Károly remained quiet, was forced by circumstance to be Horn’s admirer, found himself at his own breakfast table gagged and bound at a distance by the Jew scribbler. He could say nothing. And so Károly laughed. The betrayal of the press by his own father (Károly later told a colleague) brought hot tears of shame to his eyes, the ruination of a once great man. “A man can be destroyed, of course, but a national institution cannot.”
But he went himself that day to the offices of Awakening Nation and assured himself the editors would not repeat their error. There were still some men of principle in this world, though his father could no longer be counted among them.
“Oh, here’s a pity. Horn’s game’s been discovered by the clowns at Awakening Nation,” his father reported one hungover morning.
“Has it really? What a remarkable turn of events.”
IX.
THE SECOND IMRE HORVÁTH DIED IN 1913, TEN YEARS AFTER BLEATING A widely parodied eulogy at Endre Horn’s very elaborate, very Catholic state funeral.
At Imre’s passing, Károly Horváth was thirty-five, married with three sons and still saddened by the memory of his infant daughter’s death twelve years earlier. The girl had been named Klára, for his unlucky twin, and had succumbed in her turn to typhus. But now he shook off the dust and webs of rage and sorrow and climbed at last to the position he had deserved for two thirds of his life.
The day after his father’s funeral, he made a list of everything the press should immediately cease printing. This long document began with Endre Horn’s plays and proceeded through the works of nearly every member of the long since evaporated KB. Then he made a list of papers and writers he wanted the press to acquire, beginning with Awakening Nation, which had steadily grown in popularity in its fifteen years of circulation. The new chief examined his two lists, and re-examined—with the assistance of new and trusted associates—the financial status of the press. Over several weeks, he estimated the cost of acquiring everything he desired and the loss his firm would suffer if he excised all of its disgraceful properties. And then he revised. Some things, unfortunately, would have to stay, even though they were hardly admirable exemplars of the memory of the Hungarian people. Horn, for example, still sold ridiculously well. Antall inexplicably brought in money. But the composer Bálint? No one listened to that garbage, and certainly no one bought the sheet music for the screeching noise. His father had been ridiculously sentimental to publish the work of that ungrateful sodomite. It was with a pleasure almost unmatched in Károly’s life that the tip of his pen very, very slowly scratched its way through the letters B-Á-L-I-N-T J-Á-N-O-S, even tore the paper slightly, and Károly recalled his own precocious words that had stopped the composer panting in his perversely libidinous tracks so many years earlier at the Gerbeaud. “Take your hands off me, you disgusting man. Conduct yourself like a gentleman or a real gentleman will teach you how.” Even at that young age he had known right from wrong and had courageously spoken. Bálint had fallen back a step, grown pale to be so eloquently chastened in front of all his filthy friends, and by a young boy of all people. “And by a boy, by a young boy,” Károly whispered aloud. On the list of forty-five authors, newspapers, and magazines he hoped to sell off or discontinue, six writers and the magazine Culture were insufficiently profitable to justify amnesty: seven slow lines, each a joy. The other thirty-five writers and four publications would have to be tolerated and slowly replaced, but surely someone else at the press could be responsible for them. He was guardian of his nation’s memory and conscience. If filth temporarily and necessarily brought in money to support this mission, so be it, but he would not dirty his hands with it.
The next year, having purged his company of unprofitable filth, Károly completed the negotiations for his acquisition of Awakening Nation, which, as of July 8, 1914, bore the familiar Horváth logo in the upper-right-hand corner of every copy. Károly took particular pleasure composing his monthly “Letter from the Publisher,” which he inaugurated on the bottom left of page one, on August 10, 1914, on the topic of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s eternal and immutable strength. In this debut he used as a symbol his own greatuncle Viktor, a Hungarian who had given his life for the empire at Kápolna. He called on Hungarians to stand firm in the face of current international tensions, as strength would certainly prevent war, this crisis would pass, leaving Austria-Hungary more dominant than ever. And though Awakening Nation never achieved the circulation of Corpus Sanus—with its bicycling results and horse-racing stories—Károly always referred to it as the jewel in the Horváth crown.
X.
MASTER’S IN BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, FINAL EXAM, CASE-STUDY ESSAY Question, as administered to Károly Horváth between August 11, 1914, and July 16, 1947:
You are the head of a small but highly successful family-owned publishing business. Please outline your corporate decisions after each of the following seventeen events takes place in the country of your operations. Include explanations of how you access materials and labor, gauge the market, determine product range, carry out marketing, and manage an integrated strategic longterm planning function within your senior executive staff.
i. Your country fights and loses a world war; labor is scarce; inflation is alarmingly high. You lose your second oldest son to disease, which sinks you into an uncommunicative depression for several weeks. You decide to stop publishing several of your most profitable titles, as their authors are responsible for the flu that claimed your son’s life. Revenue earned during the war from publishing government casualty lists, draft notices, maps, and propaganda is almost entirely depleted by the end of your despondency.
ii. Your country secedes from the stable political system it has belonged to for centuries; politics are dangerous and the government is weak.
iii. A violent Communist dictatorship emerges and nationalizes your press. You lose everything and are arrested. The Communist regime is nearly 70 percent Jewish, a statistic that strikes you as highly significant. Your execution is tentatively included on the Communists’ very busy schedule.
iv. Your country loses another war (more of an epilogue to the last one) and is invaded by Romanians, who find themselves briefly in control of Budapest before giving it back and going home. You remain in prison throughout, and your execution date is first advanced then indefinitely postponed.
v. After only four months of Communism, a right-wing counterrevolution is successfully launched. You are freed from prison, your firm is restored to you (you fire your three staunchly anti-Communist Jewish employees on allegations of crypto-Communist sympathies), and you are personally congratulated for your courage by the new head of state, a regent/vice admiral. (He is a regent, although there is no monarch on whose behalf he administers. He is a vice admiral, although your country no longer has a coastline, having lost it—as well as 70 percent of its land and 60 percent of its population—under the predictably unpopular and embittering Trianon treaty ending the world war.) The regent cites your press as the memory of a people and the conscience of a nation. You receive a medal, which you hang in your office, in a glass case with a small electric light suspended over it. Executions of real and suspected Communists sweep the country. The demand for “national-Christian” newspapers and writers seems a very tempting foundation on which to rebuild your firm’s fortunes.
vi. Civil war is narrowly averted when a pretender to the throne of Hungary briefly appears.
vii. Peace and prosperity return at last to your country. Demand rises for your back catalog of Hungarian authors and scholars, though you privately associate them with imprisonment, tyranny, murder, and disease. The prosperity they can bring you, though a necessity, seems to you a sulfurous compromise with evil.
viii. The Depression.
ix. Elections subsequent to the Depression unsurprisingly favor the fascists. The regent’s new government flirts with Mussolini and Hitler and pushes through laws setting quotas on Jews admitted to universities and the professions, then declarin
g them an alien race. Please detail your firm’s extensive opportunities for profit and acquisition.
x. Another world war. Your country tries very hard to stay out of it, wedged as it is between two very large opposing combatants who don’t think yours really counts as an independent nation. Detail your new government and military printing contracts.
xi. Forced to pick sides, your country wades delicately into the war as a member of the Axis and shyly helps invade the Soviet Union. The government forbids marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Please estimate how many government-edict posters you can produce and paste in Jewish neighborhoods on short notice.
xii. At the Germans’ repeated insistence, the Hungarian government grudgingly, quietly declares war on the United States and Great Britain. New laws force Jews to wear yellow stars and live in a Pest ghetto. After initial efforts to ship Jews to death camps, the government halts deportation when the Budapest police responsible for the roundups threaten to rebel. Please recalculate poster revenues, including both the deportation orders and their revocation.
xiii. The government implies to its German ally that it would like to pull out of the war now, that it had only gotten involved in order to reclaim a little of the Hungarian land lost in the last world war, that it has no serious grievance against the British and Americans anyhow. The regent secretly negotiates with the West, then publicly announces, over national radio, Hungary’s separate peace with them. Hungary is instantly overrun by its spurned German ally. The regent’s intricate diplomatic ploy was useless: Germany and its Hungarian Arrow Cross quasi-SS allies establish headquarters in the palace on Buda’s Castle Hill and bundle the regent off to Berlin. Back in Budapest, some of your countrymen eagerly offer to help load Jews onto trains en route to Auschwitz. Jewish possessions and apartments are free for the taking. The Arrow Cross, some of whose members work or have worked for your press, rival the SS in their spirited brutality. Meanwhile, other members of the government continue to enact the terms of their separate peace with the Allies and declare war on the (occupying) Germans. Your country is at war with everyone. Please be specific as to your business and commercial opportunities.
xiv. The Americans and British bomb you in the mornings. Your eldest son (and trained heir) is killed. The Soviets bomb you in the evenings. Your third son is killed. The Soviets invade. The Germans—having already been driven out of nearly every country they once occupied—decide, for no discernible strategic reason, to hold on to Hungary and, with their Arrow Cross partners, to make a last stand atop Castle Hill. Jews are murdered in the streets and along the lovely Danube riverfront quays, where they are tied together and pushed from the elegant Corsó in front of the bombed Bristol, Carlton, and Hungaria Hotels into the icy river. Tank and artillery battles flatten the city. Your wife is killed. Please explain how to continue profitable press operations despite your crippling grief, thoughts of suicide, and the country’s near-total economic collapse.
xv. As the last of the Germans retreat, murdering as they flee (Hungary is their enemy), the nation’s victorious Russian saviors begin to steal or rape anything worth stealing or raping (Hungary is their enemy). Your office is smashed to pieces, and Soviet soldiers defecate on your library, including rare editions dating back to the 1800s, among which are exquisitely produced volumes of your grandfather’s poetry. The Soviet Army, needing to meet the deliriously high POW numbers it reported to Stalin during the war, kidnaps Hungarian males to crate back to the USSR whether or not they ever fought and, if they did fight, whether or not they fought for the Axis. Your last remaining child, a strapping boy of twenty-three, hides in a basement for 157 days, then emerges, squinting, ninety-four pounds under his prewar weight. You are not much interested anymore.
xvi. Your country has lost another world war. Hungarian currency is worthless. Ink and paper are scarce. The city boasts no gas, electricity, telephone service, or unbroken glass. Your office building is standing, but your presses are badly damaged. Some surviving Jews begin to return and reclaim their looted apartments, furniture, and other possessions. Please operate your family business in the current chaos, and with scarcely enough energy or desire to get out of your reeking bed.
xvii. Relative peace, semi-democracy, and rebuilding ensue, though the Communists are organizing in the background, arresting, torturing, murdering their opponents while they take over the police and security apparatus of the country. You have few employees, few capital assets, no appetite to go on. You spend days at a time just sitting in an overstuffed brown chair with a grease-stained antimacassar. The owners of this chair have not yet returned from their wartime residence. The question of whether they will return and then find and claim this chair, which is rightly yours, occupies a disproportionate amount of your thinking. You speak hardly at all. Your remaining son, an accidental child of your middle age, whom you know only slightly, brings you food and cigarettes. You eat little and smoke much. Occasionally, you go to the press and watch silently as some of your employees attempt to rebuild. You are accused of pro-Nazi sympathies for some of your actions and statements during the war, but your son defends you vigorously; rather than being hanged in public, you are largely left alone. You are indifferent. You die of chronic untreated heart trouble and your son buries you at Kerepesi Cemetery in the bright sunshine of July 16, 1947. You are laid to rest in the same vault that contains your numerous ancestors, your wife, your twin sister, and your four eldest children. The owners of the armchair find their way home the next week, and your son does not know what to say or do other than politely hold the door and allow the neighbor he has known and liked since childhood to push her furniture back across the hall, where it belongs.
XI.
THE THIRD IMRE HORVÁTH—NAMED IN A MOMENT OF SENTIMENTAL WEAKness by a middle-aged father who had previously sworn to excise that name from the family history—stood in the partially rebuilt office. His inheritance—stewarded for five generations in preparation for his eldest brother—was worth almost nothing when it was delivered to him, Károly’s fifth and only child, that July afternoon in 1947. The press had small cash reserves in a valueless currency. It could scarcely obtain ink, paper, or equipment. It sat in a bombed-out city, where entrepreneurs in private boats ferried joyless passengers from bank to bank, past the semi-sunken, spanless husks of the Danube’s great bridges: The Chain Bridge resembled Stonehenge; the golden Elizabeth squatted in the brown water like a society woman gone mad, her fine dresses torn and bunched around her hips while she washed her privates in full public view and sensitive souls wondered what had become of their world.
Imre signed a few unread documents and was handed a set of keys, for most of which he never found a corresponding lock. He had never had any reason, until 1945, to think that he would become the head of the family and then was unimpressed by this nasty honor during his 157-day residence in his building’s cellar. By the time of his father’s death, he felt equal only to the task of closing the press officially prior to leaving the country. He had never hoped to be at the helm of a business. He wanted to be anywhere but in the smoldering city that had consumed his entire family. He had risen to the leadership of an extinct clan, of an all but dead company. He embodied family traditions and burdens now plainly irrelevant.
Besides which, the Horváth family history had never much mattered to this Imre. He had heard pieces of it from relatives and his father’s workers over the years but had never received the concerted education his brothers had enjoyed. He had, for example, been told by his grandmother of a soldier in his family, whom he associated with the toy soldiers that same grandmother had given him on a separate occasion, so that even much later, when he understood that his ancestor had fought and died for an independent Hungary at Kápolna in 1848, he still could not help but dress that distant Viktor in full armor, with a white tunic that matched his squire’s pennon.
When he was very young, Imre’s mother would take him from time to time to visit his wordless, brusque father at the offi
ce. There the little boy saw his elder brothers working and learning the business, and they would stop to tickle him before saying, very importantly, that they were needed down at the machinery or that there was a distribution problem Father wanted them to solve and they couldn’t talk longer—the press has to be kept under control after all, Mother—and then the much-admired seventeen-year-old brother and the unpredictably cruel sixteen-year-old brother would stride off, the elder lecturing the younger with professional gestures. Then Imre’s mother might take him to the archives, and she might show him the beautiful volumes, covered in gold or soft with velvet, and explain that this one was actually written by his own ancestor, a poet who disappeared mysteriously and was never heard from again, and perhaps Imre might someday write great books. Then Imre’s father might appear in the doorway and call for his wife, and she might talk to him in the hall, and Imre might be left alone for a few glorious minutes that swelled to resemble hours, and he would wander through a forest made of books, stacks of books reconstituted into tall trees, behind which lurked enemies Imre would vanquish with lance and mace before composing heroic odes over their bodies.
In 1947, Imre stood amid the tiny remaining stacks that had once formed his enchanted forest and listened to six men who expected him to provide them income. He found it difficult to concentrate as the half-dozen employees who still saw reason to hang around enumerated for him the little that remained of the Horváth Kiadó.
Instead, Imre was distracted by the thought of two fetuses growing frighteningly fast, one on each side of the Danube, the nerve-racking result of a sixmonth flurry of seduction, which had coincided with the six last miserable months of his father’s life. For half a year, Imre had displayed a religious commitment to philandering. A life full of women, he had vaguely decided, was owed to him, repayment for the loss of his family and for his 157 days of fear and boredom. A zesty and fully savored life, full of women, he told friends, was a man’s natural embrace of the world, the only noble, human response to the destruction of Budapest. His friends agreed, but none could match Imre’s appetite or pace until, in the days afer his father’s funeral, his urges subsided as quickly as they had come and snuffed themselves out completely the afternoon of the flabbergasting double annunciation, as one after another barely recalled woman turned up at his apartment to share awful news.
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