This bedroom set survived the most extreme vicissitudes. In 1944, when both the German and Soviet command posts had abandoned the house, the poor of the village came and took away everything they could carry. The large three-doored wardrobe was the one thing they could not manage; they did not even smash the mirror, though they did their best to destroy all manner of other things. So the wardrobe was the only piece that stood there in one piece, a monument of sorts in the refuse-strewn house, a harbinger of a restorable order.
By 1960 the wardrobe had moved to the inner room of our sixth-floor Vármegye Street apartment with my bicycle on top. The makeup table served as my desk, though the angels holding the mirror had been disposed of by history, which at this point tended to resemble a collective disaster. When you get hit in the head, you stay down for a while before initiating the long struggle for restoration. We should be players in the match, not victims (or so I would tell my friends at our regular coffeehouse table).
In the early morning hours sometime in 1960 a drunk hacks below my window. I am sympathetic: we are the only ones up. We are surrounded by the kind of silence that amplifies snores, angry whispered words, the screeches of distant trains, the moans of trams rolling out of their yards. There is a flood of stimuli in Budapest, but I can only take in small bits of it. In the hours before dawn we need not contend with the assault of distracting sounds, calls, and obligations that demand attention and dull us into indifference. Perhaps I am not a city person after all.
When I go out to do field evaluations as a children’s welfare supervisor, my job requires me to enter the living quarters of complete strangers as if I were in my own home. Within a couple of minutes I discover I am in fact at home.
“It’s the man from the Council!”
A kitchen chair is shoved under my behind.
“Well, sir, you see, what happened was …”
The words gurgle up like water. I hope I can keep from nodding off.
Rezs? Rajnai sleeps in the cellar wrapped in his coat. He sleeps only till dawn, when his drunkenness wears off. The cold wakes him up.
A police officer tries to throw his weight around. I might be able to take him down a peg or two. This I do with a secret passion.
A Jehovah’s Witness spends his life being jealous of his wife. She could have him institutionalized permanently, but keeps having him released at her own risk to protect him from the stress. She brings him home; he tortures her some more.
The wife of an obstetrician’s best friend gives birth while the friend, a cripple, waits outside in the hallway for the good news. The doctor reaches into the infant’s eyes instead of his rectum, blinding it. A surgical error. He goes home and poisons himself.
I have a bad chill. My bones ache. I may have a fever. I had a fish soup at the Golden Pheasant for lunch, which helped me put the “House of Lords”—a rundown vagrant shelter where all my dealings are with toughs — out of my mind. Still, one stern word from me and the beating of sensitive hearts is immediately discernible under the threatening shell.
A woman’s husband dies: he was standing on the sidewalk when a bus hit him and killed him on the spot. The woman gets a hefty pension to replace her well-situated husband. A year and a half later, the late husband’s best friend leaves his wife and moves in with the widow. They marry. As a result, the widow loses her pension, which was larger than her salary. She has a kindergarten-aged son from her first husband, but finds little time for him. I ask her why they got married. They were already living together, weren’t they? The woman smiles and blushes. I blush too, then take my leave.
An old woman who sold newspapers walked into the main distribution center and asked for her quota. In those days people were reading Népakarat (The People’s Will), but they foisted Népszabadság (The People’s Freedom) off on her. She went out and sold almost all of them. Three young men, armed, were walking quietly along Rákóczi Street when they spied her with a Népszabadság , tore it from her hands, fell upon her, and kicked her as she lay on the ground. As the woman was dragging herself away, one of them said, “Finish her off, why don’t you.”
“What for?” one of the others said. “She won’t dare hawk that trash anymore.”
The old woman’s skull was fractured. She was blinded in one eye and has had neuritis ever since.
Now on to six more addresses, six new kinds of despair. But first I sit and pray on a bench in Bethlen Square. There is a synagogue nearby.
Now off to the darkest heart of the district. Mrs. Alabárdos and her daughter. She wants the girl to respect her. The girl will not. So she is cruel to her.
Then I grant absolution to a widower who has committed incest. His daughter forgives him as well. If I had him locked up, what would they live on?
I look in on little Lajoska Musztafa. His father, now dead, was Turkish. His mother has remarried. Her husband is a locksmith named Bogyi. The handsome young boy was proud of his Turkish roots and mourned his father. When they studied the Turks in school, however, Lajoska heard bad things about them. His fellow pupils started eying him, so he asked to take Bogyi’s name. After which Lajoska Musztafa (or, rather, Bogyi) stopped mourning his father.
A young typist goes out to Óbuda for rowing practice. It is winter. The training grounds are empty, nothing but fields and gardens. Four kids attack her. Screams. All four rape her.
“I know what you look like! I’m going to report you!”
So the boys poke out both her eyes.
An old man sits down next to me on the bench. His face is soft but stubbly; he has few teeth; he wears his winter overcoat even in the sun; he smells. An old woman with a pointy nose sits down with us. Her speech and movements are sprightly, her legs wrapped in bandages under her stockings.
Woman: “What’s for lunch?”
Man: “Tea, and bread with lard.”
Woman: “Don’t you cook?”
Man: “No, I don’t.”
Woman: “Kids?”
Man: “I had a son. He was executed.”
Woman: “So you live all alone?”
Man: “With my bedbugs.”
Woman: “But you must have a nice little pension.”
Man: “Six hundred forints. I drink it up pretty fast. Then I don’t eat, just the leftovers they give me.”
Woman: “Where do you live?”
Man: “I’ve got a nice apartment, two rooms plus kitchen.”
Woman: “Why don’t you rent out one of your rooms?”
Man: “I did, but my tenant went crazy. He stopped paying.”
Woman: “You should get married.”
Man: “Yes, but I can’t find a woman I like. If she’s young, she might not take care of me, and if she’s old I’ll have to take care of her. So I’m picky.”
I stop for a glass of milk. A wheezing old man underpays by twenty fillers. He walks with two canes. When the woman at the counter calls after him, he pretends not to hear. Every day he underpays by twenty fillers.
A woman is called into a police station and asked about a man they have arrested. He abandoned her not long before. She is either afraid or cannot bring herself to lie, and testifies against him. She is the main incriminating witness.
An electrician has recently lost his wife. Every evening he lays out a table setting for her, then eats alone. He can’t stand television. He goes over to the wardrobe and takes out his wife’s clothes one by one. “She wore this one on such and such a day and that one on another.” That is how he spends his evenings.
The welfare officer has grown thick-skinned from his work. The office madness and his wife’s nerves box him in. Unable to sleep, overworked, he learns to put a stern face on things.
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