Katalin Street Page 10

  After some time she rose to her feet. As she did so she stumbled against the eighteenth-century footstool, the one with the shepherd and shepherdess standing on either side of a stream, the girl with a beribboned stick and a jug and the boy lifting his hat in greeting. The footstool fell over with a dull crash.

  A light flickered in the doorway for a moment and instantly went out: a ray of blue light, the blue flicker of an electric flashlight. Someone shouted—a long sentence, clearly enunciated, impossible to misunderstand. Not so much frightened as caught off guard, Henriette scrambled to her feet and began to run toward the fence on the left-hand side. As she reached the archway she heard the soldier shout again, and she was struck by the absurd thought of how sensible it was that they had left a watchman at the deserted house in case people might steal something: a house in that situation really needed one.

  She made it to the hedge, still much less afraid than she would have expected. Now for the Elekes house! Irén had prepared a hiding place in the cellar, which was never locked. The soldier would have spent some time looking for her and wondering where she had gone. Reaching the fence, she started to push on the two boards that Bálint had loosened to let her through to the Elekeses’ garden, and her heart came to a stop. The boards refused to budge. They had been nailed back on the other side.

  Completely forgetting that she should always stay behind the hedge, she ran blindly into the garden, towards the Birós’ fence that she had come in through. Another flash of blue light. It didn’t reach her, but the soldier was now in the garden. At that point she knew how wrong she had been earlier: she hadn’t died on either the first or the second occasion, or even on this the third. She was still alive, and she wanted to live. But by the time she realized that she was already dead.

  Two shots rang out in the moonlight. Searching unsuccessfully by the light of his torch, the soldier decided his aim had been poor. But the first bullet had flown true to its mark.

  I HAVE already described what sort of people we were, so you will understand why I was the only one the Major and Bálint had told the truth to about where Henriette was, and why the rest of the family simply accepted the official version, that she had gone to join her parents and they had left Budapest. My mother was incapable of keeping a secret, so much so that we had to hide our Christmas presents at the Helds’: the moment she suspected that we had bought her something she would immediately put aside her constitutional idleness and start searching for it, turning the entire house upside down in her desperation to see what it was and completely destroying its value as a gift for a special occasion. With Blanka there was a different problem. She was so riddled with fear, so terrified of the war and of being hurt or harmed in any way, that we couldn’t risk her knowing anything. Though she loved Henriette like a sister, we could never be sure that if she were ever questioned, or actually threatened, she wouldn’t simply burst into tears and blurt out the truth to make them leave her alone and stop tormenting her, only to realize a few minutes later that what she had just done might have sent someone to their death. Nor could we put the least reliance on my father. He quite understood that the Helds were in an exceptional situation, and that it was natural and proper for the Major to do everything in his power to help them, but on the other hand it was actually illegal to hide such people, the law expressly forbade it, and respect for the laws of the land—even the most immoral of them—ran as deep in him as the marrow in his bones. The sort of things that were going on at that time filled him with astonishment and dismay. Both as a Christian and a teacher whose vocation was to instill moral values in the community, he rejected the beliefs and attitudes of the fascists. But for him obedience to authority, submission to one’s superiors, in whatever circumstances and however painful, remained an absolute duty. It would take the death of the Helds and the disappearance of Henriette to smash his brittle morality to pieces. Even today he cannot forgive himself for what followed—and now of course he is in a position to help no one.

  Bálint came over to see us later, that evening of the day of our engagement. It seemed perfectly natural. It had been a very sad day: Uncle Held was obviously no longer protected by his medals and it had been necessary to intern the two of them for a while in some sort of detention camp—or so my father thought and believed; but we exchanged rings nonetheless. We went out into the garden, this time without Blanka, and Bálint chose the bench farthest from the windows to deliver his message, in a terse whisper: Henriette was still with us, she was to stay at their house until they could find somewhere for her to go; the Major would be returning to the front the following day but Mrs. Temes could be depended upon, and as the house was the home of a serving soldier, it was unlikely to be troubled by the authorities and she could hide there in safety. If he could contrive a way, he would come for her in an ambulance, take her to the hospital, and hide her among the patients under the name of Mária Kis. If the Helds hadn’t gone off in such a hurry but had waited for his father—who of course hadn’t been summoned to headquarters but had gone to try and get them false documents—they wouldn’t have ended up in that accursed office where everyone who presented themselves was detained, and he would have been able to save them.

  Bálint added that he would go to the Helds’ later that night and loosen some of the fencing planks in both their garden and ours, so that if their house were ever searched or hit by a bomb Henriette would be able to run through their garden to ours and hide in the cellar: it was the last place anyone ever went to, and one we knew well from our childhood games. I was not to go to the university. I was to stay at home and wait in case I could be of help. All that, without arousing the suspicion of the rest of the family.

  He spoke slowly and precisely. There was none of the low, gentle murmuring of a fiancé—these were orders. I listened attentively but my mind was racing. He couldn’t spare me even this one evening, on this very special day: once again he was interested only in Henriette and keeping her safe. He hadn’t even kissed me. I knew he had been in love with me for many years, but now something between us had broken. At the same time I was furious with myself for being so base and selfish on the day the Helds had been arrested and Henriette’s life put in danger. Was I simply jealous of the concern he was showing for her? “I’m the one he loves,” I consoled myself, and later on we did exchange a kiss. But somehow it wasn’t the same. The shadow of the Helds hung over us, and I was thinking that now Henriette was going to be living with Bálint and the Major. Mrs. Temes lodged downstairs, in a separate part of the house, so they would be alone on the first floor, and what might happen then? Nothing—I felt sure of it. Nothing at all. They both loved me. Only now do I see that the reason for my hard feelings toward Henriette was that she had managed to awaken something in Bálint that went beyond both love and desire.

  The night following my engagement was a troubled one: I simply couldn’t rest. Blanka sniffled and sobbed for a while, then fell asleep. It was a long time before I went to bed. I stood at the window leaning on the sill and staring out into the garden, as I had done that same morning. I was thinking that Henriette would now be sleeping under the same roof as Bálint before I would.

  The Major (I never addressed him as “father,” I never had the chance—he was killed just a few weeks after our engagement) went back the next morning, and Bálint spent almost the whole day at the hospital. As I had promised, I didn’t go to the university. I told my father the lie that I had nothing to do there because the courses had been suspended due to the bombing raids. Blanka was busy cramming, and the days seemed endless. I saw Henriette only once, and even then she didn’t know I had.

  It was building up for rain, and clouds covered the moon. It was a particularly mild evening. After supper I went out into the garden, moved the loosened boards aside, and slipped through into the Helds’ deserted property. I wasn’t afraid, just very sad. In the silence and darkness the house seemed no more real than the ruins of Pompeii, which I saw some years later on a grou
p holiday. If at that moment some spirit, one of those guardian angels whose sole duty is to accompany one’s footsteps through life and inspire both good and bad thoughts (so a good spirit in this case), had whispered in my ear that I should go back home and, despite the prohibition, tell my father—because he was an honorable man, even if currently in a state of moral paralysis after discovering that the law he had upheld all his life can itself be illegal—that Bálint was hiding Henriette . . . then perhaps everything would have turned out differently, and perhaps our life together now might have been rather better than it is, because, as I now know, everything changed for us with the death of Henriette.

  But the spirit standing behind me was an evil one. It urged me to go deeper into the Major’s garden to see what was happening there. Once we were married it would be my home anyway, not Henriette’s; and besides, Bálint was late, he should have been at our house some time before this, because when I had phoned the hospital a little while before they had said he had gone home “much earlier.”

  So I pushed aside the planks in the Birós’ fence and continued on my way behind the hedge, keeping my head well down. The ground was soft underfoot—Mrs. Temes must have been out watering the garden. The first thing that caught my eye was Bálint, sitting in the semidarkness on the edge of the stone fountain, with Henriette beside him. I stopped and waited. I have no idea what I was hoping for. We often don’t know what we really want.

  The evening was so soft I felt I could grasp the air, the wind, or the shadows in my hand. Of the house itself I could see very little. I often dream about the total darkness of the blackout: I see the blanked-out windows, and it sometimes makes me cry. When this happens, Bálint wakes me up by shaking my shoulders, but he never asks me why I am crying, and I never tell him. There seems no point.

  They were talking quietly but I could clearly make out what they were saying. Mrs. Temes wasn’t with them, but I knew where she was because I could hear her singing—the lilt of a folk song was coming from behind the shutters in the kitchen. For a moment it shocked me once again that they should have entrusted Henriette to her and not to us: only later did it seem really hurtful.

  Their shadows merged, making the two of them look like a single person. Bálint was speaking, calling her by the name he had sometimes used when they were children and he wanted to tease her. For some reason it had really upset her then, but now it was “Henrik” once again and I had the feeling that this time she didn’t mind at all, in fact she was enjoying it, as a term of endearment. When my Kinga was born, and I was a new and happy mother living apart from the world and from people, this was the voice I used with my baby daughter, the one Bálint was using with Henriette now. There is a kind of speech in which the words themselves become a mere framework, a sequence of vowels and consonants so charged with feeling that their literal meaning becomes irrelevant.

  “Henrik,” I heard him say in the semidarkness, “silly little Henrik will put on her pretty blue dress and we’ll take her to see the whole wide world. We’ll take her to Salzburg and listen to Mozart, and little Henrik will sit in the front row and clap her hands, and then she’ll go to Paris to see the paintings and the statues, and she’ll go to all the other places too. She will wear her pretty white hat and her patent leather shoes, and her gloves will be tied around her neck, because little Henrik is still very little and she loses everything, and if she loses her gloves they won’t let her in to meet the pope in Rome, which would be so sad, because he really wants to see her and say to her, ‘Young lady, if only I were able to marry. . . .’ ”

  I didn’t catch what she said in reply, but she did say something. I only heard her laugh, and after that I had no more wish to listen. Bálint never spoke in that way with me. He just kissed me and stroked my breasts. Until that moment I had not realized how little he actually gave me, and I wanted some of what Henriette had been given.

  I made my way home through the Helds’ garden. The family had been looking for me. I just muttered something and went and sat down to wait for him in the morning room, wondering what he was going to say. He came at nine. I reckoned he must have given silly little Henrik her supper and she was now playing dominoes with Mrs. Temes. They were certainly doing their best to keep her amused. I ran to meet him, and we kissed in the entrance hall.

  I prayed desperately that he wouldn’t lie to me. I wanted him to say, “Irén, I didn’t want to leave Henriette alone this evening, so I spent some time sitting with her in the garden.” Instead he looked at me as if he were weighing up what he should say. Then he kissed me again, and said he’d had a difficult evening in the hospital, had spent hours sitting with a patient, and had just arrived home. I nodded, as if I understood. He stayed for dinner. I noticed how hungry he was, and I thought, no doubt he gives his own food to silly little Henrik, because officially she doesn’t exist and Mária Kis won’t have a ration book.

  Please don’t get me wrong: I loved Henriette and I really wanted her to live. To live for a thousand years, and for life to make up to her for our wicked laws and for everything that had happened to her and to all the Helds, and also because of that nameless something that had made Bálint lie to me and sit there with her on the edge of the fountain with the gasping fish and promise that he would take her to Salzburg and that the pope would fall in love with her. But understand this too: behind the thoughts that were in my mind was another set of preoccupations of a different order altogether, thoughts that were buried so deep in me that I had never realized they were there. They knew it was better to stay unformulated and never rise into consciousness, but they were there just the same, watching and waiting.

  On the morning of the day when the Helds’ house was emptied by the military or whoever it was, before being converted into a first-aid station, I had a truly horrible row with Blanka. Once again she had taken something of mine and ruined it, and the stress I was under from my thoughts about Bálint and Henriette’s relationship, added to the shame I felt at not being able to be more reasonable and less envious of the few kind words she’d had from Bálint, led to an explosion. You could buy stockings only with coupons, and on the previous day Blanka had gone to have her graduation photograph taken: she was desperate to look pretty, so she selected my very best pair, the ones I had first worn on the day of my engagement and, as she explained later between her sobs, taken them “with your subsequent permission,” because she didn’t have a single pair of her own. On the bus someone had given her a kick, and she had brought them back with a large hole in them. I saw it only in the morning when I went to put them on. Naturally, she hadn’t dared show them to me.

  It is always the most inexplicable things that make us lose self-control. Clearly it wasn’t the stockings that had made me so upset, but I wept and raged so bitterly that my father came rushing in anxiously to see what the matter was. Blanka was staring at me, her lips quivering, her eyes wide with fear, as they always were on these occasions. She was holding out her tiny horseshoe-shaped purse—there was hardly anything in it, but it was all the little she had—and wanting me to take it all, down to the last penny, as a punishment: she was so much to blame, so useless. Gradually I calmed down, stopped crying, and put the ruined stockings back in the drawer. By the time I was telling her to pull herself together I was relatively collected myself. I told her that I simply couldn’t abide the perpetual chaos and filth that reigned in the house because of her and my mother. Rose had gone, and my father and I had to do everything; I couldn’t tell my mother what to do, but Blanka at least, if she wanted to live in peace with me, would have to stop doing things that annoyed me. She was so untidy I couldn’t bear to live with her a moment longer. At least she might try, as a break from studying, to pick up one or two things occasionally and not just leave it all to me. If she wanted me to forget what she had done to the stockings, she could spread a little order and cleanliness around her. That very day she had once again hung her underwear out in the garden, the way the Gypsies do; she’d had the
nerve to tie a rope between two shrubs and string up her slips there, because she was too lazy to go up to the attic. It was a disgrace to behold. She had better get them out of the garden immediately or I didn’t know what I would do to her. She went out without saying a word.

  We had lunch together. She had arranged to go to a school friend’s house to revise her physics work and came home several hours after I had gone out myself, contrary to Bálint’s instructions. I had been required to attend a course for air-raid wardens, and absence was a punishable offense. I returned just as supper was being served. Blanka was very quiet, hardly daring to speak to me. Finally she told me she had cooked the meal. I was very pleased about that, because she was a much better cook than my mother. On her right hand there was a bandage, a really squalid, disgusting bandage, that she was obviously eager that I should see—I didn’t ask her how she came by it because she so much wanted me to. These accidents were an everyday occurrence: she was forever cutting, burning, or scalding herself when she cooked.

  Meanwhile Bálint hadn’t even phoned. I tried to get him at the hospital, only to be told he was there somewhere but they couldn’t trace him. I really wanted to talk to him, to tell him what was happening at the Helds’ house, and I urgently wanted him to come home early and talk to me, now that we needed to revise his plans for Henriette’s safety. The morning’s explosion over the stockings had resolved something inside me, and I was now deeply ashamed of having made such a ridiculous fuss about them. Blanka started to clear the table, and my father ordered me to help her: couldn’t I see how awkward she was, with her bandaged hand?