Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

When Hollo came back to the table, he was followed by the waiter, who set the table for a meal as we talked. ‘I ordered the perfect meal,’ said Hollo, sitting down in his red braces, ‘Goose livers, followed by fogas. Best Balaton wine, no expenses spared.’ ‘Very good,’ said Ildiko, ‘Sandor, your friend says he would very much like to meet Criminale. Why don’t we have this lunch and then go there in the Ultimate Driving Machine?’ As she said this, she looked over at me and smiled. Hollo frowned. ‘No, not such a good idea,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ asked Ildiko, glancing again at me. ‘You know very well,’ said Hollo, ‘Criminale does not like me any more.’ ‘He doesn’t trust you any more,’ said Ildiko, ‘But if you come with an important foreign visitor . . .’ ‘How do you even know he would like that?’ said Hollo, ‘If you insist to go, I will wait outside, in the car. I do not want to meet him. Besides, he will be away, he is always away.’ ‘You see?’ said Ildiko, smiling at me, ‘In Hungary a student never loves his teacher. That is because the best way to succeed is to denounce him.’ ‘I did not denounce him,’ said Hollo, ‘Only I disputed his grasp on correct historical reality.’ ‘It’s the same,’ said Ildiko, ‘Never mind, everyone does it.’ ‘He does not forgive me,’ said Hollo. ‘He will have forgotten, darling, of course,’ said Ildiko, ‘He is a big man and has more things to think of than little Hollo Sandor.’

‘Bitch!’ said Hollo. ‘Pig!’ said Ildiko, looking delighted. ‘Wonderful fish,’ I said, uneasy. ‘You are making a scene in front of our host,’ said Hollo, ‘Didn’t I fix you up a nice lunch?’ ‘You are a beautiful boy,’ said Ildiko, reaching out and stroking his cheek, ‘Just, nobody trusts you!’ ‘Okay, okay, we will go after,’ said Hollo very grudgingly, ‘I just know he will not be there anyway.’ ‘You see, I knew he really wanted to take you,’ said Ildiko, smiling brightly at me, ‘Now, is it true you are making a film? I would love to make a film, especially a film with travel.’ ‘So far it’s been no film and all travel,’ I said. ‘Maybe I can help you,’ said Ildiko. ‘Maybe we both can help you,’ said Hollo. ‘This one, who thinks he knows everything,’ said Ildiko. And so we talked on, through a long and excellent meal.

At the end of it, the bill came, and I suddenly thought of Lavinia. I checked the paper, and saw with relief that by Lavinia’s lavish West End standards it must have come to no more than the price of a first-rate after-the-opera snack. We went outside, into the square. Here Ildiko stopped on the pavement, and stuck her arm through mine. ‘We will just wait here, and you can bring to us your Ultimate Driving Machine,’ she said to Hollo, who walked off, his coat collar turned up, toward the Saint Matthias church. This fine philosopher, you know how he lives now?’ asked Ildiko. ‘Fixing things,’ I said. ‘He talks to German and American businessmen in the bars and cafes, and promises he will find them some investment,’ said Ildiko, ‘Next he goes to some more bars and cafes, and talks to the government officials, telling them he can find them hard currency and takeovers. So a little bit here, a little bit there, and everyone has something. Be a little cautious.’

‘I am,’ I said, ‘But he’s very helpful.’ ‘You know, once he believed in the heroic future of the people, the great progress of history,’ said Ildiko, ‘Now what does he believe in? Video-recorder, mobile phone, fashion suit, the Ultimate Driving Machine.’ ‘What does he call himself, a Wenderer ? I asked. ‘No, a Wendehals , maybe a Veränderer , always a quick-change artist,’ said Ildiko, ‘My country is full of them. Perhaps this is how we have survived, better than some. But sometimes I think this is not the best way.’ ‘What happened between him and Criminale?’ I asked. ‘You ask so many questions,’ said Ildiko. ‘I have to, it’s my job,’ I said, ‘I’m a journalist on a story.’ ‘Well, okay, what does it matter,’ said Ildiko, ‘What happened is what always happens. The student, he was Bazlo’s student, takes on the master and tries to seize his place. The master resists, of course. Especially if he is Criminale, this is a clever man, by the way.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ I said, ‘So what happened?’ ‘Oh, the student accuses the master,’ said Ildiko, ‘He is not reliable, not politically is in some troubles, but these things are always difficult. People take sides, there are battles everywhere. Then someone wins, someone loses. Sandor thought he had won, he always thinks that. Criminale came to him and said these things are not nice, let us make some peace, I find you a very nice job in Vienna. But when Sandor came back again to Budapest, he found his post here was no more. Now you see why he does not want to go to Criminale, they have this bad history together. But Sandor likes to do anything for me. Oh look, here it is, Ultimate Machine. I go in the front and show him the way, if he has forgotten. And I think you get in the back and shut your eyes, you know how he drives.’

So I sat in the back of Hollo’s car as it raced in a zigzag back down the streets of the hillside, then through a tunnel under the castle, then across the Chain Bridge over the Danube and into Pest. Hollo and Ildiko bickered in the front: were they lovers, old student friends, just useful contacts for each other? It occurred to me that, now I was in their Hungarian world, the whole story of Criminale, which had bothered me so much in London, was perhaps nowhere near as obscure and mystifying as I’d thought. Here too was a world where history was always changing, where old battles and allegiances had played, where people were always having to remember and handle and reconstruct the past. Gerstenbacker had given me a fine word for that – Vergangenheitsbewältigung , written down on a bit of paper as he left the inn at Heiligen – that seemed to explain everything, and more. It was a world where a master had his restive students, where dangerous accusations flew back and forth, where philosophers were bound to have their adversaries and ideological betrayers, where minds, changed when necessary, and shifts of power and state opinion made lives no purer or safer than those of – well, almost any of us.

Talking at the Restaurant Kiss, Hollo had reminded me of Lukacs’s prefaces. Now I remembered one that had been written at the time of the Hungarian Uprising, when Lukacs had joined the new liberal regime, resigned in good time, been exiled by the Russian invaders to Romania, survived, come back to partial Party rehabilitation, and turned back with the tide. Perhaps it was no wonder that it seemed the most devious preface of them all. It attacked the dogmatists for not being revisionists, since revisionism was needed to put Stalin’s positive achievement in true perspective. It also attacked the revisionists for not being dogmatists, because revisionism was ‘the greatest present danger for Marxism’. As for the book it introduced, it spoke of the need for ‘critical’ realism, but refused to criticize socialist realism itself. Lukacs’s busy philosophical mind moved back and forth, but always ended up frozen in its mental prison. But the prison he chose to call reality itself, and he tried to argue his fellow human beings inside it with him. Doubting dogma and making it, Lukacs survived as a philosopher, a tainted hero to the end. If Lukacs, why not Criminale? Well, perhaps I would soon find out, at his apartment.

Our car stopped at last, in some great boulevard of large, late-nineteenth-century apartment blocks, not far from the Square of the Heroes, which once, they told me, held a statue of Stalin, long gone. Ildiko got out, and we followed her, I gladly, Hollo reluctantly. We went into a courtyard hung about with washing and filled with the noise of radio folk music from the windows above. There was an entrance with a grilled doorway, and beside it a set of name cards, with some of the names scrawled over and replaced. None of the names was that of Bazlo Criminale. Ildiko rang a bell; we waited, a long time. In a society of functionaries, the person who holds the key or controls a door evidently has, if only for a moment, true power; no wonder a door takes so long to get through, a key so long to find. But at last a small elderly woman, clad in a blue nylon overall above dirty black trousers, unlocked the door slowly and pulled it cautiously back. Ildiko began to speak to her, and then Hollo turned triumphantly to me: ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘He is gone away.’