Prague (25 page)

Part of the problem began at the KB. Karoly was first granted the privilege of accompanying his father to the Gerbeaud one summer evening when he was twelve, and the boy noticed immediately that the other men dressed differently

i UK i nun

than his father. They spoke differently. And when they bothered (plainly unwillingly, Karoly felt) to talk to the boy himself, he felt their laughter. That first evening, the painter Hanak performed some simple but practiced sleight of hand for the boy. The grubby artist borrowed a banknote from the senior Horvath, showed it to the child, then folded it small and hid it in his huge fist. "Which hand is the filthy lucre in, young Karoly?" he asked, to the boy's mounting distaste. Karoly pointed at first one then the other of the artist's hands, disliked their hairy knuckles and paint-stained fingers. One then the other of the fists creaked open to reveal nothing but smudges of color on palms of cut leather, textured like the pads on the paws of Karoly's beloved pumi dog. 'A mystery, is it not, little boy?" asked the artist. The painter returned to drinking, chatting, and ignoring the boy, who asked Hanak, though his father did not hear it, "So will you keep Papa's money then?" The artist laughed and raised his glass of beer to the youth: "You understand magic very well, little boy," he said before again turning his back on the demonstratively unhappy child.

Twelve-year-old Karoly had taken the invitation to his father's special evenings as a sign that he was now his father's adviser and peer. He took his responsibility to heart. "I did not like these men," Karoly told his father very seriously as they walked home together past the endless construction of new homes around Deak Square and Andrassy lit. "There is something wrong about them. The dirty one stole your money." Karoly was angry, not least because he had been used as an accomplice in the theft of his father's (and his own) wealth.

His father struck him quite hard on the mouth. "He did not steal it and he is not dirty," Imre said quietly as the boy brought a hand up to his face. "He is a great artist. He needs the money more than I. Should I embarrass him and ask for it back? Would you like that, my little philistine? Should I shout that I am rich when he is poor? No. I allow this to happen as a favor to him. In return, he produces great things, which I admire—" The father, with an increasingly lighter tone, spoke at some length on the discretion required of patrons of the arts, how these men of the KB were his own superiors (in talent) as well as his equals (in taste) and his inferiors (in wealth and success). But after a while, after trying to understand how he could have been wrong in his actions and his words, the boy no longer listened, simply grew angrier and more confused. He settled at last, with the unshakable certainty of a twelve-year-old, on the con-

crete violation of objective principle: These men are criminals. And father is their victim, though he will not admit it, as he is ashamed of it.

For the rest of the silent walk home, Karoly looked forward to discussing the evening's events with his twin sister, whose intelligence he respected above all others'. But when they arrived home, his mother told him Klara felt poorly and had gone to bed early. The pneumonia, which began its oozing assault that evening, ended her short life not long after, and to the end of his own life, Karoly was never quite able to shake the irrational, gnawing feeling that the KB had somehow harmed Klara fatally, had stolen her too that night, making of him an accomplice in that evil as well.

But Karoly's father did not release him from the gift of attending, from time to time, the meetings of the KB. After a period of banishment for his first reaction (which quickly became a period of mourning for the loss of Klara), the boy, now different in a way his father could not quite specify, was brought again. And though he sat mute every evening he was brought, his father believed him intimidated in the face of the brilliant company. Imre—more than ever addicted to these evenings of culture and gossip after death had rendered his home so dark and his wife so irritatingly distant—intended that his boy grow up in the company of intelligent men and artists. Such men, he told his son on the walk to the Gerbeaud not long after Klara's funeral, were the only ones capable of providing a balm to the brutal wounds life inflicts. Karoly pitied his father.

The boy was a few years older when he understood they were laughing at his father, though the men of the KB hid that laughter in ways he could not explain. After more evenings spent in silence, he also felt they were trying to corrupt him against his father, to teach him to laugh at him in their private fashion, just as Hanak had drawn him into theft. "Shall we hear out your old man's views?" the composer Janos Balint whispered to him one evening in the middle of a long and mysterious debate when tempers had flared and several voices were trying to drown Imre's quiet, unyielding lecturing. "Or shall we take this opportunity to sneak outside for some much-needed air?" Balint stood, favoring his good leg, and took the boy's hand, but Karoly pulled it back sharply.

"I wish to hear my father," he said clearly and calmly. "He is very smart, and if you cannot see that, then you are very stupid." This retort, hissed out and bitten off with a snap of the head, amused the composer as well as the journalist who sat at Karoly's other side. That evening, the walk home began with a

blow, but that did not suffice to compel Karoly's respect for the exalted membership of the KB, and now after several silent evenings the boy would not be quieted. "He tried to take my hand, Father. There was something wrong with this."

"The man is married with children, you—" Imre began to say, but Karoly's insinuation nauseated him. "He is a great composer—" he began again in an effort to compose himself. Finally, he had nothing to say but "Stand up" when the child did not immediately rise from the sidewalk after another light slap. "Get up," he spat, "for God's sake. These men are your country."

The next banishment lasted nearly two years. Karoly was left in the gray, unhappy home in the company of his mute, daughterless mother until his rarely seen father, assuming the boy had matured, allowed him to return to cultured company. Now Karoly laughed with them, not because he agreed with their unspoken, hidden condemnation of his father as unintelligent or under-read or out of his element. Karoly laughed with the KB at his father because his father could not see that his heroes despised him, and Karoly could, and that was bitterly funny. If one refused to see the truth, then one could hardly expect to be loved for one's blindness.

"It would appear you had rather a better time this evening now that you are older. Am I right, my boy?" came the satisfied question on the peaceful walk home.

"I think they laugh at real men, Father. I think they are rotted. They are hateful. They are not my country." The father thought at first Karoly was making an obscure joke in dubious taste. He stopped walking, considered his son, and realized the boy was now too large to strike. "Come along. Father," the son said with just the same smile he had seen on Horn's lips when Imre praised a current play written by a talentless rival.

Karoly refused all future invitations to the KB, and his father had no further tools to improve the boy's behavior now that corporal punishment was unfeasible. The matter was never discussed, and when members of the KB came to the press to discuss work, Karoly was either noticeably absent from his post or instead displayed a form of impeccable, quasi-military politeness that puzzled his father and "made my flesh crawl," in the words of the historian Balazs Fekete.

The press was superficially successful, Karoly would admit to a temporary confidant (usually a low-level employee, starstruck to be warmed by the rising son), but it was fundamentally unhealthy, out of balance. His father, and the

health of the firm, relied too heavily on the continued so-called inspiration of these so-called Hungarian so-called geniuses. Besides which, if the Horvath Press was in fact the memory of the Hungarian people, it should print Hungarian writers, and one need not know much to know that the members of KB were no such thing. For those who cared to look, he told his agreeable if quiet companion, there was a simple, obvious reason they made a profession of laughing at real Hungarians: They were not real Hungarians. "Their works are foreign, un-Magyar. They do not address what concerns the Magyar. They tinker with entertainment. They ignore their duty to educate, because they cannot help it: No non-Magyar can express a Magyar soul. This is a question of hard principle," Karoly explained as his listener drank, "not fickle opinion or fleeting popularity.

Hard principle."

The heir knew, however, that he was not a debater, and could not prove to his father his knowledge, and so he went to great trouble to find the voices that could. Though never well liked at the press, Karoly did cultivate some employees who helped him find the newspapers and books that made sense to him. Much to Karoly's shame, these newspapers and books were usually printed by other houses. He was ashamed to work for a press that seemed to avoid true Hungarian writers, writers of hard, scientific truth, simply and plainly expressed, men like Bartha and Egan, concerned with the nation's health rather than its cheap titillation, men willing to state and prove the obvious to ostriches: Jews were not Magyars. Liberal liars were not Magyars. Much of corrupt, cosmopolitan Budapest was not Magyar. And all the while the foolish chattering voices of liberals, Jews, and self-proclaimed artists and intellectuals created an intolerable cacophony in the house that was once the memory of the Hungarian people. For business reasons alone, for the family's fortune if not for the sake of the nation, Karoly's father had to be made to see reason. He would stress hard numbers; only profits remained to guide his errant father back to rectitude.

One morning, when Karoly was just twenty-one, Imre was late coming in to breakfast due to a long evening at the Gerbeaud the night previous. Karoly awaited him at the cluttered table. His father settled slowly into his chair and looked with disappointment into an empty coffee pot.

"Exciting evening, old man?" asked his son with unnecessary volume.

"Exciting, no, I wouldn't say. Illuminating."

"Illuminating? With those Jews and scribblers? To each his own, I suppose."

"Jews and scribblers?" Imre responded groggily. "What is this now?"

The young man tapped the newspaper article lying open on the table, slid it toward his father. "Nothing I haven't thought myself, but it's nice to see it in print. Nice to know there is still time enough to save our fortunes. My inheritance, don't forget. Time to consider whether our fortune isn't founded on the wrong stones. The memory of whose people, I wonder," the boy concluded with an ironic grin that would hardly have been out of place at the Gerbeaud.

Imre, hungover and permanently unsure what to make of his moody offspring, picked up the newspaper and after a few moments began to laugh. He reached over the table and pinched his son's cheek, a gesture he had almost never performed even when Karoly's age would have been appropriate. "You almost fooled me," he said.

Karoly had prepared himself for a necessary, cleansing dispute on principles, and now found his father's condescension almost mystifying enough to erase the practiced grin from his face. "Did I?"

"I think this is Horn's best effort so far," his father mused.

It seems to me, began the column that so moved Karoly Horvath in 1899, that the Jews and scribblers who pollute our stages with their little plays, and pollute the city with their little cafes, and turn Budapest into an absolute Sodom and Gomorrah with their unnatural habits are putting us real Magyars at a terrible risk. I for one do not wish to be sitting at the table next to them when God decides to send a bolt of lightning down to destroy this plague once and for all. I for one do not wish to be in the theater watching a sordid little play written by moneylenders when the nation finally rises up in disgust and tears the actors and writers limb from limb, after tolerating yet another display of what feebler minds than my own insist on reviewing as "flashing wit" and "high comedy" and "perhaps Endre Horn's finest work to date," I ask you, good Magyar brethren, how much longer must we wait before some relief will come to us? I suppose we cannot hope that God will strike down these deviants prior to the play's closing on the 18th of next month, since the full houses that it plays to must contain at least some decent, if misguided people. However, if the rapidly approaching century's end is not a good time for the judgment day which will separate the wheat from the filth, then I do not know when a better day would be. Far be it from me to tell God His responsibilities; surely that's the Pope's job, but I for one am looking forward to January 1, 1900.1 shall be hiding under my bed and when the flood is passed and the streets are clean and God in His wisdom is ready to receive the worthy up the golden ladder which He will drop down to us, then I will emerge with all my friends and family from under that bed and we will step lightly over the twisting, screaming