Temptation Read online

  He had only one real passion, and that was fishing. He had a beautiful fishing rod he’d made himself, and he would sit alone with it day in, day out, on the riverbank, saying not a word. He was absolutely convinced that fish knew human speech and if they heard it, wouldn’t go anywhere near the hook. Woe betide anyone who raised their voice while he was waiting for the fish to bite.

  Old Rozi was so consumed by “curiosity” that one day she went down to the river where the lonely fisherman sat. She paraded past him once or twice, but “he don’t even look at me, you see. Not so much as glance sideways.”

  But old Rozi was not one to get discouraged and kept going back down to the river till one day the man took pity on her. Not that he said anything to her—like I say, he couldn’t stand anyone talking while he was fishing—but instead nodded silently to say that she could sit down beside him. So Rozi sat down. She didn’t dare say a thing, watching the river quietly. He didn’t say anything either, just stuck out his left hand leisurely, so that he didn’t upset the rod in his right, and placed it on her breast in total silence. They sat like that for a long time, not a word between them. Rozi was, in her words, “fit to burst” by the time the man finally deigned to tie his rod to the reeds and lay her down on the grassy bank.

  “Don’t you breathe a sound, though!” he whispered in her ear. “So’s not to scare the fish.”

  This sounds like a made-up story, but it had such an impact on Rozi that from that day on she didn’t let that man out of her sight. She put him in her house at the edge of the village and devoted everything she got from other men to the upkeep of this one.

  He remained just as calm as he’d always been. There was nothing in the world that could upset him, certainly not Rozi’s profession. As long as he got to spend his days fishing by the river and had a litre or two of wine with his fish paprikás at supper, the missus could do as she liked. He lived on the money Rozi made with her favours like a lazy, kept mistress. In the village, they called him Mr Rozi, and even we children used to call him that among ourselves.

  Rozi was by then no longer in her first youth. She must have been around thirty, an advanced age for a peasant girl. Her more genteel clientele began to fade away and Rozi was forced to lower prices and try to make up the difference by increasing turnover.

  Mr Rozi went on happily working his way through the young peasant girls. Not that he desperately wanted them, but to kill the boredom while he waited for the fish, he’d occasionally signal to one or another that they could sit down beside him. And they came and sat.

  Rozi knew, and pretended not to. It wasn’t as if she could say anything, so she just looked on and “agonized”. She would spend nights tossing and turning next to her snoring man, suffering pins and needles around her heart and cold sweats. This dissolute slattern, who’d been selling herself since the age of fifteen, was suddenly so overcome with jealousy that it was like an incurable illness.

  One day she couldn’t take any more, so she got to thinking and called the tailor to have a new suit made for her man.

  “What’s that for, then?” he asked, not being in the least bit vain.

  “What for? For wedding. You can’t wear old one to wedding.”

  “What wedding? Who the hell’s gettin’ married?”

  “You and me, of course!”

  He just stood there silent for a bit, because it took him a while to understand. When he finally did, he broke quietly into a smile.

  “You can tell you’re Slovak,” he said, “by how cunning you think.”

  But he wasn’t against the idea. Marriage? Why not. If the missus wanted it, let her have her way. After all, she brought home the bacon. Fortunately, the weather was lousy on their wedding day and he couldn’t have gone fishing anyway.

  Rozi, on the other hand, took their marriage very seriously indeed. The ring, the marriage certificate and the priest’s sermon revolutionized her life. From that day on, she drove her visitors away, every one.

  “Husband won’t have it!” she’d say haughtily, though she knew full well that her “husband” would have fallen off his chair laughing if he’d heard her.

  Two weeks after the wedding, she got on the train and went to the county town. To learn to be a midwife, she said. The village roared with laughter. Show me the poor forsaken fool, they said, who’s going to have an innocent babe brought into the world by the likes of her!

  But Rozi knew what she was doing. She wasn’t going to bring babies into the world. Far from it. From then on, she made her living stopping children from being born.

  Her idea paid off. The village abortionists were outmoded, ignorant and dirty old women, and everyone preferred to go to Rozi when they got into trouble. And they got into trouble pretty often, especially in the winter, when people have time on their hands.

  But old Rozi kept another, larger business, too. Peasant girls who got into trouble and whom it was too late to “help”, like my mother, could do their lying-in at hers. She would even feed them till they were strong enough to go up to the city as wet nurses. Their children stayed with Rozi and the poor girls, who in this way dealt with all their troubles in one fell swoop, couldn’t thank her enough. Then, of course, they got to send the better half of their already meagre salaries to their selfless saviour for more or less the rest of their days.

  This woman, this indestructible woman, was like a cat—she always landed on her feet. She was now making a living from other people’s love affairs as she had once done from her own. The house at the edge of the village underwent a veritable renaissance. She now had pigs, cows and chickens; she had a horse, a cart and a maid.

  But whenever possible, she would go out fishing with her man by the river. She didn’t like to leave Mr Rozi alone much, and looked after him like some precious heirloom, though Mr Rozi was hardly a gilded youth any more. He must have been the same age as Rozi, and Rozi must have been pushing forty.

  At that time, she had eight little bastard boys living with her. Rozi could easily have retired. Eight young servant girls in various different cities throughout the country worked in her stead from sunup to sundown. She just kept raking in the money, so that eventually she was among the richest peasants in our desperately poor little village. People even stopped bringing up her past because, as they say, bygones should be bygones, and more to the point, dogs may bark, but money talks.

  Rozi began putting on weight. On Sundays, she’d wear a black silk dress buttoned to the neck and a cross as big as a bishop’s. She changed her way of talking, too. She was no longer playful and chatty, but considered every word she said. She would talk to the little peasant girls who came to her in the family way with sanctimonious condescension, making it clear that though she looked down on them, she would forgive them in the name of our merciful Lord. She was short with the poor and would brook no familiarity, scolding her maids all the livelong day; but if a wealthy farmer greeted her on the market square, she was all honeyed words and gestures. In a word, she’d started acting like a lady.

  She became religious. Before, she’d never gone to church, but now she would kneel for hours like a nun. She hung a huge picture of the Virgin Mary over the tired old couch where previously she’d frolicked with her clients, with an eternal flame burning under it in a gold-rimmed red glass.

  One day, she turned to Mr Rozi.

  “Ever thought about death, Jóska?”

  “The hell I have!”

  “Watch your mouth, I’m serious. We can’t leave all this to dogs!”

  Mr Rozi shrugged. Money hadn’t changed him; he still didn’t care anything about anything as long as his belly was full and he was left alone. Not so Rozi. She was going for immortality.

  “We ought to make child.”

  “Right here?” asked Mr Rozi, since they were out on the street at the time.

  But he had no objection to this either. Children? Why not. If the missus wanted it, let her have her way. He wasn’t going to have to give birth to it. And she
brought home the bacon. It was the least he could do. You couldn’t fish at night, anyway.

  “It could be here by Christmas,” old Rozi said.

  But it wasn’t. And it didn’t come for Easter either—it never came at all. This woman—who had been pregnant God knows how often when she hadn’t wanted to be—couldn’t get pregnant now that it was her greatest wish. She ran from one doctor to the next, went to the county town and even the capital. She took baths, pills, home-made concoctions. Nothing worked. Maybe it’s my man, she thought; she tried others. That didn’t help either.

  For the first time in her life, she lost her head. She came and went like a madwoman. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t accept it, and she was convinced that everything she owned would “go to dogs”.

  One day, she tore the picture of the Virgin Mary off the wall and hurled it in the corner, candle and all. There wasn’t a man alive who could’ve cursed the way she swore then. She spent entire days under a dark cloud and beat the children. Then she grew eerily calm. She threw herself into a corner of the front room and just sat there motionless for hours with the shutters closed. She would occasionally mutter something to herself, her hollow mouth moving almost soundlessly, like a defunct mechanism falling to bits.

  She started going grey. She lost weight, shrivelled, grew old overnight. She became a mean and crotchety old woman.

  She had always been mean, but at least till then her meanness had had some purpose. She had turned it into money, silks, gold chains, the pigs in the sty and the cow in the shed. Now her meanness became as barren as her womb, and she took no profit from it any more. She was wicked for the sake of it. She derived a perverse, inhuman pleasure, a revolting, sick satisfaction from causing others pain. But it also happened, which never used to happen before, that she was good. Then she would give gifts to all and sundry, be charming to everyone she met, and shower the children with frantic kisses. But this was a macabre and dangerous kind of goodness, and once a fit of it had passed, she was a hundred times meaner than before.

  3

  SHE DETESTED ME from the moment I was born.

  I know that sounds unlikely. It may be that a grown-up doesn’t particularly like a child left to their care, or they suddenly lose their temper, but detest? . . . It sounds unlikely, and yet it’s true: she hated me. Not with some passing flicker of hate, either, born of irritable folk rubbing each other the wrong way, fading as quickly as it had come. No, this was a grave and consistent—almost masculine—hatred, you might say. It was permanent war, with not so much as a single truce in the entire fourteen years I spent under her roof.

  The roots of this hatred must have gone alarmingly deep. I was born at just around the time she learnt, once and for all, that she would never have children. Maybe that was why she hated me. I don’t know, it’s just a guess. “For what man knoweth the things of a man,” as St Paul writes to the Corinthians, “save the spirit of man which is in him?”

  I wasn’t what you might call a loveable child. I should make that much clear right now. I was unusually unfriendly, almost standoffish, suspicious, stubborn, and always ready to strike. By the age of seven, I was utterly devoid of what is commonly called boyish charm.

  I have a photograph from back then, a group photo one boy’s mother had taken of us. I’ve seen few less likeable children than myself in that image. There’s something scary and rough about my entire being. My shoulders look like I’d borrowed them from someone five years older, and my face is hard, mean and low. I’m distinctly hideous in this photo, though on closer examination, my looks are not unattractive. I had quite large, deep-grey eyes, a strong, straight nose, a fine, determined mouth, and black hair that fell neatly to my brow. My looks were so fully formed that they haven’t changed much since, and that was probably the trouble. I had the face of a man, and the things that make a man’s face masculine make a child’s face ugly.

  They say that at the age of five or six I was at daggers drawn with the grown-ups around me. I never opened my mouth if I wasn’t spoken to, and when I was, I gave short, snappish answers. I faced them with my hands jammed in my pockets, legs spread wide apart and chin forced down to my neck; that’s how I looked up at them, like a bull, head down, ready to charge.

  “What face you make again!” old Rozi would yell at me half a dozen times a day. “You look like murderer.”

  Yes, I was probably not the most charming of children, but then how, pray tell, was I supposed to be? Life does not begin at the moment of birth. They say that the emotional shocks suffered by a woman with child will often leave physical traces on her baby. Is it far-fetched, then, for me to feel that the deep-seated hatred that filled my mother as she bore me has left its mark on my life ever since? I don’t know. This, too, is just a guess. But I do clearly remember that I was perfectly aware of my situation by the age of seven. I knew that there wasn’t a creature on God’s green earth, my mother included, who truly cared about my miserable fate; that there was nothing but hunters and hunted in this poachers’ world, and I was not a hunter.

  I thought that was natural. I was absolutely convinced that people were only good when they had to be. Bastard children had to be; rich people did not. I envied Rozi, that she could afford to be bad. Anyone who could afford to be bad had made it.

  I was surprised by people being good to me. I was suspicious when they were. Why would someone be good to a little bastard? What were they after? I wondered, suspecting the worst, and if I realized they didn’t want anything, I looked at them as if they’d had two noses or three hands. I thought people like that a little mad. Unnatural. Grass is green, the sky is blue, and man is mean. At least, anyone with any brains. Only Mad Wilma was good, and she was the laughing stock of the village.

  When I think about it, I didn’t even really know what the grown-ups meant by good. I thought it was some hollow slogan they’d thought up to fool children with. A lot of words were like that. Religion, for example. There was the Sunday religion that people practised in church, and the everyday religion people practised in the village, and I didn’t understand what the two had to do with each other. Old Rozi was religious too. She’d kneel for hours in front of the picture of the Virgin, and when she was having one of her fits of kindness, she wouldn’t shut up about “Christian charity”. As for what her Christian charity actually meant, I had more than my fair share of chances to discover. They could pour their sanctimonious words on me by the bucket; they meant nothing to me, just like their threats about the bogeyman. I didn’t believe in their bogeyman, and I didn’t believe in their fine, sanctimonious words either. I only believed in what I saw.

  There was a sort of mischievous squirrel bounding around inside me, snickering softly and pulling faces each time the grown-ups parroted these words. But I never actually said a thing. A skunk protects itself with its smell, the peasant with his stupidity. Faced with grown-ups, I adopted an expression so vacuous, I looked like a cow chewing the cud. I thought them dumb, dishonest, base creatures, and I wasn’t going to stand around arguing with them. I just watched their hypocritical faces, looking up with my head down, my chin pressed against my neck and my legs spread wide, hands in my pockets, saying nothing. I was completely unapproachable.

  Honour thy father and thy mother, they preached. Very well, I said to myself, you do that. The squirrel jumped, stuck out his tongue and snickered. I’d never seen my father in my life, and all I knew about my mother was that she didn’t concern herself overly with me. Four or five times a year a peasant girl came, a total stranger, spent the afternoon with me, and left. They told me she was my mother.

  Secretly, I was terrified of these visits. I was seized by an awkward, suffocating anxiety whenever I saw her. I remember I would get a bitter taste in my mouth, as if chewing something rotten. As to why that was, I couldn’t have told you. My mother was kind to me, never beat me, never even quarrelled; on the contrary, she used to bring me five krajcárs’ worth of potato sweets, and I would have done almost anything
for those. There were other advantages to her visits. On those days, I got a good lunch and could eat as much as I wanted, something that never happened otherwise. “Coincidentally” we always had my favourite food for lunch: székelygulyás stew and noodles with cottage cheese and bacon. I would have forgone both, though, if that strange peasant girl had only changed her mind and stayed at home.

  She would always send a postcard to say when she was coming, and I would be filled with anxiety days in advance. She used to come on Sundays in the early afternoon. I would hide from the others. I used regularly to lock myself in the wooden shed that was the privy, attached to the back wall of the house, and if I wasn’t disturbed, I would sit for hours on the boards, shipshape and scrubbed white, staring dully at the fat green flies humming greedily as they feasted in the pit below. These were times of great, heavy silence. Old Rozi and Mr Rozi were having their afternoon sleep, the maid had the afternoon off, and the children had scattered. The summer sun beat down on the roof of the wooden privy, the air was suffocating with its heat and smells, and the sweat streamed off me as my eyelids grew heavier and heavier. I would sit and wait like that, my head drooping down onto my chest, drifting in and out of sleep, until the bell of the little gate would interrupt the Sunday silence.

  “Béééla!” called my mother’s voice. “Rozi!”

  I stood up, spat heavily, and then with the slow, deliberate steps of an old peasant, ambled over to my mother.

  We weren’t in the habit of kissing ladies’ hands by way of greeting. My mother kissed my face, I never kissed hers. I don’t know if she ever noticed, but if she did, she never said anything. She was a hard-natured woman who couldn’t stand artificial sweetness. The other mothers would clamour with effusive, sentimental nicknames for their offspring, but she just sat beside me quietly. You could tell she had her private opinion of them.