The Phoenix Land (10 page)

In such surroundings five hundred crowns soon disappeared, and in such surroundings too, it was impossible to call a halt. The only way to avoid spending money was to stay away. This, however, required the steadfast character of a Cato, and neither of us had such a character. Soon we were drawn into the game and, no matter whether our luck was good or bad, somehow we always had money, from our winnings or from moneylenders.

As far as I was concerned, this phase did not last long as I was soon sent first to Fiume and then
en poste
abroad. Afterwards I only weakened once or twice, but Mihály, who had inherited a truly immense fortune as soon as he came of age, continued without a pause.

It was in those last years, when we were nearly always in each other’s company, that Mihály’s character was finally fixed
forever
. And it was then that those peculiarities, which had hitherto been suppressed, started to emerge for all to see.

One of these was daredevilry, which must have had its roots in his childhood when he had been so overprotected. From this sprang the assertive spirit of ‘I’ll show you!’ of which I will give two examples.

The one I recall now happened at the end of the 1890s in Vienna, when he insisted on going up in a newly designed
balloon
whose inventor wanted to try it out for the first time. This inventor, I understand, had created a balloon that, if one wanted to come down, had to have the skin torn. The balloon would then transform itself into a parachute and, according to its eminent inventor, gently deposit the passengers on the ground. Mihály Károlyi and a friend, Stanislaus Deym, volunteered to fly with him at their own risk so as to try out this excellent invention. The takeoff went well, and the wind took them way over the borders of Bohemia. Then the inventor ordered them to climb out of the basket and cling to the lowest part of the net which covered the balloon and which was much wider than the basket itself. So there they were, at a height of one thousand metres, hanging by their hands alone and with nothing between them and the
ground. A charming situation! Then the inventor tore the hull, upon which balloon, basket and its three passengers dropped like a stone to the ground – how far and how long it took, no one knew. Despite all this, the experiment was in one sense a success since no one was killed; but not much of a success, for all three were found unconscious in a field and carted off to a hospital in some neighbouring town. I well remember how astonished his uncle Sándor and my aunt Clarisse were when they received a telegram from Mihály, whom they had thought was in Vienna, saying that he was in Budweis, that he had flown there and was well. I don’t think he ever entertained them with the balloon trip’s more delightful details, nor anything of the famous inventor.

I was with him on the occasion of the second adventure. We were both staying at Abbazia with our families when we heard there was to be some famous party that night in Fiume.

Abbazia, just down the coast, was a favourite winter retreat for the Hungarian aristocracy. I do not recall if it was to be a masked ball or some informal hop-and-skip dance. We didn’t tell anyone, but that night when all the others had gone to bed, we went down to where there were small sailboats kept for hire by those who wanted to go bathing up the coast. We woke up the boatmen; but no one was willing to take us as far as Fiume because there was a strong wind over the Quarnero and the red warning flag was hoisted above the mole. However, nothing would daunt Mihály and he finally, for a horrendous sum of money, persuaded one of the men to take us across; and so off we went. By the time we were barely four hundred metres from the shore the wind had become so strong that we would have capsized if we had not hauled down the sails of that miserable little boat and rowed instead. We rowed, all three of us, all night, arriving at Fiume some time after dawn when all the revelry had long been over. I was never so close to drowning.

Wildly excessive daring characterized all his activities. He drove a car at breakneck speed, in spite of only seeing with one eye, and having to wear glasses at all times. Twice he was picked up for dead and suffered from severe concussion. He hunted, bought prize-winning show-jumpers and started to play polo,
which is a dangerous game even for good horsemen, and Mihály was a poor rider and violent with it. That he survived at all was due only to the fact that from a puny child he had grown into a big strong man.

All these characteristics were caused by his innate need to play with fire, seeking danger so as to show everyone not only that he was not weaker or more awkward than other people but, on the contrary, was outstandingly courageous and, indeed, braver than anyone else, and especially to show those who had looked down upon him in childhood that he could now do better than any of them. So that everyone should marvel, he made a point of being different from others, unusual, and a man to be feared. It was also important to him that by will alone he could overcome all difficulties and cope with any challenge. It was all ‘I’ll show them!’ and stemmed from that pampered childhood when
everything
was permitted to him. All his life, from a baby, as a child and then as a young man growing up, he had been the centre of everything. As a grown man with an immense fortune and
surrounded
by flatterers, how could he have turned out differently?

With such a background and upbringing, reared in an
hothouse
atmosphere of abstruse confusing ideology, itself far removed from reality by its heady mixture of violent chauvinism and ideals of international cooperation, and violently self-willed withal, he stepped onto the platform of Hungarian politics.

At first he surprised everybody with his energy and his
determination
to get his own way. However, little by little he became wilder and wilder and more and more unpredictable, veering off in unexpected directions and down dangerous unexplored paths … on and on he went but never as a leader imbued with new ideas but rather one who was carried away by bombastic slogans and by the dizzying height of the role in which he had cast
himself
.

The government was lavish with numerous declarations during the first hours of the revolution. Among so many, the most famous was the message issued by Károlyi on the 2 November,
which he addressed ‘to all the nations of the world’ no less and in which he declared that Hungary was now a neutral state and from that day on was at peace with the whole world.

‘As of today Hungary is a neutral state!’ shouted all the
newspapers
in black type on their front pages, and their more gullible readers were all thrilled, saying to themselves: ‘We are neutral! How wonderful! How marvellously simple! We’ve said it, and immediately it is so. What a wonderful statesman that Károlyi is. Fancy knowing just what everyone longed for!’ They had the example of those happy neutral states before them who had not only avoided the bloodletting but also had grown so rich that they were now the envy of all. ‘Let the Germans, the French, anybody, everywhere, go on fighting! It’s of no matter to us! We are not interested any more. Perhaps it will even do us some good. Perhaps we can even make some money from it, like the other neutral states!’ the poor things were saying happily to each other.

Perhaps some wise rabbi of the ancient faith was the only man who, sitting in his room in the Orczy court of Budapest’s old ghetto, surrounded, I imagine, by copies of the Talmud, torahs, and other holy books, would have smiled at the thought of this folly. What is this sudden transformation of a state that lost the war into a neutral power, the holy man may have reflected, but a legacy of an old ceremony still practiced by some orthodox Jews? According to their custom, when a family member is sick and likely to die they send for the rabbi. He, in his turn, does away with the dying man’s name (let us call him Moise) by
pronouncing
the words: ‘You are no longer Moise. No one here is called Moise; from today your name is Ephraim.’ This is necessary so that, when the Angel of Death enters the house and calls to the dying man ‘Moise! Come with me!’ they can reply: ‘What Moise? There is no Moise here. Moise must be somewhere else!’

‘But this sick man here in his bed,’ asks the Angel of Death, ‘isn’t he the Moise I seek?’

‘Oh no!’ they can all reply truthfully, ‘This is Ephraim, with whom you have nothing to do!’

So the Angel of Death can only say, ‘Excuse me’, take his leave and seek Moise elsewhere. Echoes of this arcane custom could
well have occurred to our old rabbi as he pondered the Károlyi government’s message to the world, smiling ruefully as he weighed up its historical significance while possibly even
despising
it a little as just one more example of the goyim, as so many times in the past, once again following an archaic Hebrew tradition.

We should not be surprised, therefore, that this noisy
declaration
of neutrality by Károlyi was received with confidence and joy not only by the general public, who in those days understood foreign affairs even less than they do today, but also by those who had some claim to know better. Today we know everything that followed. We know that Károlyi’s foreign contacts were to prove quite worthless, with the result that he was completely
uninformed
about the power and also the real condition of the
victorious
nations, and so his bold enterprise was not solidly based on any security of contract either by an exchange of official
documents
or even by a verbal promise. His ideas were all based, on the other hand, on erroneous suppositions which sprang, like empty phantoms created only in his own mind in the likeness of some wishful theory, from some visionary fantasy by which all nations were now ready to embrace and love each other – and were prepared to do so with unthinking haste so as to be prepared for some imminent apocalypse.

This is the only reasonable explanation for all the Károlyi government’s actions, from the first days of power until the last moment when they handed over that power to the Communists. It can only have been a firm conviction that world revolution was even then about to break out at once, immediately and
everywhere
. They gambled everything on this single ticket, on this one possibility – just as a punter at the races will risk his entire fortune on the win of a single horse or on just one number at roulette. All their decrees, including those ‘people’s laws’ they were to issue, came from the convictions of just ten men that this idea was not fantasy but reality, never for a moment
understanding
that they would be valid only if such a dream actually came to pass. In all other circumstances their actions would prove at best harmful and at worst fatal. But none of this bothered them, so hypnotized were they by this single improbable theory. They
cared nothing for any other ideas; indeed, they did not even
consider
the possibility of anything different.

This degree of recklessness and ignorance could only have been believed possible by anyone who did not know the new leaders well and, especially, Károlyi himself. Indeed, anyone who witnessed the confidence with which they publicly expressed their guiding principles, who heard the decisiveness with which they declared their infallibility and sensed the Olympian height from which they smiled down in pity on any mere mortal who might voice some warning or hint at
misgivings
, could be forgiven for taking it as read that behind all this self-confidence there had to be some secret agreement with the Great Powers, probably starting with France, and that, for the new Hungarian government, everything they were doing today was but the first phase of a plan that, once successfully achieved, would be followed tomorrow by untold benefits for all. That no one then realized what was actually happening is difficult to credit today; but it must be accepted that those new leaders were truly extraordinary. As it turned out, they managed to destroy everything that would have ensured the nation’s real strength. The minister of defence saw ‘no need for soldiers’ while the
minister
of finance declared he would raise taxes to a level ‘the world has never seen’! They adopted a whole sheaf of contradictory slogans which could be brandished in coffeehouse debates to confound their hearers but which, when put into effect, proved merely destructive of essential institutions. It was as if they had all eaten from the ‘Tree of Ignorance’! The foreign minister named only one ambassador: Roza Bédi-Schwimmer was to be sent to Bern – a woman to Switzerland, whose government was at that moment engaged in a battle over female suffrage! Of course, she was not received. Similarly, as soon as the minister for finance had declared his intentions all capital went into hiding or disappeared abroad. At the same time, although the minister of defence’s speech was generally applauded, the army melted away.

Even those highly disciplined army divisions that returned in good order from the Italian Front, disintegrated as soon as they were across the Hungarian border. Examination of the details of
how the army was to dissolve itself so disastrously reveals ever more inane stupidities. Once the government had declared its policy of disarmament, officials were sent to the border posts to await the arrival of the troops and to direct them, still fully armed, back to their home villages. Thus, instead of being
disarmed
, the men still possessed their weapons and were free to fire them off at will, which they did to conduct whatever vendettas they had a mind to. All violence went unpunished, for the old officials no longer had any authority and the new government’s agents no power. And, with no one possessing either power or authority, there was anarchy everywhere.

That anarchy spread so rapidly was characteristic of the times. One result of this was that, when Károlyi wanted to go to Belgrade to attend the armistice discussions, nobody, not the government, nor the ministry of defence, nor even the
commanding
officer of the Budapest garrison, could find the twenty or thirty men needed as guards on the special train. As a last resort, they were forced to turn to the Soldiers’ Council, which was gracious enough to furnish the necessary guard. This
happened
on 6 November, barely a week after the glorious revolution when Károlyi’s personal halo was as yet untarnished
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