The air raids grew more frequent. Russian planes were now involved, and they did considerable damage to the brick buildings of the city. The frequent air raids also damaged the electric power lines, so the streetcar service deteriorated and, more to the point, all the lights went out. On such occasions we had to stop reading and could not listen to the radio. Our building received its power from an auxiliary substation, with the result that the power came back on from time to time when the rest of the city had none. In many houses the water system stopped functioning too, because the pressure dropped: at best there was a trickle of water on the ground floor. Many restaurants didn’t even open, or, if they did, didn’t stay open for long and could serve nothing because there was nothing to serve. I concluded that the time had come for my sons to move in with me, because it was getting more and more dangerous to be out on the street. My decision was influenced in large measure by the destruction of Margaret Bridge. The bridge had been mined: evidently the Germans planned to blow all the Danube bridges up when they retreated. But this explosion went off much sooner than they intended, for reasons we do not know. At the time the bridge was full of pedestrians, and a two-car streetcar, packed with people, was on its way across. All the passengers died in the river.
My younger son got to my apartment by taking a long detour. I did not let him return to the Hászkas.
My sons continued in the role of godsons: others in the building knew them as such from earlier visits, and had been told that they would be moving in.
Ever since the throat-slitting incident, I had been doing my best to avoid all unnecessary conversation with our landlady, but now I had to turn on all my charm to find a solution to this new situation. I wanted her to cook a hot meal for us every day. The woman was fond of money, and so, even though at first she showed reluctance, she couldn’t refuse when I said that, in addition to paying her, I would keep her supplied with all her household needs, so that she wouldn’t have to take care of these things herself. Later, in connection with this cooking arrangement, it transpired that there were two refugees living in the maid’s room next to the little kitchen. This was the same room that I had already rented from her, as a reserve, a couple of months earlier.
The landlady explained that she had taken pity on the two refugees and given them kitchen space and somewhere to live. Maybe I was wrong: perhaps she had a good heart after all. Or maybe not. Perhaps she simply wanted to get double rent on the maid’s room.
‘With all this new activity in the kitchen, perhaps we should invite them to eat dinner too,’ she added.
We could hardly refuse the request, and so at the first dinner we met the refugees. One glance and I saw that they were in the same boat as we were. The woman was a likable person, fortyish, with a nice smile. She was registered as a war refugee and talked constantly about the good life she had once enjoyed – living in a well-appointed house, with a big household, lots of servants, in fact like a countess. So we simply named her the countess. Her friend, whose shaving habits left something to be desired, was a tall, intelligent-looking man of around sixty, whose outward behavior betrayed internal anxiety. This anxiety reached a level of downright torture if anyone at the table asked him questions.
‘Where are you from?’
‘From Nógrádverőce,’ he said, after a moment’s thought.
Ozma suddenly sat up, his local patriotism stirring. ‘Who do you know in Verőce? I have a summer house there; that’s why I ask.’
The man’s embarrassment was so palpable that he made me uncomfortable too, and I felt the need to intervene.
‘Mr Fényes lived in Verőce fifty years ago, when he was a child. And you’ve lived there for only two years. He’s hardly likely to know you as a local celebrity.’
Ozma must have grasped the situation from the way I snapped at him, because he fell silent. We went back to discussing the countess’s wealth.
After the meal I took the man aside. ‘You have no reason for fear, at least not from us,’ and he almost fainted when he learned that we also were Jews.
For the most part we led our lives confined to the apartment. One night I discovered some unexpected guests. Turning on the light, I happened to look at the wall. There, walking quietly and with dignity across it, was a bedbug. My captivity in Russia had taught me how to deal with these wild creatures without having to touch them. With the help of a strip of paper and a match, I was able to incinerate our little bloodsucker. This was generally the best way of exterminating them, but it did of course leave a mark on the wall.
I decided not to mention my discovery to the landlady for fear that she would attribute the arrival of bedbugs to my various illegitimate overnight guests and forbid me to let them in. Because pest-exterminating firms were no longer functioning in the city, we could not get outside help. With no other options available, I took to turning on the lights several times during the night, when everyone else was asleep, and using my tried and true method for eliminating the insects. The burn marks on the wall increased from day to day. But finally one of these hunting expeditions had its glorious culminating moment: there were no bedbugs on the wall. But true happiness is lasting happiness. Even after several days there were still no bedbugs to be seen: they had evidently retreated, but the burn marks on the wall bore witness to our previous struggles. It occurred to me that I could use two wall-maps bought some months before, one of Hungary and one of Europe, to cover the burns. I delegated responsibility for this enterprise to my son. I was a great believer in shared labor.
The two maps with their bright colors lent a certain unaccustomed freshness to the room. Hanging there, they looked like two surrealist paintings. But later they became not just interesting decorations but the basis for an exciting, not to say impassioned, game.
With the city under siege it was almost impossible to leave the house, and so to pass the time we began to ask one another questions based on the maps.
‘How many villages in France?’
‘How many rivers in Italy?’
‘How far from Budapest to Munich?’
The winner was the person whose guess came closest to the information provided by the map. Afterwards, as tends to happen with such games, precise rules developed, along with certain rewards, in addition to the glory of winning. We had in reserve three boxes of Gerbeaud cookies (before the war Gerbeaud made the finest cookies in Hungary). We each took one of the boxes and from here on the winners were rewarded with cookies. This new game led us to abandon chess, in which my older son was already so proficient that no one but he stood a chance of winning.
The new game had its moments of crisis. I was pretty lucky with my answers, with the result that one day my younger son asked, ‘Don’t get angry, Uncle Lexi, but are you preparing your answers in advance?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, for example, before asking us the distance from Paris to London you check the map so that you end up with the best answer.
‘You mean, I cheat?’
‘Not normally, but maybe in games.’
I felt that self-defense would be beneath my dignity, so I simply said, ‘In my regiment I was the best judge of distances. You’ve heard me say that before, so I didn’t just invent it. Let’s do things a different way: we’ll take it in turns to ask the questions, which will give everyone the same chance.’
For several days our games continued in harmonious tranquillity, using the new rules. But luck continued to favor me.
One morning, as we were about to start playing, my elder son spoke: ‘I speak not just for myself but also for George. Godfather, your approach to the game is not entirely above reproach.’
‘I don’t understand. What are you complaining about now?’
‘Ever since we started, you’ve been winning. In itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. The trouble is, you eat your winnings.’
I was taken aback by his remark. ‘As far as I know, there’s no prohibition against eating what you win. You know I like sweet things.’
‘It’s true it’s not actually prohibited, because no one thought of it. But it is unfair, because you reduce the chances of our winning the cookies back.’
George chimed in, ‘From our perspective, this is more a moral than a material question.’
His remark showed that he wanted to hang on to the moral high ground. I tried without success to explain that, even if I didn’t eat the cookies, there was no certainty that they would win them back. And if they lost their entire stock, how would they continue the game? On credit? With an IOU? At what point would it be permissible for me to eat my winnings? We could come to no agreement on these matters and so the game ended. To restore peace, I magnanimously proposed that we play chess for cookies. I had accumulated enough and so I felt able to make the proposal. We began to play. But it became clear that my sons, generally better chess players than me, played less calmly than usual now that their last cookies were on the table – with the result that they lost more often than they won. So we had to abandon the contest and go back to playing for glory alone.
Paul now rediscovered his skill at chess and began to beat me more soundly than before. Our landlord the captain was already in despair: he had not won a game in weeks. In fact, he no longer dared play chess with Paul. So I had to play some consolation games with him to bring back his good humor.
One December day we had a wonderful surprise.
Danyi, Paul’s friend, came to visit, unwashed, unshaven, but with a big knapsack on his back.
‘How are you doing, Jancsi?’
‘Not too well. Imagine, I’ve walked all the way from Soroksár. The Russians have got that far. Our whole ditch-digging team simply ran away. As soon as they heard the Russians had arrived, they took to their heels. It occurred to me that everyone would have abandoned the village office as well, but that they would have left their rubber stamps behind, so I went round and picked them up, thinking, Uncle Lexi, that you might be able to use them. I’ve brought them all.’ And he proudly put on the table a total of thirty-seven different rubber stamps.
‘Thank you for thinking of me.’
But secretly I was a little concerned. What on earth would I do with so many stamps, especially now, when everything was coming to an end?
‘Anyway, go and wash up, and eat something, to get your spirits back.’
Danyi became the terror of our landlady: he was so fond of eating that he ate everything that was put on the table. I enjoyed watching his hearty appetite: he was able to put away two pounds of sausages without a bit of bread. For Christmas I gave him a set of ration coupons, valid as of January i. The nearby black market in coupons was still in operation.
Two days before Christmas, the Russians advanced as far as Széna Square, in the heart of Buda. Members of the Szálasi cabinet and other prominent Arrow-Crossers had been hastily packing up everything they could find and moving westwards in commandeered trucks and taxis. There wasn’t a rental car or a taxi left in the city.
On December 24, the radio announcer read a new decree whose brutality and cruelty exceeded pretty much anything we had encountered before:
Everyone sixteen years old or older must report for military service.
Anyone who fails to obey this general mobilization is to be shot.
Anyone who hides Jews is to be shot.
Anyone who hoards merchandise, or sells at a higher price, is to be shot.
At the end of each statement the words ‘is to be shot’ appeared (actually the Hungarian words were more like ‘is to be butchered’).
In other words, anyone who disobeyed the decree would not be tried by law, not even by court martial, but simply murdered on the spot. The text of the decree showed that the Arrow Cross government had lost the game, and also its collective equilibrium: its only hope was to buy a little time through out-and-out terror. The desperate tone of the decree only reinforced our hopes.
‘This is no longer the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the end,’ said Ozma.
Our hopeful mood prompted us, and not just our Christian landlords, to celebrate Christmas. We had one can of food with no label on it: the label had come unstuck over time. So we didn’t know what was in it. The shining can, mute as to its contents, was a steady source of fantasy to us. We speculated constantly on what it might contain: goulash with paprika perhaps? or corned beef?
We decided to celebrate by opening the can. Lacking a canopener, we used a hammer and chisel to cut round the top of the can and opened it with much excitement. To our great surprise the two-pound can contained pineapple, which even in more peaceful times was reckoned a rare delicacy. We had not seen pineapple in years, let alone eaten it. We decided that we would each eat one piece a day, and, because there were five of us, we could brighten our lives with it for the next four days.
In the course of my life, whenever I have tried to economize, I have come out the loser. It was the same on this occasion: on the third day our exquisite pineapple pieces went bad on us and we had to throw away the last day’s supply.
The landlord and his wife invited us to Christmas dinner, but they did not seem to be in a holiday mood, in fact seemed downright gloomy. I thought this might be because the landlady’s stepdaughter, who was an Arrow-Crosser, had just left to escape to the west. But it turned out that their unhappiness had a different cause. While we were still at dinner the landlord pulled me aside. He was visibly flustered and evidently did not know how to start the conversation.
‘Lexi, what do you think? Will I get into trouble for having furniture taken from Jews?’
‘Why would you get into trouble? You got it from the government, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but what if the Arrow Cross government collapses?’ he whispered.
‘It won’t collapse,’ I said, to cheer him up.
‘But what if it does?’ he went on insistently, evidently looking for further reassurance.
‘Do you have a receipt, to show that you paid for the furniture?’ I asked, pretending to be an expert on such matters. The captain scratched his head.
‘I would be happy to pay, but so far nobody’s told me how much.’
‘Try to get a receipt,’ I advised.
‘I’m afraid it’s too late for that,’ he said despairingly.
‘Surely you can get one. You have such good connections,’ I assured him.
He made a long face and, with a gesture of hopelessness, turned back to the dinner table. We sat down again.
It’s amazing how easily one loses one’s common sense when greed takes over. My landlord had, in middle-class terms, a perfectly decent apartment, and he had no need for the collection of beat-up old pieces of furniture that he had acquired. Getting them there had required a great deal of energy: they had transported them through the streets on a tiny handcart because there were no other means available. In the apartment there was hardly enough room for the furniture, which effectively blocked free movement around their room. A stouter, big-bellied person couldn’t have even got into the hall. It was perhaps just as well that they spent relatively little time in the apartment anyway: most of the time they were in the air-raid shelter. And now they were frightened that a change of regime would bring some kind of trouble: fear was written all over their faces.
The Russians’ military victories and their gradual advance on the city gave me hope and a measure of secret joy. But our sense of celebration was short-lived: we had to figure out what to do about the emergency decree.
The proclamation of general mobilization meant that every man between the ages of sixteen and fifty had to report for military duty. My son Paul clearly belonged in that category. His biological age was eighteen, and his identity papers indicated that he was seventeen. Tall and well-built, he looked more like nineteen than seventeen. There was no way we could rearrange his identity papers to make him sixteen or younger. I carefully studied the decree, looking for exceptions, but none of them seemed applicable to Paul. There was nothing for it but to order him to stay in the apartment for the time being. For some time now we had not been going to the air-raid shelter in the basement, because our ground-floor apartment was at almost the same level as the shelter and in some ways a better place to be if the building got hit: it was easier to dig people out of a ground-floor apartment than out of an air-raid shelter.
Because we did not spend time in the shelter, it was hardly possible that Paul would catch anyone’s unwanted attention because of his age. But since our building had no running water, it was now George’s job to carry buckets of water to the apartment from the basement of the neighboring market. Up to now, the job had been shared by the two boys, depending on who ‘owed’ a work assignment. I should explain the system. Between seven and ten o’clock each evening the electricity was turned off. Our passion for betting had taken over again and during the day we laid bets on the exact time the current would go off. The person who came closest to guessing right was declared the winner for the day. If we had no chocolate or cookies to bet with, we could offer relief from an hour’s work assignment in place of a Gerbeaud cookie. Sometimes we had enough manpower stored up to last for days or even weeks.
In the evenings, sitting in the dark, we realized how hungry we were. As we sat round the tile stove that heated the room, one of us suggested that we could bake potatoes in the ashes. The experiment was such a success that it became a nightly routine. We invited the landlord and his wife too, and our potato baking became the high point of the day. Baked potatoes smell wonderful. We never investigated whether it was the smell of the potatoes or the word of the landlord and landlady that caused the entire building to learn that Lexi Szabó and his family baked potatoes every evening, but not an evening passed without one or two people dropping in, on one pretext or another, to sample our potatoes.
Even the new threat of summary execution, like all bad things, had its good side. Café and restaurant owners were so terrified about food hoarding that they opened up again. Even though they kept their shutters closed, one door was always open, and, if nothing else, you could always get a cup of hot tea, though sometimes without sugar.
The merchants were frightened, too, and sold whatever merchandise they had left. One of them, in our neighborhood, was shot to death for selling beans above the official price. The streets presented a depressing scene. On József Avenue, hoisted on a lamp-post, hung two men. Attached to the neck of one of them was a piece of paper saying: ‘This is what happens to a Jew who hides.’ Around the neck of the other a paper said: ‘This is what happens to a Christian who hides a Jew.’
The wind shook both papers with the same indifference.
Passers-by turned their heads away as they hurried past, their faces blank, but there were a few who gathered in groups to comment.
I also stopped and risked a remark: ‘Maybe it would be better to let the law courts deal with people we think guilty.’
A red-faced fellow glared at me so angrily that I felt it best to keep quiet.