Two
On War and Prostitution
Every newborn is a Messiah — it’s a pity he’ll
turn out a common rascal.
— Imre Madách
Up to the age of ten, I was allowed to forget that I’d been born the same year Hitler came to power. In war-torn Europe, our city appeared to me as a capital of fairyland: it was tiny and toylike, yet ancient and majestic, much like some older sections of Salzburg. Here I lived, a happy young prince in the best of all possible worlds, surrounded by a numerous and protecting family: my mother, that quiet and pensive woman, following me with her serene eyes; my aunts, those loud, earthy yet elegant friends of hers; and the Franciscan monks, my benign uncles. I was allowed to grow in a hothouse of love, and absorbed it into the cells of my body. But perhaps it’s just as well that, after learning to love the world, I also came to know it. From a happy-go-lucky boy toying with the idea of priesthood and blissful martyrdom, I turned into a pimp and a black-marketeer. At the end of the war — after two nightmarish years and before reaching the age of twelve — I became a “liaison man” in charge of Hungarian prostitutes in an American army camp near Salzburg, the city which in other respects was so much like my own.
My transformation began in the summer of 1943, when the waves of the war finally reached western Hungary. Our quiet city became a German garrison, and during the nights American bombers began to create new rubble beside the ancient ruins. Our apartment was requisitioned for the officers of the Wehrmacht, and none too soon either. A couple of weeks after we moved out, the house took a direct hit. To escape the air raids, we moved farther west to my grandparents’ home in an out-of-the-way village, and in the fall my mother sent me to a military school in a small town near the Austrian border. She said I would be safe and properly fed there, and would be taught Latin.
The colonel who commanded the school summed up its spirit in his welcoming speech to the new first-year cadets: “Here you will learn what discipline really means!” We were bellowed at every moment of the day, in the classroom, the courtyard and the dormitory. Every afternoon from three to four we had to walk up and down the park, which was large and heavily wooded and surrounded by high walls. We were ordered, on pain of severe corporal punishment, to walk briskly and never to stop for a second, and there were sergeants watching us — leaning, against the trees — to make sure that we obeyed the rule. However, we junior cadets also had to obey the commands of senior cadets, who had some duly constituted military authority over us. I found myself in a quandary the very first day when a senior cadet walking behind me began to shout at me to stop and stand at attention. He was a thin, red-haired boy with a brush-cut, sickly and unimposing in appearance — in fact he looked younger than I did. I was worried about disobeying him, but even more worried about disobeying the sergeants. I walked on briskly and he had to run to catch up with me. By the time he reached my side he was sweating and out of breath. “Salute me!” he demanded in a reedy and shaking voice. “Salute me!” I saluted him and walked on, overcome by a feeling of revulsion. I was convinced I had been thrown among a bunch of raving idiots.
It was a shock from which I have never fully recovered. My one and a half years of drilling at the Royal Hungarian Officers’ Training College very nearly turned me into an anarchist. I can neither respect nor trust senior cadets, generals, party leaders, millionaires, executives, nor any of their enterprises. Incidentally, this attitude seems to fascinate most women — perhaps because they are less overwhelmed than most men by the perfection of the man-made order of the world.
The senior cadets were especially concerned about the way we made our beds.
“Your bed must be as straight and smooth as glass!” our room commander would scream, throwing my blankets and sheets into the four corners of the room. “You need some practice!”
Even after the Russian armies entered Hungary and Admiral Horthy announced that further resistance was useless, that the greater part of the Hungarian Army, more than a million men, more than ten percent of our population, had been killed, and that there could never be a Hungarian Army again — even then, the room commander was still obsessed by the smoothness of our blankets. When he threw apart my bed I had to remake it within three minutes; if it took me longer, as it always did, he threw the bed apart once again, and repeated the performance until he got bored with it. We played this bed game until the Russian troops reached the outskirts of the town. Then the colonel fled with his family and all his belongings in the trucks that had been designated for the evacuation of the cadets, most of the other officers disappeared, and we were led by a major, our history teacher, on a westward march through Austria. I wasn’t to see a bed of any kind for several months.
About four hundred of us joined the chaotic mob of refugees who, fleeing from the war, remained in its constantly moving centre, right between the German and Russian armies. Marching between the front lines through the plains and mountains of Austria, we learned to sleep while walking, to walk past mutilated bodies, dead or still twitching, and I learned at last that the Cross stands not oniy for sacrifice and forgiveness but also for crucifixion. Being eleven anti a half years old at the time, I was impressed for life by man’s insane cruelty and by the fragility of our bodies. A religious upbringing is said to implant in one a sense of guilt about sex, but ever since those weeks of shock, hunger and exhaustion, the only forms of self-indulgence I recoil from are hatred and violence. It was then that I must have acquired the sensibilities of a libertine: when one sees too many corpses one is likely to lose one’s inhibitions about living bodies.
Going through blacked-out Vienna in the middle of the night, I lost the other cadets, and from then on I was on my own. I lived on what I could steal from the fields by the road. Other refugees before me must have done the same, for the peasants were guarding their kartoffel patches with machine-guns, and I often got my skin burned before I could bake a potato. By the middle of May, 1945, when an American Army jeep picked me up on the road, alone and half-starved, I was ready for anything.
In saying that I became a whoremaster for the American Army before I reached my twelfth birthday, I don’t mean to create the impression that the soldiers treated me unfeelingly or without any consideration for my youth. I certainly had a far better time in the U.S. Army than at the military school. And if I did jobs inappropriate to my age, it was because I was anxious to earn my keep — and perhaps even more anxious to learn about sex. The two soldiers who picked me up brought me to the camp and saw to it that I was fed, showered, given a medical examination, and taken to the commanding officer. The doctor’s report on my run-down physical condition and the visible effects of my nightmarish experiences must have aroused his pity, and he decided that I should stay in the camp. I was given a bed in one of the long brick barracks (built originally for the Hitler Youth), a cut-down uniform, a GI’s ration of cigarettes, chewing-gum and lifesavers, and a canteen; and I lined up with the soldiers for the five-course dinner with a profound sense of well-being. For the next few days I spent most of my time wandering through the barracks, trying to make friends with the soldiers. They had little to do but look at pictures, shave, clean their clothes and guns, and teach a stray kid English words. “Hi,” “OK,” “kid” and “fucking” (as a universal adjective) were the first words I learned, in about that order; but within a couple of weeks I had picked up enough of the language to discuss the war, Hungary, the U.S. and our families at home. One night I happened to be around when a Hungarian girl and a soldier were arguing about the price, and I volunteered my services as interpreter and mediator. Five packs of cigarettes, a can of powdered milk, twenty-four packages of chewing-gum and a small can of beef were the main items of exchange. It turned out that most of the women who visited the camp by night, while the MPs looked the other way, were Hungarians from the nearby refugee camp; so I was soon active as a translator, go-between and procurer.
The first thing I learned in this adventurous occu
pation was that most moralizing about sex had absolutely no roots in reality. It was a revelation which came also to those surprised, respectable, sometimes even snobbish middle-class women whom I guided to the Army barracks from the crowded and destitute Hungarian camp. At the war’s end, when even the Austrian inhabitants were in dire need of almost everything, the hundreds of thousands of refugees were hardly able to survive — and their position was all the more pitiful as most of them were used to a comfortable bourgeois style of living. Pride and virtue, which had been so important to these women in their own setting, had no meaning in the refugee camp. They would ask me — blushing, but often in front of their silent husbands and children — whether the soldiers had venereal disease and what they bad to offer.
I fondly recall one beautiful and high-born lady who was extravagantly dignified about the whole business. She was a tall dark woman, with huge vibrating breasts, and a bony face glowing with pride — in her early forties, I would guess. Her husband was a count, the head of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Hungary. His name and his military rank, even though it belonged to Admiral Horthy’s beaten army, were still potent enough to secure them a separate wooden shack among the refugees. They had a long-haired daughter about eighteen years old who used to giggle whenever I entered their place on my not-too-frequent errands. Countess S. would only go with an officer, and only for two or three times the usual rate. The count used to turn his head away when he saw me. He still wore the trousers of his dress-uniform, black with broad gold stripes down the side; but above them, instead of the coat with its gold-fringed epaulettes, he wore a disintegrating old pullover. I had an eerie feeling in his presence, remembering the pages about his family in our elementary school history books, and the pictures of him, the great general reviewing his troops, in the newspapers we’d been given to read at the cadet school. He rarely returned my greeting, while his wife always received me like an unpleasant surprise — as if she herself hadn’t asked me to report to her whenever I had any requests from nice clean officers who were not too demanding.
“It’s that boy again!” she used to cry, in a pained, exasperated voice. Then she would turn to her husband with a dramatic gesture. “Do we absolutely need anything today? Can’t I tell this immoral boy to go to hell, just for once? Do we really need anything so badly?” As a rule the general didn’t answer, just shrugged his shoulders listlessly; but he occasionally snapped back: “You’re the one who does the cooking, you should know what we need.”
“If you had gone over to the Russians with your troops, I wouldn’t have to defile myself and commit mortal sin to feed us!” she cried once, in a state of sudden hysteria.
Although I’m translating the dialogue, she did use these quaint, unreal expressions like “defile,” “commit mortal sin,” and “immoral boy” (which I used to like). She had not only the vocabulary but the bearing of a formidably righteous lady, and I half-sympathized with her, sensing what she must have gone through before stooping to “defile herself.” Yet I couldn’t help finding her distress slightly exaggerated, especially since she repeated her scenes with such exactness that I had the impression she was acting in a play. Her ritual challenge to her husband was never picked up, but. their daughter was curiously eager to relieve her mother and do some of the sacrificing for the family herself. “Let me go, mother — you look tired,” she would say. But the countess wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’d rather starve!” she stated angrily. “I’d rather see you dead than selling yourself!” And sometimes she added with despairing humour, “I’m too old to be corrupted, it doesn’t matter any more what I do.”
We all waited silently while she collected herself, put on her make-up, and then stood watching her husband or just looking around the little room. “Pray for me while I’m gone,” she usually said as we walked out, and I followed her almost convinced that she would be glad to die if only she could avoid the coming ordeal.
By the time we reached the car, however, she could manage a brave smile, and on occasions when a certain young captain was waiting for her, she used to laugh happily and quite freely on our way to the Army camp. And when her face suddenly grew dark and pensive, I felt as if I would catch fire just sitting beside her. At such times one could see that she had the most sensuous mouth. I often observed similar changes of mood in the women I escorted to the barracks: they departed from their families as goddesses of virtue who were being sacrificed, and then quite unmistakably enjoyed themselves with the Americans, who were often younger and handsomer than their husbands. I suspected that many of them were quite glad to be able to think of themselves as noble, unselfish and self-sacrificing wives and mothers while in fact taking a welcome holiday from marital boredom.
Not that I was ever present while they were actually with the soldiers in the barracks, although I made many futile attempts to stay around. After all, I wasn’t receiving any pay for my services, and I somehow felt the soldiers and the women owed me the chance to pick up some first-hand knowledge of their activities. But no matter how casual they were about the harmful impressions I might be subjected to in arranging their meetings, they drew the line at the start of their lovemaking, and wouldn’t allow me to stay and watch. Sometimes when I grew too excited by some preliminary necking that took place in front of me, I used to protest against the injustice of it all. “I’m not a kid when you need me to fix you up, but I’m a kid when it comes to fucking!” I wanted my ration of that too. I was so busy translating phrases like “Ask her whether she’s tight or wide,” I was so inflamed by all the talk and caresses, that I was in a state of permanent erection.
I rarely missed a chance to slip into an officer’s hut after he had left it with a woman. In the soldiers’ barracks there was always someone else around, but in an officer’s private quarters I could sometimes examine the scene undisturbed. I tried to pick up clues from the rumpled beds, the half-empty liquor bottles, the lipstick-smeared cigarette butts — but most of all from the smells still lingering in the room. Once I even found a pair of white silk panties, and sniffed them greedily. They had a peculiar but pleasant odour. I had no way of knowing, but I was sure that the smell must be from the female stuff, and I pressed the panties to my nostrils and breathed through them for a long while.
I remember only one occasion when I actually felt I might as well stay a kid a bit longer. I was watching a soldier who had caught venereal disease and had just been given several injections right into the penis. While the other soldiers sat around in the barracks laughing their heads off, he walked up and down between the two rows of beds, still bent over with pain and keeping his hands between his legs. His eyes were filled with tears and he was shouting in a hollow voice: “I’ll never screw anyone but my wife! That’s the last hooker I’ll screw as long as I live!”
It was several days before I began again to consider how I could arrange to make love with one of the ladies I served.
My thoughts centred around Countess S. Although she called me “that immoral boy,” I couldn’t help feeling that she must like me at least better than one of our lieutenants — a fat Southerner with false teeth — whom she used to visit sometimes. While I couldn’t hope to compete with the good-looking young captain, I thought I might get through to her after a night with the lieutenant. One morning I saw him drive away and hung around his quarters until she got up. When I heard her turn on the shower I slipped in. She didn’t hear me enter the room and, opening the bathroom door stealthily, I could see her under the shower, heart-stopping, naked. Although I had seen a great many pin-up pictures on the walls of the barracks, this was the first time I saw a woman naked in the flesh. It was not only different, it was miraculous.
She didn’t notice me, and when she stepped out of the shower I took her by surprise, kissed her breasts and pressed myself against her wet, warm body. Touching her, I was overcome with a happy weakness, and though I wanted to look at her I had to close my eyes. It was perhaps because she could
n’t help noticing the deep impression her body made on me, that she waited a few moments before pushing me back with revulsion. “Get out of here,” she hissed, covering her nipples with her hands. “Turn your back!”
I turned my back and offered to get her ten cans of powdered milk, five cartons of powdered eggs, and all the cans of meat she wanted, if only she would let me make love with her. But she threatened to scream for help if I didn’t leave her alone. Having my back to her and imagining her putting on clothes and covering herself, I got such painful cramps that I had to sit down on the lieutenant’s bed. After she had dressed, she sat down beside me and turned my face toward her with a sharp gesture. She seemed depressed.
“How old are you?”
“I’m grown up.”
I thought of asking her to see for herself, but there was no need. Looking down at me, she shook her head in despair. “God, what does the war do to all of us!”
For once, I had the feeling she really meant what she said.
“You’re being corrupted and ruined here. You should go back home to your mother.”
I think she was depressed both by my degradation and her own, which had brought her to the point where a mere kid could make a pass at her.
“The lieutenant had to go to town and he won’t be back for a long time. And I have actually better contacts in the kitchen than he has. The cooks like me. I can get you anything.”
“You shouldn’t think of love as something you buy. And you should wait until you’re older. Wait till you get married. Your wife will keep herself clean for her marriage and so should you.”
Sitting on the lieutenant’s bed and hearing the GIs’ voices outside, she herself must have sensed the irrelevance of her statement. We just sat there side by side, and she asked about my family and where I was from, while she waited for the officer to come back and pay her.
In Praise of Older Women Page 2
