The Europe That Was

by Geoffrey Household

  He had a good job in America, too, you say regretfully. It must have been, if his employers bothered to make him declare whether he had ever been a communist or not. And so he refused to answer, did he? And Sarita refused to answer for him. God, there’s loyalty for you!

  Well now, Joe, I admit these questions have to be asked, for one can’t run a great country with gloves on. But at the same time I know what the effect would be on myself if I were asked to declare my politics as a condition of employment. I should answer like a wide-eyed sheep, and be ashamed of myself afterwards for not having had the guts to tell the questioner to go to hell.

  But then, I am not a citizen in the magnificant class of Marton Hevessy. Nothing on earth would induce me to become a Jew in a swarm of Nazis, or to provoke confession-forcing commissars by creating myself a baron, or to pass myself off as a possible communist in the America of 1951. What courage the man has for doing the right thing at the wrong time—the wrong time for his own personal benefit, that is.

  Joe, what do you know of Marton Hevessy?

  ROLL OUT THE BARREL

  Margit was an island like the rest of us. In the set of complicated currents she kept her shores intact only by loyalty to what was best in herself. She had not much else to be loyal to.

  She was a Hungarian peasant who had earned her lonely living as a servant in Budapest ever since she was fourteen years old. Social democracy and a husband with a bit of land—those were her desires, political and personal. Towards the present régime she was dully neutral, for it snatched away with one hand what it gave with the other.

  She took pride in her skill, and as much in her employers as they permitted. For the last six months she had worked for a middle-aged consulting engineer, respectable and law-abiding. He seldom laughed, and his ready smile seemed to spring from a natural courtesy rather than any personal interest. He left no doubt, however, that he appreciated her cooking, and that was enough for Margit.

  She used to day-dream—failing a better subject—that he had asked her to be his wife, though any woman could see that he was dedicated to something, perhaps the memory of a former love, more distant than marriage. The dream never lasted longer than the washing-up of two plates and a coffee cup.

  Margit knew very well that she hadn’t the beauty to revive a dead heart. All her mirror told her was that she was squat and thick and brown; it could not reveal that her eyes were gay and that she moved with light feet and a provocative swing of the skirt. That touch of gallantry had been born of the czardas danced in the village of her girlhood, and was kept alive by the barrel of excellent wine in the kitchen.

  The barrel was a present from her brother, who had inherited the little family vineyard and contrived to hold back enough of the harvest to supply himself and her. The rest went to the State cellars for export. Margit was puzzled that wine should have become so scarce and expensive. In the days before the war a generous employer would no more have thought of reckoning up what was drunk in the kitchen than of counting the potatoes.

  So Margit treasured her hundred-litre barrel. She wasn’t a heavy drinker. At the moderate rate of a big glass for lunch and another for supper, there was only enough to keep her morale more gay than grim for about two hundred days. The barrel, too, was a symbol. It brought into the worried city a sense of solidarity with her village—a spiritual rather than political class-consciousness. She felt for her hundred litres the welcome that a business woman would give to a hamper of flowers from the garden of her first lover.

  Some of her treasure, of course, she had to share; but that, too, was joy. She was enabled to be gracious and to indulge the aristocrat that lived in her peasant heart. So, when she received a visit from the well-dressed gentleman who had recently begun to sit outside the café at the corner, it was hospitality rather than fear which made her draw a jug for him.

  She knew what he was. Among the humble there was unspoken alliance for the recognition of secret police. The porter of the block, who that very day had been ordered by the well-dressed gentleman to give him a weekly bulletin of information, had dutifully kept the secret, but handed out broad hints to chosen friends.

  The policeman in Margit’s kitchen was a very superior specimen of the breed—not at all the type which normally collected information from porters. She greeted him with the politeness reserved for a class above her own, and hovered hospitably over him.

  ‘Good wine, this!’ exclaimed the gentleman from the café at the corner, stretching his legs under the table. ‘Is your employer rich?’

  ‘My brother sent it me,’ she replied. ‘It has nothing to do with the master.’

  ‘And what does he drink himself over there?’—the visitor jerked a thumb towards the narrow passage which led, through a faintly delicious atmosphere of spices and onions, to the office and dining-room of Margit’s consulting engineer.

  ‘Whatever he can get, sir.’

  ‘And plenty of it, eh?’

  The visitor, determined to be a democrat, pinched her playfully. Margit’s reception of the compliment was cold. She knew from experience that her rotundities were eminently pinchable, and she did not—for example, with the porter—take offence. But the caress of her visitor was incorrect; he made it appear a studied gesture rather than an irresistible temptation.

  Margit dropped her best manner and answered him with a rough frankness. That was one good thing about the present régime. You needn’t—if you belonged to the proletariat—bother with ceremony when you didn’t feel inclined.

  ‘How can anyone get plenty of it?’

  ‘Complaining of the régime, are you?’

  ‘Listen, I’m a peasant! Better off, worse off? I don’t know. Wait and see—that’s what we say.’

  ‘What about the visitors here? Is that what they say?’

  ‘Do you think I’ve nothing to do, cocky, but crawl up the passage and listen at the door?’

  The visitor gave a hoarse chuckle, into which Margit’s wine and pleasant, broad accent had injected some sincerity. ‘We come from the same district,’ he exclaimed. ‘I see that!’

  ‘Every district has some black pigs among the white.’

  ‘That’s the end, sweetheart,’ he said—quite tolerantly, but as if the inevitable time had come to exchange good-fellowship for his normal business attitude. ‘Sit down!’

  Resignedly she sat down opposite him at the kitchen table. He represented the limitless power of the State. There was no need for him to explain or threaten, and they both knew it. He drew from his pocket three photographs of the same man: full face, right profile, and left profile.

  ‘Have you ever seen that one?’ he asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever heard the name of Istvan Sarvary?’

  ‘No. Who’s he?’

  ‘An enemy of our country, my girl. A revolutionary and warmonger. And at last I’m on his track. Look at those photos, and take your time.’

  Margit obeyed. The police photographs were clear, glossy prints, upon which every detail could be seen. The subject looked like an unwashed criminal, hollow-cheeked, sneering and obstinate. She did not recognize the face. Then, in the left profile, she noticed the man’s glasses. They were round, old-fashioned, and of heavy tortoise-shell, and there was a home-made repair just in front of the left ear, where the rivet or binding had been wrapped in some soft substance to prevent rubbing.

  A possible identity for Sarvary at once occurred to her. Yet it was so unlikely that there was no sudden start of recognition in her eyes or mouth for the trained interrogator across the table to leap upon.

  ‘You are interested?’ he suggested.

  ‘You told me to take a long look.’

  ‘And what do you see?’

  What she saw in the eye of the mind was a drawer in the consulting engineer’s dressing-table, and a pair of old glasses with the left bar wrapped round by a neatly sewn strip of wash-leather. Could they be the same glasses? Was it possible for a haggard, clea
n-shaven man with dark, wavy hair to turn into her employer with his well-rounded cheeks, his straight white hair greased firmly back, and his white luxuriant moustache which looked as if it had been over his mouth for the last thirty years?

  Then there was his nose. The man in the photograph had a strong, fleshy nose, quite ordinary. Her employer had a Roman nose with a marked and distinguished hump on its bridge. The shape of it, she remembered—almost with a giggle—seemed to change in hot weather. No, of course it was unthinkable. Her kind master could not be a man wanted by the police, a barbarian trying to bring about another war.

  ‘I’ve seen someone like him,’ she said at last.

  She couldn’t tell how much her face had given away. Something, yes. The keen peasant game of buying and selling was in her blood. She knew, from the parallel of the market-place, that her hesitation had been too long and that she must explain it.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The new notary of our village.’

  ‘They have a queer breed in your village,’ he remarked contemptuously. ‘Stop fooling, girl! When did this man come to see your employer?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then what was he doing—the person whom you thought the photograph resembled?’

  ‘Our notary? He makes too much money at home to come to Budapest.’

  The visitor rose from the table and brutally dominated her eyes.

  ‘If you hurt me, I’ll scream,’ she threatened. ‘They know I’m respectable here.’

  ‘Hurt you? My dear, we don’t do that sort of thing. I’m just going to give you time to remember.’

  The gentleman from the corner café strolled impassively across the kitchen and turned on the tap of the barrel. The thin, fast stream of wine hit the tiles with a neat splash.

  Margit shrieked, and leaped for the tap rather than for him. At once she made brutal contact with her chair again, arms bruised, bewildered by the dexterity with which she had been flung back.

  ‘We like wine in our district, don’t we?’ he said. ‘Barrel full?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir,’ she begged. ‘Nearly full.’

  ‘Then it will take about ten minutes to empty it. Plenty of time to talk.’

  The purple and pink foam that had jumped from the kitchen tiles subsided, and the lake of wine deepened and spread.

  ‘Please, sir! Please!’

  ‘But, I shall be delighted to turn it off when you’ve told the truth. A pity for such good wine to be wasted! I should say your brother’s is a rather stony soil facing south,’ he replied, talking with an exasperating slowness.

  ‘It didn’t remind me of the notary. I swear it,’ she sobbed, the big tears richocheting off her apron into wine.

  ‘Ah? Of whom, then?’

  ‘Nobody. I was impertinent. I’ve never seen the face before.’

  ‘And the name Istvan Sarvary? Have you never heard it? Or overheard it, perhaps? Think now! That’s a generous tap you have there.’

  ‘No, never! Never, sir! I’ve never heard of it.’

  The words were loud and incoherent with grief. The lake of wine found out an imperceptible slope and began to run towards the passage. At the door it deepened to a quarter of an inch, and the colour changed from a pink transparency to black with red reflections.

  ‘He might have come here without you knowing it?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course he might,’ she answered eagerly.

  ‘You’re not sure that you haven’t seen him, then?’

  ‘No. How could I be sure?’

  ‘Then we have only to take a little step further. Look! I’m just going to shut off the tap. Tell me when it was he might have come here—that’s all I want to know.’

  Margit was utterly muddled. What he invited her to say sounded so reasonable. Why on earth was she letting her wine run away when she had only to tell him a date, a movement, her crazy suspicion, anything? Yet—she didn’t tell lies.

  She opened her mouth and nothing would come. All the inhibition of the Christian Europe that had made her stood in the way. Had she been asked outright whether her employer could be Istvan Sarvary she might have answered that at least she had wondered. Might have. But there again, standing at the gate, was all the loyalty of a feudal system that had vanished and left nothing but its good behind.

  ‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know.’

  The interrogator kept the barrel running.

  ‘Won’t little one, not can’t! Won’t, you mean.’

  She heard the front door open and shut as her employer came home.

  ‘Good heavens, what’s all this?’ he exclaimed.

  He bounded up the passage on the track of the wine, and caught the visitor with his hand still on the tap.

  ‘Margit, your wine! What’s all this?’

  Margit’s face was bedabbled with tears. The gentleman looked confused and guilty.

  ‘Tap leaking?’ the consulting engineer asked.

  ‘He turned it on,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘No, no, no!’

  ‘Well, then—ah, I think I understand! But, my dear sir, if you had anything to ask, why didn’t you come to see me? I know everyone in the building and my reputation is sound, I hope. No good telling you I’m a party member—too old, for one thing. But what I always say is, they’re doing fine work for Hungary. Example to all Europe, eh? We’re both patriots, aren’t we? Well, there’s the bond. Now you put me through the hoops in any way you like.’

  Her master was so friendly and natural that Margit at once put out of mind that imagined identity. After all, there was more than one pair of mended spectacles in the world. And then his nose! You couldn’t alter a nose that God had made.

  ‘What do you know of Istvan Sarvary?’ the visitor shot straight at him.

  ‘Sarvary? Why I thought he was abroad. Don’t tell me the swine has managed to get back to Budapest?’

  ‘He was a friend of yours, was he?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t. Far from it! But you’ve come to the right shop, my dear sir. I’ll answer all your questions. We can’t have men like Istvan Sarvary about. Margit, there’s nothing to drink in the house. May we borrow what’s left in the barrel? I’ll make it up to you. We’ll try to get something as good as yours.’

  ‘You’re generous,’ the gentleman sneered suspiciously.

  ‘You think so? I’ll tell you how it is. I don’t want the State to show pity. Try the dogs, shoot them, exile them, put them to work! They’re expendable, aren’t they? But a little woman like this—well when she gets in the way, the State can’t help it and mustn’t show pity. Never! But chaps like you and me are free to do what we can. That’s what I say.’

  Margit didn’t agree at all with this view of the State, but she assumed it was politics and over her head. If a man with a good heart accepted cruelty, it meant nothing and was just words.

  The man from the corner café took Margit’s employer a little aside, and warned him of something in a low voice.

  ‘She? Oh, I don’t think she could have seen him. But you never know. Well, if there’s anything at all, you’ll get it out of her. Better methods than wine taps, eh?

  ‘Now let’s sit down. It must be seldom that you get a real hot tip straight from the horse’s mouth and a jug of first-class stuff to go with it. If you don’t mind me saying so, I’ve watched the scent of that wine making you more human every minute.’

  The visitor grinned, then pulled himself together with military solemnity and declared that he had no time for gossip.

  ‘This is going to be worth your while, captain. I’ll tell you for a start one man whom Sarvary is likely to be seeing—his wife’s cousin. You didn’t know that, did you? And you’re in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘Not yet,’ the visitor admitted, ‘but I shall be. It’s every man for himself in the police, and I like to wait for the best minute to put in my report. Now you help me, and I won’t forget you. What would you say if I told you I’m on to
a connection between Sarvary and this very house?’

  ‘Your very good health!’ exclaimed the consulting engineer, raising his glass. ‘Is that so? Well, well, now let me see! First of all I’ll fix up my Margit, and then I’m with you. I can’t have such a cook upset,’ he explained. ‘You can’t expect a little artist to work without a drink in her heart. Look here, sweetheart, here’s an address! You go there and tell them to deliver another barrel of red this evening. And you must need a rest after all this. Take the afternoon off if you want to.’

  He scribbled a note and gave it to Margit. She had never seen her employer so cordial. She was hurt that he had never smiled at her as genuinely as he was smiling at this filthy crook from the corner café, and hurt, too, even if she were to be compensated, that the pair of them should calmly sit down and drink up the rest of her wine. She said to herself that it was unfeeling. Just unfeeling, that was all. Not even enough to excuse a toss of the head.

  ‘But I can’t stop long,’ the visitor protested. ‘I don’t want to take my eyes off this street.’

  ‘Splendid! Splendid! It’s good to know that our safety is in your hands. But why not telephone one of your sergeants and tell him to check all movements in and out of this house in your absence? A good chance to see whether he knows his job! He won’t know you are here and you can watch him through the curtains.’

  Margit put her kerchief over her head and went out, leaving the two to their sly grins and good-fellowship. It was just like men, she thought, to sit down and souse on somebody else’s wine and pretend they were catching enemies of the State. It didn’t make any difference—townee or peasant, consulting engineer or communist, they were all the same. Wine and pinching people where people were roundest and sacrificing the helpless.

  She delivered her employer’s note at the address he had given her. It was a cheerless, obscure, commercial office without the heartening smell of liquor or the noisy group of customers welcome to try out many more vintages than they ever meant to buy. Well, nothing was sold any longer as, traditionally, it ought to be sold.