Portraits of a Marriage (44 page)

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 they 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.

My heart ached when I listened to them. What do they know about it? I thought. I understood how they felt, the people who didn’t live here, who weren’t with us, who didn’t know how a million others felt when they saw their lovely bridges blown into the air above the Danube, bridges that had been a hundred years in the building. And I knew what we felt on the day we could cross the river on foot again: breathless, like the Kuruc or the Labanc or the Turkish invaders so many centuries ago. Nobody can understand us if they’ve never lived with us! Why should I care how long the bridges are in America? Our bridge was made of rotting wood and scrap iron and I crossed it before most people did. To be precise, I was
among
the first, pulled along by the long queue of which I was one part, shuffling along with the rest, when I saw my husband on the other side, crossing from Pest toward the Buda bank.

I sprang from the queue and rushed over to him. I embraced his neck with both my arms. Everyone was shouting at me and eventually a policeman dragged me away because I was obstructing the human conveyor belt.

Wait, let me blow my nose. How sweet you are! You’re not laughing at me: you are really listening. You are listening as intently as a child waiting for the end of a fairy tale.

But this was no fairy tale, my pet: there was neither true beginning nor true end. Life billowed around and within us then, those of us who lived in Budapest. Our lives had no firm boundary, no proper frame. It was as if something had washed away the boundaries. Everything just
happened, unframed, without edges. Now, much later, I still don’t know where I am, where things started or ended in my life.

It’s enough to say that that is exactly how I felt when I ran from one side of the bridge to the other. It wasn’t a calculated, conscious dash, since just a few moments before I had no idea whether the man with whom I had—but it was so long ago, it was before time began, in that period we call history—if the man who had been my husband was still alive. That time seemed an eternity away. People don’t measure their lives with clocks or calendars, not personal time, the time that is genuinely theirs. No one knew whether other people had survived: their lovers, the people they had shared a house with. Mothers didn’t know whether their children were alive or dead. Couples met by accident in the street. We seemed to be living in a time without history; in prehistoric time, before there were land registries, house numbers, directories. Everyone lived and lodged wherever they could find, wherever it occurred to them to live. And there was about this chaos—this Gypsy life—a peculiar domesticity. It might have been how people lived in the dim, distant past, when no one had a home and there were only wandering hordes and tribes, Gypsies with carts and unwashed children, journeying without destination. It wasn’t a bad life. It was familiar somehow. Under all our accumulated garbage we seem to carry some memory of a different, less fixed time.

But that’s not why I rushed over to him, not why I hugged him in front of thousands and thousands of people.

At that moment—please don’t laugh—something broke in me. Believe me, I had been carrying on as normal. I put on my bra and survived the siege and what preceded it, with dignity: the Nazi monstrosities, the bombing, the terrors. Mind you, I wasn’t entirely alone at that time. When the war turned deadly, desperately serious, I spent months with my artistic friend. I don’t mean I lived with him; please don’t misunderstand me. He might have been impotent for all I know. We never spoke about such things, but whenever a man and woman live together in the same apartment there is always some air of romance hanging about the place. There was no such air in those empty rooms. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had rushed into my room one night and strangled me with his bare hands. I slept at his place sometimes because there were air-raid warnings every night and I couldn’t
always get home past the anti-aircraft posts. And now, much later, now that the man is no longer alive, I almost feel that I
have
slept with him, or with someone like him, someone who had decided to wean himself off the world, to give up everything people thought most important. It was like being on aversion therapy for him: he wanted to give up an exciting yet repellent obsession, one as addictive as drink, drugs, vanity … everything. My role in his life was to be his nurse—his dry nurse.

It’s quite true that it was me who first sneaked into his apartment and then into his life. Just as there are cat burglars, you know, people who sneak into property, there are cat women who sneak into a man’s life at an unguarded moment and, once there, make off with anything they find: memories, impressions, the lot. Later they grow bored of these things and sell them—sell everything they managed to stow away. Not that I ever sold anything I got from him, and I am only telling you this much because I want you to know everything about me before you leave me—or I leave you. He simply tolerated me being near him at any time, morning, afternoon, or night … The one rule was I was not to disturb him. I was forbidden to talk to him when he was reading. Often he just sat with a book and said nothing. Otherwise I could come and go as I pleased in the apartment, to do whatever I felt like. Bombs were falling all the time, and everyone lived for the moment, making no plans from one minute to the next.

It must have been a terrible time, you say? Wait, let me think about that. I think it was a time of discovery. Questions we never really consider, that we wave away with a gesture, became all too real. What kinds of things? Well, the fact that life is without meaning or purpose, for example—but much else too. We quickly got used to the fear: you can sweat fear out the way you do a fever. It was just that everything changed. The family was no longer the family; a job no longer counted for anything. Lovers made love in a hurry, like children gobbling their food, keen to grab as many sweets as they can, stuffing their cheeks with them when the adults aren’t looking … then the children skip off to go play in the street, out in the chaos. Everything broke down: apartments, relationships. There were moments we could still believe our homes, our jobs, people at large had something to do with us, if only in a psychological way, but come the first bombing raid we suddenly discovered we had nothing at all to do with whatever was important before.

But it wasn’t just the bombing raids. Everyone felt that beyond the air-raid sirens, the yellow cars rushing to and fro, the dispossessed, the armored patrol vehicles packed with booty, the soldiers making their way home from the front, the fugitives in covered peasant wagons, beyond the multitudes drifting around like Gypsies in caravans, something else was happening. There was no distinct war zone anymore: the war was happening in whatever remained of civilian life, in our kitchens, in our bedrooms, in our selves. A bomb had gone off in us, and everything that had previously held society together—even if it was no more than indifference or laziness—was blown away. Something blew up in me, too, when I saw my husband on that new humpbacked bridge over the Danube. It blew up like a bloody great bomb left at the side of the road by a Russkie or a Nazi.

It blew up the entire movie-style affair between us—a movie as dumb and trashy as those Hollywood productions where the managing director marries the stenographer. What I understood in that moment was that it was not each other we had been seeking in life, that the affair for him was about something else: the terrible guilt he felt under the skin, a guilt that had eaten its way into his flesh. He wanted to transfer to me the thing he couldn’t lay to rest. What was it? Wealth? The fact that he wanted to know why there were rich and poor in the world? Everything the writers, the politicians, and the demagogues say on this subject is worse than useless. Forget the bald professors with their horn-rimmed glasses, forget the sweet-talking preachers and the hairy, bellowing revolutionaries. The truth is more terrifying than anything they tell you. The truth is that there is no justice on earth. Maybe that is what that man, my husband, was after: justice. Is that why he married me? If it was only my skin or flesh he wanted, he didn’t have to marry me—he could have had that cheaper. Maybe he wanted to rebel against the world he grew up in, the way the sons of the rich rebel and become refined, faintly scented revolutionaries. Who knows why? Because they can’t bear being who they are; because they are too lucky; because sport and perversity is not enough for them, and they must go and play on the barricades. Well, he could have gone for another form of rebellion, not the backbreaking torture of living with me. You and I, people who have risen from the depths, from the wetlands, or from Zala, don’t understand
such things, my dear. The one sure thing is that he was a gentleman. Not the way most of the titled nobility were. He was not like Sir This or Baron That, people who elbowed their way to a coat of arms. He was a decent sort of man, made of finer stuff than most bastards of his class.

He was the sort of man whose ancestors took land by conquest. They marched with axes across their shoulders, entered primeval forests in unknown territory, bellowed out anthems, and chopped down trees as well as the locals, while still singing. One of his ancestors was among the Protestants who migrated to America shortly after the initial voyage. He took nothing with him on the journey, just his prayer book and his axe. My husband was prouder of him than of anything else the family later achieved, such as the factory, the money, and a sackful of distinctions.