by Sándor Márai
I put the sticks down. The president ordered Champagne for the band. With all the low lighting everyone was in the mood. It was like an angel had flown through the place.
It’s true, friend. As long as I live I’ll be tasting the last glass of bubbly I drank that night in the bar. I was sitting close to the president and I saw the head screw looking at his watch. He stood up, leant over the table.
“With all due respect, comrade, I have to go. There’s work to be done at dawn,” he said quietly, and with one hand he demonstrated what kind of work that would be. The president looked serious. He nodded and said aloud, “I know.”
“At six,” the head screw whispered, “Double act.”
“Then you must go, Ferenc,” said the president. “After that, go home—and get a good snooze in.”
The guy gave a broad smile.
“Yessir, comrade!” he said, and clicked his heels.
They shook hands. After the screw had marched out military fashion, a short silence settled on the bar. The disooze was crooning fine prose into the president’s ear. Those sitting further off couldn’t hear what the screw had said, but you could see from their expressions they got the general idea. The saxophonist folded his arms as though he were engaged in some spiritual exercise. The pianist leaned over the keys, wiping his glasses like there was nothing he could do about anything. The accordionist lit a butt to show that he was through with art for now, that he was on his break. We avoided each other’s eyes, but we all knew what “six o’clock” and “double act” and “snooze” meant. It wasn’t just those, like us, who had heard the words who understood. Others did too, all those who saw the way he said good-bye.
The president had had enough of smooching. He tapped the fleshy upper part of the disooze and gestured to Comrade Waiter that the serious partying was about to begin and the band should strike up. He winked at us too, in a lordly way, to get us playing again. That’s the time the stink started.
At first I thought someone had left the john door open. Or one guest had been caught short, and whoops—too late! I looked around but didn’t see anything suspicious. Discreetly, carefully, and because she was close to me, I tried to sniff the disooze. The patchouli was thick on her like gas on a marsh. But the stink rose above it. I was astonished that the others couldn’t smell it as I did. It was as if they hadn’t noticed anything.
The sax player took up the tune. We played our hearts out. We swung, but the stink was still there, in fact growing stronger. It was like there was a crack in some pipe in the sewers. It was everywhere, mixed in with cigarette smoke, the smell of fine food, and the high odor of expensive wine. It wasn’t like lime or dishwater or fertilizer. And I couldn’t tell where it was coming from: not from the corridors outside or from under the floor. I took a sly sniff of my own hand in case something had stuck to it. But there was nothing special there. All I knew was that never in my life had I smelled anything so foul.
I drummed away, dutifully. But then I started feeling sick. I looked around me. There, in the dim light, was high society chattering, sipping, and grinding away like nobody’s business. They were our customers, our guests. They sat in their places quite happily without reacting to the smell. It was just like it used to be in the old days … they showed nothing—there was no panic, no twisting and turning—it was like they hadn’t noticed they were up to their ears in hell. The stench hurt my nose. But I carried on, looking on in astonishment, everyone in the bar behaving like the gentry, people calmly carrying on while everything was seething around them, like everything was just as it should be. I remembered what Sweetheart told me, how middle classes never show what they’re feeling, but continue polite, not moving a muscle, however much things stink and fester. It was just like that here. They could afford to be like that, because they were in charge now. You really would have taken them for gentry. It was just that there was this terrible smell everywhere. My stomach was heaving. In a break I stood up and quietly went to the john. No one paid any attention to me.
But the stench followed me. I stood in the john staring into the bowl. My head was a mess because all I understood was that something was over, done for, and that I couldn’t go back in there and drum, not ever again. It wasn’t my head talking—it was my stomach. I had a coat hanging in the cloakroom, one that used to belong to my dad, that I kept for cold mornings. I hung the tux up on the hook, pulled on the coat, slipped my black tie into the pocket, and whispered to the attendant that I had a bad stomach and needed some air. It was coming on for dawn. I went straight to the station and sat in the waiting room. I figured that since my AVO appointment was for noon they wouldn’t start looking for me before then. There was an express bound for Győr. That’s what I was waiting for.
I couldn’t tell you, not if you twisted my arm, what I was thinking while waiting for the train. I could spin you some story about patriotic feeling or this or that other thing, but I wasn’t feeling patriotic or nostalgic. Because the thing hit me like a blow to the gut in the middle of an AVO exchange of ideas. I thought of Papa and I thought of Mama, but they were like images on a screen at a movie, there one minute, gone the next. People I met here in America would later tell me how they were all broken up with regret when they set out. One guy said he folded a piece of Hungarian soil in his handkerchief. Another had stitched photographs into the lining of his coat. But I took nothing with me, just the black tie that I had to wear for work in the bar. I didn’t brood over it. All I thought was I had to get out as fast as possible. Győr was the city I had to head for, because I’d heard it was nearest the border. The guy who told me gave me an address he’d got from someone who’d done the trip himself. I figured the tobacco I had with me was enough to last me the journey. I had a little pouch of it on my back. I had a thousand in cash, all in one-hundred bills, and a bit of change. I’d never used a bank in my life, thinking it was safer to keep my money under my shirt.
The stench seemed to be lifting now. I felt hungry. I grabbed some ham from the buffet and sank a glass of cheap wine. All I understood of everything that had happened to me was that nothing that had ever happened before mattered anymore. I had to go. But where? … Out into that dark bastard of a world where I couldn’t understand what people were saying. I didn’t speak too many languages then. All I knew was davay and zhena. I didn’t think that would be enough out there. But then, as I was chewing my way through the ham sandwich, in the middle of eating, I started feeling really hungry … hungry to be away. A hunger for any place, however far. I didn’t care if it poured, if I suffered sunstroke, the thing was to go.
We arrived in Győr at ten. I called in at a hardware store and bought a tin mug with a handle, the kind they store lard in when making salami. It used to be a regular joke that I was the kind of guy who goes to the village to buy lard. In Győr I picked up the contact I’d been given. There were two others waiting to cross, two Commies. At two in the morning we set off on a cart, then left it somewhere a few miles before the border, got off, and walked. Soon we were lying flat on the ground. There were observation towers, guards, and sweeping lights. There was an eclipse of the moon that night. The rain was dripping down, the dogs were barking. But our guide, an old Swabian, lay in the mud and was pretty relaxed about it, muttering how there was nothing to fear, the wind would blow our scent away. We were in some kind of meadow, muddy patches and sparse grass. We lay there for about an hour or so. We had to wait until they changed the guard. The Swabian said it was easier moving about then.
We didn’t say much, and even then only in whispers. One of the Commies was cursing quietly, because he was an old-time socialist and now here he was having to leave his beautiful homeland, slithering along on his belly in the mud. It’s true, we were crawling along on our bellies, flat out, the way corpses are carried downriver to Mohács.
It was then I bit the grass.
I remember it clear as day now. I’d never eaten grass before. There I was, flat on my belly in the mud of the motherland, w
hen suddenly I found myself eating grass. I’d bitten into the mud. I could taste the clay. I don’t know what was up with me, the devil alone knows … I’d no idea. All the same there I was, chewing the grass and the mud like an animal with rabies or like someone who’d drunk too much strong coffee so it drove him mad. I bit the grass, the way they say someone bites the dust in battle, like they’ve crossed over and joined the other heroes in heaven. What caused it? Being pushed around so long in the morning? Who knows. And now I’d taken a bite of home soil. That’s when I realized what I was doing.
It didn’t last long, and I soon came to my senses. But I was in shock. The grass and the earth together tasted more bitter than the Champagne the president had lavished on us in the bar.
Here was the border of my lovely little country, it was night, it was muddy, and the stars were out. I was an animal. But not only an animal. I was a man, and for the first time in my life I was conscious.
As you yourself know, then and before, there was a great deal said about our national soil. Others were chewing on that soil long before I was, and I don’t mean literally. They were bringing up “our national soil” at the national assembly, scattering it round in parliament, and shoveling it in handfuls from soapboxes. There was a stream of comrades coming to the village to explain to the people that the land was ours now. Before, it was four acres for Papa, and four thousand acres for the count. And all the vast spread of land everywhere in the country, all that soil, was ours … I heard it when I was a kid in diapers and have carried on hearing it ever since. The moment I first drew my boots on, they told me, “That’s national soil, comrade—the land is yours.” But now I realized I’d never really understood when they said, “The land is yours.” What was the soil? The land? The country? The nation? All I remember is that there were always shortages, always the sheer slog. When the count skipped it shortly after they carved up his estate, what was left to me of his land … when dad was spitting out his broken teeth in the village hall because they put his name on the kulak list and he didn’t want to sign his acres away to join the collective … what did the land mean then? The soil? The country? My head was spinning. It was like waking from a mixed-up dream.
I lay there on my belly on the land, on my country’s land, like a freshly washed corpse, the thoughts in my head whizzing round and round like a carousel. There was a song we used to sing when I was a kid at the village school. “If Earth is our Lord’s Easter bonnet / We’re the sprig of flowers on it …” The words came back to me. But however I tried I couldn’t pick up the smell of flowers. Maybe because the meadow we were crawling across was partly marsh … The wet mud, the marshy feel of it, brought back a lot of memories. I was sorry to lose my drumsticks. I’d left them in the bar. They were good sticks, made of hazelwood. You couldn’t get the like in Rome. I don’t need them in New York, because they won’t let me play. I can’t practice my art. Lying there in the mud, I was wondering what else I’d left behind … What, after all, did it mean to have a country, a homeland? This country in particular?
Life is hard, friend. I remembered what I’d been there. First it was “Yes, Your Worship” and “Dirty prole.” Then I discovered I was the nation, the people, and that everything was mine now. But the fact is nothing was ever mine. This hadn’t occurred to me before. Not that I’d ever ranted on about my homeland this and my country that. I didn’t think anyone owed me a living. But now, there on the border, it all came back, all mixed up. It seemed to me there were different notions of my country. They explained to me that it used to belong to the gentry. But now there was a different country that belonged to the people. But what did I have, me as myself? What was my country? And if I did have one, what had happened to it? Suddenly it had slipped from under me and, frankly, I didn’t know whether it really existed anymore, and if it did exist, where it was. It must have existed somewhere, because I could smell it right here, in the mud where I lay. Much later Sweetheart told me—it was late at night—that when she was a girl she slept in a ditch, and dormice and squirrels used to scamper over her. The smell of that ditch must have been something like the smell of the marshy meadow I was lying in. It was the smell of mud she must have breathed in when she first found herself in the ditch, the ditch that was her home, her soil, her motherland. It was what I could smell as I was leaving it behind. But it was different from the smell that I wanted to escape in the bar. It wasn’t a choking smell like that, but something more familiar, like our own smell. Because that’s me, that’s how I smell. It’s an earth smell, and that earth smell had followed me all the way to the border. It was as if that was all that remained of home for me.
Now that everything was changing I knew just one thing, that once I was over the field there wouldn’t be that foul smell in my nose, the stench I first noticed in the bar. The stench that remained in my nose and had soaked through my skin. It was like sleeping with a whore and still smelling of her in the morning so you have to scrub and scrub to smell clean again. All I knew is that I didn’t feel like playing the drums for any of them. I wouldn’t sing like a canary for them. I’d sooner be stretched out in the mud, on the border.
It was dawn when the searchlights went out. The Swabian, who’d started out digging wells, had become a gamekeeper, then, finally, a kind of one-man business smuggling undesirables, gold coins, in fact anything that could be moved, across the border, now gave the signal. We went on all fours, like dogs, scurrying like that out of the country. I left the country covered in mud—in every sense. The rest was routine. I’d coughed up five hundred as a deposit, and now that it was over I gave him another thousand as agreed. The Austrian cop who came across us was already bored, because, day and night, there were countless numbers of us crawling out of the woodwork, people screwed by the people’s democracy. But in the end it was all quite simple. They put us in a camp first, but I didn’t stay long. After eight weeks I got the visa from Rome. My brother sent it, the one who’d left me with the revolver. I got the work permit because dagos respect artists and there was a constant need for drummers there. By fall I was drumming in a bar.
Wait, a lady customer. Welcome, my fair lady. Just a martini dry, as usual? You are served, lady.
Take a good look at her without her noticing, because you rarely see anyone like her. They say five years ago she was well known on Broadway. She played in the theater next door, big place, where they don’t sing, just talk. She was a hit like you wouldn’t dream of. She’d run up and down the stage in a black wig because she was supposed to be bananas and raved in English at her husband that he should liquidate the houseguest who happened to be an English king. She rushed around here and there with a knife in her hand and she was supposed to be, it said on the program, Lady Makebed or some such thing. So then she got the call from Hollywood because they told her she’d make a stash there, she’d be Miss Frankenstein. But they had ideas … first they took out her teeth, then they started reshaping her private parts, and that was all okay, but then they wanted to monkey with her face, and the plastic surgeon was a fraction out in his measurements, so she got fixed with this permanent half-smile, there, as you can see … She can’t do anything about it, it’s like she was greeting you with a smile, her mouth half-open. There weren’t going to be any parts for her with a mouth like that, but they got her a return ticket and sent her back to New York. Here they told her she couldn’t speak the parts with a half-open mouth, she was all wrong for them. Ever since then she’s been coming to this bar. She’s sold the fur. After the third martini she gets sentimental and starts weeping. But her mouth is so fixed she still looks as though she’s laughing. She parties and weeps like our happy forefathers, the Hungarians of old. Don’t look at her or she’ll be over immediately in case you don’t mind paying. I’ve put a dozen martinis in the book for her, all on credit, but I’m not going to say anything. We artists got to stick together when we’re broke. Another for you? What you looking at?
The photo? It was the one in the passport, I’
ve just had it enlarged. Where could she go without a passport? To join the angels, friend. You don’t need passports or photographs there. No jewelry, either. Take a good look at her. That’s what she was like. But not just like that. By the time I met her she was like a flower at the end of the season.
I don’t like talking about her. She’s been gone ten years. Soon after that I too said “Ciao, Roma” and crossed the Big Pond. They say what’s gone is gone, why fret about it? Yes, but heaven knows it’s not always like that. Some things don’t disappear quite so easy … because this picture isn’t the only reminder I have of her. I remember more … her voice, for a start. And some of what she told me. She wasn’t like the usual kind of woman I met. The rest have vanished without a trace. But I remember this one.
Because, as you probably know, with artists like me, chicks more or less just pass each other the house key. There were all kinds, I needn’t list them all. There were cute little thin girls. There were big ones. There were showgirls with boobs out to here, but also women with class, women with a position in life … women with taste who sensed their time was almost over, who’d grown wild and started firing on all cylinders … but, let me be clear, all of them wanted just one thing, which was that I should love and adore them, and only them, forever.
