Katalin Street Read online

  Finally he pulled the envelope from his pocket, the one he had been given at the hospital, and counted out the money. She watched him in silence, then touched the hundred-forint notes with awe. Bálint went over to the telephone and rang Szegi. They spoke in a kind of code, but Szegi gathered what he wanted quicker than Blanka had, and he roared with laughter when he heard that Bálint proposed sending his “sister” instead of himself and would be happy to pay in full if Szegi could guarantee that it would all work out. Szegi gave his word and said he would be outside the building at three in the morning. Bálint didn’t wait to hear the obscene remarks about his sister-in-law and hung up.

  Blanka struggled to grasp what he had in mind. He could see she was just as afraid of going as she was of staying. She hovered around him, miserable and indecisive, then suddenly sat down at his feet and placed her head in his lap. She whimpered for a while, then began to pack. Bálint had to throw out three-quarters of what she put in the bag. She wept and tried to grab it all back, disputing every item. Next, she wanted to say goodbye to her parents. Bálint said no. She had difficulty in seeing how important it was for them not to know that she had escaped to the West. Then she wanted to phone them to hear their voices for one last time, but that was refused as well, so she sat down and wept softly. She offered no thanks for the money Bálint had put in her bag. A solution that promised to place her beyond the reach of Timár’s colleagues, and all her other responsibilities, weighed less with her than the terrifying uncertainty of where she might be going and what might happen to her once she got there. Bálint began to lose patience with her, and for a moment he was overcome with anger. She was being utterly irresponsible; she was ungrateful and stupid; he would do better to leave her to her fate and let Timár’s bunch tear her to pieces, do whatever they wanted with her. He was now shouting at her, and she cowered in fear. He began to feel ashamed. Why was he shouting? This wasn’t Irén, wise and clever Irén, it was only Blanka—a little mouse scuttling along the highway, terrified of the only path that led to safety because she had no idea what might be waiting there.

  They ate once again, this time a more normal amount and less ravenously. Then she started to remake the bed. Bálint watched her struggling with the fresh linen and was again filled with pity for her. She was trying so hard, putting so much effort into it, but what in God’s name was the point of putting clean sheets on a bed for this one last night?

  There were sounds of shooting outside, still at a distance. The radio announcers seemed to have become deranged trying to keep up with everything that was going on. The two of them lay down side by side, as naturally as men and women do in times of disaster or in air-raid shelters during an attack. Blanka waited a while, then drew closer to him and stretched herself out as if inviting him to say what he wanted. He didn’t want anything. “You don’t have to pay me,” he said almost angrily. “And you don’t want it either.” Her sigh of relief told him he had been right. For too long now fear had kept her from sleeping, and she was already dozing off. He lay beside her, fully awake and once again smoking. At one point he got up and made himself some coffee, finished the bottle of apricot brandy, and set the alarm for nine o’clock. He had to be at the hospital by ten. At two thirty he woke the girl. Just as in childhood, she was so drowsy she had difficulty standing up. He sprinkled her face with cold water, and she tottered off to the bathroom. He made her some tea, which she didn’t drink, then she started to cry and tried yet again to smuggle some ridiculous knickknacks into her bag. He smacked her hand sharply and took them out. She wanted to go in a blouse and skirt. He made her change into trousers, helped her dress, and draped her winter coat over her arm.

  It was pitch-black when they left the apartment, and the world outside was completely still. The silence that reigned in the absence of traffic was more charged and more disturbing than if the tanks had been rumbling down the street. It took some time to rouse the concierge. Puffy-faced, her eyes half asleep, she opened the outer door. So far Blanka had not said a word, just gripped his hand tightly. Her teeth were chattering. “It’s so cold,” she said at last. She hadn’t slept enough. Bálint knew that she was afraid and drew her closer to him, trying to warm her with his body. She started to mutter the kind of childish mantra they had once used to ward off danger, and again he felt like smacking her. The idiot, the stupid little goose—this time it was for Szegi not to come. She didn’t want to go; she wanted to stay where she was and not have to confront the big wide world. So what would happen to her at the tribunal? When Szegi’s truck finally stopped outside the building he had to push her away from him.

  No one spoke. The truck was piled high with suitcases and people, children among them. Szegi whistled their old tune from the prison camp and Bálint made a surly reply, as if he felt too old for that sort of romantic nonsense. He threw Blanka’s suitcase on board, kissed the girl, and helped her up onto the truck. His last glimpse of her was by the reflected blaze of the headlights. Her hair was tucked under her bonnet and she was no longer crying. Szegi had made her sit beside him in the cab and had the good grace not to count out the notes that she pressed into his hand. In Bálint’s eyes she was once again the little soldier, but stripped now of all anger and passion, she looked unutterably sad. Her rifle was nowhere to be seen.

  THAT EVENING everything seemed particularly unreal. Pali came home early to tell us the latest news, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. From the moment I heard that Bálint had been in the apartment I could think of nothing but him and myself, apart of course from Blanka and her fate. And I wasn’t the only one who felt drawn back into that circle in which his life was inextricably bound up with mine, a life in which nothing had changed other than that, in the meanwhile, one of us had spent time as a prisoner of war, one had broken off with the other, one had been married and produced a child. My parents reacted to Pali’s information with barely a word, and I knew that they too were thinking about Blanka and themselves, and about Katalin Street. No one said anything, but we all felt it. Pali blundered on regardless, until the poor fellow got on my nerves so much that I had to go into the dining room and start brushing out the fringes of the carpet just to get away from him.

  I suspect now that he came to realize much earlier than the rest of us did—though it was only later again that we understood the full implications—that our attempt to live as a normal married couple in a conventional relationship was doomed to failure. We had never fully accepted him as one of the family, which was really sad: he was such an admirable and upright character. He was fond of my parents, as indeed they were of him, and he sincerely loved me, just as I loved him, up to a certain limit. But all through our marriage there had been things that we could never say to him, and aspects of his own life that simply didn’t interest us.

  That evening he must have spent quite some time feeling that, as so often before, we had again shut him out. There was nothing I could do to help, and I didn’t dare attempt a private conversation with him about Blanka, who was then uppermost in everyone’s mind, hiding in her apartment somewhere or other where they would soon catch her and punish her. We were preoccupied too with Bálint’s unexpected appearance. His visit had made it impossible for us to deny that life without him had been insubstantial and unreal. My father was very pale, looking even more broken-down than usual. I knew for certain that he had not been in contact with Blanka since he had driven her out of the house, but also that he had never got over the memory of that day. For my part, I had long ceased to harbor the bitterness I first felt toward her. Indeed, what she had done turned out to have been useful, a source of relief. But for the fact that it had been Blanka, and specifically Blanka, who had brought his troubles upon him, Bálint might well have come back to me.

  She and I began meeting shortly afterward. She would telephone me at the school and wait for me after work. Sometimes she even hung around outside the apartment hoping for a glimpse of our father. My mother spoke with her every second or thi
rd day. I met her initially in a café; then, when she was given an apartment, we saw each other there—though I had to warn her in the early days not to boast about the way she had jumped the queue. It was blood money, paid in return for Bálint’s head. I often reduced her to tears this way, but she was always glad when I went to see her, and particularly touched when Pali came with me. She addressed my husband with as much decorum and respect as if she had been the Dame aux Camélias.

  Naturally I had by then talked to Pali about Blanka, had told him what she had done, the simple details—everything that could be put into words. But looking back now, with the memories of our life together starting to fade, I can see that he never truly grasped the reality of what it all meant. For example, he never properly took in the fact that I had once had a serious love relationship that had come to nothing. He couldn’t see how deeply it mattered to me; he thought it must have been just another childhood crush. Or again, he listened to the story of what happened to the Helds with real compassion but made no attempt to see a connection with the way the circumstances of their disappearance had affected, and might continue to affect, the lives of the rest of us. To him the three houses belonged to the past. He just couldn’t understand what Katalin Street meant to the family.

  On the night Bálint came back, my mother suddenly spoke out. I don’t ever, in all our lives, remember having heard her use that particular tone. She could be quarrelsome or shrill, sly or charming, devious or flattering. This time she had something to say. She told my father that she was afraid for Blanka and that he should bring her back home. My father raised his head from his book, stared at her, and said nothing. From outside came the sound of distant gunfire.

  Pali, who was much more able to judge the public mood from what he saw and heard at work than I was at the school, immediately supported her. Replying to him and ignoring my mother, my father said he had no need of advice, and he went on to expand his view of the matter: Blanka was an adult, she had made her bed and she should lie in it—nobody was going to kill her, unless she had committed any more crimes in the meantime—and if the verdict of history came down against her, she would just have to live with it. I expected my mother to burst into tears or throw a tantrum, but she did neither. She just went to the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

  Pali called me away to bed, but I didn’t follow him. I dithered about in the apartment, spinning out the time, waiting for him to fall asleep. I was completely off-balance. I needed time for reflection, and I racked my brains to think of a way of meeting Bálint again: I was convinced he must be living with Mrs. Temes. My father had also stayed up, not wishing to get into a discussion with my mother, and the two of us pottered about, postponing the moment. I’m sure he was just as aware of my reasons for being there as I was of his reluctance to go to bed. I rang the school caretaker, rousing him from sleep, and demanded to know if everything there was all right. It was. Unable to spin things out any longer I went to get ready in the bathroom. In the doorway I bumped into my mother. She had her coat on and a scarf over her head. She was about to leave the apartment.

  Once again I was filled with astonishment at just how much the two of them loved Blanka, the one showing it by the harshness of his treatment of her and his total incapacity to forgive, the other so brave and so ready to take action on her behalf. At that time I still didn’t realize that of all the people in the world I too loved Blanka the most, more than I loved anyone who ever had been or still was part of my life. More even than Bálint.

  My father asked her, with some irritation, what she thought she was doing. I took her coat from her and promised, as I gently pushed her back, that if she would stay at home I would go myself to fetch Blanka in the morning. I couldn’t possibly allow her to leave the house that night, with shooting going on in the streets. My father heard my promise but pretended not to, and I saw a flash of joy cross his face. He was pleased that we had defied him, and I could see how intensely happy it made him to think that he might see his profligate daughter again. At this point my mother burst into tears. The noise woke little Kinga. Pali got out of bed, went and picked her up and brought her out to join the rest of us. Commotion reigned. He stood there, the child in his arms, staring at us like a young St. Joseph, without the faintest idea of what was going on.

  Later I often thought back with a sense of guilt at the way I married him simply to put my own life in order, because I wanted a normal sexual relationship and someone to love me, to make up for having been rejected by Bálint. He certainly should not have waited until that evening when, during dinner, I told him, brightly and naturally and with no attempt to soften my words, that Bálint and I had decided to get married after all, and I would be leaving him. He should have been the one to leave me, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. I often think of him now with a mixture of gratitude and yearning. He was a hundred times better as a husband than Bálint proved, and an altogether finer man. If there is indeed a life after death, I shall certainly be held to account for my marriage to him. It wasn’t as if I had never given him anything, that is, up to the moment when I left him at a single word from Bálint. It was just that what I had been able to offer him amounted to very little. Almost nothing.

  That night was an anxious one for all of us, but I was particularly on edge. Pali was every bit as conscientious as my father and nothing would have kept him from his place of work even in the most troubled of times, so he couldn’t go with me to Blanka’s. I knew that my father would never set foot over my sister’s threshold—for him it was quite enough that he was allowing her to come back. Clearly I would have to go alone. Visiting her even in normal circumstances was always problematic. I knew what sort of life she led, and I listened to the allusions she made, the things she let slip, with all the awkwardness of a young woman in a respectable married relationship.

  By this stage it had been a long time since my professional success had brought me any pleasure. A few years before, in the early fifties, both my father and I had been given awards. My father loathed everything to do with the personality cult but he nonetheless took a childish delight in these particular honors, imagining that in our case they were in recognition of the honest day’s work we did, that they were an exception to the rule, a flicker of light in an hour of darkness. In fact it was my mother’s response that made me realize that there was something odd about them, something not quite right. She let slip a few remarks, luckily in my presence and not my father’s, about what a fine sister I had, and about the high-ranking official—she blushed the moment she said the word—who had taken her up and did whatever she wanted. I stared in horror at the box in which the medals lay glittering. I was a good teacher, truly conscientious, to say nothing of my father. We both deserved these honors, but I could no longer find any joy in them.

  From then on I became deeply suspicious of all the little presents that found their way into our house from Blanka. Most of them were unobtainable, and I wondered darkly about who might be her lover now: someone in the department of foreign trade, perhaps, or an important politician?

  We set out early in the morning, I to the inner city, Pali to the waterworks. For the moment everything was quiet. Before leaving I had telephoned the central office and been told that lessons were still suspended, so I knew I had some time and would be able to arrive at school late. All the same I hurried, first to get the business with Blanka over quickly and then get to Mrs. Temes’s. At the front door my mother had slipped a key into my hand. Again she had surprised me—I had no idea she had a key to Blanka’s apartment. My father had behaved as if he knew nothing about where I was going and busied himself fumbling with the knobs on the radio, trying to catch the news. He paused for a second and looked at me as if he were attempting to imagine what his life would be like when finally he could see nothing at all. I left Pali at the corner of the street. The moment I found myself alone I began to feel less confident, but nothing untoward happened on the way. A truck coming from the market with
a load of cabbages stopped beside me. The driver leaned out and asked if I was going to the city center, and if so, he would take me—I shouldn’t be hanging around on the streets alone. I sat next to him, with the cabbages bouncing around behind us. The truck put me down just outside Blanka’s window. The hated statue that had been erected just a few years earlier was no longer there. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with my own problems I would have paid more attention to that bizarre journey with the cabbages. I would have listened more carefully to what the driver was saying and realized that he was addressing me in the familiar form. Later on I called these images up in my memory—the unexpected absence of the statue, what the driver was telling me, his use of the familiar “you”—and the strange, menacing silence everywhere.

  Reaching the door of her apartment I suddenly felt afraid. The window in the door had been smashed and the gap stuffed with newspaper. I pressed the bell as we always did: three short rings. The door remained closed. Knowing Blanka I was hardly surprised. As a child, and even now as a grownup, whenever she was frightened she always thought that she could hide safely inside a cupboard or under the bed. I was again astonished at my mother’s foresight in giving me the key, and I turned the lock.

  I stepped cautiously in, not expecting to find her straightaway. She would be in some hiding place, if she were alone, that is, and I tried to think of the sort of banalities that one might utter in the situation if she wasn’t. I went on, through the hallway and the appallingly untidy sitting room, and opened the door to the bedroom. I stopped right there. The bed was unmade, and on it lay Bálint.

  I forgot about Blanka, totally. It struck me later that if at that precise moment they had been dragging her away screaming in front of my eyes I probably wouldn’t have noticed. I hadn’t seen Bálint since the day I slammed my ring down in front of him and he walked out, and here he was now, lying naked in Blanka’s bed, sleeping so deeply he hadn’t even heard the doorbell. I sat down next to him on the edge of the bed and studied him. My father had conditioned me to think that it couldn’t possibly be right for me, as a married woman, to be there, but a contrary reflex of my own made it seem absurd that such niceties should ever come between Bálint and myself—in fact I almost laughed. The notion that someone like Pali should even exist seemed no less absurd.