In all likelihood, the boy had gone to considerable trouble and expense to bring his little friend to the theatre. He didn’t necessarily expect gratitude, but he must have hoped that taking her to see a famous star, in the company of an elegant theatre audience, would make him more impressive in her eyes. Now, since he couldn’t disappear, he attempted to laugh off the incident with a foolish grin, with a nervous twist of his shoulders, looking around at us with an expression which said, “Isn’t she silly, but isn’t she cute?” But as he turned his head in my direction, I caught his eyes for a second — they were the eyes of a maimed dog. Seeing him trapped in the crowd, in the girl’s arm, in his own awkwardness and humiliation, I had to suppress an impulse to draw him aside and offer him, as one man to another, my sympathy and solidarity.
My own encounters with young girls were positively ghastly. However, before I tell you about them, I should give a brief account of myself from the time I left the U.S. Army camp in Austria in the summer of 1946.
The camp commander wanted to adopt me and take me home to join his children in Chicago, but I declined his kind offer. He listened sadly as I told him I was sure that my verse-play would make me a million and I would soon be richer in Budapest than he was with his hotels in America. He had the seventy-five hundred dollars he’d saved for me sewn into the lining of my windbreaker, and made me promise I wouldn’t brag about it to the Russian guards when I left the Western Occupation Zone.
I returned to Hungary on a Red Cross train and rejoined my mother in Budapest, where she had moved to get a better job. With the help of the American money I had brought, she rented and furnished an apartment for us in a majestic old building on the top of Rosehill in Buda. Having no friends or relations in the capital, we lived at first a rather solitary life. While my mother was at the office, I was at school, and in the evenings we used to go out for dinner and to see a play or a film. Although she handled our money, on such occasions she let me carry the purse and pay our way. I was by this time a tall boy looking older than my age, and it pleased me tremendously to be seen with such an impressive woman as my mother. At forty she was still beautiful and must have had her own life — just as I had my private dreams and pangs — but we had a kind of friendship which is perhaps only possible between a widow and her son. She absolutely forbade me to show my verse-play to anyone, saying that we didn’t need the money just yet. Still, she read with interest everything I wrote, and often bolstered my confidence by asking me what books she should read. But I was no longer young enough and not yet old enough for her to confide in me everything that was in her heart. Nor did I feel I could discuss with her my urgent problems concerning women.
In this respect, returning to the peaceful life of a schoolboy was as great a shock as leaving it had been two years before. There were no more friendly ladies to touch casually when they came to visit my mother, there were no more prostitutes to contemplate. I had to face the teenage girls.
Of course I seized every opportunity of doing so. The most painful and bewildering occasion I recall was a school dance — the kind of affair I would have attended in Chicago if the commander had adopted me. In Hungary there were separate schools for boys and girls, but we too had our mixed parties in the gym. The visually rather impressive difference came from the fact that our get-togethers were sponsored not by the PTA but by the Communist Youth Organization. Our modern gym was decorated for the dance not only with crępe paper and balloons but with huge pictures of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, who glared down at us from the top of the climbing-ropes. Oddly enough, the tunes we danced to were American, often the same ones the GIs had played in the camp. They were chosen by the physical-education instructor, who sat in a corner with the school’s record-player, resolutely ignoring our little indecencies.
On that late Friday afternoon, I paired off with a slim brunette named Bernice. I asked her to dance because of her quick dark glances, which gave me hope that something might happen between us. Otherwise, she was unattractive. She had a thin, undernourished face, and her body was all bones. I could feel her tiny breasts only when we were dancing so close together that I also felt the sharp buttons on her blouse. Stepping back and forth to the music, she giggled with excited satisfaction as I kissed her on the neck below the ears. I asked her for a date the next afternoon, and we decided to go and eat pastries at the Stefania Cukrászda. As we danced on, I drew my head back a little and pressed my lower body against hers. Bernice stopped giggling and pressed herself forward, and also began to shift from side to side. After a while the inevitable happened: I began to grow hard against her belly. First she blushed and made a grimace, then drew back a little. Later, as she couldn’t help feeling me even with a slight distance between us, she pushed me away and started to giggle hysterically. She ran and left me standing alone in the middle of the gym.
I found her sitting on the leather-topped saw-horse by the wall with a group of her friends, all of them talking and tittering. I reached them just as one of the other girls let out a cry of shock. “Oh, no, no!” she shrieked, and put her hands over her mouth. When they noticed me they broke up in a fit of horrified giggles, as if they had all gone crazy. I asked Bernice to come back to the dance-floor, but she refused. Still heated and wrought up, I turned defiantly to one of the other girls. She dismissed me with contempt: “I wouldn’t dance with you !”
One of the horrors of being very young is that you don’t know when you’re beaten. I proceeded to ask each and every girl sitting on the saw-horse to come and dance with me, and collected a firm no from each of them. One of the girls slipped off the saw-horse and scurried about the dance-floor, spreading the news of my erection. As the record was being changed, I started out toward several girls who had just left their partners, but they burst out laughing and blushing at the sight of me. I couldn’t comprehend what was so ridiculous or terrible about my wanting that stupid bony Bernice. It was perfectly normal, I insisted to myself, yet I felt like a pervert. I slunk out of the gym and went home, in a very gloomy mood.
There was another episode that I still can’t recall without the taste of humiliation. Acting on the dangerous and idiotic assumption that plain girls must be, by necessity, kinder and more modest than beautiful ones, I once invited a truly ugly girl to a movie. At the appointed time, I was waiting for her in front of the theatre, neatly dressed and with a fresh haircut. She showed up fifteen minutes late and in the company of two of her friends. When they saw me they began tittering, and then just passed by me without even returning my greeting. In all truth, they couldn’t have said a word even if they had wanted to. They were giggling so hard that they couldn’t even walk straight — they looked as if they were going to break in the middle. Looking after them in complete bewilderment and with killing shame, I overheard my ugly girl say: “See, I wasn’t lying, I did have a date.”
I went into the movie by myself, and cried in the dark. Why had they laughed? Was I repulsive? What was so funny?
There were luckier times, of course, when the girls kept their dates and even permitted themselves to neck with me. It was like being on a plane that zooms back and forth along the runway and never takes off. I began to feel unattractive, unwanted and helpless. And how else could you possibly feel after a girl bathes her tongue in your mouth and then firmly withdraws it, as if one mouthful of you were more than enough? My classmates must have had equally unnerving experiences, for we all seemed to resent girls even while we were obsessed with them. And it didn’t take much to turn our passion into hostility.
One morning I came late to school and found the class in a ferment. There was no sign yet of the teacher, and one of the boys stood at the blackboard, busying himself with a red chalk. In letters one foot high and one foot wide, he was covering the black surface with the most obscene word in the Hungarian language. It was a synonym for vagina. The rest of the class were sitting at their desks, trying to say the red word in unison, half-jokingly and falteringly at first. Pi-na! Pi-na! To give weigh
t to the word, they began to stamp their feet on the floor and pound their fists on the desks. Their faces red with excitement and physical strain, they were soon roaring the word wildly, yet with a fine feeling for its rhythm. As they stamped their feet the dust rose from the floor, giving the final touch of a storm to this sudden eruption. Pi-na! Pi-na! The boys were getting their own back for all those questions like “What do you think you’re doing?” and “What more do you want?” As they stamped their feet, pounded their desks and bellowed the forbidden word, there was no question what they all meant and wanted. Or rather, what we all meant and wanted, for I had rushed to my place and joined the gang. I could feel the floor-boards loosening and the walls shaking as the whole building echoed our battle-cry: Pi-na! Pi-na! Pi-na! One of the rattling windows burst open and the red word flew out into the street. In this quiet part of old Buda, with low buildings and almost no daytime traffic, our voices must have carried a long way indeed, stopping short old ladies, housewives, and postmen doing their rounds. This pleasant thought about the outside world listening in wonderment and anxiety inspired us to still greater efforts. As the window flew open, we all began to roar even louder. Yet the meaning was not obscured by the volume, it was not just a muffled and equivocal roar, it was the Word, unmistakably clear and real, sent forth to bring down the school, the city, and give heart-attacks to our enemies and friends alike. Our classroom was on the second floor, and I expected us all to plunge through to the ground, on top of the eighth grade. But I kept on stamping my feet and pounding my fists so hard that they hurt for days afterward.
Finally the principal rushed into the room. He came to a sudden stop when he saw us, as if paralyzed with horror. He began to shout at us,but while we saw his lips moving, we couldn’t hear his words. Pi-na! drowned out his voice. Not until two policemen appeared in the doorway did he succeed in quieting us down. After a brief and tense lull, during which the dust settled back on the floor and in our throats, he asked in a weak voice: “Have you all gone insane?”
The two policemen remained in the doorway and listened to the principal’s little speech, with nods of approval and slight headshakings of feigned shock. The principal was a thin, fair and pitifully balding man whom we had nicknamed the Queer, although we knew that he had a wife and five children and also carried on an affair with his secretary. A progressive educator, he tried to explain to us what a childish thing we had done. He didn’t preach about sin and obscenity, he lectured about the social consequences of rudeness and lack of consideration for others, and the necessity of adhering to reason. Yet he himself was in such an irrational state of mind that he went to the open window and closed it, as if in a futile attempt to keep our Word inside the room, so long after it had flown away. As a matter of fact, he was so tangled up that once he failed to quote us in an appropriately roundabout way: he actually pronounced the Word himself. This evoked but a small brief tremor. We felt tired and smug, and satisfied that we had made our point.
We later heard that our math teacher, whose absence from the classroom had been brought to the principal’s attention in such a dramatic manner, was deprived of a week’s pay. But why should the principal punish the math teacher? He should punish those nervously giggling horrors, I thought, those shy little angels who get shocked so easily.
My mother didn’t share my opinion of girls. Whenever I confided to her my more innocent problems — like my date showing up with other girls and then just walking past me — she told me not to worry. “These things will pass — they’re all part of growing up,” she used to say. But I didn’t want to wait for my problems to pass — I wanted to get rid of them.
The sensation in Budapest at the time was Claude Autant-Lara’s film Devil in the Flesh, which I went to see at least a dozen times. It was about the love affair of a young boy and a gorgeous older woman, and as I watched Micheline Presle actually coaxing Gérard Phillippe to make love with her, I decided that my problem was that my dates were too young. We were labouring under the strain of our combined ignorance. Our English teacher told us that Romeo and Juliet was about the power of youthful love triumphing even over death. When I read the play, I was convinced that it was about the power of youthful ignorance triumphing even over love and life. For who else but two dumb kids would manage to kill themselves just at the moment when they were finally brought together, after so much trouble and intrigue?
And I still think that boys and girls should leave each other alone, if they have a choice. Trying to make love with someone who is as unskilled as you are seems to me about as sensible as learning to drive with a person who doesn’t know the first thing about cars either. You may have quite a ride on the drag-strip, but you’re bound to acquire some bad driving habits, even if you escape accidents. Whenever I see a man reaching out for a woman with painful uncertainty — as if he had something to apologize for, as if he expected her to suffer his desire instead of sharing it — I wonder just how it all happened on that blind date. I also wonder why it is that so many men seem to think of women as their enemies. The last time I was in New York I saw a play by a chic homosexual author and, hearing the men in the audience laugh and applaud every time something vicious or vulgar was said about women, I felt as if I were back in that classroom riot, when we tried to bring down the walls of Buda with the greatest obscenity we could think of. But that riot had nothing to do with any real faults of women — it was inspired by the simple and natural fact that young girls are upset by the strange sight of a boy’s flag flying.
I did know one girl who wasn’t so easily upset. We were both fifteen at the time, but Julika was taller and less confused than I was. “András, you mustn’t jump to conclusions about people,” she often warned me. “You’re in too much of a hurry about everything.” A straight, level-headed brunette with braids. We met in the fall, and I remember going to visit her on a cheerful winter afternoon when the snowflakes appeared to float in the sunny air instead of falling to the ground. It must have been shortly after Christmas, for the decorated tree was still standing in their living room. Her parents weren’t home, and Julika served me tea and walnut-cake and showed me her presents, including a silk nightgown which she had received from her mother. After some heated necking on the couch, I persuaded her to model it for me. I waited in the living room while she withdrew to put it on, which seemed to take a very long time. At last Julika reappeared in her pink silk nightgown. She was nude for all purposes of visibility in the transparent material, but it covered her body from neck to feet, which must have comforted her. She moved about with perfect composure and kept turning around so that I could admire the folds of the skirt. I could finally see her long, long slim legs right to the top. At first her heavy brown braids hung down in front, but when she tossed them back I could also make out her nice pearlike breasts. They rounded out downward and the nipples struck two dark points into the silk. She had a large and rich mouth and a funny nose which she could wiggle from side to side — it was a sign that I should kiss her. We began fondling again and soon found ourselves in her parents’ bedroom, on their wide bed. I pulled off her silk nightgown and dropped it on the floor. Julika was as willing as I was, but perhaps more anxious and fearful about what was going to happen. She was lying on top of the bedspread, her long cool legs invitingly apart, but otherwise motionless. She opened and closed her eyes nervously and smiled heroically, and began to shake.
“Julika, you’re afraid of me,” I said, myself lost and nervous, and perhaps looking for an honourable way out. “If you don’t want me to do it, I won’t. I don’t want to rape you.”
“Oh, no, don’t be silly. I’m just a little jittery,” she insisted. As her fingers inadvertently touched my erect penis, she put her hands behind her small bottom and turned her head away, whispering almost inaudibly: “Don’t mind me, just go ahead.”
I tried to enter her, but she was so tight that I couldn’t. So we began kissing again, but warily, and with long pauses in between — not at all as we had in
the living room or on the dark streets at night. Every so often I tried to push my way in, but not knowing how to go about unlocking a woman, and receiving no help from her apart from her jittery willingness, I failed repeatedly. The worst of it was that after a while Julika grew absolutely calm. She looked at me with slightly wider-than-usual eyes, but was no longer fearful or shaking: she lay on the green bedspread motionless and relaxed — slightly bored, I thought. After half an hour or so, I began to sweat from my futile efforts and my shame.
“It’s cold,” Juhika said, sitting up. “I’d better put my nightie back on.” When I tried to excuse myself, she cut me short with a sisterly kiss. “I guess it was too cold for you too. We’ll try it again in the spring.” We lay there for a while, stroking each other’s arms, and when she finally got up to go and dress in her own room — asking me to straighten the bed in the meantime — she did a little pirouette in the doorway. “But it is a pretty nightie, isn’t it?”
I agreed gratefully, deciding that she wasn’t mad at me. But how did I make her feel about herself? I was to call her the next day, but I did not, neither the next day nor ever again. I was ashamed to face her.
Which is to say that young girls should show their nighties to older men.
Five
On Courage and Seeking Advice
My leader leads me from within.
— Attila József
It got so I would nearly lose my mind when a woman was pressed against me on a crowded bus. I tried to concentrate on my studies, and acquired the earnest look of all those dedicated students whose minds dwell only upon Important Matters and rape. I had a friend, a pint-sized musical genius with glasses: he was fifteen, too, but he was already in his last year at the Academy of Music as a conductor. I read in the newspaper some weeks ago that he had a triumphant concert in Milan. Back in the old days we used to masturbate together, without much joy. I’ll never forget him in my room one evening as he interrupted his conducting and let go of his baton with a cry of despair: “Hell, you need a woman for this!”
In Praise of Older Women Page 4
