Maybe I thought this building was classy because there was a better chance to see unfamiliar things than in our buildings, and maybe that’s why I didn’t notice how depressingly pathetic a place it was. People living here talked much more than in other buildings, they yelled more freely between floors and in the courtyard. Or perhaps my idea about its being classy was shaky, since I thought classy meant exceptional and alien, mysterious, and not linked to wealth or poverty. Mezzanine seemed grand to me because there was no such thing in any other building I knew. I also had to consider my piano teacher as very classy because she used a beautiful cane and limped a little. People said it was a congenital hip dislocation; this was no less exceptional than the mezzanine. That is how I thought about things. Probably decades must go by before one manages to free up certain concepts from one’s childhood imaginings. Just as I hadn’t noticed poverty, given the sparkling cleanliness and order, I paid no attention to our prosperity either. I did not know what it fed on or how unstable it was. With my grandparents, we lived on Stefánia Boulevard, where no one mentioned such qualifications, much as one speaks of breathing only when one is breathless. Earlier, my parents’ apartment on Aréna Road was no less spacious, calm, or well cared for, and neither was my maternal aunt’s apartment in Damjanich Street or that of my paternal aunt on Teréz Boulevard. Nobody talked about this, because they all considered spiritual values more important than the material world, and even when looking after their finances the reference points were spiritual ones; such allusions were part of the going bon ton. I did not sense the falsity of this for a long time, since I barely knew another world, which is to say I didn’t notice the differences. And because I had no idea about the criteria of wealth or poverty, it didn’t occur to me for the longest time that a place or neighborhood in a city had any particular meaning. And by the time I might have understood the connections among the various quarters and districts in the city of my birth, their social structure and architecture had been so extensively altered that the traditional labels had lost their meaning. There were no fancy or rich sections, and the concepts designating them sank into oblivion too.
Of course, I had a very clear idea of what was not proper.
The concept of good manners, strangely, lasted much longer than the social qualifications for bourgeois life. I could not judge the nature of bon ton, but I was free to decide what was classy. As if, for lack of a better qualified person, I had been entrusted with the decision, and indeed I behaved as a judge. Propriety, however, was set up with geometrical prescriptions coupled with draconian rulings. One had to avoid certain things at all costs, and one had to obey certain rules come hell or high water.
As to the issue of what was classy, one simply had to weigh things; no one hindered one in making the assessment. My mother’s kid sister, for example, in her infinitely large, airy, and sunny apartment looking out on the inner gardens of the always shady Damjanich Street, did not live in less privileged conditions than we did. Her rooms opened into one another and the windows reached down to the floor — French doors. That they were French was very classy too. Streetcars ran on the streets outside, yet I knew that although I lived with my grandparents on Stefánia Boulevard in a kind of provincial seclusion, if the need arose we could get to the city by taxi, and perhaps that was the reason we were exceptional. But for a long time the yellow streetcar was for me much classier than the taxi, though our secluded provincial life was classier than the noisy city. Which meant that sometimes disadvantages made someone classy and sometimes advantages. Or, put the other way around, it’s not advisable to look for the advantageous in everything if one wants to stay classy. It’s also possible that what is disadvantageous today will be very advantageous tomorrow. This was an important rule; no wonder people did not discuss it in public. You had to be two or three steps ahead of your nose to be able to judge your own position. There was some secret instruction by which not only the mere fact but also the degree or temperature of grandeur was determined. It didn’t have to do with the number of rooms, certain objects, or the condition of a given building.
Intellectually, Nínó on Teréz Boulevard had a very classy position in the family hierarchy while my aunt Irén in Damjanich Street, by dint of her person, as it were, also enjoyed a high position, since her beauty unfortunately swept everybody off their feet; yet because of her husband, she was not considered one of the refined or truly grand members of the family. Her husband was fabulously rich, people never stopped talking about it because somehow he could not get used to being rich or preserve his affluence; he was a common, uncouth man. On his hairy fingers he wore several jeweled rings and one particularly ugly signet ring of which his daughters were very afraid. He would slap them in the mouth with those ringed fingers. And the girls were no less ill-mannered. My grandmother said that my aunt Irén paid no heed to their upbringing. It would have been hard to say exactly what my aunt Irén did pay attention to. She picked the objects of her attention capriciously, making everything around her constantly move and change. The disorder in their apartment was always great; one had the impression that they were about to move out or had just moved in and had had no time to unpack. A radio was always blasting somewhere; they had several of them; they did not disturb the girls listening to the gramophone or whistling or even playing the violin at the same time.
When visiting them, Grandmother preferred to keep her gloves on and always made sure the taxi waited for her; thank you, my dears, but I’m staying only another moment.
I thought my mother was the classiest of them all, because she was the only one among us who dared openly to betray everyone, to just up and leave; she had no problem betraying the entire family, and she abandoned me without a word. I have almost no memories of her. More like a few sentences that others whispered in my presence in a way that I couldn’t understand. Regarding my mother, I can’t separate my real memories from my desires and imagination. Not only did she settle in Paris — this would not have been startling, considering her personality — but she lived in the woods of Vincennes, where the window of her bedroom gave on a lake with the fortified castle of the French kings on the far side. I knew these kings had been beheaded. I also knew that except for her name, Mother had nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing. People spoke of her with trepidation, about how she was impoverished and, save for that certain woman, had nobody and nothing, but absolutely nothing. I imagined her still wearing the same white linen dress with the red leather belt in which she had escaped on the last train. It was in the summer, a very hot summer. I knew her shoes and her bag had been red.