We must help them as best we can so that they may take up arms against our greatest common enemy, Bolshevism.
Many people say that tactical accommodation demands too much sacrifice, too much self-discipline, and is too risky. But we must play along with them without ever forgetting what we are doing. Our responsibility, said Elemér Vay, with his practical way of thinking rounding out the professor’s abstract argument, is to maintain a sensible balance between cooperation and resistance until the German element arrives at a point where it can carry out its far-reaching grand design.
Et puis il y a toujours la Sainte Vierge, as the prince said in his inimitable way, to jovial laughter, concluding the dinner-table conversation.
Blushing was becoming permanent on Madzar’s face, it ebbed and flowed on his milk-white skin.
He walked away from the hotel with long strides, stood for some time in the hazy heat but could not calm down outdoors either.
He watched the car receding in clouds of dust, absentmindedly greeted approaching and receding strangers a little way from the hotel, near the blinding white walls of nearby buildings. There was hardly a soul abroad in the stifling midday heat. He felt like breaking and smashing things; only when nearing the parental home did he slow down a bit. If at that moment his mother had appeared, he would have raged at her, he was sure, as his father used to rage. But reason told him he should enter the house quietly, very quietly. He had the urge to scream as he crossed the empty, dead yard. He went the long way around to avoid peeking from the corner of his eye into the workshop, whose doors were wide open for the expected guests, and to keep from rushing in to demolish the ridiculous furniture. He wouldn’t have had to do much to make the pieces fall apart, along with their puritan discipline.
I am ruining my own life.
In the summer midday, motionless silence settled over the city and the river.
An occasional stray fly on the veranda window, shaded by the grapevine bower, provided the only movement. There, in the middle of the veranda, stood the table set for three awaiting Mrs. Szemző. The plates decorated with a cheap pattern, the vulgarly colorful and barbarically cut glasses, the cheap, polished-to-death cutlery. He took off his jacket, let it slip from his hand, he had no more use for it. Quietly he kicked off his ugly perforated shoes, careful that they made no noise on the stone. He gazed at these shoes made especially for festive summer events, but what he was really looking at were the indentations his father’s feet had created in them. He kicked off his pants, quietly. Last, he literally tore off the short-sleeved shirt, which had become drenched under the jacket. He remained half-dressed like that for a long time, in his father’s long underpants and his own milk-white skin.
He could not sit down because the armchair made of willow twigs would make a loud cracking sound.
Eventually he stopped wanting to sweep the settings off the table, as his father had done more than once at a Sunday lunch, or to smash everything to pieces.
But there was no part of his body unacquainted with the joy of breaking things.
And then his utterly humiliated mother would come and pick up everything from the stone floor and even be glad no one had beaten her. She has spent her life as my father’s servant and she’d be glad to become mine. Which would break his heart, he felt. He heard no noise from the corridor because she was probably waiting on the other side of the yard, in the summer kitchen, with all the food ready to be served.
Would that God, that son of a bitch, might bring the heavens crashing down on this fucked-up world.
As he carefully lifted his neatly folded work clothes from the top of the hope chest, he had to leave off with the cursing.
He managed to cross the corridor silently and close every door of every room, always darkened during the midday hours, without a sound.
No door handle clicked in the stillness.
He lay motionless on the sofa for a long time.
The mute summer sizzled through the cracks of the drawn shutters.
He had spent his nights on this living-room sofa and maybe he slept on it now for a short time. Because suddenly he jumped up, startled, as if someone were about to kill him. He had to go to work, otherwise he would not finish on time, let others have a ball, and he quickly reached for his work clothes, as he did every morning. Both his feet were in the legs of his cotton pants when he remembered the previous night, Mrs. Szemző’s telegram, his own ridiculousness, and the arrival of all those people. With his pants pulled up only to his knees he sat back on the sofa, took the telegram out of his pocket where he had shoved it, blushing, the night before, and spread it out on his knees. In the dimness he had to lean close down to the paper, which made him look like a child. In his shame he then leaned farther forward, as if he had to vomit. In his shame he buried his face in his hands. He did not understand how he could have sunk so low. Because, although obscured by a convoluted style and labyrinthine phrases, everything was there, spelled out in the telegram.
How could he have misunderstood it so badly.
The previous evening he had seen not what was in the telegram, with the peculiar letters of the telegraph machine, but what he recognized from his ridiculous daydreams in those letters. How could he have made himself so vulnerable to this woman.
So, that’s how low I’ve fallen.
Of course, now he saw clearly how it had all happened. As if, locked in his body, he’d been forced to live simultaneously in several parallel worlds and, given the current tensions, had by accident mixed them up and replaced one with the other. And thus he had indecently revealed to Mrs. Szemző one of his hidden selves, which she, luckily, not being familiar with his other hidden world, couldn’t have understood.
When he recalled these events long decades later, he sadly acknowledged that despite everything he had never been happier than he was during the next few days which the Szemzős spent in the city of his birth, and that he had suffered untold agonies in wanting the woman’s body so much.
He could no longer tell himself he was not attracted to her.
On a single occasion, they embraced each other in the afternoon quiet of the workshop, among the pieces of furniture in progress; then they could feel it.
His happiness was brief, the kind one never comprehends except when unexpectedly one remembers it.
Or, if he was happy sometimes, he may have felt it even more deeply and free of dramatics, but never so darkly and so lightheartedly as back then.