Csardas (58 page)

He saw the boy, Janos Marton, once that winter. He went into the kitchen of their town house and the boy was waiting by the door, standing to attention, his cap in his hand.

“Oh... er... hello.”

“Good morning, sir,” the boy said tonelessly.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

“I’ve brought the shoes, the repaired shoes.”

“I see.”

In the old days he and the boy had always glared at each other, blue eyes blazing at brown whenever they met. But they were older now and had learnt to dissemble. Now there was embarrassment and tension between them, an embarrassment made worse by the fact that Janos was wearing an old jacket of Leo’s. He was surprised at his own reaction to that. The jacket was patched and thin and indeed no longer fitted him, but he had to fight a longing to leap forward and tear it from the peasant boy’s back.

“How are you enjoying school?”

“Very good, thank you, sir.” Up at the farm he would have addressed Leo as “excellency,” but three years of school in town had already removed deference and humility from his manner. In another three years he probably wouldn’t even call Leo “sir.”

Marie bustled back into the kitchen and gave the boy some money. “That’s for your uncle, for the shoes,” she said. “And here. The mistress found an overcoat for you, and also some more of Mr. Leo’s old schoolbooks.”

“My schoolbooks!” How dare Mama give his old books away? She had no right to go through his school chest and sort out his things.

Marie looked surprised. “Why, yes, Mr. Leo. She didn’t think you’d have any more use for them.” She held out the bundle. Most of the books had one or both covers torn and they were battered and ink-stained.
“Third Year Mathematics,”
she said doubtfully.
“The Structure of Hungarian Grammar.
Your mama thought you wouldn’t have any more use for these, Mr. Leo.”

He forced himself to laugh. “No, of course not. Thank heavens I’m through with all that nonsense. If they’re of any use to young Marton here, he’s very welcome to them.”

“Thank you, sir.” The voice was humble, a little afraid, but the blue eyes glared resentment.

“Off you go then, Janos Marton.... Here, wait.” Marie waddled over to the stove and took a piece of hot strudel from the top of it. “Take this.”

The boy hesitated. His tongue came out a little and moistened his lower lip. He picked up the bundle from the table and walked back to the door. “No, thank you,” he said distantly. “I’m not hungry.”

Marie stared, astonished. “What are you saying? Boys are always hungry!”

“No, thank you!” He opened the door and left.

Marie faced Leo, puzzled and slightly hurt. “What of that, Mr. Leo? He’s never refused food from me before.”

“It must be as he said, he’s not hungry.”

“Pah!” She shrugged and returned to the sink. “You’ve only to look at him to see he’s hungry. He doesn’t get much to eat at his uncle’s. He’s a mean man, the cobbler. He only gives the child enough to keep him from starving. Still”—she shrugged—“he’s a peasant child. He’s used to being hungry.”

He left the kitchen, disturbed because he hated the thought of Janos Marton wearing his old clothes and using his old books. And disturbed too because his presence had prevented the boy from accepting a piece of strudel.

It was cold when he returned to Berlin. There was thick snow that turned quickly to slush in the streets. It was disagreeable to go out and he found more and more that he was shutting himself in his room, studying, thinking, growing depressed about things he couldn’t quite sort out in his mind. And finally, not really knowing why he did so, he went to the bookshop off Friedrichstrasse.

Hanna wasn’t there. The manager told him that she didn’t work for him any more, and he looked uncomfortable when Leo asked why and mumbled something about “changes.” She wasn’t at her apartment either. That was in the possession of two large, handsome young men with S.A. armbands on their sleeves. The room, which he had never seen before, was full of papers and files and there were two desks and a picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. He couldn’t imagine how it must have looked when she was there.

He finally found her, through Lisette, in a lodging house in the Centrum district. She was much thinner and her hair had grown out a little.

“Oh. It’s you.” She held the door open just enough to show herself, but she made no attempt to ask him in.

“I—I wondered where you were. I went to your apartment, and to the shop.”

“I lost my job,” she said in a hard, unpleasant voice. “Business has been so bad Herr Gruber said he couldn’t afford to pay an assistant.”

“Where are you working now?”

She hesitated; then her hand suddenly fell from the door handle and she leaned wearily against the wall. “I don’t have anything at the moment. Most of the shops are cutting down on staff, not taking more. A friend of Lisette’s told me they were taking waitresses at the Garten, but I didn’t get anything. There were too many out-of-work waitresses for a shop assistant to stand a chance.”

She looked very small, very vulnerable. He felt a wave of emotion, a gentle protectiveness, the same that he felt whenever Terez, Eva’s little girl, put her hand in his. He placed his hand against the door and gently pushed it

“Can I come in?”

She sighed, then shrugged her shoulders again as though she didn’t care any more.

The room was horrible, tiny, damp, and dark. There was a bed, a chair, and a cupboard. Under the window a brown fungus flowered into a Frankensteinian creation. She followed his eyes and said apologetically, “It comes back. I keep scrubbing it off but it comes back.”

“Don’t you have any money? I mean, why did you give up your other apartment and come to this terrible place?”

“Don’t be stupid!” she flared suddenly. “Don’t you know anything about money or earning a living? The other apartment cost me forty marks a month. This one costs me sixteen. If I’m lucky I’ll find another job before my money goes.”

She had seemed so cool and self-possessed before, except for their final evening. She had seemed older than he was, groomed, self-assured, able to take care of herself in a way that he, with his over-protected, middle-class background, was incapable of doing. The pale eyes with the long dark lashes were enormous in her white face and when he looked down at her hands he saw they were quite still, the blue veins standing out vividly. He reached out, touched them, and found they were icy.

“Come and have supper with me,” he said, and saw a spurt of greed in her eyes. “We’ll go to the Vienna. It’s not luxurious, but the food is good and we can talk there.”

Watching her eat he thought of the boy Janos again. Food... food... what a difference it makes, he reflected. There are really only two kinds of people in the world, those who have enough to eat and those who don’t. He saw a faint flush of colour creep back slowly into her cheeks as the hot meat and soup settled in her stomach. Her tiny face was almost bird-like, and for the first time since he had knocked on her apartment door she smiled at him, the funny smile that began in her eyes and barely touched her mouth.

“How long have you been out of work?” he asked.

“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.