‘Look!’ she whispered. ‘That’s her . . .’
‘Who?’
‘Anna. Who works for the Vizys. Anna, the Vizys’ maid.’
The man peered about in the gaslight gloom but saw nobody since the vision was of the most fleeting kind. The ghost in the blue calico dress had flitted by the wall carrying a fresh loaf from the baker, had disappeared behind the gates of a coffee-coloured house and was already rustling up the stairs. She was irredeemably lost to their sight. They waited for a short while as others had done before them, then moved on silently, wrapped in their own mysterious thoughts.
11
Master Jancsi
One September morning the messenger boy at the ministry brought Mrs Vizy a telegram her husband had already opened. Its brief message was: Arriving tonight Jancsi.
In his letters to Vizy, Ferenc Patikárius made frequent mention of his twenty-one-year-old son, Jancsi, who was still hanging around Eger. Up to the age of fourteen Jancsi had been a student at the military cadet school at Sankt-Polten. When his elder brother Sándor was killed in the Carpathian campaign, his father removed Jancsi from the school and enrolled him at the local gimnázium. He wanted his remaining son to be educated into a profession. The boy’s next four years rushed by like a dream, its terms interrupted by enforced holidays owning to coal shortages all of which induced lax discipline. He watched his teachers and elders trooping off to war, becoming dead heroes from one day to the next. Like everyone else he quickly aged with the war. In his last year he was called up, given his training and attended his lessons in military uniform while waiting to be summoned to the front. But the summons never came. The revolution broke out in the meanwhile and he had just time to pass his military exams.
Then, with the iron discipline of the Lower Austrian cadet school behind him and the freedom of a generally imponderable future before him, he entered a period of drifting. He became something of a socialite. He danced his time away at parties, courted the local girls and developed a reputation as an impromptu wit. He dreamed of being a film star. He did not fancy any other career. For two years he stalled. He had no appetite for further study.
Eventually his father despaired of his torpor and appealed to his brother-in-law to make a man of this rascal whose life had been broken by the war. Vizy’s advice was that on no account should he enter local or state service like some genteel pauper: instead he should perform his Christian middle-class duty and heed the spirit of the age by seeking some practical, financial position. This would be the best course for him. Ferenc Patikárius agreed.
Vizy rang a banking acquaintance who promised to employ the lad as a salaried trainee. It only remained to find a flat for him. At this time flats were extremely scarce in Pest. Mrs Vizy was jealous of her rooms and it was only with some difficulty that she was persuaded to accommodate her nephew until something turned up. She felt a certain obligation to her brother.
In the evening she set the table for three. Jancsi failed to arrive. This wasn’t altogether a surprise: he was the most unreliable fellow in the world.
Three days after the cable, when they had almost forgotten their prospective lodger, at about eleven in the morning, the door burst open. Jancsi blew in like a hurricane.
‘Aunti Angéla!’
‘Jancsi, Jancsi!’
‘I kissa da hand.’
‘Hello, hello. What time do you call this? What a fellow! When did you arrive?’
‘This very moment. I got the express. It was three hours late.’
‘You are an idiot, you know.’
They were both talking at once, screaming and hugging each other. It was a theatrical welcome, somewhat overtheatrical in fact. Mrs Vizy disengaged herself and straightened her hair which he had thoroughly rumpled in his harum-scarum way. She gently pushed him away.
‘Wait, let me look at you.’
She examined her nephew. Jancsi looked like a vice-admiral, in white from top to toe. He wore white flannel trousers, a white jacket and white sports shoes. The dark times appeared not to have touched him.
‘How you’ve grown!’ marvelled Mrs Vizy. She was trying to discern the prematurely aged cadet who was allowed home for a few days at Christmas and languished at the end of the family table with a sad little cermonial rapier at his side. To meet him like this after some years was rather disconcerting.
Like everyone else she liked to fix her distant acquaintances in a particular place at some precise point in time: time stopped for them as if they were dead, and she gently deceived herself by imagining that just as time had frozen them into a photograph so she too had been stopped in her tracks on the road to annihilation. Once they succeed in meeting, though, most people realize the deceit and smile in confusion as if seeing something pleasant rather than something terminal and terrible.
So Mrs Vizy talked nonsense. She looked into the far distance and smiled as she remembered.
‘Come along, I’ll show you your room. You can stay here as long as you need to. This divan will be your bed.’
‘First rate,’ said Jancsi and threw himself across it. Then he rolled off and stood on his hands, proceeding miraculously to walk round the room in this manner. His white face reddened as the blood rushed to it and his jacket flopped over revealing his fine zephyr shirt and the handkerchief in his top pocket, folded into a dove shape.
‘You idiot!’ Mrs Vizy admonished him. ‘Don’t you dare turn my house upside down. You’re as crazy as ever.’
‘So I am, Aunt Angéla,’ he proclaimed, bounding to his heels and giving her an exaggerated bow.
He started to whistle.
Mrs Vizy watched the whirling dervish. Her memories of his old escapades whirled with him and echoed to ancient laughter. A notorious wag will always appear more amusing to his relatives than to a complete stranger. Despite Jancsi’s mobility there was something deliberate about him which implied a sense of distance. His perfect, almost neurotically elegant clothes conveyed the same message. He was strong and muscular but his chest was narrow. His small hands were dry. He never sweated however hot it was. His short spiky copper-coloured hair was firmly plastered over his neat and surprisingly delicate skull, from which his flat ears hung loosely as if cut out of paper and merely pasted on. His thin lips were stubborn and cruel. His face was lifeless, wooden and irregular, a series of whimsically contrived planes set tumbling over each other within a roughly pentangular frame. A cubist sculptor might have carved it.
Abruptly he stopped whistling. His baggage was being brought up, two suitcases of the finest English pigskin. He grew serious and devoted his rapt attention to the opening of their locks. It was all here. Eleven suits, tails, smoking jacket, winter overcoat lined with opossum fur, beautiful shirts, silken underwear, patterned socks, lacquered shoes and low-cut shoes for leisure wear with long protruding leather tongues, a manicure bag, various perfumes, and glycerin soap in white ebonite jars since he couldn’t bear anything but glycerin soap on his skin. Right at the bottom there were two books, one a set of famous literary parodies by the humorist Karinthy and the other a brief textbook entitled How to Master English in an Hour.
Aunt Angéla wanted to help him unpack but Jancsi wouldn’t allow anyone else near his clothes. He lacked nothing. He had even brought clothes brushes with him. He went through his jackets, brushing them down, flicking the odd speck of dust away with his fingers. He smoothed his trousers and fixed them in their presses, then hung everything away in the wardrobe his aunt had put at his disposal.
He took his toiletries into the bathroom then started on his ablutions. He washed thoroughly and long. He soaped himself, showered, and despite already having shaved that morning, applied the keen American razor to his smooth face. He puffed some deodorant under his arms, changed his underwear, put on a dark-blue suit and a rust coloured necktie and emerged as if newborn into the dining room where Uncle Kornél was waiting for him.
‘Hello,’ he greeted his uncle in English. ‘Hello. How do you do?�
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‘Welcome, you ass. And how are you?’ Uncle Kornél embraced him roughly and, as family custom dictated, gave him a buss either side of his face.
‘Thank you very well.’
‘What do you think!’ exclaimed Mrs Vizy. ‘He speaks perfect English. He wants to go to America and be a film actor.’
‘He’ll have to make a living here first.’
‘Your Uncle Kornél has found you a post in the bank.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Jancsi nodded.
‘Now you listen here, you young jackass! Tomorrow morning we will go down together to meet the manager. You must introduce yourself.’ He explained the nature of the job but Jancsi was unable to pay much attention. There was a dark-brown wart on the left side of Uncle Kornél’s face: it was the feature he remembered most clearly. Now as his uncle talked it jogged up and down and Jancsi felt the urge he often felt in childhood, to grab hold of it between his fingers, lift it and pull at it until it snapped off and Uncle Kornél let out a scream.
Aunt Angéla gave some instruction to the maid about setting the table. In her white dress, her blond hair gleaming, his aunt illuminated the room like a tall candle shedding unearthly light.
Jancsi eyed the couple. To him they were merely actors who had chanced upon their masks somewhere and wore them now because they felt like it. He was unable to see that lives other than his might be as strictly necessary as his own. He was still possessed by the merciless nihilism of youth. It confused him and he tried to cover it up. He coughed and remarked that his family looked forward to seeing them in Eger, that they really should pay a visit. All the while he was fiddling with the cutlery.
They sat down to eat. He took his place opposite Kornél and fixed his eyes on the tablecloth, darting an occasional glance up at his uncle as he drank his soup. Not for long.
‘What is this?’ he suddenly cried out and held his spoon high in terror.
Mrs Vizy opened her eyes wide as at something miraculous. It was a bad omen. The spoon that Jancsi had been dipping into the soup had wasted away and there was only the handle left.
‘Is this your doing, you scamp?’ she asked her grinning nephew.
‘Funny, eh?’
‘Silly prank. Where did you get it?’
‘In Vienna. Last month on a visit. It was in a bazaar. Look,’ and he took a similar spoon from his pocket.
Uncle Kornél wasn’t angry.
‘Look here, young man,’ Mrs Vizy reproved him, ‘when will you grow up and come to your senses?’
Jancsi showed them the complete set of practical jokes an Austrian company produced for the general conviviality of mankind. He had a cigarette case from which if you tried to remove a cigarette the whole contents sprang out. There was a cigarette which exploded with stinking rockets when you lit it, a matchbox filled entirely with duds, a brandy glass which appeared to be full of yellow liqueur that could not be drunk because the top was glazed, a small pistol that mewed, and a printed tramticket which entitled the bearer to lie down on any tramline of his choice.
Aunt Angéla lamented the incorrigibility of the boy. He had been no different when he was small. Once in Eger he pulled the chair from under the choirmaster. Another time when they were painting the fence he covered their white dog in green oil paint and the poor creature remained green to the day it died.
Uncle Kornél tried to drink from the brandy glass, fired the mewing pistol then warned him that this was enough, no more jokes now, tomorrow the serious work would begin.
The next day they drove together to the bank. They sought the manager but were directed to the office of a departmental head and it was only after some delay that they found the correct waiting room which in any case was full of customers. Vizy sent a message to the manager who sent one back begging their pardon but he had to attend to a minister from Bulgaria and he would be with them soon. A secretary wearing glasses ushered them through into a small plain room where they used to hide personal visitors.
In a few minutes the manager, a short powerful thick-set Jew, appeared through a side door. His suit was creased and he was smoking a cigar through a holder.
He took Vizy and Jancsi by the arm and steered them into a vacant consulting room. He was so busy, he confessed, he barely had time to breathe between appointments. When Vizy had carefully presented his request and reminded him of his kind promise, which in the meantime he had forgotten, the manager took a pad from his pocket and asked Jancsi for a pencil – fancy him not having a pencil of his own! – and immediately wrote out something, chatting and smoking all the while. The ash dropped from his cigar on to his waistcoat. He ignored it. When they had finished he shook hands with them and made straight for another side door where a committee was waiting for him.
A smart gentleman now stepped into the room. He had already been informed of the arrangements and happily shook Vizy’s and Jancsi’s hands on which he could evidently feel the still warm and magical imprint of the manager. He escorted them into the lift and to the ground floor, then down some iron stairs into the armoured vault. Here Jancsi was given a desk, introduced to his colleagues and put to work.
It was a world of marvels. Every day Jancsi grew to admire it more. The enormous building in the middle of the square rose so majestically, so festively towards the heavens it might have been a cathedral. Even the haughty procession of fast cars waited patiently by the pavement before it, and the pedestrians who passed by its doors peered respectfully and curiously into the hall, lowered their voices and all but doffed their hats. Those who believed in nothing else, did at least believe in this; it reassured them to feel that there was something to life after all.
Even the porter in his braided cap stood in the doorway with a certain air of self-importance; his office included the street but it also extended into the sanctum itself, surrounded as he was by dubious hordes of visitors who ignorantly insisted on seeking unauthorized entrance. He was the one who made the first decision as to whether a person might or might not set foot inside, and he performed this duty in a quiet tactful manner, dealing with hysterical paupers in much the same way as Jesus had with the money-changers and publicans in the temple. This temple was equally short with unbelievers.
Jancsi liked to loiter in the entrance and in the gilded corridors of green marble where sunbeams filtered through stained glass. In the distance he could see the branched staircase dividing, and glimpse panelled halls and reception rooms with luxurious armchairs and divans. An air of abundance and supreme wellbeing emanated from them. The paternosters trundled round, the great cashier-hall clattered with thirty typewriters, and a hundred clerks in glass booths were stooping over desks.
Where he worked, down in the vault, the lamps were always burning in honour of the local god. This section which dealt with stocks and shares was guarded with particular care. The rooms were divided by steel doors half a metre thick and alarm bells rang at the slightest touch. At dusk the security guards appeared with their electric torches. Here the clients carried trunks loaded down with currency or gold or jewels, and filed into cubicles like confessional booths where they examined not their consciences but the contents of their bags which they personally proceeded to place in safes of steel. The air was loud with the ringing of strange bells, at the sound of which officious little ushers appeared from one door or another.
Above him in a wing of the first floor reigned the omnipresent figure of the man he had met but once, the manager, who was always here and never here, who appeared only for a moment and even in his car was likely to be negotiating with big American corporations. He stole up in the lift unseen, entered his office unobserved and was surrounded by a ringing choir of phones, humming tubes of internal post, squadrons of telegrams and a bevy of bright and busy secretaries, company managers and directors who served as votaries, attendant priests and old fat bishops respectively. Thus attended he would retreat to the deepest sanctuary and perform his holy offices at the altar where he might survey – for minutes at a time
– the one deity in which the twentieth-century still believed, the god of gold.
How fascinating all this was, and how secure. Jancsi felt he was at the still point of an unstable world, a minor clerk of a new religion. Suddenly and for the first time he could imagine himself as an independent adult.
Later he discovered that Józsi Elekes was also employed here and worked on the second floor in the currency department. They bumped into each other in the corridor and fell into a delighted embrace, chortling like country cousins. They arranged there and then to meet for a drink together at a café concert. They couldn’t bear to part till late at night. Jancsi escorted his friend to Vienna Gate tér where the Elekeses had their flat. Elekes in his turn escorted him to Attila utca, and so they continued until they ran out of conversation on the one topic that fully absorbed them, the seduction of women.
Elekes had been two years above him at the Eger gimnázium, and had already been with the bank for a year. He regarded himself as a native Budapester. He had a wide circle of friends. He spent mornings on the office telephone arranging their daily entertainment.
Jancsi’s first task was to find a new sweetheart in the city. He couldn’t bear not to have one. He felt he hadn’t properly moved in until there was a girl to whom he could pay court, some one and only he could think of each night before he went to sleep, one who would be the chief concern of his life. There were two candidates for this post, Elekes’s sister and Ilonka Tatár. Eventually he settled on the latter.
As many as ten or fifteen young men would flock to the Tatárs’ of an afternoon. It was partly because Elekes was stalking Margitka that Jancsi favoured her sister. Ilonka was a gay and charming girl, rather pretty if a little on the plump side. In due course she would end up as fat as her parents.
Jancsi’s romance consisted of casting his first glance at her when he entered the room, of lingering over their formal handshake and of leaning on the piano and asking her to play some old Hungarian tune. He sent her flowers too: often, before office hours, he could be seen in the Krisztina florist’s, flitting from bouquet to bouquet, sniffing at the white violets and ordering them to be delivered at the Tatárs with his personal card.
Anna Edes Page 11
