The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 (15 page)

One evening Géza Gl——’s wife, Inczi, turned up. She was a beautiful little thing with sparkling eyes and a perfectly formed row of teeth. I walked her home and she invited me to tea. I went the next day. Géza was at the front with the field postal service. She was charming, and cheered me up. I felt good.

Then she sat down at the piano and played several really lovely atmospheric recent songs of wartime.

One of the loveliest was “The Map.” Though a little sentimental, their melodies and words caught the romance of war. In another, a private finds himself among the beau monde in Váczi Street and propositions a beautiful “ladyship.” “Let me be happy just this once, yerladyship; tomorrow morning, I’m marching off to war.” Her ladyship is outraged and tells him to get lost. Social injustice!

I took a turn at the piano and sang one of the most beautiful of the soldiers’ songs:

Then another:

Then:

I was sitting next to her and suddenly I kissed her hand. Then her arm. Perhaps I should not have done that. She bent her head forward, and I could feel the glow of her face . . .

Géza was at the front, where everything is forgiven.

Over the next few days I decided to continue gallivanting about the city. I wanted to live with the possibility that I could free myself from all ties and lead a completely independent existence.

I went up to the studio less and less. I paid a visit to my neighbor there, Baroness Splényi. She received me warmly and kindly, and asked after everything. I told her the whole story, as I had done a hundred times by now. No one saw much of Adrienne; she was working as a volunteer nurse now. And a casual mention of someone new: Márton Lovászi. I was a little surprised; but there were other fish in the sea . . .

Later on, Valér Ferenczy came in. Not having been a soldier, he observed me and listened to my remarks on the war with a certain detachment and a distinct lack of interest. It is, I suppose, understandable that even someone who sees and hears a thing should place a different importance on it from someone who has actually experienced it as well. One has to take account of this; and also of the fact that suffering and the fear of death—indeed, death itself—look different from the perspective of the hinterland than they do to someone taking part. Gradually, I was beginning to see the unadorned and harsh reality behind all the sympathy and the solemn extolling of heroism: “I’m glad you’re back, but I’m even gladder that I didn’t go, and I’ll do whatever it takes not to go.” Below the surface and despite all show to the contrary, the reality was that everyone had become engaged in a determined, sullen fight for life. It was a fight waged in complete silence and secrecy, but was none the less fierce for all that.

Those who had escaped death or physical ruin thought: I’ve done my bit, now it’s the turn of those who, so far, have sat at home and enjoyed the benefits of being “essential”—respect, making decent money, and the favors of the swelling numbers of women hungry for love.

The others thought: I’ve never been a soldier, I’m not a soldier, and I’m not going to be a soldier. War is for soldiers. We have plenty to complain about too.

I felt that I was on the right lines in seeing this silent struggle as explaining the sense of alienation that grew within me day by day, dissolving the ties between me and the old Budapest.

I had another neighbor at the studio, Móricz Sándor. He had gone away; no one knew where. Inspired by the success I had had with some of my large compositions, he had had a go with one of his own, but with an Old Testament subject. It had turned out dreadfully—a crass, artless black mess. Whether he finished it or not, I don’t know; I had gone by then.

I wasn’t getting much done in the studio. I came up meaning to start work; but I hadn’t counted on the fact that my entire emotional and mental world had taken a different path, down which, for the time being, I could make no progress.

Although my mind teemed with images of war, I didn’t know where to begin. I had already made notes and compositional sketches for a dozen subjects, but they were confused and contradictory. I tried to distinguish them by leaving behind the bloody horrors, the limbless, headless corpses that are the real face of war. Not that: enough blood had been painted. However paradoxical it seemed, war created something. It brought about extraordinary qualities of spirit which could only be read about, in the cynical world of home, in the works of fervent popular writers. It is these higher feelings which make men human; they are what raises mankind, with all its wickedness, above the beasts.

I too had experienced examples of this: wounded men holding each other up, a soldier burying his fallen comrade, a Russian soldier giving water to the wounded, and countless others. I occupied myself with such subjects, but it was too soon for anything to come to fruition. At any rate, they were completely alien to the spirit I had found at home.

I transferred my perambulations to Buda. I found myself, at the age of thirty, revisiting my past.

I boarded the horse-drawn omnibus at Andrássy Avenue. I sat up in front, next to the driver. Fürdő Street, the Chain Bridge tunnel and Krisztina Square: four kreuzer. It was a journey I had taken many times when I started at the Academy of Fine Arts.

I always used to wonder how a pair of horses could cope with this monstrous contraption on wheels. But they plodded calmly on, even up the slow incline of the tunnel. In the evenings, the tunnel was quiet. The people of Buda retired to their beds, and only the occasional pedestrian’s footsteps echoed as a single unbroken sound. Sometimes, if I found myself alone, I liked to call out the notes of a chord—C, E, G, C—to hear their individual sounds blending together and the ringing slowly, gradually dying away, like a distant chorus. I had got the idea from the interior of the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig,
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where a German singer was engaged to call forth amazing and varying chords, using the unique acoustics, from a series of individual notes. I felt like trying it again, but the clattering of the omnibus and the sound of the horses’ hooves would have spoiled the effect. Besides, the driver would not have been impressed; at best, he would have thought “another nutcase from the battlefield.”

The omnibus terminated by the Horváth gardens on Krisztina Square. Here stood the Summer Theater, an enormous wooden construction. I once came to see
Mignon
[7]
here with Uncle Béla; he was so affected by it that his eyes filled with tears.

The parish church where István Széchényi
[8]
was married is here. Then the market, with the gypsy women’s covered stalls. To the left, the Zöldfa tavern; to the right, another, the Vén Diófa; then the palace of the Karácsony counts with its vast park, a baroque stone figure of Hercules on its Krisztina Street façade.

Along Márvány Street. We used to live in the house on the corner, overlooking the enormous Jankovics park, the magnificent mansion in the style of the National Museum at its center. The third house on the left from us was the famous Márvány Menyaszony restaurant. Gypsy music could be heard playing there every night until dawn, to the chagrin of my poor father.

Beyond the Southern Railway Station overpass there were only a few scattered houses amid the fields.

During my second year at the Academy, I used to tutor Géza Prahács, who lived at the start of Németvölgy Street. I would go out to see him along lanes between fields full of maize. There was only one house on the hillside, the Szép Olasznő tavern. The constabulary lodgings were not far from here, the last house on Németvölgy Street. Poor Dr. Rehák used to complain about how often he had to go out there along this road, as he was the doctor to the lodgings.

I headed down the street, now less rustic in character. I stopped for a minute in front of the house at the end of its long garden, and smiled at the memory of how, at month’s end, old Prahács—a chief inspector on the railway—used to hand me the fifteen korona, saying something (perhaps in Slovak) that sounded rather like “
netchy potchty
.”

I ought to go up to the Castle now and find the little Slovak restaurant for a pair of sausages with horseradish, washed down with a glass of good beer, for thirty-four kreuzer. Another time, though. I boarded the number fifteen tram—white stripe on a field of green—and headed home.

There I found Manczi and Vincze waiting for me. Vincze had been able once more to wriggle out of being called up.

Manczi took me to one side. “Have a word with Vincze, please. He’s managed to get off again, but he can’t hide how scared he is. It’s getting almost embarrassing.”

“Look, Manczi, dear. I’m superstitious. I don’t want to stir up anything unpleasant with my pessimistic thoughts, but every time I’ve seen fear that goes beyond what’s rational—when it becomes like a mania—the worst always happens. It might be some sort of instinctive awareness of the inevitable; or it might be that fear clouds the mind to the point where the judgment goes, you can no longer see what you need to do to save yourself, so that you behave irrationally, without realizing what you’re doing—I don’t think we’ll ever know. I’ve wondered about this myself to the point where the thing I’m most afraid of is fear.”

“He can’t sleep any more. He’s on sleeping pills.”

“I think the only thing that works is to be tough with yourself and take things as they come. It’s not all peaches and cream here at home either. I’ll try telling him a few of my funnier anecdotes from the front.”

I told him the one about the squaddies on the latrine. One says to the other: “My dear old Ma always used to say, ‘Son, if you’re going out for a shit, go as far from the house as you can.’ Well, I’ve come a good long way now.” The laughter sounded a bit strained. Vincze just smiled sourly.

On my return from Lovrana in March, there was a field postcard from him waiting for me.

“It’s horrific. I can’t bear any more. God be with you all.”

I never saw him again.

I had decided against putting in an appearance at the Fészek coffeehouse. One evening, I peered through the window and saw the old crowd, diminished in number, sitting at the usual table. Egry was playing chess with Piazza; the others were reading or talking. Teplánszky appeared to be leading the discussion. I hesitated a minute or two over whether to go in. In the end, I did not.

Instead, I had the happy idea that I would pay Károly Székely a visit. Gyula Berán and Vilmos Szamosi-Sóos
[9]
also lived on the top floor of a fairly recent block of studios at the corner of Zárda and Zivatar Streets. Again, I crossed the Chain Bridge by omnibus, but I got off before the tunnel and walked along the high street. Above the church on Corvin Square, Szalag Street rose in an S. Baron Iplinyi and his family used to live just at the start of it, on the first floor of an old house with vaulted ceilings. I used to go there for parties. Adrienne always gave me a warm welcome. The parents honored me with their attentiveness. I spent happy hours in the spacious apartment full of antique furniture. Even with a slight squint in one eye, Adrienne was quite pretty; her kindness knew no bounds. With her short but exceptionally well-proportioned figure, she was lively in company, darting about hither and thither among the guests. The whole family was quite short, with black hair and eyes. It was said they were Armenian.

Walking up the curve of the street, I made a little detour, then emerged via Kacsa Street to the start of Zárda Street. I remembered this steeply sloping road from my student days, when it still had the stations of the cross all the way up to the Calvary in front of the charming little chapel at the summit of the hill. Here, at the chapel, was the top end of the ancient Gül-Baba Street that led up from the Danube side. Beyond that, there was only scrub, weeds, and bushes, with groves of acacia trees; however, there were footpaths that led to the Calvary at Óbuda, whose marvelously well-made stations stood on the way up to the Trinitarian monastery at Kiscell, then on up the hillside.

Once, when my cousin Zoli was staying in Pest, we had walked up to the end of Zárda Street; there, on the edge of an arbor of acacias, we lay in the grass, slightly drugged by the sweet scent of acacia flowers, marveling at the view of Pest. Looking up along the river, we saw spires and domes brushed by the rays of the afternoon sun, the rich contours of the Castle Hill sharply silhouetted in bluish gray against a yellow-green sky. The distant hills of Gödöllő were bathed in tones of orange, pink, and violet. It was a marvelous sight.

If I remember right, it was from about this spot that the Viennese artist Rudolf Alt
[10]
painted his view of Pest-Buda during the construction of the Chain Bridge.

Zoli had broken the silence. “This would be the place to buy a piece of land.”

“Pricey. I hear they want twenty korona a fathom. I’m trying to persuade my father that we should jointly buy six hundred fathoms or so further up from us, where the Szép Olasznő is. Round there you can still get it at about two korona. But he’s terribly cautious about that sort of thing.”

We fell silent again, propped up on one elbow, the Gül Baba mansion with its four domed towers below us. Little did I know what a significant role it would later play in my life.
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