It was like a historical cesspool. Under it all I spotted the fringes of an Oriental carpet and a photograph of the judge, the photograph framed in silver, the old man posing in his frock coat, his hair pomaded. I stared at it in awe. It was like being confronted by a religious icon. There was something saintly about the old stiff figure, something dynastic. But I soon grew tired of looking and pushed the photograph aside with my foot. The bomb had wrecked more than one apartment here. Something had turned the flotsam of history into a heap of garbage. The tenants hadn’t yet emerged from their cellar. They might have died there. I was about to go back down when I realized I was not alone.
Through the open door linking this room with one of the neighbor’s rooms, I saw a man crawling on all fours. He had a box of silver cutlery under his arm. He greeted me without embarrassment, perfectly politely, as if he were merely visiting. The room next door was the judge’s dining room: it was from there he emerged. I recognized him as an office worker, someone I knew by sight because he was local too, one of the honest burghers of Krisztinaváros. “Ah, the books!” he sighed in sympathy. “What a shame about the books!” … We climbed down together to ground level, me helping him to carry the silverware. We talked freely. He told me he had really come for the books, because the old judge had a substantial library full of literature and legal textbooks, all nicely bound … and he so loved books. He thought he’d try to save the library, but the books were beyond saving, he told me with real regret, because the ceiling next door had also fallen in and the books were so badly soaked they had practically turned to pulp, the kind used in paper mills. He said nothing about the silver cutlery. He had picked that up almost as an afterthought, instead of the books.
We chatted on while we clambered down the pile of rubble on all fours. The office worker gallantly showed me the route down, every so often holding on to my elbow and guiding me round the more dangerous, gravelly edges. We rested a moment in the doorway and said good-bye. He ambled down the street with the box of silverware under his arm, the perfect, respectable neighbor.
All these people — the Bulgarian, the plumber, the locksmith, the clerk — were busily going about their work. They were the kinds of people who would later be described as “the private sector,” self-employed maszeks. They thought there was time enough, if they hurried, to save whatever hadn’t already been stolen by the Nazis, our local fascists, the Russians, or such Communists as had managed to make their way home from abroad. They felt it their patriotic duty to lay their hands on anything still possible to lay hands on, and so they set about their work of “salvaging.” It wasn’t just their own effects they were salvaging, but other people’s too, stowing them away before everything disappeared into Russian soldiers’ packs or the Communists’ pockets. There were not that many salvagers but they were remarkable for their industriousness. As for the rest, those nine million or more others in the country — you know, those they call “the people” now — they — that is to say we, were still paralyzed and looked on passively while the properly interested parties went about stealing in the name of “the people.” The fascist Arrow Cross had been robbing us for weeks already. Salvaging was like a highly infectious plague. The Jews were completely stripped of their property: first of their apartments, then their lands, their businesses, their factories, their drugstores, their offices, and, finally, their lives. This was not private sector maszek work but the state itself. Then came the Russians. They too went about looting for days and nights on end, going from house to house, from apartment to apartment. Then, when they left, came the Moscow-trained Commies with their handcarts. Now they had really been taught how to bleed the people dry.
The people! Do you know what that is? Who they were? Were you and I “the people”? Because today, everyone is heartily sick of them claiming to do everything in the name of “the people”: “the people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat.” I remember how surprised I was when one summer, a long time ago, at harvest time, my husband and I were staying on an estate and the landlord’s boy, a little boy with blond curls, rushed in at dinner and enthusiastically bellowed: “Mama, Mama! One of the proletariat has just had an accident — the harvester has chopped off one of his fingers!” Out of the mouths of babes, we said patronizingly. Now, everyone is a part of the masses — the proletariat, the gentry, even people like us.
Mind you, we were never so united, “the people” and the rest, as in those few weeks when the Commies first arrived, because the Commies were the experts. When they stole, it wasn’t theft but restitution. Do you know what “restitution” means? “The people” had no idea. When the progressives brought in laws that told them “What’s yours isn’t really yours: it belongs to the state,” they simply stared. There seemed to be nothing that was not the state’s. It was hard to get your head around that.
The people felt less contempt for the looting Russkies than they did for those enthusiastic purveyors of social justice who one day “saved” a painting by a famous English artist from a foreigner’s apartment and next day took possession of an old family’s collection of lace, or some class-alien grandpa’s gold teeth. When they set about stealing in the name of “the people,” everyone just stared. Or spat out of the side of their mouths. The Russians went about ransacking with po-faced indifference. We expected that. They had been through all this once back home, on a really large scale. Russkies didn’t argue about restitution or social justice: they just robbed and stripped.
Ah, you see! I am all hot and bothered just thinking about it. Pass me the cologne, I want to splash some on my brow.
You were lying low in the provinces, so you couldn’t know what life was like in Budapest. Nothing had happened, and yet, as if by magic, at a whistle from some fairy or demon, the city came alive, just like in those tales where the wicked wizard vanishes in a puff of smoke and the enchanted, apparently dead leap to their feet. The hands of the clock start moving round again, the clock ticks, the spring bubbles up. That war drifted away like a wicked demon: it tramped off westward. And now, whatever remained of the city, of society, sprang to life with such passion, fury, and sheer willpower, with such strength and stamina and cunning, it seemed nothing had happened. The weeks when there was not a single bridge, not even a pontoon bridge, over the Danube, we crossed by boat, as people used to do two hundred years ago. But out on the boulevard there were suddenly stalls in gateways, selling all kinds of nice food and luxury items: clothes, shoes, everything you could imagine, not to mention gold napoleons, morphine, and pork lard. The Jews who remained staggered from their yellow-star houses, and within a week or two you could see them bargaining, surrounded as they were by the corpses of men and horses. People were quibbling over prices for warm British cloth, French perfumes, Dutch brandy, and Swiss watches among the rubble. Everything was up for grabs, for offer, for a quick deal. The Jews were trading with Russian truck drivers; goods and food were moving from one part of the country to another. The Christians too emerged. And soon the migrations began. Vienna and Bratislava had fallen. People rushed to Vienna, getting lifts from Russians with cargoes of lard and cigarettes, returning with cars.