A noisy crowd milled in front of number 16, at the corner where the street opened onto a small square. The building’s façade had been worn until the stone garlands under the windows appeared to be paradoxically both smooth and crumbling. The balconies, like John’s on Andrássy út, were invitations to gamble. Bullet holes, administered in two doses, still drilled the front of the building, like the work of massive, lithovoric termites. One of these cavities—much to the amusement of generations of neighborhood children—penetrated the plump stone bottom of a floating cherub, who supported one end of a disintegrating garland. He had been looking over his right shoulder at the time of the shooting and now was trying to glimpse his wound. One could imagine a young Russian or German invader avoiding certain crucial details and reporting this incident as a confirmed kill or, in 1956, a Hungarian rebel sniper across the street, shooting perhaps from his own bedroom window, bored in a lull in the action and testing his skill on a promising target that he had looked at every day and night for nineteen years.
Number 16 had been a gift when it was completed in 1874. Its birthdate was carved next to a Latinized version of the Hungarian architect’s name in the ornamental stonework over the front door, but by 1990 the entire 7 and the right half of the 8 had turned to dust (one lazy grain of rock at a time, like an aesthete preacher’s illustration of eternity) until only a mysterious hieroglyphic remained, a date without a decade and almost without a century, .
But in 1874 the building is in the very latest (French) style. It is the gift of a decliningly rich man to his second son on the occasion of that son’s wedding. The son and his new bride take possession of the house in June of that year, one month after the date appears above the door. Man and wife arrive from Budapest’s Nyugati rail station in their carriage, directly from a wedding trip that had taken them to Vienna, Italy, and Greece. The husband helps his wife down, takes her arm, walks her the ten yards from road to front stairs, past hedges and flowers, past welcoming staff (a cook and two maids come with the residence). At the threshold, husband smiles at bride, whispers something in her ear that makes her blush, kisses her hand. “Welcome to your home, my dear,” he says, and a maid opens their door.
By 1990, the hedges and flowers were gone. The road had been expanded, and a sidewalk only a few feet wide separated the six thin concrete steps to the front door from the daily parade of fuming tailpipes and balding tires. A side door for tenants led into the courtyard and from there to the crowded upper-floor apartments. Next to the front door, however, hung a hand-painted sign, red and black letters on wood: isten hozott a házamban [Welcome to my house].
Late one afternoon, after the house is settled, the furnishings arranged, and a social life as a couple is embarked upon, the new husband is made to understand by his father that there is not enough money to support three sons without careers. The bulk of the father’s fortune will naturally pass to the eldest son and a small annual sum—enough to pay for certain essentials, such as the house, for example, but far insufficient to rely on for everything—will accrue to the two younger brothers. In a small study off the main hall the father delivers this news to the young man in a tone of jovial inevitability, nothing surprising in the matter at all; nothing else could ever have been expected or supposed. The house, his father explains, was meant to provide a fair beginning and should serve that purpose in the family for generations. The father, feigning not to notice his son’s expression, lists several possibilities that can be arranged for him, none terribly taxing or at all unbecoming, good opportunities to think over, no hurry, of course, but do let me know your preferences: a seat on the stock exchange, participation in some commercial ventures, a position in the government. The son is silent, his wrath overcoming his initial astonishment at the betrayal. The father, still avoiding his son’s glance, concludes his practiced remarks, says he understands the boy will want some time to think about it, and offers to show himself out. The owner of the house waits until the sounds of his father’s exit have faded before he hurls his coffee cup at the wall, where it shatters with an explosion muffled only by his obscene expression of fury.
The sign—ISTEN HOZOTT A HÁZAMBAN—was hung in 1989 by Tamás Fehér when the legal standing of his new project was still unsettled. The sign was a joke, a feeble disguise expected to fool no one. And even when the club’s legal status was secure, nothing more official or easy to use replaced the old sign. Instead, the institution grew in popularity without any name at all and was widely known simply as A Házam [My House]. The building’s interior layout had changed substantially in its 116 years; by 1990 the small study (where the first of the wedding china had broken) corresponded only approximately to “Backroom 2,” where several cartons of liquor lay stacked next to Tamás’s desk. The small study off the main hall had been larger than Backroom 2, however, and if the china cup had exploded just over where a framed photo of a Hungarian fashion model now sat on Tamás’s desk, it had actually been thrown from a spot located on the far side of the curtain that separated Backroom 2 from the bar.
The noise will soon conjure his curious wife. The thought of her seeing him like this, humiliated by his father and elder brother, is unbearable. He strides out of the room, passing a frightened maid coming to clear up the remnants of the cup, and turns away from the main stairs, pretending not to hear his wife calling him. Still unfamiliar with parts of his new home, he finds himself in the kitchen, walking rapidly past the baffled (and territorially offended) cook, who is in conversation with the faceless second maid, both of whom jump to standing and bow their heads as their fuming master passes. He opens first one door, which he finds full of pots and pans, then a second, and walks down the brick stairs in front of him. The staircase is impossibly dark, and in a rage he turns back up the stairs. “Gyertyát!” he demands, and the maid quickly complies. Armed now with a candle, he closes the door behind him and heads downstairs again. He stands on the new brick floor of a cellar he did not know he owned, whitewashed and clean, larger than what his candle can illuminate all at once.
In 1990, the cellar was lit by metal lamps, plain round stainless-steel hoods, enclosing extremely bright single bulbs, attached to plastic claws that gripped heat and water pipes. They were pointed at the corners, where the dirty white walls met the stained and cracking ceiling. The reflected light was sufficient, even atmospheric. Tamás had been pleased when his fashion model girlfriend had brought him fifteen lights as a gift, prouder still when she described stealing them one or two at a time from the studio of a West German fashion photographer based in Pest. The windowless, unventilated cellar held about 250 people on the night of the Fourth of July, 1990.
He walks the room’s perimeter while he thinks what to tell his wife. He drags his left hand lightly along the white plaster. Ledges that are cut into the wall support sacks of potatoes, flour, other staples. Realizing the room’s shape, he crosses it diagonally. In the center of this cool rectangle, bottles of French and Tokaj wine recline in tall wooden racks. The cellar must stretch all the way underneath the courtyard. He tries to recall the layout of the floors above him and walks aimlessly, carrying his small circle of yellow light with him, guessing which pieces of furniture float over his head. Directly above him, he decides, sits the long chair next to the fireplace, and above that is the bed, and above that, the maid’s basin, then the roof with birds’ nests, then open sky. Through all of this furniture, weightless over his head, on invisible floors, stroll staff and wife, layered over each other, amid floating and carefully arranged décor. Then the unbidden thought comes, soothes him, solves everything: If he were to arrange the death of his elder brother, all would be well again. He stands straight, turns to face the wall, looks up again, and wonders how it could be accomplished. He knows he will never do it, even as he hopes that he might. He says aloud that he will never do it, thus permitting himself to plan.
Against one short wall, Tamás had built a small wooden stage, about four and a half feet off the floor. On the F
ourth of July, 1990, the stage supported Cash Ass, a band composed of three men and a woman. She wore a black cocktail dress and high-heeled black shoes. Her platinum-blond hair was cut in the smooth, curving Hollywood style of the late 1950s. While she waited in the background during an instrumental passage, her face expressed a fleeting interest in her bandmates and calm indifference to the hundreds of eyes watching her. The three men were playing the instrumental opening, the sixth and final song in the third of the night’s three-set contract. The men, too, wore black cocktail dresses and high-heeled shoes to match hers, and their platinum-blond hair aped hers so perfectly, it seemed likely that she too was wearing a wig. One musician played an assortment of children’s instruments—ukuleles, banjos, cowboy guitars—all heavily amplified and blasted through the several large speakers slung around the basement. The second man played a bass guitar with incredible facility, maintaining a funk groove interlaced with thirty-second and sixty-fourth note trills, machine-gun patters, like bandoliers worn as fashion accessories. His thumps and pops caused dancers to twitch and jump in the steamy heat. The third musician sat at an array of cassette players wired to a single control panel. Brushing his platinum-blond bangs away from his eyes, he brought up the volume of one cassette while he lowered another. During this song, he orchestrated:
• a baby crying and an elderly male voice attempting soothing Hungarian.
• a Soviet-era speech in Russian. (All of the Hungarians in the room had, at one point or another in their academic lives, been required to learn Russian, but it was a point of pride to assert forgetfulness, the highest achievement being lack of any Russian vocabulary whatsoever, a common claim belied by the number of dancers who now laughed and made faces.)
• the theme song from an American children’s television program, sung in a happy major key by a man, a woman, and several gifted children.
• a Hungarian couple exerting themselves, moans and bed squeaks.
• cut-and-spliced British cricket commentary: “The South Africans have rather a steep hill to scale steep hill to scale have rather a steepsteepsteep hill steepsteep hill to scale the South Africans have rather a steep hill to scale this afternoon, Trevor, Trevor, Trevor, Trevor.”
• the Hungarian national anthem, recited atonally by three friends of the band. They imitated distracted schoolchildren until, after about ten seconds, the three voices were at three entirely different places in the anthem, and the crowd’s applause and shouting grew deafening as the nation’s hymn scrambled toward incomprehensibility.
He walks slowly down the center of the empty room, toward the wine rack, and his thoughts come quickly. Easiest matter in the world to loosen this wine rack, for example, so it falls on someone reaching for a bottle in a high nook. There would be blood and broken bone, and if it were late at night and the victim had already drunk a large quantity, the explanation for the accident would glow in the very red face of the deceased. I will express to my father how pleased I am to take his suggestion, how fine an arrangement that stock-jobbing position is, and then I will invite my good brother over for a brotherly dinner. How late we could dine, how happily I would see my wife off to bed, how pleasantly I would send the servants away, how joyful I would be to sit up late, chatting and drinking with my beloved brother. And then I would take him down to show him the cellar. How horrified I will be! How heartbroken! It is like the loss of the sun—no, that is too much.
Halfway down the room, at the very center of the throng, a wooden platform stood high enough that people could dance beneath it. Perched with his head just under the ceiling, an army buddy of Tamás’s operated the sound board. Just behind his aerie, next to its splintered and graffitied wooden ladder, Charles Gábor, wearing khakis and a black polo shirt, buffeted by the twist of the crowd, was kissing a very short girl he had never seen before but who moments earlier had bumped into him and plunged her hands into his pants.
How difficult can it be to poison a potato, he wonders as he stands in front of the ledges cut into the back wall. No, the risk of the wrong person eating it, or . . . of course. It’s a new house. Surely the balconies might have been installed badly, a balustrade may be loose, a person could easily fall. The wine rack seems the best plan.
At the back of the room, on a ledge cut into the wall, Scott and Mária held hands, yelled things to each other, but as they sat directly beneath one of the club’s speakers, they soon gave up, hoarse, and settled for kissing and watching the band. The volume of the guitar and the bass suddenly dropped, the tape jockey brought up a scratchy recording of a funk drumbeat, and the blond woman approached the microphone. She closed her eyes, crossed her arms, placed her hands over her breasts, and sang in Hungarian-accented English, with a well-trained operatic voice:
We all live underneath the hammer
Wielded by Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Glamour.
The crowd, with variable English fluency, joined in a repetitive chant of the couplet while the woman’s singing slid slowly but definitively away from her operatic training into a hard-rock voice, then to a raw scream. She snarled, more and more angry, and the sound of the crying baby grew louder, the ukulele more piercing, the bass groove ever more complicated, and the Hungarian national anthem more and more confused. People jumped up and down and screamed the lyrics, couples danced, and young men shoved other young men they did not know. Hungarian and foreign men smoked near the front of the stage, trying to look moderately interested, shaking their brains, almost to the man, in search of the right thing to do or say in order to win even the slimmest chance of sleeping with the singer.
His anger has passed, and with it his more baroque plots. He completes another circle of his basement, his free hand dusted with white from dragging it along the cool walls. He arrives at the staircase again, still hoping for his brother’s death, but now only in a vain effort to forestall thinking about what he must tell his wife, what he must agree to do. He will never kill his brother. Far more horrible solutions will be necessary.
On the left side of the room beckoned the dance hall’s only exit, an opening to a brick staircase that rose from the poured-concrete floor, lit by the same clamped, hooded spotlights. This sole artery was stenotic with descending prospective dancers and ascending drinkers hopeful for fresh air. Everyone smoked.
June has become March and he sits on his basement stairs again, crumbles bits of the mortar between his fingers, and tries not to listen to the screams. He tries instead to think about some detail from his government job. He is not unhappy with the post. All the nonsense he caused, the broken cup . . . It turned out to be the simplest thing in the world. Rather pleasant, even. He told his wife of his father’s announcement that very night, of course, said he had expected it, had known about it for months, he said, simply hadn’t wanted to bother her with the details on their honeymoon and wouldn’t she be proud to say to her friends that her husband held a post on the stock exchange and . . . But by then the damn tears were coming again, and even though he tried to stand up and go to the other room before she saw them, he allowed himself to fall back into her arms when she pulled his hand, and he simply wept there, ashamed, while she stroked his head and brushed the white dust from his hair and began to kiss him.
The screams stopped, but he doesn’t know when, doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting in silence as well as darkness. He climbs up to the kitchen. He stops to listen. The screams are definitely over. She must certainly be out of danger, but he does not move from his position near the cold kitchen stove. Then screams return, but now they are the first protests of a baby. And still he does not move.
The stairs led from A Házam’s dance cellar to its ground-floor bar and lounge. Behind the bar, Tamás and two other men ministered to the crowd’s needs. On the walls behind them hung framed photographs of various Soviet and East Bloc leaders, all autographed to Tamás, though in Hungarian and with the same thick black pen and the same hand. “Big Tamás,” read the Hungarian inscription on Stalin’s photog
raph, “I will never forget that time with the three Polish girls! You are the best! Joe.” “Tamás, your house, my house: There is always a party. Rákosi.” “Tamás, mistakes were made, excesses committed, but never by you, cool baby [these last two words in English]. Nikita K.” “You come to my house, T. I’ll show you what the girls like! VN Lenin.” “Best wishes to our dear young Tamás from Mr. and Mrs. Ceau¸sescu.”
He still occasionally recalls plotting his brother’s death so many years ago and, that very same night, conceiving the child whose vicious arrival killed his wife, and in an instant of extreme pain, he still cannot deny that the two events are connected, and he is pricked by a barb of the perfumed religion he never otherwise touches: The child was conceived in the shadow of his sin, and he essentially murdered his wife that night nine months before her death, by taking her when murder was still throbbing in his head. And in these moments, the guilt of his crime is so physically painful that he will close his eyes to defend himself. This wince, much less common ten years on, is still immediately followed not by relief but by an almost equally painful feeling that he is a fool. Tonight, though, in front of a fire that is not quite sufficient to warm the room, the boy has noticed his father’s face and for the first time musters the courage to ask what pain his father suffers to cause such an expression. “You are almost too big to sit in my lap,” his father replies, pulling the boy up from his toy soldiers to join him on the long chair. He looks at a son and summons up a favorite thought, one that has soothed him many times in the past: Most men would consider the boy the murderer of his mother, but I do not; he is an innocent in my eyes. I will never make him pay for what he did to me.
Prague: A Novel Page 10
