Temptation Page 6

  As to what my thoughts were on the Jewish Question at the age of six, I have no idea. But I suspect that it wasn’t pure heroism that led me to swim against the tide of public opinion. Everything must have been upside down and inside out in my heart, so much so that I even forgot about my precious reputation. I didn’t care what the village would say. I was ready to be ostracized by everyone if only that little Jewish girl they all detested would be my friend. Because the truth is, we weren’t even on speaking terms yet.

  Every time I headed to the shop, I resolved that this time, today, I would speak to her, but I always lost my nerve. It’s true that her parents were always there, too, and they didn’t let her out on the street alone. Sárika’s grandfather, the seventy-year-old innkeeper, had been beaten half to death one night, and since then not even the adult members of the family dared go out after dark. The non-Jewish bartender served at the inn at night, and they always drew the shutters of the shop before it grew dark, closing themselves up in the house. People in the village said they used to perform twisted rituals by candlelight, sacrificing to a wrathful Jehovah.

  Sárika was a quiet, serious little girl. She came and went noiselessly, eyes discreetly lowered, and as soon as I stepped into the shop, she’d switch to German with her parents. It seems she didn’t want me to understand, because otherwise she always spoke Hungarian.

  Needless to say, I always spent what little money I had in Sárika’s family’s shop. I would choose slowly and carefully, occasionally even commenting on the quality of the goods, partly to emphasize that I was a serious and regular customer, and partly—mainly—so I could be in there longer. I kept looking at Sárika the whole time. But Sárika took no notice of me. I spent months mooning after her like this, but all I managed to accomplish was that once—just once—she smiled at me. And even then, it was by accident. What happened was that one day, I tripped a boy in front of their shop. The boy must have been on his way to some birthday party or other celebration, because he was wearing his Sunday clothes on a weekday. He was irritatingly preened, and he was walking past the houses as cockily as a rooster at mating time. I don’t remember why I did it—if it was out of jealousy, or because of his pretty Sunday clothes, or just because his strutting annoyed me—but the fact is, I tripped him up. The street was muddy and the little dandy landed face first in a good-sized puddle. I heard a muffled snicker behind me. I turned and was absolutely dumbstruck. Sárika was standing in the doorway of the shop, smiling. Smiling at me.

  I knew this was the moment. I’ve got to say something, I said to myself, and . . . didn’t. I spent days kicking myself for my cowardice and spent weeks, months, doing everything I could to try and get another smile out of her. I’d spend hours in front of the shop and trip every child that came that way, regardless of age or sex. In vain. Sárika never smiled at me again.

  I had just about given up hope when something unexpected happened.

  8

  BUT FIRST, I HAVE A CONFESSION to make. I was not, in the way that grown-ups tend to think about these things, strictly speaking faithful to Sárika.

  I say in the way that grown-ups think about these things, because I in no way considered what I got up to with a maid called Borcsa while I was hopelessly in love with Sárika to be infidelity in any way. I, like most other children, considered physical and emotional love to be two completely separate things. I’d never felt any kind of physical desire or curiosity with Sárika, though I was much concerned with the mystery of those things at the time.

  I lived among servant girls and worked alongside them all day long, and they were mostly young, lively peasant girls who, being unacquainted with the gems of the Hungarian film industry of the time, had no idea what a decent, socially respectable Hungarian peasant girl was meant to be like. They simply were Hungarian peasant girls, who said what they thought, and what they actually thought—why deny it?—didn’t tend to appear much in the aforementioned cinematic masterpieces.

  The girls treated me like a newborn kitten whose eyes have not yet opened. They talked freely in front of me, especially of things supremely suited to unsettling a prepubescent boy.

  On the hot summer days when we went bathing in the river secretly, behind the old woman’s back, most of the girls undressed in front of me. My childish eyes were free to roam over the hills and valleys of these grown women’s bodies, seeking out timidly, awkwardly and with predatory hunger the “differences” in the regions around the breasts and elsewhere, where those wild, dark, exciting grasses grew, and where for a child, all was secret.

  I saw them flirting with the lads and heard their shy giggles, ticklish laughs and sensual squeals; I saw the lads’ wild eyes, and that great, incomprehensible madness, like a contagious sickness, lit its first fires within me too.

  Meanwhile, I came and went among the grown-ups with the most innocent expression in the world. I gave deliberately naive answers to sensitive questions and pretended not to understand the screams of laughter that greeted my sanctimonious responses. They must have been absolutely convinced that I didn’t even know yet whether I was a boy or a girl, whereas in my imagination, the Devil’s burning bush was already lit and I was waiting, on tenterhooks, for its revelation.

  And this, at least in part, did come to pass not too long thereafter, thanks to Borcsa.

  It happened around harvest time. One brutally hot afternoon, when all the household was out in the fields, the old woman told Borcsa to take me and clean out the attic. There was no one else besides us in the house, so we locked the garden gate and went up to the attic to clean.

  Upstairs, the heat was even more unbearable. We set about our task sluggishly, with a great deal of faffing, and what we did manage to accomplish wasn’t worth a damn. Borcsa didn’t try to force the thing too long, throwing her broom down in the corner, and then—swearing bitterly—herself too, in last year’s hay. I was no more diligent and immediately followed her example.

  We lay immobile beside each other. It was so quiet, it seemed as if the whole village had succumbed to heatstroke. Only the fat, shameless flies flew about with their awful humming, settling again and again on our sweaty faces.

  Borcsa drew her knees up as she lay, which made her short skirt slip high up her legs. She herself may not have noticed, since she was lying with her eyes closed, but I was all the more attentive. I took such a good look at her I still retain the image in my mind today. I can no longer remember her face, but I still recall the maddening beauty of her white thighs peeking out beneath her short skirt.

  She was a shapely peasant girl, hair black as coal, forever hopping about like a flea. She talked all day long, explaining, recounting, gossiping, laughing, and—when she was alone—humming constantly. But she really lost her head when she got a whiff of a lad. Then she’d rush about as if her backside were full of hot peppers.

  “I was no angel as youth, Borcsa,” said the old woman, “but you, you a real witch, fit to burn!”

  I shut the door. The attic had no windows, and only a strip or two of light filtered through the gaps in the rotten door, as if drawn on the floor with a ruler. We lay silently in the semi-darkness. Suddenly, Borcsa sat up.

  “This damn heat!” she murmured, and removed her shirt.

  My eyes almost popped out of their sockets. Her damp undershirt clung to her pointed little breasts, and that maddening black hair poked out from her armpits. That, in itself, would already have been enough to drive me wild, but then she also removed her overskirt. She was now wearing nothing but an underskirt, and it wasn’t even starched. It draped itself, soft and revealing, over her graceful young body and promised rather than veiled.

  “You ought to take them rags off, too!” she said, and I immediately removed my sticky shirt. That in itself wouldn’t have meant anything, since I often ran around shirtless. But Borcsa asked:

  “Why don’t you take your trousers off an’ all?”

  “I ain’t got pants on.”

  “Me neither,” she
giggled.

  “Yeah, but drawers,” I said knowledgeably.

  “Nor them.”

  “What, then?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothin’?”

  “That’s right, nothin’!”

  And she giggled as if I’d been tickling her.

  “Come off it, Borcsa!” I laughed, but my heart was beating as if Beelzebub himself had been chasing me.

  “I ain’t in the habit of tellin’ lies,” Borcsa tittered.

  “Go on and prove it, then . . .”

  I reached for her skirt. Borcsa struck at my hand.

  “Aw . . . just a little!” I pleaded.

  “Stop it, you little worm!”

  “There!” I shouted with feigned childish glee. “You do have panties on, you’re lyin’!”

  “No I ain’t.”

  “Go on and show me, then!”

  “No damn chance!”

  “Aw . . . Borcsa . . . go on . . . just a little. . .”

  I reached under her skirt. She pushed me roughly away.

  “Look at you!!” she snapped at me angrily. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourself ? I’ll tell the old woman on you!”

  She was so het up, I thought she’d throw me right out of the attic and drag me to the old woman by my ear. But she didn’t. She just lay beside me in the half-light and then lots of things happened that I don’t remember, until all at once. . .

  I don’t know how it happened. All at once I was lying in her warm, naked lap and the world seemed more wonderful than ever before. This wasn’t strictly speaking lovemaking, or lovemaking in any sense really, since I was merely a prepubescent, curious little boy. She did with me what girls like her tend to do with curious little boys like me, far more often than people think.

  I felt like when you’re falling slowly in a dream, very slowly, without hitting the ground for the longest time. My hands grabbed on to her flesh tight, and it felt like my fingernails were on fire. I was dazed by this frightening, never-before felt, unbelievable bliss. My eyes grew heavy and I fell into a deep, strange semi-sleep, but at the same time I was wonderfully awake. It was as if our bodies and the whole world with them had started to melt in the dark, airless heat—everything flowed apart, fell to pieces, grew dreamlike, and was gone.

  I was roused with a start. Borcsa was moaning loudly. Crumbling, incomprehensible words came out of her mouth and her heart was thumping so hard I felt the pressure of every beat in my chest. I stared at her twisted face, horrified. Her mouth was half open, her eyelids went dark, she was breathing in short, sharp bursts as if suffocating. I was incredibly scared. I thought she was going to die right there in my arms. I wanted to shake her, to wake her and ask what was wrong, but somehow my instinct stopped me.

  A few minutes later, of course, she was wonderfully calm. Her arm fell limply into the hay, and she didn’t move at all for some time. She was lying there as faint as if she were on her deathbed. I was still a little scared. But then she opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  “You little worm!” she whispered with a strange, ringing laugh, and gave me the sort of delicate little slap with the tips of her five fingers that men, however little they may be, never resent.

  “Come on, then, chop-chop!” she said in a changed tone. “We have to get to it.”

  With that she jumped up and, as if nothing at all had happened, got to work, humming loudly.

  From then on we used to go up to the attic often, till one day the old woman caught Borcsa with Mr Rozi and threw her out of the house.

  All this happened during the time I was madly in love with Sárika. I was not only not in love with Borcsa, I didn’t even care for her. I craved her like a hungry man craves his food, but her soul mattered to me just as little as the pig’s whose meat I ate in my favourite stews. All day, I thought about Sárika. Secretly, I would call her my heart’s love, and hold imagined conversations with her. She was the first person ever to inspire in me the sweet but slightly incredible suspicion that there was more to the human soul than selfishness, greed and animal urges; and that perhaps the grown-ups weren’t lying when they talked of love and affection.

  After Borcsa left us, I tried my luck with some of the other servant girls but, to my great disappointment, got absolutely nowhere. I started missing Borcsa, and thought more about her than ever. At those times, I would sneak up to the attic and, in the hay where we’d lain together so often, close my eyes and relive our thrilling encounters in luscious detail. I heard her strange, sensual moans, I saw her maddeningly beautiful white thighs, and I did what Gergely used to do. Soon enough, I too had rings under my eyes.

  9

  THE FIRST TIME I TALKED to Sárika was around Easter. It was spring, just like in the best love stories, and I was walking home, minding my own business, from the fields in the snapdragon-hued dusk. When I got to the high street, though, I heard the rumble of feet and a terrific chorus of children’s voices.

  Cohen, Levi, Bruck

  every Jew’s a crook!

  This sort of thing was so common at the time that I didn’t even bother to quicken my pace. The Jewish peddler’s arrived, I thought. Or maybe they’re playing pogrom, which was very popular among the children that year. But when I got to the main square, I saw that this was no joke. A shower of stones and mud was raining down on a terrified, sobbing little girl—the little girl being Sárika.

  I saw red. Trembling with fury, I took the rake off my shoulder and a moment later three of the little terrors of the Jews were rolling on the ground, weeping and wailing. The others, two or three of them, were running as fast as they could, and the fallen heroes were not much more heroic. They got to their feet, sniffling and crying, and amid the usual curses and threats, limped off the battlefield.

  I stood there alone in the road, having swept the field, as the dispatches used to put it, and I really did feel like a victorious general. I could see Sárika standing on the corner, watching the developments. She didn’t dare, it seemed, go back to the shop, for she had clearly gone out on the street without permission, and was scared to tell her parents what had happened. I wanted to throw myself at her feet like the shepherd in the fairy tale who won the princess’s hand with his heroism, but I saw at once that that sort of thing wasn’t very dignified for a victorious general. So I drew myself up straight, stuck my hands in my pockets, pressed my chin down against my neck and approached my heart’s love with slow, dignified steps. As I walked, I was desperately trying to come up with some punchy line with which I could fittingly start the conversation. I can’t comment on the rhetorical prowess of other generals, but what I do know is that after this victorious encounter I couldn’t think of a single blasted word. So I just stood in front of my sweetheart; she, too, was silent. We were still panting heavily—me from fighting, her from running. I looked at her pale, pretty face; she looked down at the point of her shoe. We stood there like that, in silence, for several minutes.

  Finally, I had an inspiration that would save the day. I reached into my pockets and produced ten or fifteen coloured glass balls and, squatting down, started playing on the ground in front of her. I was a real master at marbles, so I was certain that—coupled with my performance on the battlefield just now—my gaming skills would only serve to heighten the effect. Sárika looked on in silence.

  “Know how to play?” I said at last, almost offhand, playing on.

  “No,” she replied in a thin, frightened voice.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  But Sárika didn’t move.

  “Nothin’ to be afraid of,” I said, with a little masculine hauteur. “I don’t hit good little girls—I fight injustice, like Sándor Rózsa!”

  That was a fine little sentence, and I liked it very well, but it was not, apparently, having any particular effect on Sárika. She just stood there, eyes on the ground, scratching the pavement with the point of her shoe. I stood up and went a step closer.

  “Why won’t you play with me?”
>
  “I’m not allowed,” she replied quickly, barely audible.

  “Ain’t allowed?” I asked in astonishment. “They told you not to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “ ’Cause what?” I snapped irritably, “Come on, out with it!”

  She didn’t reply. She just stood there, looking at the ground and scratching away at the pavement.

  “I saved your life, and you ain’t even goin’ to answer me?” I said, with the wounded pride of a victorious general. “Why ain’t you allowed to play with me? Go on, tell me!”

  Sárika shrugged gently and, her eyes still lowered, quickly, almost mumbling, she said:

  “Because you’re one of old Rozi’s boys.”

  I felt myself blush. I know it wasn’t ignorance that made her call me one of old Rozi’s boys. That’s what they called us illegitimate children in the village, and we knew it—oh, we knew it all right. This simple, unqualified label, “one of old Rozi’s boys”, was almost as hurtful and humiliating as that other unqualified label of “Jew”. They branded us like cattle for market. More than once, when I was walking down the street minding my own business, I heard my peers pipe up mockingly, chanting from behind a fence or window:

  “Old Roz-ee’s son, where’s your faa-ther gone?”

  Oh, I knew that well enough, all right. But that this little girl should say it to me, and me having saved her life barely moments before . . .

  “Dirty Jew!” I said, a dark and bottomless hatred bursting out of me, and I spat in her eye, the eye of the little girl for whom barely minutes before I would have gladly laid down my life.

  10

  OH, I’D KNOWN ALL ALONG there was something not right about my background, but in the end, you get used to anything—and you live through it all. Except your own death, of course. My peasant stomach digested the dog’s dinner, and my peasant soul digested my dog’s life. I will admit, I was upset from time to time when that mocking chorus started up from behind a fence, but that was nothing more than a sort of emotional scratch—the wound was never very deep and barely left a trace.