So that this perverted little asshole, this lousy turd with his pencil-thin prick, can have his revenge.
As if Rott understood that Karakas grasped all his ulterior motives.
And to snuff out the elemental joy of becoming pals and also to show who was boss, Karakas, with true manly affability, gripped Rott’s thigh under the water.
Comrade Rott will forgive me, I’ve had a tough day, I must excuse myself.
Contemptuously he let go of the strange thigh, motioned that he would take a dip in the cold-water pool, and their audience ended.
And Rott was free to go on his way unhindered, with his breathing regained in fear and trembling. He regretted that he would no longer find his friends behind the little green door. He felt especially sorry about the anticipated loss for Hansi. And he could not imagine how life would be reorganized between the two of them once the third member of their group disappeared for good. He was afraid that the two of them might not be able to bear the solitude, which he could well endure on his own. Karakas did not lie, he very rarely did, and he was indeed having a difficult day. He needed the cold-water pool, and he repeatedly immersed himself in it. The movements pleasantly numbed the skin covering his warmed-up muscles. Above the pool they were waiting for him with his bathrobe and various towels. He dried his head as he walked. The masseur stayed close behind him and continued to massage him with the rich material of the robe, kneading his back and shoulders while buzzing in his ear that comrade Karakas should really stay for a few more minutes today, take time out to see to his health because he could feel how knotty his muscles were through the robe.
They opened the cabin door for him and handed him his clothes item by item. A few minutes later, curled up on the deep seat of the large Russian limousine, the Zim, they sped him back across the Margit Bridge to the prime minister’s office. When they reached the ramp to the island, where the arc of the bridge rises to its highest point, he looked among the flat roofs of Újlipótváros for the roof terrace of Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment. Behind the high solid parapet, he quickly found the pale little light of the salon’s always-open glass screen. In time, on their way out, the policemen most likely had to close the door they had found open.
The reason he loved Mária Szapáry was not because in November 1944 she had saved his life.
It probably happened the other way around.
The woman must have hidden him in the big wall closet because she could not otherwise reciprocate his silent and persistent love for her. By then other people were hiding there too: Jupi, who had given him only his name used in the movement, a field officer from a very good family, and a Jewish engineer from the neighborhood. Later, Mária Szapáry spoke to her women friends about Karakas as she would about a loyal canine, very kindly. Which he also knew, because with her customary noble simplicity she called him dog straight to his face. Listen to me, dog, I want to come up to your office, when will you have time for me, you could do me a number of favors. I’ll go see dog about it, he’ll take care of it, he’ll smooth things over. I’ll talk to dog about it, I won’t go to see him, but sooner or later at some upcoming reception. Even if she had any interest in men left in her, what could she have done with such a shop assistant with his slicked-down hair.
Karakas had been ordered home from Paris for illegal work, but after the German occupation he was no longer safe, his false papers notwithstanding. The potential danger of his situation could hardly have been greater, but neither of them had a choice. He did not know what to do with the news of the red countess’s death. It pained him and made him sentimental. He wanted at least to see the apartment, if he could not comprehend his completely unreasonable attraction. In the last few years, he had been preparing for such a visit, as if he were threatening Mária Szapáry with it.
Yes, of course, I’d be very glad, please come for tea, we’d love to see you, anytime.
They had seen each other exclusively at public places, in theaters, at the opera, film premieres, or state receptions to which the countess was almost always invited officially because of her role in the resistance; sometimes she showed up to have something quickly taken care of, though since 1956 she had let Karakas feel that despite these meetings they would not retrieve their earlier harmony.
Of which neither of them wanted to speak.
To open the wall closet through whose sliding back panels one could gain the flat roof.
From there they reached the steel door of a more distant elevator shaft. When Mária Szapáry was taken away, that is where they holed up for two days and two nights, without food or water. They had to go out to the roof to shit and to urinate. And then they got to the street during the heaviest bombardment, when the front had reached the nearby streets.
According to the first police report, and this reached the highly placed man in the form of a verbal accounting, his secretary whispered what had just been communicated over the telephone, that in the early morning hours Mária Szapáry had taken Elisa Koháry out of the apartment, in a wheelchair, to the corridor, where she had earlier pried open the door to the elevator shaft, using a screwdriver later found in the apartment.
And what she was preparing to do must have been clear to the other woman too.
They also found crude material traces of her resistance and struggle and, given the sensitivity of the case, secured them.
She had pushed her into the elevator shaft along with the wheelchair. It made an enormous noise, and the neighbors heard a woman’s screaming, probably the hapless woman’s last shouts.
Despite the early hour, many people ran out to the echoing corridors.
They heard something, but the noise was actually subsiding; when it completely subsided they heard someone slam and lock the door to Mária Szapáry’s apartment, but they could not say whether it was Mária Szapáry.
With her strong deliberate steps, in her rope-soled Basque slippers she clattered across the hallway, across her workshop, out onto the terrace where now, at the ides of March, the flower boxes were still empty. She was as calm as if she had just let out a tarrying guest.
Indeed, that is how it was.
But a year earlier, when she for the first time had confessed to Mrs. Szemző, Irma Arnót, that this was it, up to here and no further, because she could not go on like this, she no longer had any reserves left for the woman, none, then Irmuska did not say not to do it.
They just kept sitting until it became light outside.
In the widest possible arc, she threw herself over the parapet.
Not to get caught on anything.
This Sunny Summer Afternoon
I don’t know how things had started between us, but Ilonka Weisz always waited for me here on this landing between the first and second floors.
I’d known her from before because she was friends with Viola and Szilvia. Sometimes she visited us in Damjanich Street and occasionally she came with us to City Park. But she would never talk to me, as if I didn’t exist.
Viola and Szilvia said this was because she positively detested me, that I shouldn’t be surprised if she looked right through me. And the reason they could not make Ilonka Weisz change her mind was that whenever they were close to softening her heart toward me, I would behave callously again. They had to endure my insensitivity because they were my cousins, and one puts up with a lot when it comes to relatives, but I shouldn’t expect Ilonka to tolerate it. And they asked me confidentially to stop behaving so callously, at least with her, even if I went on being callous with them.