Well, look at it, please, as you can see this would give you a bare prism shape that bumps up into the sky. And that, with your permission, is not me. I will not take on a project like that.
Indeed, his witty colleagues saw the facades of his structures, missing only a grand tympanum and Doric colonnade, as some sort of old-fashioned archaizing creation. Yet he never used archaizing elements in his work, just as he stayed away from showy Baroque or Renaissance ornamentation, which his colleagues liked and for which customers paid willingly.
This he could not get through his head. Why would they spend so much on nonsense when for the same amount they could pay for a comfortable and well-balanced space.
On all three floors, every room facing the street or courtyard had two symmetrically arranged windows, and he gave each only as much emphasis — with foliated profiles carved from Sóskút sandstone — as the human eye receives from brows and lashes. One profile he placed high, as in neoclassic buildings, well above the window openings, if for no other reason than to keep the rain from hitting the windowpanes directly, and the other, as if supporting the windowsills, as a corbel. The profiles, made of three narrow layers, took their pattern from Ionic stylobates. He ran a wider line of the same profiles not only above the storefronts on the ground floor but also under the well-elevated roof, as a kind of cornice to close off the vertical division of the facade with appropriate friezes.
The principles voiced by his contemporaries, their jests and objections to his work, were not without foundation. Because he tried stealthily to smuggle back the classical look not only with these subtly restrained references and markings but mainly with vertical segments of brick. Even he could not eliminate the tension between structural demands and the realized interior proportions, and as a result unabashed ornamentation came to characterize that era.
In October 1956, a few senseless submachine gun bursts sprayed this symbolic colonnade.
The bricks, fired many times, resisted the impact of the bullets well, though one could follow the arc of the bursts in the damage they caused. Here a brick was dislodged, there the edge of another was chipped off, somewhere else a bullet lodged in the mortar. The plastered surfaces had been painted a bright, sunny yellow, and in those days, segments of the brick facing were virtually dangling between the light corbels. Today, there is no trace of color; floating airborne dust and soot have turned the facade’s modest details gray, and from the profiles, friezes, and cornices pigeon shit has been dribbling daily, turning hard as stone.
Coming through the gate and walking by the long row of garbage cans, whose lids the cats continually pushed off, allowing whole packs of rats to feast even during the day, one would probably not notice that the filthy, begrimed walls were decorated with the same simple, layered profile as could be found on the facade. Because of a burst pipe on one floor that went unattended for months, huge patches of plaster had peeled off the attractively arched ceiling and bare bricks, exposing live electrical wires that dangled from between the fraying stalks of plastering reed. The concierge, who was still a stripling when ancient Samu Demén had him brought up to the capital from Jászberény, looked up at the ceiling several times a day because, to be honest, he was anticipating a disaster. He feared that the loosened mortar between the bricks in the vaulting would not hold and the enormous, slowly rusting ceiling lamp would come crashing down.
First as assistant concierge and then as concierge, he has been taking care of this house for more than thirty years, and he’s been doing it with unsparing and passionate enthusiasm, as if he could not forget that his life would have turned out very differently if not for this job.
Mentally he was fit, aggressive, sly, and mean, but he had serious physical limitations; in his early childhood, in his own environment, he had been drifting dangerously toward a speedy end. Somehow he was in everybody’s way, useless for regular work in the fields, beaten by his siblings, kicked, knocked over, and neither his mother nor grandmother had spared him; if by chance providence hadn’t snapped him out of there he’d probably have ended up in the corner of the stable, an outcast. He had an exceptional relationship with animals. Since the death of old Demén he has lived as one who must work off a loan that providence gracefully has advanced him by tending to an inanimate object, this building.
Unexpectedly, in the last months, his enthusiasm has faltered, something was used up or exhausted in him, something snapped. There were no signs of illness, but he realized from one moment to the next that with his waning strength the deterioration was too far gone for him to arrest. And suddenly his adored daughters also became unmanageable; they drank, swore, did not come home at night. Total collapse was sneaking up on him.
Since the garbage man stopped coming every day and showed up only twice a week and sometimes not at all, this task too fell to the concierge and he didn’t know how to cope with it. He did not get any new cans, but he had somehow to store the building’s ever-accumulating trash when a week went by without its being collected. Pox on them all. He swore too, why not. He got hold of some rusty paint barrels, soldered handles on them by which he dragged them out to the curb. If the garbage people didn’t come, he’d drag the barrels back at noon. From other barrels’ bottoms, he made lids for the ones with handles.
He kept doing everything, of course he did, but in the meantime he thought that if the big lamp was going to fall out of the vaulted ceiling, let it fall and bring down the ceiling and the whole building with it. Let everything collapse, everything has to rot eventually. In the past, he wouldn’t have dared think such thoughts, but now it felt good to think this way, that’s what made him a free man. He still kept his eye on everything, but his helplessness, and his fury over his helplessness, spread wider and wider. He could not prevent the stench of rot invading the entranceway that Samu Demén had so lovingly designed.
Back then, horse-drawn carriages were the means of transportation for genteel folk, and Demén had designed a driveway that took into account larger baggage wagons as well. The finely proportioned, slightly convex, and sensible driveway, paved in insanely yellow ceramic tiles, was appreciated later by people who rode no longer in horse-drawn carriages but in automobiles, streetcars, and taxis, or who simply walked. It was obvious that somebody had taken great care to anticipate how all the expected movements in this space might take place unhindered and in easy comfort. He had even considered that horses had to urinate and that urine is yellow and must somehow drain away. Rats now used the small openings in the sewage pipes that were hidden under the wide stone ledges on both sides of the driveway; they were just the right size for rats. With long years of labor, they had chewed their way through the finely wrought brass drain-netting so they could reach the garbage cans unnoticed. In the old days, the wide stone ledges, useless today, served as a place where one could step from one’s carriage, and they were wide enough to keep the follow-up step steady as well. When the planner figured that there should be enough room to open the carriage doors on both sides without pressing either the passengers or coachmen against the wall, he was thinking of their dignity. Although no carriage or automobile has turned into this driveway for a long time now, the need for dignified behavior has been well guarded by the dimensions of this space.
The building received arrivals with a certain solemnity, as did the stairwell, separated from the driveway by an enormous windbreak. One’s first glance at the surprisingly well-proportioned stairwell, bathed in natural light on every floor, would be through the huge, colorful ground-glass surfaces of the windbreak. Its four panes survived the war, but during a nocturnal disturbance one was shattered. Such a large sheet of glass was nowhere to be had; the tenants complained about the draft, and the concierge replaced it with plywood. Still, the space preserved its beauty. One could step in here without fear of immediately bumping into the elevator door. Sometimes a whole group of people would arrive at once while another might be on its way out; in a genteel building one should take such possibilities into account.