It is true that she looked at people in love with distrust; I’m a prude, she thought. She was repelled by their toying and dallying; when she saw them she turned away, pretending not to have seen them.
I’m intolerably prudish, she admonished herself, and I can thank that bigoted mother of mine for that too; she knew it, yet she found them disgusting, these dumb lovebirds.
She willingly gave up tenderness; she preferred unruliness, wildness.
What they had was not exactly love but, rather, a covenant or testament. She and Simon said to each other straight out that theirs was a new testament, why not, this was the real new testament, not Jesus Christ’s. Anyway, how can one love a snot-nosed boy like this, I’ll wind up wiping his nose. They will mate. And secretly she was excited about finding out whether he was Jewish or half-Jewish, it was all the same to her; all they had to do was go to bed and then the big truth would out. She finally wanted for herself one of these little doomed ones; this too was part of her rebellion. She had never been to bed with a Jew, and this interested her very much, this was more than rebellion against her upbringing. As though this act promised a hitherto denied quality that she’d become familiar with so she could distinguish it from other qualities; this act was still to be performed and not to be foresworn. Is there a palpable difference. Based on the experiences available to her, she did not think it was feasible to separate personality from race, since a person had no sensory means to do so. She was excited by the image of an unprotected cock, by its being circumcised, because their terrible reputation for lasciviousness lay in this anticipation. To take revenge on her parents, who with their Christian fussing around had embittered her entire love life, deliberately and well in advance. She wanted nothing of their life and still her mouth was stuffed with it; it made her spit all the time.
She could not move for all her inhibitions, therefore she made large gestures.
Hardly anyone noticed.
She also considered changing her name so as not to carry her parents’; they shouldn’t be right about everything all the time. Yet taking Simon’s name would have offended her independence, and in truth she found it ugly, common; she wouldn’t admit it, but there remained in her a proud aristocratic dislike of Simon’s rather ordinary name. It wasn’t in the Almanach de Gotha* and therefore did not exist.
Which was in every way adequate for the man’s proletarian pride.
She could have taken her mother’s name had she not felt a certain physical revulsion against her mother for her own joyless conception. She could never touch her mother, let alone carry her name. She was even repelled by her mother’s former beauty, though she could not ignore the hereditary path it traced in her, and by the fact that it was allegedly her mother’s little-girlish physical perfection that had caused Klára’s father to fall madly in love with her. Although Klára did not know exactly what governmental position her father had held or in what areas he had performed his delicate, highly confidential activities, she forgave him, blindly, for everything. She adored and worshipped him for his circumspection, calm, and wisdom. Whenever he came home for a few days after one of his secret missions, Chief Counselor Elemér Vay had played with the little girl, giving her rides on his knees for hours or shooting glass marbles with her on the living-room floor, as if he were her grandfather.
At the bottom of Klára’s memory, images of these occasions settled into patterns for happy hours ahead.
Even though she also had rather ominous presentiments about her father.
Once she was in school, on exceptionally happy days he would speak to her in German to quiz her on her French vocabulary, and they both enjoyed this immensely. She made excuses to herself, a little ashamed, for his having been taken by Arrow Cross men to the military prison in Sopronkőhida, outside Budapest, along with the elderly papal nuncio and Count Esterházy.*
On such sensitive historical terrain, concerning the question of how these men wound up in Sopronkőhida, it was advisable for her to move cautiously, if only because of Simon. She decided not to ask, not to explore; a few inadvertent or malicious remarks were enough to persuade her not to inquire further. On her admissions applications she wrote that although she and her family had been relocated, which was why she graduated from a Franciscan high school, not only was she a confirmed atheist, but her father had anti-German views and had carried out important activities in the resistance; before she was born, pro-German factions had forced him into retirement and the Arrow Cross had failed to execute him only for lack of time. Yet anxiety about her father persisted, as well as shame about her own exaggerations and distortions, shame that she felt forced to talk like this, to lie so much. She could not deny or ignore that during the war His Excellency the regent had reactivated her father’s career and entrusted him with special missions, because everybody in the family was very proud of this.
But if something deemed incriminating were revealed about her father, Simon would leave her; this too was very clear to her. Although among some quietly accumulating counterarguments was the fact that recently Simon had come very close to being offered a job in the diplomatic service; since it was hard to imagine a screening process that would not uncover her family background, perhaps it had already been done and did not conclude with a negative result.
For his intemperate hatred, Klára loved Simon even more, though she could imagine a hatred so intemperate that it might make him break up with her. In fact she could not go past a certain point with him, despite the hatred she harbored for her own family. The chief counselor’s old sports car, in which they were now headed toward Stefánia Boulevard, had weathered the Hungarian Nazi regime — and, after its collapse, the requisitioning of goods to pay reparations to Russia — in a garage in Börzsönyliget, hidden among bales of straw. Only after 1956 did they free it from the straw, using pitchforks. For years afterward, the car seats smelled of hot Hungarian summers, of larks and hayed fields. Before starting out in it for Vienna with their two grown daughters that year, wearing army boots and awful-looking trench coats, so that the girls could finally dance with their peers at the opera ball, they had to obtain a new license plate and papers for it. Were the girls to be stuck in Budapest, neither of them would get into any Hungarian university, and without that, their future would have been very bleak. In those days there were no special problems in obtaining the right papers, and nobody raised objections. After a few years of enforced silence, the old network was functioning again. On the last Tuesday of October, the ready-to-fight core members met for the first time in Lehr’s apartment. While the hoi polloi on Köztársaság Square were busy hanging people, shooting, storming the Communist Party headquarters looking for underground torture chambers and, with their own ears, hearing freedom fighters banging inside the fortified secret-police cells, the men in the Teréz Boulevard apartment, bright in the languid sunshine, were reactivating their secret society.
It took only a few days.
By the time they had the false papers and the phony license plate, the Russians, together with the city police of Győr, had sealed off the borders again. Now, sitting in the car together, Klára and Kristóf could not have known that when Kristóf fled home from the devastated square that very Tuesday to tell the speechless and incredulous elderly gentlemen what he had seen, virtually breaking in on them in his agitation, he had chosen Klára’s father’s face to focus on. As if this oldest pair of eyes having been the most skeptical were the safest, as if it was this gentleman especially whom Kristóf had to convince that he was not exaggerating or distorting anything, that charred stumps of bodies really were lying out among the burning books and documents, that people really were being hanged in the street.