for a quick deal. The Jews were trading with Russian truck drivers; goods and food were moving from one part of the country to another. The Christians too emerged. And soon the migrations began. Vienna and Bratislava had fallen. People rushed to Vienna, getting lifts from Russians with cargoes of lard and cigarettes, returning with cars.
We were still deaf from the half-dead shells they’d been dropping on us, and those big smoke-belching bombs of theirs, but cafés in Pest quickly opened up again. There were places you could get strong, fiercely poisonous coffee. Russian sailors were dancing at tea dances with girls from Józsefváros to the sound of wind-up record players. Not everyone’s relatives were yet buried, and you could see the feet of corpses protruding from improvised roadside graves. But there were women in fashionable clothes, fully made up, hurrying over the Danube in boats to meet young men at some wrecked apartment block. Well-dressed middle-class people were taking leisurely strolls to a café that, just two weeks after the siege, was serving veal paprika. And there was gossip—and manicure.
I can’t tell you what it felt like. Here was the occupied, burnt-out town still reeking with smoke, full of Russian burglars and criminal
sailors who robbed people in crowded streets, and there was I, in a shop on the boulevard, bargaining with the shopgirls for French perfume or nail-polish remover, just two weeks after the siege.
Later—even now—I feel there isn’t anyone out there who can understand what happened to us. It was like returning from the far shore of the underworld. Everything from the past had collapsed and rotted. Everything was gone—that at least is what we thought. Now something new would have to begin.
That’s what we thought those first few weeks.
Those first few weeks—the weeks immediately after the siege—were worth living through. But that time passed. Just imagine! For those few weeks there was no law, no nothing. Countesses sat on the sidewalk selling cheap, greasy lángos. A Jewish woman I knew had gone half-mad. She walked the streets all day with crazy, glassy eyes, searching for her daughter, stopping everyone until she found out her daughter had been killed by our own fascists and thrown into the Danube. She didn’t want to believe it. Everyone went around believing they were living new lives and that it would all be somehow different from before. The idea of something “different” gave people hope, a hope you could see sparkling in people’s eyes. It was as if they were lovers, or drug addicts—people living on the crest of some huge elation. And indeed, pretty soon everything was “different.” But not in a way we recognized.
What had I imagined? Did I imagine we would be better people, more human? No, I didn’t: nothing of the kind.
What we did hope for in those days—because we did hope, myself included, and everyone I talked to was equally hopeful—was that the fear, the suffering, the dread and loathing, all that fire and brimstone, might have purged something from us. Perhaps I hoped we might forget certain passions, some bad habits. Or … No, wait, I’d like to tell you just as it was, quite straight.
Maybe there were some reasonable things to hope for. We might have hoped for an end to the great sense of chaos, the sense that everything would be in a mess forever and ever. Maybe some things might simply vanish: the gendarmerie, ostentatious display, the state dog pound, the habit of addressing people by old-fashioned honorifics, that this-is-mine-and-that-is-yours and yours-forever-mine-forever attitude. What would replace it? Oh, we’d have a great party, an enormous, strident nothing where humankind could stroll down the streets, munching lángos, avoiding piles of rubble, and throw out everything that constituted a habitual tie: houses, contracts, manners. No one dared speak about this. We were busy having heaven and hell at the same time. It was how people lived in Eden before the Fall. We had a few weeks of it in Budapest. It was after the Fall. It was the strangest time of my life.
Then one day we woke up, yawned, shivered with cold, our skin covered in goose pimples, and discovered nothing had changed. We understood that there wasn’t any such thing as “different.” You are dragged down to the pit of hell, roasted a while, then, if one day some miraculous power should pull you out again, you blink a few times, you adjust to reality and go on precisely as before.
I was very busy, because the days were packed with nothing—whatever you needed to survive, you had to provide with your own bare hands. There was no ringing the chambermaid and asking for this, that, or the other, the way the powerful and wealthy used to ring for me, or indeed the way I myself had rung, impudently, out of a spirit of revenge, when the time came for me to be one of the rich. And, what’s more, there wasn’t even a place to live—in other words, no room, no maid, no bell, not even the electricity to make bells work. The taps did occasionally produce water, but that was not the general expectation. You’ll never guess how exciting it was when we finally had water! There was no water on the upper floors, and water for washing had to be carried upstairs from the cellar in a bucket, right to the fourth floor: we used it for washing and cooking. We didn’t know which was more important. Proper ladies—and I thought of myself as one by then—ladies who had raged and fumed because there were no French bath salts to be had in the wartime city-center drugstore, suddenly discovered that cleanliness was not quite as important as they had always assumed. They understood, for instance, that in order to wash, you needed water of some sort in a bucket, and that water was just the same suspicious-looking stuff in which people boiled potatoes. And since each and every bucket carried upstairs had to be carried up there personally, they suddenly understood that water was a highly valuable commodity; so valuable it was too important to waste on washing hands after dirty work. We wore lipstick, but we weren’t washing our necks and other parts with such obsessive care as we had some weeks before. We survived, of course, and it occurred to me then that back in the days of the old French kings, nobody washed properly. Not even the king. Instead of washing, people doused themselves head to foot with perfumes of one sort or another. There were no deodorants then. I know that for certain, I read it in a book sometime. The great were still the great, the refined were still the refined, washing or no washing. It was just that they stank. So that’s how we lived then. We were like the Bourbons: stinking but refined.
And still I hoped. My neck and my shoes were dirty, and though I had spent quite enough of my girlhood in service, it never occurred to me to become my own servant! I hated carrying that bucket of water up all those stairs. I’d pop over to girlfriends’ who had kitchens with running water instead and use theirs. And there I dibbed and dabbed a bit and called it washing. Secretly, I enjoyed it. I suspect others enjoyed it too, particularly those who complained most about the lack of washing facilities. It was like being children again, rolling about in the dirt. It was fun. Having emerged from weeks of stewing in the pit of hell we enjoyed the mess, the filth; the way we could sleep in other people’s kitchens; the way we didn’t have to wash or dress to perfection.
Nothing happens in life without a reason. We suffered the siege as punishment for our sins, but our reward for all that suffering was the freedom, for a few weeks anyway, to stink without guilt, innocent as Adam and Eve in Paradise, who must also have stunk, since they never washed. It was good not having to eat regularly too. Everyone ate whatever was to hand, wherever they found themselves. For a couple of days I ate nothing but potato peelings. Another day I ate tinned crab, a side of pork fried in lard, with a cube of sugar from a smart café as sweet course. I didn’t put on weight. There were days when I hardly ate anything, of course.
Then suddenly the shops were full of food and I immediately put on four kilos. I rediscovered the joys of digestion and began to think of the future. Now was the time to be chasing after passports. It was then I knew it was all hopeless.
Love, you say? You’re such a nice boy. A proper angel. No, darling, I don’t think love is a great help to anyone. Neither romantic love nor brotherly love. My artistic friend explained the confusion to me, how dictionaries mixed up the two kinds of love. He believed in neither. He believed in only two things: passion and pity. But they don’t help, either, because both are only momentary feelings—now here, now gone.
What’s that? It’s not worth living in that case? You want me not to shrug like that? Look, darling, if you came where I come from … You don’t understand me, because you are an artist. You still believe in something—in art, am I right? Yes, you’re quite right, you are the best drummer in Europe. I hardly dare think there can be a better drummer than you in the whole world. Don’t believe those shady saxophonists when they tell you about drummers in bands in America, drummers with the strength of four ordinary mortals, who drum Bach and Handel—they are only jealous of you and your talent and want to take you down a peg or two. I’m sure you are the only drummer anywhere worth listening to. Give me your hand, let me kiss those delicate fingers that scatter syncopation around the world the way Cleopatra scattered pearls. So! Wait a moment, let me dry my eyes. I am so sentimental. Looking at your hands always makes me want to cry.
So there he was, opposite me, on the bridge, all because suddenly we had a bridge again. Not many, just one bridge. Ah, but what a bridge! You weren’t there when the
y built it, so you can’t know how much it meant to us when we heard that Budapest, that great metropolis, had a bridge over the Danube once more! It was constructed at lightning speed, and by the time winter was over we were crossing the river on foot again! They used the remaining iron pillars of one of the bridges and patched together a bridge for emergencies. It was a slightly humped bridge, but it could carry trucks too. And the weight of those hundreds of thousands of people, that undulating wave of humanity snaking across in one direction or the other, from early morning when the bridge was opened right to the end of the day, standing in queues by the bridgehead on both shores.
You couldn’t simply go and cross the bridge, of course. The queues wound through Pest and Buda like conveyor belts, the crowd moving evenly and slowly. We prepared for the crossing the way we prepared for weddings before the war. It was quite an honor crossing the bridge: it was something we could boast of. Later they built other bridges, strong bridges, made of iron, and pontoon bridges. A year later taxis were speeding both ways across them. But I remember the first bridge, the camel’s hump, the queuing, our slow progress as we tramped over it, a hundred thousand of us with haversacks on our backs, our hearts weighed down with crimes and memories, crossing from one bank to another, on that first bridge. Later, when émigré Hungarians arrived from abroad, from America, and glided across the iron bridges in their splendid cars, I always felt a little sad and had a bitter taste in my mouth, sickened by the way these foreigners simply cruised over the river, turning up their noses and shrugging at our bridges; just using them, as if they meant nothing. They had come a long way, these people, they had only had a sniff of war, watching it from a distance as if it were a movie. Very nice, they said. Very sweet the way we live here and can drive our cars over these new bridges.