It’s true, friend. As long as I live I’ll be tasting the last glass of bubbly I drank that night in the bar. I was sitting close to the president and I saw the head screw looking at his watch. He stood up, leant over the table.
“With all due respect, comrade, I have to go. There’s work to be done at dawn,” he said quietly, and with one hand he demonstrated what kind of work that would be. The president looked serious. He nodded and said aloud, “I know.”
“At six,” the head screw whispered, “Double act.”
“Then you must go, Ferenc,” said the president. “After that, go home — and get a good snooze in.”
The guy gave a broad smile.
“Yessir, comrade!” he said, and clicked his heels.
They shook hands. After the screw had marched out military fashion, a short silence settled on the bar. The disooze was crooning fine prose into the president’s ear. Those sitting further off couldn’t hear what the screw had said, but you could see from their expressions they got the general idea. The saxophonist folded his arms as though he were engaged in some spiritual exercise. The pianist leaned over the keys, wiping his glasses like there was nothing he could do about anything. The accordionist lit a butt to show that he was through with art for now, that he was on his break. We avoided each other’s eyes, but we all knew what “six o’clock” and “double act” and “snooze” meant. It wasn’t just those, like us, who had heard the words who understood. Others did too, all those who saw the way he said good-bye.
The president had had enough of smooching. He tapped the fleshy upper part of the disooze and gestured to Comrade Waiter that the serious partying was about to begin and the band should strike up. He winked at us too, in a lordly way, to get us playing again. That’s the time the stink started.
At first I thought someone had left the john door open. Or one guest had been caught short, and whoops — too late! I looked around but didn’t see anything suspicious. Discreetly, carefully, and because she was close to me, I tried to sniff the disooze. The patchouli was thick on her like gas on a marsh. But the stink rose above it. I was astonished that the others couldn’t smell it as I did. It was as if they hadn’t noticed anything.
The sax player took up the tune. We played our hearts out. We swung, but the stink was still there, in fact growing stronger. It was like there was a crack in some pipe in the sewers. It was everywhere, mixed in with cigarette smoke, the smell of fine food, and the high odor of expensive wine. It wasn’t like lime or dishwater or fertilizer. And I couldn’t tell where it was coming from: not from the corridors outside or from under the floor. I took a sly sniff of my own hand in case something had stuck to it. But there was nothing special there. All I knew was that never in my life had I smelled anything so foul.
I drummed away, dutifully. But then I started feeling sick. I looked around me. There, in the dim light, was high society chattering, sipping, and grinding away like nobody’s business. They were our customers, our guests. They sat in their places quite happily without reacting to the smell. It was just like it used to be in the old days … they showed nothing — there was no panic, no twisting and turning — it was like they hadn’t noticed they were up to their ears in hell. The stench hurt my nose. But I carried on, looking on in astonishment, everyone in the bar behaving like the gentry, people calmly carrying on while everything was seething around them, like everything was just as it should be. I remembered what Sweetheart told me, how middle classes never show what they’re feeling, but continue polite, not moving a muscle, however much things stink and fester. It was just like that here. They could afford to be like that, because they were in charge now. You really would have taken them for gentry. It was just that there was this terrible smell everywhere. My stomach was heaving. In a break I stood up and quietly went to the john. No one paid any attention to me.
But the stench followed me. I stood in the john staring into the bowl. My head was a mess because all I understood was that something was over, done for, and that I couldn’t go back in there and drum, not ever again. It wasn’t my head talking — it was my stomach. I had a coat hanging in the cloakroom, one that used to belong to my dad, that I kept for cold mornings. I hung the tux up on the hook, pulled on the coat, slipped my black tie into the pocket, and whispered to the attendant that I had a bad stomach and needed some air. It was coming on for dawn. I went straight to the station and sat in the waiting room. I figured that since my AVO appointment was for noon they wouldn’t start looking for me before then. There was an express bound for Győr. That’s what I was waiting for.
I couldn’t tell you, not if you twisted my arm, what I was thinking while waiting for the train. I could spin you some story about patriotic feeling or this or that other thing, but I wasn’t feeling patriotic or nostalgic. Because the thing hit me like a blow to the gut in the middle of an AVO exchange of ideas. I thought of Papa and I thought of Mama, but they were like images on a screen at a movie, there one minute, gone the next. People I met here in America would later tell me how they were all broken up with regret when they set out. One guy said he folded a piece of Hungarian soil in his handkerchief. Another had stitched photographs into the lining of his coat. But I took nothing with me, just the black tie that I had to wear for work in the bar. I didn’t brood over it. All I thought was I had to get out as fast as possible. Győr was the city I had to head for, because I’d heard it was nearest the border. The guy who told me gave me an address he’d got from someone who’d done the trip himself. I figured the tobacco I had with me was enough to last me the journey. I had a little pouch of it on my back. I had a thousand in cash, all in one-hundred bills, and a bit of change. I’d never used a bank in my life, thinking it was safer to keep my money under my shirt.
The stench seemed to be lifting now. I felt hungry. I grabbed some ham from the buffet and sank a glass of cheap wine. All I understood of everything that had happened to me was that nothing that had ever happened before mattered anymore. I had to go. But where? … Out into that dark bastard of a world where I couldn’t understand what people were saying. I didn’t speak too many languages then. All I knew was davay and zhena. I didn’t think that would be enough out there. But then, as I was chewing my way through the ham sandwich, in the middle of eating, I started feeling really hungry … hungry to be away. A hunger for any place, however far. I didn’t care if it poured, if I suffered sunstroke, the thing was to go.
We arrived in Győr at ten. I called in at a hardware store and bought a tin mug with a handle, the kind they store lard in when making salami. It used to be a regular joke that I was the kind of guy who goes to the village to buy lard. In Győr I picked up the contact I’d been given. There were two others waiting to cross, two Commies. At two in the morning we set off on a cart, then left it somewhere a few miles before the border, got off, and walked. Soon we were lying flat on the ground. There were observation towers, guards, and sweeping lights. There was an eclipse of the moon that night. The rain was dripping down, the dogs were barking. But our guide, an old Swabian, lay in the mud and was pretty relaxed about it, muttering how there was nothing to fear, the wind would blow our scent away. We were in some kind of meadow, muddy patches and sparse grass. We lay there for about an hour or so. We had to wait until they changed the guard. The Swabian said it was easier moving about then.
We didn’t say much, and even then only in whispers. One of the Commies was cursing quietly, because he was an old-time socialist and now here he was having to leave his beautiful homeland, slithering along on his belly in the mud. It’s true, we were crawling along on our bellies, flat out, the way corpses are carried downriver to Mohács.