Katalin Street Read online

  He went into an espresso bar. In the doorway he bumped into a woman, clearly a stranger. She smiled at him. He smiled back joylessly, and she asked his pardon.

  Henriette pulled herself together and peered through the window. She knew that if she let the moment slip she would never again have the courage or strength to approach him or even show herself to him in a form he could comprehend. “Patience,” she told herself. “This won’t be easy. And it won’t be easy for him. I can’t run away now. It would all be over.”

  She gazed at the young man, and around the café. She had never been in one of these places before. In the old days there were only coffeehouses and patisseries; less coffee was drunk and by fewer people—it wasn’t then the fashion. She stared in wonder at the strangely shaped cups, the espresso machine, and at Bálint, who was now sitting at a table on his own. He was looking at her through the window, returning her gaze. She hesitated a moment longer, made her decision, and went in to meet him. She was terrified. She walked slowly up to him and sat down at the table. Once again they were face-to-face.

  Still he said nothing. Eventually he reached out and moved his doctor’s briefcase to a chair farther away. She realized he was making a place for her to sit next to him. She breathed a sigh of relief, moved over, and waited for him to speak her name.

  The arrival of the waitress cast a shadow across the table. She was asking what they wanted. Henriette glanced down at her lap, and his eyes followed hers. She had no purse, no handbag, no gloves. Now he spoke for the first time, to order two coffees. When they arrived she sniffed hers gently: it had a powerful, heavy aroma. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t want to drink, she didn’t want anything to eat or drink, and she simply stirred it.

  At last he spoke. He wanted to know what she wanted. She said nothing. She just looked at him.

  “Drink up your coffee and clear out of here,” she heard him say. “There might be a police raid, and they’d arrest you.”

  Another raid? What sort of raid? A moment of fear, then she smiled. No one would ever harm her again. Bálint finished his cup without another glance at her and paid the bill. Seeing him about to leave she stood up. The surprised waitress asked her why she hadn’t drunk her coffee. She made no reply and followed Bálint out, keeping close behind him.

  As children they had often played a game where they were supposed to be someone else. She usually came last. When it was her turn she could never think of anything to prove that she was that person, as the rules required. Once again she had the feeling, the shameful feeling of old, that she couldn’t make anyone believe who she was, but this time the shame was familiar and nostalgic, tinged with sweetness. She was again walking beside him, still very nervous, and still hoping that he would eventually stop and say her name. He had, after all, made her sit down at his table and ordered her coffee.

  He complained constantly as he walked, the way he always had whenever something was bothering him. He kept telling her to go away, to leave him in peace: in God’s name, couldn’t she leave an exhausted man alone? She understood the words, but the meaning went over her head and failed to penetrate her consciousness. She followed him devotedly, and when she realized that he was going to the apartment he had taken over from Blanka, she smiled to herself. Of course, that was why he had been so silent in the café, and why he had said so little out in the street in front of strangers, and why he was saying such odd things now. They needed to be away from other people before they could really be together.

  When they arrived at the entrance to the building he stopped, and she knew she had been right. He studied her for a while, then said, “All right, come on up.” As she ran up the stairs beside him she wondered what she would say to him when the time finally came. Until he actually told her that he knew who she was there was nothing she could say. When they got to the door he spoke again, just as he was about to open it, but it made no more sense than what he had said earlier. It seemed to have no connection with the two of them or their real relationship. Why, at that precise moment, did he tell her, “I don’t have very much money”?

  But he was the first, the only one, who had allowed her to go home with him, had actually invited her in! It felt very familiar walking through the apartment. She had been there often enough, even if it was in a form he wouldn’t have been able to see. She went straight to the table where the Major’s photograph stood, then glanced up at the wall behind the sofa, at the portrait of the Major’s wife that Mrs. Temes had rescued from the old house. Bálint watched her closely, seeming not very pleased by the fact that she had approached and greeted his father and mother, that she should take so much interest in his parents.

  But he said nothing. He still hadn’t told her his name or asked her to sit down. Perhaps he didn’t know how to begin? Seeing her again couldn’t be easy for him—on the last occasion she had been lying dead in the garden—but she was puzzled by the way he kept spinning out the time with these trivial actions. How could she help him, make it easier for him to find the opening words? He was behaving very oddly. It wasn’t at all how she had imagined their first meeting would be.

  He emptied his wallet and started counting out his money. He really didn’t have much on him. He put a fifty-forint note to one side and looked at her. She returned his gaze and smiled, waiting for him to say something, something personal. The smile died on her lips as she saw him undo his tie, take off his coat, and disappear into the bathroom to get undressed. He came back in his dressing gown, with slippers on his bare feet. Under the dressing gown he was naked.

  She just stood there, in the middle of the room, her hands clenched, saying nothing. She was deathly pale, hardly able to breathe.

  “What are you waiting for?” he demanded. “You can take your own clothes off. I don’t like messing around with that sort of thing.”

  It was altogether more than she had bargained for. If he had addressed her as herself, as the Henriette he had at last recognized, then perhaps she might have gone with him. But he hadn’t. Now she knew that he wasn’t speaking to her as herself, and she understood what he had taken her for. If he hadn’t done so by now, he clearly never would realize who she was.

  She stood there, motionless. He reached for a cigarette, but there was no time for him to light it. She went up to him, much closer than she had so far, and touched him gently with the tips of her fingers. He took her hand, even as he understood that what he had been expecting wasn’t going to happen. There would be no lovemaking. For some reason this queer little girl had changed her mind. He wasn’t particularly bothered by that. He hadn’t really wanted her. He just hadn’t had the heart to turn her away, she was so like Henriette. And how could he tell her that he would have slept with her only out of kindness, because she was so like someone he had once loved, loved probably more than anyone in his life? She would never have understood. She was interested only in the money—what else was she after? She had nothing, not even a handbag. What he couldn’t work out was why, after coming all that way with him, she had then changed her mind.

  He didn’t want to take her to bed, but he longed to kiss her. She declined. She turned away, walked around the room once more, then again came up to him, so close that he could feel her breath. Once again she placed her fingers on his face momentarily, then, still as silent as she had been out in the street, she started toward the door. He thought she might have changed her mind again, that she was going to the bathroom to get undressed, and he suddenly realized he wanted her. He really wanted her—but with an accompanying sense of shame, as if he had just been given a sister and physically desired her. The idea was at once horrifying and strangely alluring.

  He heard her footsteps go quickly past the bathroom, then the click of the lock in Blanka’s front door. There was no way he could run after her. She was already out in the stairwell and he was still in his dressing gown and barefoot. He opened the window and leaned out, so that he could at least watch her leave. She was just going out into the street.


  She was sobbing, sobbing as she ran. She ran awkwardly, without any rhythm, the way Henriette used to. “Perhaps she’s hungry,” he thought. “She had no money.” He realized he should have given her something; she shouldn’t have been allowed to leave empty-handed, he could at least have given her the fifty-forint note. He went back to the window and crumpled the note into a ball to throw after her. But he was too late. By the time he had leaned out and looked around for her, the square was empty.

  I LEARNED later that he had gone first to the school and been told where he could find me: I was on my way to the exhibition with my class and might already have arrived. As far back as he could remember, he said, he had never been inside one of these places, and as he set off to find us he was glad to have the chance to see the famous collection at the same time. I was already in the building when I spotted him, standing in one of the rooms among the statues, and I was very happy to see him there. My body registered that pleasing sense of intimacy that had long shed any charge of sexuality. In that respect we had both put our lives in order; this was more like the instinct by which animals born blind recognize one another, the shared memory of a collective dream. I was always happy when I saw Bálint.

  We didn’t speak to each other immediately. I had my hands full. I couldn’t leave the class to their own devices, and I needed to get a sense of the contents of the different rooms. So I went from one to the other, looking about, with an increasing sense of dismay. My aesthetic preference is for the smoothness of bronze and polished marble, and those calm, serene, noble faces, and I was confident that the pupils would understand and respond to those perhaps even better than I would. Instead, I had stood, in something verging on horror, before the piece that was the pride of the exhibition, staring at its shapeless contours, the twisted heads and the sightless gaze in their eyes that were not eyes but holes carved in stone in place of eyes, vacant spaces that held the real meaning of those faces. None of them had eyes, ears, or noses.

  He was obviously waiting for us to be able to move away somewhere and talk. Ever since Blanka’s departure we had met regularly if infrequently, but we had never been together for more than a few minutes without a member of the family being with us. Bálint liked Pali and enjoyed talking to him: Pali’s being there troubled him so little that at first it rather offended me. He found my little daughter Kinga amusing and handled her rather better than her father did, who was always the overanxious parent whose ceaseless attention she found rather annoying. A few days earlier Bálint had spent the whole afternoon with us, so bumping into him in the gallery wasn’t a complete novelty, though an even more delightful surprise for that. I signaled with my eyes to my colleague to ask if she could manage without me and she nodded her affirmation; the children were quiet and taking an interest in the statues. So I went over to him and as usual started to talk about Blanka: we’d had a letter from her the day before. He stopped me in my tracks. We could talk about that later. He wasn’t there by chance. He had come because he wanted to discuss something with me, then and there if possible.

  We sat down on one of the benches, he at a short distance from me, so that I could see both him and the statues. There was now a different expression on his face, a curious look of reconciliation, of things having been resolved. It annoyed me just a little. Bálint’s face always betrayed his changing moods, whether of anger or mockery, intimacy or coldness, and I had seen him in this state of mind before. There was the same unfeeling detachment he had shown when he told me he had been put to work in an office yet again, not as a result of any particular complaint made against him or because of his class origins but because it had apparently been decided that, in the end, he just wasn’t a good enough doctor to be in charge of a ward: he supposedly lacked something, some God-given gift, that would have made him a good physician. He clearly didn’t see it as anything tragic. He talked about the whole business as if it had happened to someone else. My parents’ response showed that they were much more upset about it than he was. But I knew what lay behind his display of resignation.

  I didn’t have to wait long for the message he had come to deliver. It was couched in the simple terms one might use for ordering a book. He had decided to marry me: I was to divorce Pali and live with him.

  I didn’t move. I simply turned my gaze away from him and back to the statues. Near us, on a low plinth, stood three marble columns with a large stone ball entitled The Warrior. It was just a torso, one of those strange, formless ones that have a head but no face and no limbs. It was grotesque, but, God knows why, it projected an extraordinary force. I looked at it and made no reply. I didn’t think he expected one. He knew, as we all did, perhaps even my husband himself, that Pali’s coming to live with us had been a sort of accident. He lived among us and in our apartment but no one had ever taken him seriously, not even my father, with all his views on the sacredness of marriage. Bálint also knew that Kinga wasn’t a true token of love between us, the romantic fulfillment of our life together: we had simply wanted someone through whom we could satisfy our need for caressing and petting without feeling embarrassed. We might as well have bought a puppy.

  He didn’t reach over to take my hand and I didn’t offer it. Some years before I had asked him what he felt when he suddenly saw Timár’s car pulling up outside the house in the village and he was told he was free to return to Pest, and that everyone knew he had been innocent all along. He shrugged his shoulders, as if reluctant to reply, then gave me that look I knew so well of old, the one that told me that this was clearly one of those things I would never understand, and he muttered something about it having meant nothing to him. “So being rehabilitated counts for nothing?” I had asked indignantly, and my father, who was with us at that moment, remarked that one should never be ungrateful or cynical. “I’m not cynical,” he retorted with irritation; and he went on, in a rather louder voice than usual, “It meant nothing to me at the time. It’s something neither of you would ever understand.”

  Well, I understood now.

  I lowered my eyes. I didn’t want the children to see tears streaming from them. I felt his fingers closing around my wrist. At that moment, perhaps for the first time in our lives, he had no idea what was going on in my mind. His touch was warm, and its gentle pressure told me exactly what he was thinking: “Look, I know how happy you are. Everything that has kept us apart has now changed, is behind us. Show your happiness not through tears but with your whole heart, the way you once knew how to.” For the first time in our lives he just couldn’t see that I had given way not to joy but to despair—despair for myself and for him. If I was weeping so profusely I could no longer bear to control myself as the place and the circumstances required, it was because it was such a long time since I had last loved him.

  The thought was no less horrifying than the statues standing around us. If I could I would have plucked it out like a splinter from under a fingernail. I saw in an instant that Pali was the only solid element in the concentrated unreality in which we were all struggling and drowning. My father had been reduced to helplessness and my mother slaved away day and night and lived in a permanent state of nerves: she and I were the only ones who were still what we had always been. The old houses in Katalin Street had vanished. Everyone who had known us as we were had taken refuge in illness, like Mrs. Temes, or disappeared to some distant island, like Blanka, or been killed, like the Major and the Helds. But Pali was real and true, even if none of us acknowledged that or took him seriously; perhaps even he didn’t think of himself as a real member of the family. Now he would no longer be there, and his leaving the apartment would shut off the one route through which we might ever follow him. It would mean that now we would never be able to escape. Bálint had come back and blocked the way. He had struggled on for so long on his own and finally come to see that without us he would never find what he had always wanted, something from the time when the two of us were children. Only through us could he make his way back to Katalin Street. We wer
e the only ones who remembered that time when everything in his life held hope and promise.

  I lost all interest in who was watching or what people might think of me. For the first time since I had become a teacher I stopped caring about what the pupils might say—that they had seen me sitting on a bench unable to hold back my tears. Bálint moved closer to me. By now he wasn’t simply holding my hand; he also had his arm around my shoulder. I was thinking about how all my life I had been preparing for just this moment, the moment when I would become his wife, and now here we were, so close to achieving that, closer than we had been even on the day Henriette died. The war had ended, there was no more bombing, and it was now more than ever possible to make plans that might actually come to something. But we had both grown older, he no longer loved me with the same soulful intensity that he once had, my own feelings for him had cooled and were exhausted. We would be setting out on life as traveling companions aboard a ship that might be blown God knows where, clinging to each other and exchanging our sad memories, having known the same sunny uplands and what it had been like living there before we had been plucked away to sea; both having seen the same blue sky shining, before the thunder broke.

  I just sat there. In my mind I was bidding farewell to calm and tranquility. I was saying goodbye to Pali whom I loved and beside whom life was simple and comfortable. He had never asked more of me than I was able to give, had never once pried into my silences and secrets. By now I was no longer crying. My tears had run dry. I was numb with fear. Bálint looked at me, and there was a tenderness in his eyes, and pity. He was used to my not understanding him and had often made fun of me. Even in the days when we were so madly in love he had complained about how little I was able to read his mind. Now, as I gazed back at him, I would have loved to tell him that perhaps for the first time in our lives I knew exactly what was going on inside his head and why he felt so sorry for me. I also knew what he had left unsaid, something he should have added to his request: “It is a corpse I am offering you, Irén, not the person you once loved. The man you will marry is an empty shell, just so much empty air.”