We were still deaf from the half-dead shells they’d been dropping on us, and those big smoke-belching bombs of theirs, but cafés in Pest quickly opened up again. There were places you could get strong, fiercely poisonous coffee. Russian sailors were dancing at tea dances with girls from Józsefváros to the sound of wind-up record players. Not everyone’s relatives were yet buried, and you could see the feet of corpses protruding from improvised roadside graves. But there were women in fashionable clothes, fully made up, hurrying over the Danube in boats to meet young men at some wrecked apartment block. Well-dressed middle-class people were taking leisurely strolls to a café that, just two weeks after the siege, was serving veal paprika. And there was gossip — and manicure.
I can’t tell you what it felt like. Here was the occupied, burnt-out town still reeking with smoke, full of Russian burglars and criminal sailors who robbed people in crowded streets, and there was I, in a shop on the boulevard, bargaining with the shopgirls for French perfume or nail-polish remover, just two weeks after the siege.
Later — even now — I feel there isn’t anyone out there who can understand what happened to us. It was like returning from the far shore of the underworld. Everything from the past had collapsed and rotted. Everything was gone — that at least is what we thought. Now something new would have to begin.
That’s what we thought those first few weeks.
Those first few weeks — the weeks immediately after the siege — were worth living through. But that time passed. Just imagine! For those few weeks there was no law, no nothing. Countesses sat on the sidewalk selling cheap, greasy lángos. A Jewish woman I knew had gone half-mad. She walked the streets all day with crazy, glassy eyes, searching for her daughter, stopping everyone until she found out her daughter had been killed by our own fascists and thrown into the Danube. She didn’t want to believe it. Everyone went around believing they were living new lives and that it would all be somehow different from before. The idea of something “different” gave people hope, a hope you could see sparkling in people’s eyes. It was as if they were lovers, or drug addicts — people living on the crest of some huge elation. And indeed, pretty soon everything was “different.” But not in a way we recognized.
What had I imagined? Did I imagine we would be better people, more human? No, I didn’t: nothing of the kind.
What we did hope for in those days — because we did hope, myself included, and everyone I talked to was equally hopeful — was that the fear, the suffering, the dread and loathing, all that fire and brimstone, might have purged something from us. Perhaps I hoped we might forget certain passions, some bad habits. Or … No, wait, I’d like to tell you just as it was, quite straight.
Maybe there were some reasonable things to hope for. We might have hoped for an end to the great sense of chaos, the sense that everything would be in a mess forever and ever. Maybe some things might simply vanish: the gendarmerie, ostentatious display, the state dog pound, the habit of addressing people by old-fashioned honorifics, that this-is-mine-and-that-is-yours and yours-forever-mine-forever attitude. What would replace it? Oh, we’d have a great party, an enormous, strident nothing where humankind could stroll down the streets, munching lángos, avoiding piles of rubble, and throw out everything that constituted a habitual tie: houses, contracts, manners. No one dared speak about this. We were busy having heaven and hell at the same time. It was how people lived in Eden before the Fall. We had a few weeks of it in Budapest. It was after the Fall. It was the strangest time of my life.
Then one day we woke up, yawned, shivered with cold, our skin covered in goose pimples, and discovered nothing had changed. We understood that there wasn’t any such thing as “different.” You are dragged down to the pit of hell, roasted a while, then, if one day some miraculous power should pull you out again, you blink a few times, you adjust to reality and go on precisely as before.
I was very busy, because the days were packed with nothing — whatever you needed to survive, you had to provide with your own bare hands. There was no ringing the chambermaid and asking for this, that, or the other, the way the powerful and wealthy used to ring for me, or indeed the way I myself had rung, impudently, out of a spirit of revenge, when the time came for me to be one of the rich. And, what’s more, there wasn’t even a place to live — in other words, no room, no maid, no bell, not even the electricity to make bells work. The taps did occasionally produce water, but that was not the general expectation. You’ll never guess how exciting it was when we finally had water! There was no water on the upper floors, and water for washing had to be carried upstairs from the cellar in a bucket, right to the fourth floor: we used it for washing and cooking. We didn’t know which was more important. Proper ladies — and I thought of myself as one by then — ladies who had raged and fumed because there were no French bath salts to be had in the wartime city-center drugstore, suddenly discovered that cleanliness was not quite as important as they had always assumed. They understood, for instance, that in order to wash, you needed water of some sort in a bucket, and that water was just the same suspicious-looking stuff in which people boiled potatoes. And since each and every bucket carried upstairs had to be carried up there personally, they suddenly understood that water was a highly valuable commodity; so valuable it was too important to waste on washing hands after dirty work. We wore lipstick, but we weren’t washing our necks and other parts with such obsessive care as we had some weeks before. We survived, of course, and it occurred to me then that back in the days of the old French kings, nobody washed properly. Not even the king. Instead of washing, people doused themselves head to foot with perfumes of one sort or another. There were no deodorants then. I know that for certain, I read it in a book sometime. The great were still the great, the refined were still the refined, washing or no washing. It was just that they stank. So that’s how we lived then. We were like the Bourbons: stinking but refined.
And still I hoped. My neck and my shoes were dirty, and though I had spent quite enough of my girlhood in service, it never occurred to me to become my own servant! I hated carrying that bucket of water up all those stairs. I’d pop over to girlfriends’ who had kitchens with running water instead and use theirs. And there I dibbed and dabbed a bit and called it washing. Secretly, I enjoyed it. I suspect others enjoyed it too, particularly those who complained most about the lack of washing facilities. It was like being children again, rolling about in the dirt. It was fun. Having emerged from weeks of stewing in the pit of hell we enjoyed the mess, the filth; the way we could sleep in other people’s kitchens; the way we didn’t have to wash or dress to perfection.
Nothing happens in life without a reason. We suffered the siege as punishment for our sins, but our reward for all that suffering was the freedom, for a few weeks anyway, to stink without guilt, innocent as Adam and Eve in Paradise, who must also have stunk, since they never washed. It was good not having to eat regularly too. Everyone ate whatever was to hand, wherever they found themselves. For a couple of days I ate nothing but potato peelings. Another day I ate tinned crab, a side of pork fried in lard, with a cube of sugar from a smart café as sweet course. I didn’t put on weight. There were days when I hardly ate anything, of course.