We all looked out for ourselves. The kitchen maid would not lift a finger to help me in my duties. The manservant would sooner have cut off his hand than help the cook. We were all simply components to keep the machine ticking over. Do you know what made me nervous in all this? It was that I never understood the machine we were serving. We were all components, both masters and servants, but was the machine an accurate Swiss watch or a timed explosive device? There was something unsettling about this quiet, refined, ultra-English mode of life. You know, the way everyone kept smiling, like in English detective fiction, where murderer and victim continue to smile even as they are politely discussing who is to kill who.
And it was boring. I wasn’t good at putting up with this fully heated, fully laundered, dry-cleaned, English form of boredom. I never knew when it was proper to laugh. In the parlor, of course, I could only laugh inwardly because I had no right to laugh when my anglicized employers told each other jokes. But it was the same with laughter in the kitchen. I was never sure when it was safe. They liked their jokes. The manservant subscribed to a comic journal and over dinner would read out the incomprehensible, and to my mind idiotic, English jokes. Everyone burst into loud laughter: the cook, the chauffeur, the kitchen maid, and the manservant, all of them. And, as they did so, they craftily watched me with one eye to check whether I understood their marvelous English sense of humor.
Most of the time I only understood enough of the charade to know it was beyond me, and that it wasn’t really the joke they were laughing at, but me. The English, you know, are almost as hard to understand as the rich. You have to be very careful with them, because they are always smiling, even when they are thinking the most terrible things. And they can look at you so stupidly you’d think they couldn’t count to two. But they are not stupid, and they are remarkably good at counting, particularly when they want to put one over on you. But of course they carry on smiling even then, even as they are cheating you.
The English servants regarded me, the foreigner, of course, as a kind of white Negro, a lower life-form. But even so, I suspect they didn’t look down on me quite as much as they looked down on my immigrant employers, the rich German Jews. They looked at me with pity. Maybe they felt a little sorry for me because I couldn’t fully appreciate the sparkling humor in Punch.
I lived with them as best I could. And waited … what else could I do?
What was I waiting for? For my knight in shining armor, my Lohengrin, who would one day leave home and hearth and rescue me? For the rich man who was still living with his rich wife? I knew my time would come, that I just had to wait.
But I also knew that that man would never make a move by himself. I would eventually have to go for him, to grab him by the hair and drag him away from his life. It would be like saving someone from drowning in quicksand. That’s how I imagined it.
One Sunday afternoon I met the Greek in Soho. I never found out what his real occupation was. He told me he was a businessman. He had rather too much money and even a car, a car being a much rarer sight then than it is now. He spent the night in clubs playing cards. I think his only real occupation was being Levantine. The English were not surprised that someone could make a living simply by being a Levantine. Smiling and courteous, humming and nodding, the English knew everything about us foreigners. They didn’t say anything, just hissed a little when someone offended against their code of good manners. It was, of course, impossible to discover what the code actually was.
My Greek friend was always up to something just off center. He was never jailed, but when I was with him in a pub or a classy restaurant he would take the odd glance at the door as though he were expecting a raid. He kept his ears open. Oh, do put that photograph back with the other one where it belongs. What did I learn from him? I told you: I learned to sing. He discovered I had a voice. Yes, you’re right, that wasn’t the only thing I learned. What a donkey you are! I told you he was Levantine: forget the Greek part.
Don’t interrupt. I just want to get to the end of the story. Tell you what about the end? That it was all in vain, that secretly I never stopped hating my husband. But I loved him too, loved him to distraction.
I understood that the moment I was walking over the bridge after the siege and met him coming the other way. How simple it sounds when put like that … There, you see? I’ve said it and nothing has happened. Here you are in a bed in Rome, in a hotel room, puffing away at an American cigarette with the scent of coffee from the Turkish copper pot wafting around you, it’s almost dawn, your head is propped on one arm, and you’re looking at me like that. Your lovely shiny hair is tumbling over your brow. And you’re waiting for me to go on. Isn’t life extraordinary with all its changes? Well, there I was crossing the bridge and suddenly who should I see walking toward me but my husband.
Is that all? Was it as simple as that?
Saying it now, I myself am astonished how much can fit into a single sentence. For example, just saying something like “after the siege.” One just says it, right? But there was nothing simple about the siege. You will know that at the end of February the big guns were still booming away in some parts of the country. Towns and villages were burning, people were being killed. But in Pest and Buda by that time we were — in some ways — living like people in great cities normally live. But at the same time, we had another life. We were like nomads before time began. We were wandering Gypsies. By mid-February the last Nazis had been defeated in Buda and Pest and gradually, with the ever-fainter sound of thunder, like real thunder, the front moved on, each day a little farther away. People started emerging from cellars.
You, of course, were out in Zala County, where there was no fighting: if you could have seen how things were in Pest, you’d have thought we had all gone mad. And you would have been right if you judged by appearances alone in those weeks and months after the siege. It was everything you could possibly imagine. Appearances won’t tell you what people feel, how people talk when crawling out of the rubble, when they’re still humiliated and terrified. You can’t smell the foul stench they’ve had to get used to: the dirt, the lack of washing, the lack of water. We were emerging from filth, from close human contact. I think I’m remembering this all topsy-turvy now, the way it is lodged in my memory. A lot of things get confused when I think back to this time. It’s like when the reel breaks in a movie, you know … suddenly you lose the thread of the story, dazzled by the flashing gray patterns on the screen.
The houses were still smoking. Buda with all its pretty detail, the Bastion, and the old quarter, were one great dying fire. I happened to be in Buda then. I didn’t spend the siege in the cellar of the house I’d been living in, because that had been bombed in the summer. I’d moved to a hotel. Then, once the Russian army had surrounded the city, I moved in with a friend. Which friend? You’ll find out in a minute.
It wasn’t difficult finding accommodation in Pest then. People usually spent the night elsewhere, anywhere but at home — I mean people who could easily have stayed at home, who didn’t have to hide — but everyone was caught up in a great tide of emotion. We were like mythical creatures left over at the end of some festival. People felt they had to hide because it wasn’t impossible that some dark force should be out looking for them, pursuing them — the Russians, the Communists — who knows? It was as if everyone was in disguise, guests at a macabre masked ball to which everyone was invited. Persian soothsayers and master chefs, complete with false beards … the cast list was uncanny.