“And that is the sad state of our affairs, Horváth úr.” Imre grudgingly offered to come into the office a few more times, at least until some stability was achieved and someone else took control, or circumstances became too obvious to ignore and no one bothered to come at all anymore. While he waited for the others to give up, “a few more times” quickly absorbed a few weeks, and then a month or two, during which Imre was taught by his employees how to work and repair the press’s machinery. He learned how messengers sent by newspaper editors brought articles pasted on cardboard for him to print. He learned how books were built and spines stamped (though none were being produced). He learned what the strange little picture of a gun meant. Imre learned about the company’s sad finances, about his father’s poor—then erratic, then frightened, then abdicated—decisions, about the firm’s reliance on clients and partners and writers now overthrown or executed or in prison. Imre gathered opinions from his employees and his friends about what books people might buy if they had any money. He kept lists of these theoretical books, and he searched the ruins of the archives for reprint possibilities, and in the meantime he continued printing two- or four-page newspapers that would go out of business after only a few issues, and modest black-and-white advertising posters that, even in their modesty, were misleading: The shops they sheepishly extolled had pathetically little to sell.
A few months lined up to become six. His skill at scavenging and black marketeering—acquired during a war that felt, until the triple tragedy of 1944–45, like a game he played with undeniable skill—served him and the press well as the primordial economy slowly re-evolved from bartery ooze back to an upright currency. He squeezed enough money from his desiccated legacy to make discreet payments and gifts to two young mothers on opposite sides of the river.
And at last he won his first victories. He commissioned the mothers of a few of his friends to write a cookbook featuring recipes suitable for shortages, and Enough for Everyone, the first book to be published by the Horváth Press in four years, sold very respectably. Six worried employees multiplied and became eight occasionally optimistic employees.
Awakening Nation had long since vanished, and any old copies Imre happened to find he promptly combusted, especially those featuring the increasingly raving “Letter from the Publisher.” But the financial paper, now Our Peng, began to sell well again. Imre was soon lucky enough to arrange, through a friend, a contract to print ration-book coupons as well. A ninth employee was deemed useful.
Over nine months, the Horváth Press gave birth to four contradictory history books covering the previous thirty-three years. All of the books were financed by new or restored political parties; it was as if, with an uncertain future, the past as well grew hazy and no one could quite agree who had done what to whom or why, who had been wicked and who had been wise, except that everybody agreed Trianon was a crime. Imre read as much as he could of all four volumes, making less and less progress with each. Their proceeds, however, paid for a new truck and repairs to the warehouse and one of the presses.
The reborn Horváth Kiadó’s most successful postwar venture was released at the beginning of 1948, just after the final governmental takeover by the Communists. The book was Imre’s own inspiration and a work he cherished for many years. He collected photographs from friends and friends of friends and outright strangers all over Budapest. He simply asked people to loan him family portraits, old snapshots, favorite pictures of the city or the countryside—anything they truly loved. He asked for a line or two of written description. Then he edited and combined these donations into an album, which he published under the title Békében (In Peacetime). He captioned each photograph with its description in the first person, even though the words represented hundreds of different speakers. This is my brother the day he left to study in England. . . . This is a poor family that lived next to us; they had almost nothing, but they were extremely kind to that little dog, a mutt named Tedi. . . . This is my mother and father on their wedding day, 1913. . . . This is my mother and father on their wedding day, 1919 . . . on their wedding day, 1930. . . . This is a Jew who lived in our building and was very kind to me when I was a girl. I hope he is well, but I fear not. . . . This is me as a little boy on the Elizabeth Bridge with my friends. . . . This is my family at Lake Balaton in 1922. . . . This is a picture of my father riding horses with the regent. . . . This is a meeting of a labor union, and my brother is speaking at the podium. . . . This is how the Corsó looked in 1910. . . . This is the old fish market; it doesn’t exist anymore. . . . This is how the Chain Bridge looked before. . . . This is my father in front of his shop; he died at Auschwitz. . . . This is my grandmother as a young girl. . . . This is a party for my name day at the Gerbeaud; I am the one looking at the krémes with big eyes . . .
Among Imre’s favorites was the quiet little portrait in the upper-left corner of page 66. It had been presented to him by a total stranger, who had heard about Imre’s project through mutual acquaintances. The photo was of a young woman, nineteen or twenty. She sat at a kitchen table, very upright, a serious expression on her face. She was unremarkable. Her hands rested on her lap, and she looked directly at the photographer. This was the most beautiful girl in the world.
The popularity of Békében was no surprise to Imre, though many of his staff shook their heads in amazement as more and more of the books were printed and bound. There were certainly those critics—professional and private—who called it sentimental, naïve, even misleading, and they may not have been wrong, but Imre felt he had made something good, and sales convinced him he was right. His composite narrator, grafted from four hundred different voices, defied category. Politics were scattershot, a variety of social classes was represented, Catholic ceremonies were presented as family history right alongside Jewish ones: the polyphonic voice of Hungary in peacetime. The words from page to page varied only slightly, and after a while, the parade of strangers described as friends and family seemed, hypnotically, to become just that. This was Hungary, and Imre was its memory. For some, the book acted almost as an opiate: The pleasure of leisurely or impatiently traveling from page to page and seeing lovely Budapest unbombed, undamaged, in black and white, was almost pornographic in its unattainable, voluptuous gorgeousness: Lipótváros, the Elizabeth Bridge, the Corsó, the Castle, the Nyugati Station the day of its inauguration—the day it was the largest, cleanest train station in the world . . .
Imre included three pictures of his own: This is my mother on her christening day, on my grandmother’s lap, and my great-grandmother is standing behind them. . . . This is me when I was ten, with my friend Zoli. We are trying to stand on our skates, but we are not very good, and we will fall just after this picture is taken. . . . This is only two years ago, with my friend Pál on my shoulders. He is four, and even though the Chain Bridge is under water, he thinks now it is peacetime. Look how happy he is.
By the middle of 1948, despite ominous signs, twenty-six-year-old Imre was operating a business that supported eleven people. He owned a warehouse, offices, a small truck, two fully functioning presses—one producing books, the other, newspapers—a third under repair, and a fourth under consideration. Much to his surprise, he was taking some pleasure in his work. He began to think he might have a knack for legitimate business after all. He toyed with the idea of selling this one, carrying the proceeds to some better place west or south, starting again doing something else.
Still in 1948, all four of Imre’s partner newspapers were closed down as enemies of the Party, and the twice-daily deliveries (2 A.M. and 3 P.M.) of pastedup layouts simply stopped. Imre’s back-of-the-mind notion to sell the press and leave the country grew more and more urgent at exactly the same speed that it became completely impossible. The West—once less than two hundred miles away—suddenly retreated infinitely farther: The government was felling trees between here and there and cultivating instead a crop of barbed wire and gun towers. In 1949, the government declared all businesses employing
more than ten people to be property of the state. The next day, Imre came to work to find a representative of the Party already in residence, sitting at Imre’s desk, examining Imre’s papers, firing the hard and soft contents of a plugged nostril onto Imre’s floor.
Horváth toured his guest through the offices and showed him the press’s reduced archives. “You may find this interesting,” Imre said amiably. He pulled from the shelf the 1890 manifesto of the first Hungarian socialist workers’ party, complete with MK colophon. “Our ancestors worked together,” said Imre with a charming smile, and offered his duly impressed guest a drink.
For six weeks, Imre was kept on as a technical assistant, training new press employees (excess farmers fresh from the countryside). Two of his previous employees had simply disappeared, and a third, György Toldy, was hiding with Imre’s assistance in the press’s basement. Each morning while the Party commissar sat in Imre’s offices trying to understand Imre’s papers, Imre stood on the press floor and explained to men who had never operated a device larger or more complicated than a hoe how to turn the daily deliveries of pasted articles on cardboard into copies of the Party newspaper. Three times Imre smuggled home a personal or family item. In a box under his bed, in his apartment, now drawn and quartered to share with three newly urbanized families, he stored a damaged edition of his great-grandfather’s poems, a small printer’s plate with the MK colophon, and a copy of Békében.
At the end of six weeks—the new staff being as well trained as could be expected under the circumstances, and the commissar having no further questions on where anything was kept or what any file represented—Imre was arrested. Two unpleasant members of the ÁVO secret police came to the press and the Party man, who had been generally gruff but not hostile, called Imre up from the machinery, sat him on the floor of his office, handcuffed him, and explained the accusations against him as the two ÁVO men took turns kicking him. The commissar recited the charges quietly: Some of the new press employees reported that Imre had called the revolution “a bad harvest,” had labeled General Secretary Rákosi “a goat’s cock,” and had predicted there would soon be a welcome uprising engineered by Hungarian noblemen and British spies. Further, one of his new flat mates reported Imre was himself a spy and used Enough for Everyone to code secret messages to the Americans. Imre managed, quite bravely, to laugh at these stories, and, to give them their due, the secret policemen and the commissar laughed with him. Then they kicked him in the testicles. “We understand these people are a bit overzealous in their loyalty to the Party. We are not fools,” the Party man said. “But this is not a joke.” And he waved a copy of Békében at the bleeding, crying young man. “This is disgusting.” He struck Imre across the face with the hard, heavy book, breaking Imre’s nose and two teeth. “Do you have a favorite picture, my lord Horváth?” he demanded, but did not wait for an answer and struck him again with the book, this time against the other side of Imre’s face. “Is there a picture from before the Party came to power that you like?” And struck him again. “A picture of your daddy?” And again. “A pretty picture of some rich parties?” And again. “Some of your daddy’s Arrow Cross friends?” And again. “Pretty pictures of the pig regent Horthy on a lovely black horse?” And again. Then there was a pause, the end of blows. “Do you like this book very much, great Mr. Horváth? Peacetime without the Party?” And he struck him again. “Now, what does this mean?” Imre remembered being asked as his bleeding, swelling head was held up from behind by hard stranger’s hands and a finger with a blood-covered nail angrily tapped the MK colophon on the last page of Békében again and again and again, smudging it red-brown. “Now, what does this mean? You are going to shoot us down, great Mr. Horváth?” And the next blow sent him into welcome unconsciousness.
XII.
SENTENCED TO LIFE WHILE HE SLEPT, IMRE HORVÁTH SPENT THREE AND A half years in a work camp.
He did not count his days and nights in bondage because he expected—even two days prior to his release—that his imprisonment would end only with his death. He did not feel some secret part of himself made strong by his hardship. He did not discreetly receive from one prisoner and pass on to the next a tattered translation of the United States Constitution or Montesquieu’s essays on the natural rights of man. He was not warmed by a great and unexpected love for his fellow prisoners. He did not organize his companions to assure that the strong protected the weak. He did not hide extra food under his dirty gray pillow and give it to the sick or dying. He did not take responsibility for breaches in discipline that he had not committed in order to save some other prisoner from punishment, and did not win as a result the undying loyalty of a small group. He did not find new solace in his old, untended religion, though the camp did not lack for Catholic priests. He did not mentally rehearse great orations that would soften the hearts of the heartless judges who had condemned him. He did not refuse to participate in education sessions and instead proudly face workmanlike beatings. He did not bait or debate his teachers, did not ask troublesome questions with a delicately ironic voice. He did not scratch detailed schematics in the dust with a bit of stick, squatting amid a circle of admiring cohorts, nodding along, keeping a lookout, chewing on seeds. He did not win the favor of the guards. He did not hold the barbed wire to let others crawl to freedom first, did not shelter a Western spy under his bunk, did not rise under the new moon and tap Morse code on a brilliantly rigged radio that only the finest minds could have produced under such circumstances. He did not look with sympathy on those of his fellow prisoners who were themselves Communists, betrayed, shocked, eaten by the monster they had so lovingly raised. He did not pester those of his block mates who were true democratic dissidents, did not ask for their acceptance, did not look on them as the sainted. He did not gaze amazedly upon his thin, quiet, pale cellmate and realize, yes, yes, this is the man who will lead a free Hungary if we are only patient, and did not, as a result, do all that was in his admittedly limited power to protect that man from abuse, vicious or petty. He did not dream of the day when all of this would be swept away. He did not swear to remember, or to become like a camera. He did not think he would be called to testify, did not expect justice would be done. He did not wonder where his rescuers would come from. He did not know better than his captors, did not fall asleep each night with a sly smile, free despite the illusory appearance of bonds, did not leave them his body while his soul soared. He was not above all this. He did not hide his weeping. He did not ask others to share theirs. He did not watch when someone was taken away or beaten or shot. He did not vow this or that. He made no oaths that someday, and so on. He did not refuse to surrender. He did not die.
And then there came what they called a thaw. It blew from the east, and in its relative warmth he was allowed to melt underneath the barbed-wire walls and flow back to the city whence he had come. And there he was told where to live. And he was told what to do. He was asked his previous work, and he was made again a printer, a low-level printer working the very same machinery he had rebuilt six years before in the very same buildings where his mother had taken him to visit brothers, a father, and ancestors living in the shadows of a forest of books. And he never knew if this re-placement was an oversight, coincidence, apology, tricky test, insult, and he never asked, and he tried to be as he had been in camp but found that he could not, because he was often too angry even to speak. He loaded the ink and manned the spinning drums and tried to be as he had been before the camp, but found that this, too, was impossible, as none of what had come before had brought him here, no logic, no progressive course, not even a game. His actions had determined nothing, and he commanded himself not to think about it.
He spoke little. He would correct the other men who worked the presses, men he did not know but who fed the paper too roughly. They did not take his corrections, nor did they take to him, nor did he find himself suddenly a natural leader of men, seasoned by pain and hard treatment. And this, too, angered him.
The P
eople’s Dawn clattered off the spinning drums now, and he did not care that its editorials spoke of much needed reforms. He did not notice that under a new and very different Horváth Kiadó logo, the paper began to report on failures of Communism around Hungary. He neither knew nor would have cared that the paper called for a return to “socialist legality,” that it apologized for the wrongful imprisonment of innocent comrades, that it applauded First Secretary Mátyás Rákosi and Prime Minister Imre Nagy for their admirable decision to imprison for life their former chief of the ÁVO and their simultaneous promise to respect civil liberties from this point on.
Imre Horváth kept to himself, and tried not to think about the past that he thought about constantly. He considered visiting his two children, those products of another time and personality, but he would not recognize them, had no gifts to offer, dreaded conversation with their mothers. After screwing up his courage for one feeble visit to his daughter the first warm day of March, he no longer considered further attempts.
He went quietly to and from his job, spoke little, and wrestled with anger that would reduce him to silence when in company but tears when alone. Twice a day he drank coffee standing up at a coffee bar near his tiny flat. He did not read of the events of early October 1956.
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