Csardas (57 page)

“Oh?”

“I expect you have much fun together?”

“We don’t see each other all that much,” she said glacially. “I work during the day and Lisette sleeps.”

He felt he could have approached her more easily if she had been wearing the green fringed dress. There was something very forbidding about her white blouse and navy skirt. Several times he tried to say, the way Jozsef would have said, “Would you like to come and eat at home with me?” but always the buttoned-to-the-neck blouse deterred him, that and the row of coffee cups between them.

At ten o’clock he gave up. “Shall we eat here?” he asked bleakly after the seventh cup of coffee.

“Thank you, but I should really go home now. I have to get up early, so I like to go to bed at ten thirty.”

“I see.”

In silence they waited for the
Stadtbahn.
And equally silently they sat next to one another on the train. At the steps of her apartment she thanked him politely for the seven coffees, then waited. For a wild, incredulous moment he thought she was going to invite him in. Perhaps she was waiting for him to ask to come in.

“May I come—” he began, and was interrupted by her eager reply.

“Oh, yes! You can come to the bookshop any time. I’m always there! You’ll find me whenever you like!”

Her eyes were curiously defenceless, shy, pleading a little, so unlike the rest of her face. He didn’t have the courage to ask again. He just said, “Thank you. Good night,” and walked away, his mouth sour with too much coffee and his stomach rumbling because he hadn’t eaten all day. He consumed several frankfurters at a pavement stand on his way home and vowed he wouldn’t bother to see her any more.

A week later he went into the bookshop again, and his confidence was slightly restored when he saw her give that funny smile that lit her eyes but not her mouth. He was wearing his ordinary clothes and he knew his shirt needed changing. This time he was determined. “Are you free this evening?” She nodded. “Would you like to have dinner with me, in my apartment?” The words suddenly sounded loud in the shop, as though he’d shouted them at the top of his voice. He flushed but refused to give ground. “I’ve bought some wine,” he finished aggressively.

“I—er—”

“You just said you were free.”

“I’m free for the first part of the evening. I could meet you for coffee in Friedrichstrasse.”

“What about the rest of the evening?” he asked doggedly.

“I—I have a friend coming round to see me. An old friend I haven’t seen for a long time. I can’t ask her not to come. She’s coming at—at nine.”

He was caught. She hadn’t got a friend coming; she’d lied. But how could he say he only wanted to see her providing she was coming to his apartment for the whole evening? It might give the impression he was a lecher, a seducer.

“Can’t she come another evening?”

“Oh, no,” she said in firm tones.

“Could you come to dinner tomorrow then?”

For a moment she looked trapped. “No. Not tomorrow. But I could have coffee with you this evening, between seven and nine, in Friedrichstrasse.”

He gave up. “All right.” He sighed. “I’ll meet you here, and I’ll make sure you are home by nine.”

The smile again, the happy, glowing, secretive smile that was really quite gratifying if you weren’t trying to arrange the preliminaries to a great passion.

They drank coffee for two hours—four cups this time—and then went back on to the
Stadtbahn,
home to the friend who didn’t exist. Again, at the steps, she paused, waiting for him to say something. As he began to walk away she called, “Will I see you again?”

“Perhaps.” He looked back. She was watching him. She was small and had a dejected look about her. Serve her right, he thought. Let her go in and sit on her own for the rest of the evening, waiting for her friend who isn’t coming. But the picture of her, drooping and small, stayed in his mind, and four days later he went into the shop just before lunch and suggested they eat together.

It was in November, after countless evenings of coffee in Friedrichstrasse, a few lunches, and some visits to the cinema, that she finally consented to come to the apartment in Savigny Plate and eat with him there. He could hardly believe after all this time that he had finally won and he was surprised to find that all the excitement and anticipation of the evening ahead had gone, vanished into gallons of coffee and dozens of formal farewells outside her apartment. He bought all the same things as before, except for the candles. He felt the time for obvious seduction props was past and he thought the candles might make them both nervous.

She was nervous anyway when she arrived. He helped her off with her coat and wished, not for the first time, that she wasn’t wearing the white blouse and navy skirt. She didn’t smile at all. She looked rather the way she had the first time they met, very cool and disdainful, a worthy companion to Lisette. She sat and smoked, not even trying to talk while he darted round the screen that separated the sink and the gas ring from the rest of the room and tried to open the bottle of wine.

“Shall I do that for you?”

“No, of course not. I can manage.” He wrestled and felt the corkscrew bend under his neurotic pressure.

“Oh, dear! You’ve pushed the cork into the bottle!”

Enraged, he stared at the cork fragmenting into the wine. Then he poured it into their glasses and tried to remove the cork from hers with a fork.

“It’s all right. I like it with cork in.” She raised one eyebrow slightly, disdainfully, and he drank his own wine noisily and filled the glass again.

She ate very little, picking at the food he had bought as though each morsel were smothered in aphrodisiac. Several times he tried to speak and gave up under her cool, analytical stare.

She drank sparingly, also, and finally she put her fork down and said, “Shall I make some coffee?”

“No!” he shouted. The composure left her face and she was suddenly nervous again. “I’ve spent weeks sitting with you drinking coffee when all I’ve wanted to do is bring you back here. For God’s sake don’t start making coffee now in my apartment! I’ve had enough coffee to last me a lifetime!”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“You’re not sorry! You know very well why I wanted you to come here, and you’ve done your best to spoil it. And you have! I don’t know what’s so different about me. Why you can’t treat me like all the other men you’ve known? What’s wrong with me that I’m only good enough to drink coffee with? Is it because I’m Jozsef’s little brother? Is that it? Because I’m a joke? I don’t understand about men dressed up as women on a stage? Is that what’s wrong with me?”

She began to cry, curling back away from him into a corner of the armchair.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked again, disconcerted and a little ashamed of himself. “If you don’t like me, why have you gone out with me?”

“I do like you.” She muffled the words with her hand. “I do like you, but—”

“But what?”

She raised her face and stared anxiously at him. “I’d like to be the same as Lisette, but somehow I can’t seem to be. And you all think I am, and I’m too ashamed to let you know that I’m not.”

“What?” He tried to follow her through the labyrinths of explanations.

“You obviously thought I was wild and daring and... everything that Lisette is. That’s what everyone thinks. When you didn’t understand the cabaret and you were sick outside I thought it would be all right with you. You didn’t understand about how necessary it is to be
fashionable
in Berlin. I thought you would be happy if I was just... ordinary, not fast or exciting. And when I realized that you did want me to be like Lisette, I didn’t know what to do.”

Her pale eyes were huge under the ragged hair. Her thin small hands were trembling and he was sorry for her, sorry and also a little repulsed. She had seemed so self-possessed, so mature, and suddenly she was a nervous, unhappy little girl, asking his pardon.

“I’ve spoilt it all, haven’t I?” she asked tremulously. “You don’t like me any more, do you?”

“Of course I do.” He just wanted to get her out of his apartment now. She seemed to be growing tinier every minute, tinier and more helpless and dependent on him. She was making him feel mean and dirty when all he had wanted to do was to be a man, like Jozsef.

“You won’t want to see me again, will you?”

“Of course I shall.”

“I shan’t always be so—dull. I’m sure it will be different later on.”

“I expect so.”

“I’ve spoilt the evening, haven’t I?”

“Of course you haven’t. But it’s getting late now so I’ll take you home. We’ll both feel different in the morning.”

She allowed herself to be comforted and talked into her coat and beret. He walked her back to her apartment and all the time she was talking, clinging to his arm and humiliating herself, asking him to continue seeing her, offering half promises of her body in the future. He kissed her cheek very gently when they reached her home and she suddenly stopped talking, staring up at him with her pale eloquent eyes.

“Good-bye, then, Leo,” she said quietly. “Good-bye.”

“There’s no need to say good-bye.”

She was already walking away from him. She closed the door of the house and didn’t look back at all.

He never wanted to see her again.

When he went home for the winter vacation it was like stepping back fifty years. He’d never realized how old-fashioned Hungary was and how out of date the members of his own family were, even Eva who prided herself on being the harbinger of current fashions and trends. Good heavens, she was still referring to herself as
moderne,
which alone was enough to date her terribly.

Hungary, even Budapest, had a stately, old-world feel about it and a sense of constriction caused by the censorship of press and politics. Berlin, capital of a new republic, with its heady air of freedom, made Budapest seem restrictive and the Hungarian people oppressed. A world war, a revolution, and a counter-revolution seemed to have made little change in the iron-handed methods with which his native land was governed. There wasn’t the vibrant sense of events that there was in Berlin. Everyone seemed sleepy and slow, and in addition Papa and David Klein were worried and depressed about the Wall Street crash.

He spent his vacation commuting aimlessly between David and Malie in Budapest, Mama, Papa, and Jozsef in the town, and Eva and Adam at the farm. And everywhere he was struck by the smallness of their worlds, their parochial attitudes. Even Papa and David Klein, worrying over the stock markets, were more concerned with what it would do to the credits and debits of their particular banking concerns than with its effect on the world. He had come from Berlin where the crash was already beginning to make itself felt. In Budapest it was the same: more poor, more unemployed, longer queues at the soup kitchens. Two students who had begun with him last October had already been compelled to drop out of their courses because their parents could no longer afford to give them an allowance. He watched his family. There was Malie—whom he loved, yes, he really did—happy and complacent with her two sons, her luxurious Budapest apartment, and an adoring husband. What did Malie know of suffering? And Eva, indulged not only by her husband but now—as mother of a son, heir to the Kaldy estate at last—by her mother-in-law also. What did Eva care for the hungry and unemployed?

He raged in silence, and when he could be silent no more he tackled Jozsef on the subject.

“Don’t you see, Jozsef? Don’t you see how wrong it all is, that we don’t care? Everyone concerned about where they will go for their holiday, and Mama still buying dresses like a girl, and none of them thinking about all the people in Budapest and Berlin who haven’t enough to eat!”

Jozsef blinked and lit a cigar. Since he had become an employee of the bank, he had adopted man-of-the-world ways. He sported a walking stick too, which he swung most professionally on his way to and from work. “I remember all that from my first year as a student,” he said, bored. “It was quite the thing when I first went to Berlin. I suppose it still must be. Do you have discussion groups about it?”

Leo wanted to hit him. His anger was all the more pronounced because he had been going to the discussion groups.

“It’s that kind of attitude that produced the Russian revolution,” he blazed. “People like you... and ‘Let them eat cake.’”

“Surely that was the French revolution, old fellow?”

“It’s the same thing! Unless we do something now there’ll be another bloody revolution. It’s poverty, not politics, that makes bloodshed!”

“Oh, but look here.” Jozsef flicked ash from his cigar. “No one wants to see people hungry, but how can we stop it? We just go on working, all of us. It’s not our fault if the system breaks down every so often. And anyway, if you feel this strongly about it you shouldn’t be taking an allowance from Papa. If it’s middle-class bourgeois money you’re angry about, why are you having such a good time on it in Berlin?”

He was so angry and ashamed he had to turn away. All the time he had been aware of his hypocrisy, raging about the unfair division of money when he himself was enjoying the fruits of that unfairness. In Berlin he had been swayed by the fiery logic of Communist agitators. He knew there was something wrong with the world, and sometimes, not always but sometimes, their doctrines seemed to make sense. Deep in his heart he carried conflicting memories that grew worse as he got older: memories of Uncle Sandor being killed by a group of ragged beggars, one of whom he thought he knew; memories of Janos Marton, trying to defend his father from attack and, again Janos Marton, walking through the snow to school, thin and poorly clothed with sacking wrapped round his feet; memories of the woman, his mother, humble and supplicating, asking a place for her son at school. All these things bothered him more and more as he grew older, when by right they should have bothered him less. He felt sick and angry when he saw fear in a peasant’s face as an overseer went to strike him. He hated the ragged, thin children and the pregnant women carrying those same children to school When the snow was too thick for unshod feet. And yet communism was what had killed Uncle Sandor. He was desperate, searching for a cause he could espouse that would ease the unhappiness he felt when he saw poverty and misery around him.