Péter Nádas, A Swish Mansion

Péter Nádas

A Swish Mansion

A chapter from Volume I of the novel Parallel Stories.
Part 1

Many years before, some time in nineteen sixty-four, the year when light slowly began to be thrown on other obscure matters in distant Pfeilen, in the Hungarian capital the national holiday worked out particularly badly.
The meteorological report forecast that on the following day bright, warm, sunny and distinctly pleasant spring weather was to be expected. On these occasions, though, no one really knew what to count on, because coming up to official celebrations the reports were, as a rule, doctored. One that was either better or worse than what was expected would be drawn up, though sometimes they stayed with the genuine one, or only titivated it a little. True, there was some hope that it would not be so this time, for the preceding days really had been brighter and warmer than average; all the same, whether or not officials knew something well in advance, at dawn on March the fifteenth a stormy northerly wind was howling over the country, one of those three-day gales that ravaged the capital especially hard. The doctoring was carried out in the counter-propaganda section of the secret service, on the basis of the overall feedback from soundings of public opinion and the desiderata of the day, but that could only be submitted as a proposal to be endorsed or, for that matter, rejected by the responsible party officials at a session of the Politburo. On these occasions, the specially routed weather report was not issued from the Meteorological Institute but was taken by courier, as strictly confidential material, to newspaper offices, where the editor in chief had the job of replacing the genuine by the false report before they went to press.
The elements not uncommonly clash in March, to be sure, when the sun enters the sign of Aries and the vernal equinox draws near.
The mercury in the thermometers suddenly dropped down eight degrees Centigrade; it all but froze again. Something terrible had happened at the site of the official ceremony, but as yet no one knew anything more definite about it. Swollen clouds raced across the sky, it grew light then dark, a fine rain whipped or drizzled down, tightly closed windows rattled in icy gusts of wind. Festive flags, two red ones flanking each one in the national colours, flapped soddenly over empty Budapest streets. Tiles kept dropping off roofs, rainwater gushed freely from broken gutters. Hardly any pedestrians were to be seen, because anyone forced to walk about in this filthy weather might easily be struck on the head by something. The streets turned into abandoned battlefields in the uproar. Heavy tree branches were strewn all over the place. People were scurrying along, sticking close to the foot of the buildings, their faces lashed with rain, water from leaks in the eaves pouring down their necks. There was a lengthy moment, though, when the din reached fever pitch, with the sounds of fire-brigade and riot-police vehicles blaring out at various widely separated points in the city. Sirens howling, they were speeding into the city centre.
A string of ambulances rushed along the dead Grand Boulevard.
Why won't someone pick it up, a female voice could be heard at much the same time as this from the back of the vast Grand Boulevard apartment.
She was shouting from the bathroom and, running low on youthful vigour as she was by now, having a hard time to make herself heard over the wind that was whistling in the light wells and around the chimney stacks of the apartment block's tile stoves and over the wailing of the ambulances. Pick it up, will you, for Pete's sake!
Even at this, no-one answered the telephone, although there were at least three others in the huge apartment, well-kept and appointed for middle-class comfort as it was, but now somewhat defying the march of time.
The sirens of the receding ambulances gradually dispersed in the wind.
From four rooms of the second-floor apartment one could look out onto the now glistening, now darkening slate-grey surface of the Oktogon junction, while two more rooms, including the servant's room opening off the kitchen, overlooked a courtyard that saw no light the whole year round. On one day around the middle of June, it is true, a slender strip of light would appear on the eggshell colour of the wall in one of the courtyard-facing rooms, and for days on end that strip of light not only always reappeared but grew longer and broader, arriving ever earlier and departing ever later, only to vanish almost unnoticed in the middle of August. Its disappearance assumed the status of an otherworldly signal that only a few people understood. Now, though, everything in that darkened courtyard thrummed and banged, whistled and cracked as if it were drumming on the roof tiles, plucking the wrought-iron guard-rails of the red marble outer corridors around the yard, and trumpeting into the depths. For good measure, at this hour of the morning, the time for lighting fires and doing the cleaning, the big, white, winged doors in the apartment were open, so that none of them could claim, in all honesty, that they did not hear the ringing or the elderly lady's shouting from the bathtub.
The telephone had struck up three times in the most spacious of the rooms, referred to by the members of the household interchangeably as the lounge or the drawing room. The instrument had rung off twice, but the third time it did not let up. It rang persistently.
All three of them were banking on one of the others picking it up, because all three had personal reasons for not doing so.
A palely freckled woman in her early thirties, who was kneeling down in one of the rooms on the courtyard side and having a lot of trouble with lighting the stove, did not budge from her place any more than the other woman, a few years younger, who was sprawled among rumpled bedding on the broad double bed of the room next door and, in order not to hear anything, was desperately and tenaciously pressing a pillow to her head with a thin, bare, dark-skinned arm. Her presence there would not have been looked on too kindly, so she was inclined to answer the telephone only in an emergency. She felt she was an unauthorised person, an intruder, and rightly so, as that's how she was regarded, with her position becoming ever more unclarifiable.
She had nowhere to go to, or else she did not feel she had the strength to make the unavoidable decision.
The pale woman who was busy in front of the stove did not go, and not just because the kindling that kept flickering to life in the draught would perpetually go out with the next gust of wind, only for great clouds of smoke then to be blown back through the stove door, but mainly because she was sticking to the rules. When the residents of the house were at home, she was not supposed to appear in the innermost rooms, even during the morning cleaning hours, without being asked. Aware though she was that nobody was in the front room at present, she would still not go.
Let them pick it up, if they want, she told herself, twitching her rather skinny shoulders as she did, as if in reply to the elderly lady shouting from the bathroom.
She was really not rebellious by nature, and she had no reason to be dissatisfied with her position, but all the same she would sometimes quietly get her own back at them, and enjoy doing so. In point of fact, she was prompted to resort to this by what she felt was her young son's humiliating status, and a little bit by her own sense of self-esteem. They lived in the perennial gloom of the servant's room, and at the request of the members of the household she had been obliged to prohibit her child from stepping outside into the kitchen. That was the magic border of the space they had in which to move, the kitchen. The child grasped that, naturally, but how could he accept it. Then again, not only could she not control the furious border infringements, but the little boy's rebellions time and again revealed her own willing servility. It was very hard to find place for the two of them, and there were difficult times when it would seem they were having to pay too high a price for their security. The barely five years old, extremely lively and, like her, wan little boy was not even allowed to play in the frowsty atmosphere of the dingy passageway known as the hall, though no one spent any time there outside meals.
Pointed remarks would be made, they would not tolerate it. You would do well, Ilona, to put that child back in the kitchen, the lady of the house would whine in that disagreeable high-pitched voice she had. I wouldn't like it if anything in here were to be smashed.
As it happened, that was the one place in the dwelling which revealed a great deal about the changing times and the tiresome force of circumstances. Originally, it had no other function than for people to gain access through it to the bathroom and toilet, the two bedrooms, the dining room and the kitchen, a sort of inside corridor, as it were, though a fair bit wider than that. Under an older dispensation for the household, this was where the big linen presses had to stand and where the ironing was done. For the last couple of years, however, an old sideboard of considerable size has stood in it, and this was where the matching large dining table with the severe chairs were moved. Not that they would ever, even by accident, have said that this was now the dining room. Need and expedience do not necessarily make for a life that is well-disposed, which was why they could not call it that. The window of the space, concealed silk drapes and darkened glass notwithstanding, looked out onto nothing more than a narrow light well, and even if the window was permanently closed, the air would at times be pervaded by a strong stench of drains or else by the no less intrusive smells of strange kitchens, to say nothing of the embarrassing noises emanating from strange lavatories and strange bathrooms. When eating, they could at best pretend they did not notice such things, not hear, let's say, someone on the first floor groaning, straining and breaking wind while they conversed about cultural subjects and wolfed down with relish beefsteaks that had been cooked to a turn. There was even one occasion when they were seated at supper and someone on the third floor, in a fury, tossed a still smoking, red-hot, burnt milk-pan into the light well, and unfortunately the pan had hit the wall, bounced off it, smashed through the darkened glass of the double window, and landed at their feet.
For minutes on end no one at the table could get a word out.
They were not helped over these unpleasantnesses stemming from need by the oriental carpet covering the floor, or having a dinner-service that, for the most part, was all in order, or two quite outstanding pictures hanging on the wall. Not much of these latter could be seen, incidentally. They were old, smoke-begrimed pictures in heavy gilt frames, and generally speaking only a single naked wall lamp gave light in the passageway. It burned day and night, lest anyone should trip up on an accidentally rucked-up carpet or bump into an unthinkingly displaced severe chair. The many-branched gilded baroque candelabrum with its intricate foliated scrolls, which hung from the ceiling like a heavy, shapeless shadow that was capable of myriad transformations, was switched on only at times when meals were taken together.
The telephone's ringing penetrated this far, but now there was no one around in there. On the larger picture one could just make out the outlines of a battle scene, glossy chestnut hindquarters of rearing English thoroughbreds, a Hungarian standard falling from the cornet's hand, semi-naked human bodies trampled under hooves. From the recessed gilt frame of the second picture vaguely emerged the glazed pink countenance of a young man, József Lehr by name, a captain in the 1848 Home Army, who looked out with dreamy eyes through the chink of the slightly parted striped silk drapes into the eternal gloom of the light well. Splashes and quick, brisk squelches of soap could be heard from the bathroom.
The one person who could have picked up the telephone without further ado, though, a barely eighteen years old, gracefully tall young man, his figure erect almost to poker-stiffness, was simply not in a position to do so. He could see and take stock of everything, he heard the ringing of the telephone very well, yet for a long time he was not entirely present anywhere. And anyway there were a great many things he did not do that he could have done, preoccupied as he was with far more important matters. It was as if he had to survey in advance the whole of his life to come, then, from this imaginary perspective, weigh up what he should and should not do.
Who would be capable of taking such a huge responsibility on their shoulders; it paralysed him.
Those around him noticed, at most, his fleeting absent-mindedness, not the threat to his mind. He had received an impeccable upbringing, so that when he spoke with someone he would smile assiduously, pay unflagging attention, not intrusively, but showing interest and asking questions, which generally suffices for people to find someone truly charming. Even his relatives did not notice the unpredictability of his behaviour, considering him a little odd, but essentially a decent boy.
He was now standing by one of the front windows, and as he watched something, every now and then he would press his groin gently against the windowsill. He was keeping something under surveillance; he had virtually latched his gaze onto something that no one else but he could see, though it was more just his unnatural posture, the stiff little half-turn of his body, which revealed that. When he happened to lean forward and felt the pressure of the sill on his groin, then he was almost brushing his temple against the glass. At the same time, he was obliged to hunch up his shoulder into his neck so as not to press with it on the windowpane. No one would have been able to work out what he was up to. If he had just stood at the window, not watching anything in particular, then he would have had to be looking at the holiday emptiness of the junction's square, with a yellow tram threading its way across every now and then, or at the branches of the wind-rocked trees, glistening barely as they beat against one another, or perhaps at the enormous sky, on which whitely crackling rifts opened up and chased one another yet the rain-laden, but nonetheless lightly scudding clouds never amassed.
The spectacle had some kind of unpredictable rhythm.
A sudden deluge did not necessarily hammer on the windowpanes when the heavens darkened. Up above the clouds must have been moving more swiftly than the rain was able to sweep down from them, as a result of which it seemed to be gushing out of the whitely crackling rifts.
He saw that too, though he didn't look at it, just as he looked at things that he couldn't have seen at all. One could not even say that he was thinking about something. He was not thinking. He was responding with his body to the pulse of the gusts of wind, and thereby involuntarily setting to this rhythm everything that ran through his mind as a thought or indefinable sensation. As if the elements had taken control within him too, as they did within the whole city that day. His brow darkened and brightened; he alighted upon arguments and shortly afterwards cast those same arguments aside; sensations streamed over him then just as suddenly dried up; he became despondent only to find hope. He had no explanation for the simultaneous multiplicity. Out of this painful deficiency a mental confusion yawned at him-his own. Not a feature on his face became distorted, however; on the contrary, his demeanour was rendered frighteningly detached by self-discipline.
There was someone in him, another, who had no individuality but who accompanied his every movement and thought. Whatever he missed, whatever he did or whatever he intended to do, this other observed indifferently, expressed no opinion, gave not an inch either. If the torment was great, then this other registered on his features as an impartial air. Waiting for the moment to act, interfering in nothing. As if mutely declaring that every moral commandment or ethical consideration was secondary, for action, even renunciation, took precedence over everything. Yet by the tense, craning way that he held his head, the almost sullenly pursed upper lip, he nevertheless gave away that he was not staring indifferently but wanted something, or was unable not to want something, he saw something, was maniacally keeping his eye on something, could not let it go. That something was across the square, down there at the mouth of the Grand Boulevard, on the far side. It would sometimes be covered by a passing tram. Maybe at the bus stop. When a bus stopped, as if he had to look beyond it, he would stand even more on tiptoe. Maybe someone ought to be coming, that's what he was waiting for, and that's why he could not abandon his watch-post.
While he was waiting for this, or perhaps something quite different, and enjoying the rhythmical pushes of the hard windowsill against his groin, the young woman on the bed in the room overlooking the back courtyard stirred after all. A twinge of impatience or protest, possibly an excitation of a sensitive body, seemed to sweep over her bare arm. Her smooth, darkish skin twitched antagonistically, the muscles of her arm jerked uncoordinatedly. In reality, this was the final throb of sleep, attended by the unwanted awakening.
She had been left alone in bed already early that morning, the departed person being betrayed by the thrown-back eiderdown and a few scattered items of clothing; there were dark socks in front of the bed, a pyjama bottom somewhat further away, and a pair of white underpants on the carpet, a discarded shirt and the top of the cream pyjamas in a more distant armchair. Since he had gone, the young woman had forced herself to sleep, because she wanted to forget the night, dozing off only to awaken again with a start. Not because of the morning noises, or the persistent ringing. It was as if she were crossing a choppy river in a flat landscape on a ferry, and the ferry were putting in with her, first on one, then the other bank. It seems she really was dreaming, dreaming of crossing. She dreamed of banks between which there was no difference, no bushes or trees, not one tree, just carts, barging cattle and people pouring out of the endless plains in the clouds of dust they were kicking up. The final images of that dream still had a hold, for a while, on the surface of her wakefulness. It was not a river, however, but a vast stream, the surface of its dully glittering, sand-choked water almost convex. One could not see across from one bank to the other. Only I ought to see, she thought, half-awake, recalling the bank that had been left, but it's impossible, impossible. At the same time, she did not know what exactly she ought to see. Words, the meaning of which she did not grasp even when awake, rattled emptily through her head.
As if to take a look from under it, she slightly lifted the pillow off and at the same time also raised her head. Rather than for nonsensical words, why wasn't she listening out for whether someone was at last going to pick up the telephone; or perhaps she ought to go, after all. Through moving, she suddenly caught a smell that was at once foreign and familiar. What was happening around her, come to that? She was gratified to establish that no one was picking it up, notwithstanding the elderly lady's distant insistence. She neither. Nothing to do with her. After all, Kristóf was there, in one of the rooms on the street side. She now made a mental tour of the whole apartment; whenever she woke up she would proceed with her alert senses from room to room, as if she were scanning the status and mental stock of those presently in it, and there was indeed something crudely animal in that activity.
Over time, in any case, she had developed a soft spot for the young man called Kristóf.
She spied on him in her imagination, went after him with her senses; she wanted to know what he did and when.
Kristóf had the next-door room on the courtyard side, and she, somewhat apprehensively, had to suppose that he might well know more about them than propriety would see fit.
They did not always have control over the louder sounds, given that shared joy was the sole thing that bound them together. She would not willingly have admitted to herself, for sure, that bit by bit she was going off Ágost and becoming attracted to Kristóf, if only on account of their similarity. Not only did she follow him about in her imagination, but there were times when she would aim directly at him the sounds that Ágost was eliciting from her. She would come a little bit for him. She would come a bit more loudly than was necessary in order that Kristóf, in the room next door, should share it. Equally, though, she could not be sure that she had accomplished her goal. Keep on ringing, why don't you, just keep on ringing. Someone was constantly talking in her head. She was not even sure whether she might not have dreamed the insistent female voice. She captured Kristóf in her despairing imagination, but in her dreams and her waking life she was terrified of the lady shouting in the bathroom.
The fire was burning, veritably roaring, in the tile stove, and she stared into the flickering light from the bed.
As if it were the first time she had seen fire. Everything on this bank that she had been obliged to abandon for the sake of the other, more familiar one had been foreign, distant. She marvelled, she did not know from where the hell the dream had popped up, since she had never seen a river as wide as that in her life. I couldn't have seen, didn't see, anything like it; it was as big as the Ganges or the Mississippi. Her voice was echoing from her own voice. It was long past the time when she ought to have got up. Her pillow reeked of the apartment's foreign smell, to which she could never accustom herself; that, however, was giving her a push-out. It was not so much the warmth of the bed that held her as that the day ahead of her seemed to have no prospects. All her days had no prospects. The ferry plying between the two banks probably denoted that she really had no home anywhere, never had and never would have one.
Her mother, of whom all that had survived was her name, Borbála Mózes, had abandoned her when she was just a few days old at the Nagykôrös Maternity Home, where the new-born baby had been recorded in the register of births as Gyöngyvér, or Guinevere, and under her mother's family name. She was unable to find out who her father was, which of the parents she resembled, or whether she resembled anyone at all. Her hated Christian name had possibly been bestowed by her mother. She grimly and relentlessly loathed her unknown girl-mother on account of that name. She had been raised first in church and then state institutions, by foster parents, then in halls of residence at middle school and finally high school. Those words, with their obscure significance, had probably been rattling around in her head because her brow was almost throbbing in pain. On the other hand, it was between the two friendly banks of the stream that the pain had dispersed, along with her disagreeable feelings, in the smell of the water, and eased up in the landscape. The early-morning sun rays had gleamed through the fine haze; it had been summer, a summer that with eyes open she did not remember, a brief, soft, early bit of happiness that, after so many years, still compensated for the torture of the headaches. Sometimes she secretly drank heavily. What had clouded the former happiness was, at most, that they had been obliged to wait for other passengers, whereas she always wanted to go, get across, quickly. Her hunger and thirst were insatiable, like someone who was always waiting for the other bank.
Now, though, she really could not procrastinate; she ought to be getting up. Her bladder was full to bursting anyway, giving sharp little twinges in her abdomen to signal the urgency.
A half-dark that was pleasantly urging her to linger ruled in the room; she pressed her thighs together. Despite the late hour, no one had opened the lightexcluding shutters on the windows as yet. The only light was what was coming in through the wide-open door and the long, flickering shades of the reddish flames on the walls.
She was staring at the flames, but not seeing what she was looking at, because she was stretching out further, groping with the feelers of her imagination, but in vain: she was unable to ascertain what she was remembering with her dream. It's a memory, it's a memory of mine after all, she kept saying to herself, meanwhile almost, but not quite, catching it. Before seeking escape from the clattering of the words by irritably turning over onto her other side, in order that the pain should disperse, vanish in the land at last, she clung instinctively to wakefulness; it was perhaps not an empty dream, but the sympathy of the other for which she longed.
Ilona, sweetie, she called out into the other room in a slightly mournful singing tone, it wouldn't hurt to open the sodding window. If it goes on smoking like that for much longer, it'll choke me.
The plaintive tone did not do much to temper the brutality of the statement, of course. She did not want a lot, but she was constantly going further than necessary and was therefore often dissatisfied with herself. She had the impression that sometimes she would be too accommodating towards others, at other times too forceful, pushy, aggressive, like someone who can't strike a happy medium. It wasn't as though she lacked yardsticks, but she could draw on several standards that were none too compatible with one another, and these frequently telescoped together to make her emphases and behaviour offensive.
The other woman did not reply for quite some time. Not that she was offended, but she would now recoil from the smoke that was billowing back, now lean forward so as to blow on and bring life to the dying flames with her bare breath. Lighting six tile stoves every day, and keeping them steadily stoked up, was no mean task even when a furious storm was not raging.
Since daybreak I've had such a dreadful migraine, could be heard from the other room, my head's almost splitting. I've no idea what's causing it. Maybe the wind.
For moments on end, the moan that passed for an apology floated forlornly in the air between the two rooms.
The domestic, Ilona Bondor as she was known by her full name, understood and, to some degree, sympathised with the younger woman's plight, and she felt no need to make a special point of spelling out what could give rise to a migraine at daybreak.
She'd been at the bottle again in secret, or else Ágost had once again failed to satisfy her.
Though it may not have been the way the other wanted from her, she genuinely felt for Guinevere. There was something touchingly gawky, clumsy, about her irregular, oval face, her profuse, pale freckles, almost confluent below the blue shadows under her eyes and on her nose, about her always carefully curled reddish hair and her narrow shoulders. She put one in mind of an undeveloped, slightly rachitic young girl, even though she was not in the least immature or unsure. She was more assertive than was expected of her, or would have been taken in good part, on the basis of her outward appearance. She was well aware of who she could count on for what. This time, too, she only looked up when the tiny flame on the kindling had finally taken hold on the sticks.
I think it would be best for all concerned if Gwennie were to do us the favour of crawling out of bed, she called back over her shoulder. She might even be so good as to pick up the 'phone. I seem to remember Gwennie telling me yesterday that she would be getting up early today. She wanted to go to the swimming baths before she has her singing lesson, because she said that she wanted to make full use of her days off. Which is all very well, but how's it going to work if she stays in bed. That's not nice, now, is it? Surely Gwennie doesn't suppose that it's going to make her migraine go away. Well, it won't. She'd do better to get up straight away and get some fresh air.
She had a penetrating voice, and she addressed the other in this strange manner as if talking about a third person.
The other woman, though, found nothing to object to. Like Ilona, who hailed from an ethnic Slovak village close to Buda, she herself had only been living in the capital for a few years. On the occasions when, now in the kitchen, now leaning against a door post, they would quietly tell one another what was on their minds, neither of them paid particular attention to how the other one spoke, or what she said, and it must have caused an outsider no small amusement to hear this encounter of two distant dialects. Whereas Guinevere articulated the long, half close 'urh-like' sound of her oe's with an open throat, Ilona pronounced the 'aahs' of her acute á's with rounded lips, and in addition both used expressions that neither the other nor a person brought up in the metropolis could make head or tail of. Their provinciality had a covert undercurrent that sometimes drew them together, but sometimes made them jealous and set them against one another; they paid attention to different things, judged things in different ways, and thus whatever might happen to them, they nevertheless understood one another better than those around understood them, or they understood others. Nor was there any mystery about why Ilona Bondor chose to speak about Guinevere Mózes as if she were talking about a third person. By doing so she craftily avoided having to use the formal third-person forms of polite speech that the difference in schooling would have required of her in addressing the younger girl.
It would go away a lot faster if Gwennie were to go for a swim.
Don't talk such nonsense. The reason I didn't go was because swimming always makes it worse.
All the same, it would be better if Gwennie were to be prepared for me not just to open the window; I'll open it for Gwennie, right away, but I'll have to make a start on the cleaning as well. I can't start anywhere else, because the mistress isn't yet out of the bathroom. Once she gets out then Gwennie can go in. That'll be about the size of it, I reckon.
Now it was this statement that was left hanging in the air. As far as the day's cleaning went, she really did have nowhere else that she could start. Ilona would make a start either in the most distant of the front rooms or the innermost room on the courtyard side; that was her fundamental rule, that was how it had to be. No answer came back, not even a stirring which would have suggested that that Gwennie was at last crawling out of bed. The telephone, on the other hand, suddenly fell silent again.
For a fair while nothing else could be heard than the wind playing in the cavities and cracks, drains and apertures of the imposing block of flats.
No one was to be seen on the outside corridors or in the yard; the broad landings of the stairwell also remained deserted.
At that time of day, though, one would not have expected anyone to come other than the Swabian woman bringing milk from Budakeszi, or the Slovak woman with eggs from Pilisszentkereszt, or just possibly the postman. They had all stayed away on account of the appalling weather. Ilona had taken her young son to the nursery early in the morning; she could not have him under her feet all day long. There was just one child in the building who went to junior school, and at this hour nearly everyone would be at work.
A dreadful night in October 'Fifty-six was the last time there had been a crowd of people there, complete strangers, because the tank gunfire had driven them in there off the Grand Boulevard. When the heavily limping, hunchbacked and bald janitor had opened up the heavy oak gate and eventually took a look outside, the wind was already howling along an empty thoroughfare. Since then, all those leaving the house, even at the cost of considerable effort, would carefully close the door behind them, as indeed a clumsy notice reminded them to do. For all that, the once truly elegant carriage-drive had the effect of a diabolical wind tunnel into which Satan himself was drawing up with a great howl. The lids of the rubbish bins were rattling, shuddering, hammering. There was a more banal explanation for the infernal racket. The two panes of glass that fitted into the arch of the gateway had been blown in by a blast on that October night and, despite the janitor's stubborn efforts, it had proved impossible to procure heavy, shatterproof glass like that anywhere in the city.
The no more than eighty-year-old, strikingly well-proportioned building counted more as a curiosity in that neighbourhood inasmuch as it had weathered the shocks of the past decades almost intact. It was not only luck that it had to thank for that. Even at the time it was built it had been, perhaps, the least conspicuous building in the area. It was constructed as a block of luxury apartments, like all of its more ostentatious neighbours, but through its modest dimensions it was more reminiscent of a private mansion. No building in the entire Sixth District of Terézváros was more solid than this. Fortunately, there had been no hits on it, and since the unobtrusive decorations of its puritanical façade were made of choice materials, even bomb blasts had inflicted no damage. The residence had been built by a restless, quarrelsome man, himself from the provinces, or at least someone whose mind did not work on a city scale. His building thus stood out in contrast to the rest, which turned out to be to its advantage. People who should know judged that the almost totally unadorned building could be classified as a transition between classicism and eclecticism, and it therefore represented, at all events, a missing and extremely important link in Budapest's architecture, even though, owing to an unfortunate chain of circumstances, the architect subsequently had hardly any of his own designs constructed, and this deficiency had therefore left a profound mark on the way the city looks.
He was the sort of man about whom it was said that he was of bad character, though there were more than a few things in which he proved to have outstanding talents. Maybe he was never able to make up his mind whether to battle and play the eccentric or, on the contrary, to go along with the vulgar, dull-witted norm. In point of fact, he struggled with himself for the whole of his long life, always finding of course an object that benignly covered up the crude rampaging of his insane egoism. He would subordinate himself to anyone as if guided by a spirit of pure self-sacrifice, sometimes even fawning nauseatingly, and then there were other times when he played the self-willed grandee, unconstrained by all others. The name of the architect was Samu Demén.
He came into the world in the town of Jászberény, a few years after Hungary's defeat in the War of Independence, as the only son of a well-off Jewish grain merchant, and he was considered an exceptionally clever child. After six older sisters, he was the last in the line; also still living with them was the paternal grandma and two great-aunts on the mother's side, both what one would call poor relatives, so the pampering amidst which he grew up, among all these women, is hard to imagine. And that is to say nothing of the girls and women among the domestic staff, or Misses Le Vau and Papanek, the French and German governesses. The family had a sure financial base, while its prestige grew ever more solid, even though Jászberény was rather dogged in managing to keep Jewish newcomers at a distance. By the time the son had reached adolescence, most of the daughters had been married off, the majority outside the town; taking advantage of the possibilities offered by new legislation, their father took extensive lands on lease and managed them with a firm but also lucky hand. In doing so he provoked the wrath and envy of many in the small town; but others saw profit in this general boom, though even among them there were few who could reconcile themselves to the idea that land, too, could now belong to the Jews.
At all events, the boy was left to follow his own curious fancy, without restrictions or external pressure, when it came to choosing a path in life. He studied architecture, first in Berlin, then in Vienna, travelled for several months around Greece, and spent a whole year on a study trip to Italy. On the logic of his studies, he ought to have gone from there to England, but since he had been unable to acquire a decent grasp of any foreign language, and that was a constant source of insecurity and anxiety, for the last two years of his course he moved back to the Technical University in Pest, taking his degree under Alajos Hauszmann, then near the peak of his renown and influence as the doyen of Hungarian architects. The professor thought highly of the conspicuously flashily dressed young man, and it could not be said that he did not assist him, but all the same he did not belong to the charmed circle of his favoured students, because they, for all the professor's ingenuity, would not tolerate him amongst them. His manner was intolerable, his emotionalism and irascibility were at least unusual in the eyes of the others; his thick, ineradicable dialect, or his painful stammering, along with his bad habit of constantly mixing up the genders of nouns when the conversation switched to German, but most of all the loud voice in which he constantly spoke many found off-putting or intensely wearying.
If he showed up at one of the coffee-houses, rowdy enough at the best of times, at the Eagle in New World Street or the Hunting Horn, where he read the foreign papers, or the Coffee Rooms, where he associated with all kinds of suspicious figures in some highly murky political affair, or every so often, on account of a scandalous affair that linked him to a lady belonging to the highest circles, at the luxuriously appointed Queen of England, then he would instantly attract and, for long moments on end, hold the attention of those present with his dashing figure and stylish clothes. Those who knew him would drop flattering or maybe pointed remarks; those who didn't know him would feel a need to find out who he was.
A waiter at the door would attentively take his walking stick, in keeping with police regulations, while he would peel off his tight buckskin gloves with just as much ceremony, finger by finger, as he ran his eyes abstractedly and haughtily about him. He might have been taken for a famous artist from abroad, or a foreign aristocrat, as though to say by that that he was a flashy person who did not come from, and did not belong within, our ranks. He would doff his top hat and hand that over with the gloves, then the waiter would lead him to his table or to the company that happened to be expecting him.
His steps were always sure, his movements smooth and supple; he passed fastidiously between the tables like a noble wild beast.
The spell might last until, having settled on a seat, or leaning forward from the depths of an armchair, he began to speak. Everything about him was delicately wrought, long, oblong, bony, but not fleshless, like the fingers on this hands. At the same time, somehow wild and unmanageable, like the straight, glossily black hair that veritably tumbled out from beneath his headwear. Just as unruly were his eyebrows, the wayward hairs of which joined on the slightly yellowish, ivorycoloured skin over the bridge of his nose, and his almost disagreeably thick lips, the upper rim of which was bordered by a trim pencil line of moustache. Through his sheer presence, the self-confident and pampered smile that would play at the corners of his mouth, his movements, the colour of his skin, his dark gaze, now scanning nervously around, now lingering at length, he could win his way close to almost anybody's heart. And within just as little time, those embarrassing lures were dashed for those concerned by their not being given to know on precisely what footing they stood with him.
He had been born under the sign of Aquarius, and Nature fatefully dealt out to him the full repertory of his constellation but, sadly, nothing else. He was a man for spectacle, understanding everything that had anything to do with it, knowing how much it owed to harmony and how much to disharmony, and he was well acquainted with the units of measure for symmetry and asymmetry, having a partiality for symmetry, but not insisting on it, being against any monotony of proportions. These endowments did not work within him like an engineer's acquired knowledge but affected him viscerally, feeding off gut reactions. Not that he was unskilled; there was no one more able than him to take all these aspects into account in the mathematical sense of the word. He could also handle colours, forms, materials and rhythmicity of line, instinctively sensing the interdependence and reciprocity of these components; but wherever the sovereign domain of the visual came to an end he could be counted a lost person.
To be totally tin-eared is surely just as exceptional an endowment as perfect pitch. It wasn't that he was unable to distinguish a waltz from a mazurka, though there were times when he couldn't do that either, but that sort of thing can be overlooked; however, he proved pathologically insensitive to auditory dimensions of any kind, and that may have been why he had no ability to listen to others or to monitor what he said himself, if it came to that.
He didn't have friends, only admirers and enemies. Samu Demén did not pick up the fine stresses and shades of emphasis and sense. He did not even hear anybody out and was unable to argue, plunging straight in by running down, breaking in on or fuming at anybody, interrupting the conversations of others, sometimes actually talking over what other people were saying. He felt in his element when he was able to deliver free-flowing monologues. The stateliness of his movements caused few to forget that he chomped when eating. A handsome body in which there was probably never silence, nor any wish for silence.
Some people simply avoided him.
He was aware of all this, of course, but once he had left the family home he could not understand why everything that happened to him ended up with him being on his own.
There was no hint of disagreeable extremes in his buildings. He did not design from the outside inward but from the inside outward. As if he saw the courtyard before the façade, or a single room first then co-ordinated everything else to its proportions, but never the other way round. He was convinced, indeed it became an obsession, that an apartment block or living space was felicitous when its ground plan, like that of a Greek temple, was an elongated rectangle but its individual rooms, by contrast, were almost regular squares. What he sought from a space was that it should remain interior, tender and intimate; it should not extinguish a person's desires, but nor should it nourish his pretensions, make him conceited. The height of the rooms conformed to the scale of the ground plan. From this it followed that not only could he not design inordinately large rooms, since he would not have wished to have a nonsensical internal height, but also that he had to dimension all the main rooms to pretty much the same size, and they could not be a great deal bigger than the ancillary rooms.
The things he designed would have been comfortable, familiar, restful, solid and bright, yet that happened to be not fully reconcilable with the spirit of the age, which was why he was unable to realise them; for the most part, they remained on the drawing board. His ideas did not turn him against his colleagues; at worst they would just laugh on seeing his plans: Samu Demén can design nice little manor-houses, they would say, but he has no notion at all of what an urban apartment block should look like. No, his plans scared off potential clients first and foremost. The internal proportions of the mansion blocks designed by his fine colleagues really were different. While the more public rooms on the street-side faces of dwellings-the salons, studies, smoking rooms and dining rooms-grew ever taller and larger, all the spaces on the courtyard side became ever narrower, with dark corridors, closets, cubby-holes and alcoves, and the internal height of these spaces was inevitably daunting. Apartments on the courtyard side did not manage to retain even that much proportion; there everything was crammed together, abutting each other. Main rooms off the kitchen, which in turn gave onto windowless alcoves and cubby-holes, sleeping cubicles, shared lavatories on the landings of the stairwells at the rear-in short, the impenetrable and impure thick of the city.
In stark contrast to all that, he made such lavish use of space that he could not fit more than two apartments onto a single floor, which of course discouraged builders who were stunned by land prices or, indeed, looking to speculate on them. Then, just when he ought to have been arguing his point politely and shrewdly, everyone could see that he was almost exploding with anger.
Do understand, if you please, insofar as you draw a line through the upper apex of the tympanum parallel with the crepidoma, and you join these, very well, I can see you don't follow, no doubt you haven't seen a Greek temple; so anyway, then you get an almost regular square-that's the nub of it. Let us note, if you please, that this is the classical proportion. An almost regular square, though it is tending towards a horizontal rectangle. I take it out even further than that, but do please understand, I can only take it out as far as can be tolerated, optically speaking. I won't go any further, trust me, I simply won't. If we were to stick another storey on this building, if you please, two storeys, three, as you wish, then that would be to stand the world on its head.
Now, look at this, please, do you see: you get a bare quadratic prism, it prods the sky up. That, if you please, I won't do, not with me, you won't, I don't accept that sort of thing.
Truly, only a Doric colonnade and a large tympanum were missing from the façade of his building for his bantering colleagues to be able to see in it some kind of old-fashioned, antiquating formation. Yet those were not the only elements he did not employ, for he also did not use those showy ornaments cribbed from the Renaissance and Baroque that they were so fond of and for which clients were so happy to pay.
He could not get his head round it. Why people would pay for nonsense like that when, for the same money, they could pay for a comfortable and balanced space.
Every single room on all three floors, on both the street and courtyard sides, was given two symmetrically placed windows, which by means of lamellar mouldings of Sóskút sandstone received only just as much emphasis on the façade as human eyes get from eyebrows and lashes: one of them high up, as on classical buildings, a hood-mould well above the window apertures, if only so that the rain should not beat directly on the windowpanes; the other as a support for the windowsills, like a corbel. He patterned the mouldings, consisting of three narrow lamellas, on the Ionic stylobate, and he ran a thicker rule of this moulding not only above the ground-floor shops, but also beneath the strongly raised roof, as well as a kind of accentuated cornice, so as to close the friezes that so to say prefigured the vertical articulation of the façade.
Of course, the principles, drolleries and strictures affirmed against him by his contemporaries were not completely groundless. Because he smuggled back the classical not merely with these almost unnoticeably restrained allusions, but above all with the vertical profiles of the brick facing. But even he was unable to hide the tension between structural needs and the internal proportions that were achieved, and here the unabashed decoration so characteristic of that period made an appearance.
In October of 'Fifty-six, several senseless bursts of machine-gun fire swept across this symbolic colonnade.
The repeatedly fired bricks withstood the bullet impacts fairly well, though it was possible to trace the arc of the shots. Here they had knocked a lump out, there broken off the edge of a brick, and in yet another place burrowed into the soft stucco work. The stuccoed surfaces were coloured a cheerful, sun-kissed yellow, and back then the reddish-brown mouldings of the brick facing had practically floated between the buoyant windowsills. Nowadays not even a vestige of colour or floating remained; the subdued details of the building's façade had been washed to grey by flying dust and grime, whereas the daily renewed calcifications of pigeon shit ran down in long, white streaks from the mouldings, friezes and cornices.

(To be continued)

Translated by Tim Wilkinson

Péter Nádas
is a novelist, dramatist and essayist. He made his international breakthrough with A Book of Memories, 1997 (Emlékiratok könyve, 1986). His other works available in English include The End of a Family Story (1977) and A Lovely Tale of Photography (1995). His latest novel, the three-volume Párhuzamos történetek (Parallel Stories, 2005) is reviewed on pp. 151-58 of the Summer 2006 issue of The Hungarian Quarterly.