In Praise of Older Women

by Stephen Vizinczey

  When our demonstrations turned into a revolution in October, 1956, everything became blurred again. I fought like the others, but I was too terrified under the barrage of tanks and heavy artillery to feel heroic. If anything, I felt the curse of the lucky, among comrades lying on the pavement, dead but still bleeding. Nor could I feel a sense of righteousness, fighting against Russian occupation and a vicious and incompetent dictatorship, I found myself shooting at bewildered Ukrainian peasant boys who had as much reason to hate what we fought as we had. I thought I knew about wars from 1944, but it was an embittering shock to find that one can’t confront the real enemy even in a revolution. Still I hung on through three weeks of street battles, hopping from ruin to ruin, scared and hungry — convinced after a while that we could neither win nor survive. But there were moments when I experienced a kind of mystical communion with my homeland, when I felt glad that, if I could do nothing more, at least I could join all those who had died for Hungary through a millennium of ill luck. At twenty-three, I still believed that there could only be one true country for each man.

  I turned into a philandering internationalist during my second crossing of the Austro-Hungarian border. There I was, fleeing again, with just a few other refugees this time, but on an equally cold December day, and through the same mountains. I had in fact the weird sensation of re-enacting an episode from my childhood. The sky was just as bleak as in the winter of ‘44; the quiet trees still stood tall, graceful and unperturbed, as if belonging to another world; and the snowy rocks echoed the machine-gun rattle as if the shooting hadn’t stopped since I was a boy. This time we didn’t need to fear the stray bullets of opposing armies: the unseen border patrol was aiming straight at us. I was less scared than enraged, realizing that I would be a hunted animal only so long as there was native soil beneath me. “That’s it!” I began to mutter to myself. “So long, Hungary!” Wondering whether the bullets had hit the ground or my body as they hissed into silence, I tried to crawl under the snow and then run exposed — my passion for Hungary spent.

  On the Austrian side of the border we found a road, and a passing milk truck picked us up and drove to the nearest village. The village square was already crowded with refugees, who were stamping their feet against the cold and staring at a line of brand-new silver buses. These had yellow, hand-painted signs proclaiming the points of their destination: Switzerland, U.S.A., Belgium, Sweden, England, Australia, France, Italy, New Zealand, Brazil, Spain, Canada, West Germany and, simply, Wien. At the police station on the other side of the square, Red Cross officials were dispensing the first aid of hot coffee and sandwiches, while nurses in black coats and white caps scurried through the crowd in search of the wounded and babies in need. Other officials, appearing less sympathetic, were prodding the refugees to pick a bus and get on it.

  “That revolution must have made bigger headlines than I thought,” a young man commented. “We’re getting the red-carpet treatment reserved for victims of sensational disasters.” Still, most of us were bewildered by the sight of that muddy village square with its buses going to the four corners of the earth. Less than an hour before, we couldn’t move without being shot at; now we were invited to choose our place under the sun. It didn’t make sense to the senses, things didn’t connect.

  “There isn’t enough transport here for all these people!” an elderly lady cried out in a sudden fit of hysteria. “They’ll overload the buses and we’ll all get killed on these winding mountain roads!” Nobody laughed. Life had already manifested too many possibilities to make anyone feel confident.

  “That bus over there marked Brazil — are they planning to drive it across the ocean?” I asked a round-faced girl who stood beside me in the crowd, looking frightened. She laughed nervously and explained that the buses went only as far as the various railway stations and refugee camps, where we would have to wait for screening and further transportation.

  Where to spend the rest of one’s life? A couple with a small baby, who had already boarded the bus for Belgium, got off and rushed to the vehicle marked New Zealand. There were others who walked up and down the lines of buses, reading and re-reading the names of countries with studious expressions, but without being able to make up their minds. And where was I finally going to get my Ph.D.? In what language? It was impossible to believe that by taking a few steps in this or that direction I would settle these questions for good. I happened to be standing beside the yellow letters “Sweden.” If I stepped on that bus, I would meet women in Stockholm and we’d fall in love — but if I moved on to the next vehicle, we’d never even learn of each other’s existence. The round-faced girl finally made up her mind to go to Brazil. I saw her to her bus and before she stepped on — more to comfort my own helplessness than to cheer hers — I held her back and kissed her. She returned the kiss, and for a long moment we reminded each other that we were still a man and a woman, and that there would be men and women everywhere. I thought of asking her name, but I just put my hand where her breast pushed forward her overcoat, and then watched her go. She found a seat by the window and smiled down at me, exposing a broken front tooth. If it hadn’t been for that tooth, I might be writing these recollections in Portuguese. But the feel of her overcoat still warmed my fingers as I walked, no longer feeling quite so lost, to the bus marked “Italy.” After weeks in the cold, I longed for the freedom of the sun.

  The next day I was in Rome, in the company of three hundred other shaken-up Hungarians, none of whom I’d ever met before. Arriving at the new railway station, we saw people sipping their espresso at tables covered with white cloths, right beside the tracks. Only electric trains were running, and the shiny and spotless station looked like a pleasure palace, with the sun pouring in through the glass walls. We boarded buses again and were taken to the Albergo Ballestrazzi, an old and comfortable hotel on a narrow side-street off the Via Veneto. We found it difficult to get into the building: the way was blocked by trucks carrying gifts and by hundreds of people who had come to look at the poveri refugiati . As I fought my way in, an excited elderly gentleman pressed into my hand a bundle of bank-notes (eighty thousand lire, I discovered when I counted them later). Immune to surprises by this time, I thanked him in Latin and walked into the hotel. The lobby looked like a department store — compliments of the merchants of Rome. Racks of expensive suits, dresses and coats, tables covered with shirts, blouses, shoes — everything one could wish for when arriving in a strange city without luggage. However, as I joined my compatriots descending upon the goods, I heard a woman complaining loudly that there were no white kid gloves to fit her. I grabbed a huge suitcase first and, carefully checking sizes and styles, selected six white shirts, ties, underwear, socks; two pairs of shoes, three suits, six black pullovers and a smart overcoat. We clutched our new possessions; and our faces, which had appeared so humble and fearful on the train, acquired the anxiously smug look of proprietors. Struggling through the crowd with my spoils, I noticed a thin, dark bellboy staring at me with contempt and revulsion. There I was, a foreigner, picking the best of everything for nothing. Had anyone ever asked him what he could use? I felt guilty and, at the same time, was overcome with a cozy sense of satisfaction at my own good luck.

  We were each given a handsomely furnished private room, without charge, we were showered with all sorts of gifts and a great deal of cash, and we had nothing to do but relax and enjoy ourselves — and wait for the next drastic change in our fortunes.

  After lunch on the second day, the student-rebels at the Albergo Ballestrazzi were asked to come to the lobby to meet a journalist who was writing a series of articles about university life in Hungary. By then the lobby had regained its customary appearance, which was that of an inexplicably huge drawing room in a modest middle-class home: dull mirrors in thick wooden frames, a threadbare carpet, and a great many old armchairs with their upholstery fading away. There was a woman settled comfortably in one of the chairs. She didn’t seem to notice our small group approaching, alt
hough at the last moment she got up to greet us, shaking our hands briskly and repeating her first name.

  “Paola.”

  Paola was a most unlikely Italian: a straight-faced beauty, tall, blonde, and, as we were soon to learn, unsympathetic. Since none of us spoke Italian, she asked whether anyone could interpret for her in English. I offered my services, and she looked at me sceptically for a moment. “All right,” she decided, “let’s get down to work.” First she wanted to know our academic qualifications, and what we had seen and done during the revolution. Whether we tried to tell a joke or tried to describe a tragic episode from the days of the fighting, she reacted only with her ball-point pen and showed no emotion except occasional anxiety that she wouldn’t be able to read back her notes.

  “That bitch hates our guts!” one of the boys complained. “I’ll be damned if I’ll answer any more of her questions!”

  “What did he say?” asked Paola, as I didn’t translate.

  “He’s worrying whether we can tell you anything interesting enough to put into your articles.”

  Paola raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment. Finally she closed her notebook, announced that she would be back the next day, and concluded the interview on a personal note. “I think you were all extremely lucky to get away safe and sound.”

  Later that afternoon — I’d felt it coming on for days — I came down with a severe case of self-pity. I’ve been periodically subjected to this illness ever since childhood — in fact, I never recovered from it completely, only learned to live with it. However, this time the attack was more violent than ever before. I went up to my room and locked the door, and even ignored the bells for dinner: I couldn’t have endured seeing and talking to anybody. Lying on my bed, I cried over my loneliness. I felt exhausted, too weak to cope with my own inconstancy and the inconstancy of the world. Last week I was in Budapest, today I was in Rome — where would I be tomorrow, and what on earth for? I’d left my country, my lovers, my friends, my relations, and I’d never see them again. I couldn’t comprehend what had possessed me to do it. Talking to that snob Italian journalist about the revolution, I’d suddenly realized that I no longer cared about Hungarian independence, liberty, equality and justice — all those things for which I’d irrevocably messed up my life. Even translating news about Hungary irritated me: I found my fellow refugees as tiresome and unnerving as the relatives of a former girl friend, and I resolved to keep away from them as much as possible. Lying on top of the bed all night with my clothes on, I slept little, and when I did I dreamed about a tank driving back and forth over me, flattening my body as thin as paper on the pavement.

  The next morning I woke with a slight fever and a large, sore boil under my right armpit, and rushed off to the hotel doctor. According to him, my body was simply adjusting itself to the change of climate and diet. I thought it was simply rebelling against all the changes it had been subjected to. Both the fever and the boil continued to plague me for over a month, while I dragged myself through the museums and churches of Rome, either alone or in the company of Italians who had volunteered as escorts and guides for the refugees. They were kind, but they didn’t know my name, if they knew it they couldn’t pronounce it, and in any case I no longer knew whom it meant. I was just another povero ungherese . Within a couple of weeks I spoke faulty but fluent Italian, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that I wasn’t so much acquiring a new language as giving up my mother tongue. I had the ability to make contact with new people and places, but that talent obviously made me readier to abandon whatever I already had. I had even abandoned many of my interests: writing poetry, playing the piano. I could never stick to anything. Rome tempts one to reflect upon the past, and I began counting all the friends and lovers whom I had left, and all those who had left me. They appeared and disappeared: my whole life was a series of fade-ins and fade-outs. It seemed, in fact, that I had never gained anything I hadn’t lost. I felt particularly guilty about Maya, and what troubled me most wasn’t so much the fact that I made love with her cousin, but that I did it right there on Maya’s bed, on the bed where she had taught me to love — a detail which I’d never thought much about, but which now struck me as painfully characteristic.

  Incidentally, I must disagree with the great philosophers who urge us to Know Ourselves. Through all these days of penetrating self-analysis, I actually became meaner and stupider, out of sheer frustration. Every evening I withdrew early to my room to nurse my boil, wishing I’d been shot dead at the border. And every night, I had nightmares.

  Fourteen

  On Happiness with a Frigid Woman

  I love you very much because with you

  I found a way to love myself again.

  — Attila József

  I was so sick of myself that I became attracted to a woman who showed absolutely no sympathy for me. Although Paola was writing an apparently endless series of articles about Hungarian students, her personal indifference to us wasn’t affected by exposure to our company day after day. As I interpreted for her every afternoon in the dim lobby of the Albergo Ballestrazzi, I tried to guess her age. It could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-six: there were fine lines on her forehead and neck, yet her pale blue eyes shone with the unperturbed innocence (or ignorance?) of a young girl. When she walked into the lobby, wearing some clinging silk or knitted dress, strikingly elegant, her body looked as if it had been massaged into perfect shape by a long line of ardent lovers. But as she came closer, the warm glow turned into cold grace. She had a slim, distant face, the pale oval of a Byzantine madonna, and I began to wonder whether she would come to life if I touched her.

  “You know,” I said to her one day, “I’m really quite an experienced interpreter. I did a lot of it when I was a small boy.” I hoped, of course, that she would ask me where and why. At times when I didn’t believe in myself, I used to exploit my American Army camp stories quite shamelessly as feelers and stimulants. But Paola wasn’t interested. I also tried to impress her with my talent for languages, switching from English to Italian whenever I could, to show off each new word I had learned. She didn’t react. Most of the boys excused themselves from her company as quickly as they could, and I was often left alone with her before she’d found out all she needed to know for the following day’s instalment. I tried to help her, although my boil was throbbing and my whole body shivering with fever, and sometimes I alluded to my sufferings. She received such personal remarks with a raised eyebrow, as if I’d asked her to write a front-page story about my state of health.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you too,” I told her one day, thoroughly fed up, and in plain English. “I feel so sick, I think I must be dying.”

  “Now, try to say that in Italian,” she urged, in Italian. “You shouldn’t be so lazy — you should practice the language you know the least.”

  Too weak to grind my teeth, I repeated in humble Italian that I was dying.

  “Excellent!” Paola exclaimed, and actually smiled. “See you tomorrow then.”

  Infuriated, I went for a walk to calm myself. At the end of the Via Veneto stands one of the gates to the Villa Borghese, which is set in a luxuriant yet ordered park of ancient trees and fresh flowers, wild nature in a frame of carefully detailed artistic design, as much a forest as a garden. There is a small lake, there are exquisite paths winding past white marble statues, and everywhere (as the park occupies one of the Seven Hills of Rome) it offers glimpses of church domes, palace walls — a breath of the Renaissance. I’d never seen anything so magnificent and yet so soothing as the Borghese Gardens, and as I walked around I became sufficiently relaxed to realize that the fresh air and exercise had cleared my head and cooled my fever. Yet if it hadn’t been for Paola’s outrageous indifference to my sufferings, I would have spent the afternoon brooding in the hotel. Indeed, this sort of cause and effect turned out to be the pattern of our relationship: Paola used to make me furious, but I ended by feeling healthier and bright
er afterward.

  “I’m not an outgoing personality,” she observed after our last interview in the lobby, when we were left by ourselves again. “And I concentrate on what I’m doing. I noticed your friends don’t like me.”

  “They think you’re humourless, bloodless and insensitive,” I informed her.

  “That sounds pretty astute.” She was impressed, as if we were talking about someone else. “I must say, I was favourably impressed by most of you,” she added in the spirit of objectivity. “You’re all too wrought up about politics, but at least you’re not like Italian men — you’re not obsessed with sex.”

  I don’t know how the other boys would have reacted if they’d been present to hear the compliment, but its effect on me was profound. Once when I was in hospital at the age of nine with a ruptured appendix, I heard the doctor advising my mother to make arrangements for my funeral, and I was back on my feet in two weeks. Paola’s remark affected me the same way. I asked her whether she would show me around Rome, in return for my services as an interpreter; she agreed, and we made an appointment for the following day. After she left I went up to my room, did ten push-ups, had a bath, and resolved to make love with that woman as soon as my boil disappeared.