The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 (3 page)

I saw him again a year later. He and my grandmother were staying at Balatonfüred in the summer house, where the water had to be drawn by an ancient hand pump from an echoing well. He beckoned me into a stiflingly hot garden shed filled with the buzzing of wasps and the acrid smell of rotting pears. He sat in there, round-backed, on a rickety stool, palette in hand and dabbing at a hardboard panel clamped to a wobbly easel. I watched, not knowing what to say and anxious about the wasps. An oppressive hush lay everywhere. After a little while, he seemed to forget that I was there and to be immersed in thought. I slipped away as soon as I felt was polite. He only came into the house for meals and for his afternoon nap, when we all tiptoed around, even outside.

The last time I saw him was in the summer of 1967, when I was nine and he was dying. One evening, after the grown-ups had, one by one, visited him in his little bedroom, I was told that
nagyapu
wanted to see me. He lay on a narrow bed, unshaven, in an old flannel shirt. He could barely speak, but he gripped my hand, and I kissed his bristly cheek. The next morning I was told that he had been taken to the hospital, but everyone’s eyes were very red, and I realized that was not true.

I later learned that he could be heard, during his last night, crying out in his sleep: “Get down! Get down! They’re shooting from there too!”
[11]

He had told no one about the writing to which he must have devoted so many solitary hours. The manuscript—on small sheets of cheap notepaper from various sources, individually trimmed to size with a paper knife and carefully numbered—was found by my grandmother, after his death, in a locked strongbox. She too kept it secret, passing it before she died to my uncle Pali in Germany. He subsequently gave it to my father, who showed it to me in 2012.

The yellowing sheets were covered to the edges with tight handwriting, as if paper were too dear to be wasted. At first, I could scarcely make out more than a few words of the Hungarian. By chance, as I leafed through the forbidding-looking pages, my eye was caught by what I soon realized was a quite remarkable firsthand account of battle. The more I read, the stronger became my impression that it was worth the effort, and that this material might be of more than family interest.

I tentatively began this translation in 2013, initially with the shortest chapter I could find, as an experiment. By then—with the patient assistance of my mother, who laboriously photocopied the manuscript and arranged for it to be transcribed—I was able to work from a typed version, which made the task much easier. What began to emerge, and the reaction of the few friends I showed it to, was sufficiently encouraging to induce me to undertake the entire project.

The manuscript is incomplete. It is clear, from slips of paper on which Béla evidently planned the outline of the project, that he intended something much larger, covering his life up to at least 1945 and possibly beyond. The existing manuscript runs out at 1915, in mid-chapter. (My grandmother may have withheld, or destroyed, some parts: It is notable that what survives ends just before she and Béla met.) There are several complete chapters about his childhood, school days, and youth, which I have left for another day.

With some trepidation, I have taken it upon myself to be not only my grandfather’s translator but also his editor. I have performed the latter task acutely aware that he is not here to object, and conscious that the manuscript is now also a historical document, not lightly to be trifled with. At the same time, it seemed to me that a fragmentary work that gives out practically in mid-sentence is like an unfinished musical composition that ends in mid-bar: both need to be trimmed off, as it were, at a convenient point, even if this means leaving out some material that still bears the author’s hand. Luckily, such a point presented itself in this case in a way that is (to my mind, at least) a satisfying close to the work, almost as if it had been intended that way, yet leaving a sense that the story is still only half told.

Perhaps more controversially, I have made a number of cuts, chiefly in the final chapter, of sometimes lengthy digressions and discursive polemics on topics of little or no relevance to the narrative, such as the relationship between photography and fine art, which would have tried the patience of even the most engaged reader. I have felt able to justify these interventions on the grounds that, had Béla ever offered up his work for publication, he would probably have received similar advice from his editor, which I like to think he would graciously have accepted.

Otherwise, I have changed as little as possible. A very long last chapter has been divided into three, and I have supplied titles to these. The book’s title, which I have also supplied, is borrowed from the text. The epilogue is taken from the fragmentary material pruned from the end. Paragraph breaks and ellipses have been introduced where I felt that clarity and sense required them. In a few instances I have corrected what appear to be slips, the more significant of which I have recorded in the notes to the text.

My thanks are due to the people whose assistance made my task a great deal easier. Dr. Erika Östör was instrumental in arranging for the manuscript’s transcription and answered numerous queries. Ilona Csiszér and Erika Kaltenecker performed miracles in deciphering the text. Péter Geszti generously gave me his father’s copy of László Országh’s fine Hungarian-English dictionary of 1953. Anita Salamon of the Budapest School of Applied Arts kindly provided biographical information. Between them, Klaudia Trzcielinska and Siward Atkins cracked a Slavic puzzle. Stephen Unwin commented perceptively on an early draft of the translation and made valuable suggestions for the introduction. George Poulos, Judith Brown, Charles Darwent, and Tom Grant provided encouragement when it was most needed. I am especially grateful to Professor István Deák for the kind interest he showed in the project and for saving me from falling into historical error at several points in the introduction. (Errors that remain are entirely of my own making.) Above all, the tireless help of my mother and father, who patiently answered my innumerable questions—lexical, cultural, biographical, and geographical—made this translation possible, and I gratefully dedicate it to them.

—P
ETER
Z
OMBORY
-M
OLDOVAN
London, May 2014

1
. Of these, well over half were Jews, deported to Auschwitz by the Hungarian authorities, who were in charge again from 1939 to 1944.

2
. Defined with precision by Bryan Cartledge as “the upper stratum of the lesser nobility” in
The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary
(London: Timewell Press, 2006), chapter 6, n3. It has been estimated that half of all Magyars who were not servants or peasants could claim a title of nobility; see William M. Johnston,
The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History 1848–1938
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 337.

3
. For a rich and detailed evocation of this culture, see John Lukacs,
Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and Its Culture
(New York: Grove Press, 1988).

4
. Norman Stone,
The Eastern Front 1914–1917
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), 91.

5
. Cartledge,
The Will to Survive
, 312.

6
. Niall Ferguson,
The Pity of War
(London: Allen Lane, 1998), 93, 295–96.

7
. John Keegan,
The First World War
(London: Random House UK Ltd, 1998), 174–75.

8
. Three of these are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

9
. His motives for doing so may have been high-minded, although Cartledge observes in
The Will to Survive
that “the Order tended to be cold-shouldered by the nobility and gentry as social parvenus” (369).

10
. Almost half a million Jews were deported from Hungary to Auschwitz between May and July 1944.

11
. “
Feküdj! Feküdj! Onnan is lőnek!
”

The author (seated front, right of center) and companions on the beach at Novi Vinodolski, July 25, 1914—three days before Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia and the start of the First World War.

I
HAD SLEPT
badly. The previous day, the usual group of us had gone on an outing to Bribir.
[1]
Knoll, who was a county magistrate, had planned the itinerary. A stocky, energetic little man, he had even prepared a talk extolling the historic friendship between the Hungarians and the Croats, noting the castle’s former associations with Hungary. Judge Kriegl’s two daughters were lively young women, and easy company. Antal Hajnal, from the Franklin publishing house, was there; his factotum, Jankoviusz, flirted outrageously with one of the Kriegl girls. There was much eating and drinking of
vino nero
, and almost childlike high spirits. The fun had continued afterwards back at the pension, where we went on to beer. Having paid too little regard to what they say about mixing grape and grain, I was woken by nausea more than once during the night. There were no more serious ill effects, but I rose in the morning feeling like a somnambulist.

I decided to go for an early solitary swim. I managed to slip out unnoticed, and headed for the spit of land which separated the harbor from the open sea. On the far side stretched the sandy beach and the bathing station. When I reached the highest point on the spit, I slackened my pace and took in the mirror-flat water stretching to infinity. It was sleeping calmly now, though it was capable of such cruelty; even so, I loved it. I could never have enough of this beauty.

Unusual to have it all to myself. But a male figure was coming up towards me from the beach, in some haste. The bathing attendant.

I had no inkling that the course of my life would be decided in the next few minutes.

“Good morning.” He stopped. “Well, I say goodbye now.” He struggled a little with the Hungarian.

“Why? You’re not leaving, are you?”

“Leaving? I must go in the army. There is going to be war.”

“What are you talking about?” Aghast, I stared at him.

“Please. The notice is there on the wall of the bathing station.” As if in a trance, I grasped the hand he was holding out to me; mechanically, I thanked him for his services and gave him a five-korona piece.

Then I raced to the bathing station. It was all shut up, and on its wall was a notice which listed call-up dates by year of birth. I was to report for service at Veszprém—
Veszprém
!—with the Thirty-First Regiment of the Royal Hungarian Army by the fourth of August.
[2]
I stared at the poster as if I had just suffered a stroke, reading it over and over, until I realized that I was just looking at the words rather than taking in the meaning.

Only one word mattered: war.

There had been no war in Hungary for almost seventy years. When my grandfather spoke of 1848,
[3]
we would listen with bored half smiles: it was all so alien to us, so far removed from us. This was the twentieth century! Europe at equilibrium in the era of enlightenment and democratic humanism. It seemed impossible that a dispute should be decided by fighting. This couldn’t be true! They were going to shoot at me, or stab me, or I was going to shoot at a complete stranger with whom I had no quarrel, whom I didn’t even know, who would be mourned just as I would be, into whom I would jab a bayonet fixed to a six-kilo rifle and feel the cracking and juddering as it tore his chest open. “A soldier dies, that others may live.” Fine words! But I am twenty-nine, at the start of my career, filled with plans and the urge to create, with some early success. I want to work! I was born to create, and I loathe destruction of any kind.

My legs carried me on, as if automatically, along the familiar path. I had reached the bay. I stood transfixed by the sight of a sailing boat, gazing at its yard. What a pretty gallows it would make! One could hang a good half-dozen men from that boom.

I didn’t want to be among people. I turned off the shore towards the right, onto the coastal footpath they call the
lungomare
. There I found a stone bench. It must have been put up in someone’s memory: a medallion in the center was carved with a profile in relief. Yesterday, I might have taken a look at it; today, it no longer interested me.

Before me, the calm sea, the susurration of wavelets washing onto the sandy shore. The monster was asleep now. It cared nothing about what happened to the various beings that lived ashore. Sometimes it became enraged, and shook off the man-fleas that had dared to venture onto its back; after that, it took no further interest in them.

A scorpion made its way along the edge of the path. I might have trodden it underfoot yesterday. Today, I couldn’t be bothered. I watched it disinterestedly. Then it crawled into a gap in the rock.

I ought to sort out my affairs. Sebők had sent me an express letter yesterday with a subject for a drawing for the magazine,
[4]
and I had done nothing about it yet. I should be sending it off today. Never mind. They wouldn’t want any illustrations this week. Anyway, I ought to visit the editorial office. Better to telephone. I could do without the farewells and the handshaking. But having to say goodbye to my parents! And relations, and friends. I’d rather join up in secret.