As if they should have a fuck simply to understand something much more essential and basic.
In Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he must represent something strong, headstrong, and primeval compared to the timid, probably impotent Tonio Kröger. In her imagination he was the embodiment of archaic man — he tried to follow Mrs. Szemző’s thinking — which I’m not, he thought, and never was. She needs a weakling like Tonio Kröger, but she lives with a brutal character like Szemző. He was flattered that in Mrs. Szemző’s eyes he differed so greatly from whining Tonio Kröger and perhaps from her husband too. It would have been better to resemble brutal Mr. Szemző than Tonio Kröger. A chair cannot give in to nostalgia, to a catastrophe or to the small tragedies of personal life, not even to pleasant sorrow, like Tonio Kröger, whose physical fits of madness never ruffled him because he did not give in to them; a chair can’t put on airs. Madzar knew almost everything there was to know about what a chair should have; he was sensitive to objectification. And in the perspective of this utopian knowledge, he considered it imperative to be repelled by German decadence. And, no less, by Mrs. Szemző’s Jewish decadence. And not only did he read Thomas Mann with great aversion but it was also very difficult for him to listen to compositions by Wagner, Mahler, or Richard Strauss all the way through to the end; they nauseated him.
Years earlier, when studying in Weimar, the chair had become Madzar’s specialty, and if he ever was dissatisfied with his work, he never doubted his ability to deal with matter, any material, or his perfect sense of space. He had problems with his constitutional love of comfort and his archaic slowness, though, which is why he well understood what the Jewess from Budapest was talking about or had in mind. He could not free himself from the rhythm of the surroundings he came from. He acknowledged this, but dreaded awareness of it as he would a court sentence.
He was always lugging Mohács around with him.
At best he should try to find the key to his slowness and lagging; he realized that being a slow laggard might have advantages in a foreign setting, but to benefit he had to enjoy the perennial loser in himself. To learn to love Mohács’s destructive decadence. But he felt mainly indifference toward himself, and the same toward the abandoned city. He could not learn to love a place within himself where his last panic-stricken compatriot had been lost centuries before. He could not love the river’s wild maelstroms and great floods, which swallowed and carried away any person just as they would a helpless object. Although, on this last, perhaps very last summer in Mohács, despite the mental anguish and irritating technical dissatisfaction he had managed to deal very economically with historical and personal time, as well as with asceticism and decadence.
He had to create fifteen pieces of furniture during a few stolen weeks.
He stole the time from himself, who else. He shouldn’t be frittering it away; he could have followed Mies van der Rohe to America.*
But with the saturated sleepers he was very lucky, inexplicably lucky. The mysterious saturant had an unpleasant odor reminiscent of valerian, but it left no visible trace or stain and lent a deep-purple tone and a most exceptionally silky surface to the wood. While masons and roofers were busy inside and out with the Buda building on Dobsinai Road, he could make good progress in Mohács, working on the deep-purple silky-surfaced furniture for Mrs. Szemző’s clinic. Of course, they had barely delivered the sleepers from Gottlieb’s about-to-be-liberated lumberyard when Madzar discovered that it was going to be harder to take possession of his father’s abandoned workshop than he had thought. During the long years when the workshop was closed, woodbine had crawled into the roof space between the tiles and the gaps in the roof timbers and cracks in the corbels, across the splits in the adobe, looking for openings in the roof beams and planks, and it descended from the ceiling like a curtain. It was lovely, striking, and not hard to remove, but its tendrils had dangerously invaded the walls, the tool shelves, parts of the machines, and with its adhesive pads was grasping objects from all sides. He couldn’t just go at it, yanking it off, with impunity; tools, boxes, and shelves then went flying and crashing in all directions, screws and nails scattered everywhere.
At the same time, he didn’t want to rush anything. Which meant that he had completed only three important pieces by late autumn, virtually minutes before his departure.
After that he had time only to put the objects in their designated locations and call for the photographer.
It was better that way, because he and Mrs. Szemző had no time for a sentimental farewell.
Which only increased their mutual admiration.
They’d never see each other again, how fortunate, they thought, looking into each other’s eyes, and thus they managed to glide through their relationship unscathed, almost.
But in that early April heat, Madzar began his work on the chairs and armchairs. Soon the weather turned cool again, it rained a lot, and occasionally he had to light a fire in the potbelly stove. For him this was the greatest excitement and pleasure, the chairs. He hardly ever listened to news on the radio or picked up a local newspaper, for he didn’t want disturbing news to interfere with his work. Sometimes, information about what was happening around him reached him days after an event. He thought of the Germans’ strategic ideas as a material form or structure. To stupefy the unsuspecting world with revisionist demands, as if peaceful solutions still had a chance. War was imminent. And he did not need Bellardi to convince him of the dangers in German expansionism.* In his aesthetic struggle against decorative decadence, he kept a modicum of indifference about the threatening events. And he went on being annoyed by the nonsense he had heard from Bellardi. He could not get out of his head the childish drivel a spoiled aristocrat like him could come up with. Having seen Bellardi’s childishness, Madzar appreciated all the more the simple yet unusually speculative mechanism of Mrs. Szemző’s thinking. What disgusted him most was Bellardi’s dramatically conceived patriotic sense of responsibility, which no matter from what angle he looked was nothing but empty self-complacency and self-indulgence, just like Tonio Kröger’s many sentiments. He learned two days after the fact that Prague was next to fall, Vienna having been first, though the Czechs were defending themselves, their army’s motorized units were concentrating on their borders with Hungary and Germany. Or perhaps this too was nothing but provocation. While he worked, the thought that he should start packing was always with him, and he could see himself catching the last ship out of Genoa.
For a few days he followed the news persistently and even bought the miserable local papers.
He tried not to think about Mrs. Szemző while he worked, because he wanted to forget he was making these objects for her. Interestingly enough, the chairs were going to be heavier than they looked. He had to be careful not to make this work into a confession of love. He would have found that ridiculous. He was making the furniture out of military sleepers that were supposed to have been used in the war effort. He tried to be amused by this devilish twist of fate but couldn’t be; the coincidence that had brought the wood to him seemed too ominous. Secretly he hoped that Bellardi would stand by his promise and show up unexpectedly for the answer to his question.