Katalin Street

by Magda Szabo

  It was in 1952. Bálint had been living with us for three years and had never replaced the ring he had lost, though I was still loyally wearing mine. He lived with us and among us like an old-fashioned gentleman lodger. Finally Blanka spoke out. She told me that I would have to confront him and insist that we marry. He was having affairs, not with people who worked at the hospital but with cheap little tarts, the real dregs: all sorts of people went there, and his affairs were with anyone he could pick up. He was living the life of a madman, quite shamelessly, without any attempt at self-control. He needed to pull himself together. In any case, his employment there hung by a thread. He was being moved around all the time, always in a new role. Just then he was working in the same office as she was, so she could see for herself how he spent his time.

  I kept faith with Bálint and waited for him patiently. I shed tears but never in front of him. I clung to the idea that it was the curse of his higher social class that stood between us; that the war and his imprisonment had damaged him; that his father, the Major, had been a support to him all his life but in death was now a hindrance . . . but none of that really mattered, nor did it bother me however much he was being kept down in the hospital—no one there had the power to change my feelings for him. I didn’t mind if they denied him advancement, if they never gave him the kind of work he deserved, if he remained a nobody. But that he was taking lovers and still didn’t want to marry me . . . that I couldn’t bear.

  With Blanka shouting after me to stop, I flung on my dressing gown and ran through the dining room where Mrs. Temes was sleeping and on to the study, where Bálint lodged. I turned on the light, accidentally hitting the adjoining switch to the chandelier. It came on as well and the room lit up as if the house were on fire. Bálint was startled awake. He leaped out of bed and stared at me, with everything around, above, and behind him ablaze with light. I yelled at him so loudly that I woke the entire house, but I didn’t care if every single one of them gathered to eavesdrop behind the door. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was along the lines that I knew about his girlfriends; they were the reason he was unwilling to marry me; I’d had quite enough of the sordid life we were leading, but I would overlook everything if we could be married that week. I would put everything to rights and make an end of this humiliating and mindless existence we shared.

  I screamed and sobbed. I could scarcely see through my tears. By the time I had managed to pull myself together he had hauled on a dressing gown and was standing before me, staring into my eyes. He had never looked at me that way before. I felt quite sure he had never looked like that at Blanka or Henriette. This was something altogether new.

  “Go and find yourself a husband, Irén,” he said. “You’re a thoroughly nice girl, and everything’s going your way. Get married and have children. I’ll clear out as soon as I can find somewhere to stay. I’ve been waiting for you to take that ring off your finger and kick me out. The cruelty you’ve all shown me, with your endless patience, is appalling. You should have worked out what was happening a long time ago.” I stared at him in amazement. He lit a cigarette. It was the first time I had seen him looking calm and relaxed since he had returned home. He looked happy, his old self, as he had been when we were children or young adults.

  “So it’ll all turn out very nicely, then,” he remarked, and he kissed me. (At last he kisses me!) “You’ll have your peace of mind back; everything will be fine. One day we’ll even be able to take out passports again and travel. You’ve never been anywhere. You’ll go to places you’ve always wanted to see. You’ll feed the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square, you’ll visit Naples.”

  By then I was tugging at my engagement ring. At last I got it off and slapped it down on the table in front of him. By the time I left the room the place had been emptied—even the bed Mrs. Temes had been sleeping in. I reckoned they must all be in the kitchen, sitting around in their pajamas, confused and dismayed. Only Blanka was still there, and then she went off to bed. I didn’t cry. I was beyond tears. I sat down beside her and reflected on how cheap he must think me, how very lower middle class. For Henriette it was Salzburg and the pope; for me, Naples—a commonplace wall poster.

  “I’ll make him pay for this,” she said, to my surprise.

  I looked at her, but saw only a blur where her face should have been and another where her body was. For the first time since I had come to self-awareness there would be no Bálint in my life, and the thought was so surreal that my senses seemed to have taken on a life of their own. I didn’t fully grasp what she had said. She might as well have spoken in a foreign language for all that I could make of it. She was weeping for me, and I was no longer capable of tears.

  WHEN, years later, the subject came up between them, Bálint never managed to make Irén understand what a relief the disciplinary hearing had been for him, how it had forced a decision he never could have made on his own. She just stared at him uncomprehendingly, then kissed him. He submitted with some irritation, as if he were being given a reward for something that he hadn’t earned. It annoyed him too that he could never make her believe that he wasn’t angry with Blanka for the part she had played—and not for any chivalrous reasons either. He wasn’t angry with anyone, in fact, not even the senior manager who had presided over the hearing and whom history had since swept away and deposited God knows where. There were things she found it impossible to understand, and the older she became the harder it was for her. At one point, when their marriage was going through a relatively stable period, he had tried to tell her what it had really been like in the prison camp, but she simply blocked her ears and yelled at him that she couldn’t bear to hear about his sufferings. That did shock him. His worst experiences were no longer something he dwelt on; he now preferred to focus on quite different things, from both his imprisonment and the four correctional years he had been forced to spend in the country.

  The older Irén got the more she became like her father. She responded to things in an increasingly trite and schoolteacherly way. He could tell in advance the exact words in which she would decide what he was going to say even before he had said it: the miserable captive, the starving prisoner, the object of universal vilification. In truth he needed another man to share his prisoner-of-war memories with; no woman would ever grasp the idea that there could be something comforting in captivity and oppression, and that losing the right to arrange your own life at the same time absolved you of responsibility, because if someone else was deciding everything for you, however harshly or stupidly—providing you with food and dictating your hours of work and leisure, in short, treating you not especially badly but simply as a child—it relieved you of what Bálint so hated and feared, exercising his own free will and the need to make his own decisions.

  When he was finally released it left him even more confused than when he had first been captured. The thought that he would now have to go home filled him with something like horror—having to face the fact that everything there would have changed, that he would have to take responsibility for himself, be married, and raise children. Naturally he would not have told Irén that while he was a prisoner he had thought about her very little, even though he longed for female company and for lovemaking. The faces of the women he conjured up in his mind rarely resembled hers. When he did think of her, it simply reminded him that certain standards would be expected of him once he was back, a degree of integrity. The very idea made him feel exhausted and not in the least sure he could live up to it.

  At the hearing itself, nothing had surprised him—only the charge laid against him and the person making it. He had expected to be hauled up on account of his immoral private life. At least that made some sense, even though he couldn’t see what bearing the way he spent his free time had on his medical work. But that question was raised only as a side issue, a form of supporting evidence. When he first saw Blanka in the chamber, he assumed she had been seconded to write the official minutes and he felt rather sorry for her. She was al
ways so flustered and unable to concentrate that she would have to transcribe everything several times. But he was glad to see her there. It was now the fourth week since he had left the Elekeses, and every time he had spoken to her in her office to ask about her family she had looked straight through him and refused to reply; obviously she hadn’t been able to forgive him for leaving Irén. But even if she were sulking she still was part of his life, and he would have liked to reassure her that they all mattered to him just as much as ever, and that the situation wasn’t as they seemed to imagine but really much simpler. What he had learned about himself during his time as a prisoner, and about his new circumstances following his release, had been so overwhelming that he had no desire to burden Irén with it, and neither did he wish to burden himself with her problems.

  The presiding officer ordered him to sit in silence while the charge was read out. He lit a cigarette and listened to the long list of nurses, junior doctors, and former patients with whom he’d had relationships over the past few years. If he felt at all anxious it was for the women involved. He hoped that they wouldn’t find themselves in trouble because of him; if anyone was to blame he was. But when he heard the name of his accuser, and her reasons, he burst into laughter. She had been avoiding his gaze; now she looked at him for the first time.

  Blanka had always had difficulty expressing herself, and once again she stammered and spluttered and struggled to get to the point. It eventually emerged that she was accusing him of taking bribes from his patients. She had seen this happen many times, she claimed, because Bálint had worked with her in admissions. On the last occasion it had been a Mrs. Iméréne Karr. Mrs. Karr had been given instant admission into a small side ward after slipping an envelope into his hand. Bálint had made no promises before he opened the envelope, but had said he would see what he could do, and the result was that the woman was immediately put in a bed next to the window in a comfortable room for four people where, most unusually, she was the sole occupant.

  Blanka stammered and blushed. Bálint watched her, with her brave little gun, her plump little body stuffed into those odd-looking trousers and doublet, her hair that had defied Mrs. Held’s curling iron, and the cardboard helmet. Throughout the hearing he saw her sitting there in her costume, and Henriette, who happened to be in the neighborhood and had come to look for them, was baffled as to why she could see Blanka sitting there in the hospital in fancy dress and Bálint in his Hussar costume of old. Her sense of surprise soon faded, though, because every time she went home she found things that were more and more incredible—Mr. Elekes half blind and writing little plays about the victims of fascism; Mrs. Temes having moved in with them and resenting her loss of independence; Mrs. Elekes prattling away about problems of socialist education with Irén’s fellow teachers; Irén herself, an unhappy, hard-faced Irén who had not been married; and the balding, womanizing Bálint—they all seemed as improbable to her as if they were at a fancy-dress ball or had been cast in unsuitable parts in a not very good play. Well, if that was what they wanted, why should he not wear his Hussar’s uniform and she carry her rifle, and they both enjoy themselves?

  Bálint remembered Mrs. Karr. She had arrived at the hospital a good fortnight earlier and had indeed asked to be placed in a side ward because she hated being with lots of other people. She was a plump, smiling woman who had come unaccompanied on a referral by her local doctor and presenting unmistakable symptoms of appendicitis. He had declined to respond to her request, had admitted her and told her that the people in the ward would decide where to place her, as it always depended on what beds were available at the time; he immediately turned to the next patient in the queue and Mrs. Karr moved on. Blanka was sitting nearby typing, as usual. If anyone could have overheard the conversation it was she. The revelation that she was the one trying to destroy his career left him more amused than shocked.

  He realized too why she had chosen Mrs. Karr. She had died soon after the operation, one of those inexplicable deaths that sometimes follow appendicitis. The case was looked into, her relatives took her things away, and because there were so many other patients to deal with, Bálint had more or less forgotten her.

  Blanka was looking him straight in the eye, and while she stammered and stuttered out her speech, her little gun seemed to be leveled at him too. Not one word of the accusation was true, but there was no one but Mrs. Karr who could have refuted it: she had deliberately chosen a patient who was now dead. It meant that the charge was probably enough, along with everything else—all the other irregularities in his way of life—to have him dismissed. Blanka rounded off her speech with a few ill-formulated sanctimonious pseudo-socialist platitudes, drawing the panel’s attention to the need for vigilance in the maintenance of medical ethics. Only then did Bálint remember the phrase he had been trying to recover since the start of the proceedings—Blanka’s line in the play. To everyone’s astonishment he declaimed: “I shall attack you, I shall vanquish you, I shall chop your arms and legs to pieces.” The party official thought he had gone mad. Then he also remembered the way he had wrestled with Blanka on the stage until Mr. Elekes had come to his aid, and how strong she had been, how unusually strong and brave for a girl. . . . Finally Blanka sat down and lowered her rifle.

  In his reply he found himself calmer and more composed than he had expected. Neither the director who was presiding, the party official, nor the four members of the panel could have suspected how happy he was to be leaving the hospital his father had intended him for ever since he had been a schoolboy, and where since his return from captivity he had been given only the most unrewarding tasks. He denied the charge of having taken a bribe from the patient. Of course he couldn’t prove it, but neither could Blanka prove the opposite. He suspected that this issue would be at the center of their deliberations, and the decision would rest on which of the two of them was believed. There was only one assertion that Blanka could back up: that the two of them had been the only people present in the five minutes it took to admit Mrs. Karr, since their two colleagues had gone out, one for lunch and the other to the toilet.

  They were asked to leave the room while the panel considered their decision. Before Blanka could slip away into her office, Bálint seized her by the arm. Once again he sensed how strong she was and how fiercely she resisted, but he quickly overpowered her and pulled her into an embrace. She writhed and twisted in his arms but was unable to free herself. They hadn’t spoken to each other since he had left the house and he really hoped she would listen to him now. Instead she uttered a piercing scream. The door opened and the presiding director looked out. Bálint was obliged to let her go. “Now they’ll think I was trying to strangle her,” he told himself, and she ran off down the corridor. He was no longer seeing her in her military breeches but in a little girl’s dress, dark blue—Irén had told her that dark blue was always appropriate, especially for a disciplinary hearing. No one would understand how dear Blanka was to him, despite her recent testimony and the fact that he was well aware of her little tricks and her foul temper. What a hope! The official who looked out of that door when she screamed would have seen him as a serial offender. If there had been any doubt remaining as to the outcome, the truth was now clear. He had been harassing the poor girl, or trying to persuade her through physical intimacy to withdraw her allegations.

  When they finally called him in he was told that he would be transferred out of the hospital for disciplinary reasons. The ministry had chosen a village where there was no electric lighting but where improvements would be made under the next five-year plan. The ministry representative gave him another hard look, and Bálint wondered if he was trying to see what women found so attractive in him—so pale and thin, a real nonentity. Throughout the hearing, apart from the mention of Mrs. Karr’s envelope, there had been references to his womanizing. It was clearly so painful to hear that one member of the panel, a female doctor, had stared determinedly at the floor all the while. He had felt quite sorry for her; she’d
had to endure a list of such Leporello-like proportions that she must finally have realized why he hadn’t bedded her too. Much as the poor fellow had wanted to, he simply hadn’t had the time.

  The recommendation was that he should mend his ways, practice self-criticism, and be very grateful that he was being allowed to continue earning his living. He was then dismissed. He went out, delighted beyond words by the knowledge that he would be entitled to government accommodation in the village where they were posting him. To date he had been living first as a gentleman lodger and husband-to-be with the Elekes family and then, in circumstances that defied description, in a rented room in a tiny side street off the Inner Ring Road. “Principal and sole tenant,” he reflected delightedly, and then felt surprised that he could still take pleasure in something. “Blanka, what a pumpkin head, you poor little thing!”

  He was on his way to the admissions office to collect his belongings when he heard someone behind him—the sound of hurrying footsteps. It was one of the members of the panel, a colleague. He was just a casual acquaintance, someone he exchanged greetings with, who worked in another part of the hospital, and his name was Timár. Bálint stopped, wondering what the man wanted. He obviously wanted something.

  Timár told him he didn’t believe a single word of the charges made against him, and he wasn’t the only one. It was only those who had been trained to accept whatever they were told. It was all because of who his father had been and that sleazy little trollop who had brought the charges, no doubt in revenge because she hadn’t made it with him. But one day he would be back in his place in the hospital, and he should remember that it was he, Timár, who had told him so. He shook Bálint’s hand and disappeared. The man’s words made little impression on him, nor was he very interested. In fact he was rather irritated by what he had heard. The man should have spoken out at the time, but he just sat there in silence, and now he had come to offer his condolences. Why bother? And why did he call Blanka—his little soldier with her rifle—a trollop? And anyway the bit about his womanizing was all true, though it didn’t stop him being a good doctor. It was all nonsense.