Portraits of a Marriage

Epilogue

… Because I tell you, buddy, believe me I tell you how it really is. You just mind to keep a long way clear of people in the cement trade. What you staring at? Don’t you know what that is? Don’t you watch TV? You really are a novice. You have a lot to learn in our lovely big village, New York. I can see you’re pretty new here, an economic migrant, or an illegal. Be glad if they let you stay. And keep your mouth shut. Because all kinds of trash is holed up here. But we two, we’re from Zala, the pair of us, the old country, we Hungarians should stick together. Here’s your bludimari. Drink up, brother.

As I say, be really careful that you don’t go within a mile of the cement trade. Our street here, Forty-sixth, has enough safe rooms. But farther down, in Thirty-eighth, that’s where the Family get together … you know, the Family. Avoid the place after midnight. And if you meet one or two of them, be careful to be on your best behavior. Because that’s what they like, these padrones: full of good manners. How will you know a padrone? … Well, they dress smart to start with. They’re highly refined people, silver hair, sideburns, everything just so. Suits and shoes all the best material cut to the best length. And they wear hats. They tip big. They draw of a wad of greenbacks from the pocket of their pants. They do it so, left-handed. They don’t even look to see whether it’s Washington or Lincoln on the front, they just throw it down. It’s like Sunday in church, in the middle of mass, when the guy comes along with his green collection bag. You must have seen it in the movies — great film, right? But if a member of the Family calls you and invites you to attend an evening course, just be polite and say no thank you, not my line of work.

The padrones — they don’t deal with cement — that’s manual work. They do the brain work: they think. The manual work is left to the junior members of the Family, the ones still doing apprenticeships. It’s casual work. The sucker goes home at night, not a worry in the world, doesn’t suspect anything. Ten steps behind comes the casual worker, the apprentice. A car is waiting on the corner. The apprentice carries an iron crowbar under his coat. The bar has a hook on the end that’s no bigger than your bent index finger. Once on the corner, the trick is to sink the sharp end of the crowbar into the sucker’s skull … one quick move and it’s done. No waiting, no argument. The guy collapses, just like that, then you grab him round the waist. You drag him into the car, take him down to the river where there’s a box waiting. You tenderly deposit the happily departed in the box, fill up with liquid cement, nail the box down, and slide it into the water. The cops say there are dozens of them sitting at the bottom of the Hudson. It’s like — you remember the story from the old country? — Attila’s coffin. It’s teamwork and it needs proper apprentices. But you take great care! Whatever the padrone says, you just keep saying, “No thank you, not my line of work.” You stick to your job in the garage. You’re a garage hand. We Zala folk must look out for each other.

It’s not impossible, of course, that later you make it big yourself. Like, that’s something else. But you have to know your stuff. Avoid the bars on Thirty-eighth, they’re not for you. There’s always work available, but have nothing to do with them. For example they might want a persuader. You know, the kind of guy who goes to the sucker and persuades him to pay twenty-five percent a week for the loan. Avoid them too, but be polite about it. Just tell them you can’t take the djob because your accent is not up to full New York level. Accent is a big problem to them. These black guys wouldn’t accept me in the band on account of my accent … me, who back home drummed for Tito when he visited Budapest. That was before ’48, before the radio started howling on about Tito and his revisionist traitor dogs! The black guys said I drummed with an accent, my sticks were wrong. That’s what I mean by accent — it’s just jealousy and racism. That’s my biggest regret. What else could I do, I got this job as a bartender. So now you know. Sit down and enjoy yourself, I’ll pour you another.

Go on, stay, there is plenty of time. This hour of the day, after supper, there are few customers, at least till the theaters empty. We don’t get cement trade here, anyway. Our customers are writers of one sort or another. It’s not manual work like cement, but the pay’s pretty hot. What’s that? You’d like a go yourself? Go ahead, try. Who knows, you might strike it lucky, but it won’t be easy. My experience, here in Manhattan, is that books are big-time.

You get to see a lot of life from behind a bar. After midnight, with the third martini down them, the one they put against expenses because it’s part of the job, about midnight or so, among themselves, they talk pretty freely, these writers. I listen to them and think what big business it is here. It’s not like over the Pond, in Rome, or in Budapest. My guardian angel, I called her “Sweetheart,” whose photo I keep on the shelf — you see, I even got her a silver frame from Woolworth’s — she told me she knew a writer back home who no longer wanted to write because he had grown sick of books. He really did feel sick and wanted to heave up each time he thought about it. The only things he still read were those crazy dictionaries. He must have been a weird creature, an oddment, like the Chinese deer at the Bronx Zoo.

The patrons here in New York are not that sort of writer. They don’t actually write anything, but immediately sell what they haven’t yet written. They earn a mint from books. They usually start arriving past eleven, when the nearby shows have finished. They soak up the drink, straight bourbons, every time. There’s a regular, a little fat guy, who must be a real big-shot writer, because he even has a secretary and a lot of hangers-on with him, who are all ears when he talks. Whenever he says something they’re all attention, like a congregation in church when the priest raises the host. I saw it with my own two eyes the time he thought of a title and the guy, his secretary, was straight on the line, selling it. He came back out of breath saying he had sold the title for two hundred thousand, a story his boss hadn’t yet written and had only just thought of, one he’d maybe write, if the inspiration came. Everyone drank to the good news and when they left they left me twenty on the tray. That’s because big-shot writers are always surrounded by pals. There’s some really cute women in the gang too. If you really fancy writing I could introduce you to one of them.

I don’t read books myself, that’s not my thing. I’m happy enough to leaf through a good thriller, or the comics — you know, where the chick lies naked on the couch without a clue that her sexy days are over and her problems are just beginning. And her pimp leans over her, a knife in his hand, and there’s a talk bubble that says, “There’s nothing wrong with her, it’s just a bit of blood on her neck.” I like that kind of thing. Thrillers are good because the writers don’t smuggle in clever stuff — the reader gets it straightaway, without the crap.

Go on, relax, have another — your bludimari is there, right by your hand. The boss? Don’t worry about him. He’s there behind that glass door, in the back room. Yes, the guy with the glasses … He’s doing the accounts, not looking this way. Solid guy: a Mormon. No liquor, only warm water from a heavy-bottomed glass. And he won’t smoke — he’s above all that. He brought nothing from Utah, where his lot live, to New York, except his Bible and his Mormon ways, like having two wives. The second he picked up here, in Manhattan. Owns a chain of eight bars, two in Harlem. But our place here on the corner of Broadway is the smartest.

Because, you know, there are two theaters nearby. One where they sing and one where they just talk. Sometimes when they talk so much it gets to be a drag and the audience grow bored and walk out. I’ve not been in either so far, but one day I paid up a Franklin for the one that was all talk. Why shouldn’t I be an angel, I thought — you have to support art. Don’t know what angels are? People who finance a play. Investors. Drivers, hotel porters, headwaiters, they all want to be angels when there’s a play starting on Broadway. But this one was no good, I wasted a hundred. There was a lot of talking on stage — too much. It’s better when there’s some nice upbeat music, a high-kicking chorus and singers, that kind of thing. I’m not investing in writers or literature again. A man’s better off playing the numbers game. So you just wait and serve your turn in the garage.

You have to tighten your belt here, brother. It’s a wised-up world we have here. You have to pay close attention, learn the ropes. This is my fifth year behind the bar. I am a proper mister now, a senior bartender. And I’m still learning. In this place, being close to Broadway and the theaters, what we get are chiefly highbrows. What are those? People with egg-shaped heads, their heads like duck eggs, all high forehead — and spots. There are some with big bushy beards too. They’re all clever. You wouldn’t believe how important they are. I listen to them from behind the bar and they stay till morning. They arrive about midnight when the others have gone, I mean those who come here for the atmosphere, candles behind red shades. Those who stay are all in the profession. They talk freely among themselves. I listen pretty hard, as you may imagine.

Because, you know, they’re a powerful, dangerous pack … the devil knows how they do it, but in some ways they are even more powerful than the padrone. Everyone is afraid of them. They could even destroy the president if they didn’t like him. Sometimes my jaw just drops when I hear them whispering together as to who’s in line for their version of the cement, or who they’re going to build up. Some of them come here from the night desk, guys who write social columns in papers. I hear them discussing who’s screwing who and in what position. That’s the free press for you; that’s freedom, they’re free to ruin those they don’t like. Then they write books about it, print them in editions of a million. It’s what they call culture, and it spreads. In every drugstore, in every subway station, in every supermarket, you find piles and piles of stuff like that. People like us can’t get their kind of knowledge: we need higher education. It’s an art, like drumming. The fact is, friend, I don’t get lit-ter-a-ture, but back in my hometown, in Mátészalka, I served in the local barracks and we’d occasionally visit what we called a house of culture to see the girls. All I say is that the cathouse at Mátészalka was a moral institution compared to what I hear about lit-ter-a-ture here behind the bar. Back home we knew what we were paying for, and once we made a deal the head man there might say, “Give us another ten, soldier boy, and she’ll take her top off too.” As I said, I know nothing about books, but I do understand cathouses. When I was a kid I was a regular myself. All in all I can’t say it was any worse than what they call culture now. These writers will strip for cash, exactly like the girls. I mean the lady writers, not just the men … They’ll show you the lot, no knickers, from back, from front, whatever way you fancy it — if you pay. Culture meant something else to us in Zala. Papa bought the calendar once a year, and that was it. But my jaw just drops — I mean, just now I heard someone’s getting half a million for writing the memoirs of the guy who throws the switch in San Francisco. Or he writes up the confessions of a girl that used to be a guy, or how a girl became a guy, and that gets to be culture. Culture’s fancy work, brother — harder than drumming.

It’s possible that what the regulars talk about here in the bar doesn’t cover the whole field. There might be other kinds of writers in the neighborhood. I once overheard two guys who wandered in here talking in low voices about what this other kind of lit-ter-a-ture might be. The sort you don’t see much of. The kind you hear about only once the writer has shuffled off to the morgue, having topped himself in his misery. These two guys, who wandered in here by accident, couldn’t afford bludimaris but had to make do with beer. They were talking about books. They were puny little runts, scribblers of some sort, more like the guy Sweetheart was talking about in Rome. You didn’t have to look hard — even a blind man could see these runts were not about to be guests at the usual party. Maybe they were the real thing … And maybe there are more of them, only you never get to see them because they don’t hit the headlines, they’re out there drowning their sorrows. I mean, that’s what I understood as they muttered into their beer — that there were other kinds of writers. Guys who write poems, for example, who scribble in notebooks the way our great national poet Petőfi did. The devil knows. The only thing certain is that their kind don’t tend to come here.

Ah, the drums. Well, that’s sad, a real regret. It’s not that it isn’t a good djob, mixing cocktails in this bar. Like there’s a salary and free meals. And tips. I could quietly carry on here till I retire. But I don’t have it bad, anyway. I know a neat-looking Irish widow, a little secondhand, but friendly, if you get me? I have a car, an apartment, a TV. I even have an electric lawn mower out on the porch … no garden, but a mower’s good for status. The widow and I went to Florida last winter, spent two weeks, living like lords on the Riviera. I got to admit, financially, it was a good deal leaving home. But it breaks my heart when I think of the music. The freedom is better here, but what’s all that when I can’t be a musician? It’s melancholy, you feel like an exile, like the patriot Kossuth felt in Turin.

It can’t be helped. Artists don’t forget, you know. Sometimes I remember how it was after the siege, sitting at my drums in the bar, putting my whole heart and soul into it, as God, and my talent, intended me to. That bar was in a house that’d been bombed out, but they got it in pretty good order. There was heating, atmosphere, Napoleon brandy, everything you need for a people’s democracy. I had a solid reputation and the new bosses needed drummers. The gig would start about ten, but it was four in the morning by the time I got home. That was in ’48 when the Commies took over culture. Business improved for a while. The new top guys came, throwing money about. Why not? They could do it. Everything belonged to the people, after all! Every so often some leftovers of the old order would stumble in, fancy dans who’d stowed away a few gold napoleons and now wanted to drink to forget. They were paying for their own funerals, telling sob stories about the past. But the boot was on the other foot in ’48 when the new bosses came in. If they were seen to be nursing hangovers, it was for the people’s sake.

Why did I leave when things were going so well for me? Long story, friend. I was like you, not cut out for finance. Then, one day, I discovered my place was in politics.

I tell you this in confidence, as brother to brother, you might as well know. After the liberation — I still get a sour taste in my mouth when I use that word — I stayed in Zala till ’47, then moved to Budapest. I lived a quiet life there, no trouble to anyone. I like my privacy, see. So we’d been liberated, and the local count skipped it over the border. He wasn’t altogether a bad guy, but he did happen to be a count.

Later, my old man — the one the Commies shoved into a collective on the rap that he was a kulak, just because he had four acres and a garden — my old man, he said the count was no good, but the way things turned out was no good, either. At least the count let you steal a little. But the new bosses, the guys in leather coats, who arrived in the village on a truck one day shortly after ’45, politely invited everyone into the council house, strong-arming anyone who seemed a little reluctant, and persuaded them to throw everything they had into the common kitty, both their own and the land that had been divided up since, not to mention the animals — into the collective with them all! The new lot wouldn’t let you steal, because they did the stealing themselves. Shut your face, they kept repeating as they kicked your head in, everything belongs to the people now.

One day the minister drove through town, a guy trained in Moscow. He was an educated man, in charge of collectivization. Because that was the delicate term they used: “collectivization.” Well, this guy was good at it, because he’d spent the winter in Moscow and he saw at first hand how the numbers of kulaks had dropped to one million, because the comrades had collected their produce. But the old man and others explained that after collectivizing there wasn’t enough left in the granary for the winter. He stayed sitting in his car while he told us we shouldn’t complain and should understand that everything belonged to the people now. Then the minister went on to make a speech in parliament, demanding that any remaining craftsmen left in the village should also be collectivized, no matter whether it was the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the wheelwright, because they were all capitalists and exploiters, leeches who took money from the people. My old man was a smith too, shoeing horses and sharpening scythes all his life. It saddened him no end when he heard he wasn’t really a blacksmith but a leech on the people. And then they took away his work permit.

I can’t tell you the whole story, friend, not all at one go. It was a bad time. A friend of mine, who used to live in the village, had gone up to the capital just as the bright sun of freedom was dawning on us. One day he wrote me a letter. He used to play the flute so it broke your heart. That was the time they started “confiscating” corn from the count’s granary. Chicks were mad for his flute playing. He wrote to say he now played sax in a people’s democracy bar in Budapest, and that it might be an idea for me to come and join him because they needed a drummer. The old man swore a lot, the old girl cried. It was hard leaving them, but I felt the call of art. So I left.

Wait, the guests are arriving. Yes sir, Two scotch on the rocks, sir. You are served, sir.

Those two scotches are rogues, the pair of them. That one there, the one with the waxed mustache, is a faith healer, Christian style. He knows his business. The other one, the one with the sideburns, is an embalmer. If the faith cure doesn’t work, you go on to the embalmer. He prepares the corpse the way the relatives want it. I could listen to them for hours when they talk about the next in line. Because there are various kinds of smile available. There’s the saintly smile. There’s the knowing smile. Then there’s the at-peace-now smile. The saintly is the most expensive. The at-peace-now is cheaper. It’s all done with paraffin, and there’s a proper tariff. They come in at midnight after work and regularly sink three scotches. They’re moderate, religious guys.

Back in Zala County where I used to live, washing corpses was done according to an old ritual. Here they do things differently … Pay them no attention, we can carry on our conversation. After midnight they’re not interested in anyone that’s still alive, it’s just their way of saying gut’abend. They’ll only be interested in you if you have paraffin to sell.

Where was I?

As I was saying, after ’47 I felt I had hidden my talents away long enough and took the train to Pest. There were four of us in the band: the saxophonist, the accordionist, the pianist, and me on the drums. I’m not exaggerating when I say that was a great time for me. The new democracy was still settling down. It was all a bit heady. I don’t even like to talk about leaving it: the thought’s like a vise round my heart.

Because it so happened one morning I got an invitation from the AVO, the security police. I should be at their headquarters in Andrássy út at nine, though the street was called something else by then. Go here, go there, go up the stairs, go to that numbered room. I was sweating when I read the letter, but then I relaxed, because I realized they don’t normally write letters to you, they just quietly come at dawn and ring. People, back then, were terrified of the doorbell. Bell-terror syndrome, we called it.

I gathered up all my papers: my certificate to show I was a qualified musician, and another to testify I was a faithful son of the people. Plus the local certificate to say my sympathies were on the good side in the war. I’d got these papers together in plenty of time. There were guys I worked with who could vouch for my sympathies, who themselves were on the good side. I had a clutch of other papers too, but those were from before, complete with stamps and photographs … I didn’t think this was the occasion for them. I flushed those papers straight down the john. I had an old revolver, a six-shooter, one of my brothers left behind when he went to “pursue his studies” in the West in ’45. I’d long ago buried that at the end of the yard. I thought it best it should rest there, because if the AVO did a search and found it, I’d be heading for the bone yard. So I put everything in as good an order as I could, then, one morning, set off in the direction of the Opera, to security HQ.

I passed the Opera and read on the posters that they were doing a piece called Lawherring or something that night, complete with orchestra. Well, brother, I thought, you’ll never get to see Lawherring if the AVO break you. It was a sad thought, because despite being a proper musician I’d never been to the opera. There wasn’t anything of that kind back in Zala — no one ever sang from a score. But there was nothing I could do about it, I just trudged on toward dreaded old number 60. It was with a heavy heart because no one ever said it was a breeze being invited to number 60. I’d never been there before myself, but I’d heard that the fascists used to call it the House of Loyalty. Well, kiddo, I said to myself, you might be walking into history right here. I had no idea what was waiting for me. Will they be thinking I’m clean, or has someone grassed me up? I was trying to work it all out. If I got six months, I’d manage fine. I swore to myself I wouldn’t panic and that I would watch every word I said, because nothing could be worse than dropping the wrong word at the wrong moment with these guys — it would be a bad mistake.

I had the feeling I was at the turning point of my life. A guy in a flat army cap was at the gate to check my summons, and he sent me upstairs. Another uniform told me to sit on a bench in the corridor. So I sat down meek as a lamb and looked around me, with a degree of curiosity, not so much as I thought would be noticed.

There was a lot to see. There’d been an early-morning change of shift — you could see it was an all-night job for the comrades. Everyone wore uniforms of the kind our soldiers did a few years back — say, three years before. The leather belt was the same, only the armband was different, that and the braid. The faces were familiar too, guys from really poor backgrounds … I thought I’d seen one or two of them before. But my stomach was all cramped up: it was like I was sleeping after a really heavy meal followed by a glass or two more than was strictly necessary. I gazed openmouthed, as it was the first time I’d seen something like this close-to, with my own eyes. What it told me was that that famous thing highbrows call “history”—well, things don’t really change: in fact they’re always exactly the same. I sat on the low bench taking it all in, glancing up and down the corridor, watching busy comrades going about exactly the same tasks as their brothers had done three years earlier.

The comrades’ job was to escort whoever was next in line to the right interrogation room. Some of them needed escorting because they couldn’t walk. It seemed they must have got a bad pain in their feet overnight in the middle of some official conversation. So they needed support, which the guards offered by grabbing them under the arms. There were a few who went on their own feet, but not many. It was, believe me, deadly quiet along the corridor, but sometimes you could hear noises, like the sound of a scream in the middle of a polite exchange of ideas. Even so, screams behind closed doors were better than silence, because silence might suggest that the conversation was pretty well over — that some poor guy had run out of debating points.

It was half an hour before they called me in, and it was another hour before I came out. They didn’t escort me; they didn’t need to support me under the arms. I went on my own two feet, head held high. An hour earlier I had no idea what was in store for me. I was a different man coming out an hour later. Believe it or not, I’d been given a job.

I walked home slowly as if I’d drunk a little too much last night and was having to tread very carefully in the morning. One deliberate step, then another deliberate step. I went straight to my pad on Klauzál tér, the square where I’d been living six months. It was a joint tenancy, because in my situation, I couldn’t afford a pad alone. The guy I shared the bed with did day shifts from early in the morning, going out to Rákos on the shuttle service. The bed was empty and I lay down with my clothes on. I felt like the life had been kicked out of me. I stayed there till dark.

It all came back in pieces. It was like when you take a pill to make you sick up what you don’t need. When they invited me into the room I imagined I’d find some huge, barrel-chested goon there just itching to beat me to a pulp. But that’s not how it turned out. It was not some crude hulk but a guy with withered legs, quite old, with horn-rimmed glasses. He wore no uniform, just plain clothes, and he spoke quietly and politely, smiling all the way through. He offered me a chair and a cigarette, just as they do in thrillers, like a detective before a grilling. I saw my cadre papers lying on the desk in front of him, and noticed how he’d leaf through them now and then. But it wasn’t a close examination — he was just picking up a point here and there with his finger. It seemed he’d already read and mastered it all. He softly asked me to tell him, if I didn’t mind, what I was doing in ’44.

I had to think quickly. Keep your cool, I thought, let him see you’re no chicken. I took the papers I’d prepared from my pocket — they were all officially stamped with the proper stamps. All I said was that I’d never been disloyal to my nation.

He seemed to be happy with that answer, nodding, as if he expected no less of me. Then, still gently, in a thin little voice, he asked me if I knew anyone in Budapest who had served in the Arrow Cross, the fascist militia.

What?! I gasped. Me? Know militia? What kind of militia? Like a police force? Like the Wild West?

He saw I was no fool and started reassuring me. Fine, he said, fine, he won’t ask me any more about that, since he could tell I was sensitive about the militia. But he’d still like to know if I knew anyone in this beautiful cathedral city of ours who might have escorted people of a different religion down to the Danube at dawn in the winter at the end of ’44. Women, children, old people?

He looked at me so hard it was like being stabbed in the eye with an old lady’s knitting needle.

Well, I really sweated then. I took a gulp and told him straight that I was in Zala at the time and I didn’t even know where exactly the Danube was then. And, I added, quietly and modestly, yes, I’d heard that there were regrettable excesses in Pest at the time.

When he heard this he opened his mouth and watched me the way a shortsighted hen looks for grain. He said nothing for a while, just blinked a few times. Then he cheered up. He looked so cheerful he was like the virgin whose tits have just been tickled.

“You’re a wise man, Ede,” he nodded. He gave a sigh and added, by way of acknowledgment, “ ‘Regrettable excesses’ is good. You have a way with words, Ede.”

I confessed that Ede was just my professional name, that I was Lajos at home. He waved that aside as if to say it didn’t matter. “Ede or Lajos, you are a man respected among your peers,” he said. I could tell he was sincere. I felt the guy was respecting me. He clicked his tongue and rubbed his palms together; then he threw away his cigarette and spoke in a changed voice. He was still gentle, but his horn-rimmed eyes never left mine. It was no longer knitting needles but proper needles squeezed under your nails.

He lifted up my cadre papers, waved them about, and said he was no fool, either. Did I believe him when he said he was no fool? Of course I believed him, I said. In that case I should think over very carefully what he was about to say. The bar where I was a drummer was a classy place, he said. Lots of people go there, mostly decent democratic people, but not just them — others too. The People’s Republic needed citizens who were loyal to the people, because the place was crawling with enemy agents. He lit a cigarette at this point but didn’t offer me one. He carried on staring right through me. There was no shining a desk lamp in the eyes, the way they have in the books when they grill a guy. There was nothing, just a desk and a man. And there were iron bars on the windows in case the visitor should feel nervous and take a fancy to leaping through the window for a stroll in the sunshine. And on the other side of the door there was always that strange shuffling. And the smack of boots on the stones below. And, occasionally, a word of encouragement when some visitor was too slow in answering. That’s all.

Then he started speaking to me like he was the smart kid in a school full of idiots. He had the spiel off by heart. What he said was that music, night, and drink loosened tongues. So while I am drumming I should listen hard. He was very patient in explaining this. But, fact is, it was like a lesson learned at school. He told me what to look out for. He was wise to how people behaved in bars. I was to keep my eyes on any relics of the old world, the world of the gentry — guys who still had cigarettes and appetite enough to console themselves with drink. Then I was to look out for the new sort, the sort who aren’t Commies but just pretend: pigs desperate to stick their snouts in the trough, people who waste no time sticking on all the right badges. He taught me patiently, almost lovingly, the way teachers in kindergartens teach the kiddies. He went on to say there was a whole new society out there, and it included all sorts of people. Honest, sons-of-the-soil rulerists, smart city-avenue turbanists,[1] highbrow writers the lot of them, “progressive” horn-rimmed-glasses types with pipes in their mouths, the sort who sit on the fence cheering on old-style proper Communists, encouraging them to finish their dirty work for them, to do away with the old world and get the new one ready … And when they do get rid of the old world, the rulerists, the turbanists, and the horn-rimmed-glassesists are all there, waving them a cheery “do-si-donya” and “well done,” adding, “now fuck off back to the Urals.” Then they get off the fence, and politely, cleverly, take over anything of value that still remains in this pretty little country, and stow it away in their ample pockets. But in order for them to do that, the old-style Commies have to fuck off back to the Soviet Union first, those that are still alive, anyway — that is, after Uncle Joe had finished buggering the comrades about, maybe because they weren’t the best of buddies, not the way they should have been — not, at least, how the boss pictured it — or simply because, like the fools they are, they wormed their way into the affections of the Father of the People, and took jobs that did for them later. Or they were Trotskyists. Or Spanish Civil Warists. And while the old guard are still feeling the backs of their necks just to make sure their heads are still there, they, the rulerists, the turbanists and the rest, all the “progressives,” start putting it about that there is a different, neater, better way of being a Communist. But the Party begs to differ on that matter — I noted the glint in his eye as he said this — because these educated wise guys who want to set about teaching the masses scientific Marxism don’t have a clue that the masses despise them and don’t believe a word they say. You have to have rotted five years down the mines with them, a long way underground, before they believe you. Then you have to have worked your way out of the mines and spent the next five years at a bench with a vise screwed into it, snips and hacksaw in your hand, cutting sheets of metal. If, after all that, you do start talking about Marxism and Leninism, they might just listen to you. But people who sit on the fence and shout encouragement to the masses, telling them to struggle on because the time will come when they, the progressives, will teach them the finer points of Marxism — well, they’d get a few dirty looks, I promise you, he said. You want to look out for this type, he said, because that’s the sort of people you find in bars now. You could tell from the way he said it what he thought of those who were desperate to dip their snouts in the trough without ever having worked down a mine or in a labor camp … he despised them as much as he did the gentry. He had it all off pat, the way you learn things in school.

My heart beat fast, faster than I ever beat with my drumsticks, because I could see that when he picked out someone he’d make sure they couldn’t wriggle out of it, or escape … though he might enjoy watching them try. I was looking for the emergency exit, but all I saw were walls and bars on the window. Once he paused for breath I quietly asked him to tell me straight what he wanted me to do.

He took a sniff, then told me never again to call at number 60, never even to come near. Once a week I was to ring a number. When someone answered, I was simply to say, “I’m Ede, greetings to the old man.” The voice would then say he’d be delighted to meet me, but where and when? The best place would be City Park, on a bench. Or, in winter, near the marshalling yard at Lágymányos, where there are lots of nice little places that serve liquor. You can spend hours there chatting away in private, in a cozy tit-to-tit. He listed the kind of people to watch at the bar, in the order of importance. If I see someone going into the toilet and then, shortly, another guest walking in after them, I have to hurry after them to check if one of them has left a secret note or some cash. I am to leave the cash there and immediately ring the number he gave me, he said, and they would take care of the rest as an emergency, a matter of priority. The People’s Republic looked after its own, he said, and rubbed his finger and thumb together in the old “money” sign. As a drummer you can pretty well see and hear everything that’s going on in the bar.

Then he coughed, as if to say now he was coming to the succulent plump heart of the matter. The comrades. I had to watch even the comrades, he said, lowering his voice. Because not every comrade was genuine, a true, up-to-his-elbows, worker of the state — there were some who just pretended to be comrades. If I saw the liquor had loosened their tongues, that they were leaning together, whispering quietly, and, say, this was toward dawn and I could see they were getting too cozy, all on the same wavelength … I was to find out and report their names.

He went on like this for an hour, then he summed up. He said I was to make sure I worked hard. If I did, my papers would end up filed away in the records and I’d have a nice, peaceful life, having helped lay down the foundations of happiness in the people’s democracy. He picked up my own file and waved it about. Then he leaned back in his chair, took his glasses off, and started wiping the lenses. A shiver ran right through me as our eyes met. My legs were stone cold from my knees down to the tip of my toes. What it came down to was that he wanted me — a drummer — to sing for the AVO, to sing like a fucking canary. He folded his arms and calmly gazed at me.

I mumbled something about needing time. Naturally, he said, polite as ever. You have till noon tomorrow. He gave me a nice friendly good-bye smile, all teeth, like the handsome guy on those old Lysoform ads used to. I went back to my pad, no longer thinking how nice it would be to go hear Lawherring at the Opera. I lay on my bed till the late afternoon. I ate nothing. I drank nothing. My throat was dry and I felt like shit.

It was getting on to dusk by the time I managed to sit up. I put on my tuxedo. It was time to go to work. But then, as I was putting my black tie on, something stirred in my stomach. Or was it my head? I don’t know even now. All I knew was that I was in a hole. These guys had picked me, a drummer, to sing for them. I was to be like those waiters in the hotels, like those chambermaids in the embassies, like those smart chicks with sharp ears who work in offices. I didn’t need to be told what they wanted me to do. I chewed it over a long time. I didn’t need to sign up for day courses or attend a night class. I knew the score without all that. It was clearer than daylight that those they had once fingered were theirs for keeps. I was stone cold sober and shivering. It was evening before I set off to work.

It was a real nice evening, just like spring. Some of the band was already hanging around the bar. Two were old buddies, family, and I trusted them. The sax guy from Zala who brought me up to the capital, he was a brother. The pianist reckoned himself a highbrow. He was a quiet guy who was only in the band because he needed the cash; I didn’t think it was him that shopped me. The accordionist had been doing jazz for years, sometimes he’d be called home at dawn … it might have been love interest, but it might have been an AVO pimp. I wasn’t sure about him. I just felt a great sadness thinking the glory days, my pure music days, were over. There is no greater sadness for an artist than the sense that the savor’s gone out of his art, that it’s time to give up everything he has ever learned. Don’t go thinking I’m crazy or that I’m pulling some tragic act. Everyone in the business knew I was the best drummer in Hungary … I tell it how it is, no false modesty. Sweetheart told me as much. She knew what she was talking about. She’d worked for rich Jews in London, a refined bunch, who taught her a lot.

That night it was late before the place started buzzing. It was midnight when the first big payers appeared. All three were secretaries of state. They wore striped pants and fancy ties. There were many shortages in the country at the time but there was no lack of secretaries of state, not so anyone complained, anyway. They’d go around in huddles, like field mice after rain. These were fine, handsome examples of the type. They’d brought female company with them, and it’s likely the chicks too were state workers because, I tell you, friend, they carried plenty of flesh on them. They weren’t about to go on diets. The waiters hurried over to show them to a table near the band and they settled down there. They gave us a nice genial smile. They were in a good mood and you could see from their clothes they were new in the job, that they’d been something else before. I recognized one of them since I’d seen him in the bar before, selling rugs on the installment plan. Best not ask where he found the rugs. A lot of people were collecting rugs from bombed houses at the time.

Two regulars arrived with them, the poet Lajos Borsai and the war correspondent Joe Lepsény. They were in every night, holding forth in the bar. The poet made his living after midnight by wearing his patriotic heart on his sleeve and blubbing about his terrible life. He worked out which new customers were worth milking, then made his way over to their table. If they were already a little over the limit he’d pull his mother’s photograph from his pocket and his voice would fill with emotion as he showed it around. He had two mothers … one, a dignified woman, with her hair wreathed round her brow the way Queen Elizabeth had it when praying at the coffin of our great national hero Ferenc Deák. The other was a tiny, humble-looking little old lady dressed in peasant costume, complete with head scarf. He’d size up the guests before deciding which mother to produce. This time he sat down with Baron Báróecsedi, who had arrived with his latest bride, a muscle-bound retired police sergeant. His taste ran to that kind of thing. The baron was a regular too. The poet began in a broken voice:

“This time of the year the yellow clover is just coming into bloom in my little village back home …”

But the baron wasn’t in the mood. He glared at the poet. Báróecsedi was a pretty fat guy, and a little on the jealous side. He blinked suspiciously at his bride, the retired policeman. They looked at each other with pouting lips, like the lovers in that famous picture, the one Sweetheart once showed me in the museum in Rome, Cupid and Psyche.

“Look, Mr. Borsai,” he growled. “I’d be grateful if you left these Christian agricultural matters out of it. I am a nervous old Jew with a bad stomach. I am not impressed by the fact that the yellow clover is in bloom. If it’s in bloom, let it bloom,” he added angrily.

The poet was offended and went to sit with the secretaries of state. “Cigars for the press!” he cried.

The waiters rushed to bring the cigar tray and the poet picked up a fistful of Hungarian Symphony cigars from a tin box, stuffing them into his pocket. One of the secretaries of state, the muscular one, who had been given a medal of some sort, waved the headwaiter over and told him he should add it to the bill as official state expenses. Joe Lepsény, the war correspondent, seemed reluctant and refused, despite the others encouraging him to fill his pockets too.

“No thanks,” he sniffed. “Tomorrow morning I’m due at the supreme council of the Ministry of Economics.”

Full of respect, one secretary of state asked him whether there was an important decision about to be taken.

“No idea,” the war correspondent replied disdainfully. “But they have American cigars.”

They looked at him with envy because it was rumored that Joe had been nominated to the State Committee for the Administration of Forfeited Estates. It was one of the most prized positions in the People’s Republic. The sax player said he started drooling every time he thought of what would happen if a Forfeited Estate and Joe Lepsény were left alone in a room together. You know, the estates … rare paintings, antique furniture, all the stuff the gentry left behind when they hit the westbound trail in fear of the Russkies arriving. The sax player was in seventh heaven thinking of this, his solos sounding more melancholy than ever. Everyone looked respectfully at Joe Lepsény, who remained a war correspondent even though there was no war anymore. He wore riding boots, a windbreaker, and a deer hunter’s hat with a chamois tail stuck in the band, as well as a red-flag badge in his buttonhole. Later, after the revolution, he turned up in the West. He claimed to be an aristocrat from Budapest, but someone ruined the story by saying he was nothing of the sort but a laundry worker from one of the city slums. That wasn’t generally known in the bar back then. In any case this was not time to start playing at comrades, because the place was really coming alive.

It was gone midnight and there were no tables left by the time the president of the Emergency Committee arrived with his disooze friend and a sidekick — everyone knew the sidekick was head screw at the town prison — so they had to produce an extra table from somewhere and make a place for it near the band. There was a great deal of running about, because it was a real honor for the bar to have such a famous man be a customer. I have to admit he was quite a guy. No one had heard of him a year ago; then he surfaced like that monster at Loch Ness in Scotland that’s been in all the papers. The saxophonist blew a brief fanfare to celebrate the great man’s arrival, his cheeks puffed out like apples, while I added a discreet and respectful drumroll.

Then they turned on the purple light because wherever the disooze went you had to have proper mood lighting. The proprietress, a famous lard-bucket of a woman, who carried on as before supplying nonprofessional women to her select clients, didn’t know where to put herself in all the excitement. She personally filled the celebrity guest’s glass with bourbon. Everyone watched, deeply impressed. The secretaries of state looked on in awe because the president of the supreme council outranked ministers. He was master of life and death, since politicals who’d been condemned to death turned to him with their last appeal for mercy. If he’d had a bad day he rejected the appeals and they were got ready for the drop. No one ever asked him what he did and why. The proprietress whispered in the pianist’s ear that she had had her finger on the pulse of the market for thirty years, that she knew every unlisted telephone number in town, knew where exclusive goods might be offered to big spenders, but that she had never seen such glittering company in the bar all together at any one time.

Báróecsedi bowed from his seat to greet the president, who responded with an indulgent wave. The president was a big-time trophy Communist, a high-class medal shining in his buttonhole, but it was the baron and his bride, the waxed-mustached police sergeant, those all-but-extinct creatures, remnants of the old world, that he greeted most warmly — more warmly than he did the secretaries of state or Joe Lepsény, that upstanding, badge-wearing Party notable. I watched it all and remembered what I’d been taught in the morning: that real Commies, the true, dyed-in-the-wool, long-in-the-tooth sort, felt a deep-seated, jaw-clenching hatred for those who had only lately adopted republican colors. They loathed them more spectacularly than they did the old guard of boujis and barons. I watched everything like a hawk, since from that time on, every moment I spent there, I was, for all purposes, in my office. I was at work.

The president looked like something out of a fashion magazine, like an English lord dressed for the club, a lord, what’s more, bought brand-new from the shop. Suit, shoes, everything — it was all made to measure. He smiled graciously at everyone, like a proper emperor who knows he has absolute power and can afford to be charming, generous, and condescending. The disooze he’d arrived with had been his night-and-day companion for a while — she was a fine, fat piece of trophy flesh herself, famed for attending every show trial at which the president showed some guy the way to the gallows, because such things amused her. She was a dyke. She sang in a hoarse whisper and specialized in torch songs. The boss turned the lights down low so it was purple everywhere, like patchouli. We waited awestruck to see what the celebrity guest would order.

The big-time guest must have had a hard day, because he closed his eyes as he drank and seemed to be lost in thought. Then he whispered something to the disooze, who obediently took her place at the mike, and in a cigarette-stained voice, straight from the heart, she crooned a heartbreaking ballad.

“You’re the one light in my darkness!”

I only had to touch the drums very gently, tapping them with my fingertips. The saxophonist marked time, carefully watching the head screw as if he thought some plot was being hatched. The screw was constant companion to the president, just in case the great man had a brain wave that needed immediate acting on. Here in the bar he was the one who could give concrete form to the president’s thoughts and carry ideas through. The tear-jerking ballad being over, the secretaries of state clapped their hands raw. Báróecsedi spread his arms to show how transported he was, that no dyke could sing more beautifully than this dyke had just done. He knew what he was talking about: he was in the business himself. The president stood up, kissed the artiste’s hand, and led her back to the table. The head screw also leapt up and busily set to polishing the chair the lady was about to sit on with the sleeve of his jacket. The poet covered his eyes, as though such heavenly raptures were too much for him. He really got off on it.

I put the sticks down. The president ordered Champagne for the band. With all the low lighting everyone was in the mood. It was like an angel had flown through the place.

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.

It was then I bit the grass.

I remember it clear as day now. I’d never eaten grass before. There I was, flat on my belly in the mud of the motherland, when suddenly I found myself eating grass. I’d bitten into the mud. I could taste the clay. I don’t know what was up with me, the devil alone knows … I’d no idea. All the same there I was, chewing the grass and the mud like an animal with rabies or like someone who’d drunk too much strong coffee so it drove him mad. I bit the grass, the way they say someone bites the dust in battle, like they’ve crossed over and joined the other heroes in heaven. What caused it? Being pushed around so long in the morning? Who knows. And now I’d taken a bite of home soil. That’s when I realized what I was doing.

It didn’t last long, and I soon came to my senses. But I was in shock. The grass and the earth together tasted more bitter than the Champagne the president had lavished on us in the bar.

Here was the border of my lovely little country, it was night, it was muddy, and the stars were out. I was an animal. But not only an animal. I was a man, and for the first time in my life I was conscious.

As you yourself know, then and before, there was a great deal said about our national soil. Others were chewing on that soil long before I was, and I don’t mean literally. They were bringing up “our national soil” at the national assembly, scattering it round in parliament, and shoveling it in handfuls from soapboxes. There was a stream of comrades coming to the village to explain to the people that the land was ours now. Before, it was four acres for Papa, and four thousand acres for the count. And all the vast spread of land everywhere in the country, all that soil, was ours … I heard it when I was a kid in diapers and have carried on hearing it ever since. The moment I first drew my boots on, they told me, “That’s national soil, comrade — the land is yours.” But now I realized I’d never really understood when they said, “The land is yours.” What was the soil? The land? The country? The nation? All I remember is that there were always shortages, always the sheer slog. When the count skipped it shortly after they carved up his estate, what was left to me of his land … when dad was spitting out his broken teeth in the village hall because they put his name on the kulak list and he didn’t want to sign his acres away to join the collective … what did the land mean then? The soil? The country? My head was spinning. It was like waking from a mixed-up dream.

I lay there on my belly on the land, on my country’s land, like a freshly washed corpse, the thoughts in my head whizzing round and round like a carousel. There was a song we used to sing when I was a kid at the village school. “If Earth is our Lord’s Easter bonnet / We’re the sprig of flowers on it …” The words came back to me. But however I tried I couldn’t pick up the smell of flowers. Maybe because the meadow we were crawling across was partly marsh … The wet mud, the marshy feel of it, brought back a lot of memories. I was sorry to lose my drumsticks. I’d left them in the bar. They were good sticks, made of hazelwood. You couldn’t get the like in Rome. I don’t need them in New York, because they won’t let me play. I can’t practice my art. Lying there in the mud, I was wondering what else I’d left behind … What, after all, did it mean to have a country, a homeland? This country in particular?

Life is hard, friend. I remembered what I’d been there. First it was “Yes, Your Worship” and “Dirty prole.” Then I discovered I was the nation, the people, and that everything was mine now. But the fact is nothing was ever mine. This hadn’t occurred to me before. Not that I’d ever ranted on about my homeland this and my country that. I didn’t think anyone owed me a living. But now, there on the border, it all came back, all mixed up. It seemed to me there were different notions of my country. They explained to me that it used to belong to the gentry. But now there was a different country that belonged to the people. But what did I have, me as myself? What was my country? And if I did have one, what had happened to it? Suddenly it had slipped from under me and, frankly, I didn’t know whether it really existed anymore, and if it did exist, where it was. It must have existed somewhere, because I could smell it right here, in the mud where I lay. Much later Sweetheart told me — it was late at night — that when she was a girl she slept in a ditch, and dormice and squirrels used to scamper over her. The smell of that ditch must have been something like the smell of the marshy meadow I was lying in. It was the smell of mud she must have breathed in when she first found herself in the ditch, the ditch that was her home, her soil, her motherland. It was what I could smell as I was leaving it behind. But it was different from the smell that I wanted to escape in the bar. It wasn’t a choking smell like that, but something more familiar, like our own smell. Because that’s me, that’s how I smell. It’s an earth smell, and that earth smell had followed me all the way to the border. It was as if that was all that remained of home for me.

Now that everything was changing I knew just one thing, that once I was over the field there wouldn’t be that foul smell in my nose, the stench I first noticed in the bar. The stench that remained in my nose and had soaked through my skin. It was like sleeping with a whore and still smelling of her in the morning so you have to scrub and scrub to smell clean again. All I knew is that I didn’t feel like playing the drums for any of them. I wouldn’t sing like a canary for them. I’d sooner be stretched out in the mud, on the border.

It was dawn when the searchlights went out. The Swabian, who’d started out digging wells, had become a gamekeeper, then, finally, a kind of one-man business smuggling undesirables, gold coins, in fact anything that could be moved, across the border, now gave the signal. We went on all fours, like dogs, scurrying like that out of the country. I left the country covered in mud — in every sense. The rest was routine. I’d coughed up five hundred as a deposit, and now that it was over I gave him another thousand as agreed. The Austrian cop who came across us was already bored, because, day and night, there were countless numbers of us crawling out of the woodwork, people screwed by the people’s democracy. But in the end it was all quite simple. They put us in a camp first, but I didn’t stay long. After eight weeks I got the visa from Rome. My brother sent it, the one who’d left me with the revolver. I got the work permit because dagos respect artists and there was a constant need for drummers there. By fall I was drumming in a bar.

Wait, a lady customer. Welcome, my fair lady. Just a martini dry, as usual? You are served, lady.

Take a good look at her without her noticing, because you rarely see anyone like her. They say five years ago she was well known on Broadway. She played in the theater next door, big place, where they don’t sing, just talk. She was a hit like you wouldn’t dream of. She’d run up and down the stage in a black wig because she was supposed to be bananas and raved in English at her husband that he should liquidate the houseguest who happened to be an English king. She rushed around here and there with a knife in her hand and she was supposed to be, it said on the program, Lady Makebed or some such thing. So then she got the call from Hollywood because they told her she’d make a stash there, she’d be Miss Frankenstein. But they had ideas … first they took out her teeth, then they started reshaping her private parts, and that was all okay, but then they wanted to monkey with her face, and the plastic surgeon was a fraction out in his measurements, so she got fixed with this permanent half-smile, there, as you can see … She can’t do anything about it, it’s like she was greeting you with a smile, her mouth half-open. There weren’t going to be any parts for her with a mouth like that, but they got her a return ticket and sent her back to New York. Here they told her she couldn’t speak the parts with a half-open mouth, she was all wrong for them. Ever since then she’s been coming to this bar. She’s sold the fur. After the third martini she gets sentimental and starts weeping. But her mouth is so fixed she still looks as though she’s laughing. She parties and weeps like our happy forefathers, the Hungarians of old. Don’t look at her or she’ll be over immediately in case you don’t mind paying. I’ve put a dozen martinis in the book for her, all on credit, but I’m not going to say anything. We artists got to stick together when we’re broke. Another for you? What you looking at?

The photo? It was the one in the passport, I’ve just had it enlarged. Where could she go without a passport? To join the angels, friend. You don’t need passports or photographs there. No jewelry, either. Take a good look at her. That’s what she was like. But not just like that. By the time I met her she was like a flower at the end of the season.

I don’t like talking about her. She’s been gone ten years. Soon after that I too said “Ciao, Roma” and crossed the Big Pond. They say what’s gone is gone, why fret about it? Yes, but heaven knows it’s not always like that. Some things don’t disappear quite so easy … because this picture isn’t the only reminder I have of her. I remember more … her voice, for a start. And some of what she told me. She wasn’t like the usual kind of woman I met. The rest have vanished without a trace. But I remember this one.

Because, as you probably know, with artists like me, chicks more or less just pass each other the house key. There were all kinds, I needn’t list them all. There were cute little thin girls. There were big ones. There were showgirls with boobs out to here, but also women with class, women with a position in life … women with taste who sensed their time was almost over, who’d grown wild and started firing on all cylinders … but, let me be clear, all of them wanted just one thing, which was that I should love and adore them, and only them, forever.

This one was different. She wasn’t a bag of nerves. She told me straight from the start, no beating about the bush, that the only thing she wanted of me was that I should let her adore me. She wasn’t insisting on full-blown romance with hearts and flowers. Cigarettes were all she needed — that is, apart from adoring me and making a fuss of me.

At first I thought she had fallen for the artist in me. I’m not one to boast, I’m simply recognizing the fact that there’s something irresistible about me … especially now that I’ve had the bottom set of my teeth fixed. What you laughing at? It’s just as I said. They don’t come to me because I look good. I’m not like those snotty kids with one-track minds who hang around in bars … It’s the artist in me, that I still am, though they can’t know my true quality … The Irish widow I’m currently fixed with will tell you the same. It’s the artist that’s the draw, that knocks them out.

It took me time to find out what her trouble really was. Because there’d been someone, someone who was and wasn’t there … Her husband? No, he’d vanished from her life, she wasn’t interested in him. It was someone else, another one who left the country. So then she followed him from Budapest. But she missed him — the guy had popped it before the kid arrived in Rome. The useless bastard had died on her, he wasn’t going to wait for her. He’s dust now in the Roman cemetery, like Sweetheart. At least they’re together now. When she discovered her knight-at-arms hadn’t waited for her, she got real depressed. She was so lonely in Rome, she was like a virgin widow mourning for a guy who’d died before they could get married.

We met in a café in Rome. A Hungarian paper was sticking out of my pocket. It caught her eyes. Because back then I’d buy a Hungarian newspaper or some such thing when I was feeling a bit nostalgic. Then we got together. I don’t want to make it seem smoother than it was. She was a bit cool at first, but she soon came to. Neither of us were doing anything in the evening so I invited her to the bar. Next day I moved in with her at the hotel, and it became our love nest. Fall was real nice in Rome that year, nice weather. The good life didn’t last that long, but long enough for me to discover the truth. One evening when we were down to our last penny she told me everything.

Was it the truth? Can’t be sure of that — I mean, you never know with women. But I felt she was kind of emptying herself out, holding nothing back. She was no shy violet, not a giggly little girlie given to blushing. For once in her life she wanted to tell someone the truth, or whatever she thought was the truth. It might have been all fantasy, as it always is when a woman is really hard pressed. She started with her husband, who was still alive somewhere but was no longer her husband. And she finished with this bald guy, the one she followed to Rome … she followed him like someone with a real itch. Because by that time she could no longer stick the people’s democracy.

So I heard her through, right till dawn. It was kind of exciting, a bit criminal, talking through the night. She spilled the beans on what life with the gentry was like.

I was prepared to take it with a pinch of salt, if you know what I mean. But she convinced me, because, well, the kid was like me, she’d worked her way up into high society, starting lower than even I did, me, a boy from Zala! She came from the underclass. Literally. She pushed her way out of the mud the way a zombie does in a graveyard. She spent her childhood in a ditch in the wetlands along with the rest of her family. Her dad was an occasional farmhand, but then Sweetheart went to work as a maid for the gentry. For some time she was just a scullery maid, a nobody with bad shoes, someone to wash the toilet out after Their Lordships had used it. But eventually one of the crazy boujis started getting the hots for her, and it turned out to be the master’s son. She made him wait for it until he married her. Pretty soon she became Her Ladyship.

Then, one night, she told me what it was like living in this oh-so-refined, well-mannered house once the world was stood on its head. The old order was going right down the drain. I liked hearing about that. I was sure she was telling the truth. But it was like a fairy tale too, like something from another world, a world I wouldn’t have minded taking a peek in, what they call “the rich man’s playground.” But I only got to first base. The ladies I went with never invited me into their parlors or to their social affairs.

This particular story stuck in her mind. Because at that time, and even now, there’s a lot said about the end of the class war because it’s over now that we proles are winning. The upper classes are just ticking over, playing extra time before the game is up.

But when there’s no one to talk to in the bar, I sit and think. Did I, a prole, really come out on the winning side? My boss there in the back room is a nicer guy than the bailiff was back in Zala. I’ve got a car, an Irish widow, a TV, an icebox — I’ve even got a credit card. In other worlds I’m a dude, a proper dzhentleman. And it’s all on the plan. If I ever got curious about culture, I could afford to buy a book. But I hold back, because I had a hard time of it and I’ve learned to be modest. I don’t need a book to tell me the class war is not being fought out in the streets now. But a prole remains a prole and the cream remains the cream, it’s just that we avoid each other in different ways now. A long time ago, the devil knows how, it came about that the poor guy had to sweat to produce everything the rich guy needed. Today, though, the rich guy has to rack his brains to see how he can get me, the poor guy, to buy everything some middle guy produces. He wants to force-feed me, to cram me like a fattened goose. He needs to fatten me up, because the only way the middle guy can remain the middle guy and the rich guy the rich guy is if I buy whatever the middle guy tries to palm off on me. The middle guy’s job is to hand me all kinds of crap on credit. It’s a mad world, friend, and its rules are pretty hard to figure out. Take my car! It’s parked there on the corner. It’s brand-new. Whenever I get in it and turn the key, I remember what it was like when I was a kid — a car! my God! — I ran around barefoot and was dazzled any time a trap with a couple of horses trotted past me, a trap with the driver up front with shiny metal buttons on his vest, a ribbon hanging off his top hat, cracking his whip like a cop handing out a beating. Two horses! That was the dude back then. But now it’s like my cart has a hundred and fifty horses pulling it along — that’s horsepower for you! And sometimes when I draw up alongside a bus I think I’m the hundred-and-fifty-first, because I could get home easier by subway or the bus. Some Saturdays, the widow and I and a few pals get in the car and drive out to the sea, where we eat a burger, but we don’t get out, because why should we? Then we go home. But I need the car, because it’s status. Same with the tape recorder. I’ve recorded everything from singing “Yankee Doodle” through to reciting Our Father so the world can keep my voice for posterity … but now it just sits in a corner gathering dust and I can’t think what else to do with it. I don’t even have to multiply and divide, I let the gizmo do that for me. There’s a computer guy who comes in here who sold me one those pocket calculators. You just press the buttons and up come the numbers. That makes me as smart as Edison, right? And there’s that other machine where you don’t have to write out everything, you just photocopy your Dear John letter and hand it to the mailman. And there’s the shaver — I mean, it scrapes the monkey off you. And the toothbrush — electricity again — see the ones I’ve just had done, I could pass for a bishop. On credit. And … I lose track. I’ve got a newfangled camera where you just push a button and it spits out your picture, just like that. You can have endless fun with your girlfriend this way and be confident your fun won’t pass through someone’s developer, you can keep your screwing in the house the way my mother used to keep soup. And this is all mine, me, a prole! My mama, who all her life washed the underpants in a tub, wouldn’t believe her eyes if she were here. I’d buy her one of those pants washers — and dryers too. Electric! Because all this is mine now, it belongs to the working-class boy! Not to mention the world — the whole wide world is mine, because … see here, the bellboy, a snotty-nosed kid, has just taken his bride on a flight to Africa, to Kenya, on credit, on installments … I could do it myself … And should I want to really indulge myself, I could pay for sex with as many people as I like. I could join a club. It’s like the stud farm back in Zala, when they lead the bull in. I could join and become a member. Certainly opens your eyes! Quite a life, eh? But look around, use your own eyes. When I first arrived in this enormous gut of a country, I didn’t have a nickel. And today? Take a good look at me, look me up and down — believe it or not, I swear to God I am in debt to the tune of eight thousand greenback dollars! Go out and do it yourself, sucker! And don’t leave your mouth hanging open, I can see you don’t believe me. Ask anyone in the neighborhood, they’ll all tell you. Just hang round awhile and you too can have a lawn mower and an electric cooker with a red light to fry your burgers in a proper scientific manner. And everything is there on tap, because your middle-class middleman is waiting there, his tongue hanging out, just dying to make a lord out of your bottom-line prole. You too will get consumer fever, the way I did, the way a sheep gets fleas.

Okay, slide me that glass. There … you know, every so often, despite being a prole, I sometimes feel this big emptiness in me. It’s like the way His Ex-Lordship suddenly feels homesick. The worst thing is the way they won’t leave you in peace. There’s advertisements everywhere — buy this, order that. I’ll order up a one-way ticket to heaven next, just so I get some peace. When I was in Rome I heard how back in the old days, when the Caesars were around, the top Roman guys used to tickle their throats with a peacock feather so they could heave up in order to make room for the next delicious thing. That’s what those advertisements are: peacock feathers. They get you all excited, and I don’t mean just me, but the dog and the cat besides, since they can see what great things the dogs and cats on TV fill their bellies with. That’s the class war today! We’ve won, buddy! It’s just that I have to touch my head to check it’s still there, and to see if I can stuff any more into it.

When Sweetheart was cleaning out the john back home, being rich meant something different. She spent a whole night telling me about it.

I can’t remember everything she said. We talked like we were trying to spin out a never-ending good-bye. But some of those things come to mind now and then. It was like it wasn’t her speaking at all those times, not Sweetheart at all, the girl who’d made her way up from the very bottom — I mean, she never went to school, not like Her Ladyship, the one she served. And Sweetheart could really talk, talk like a tape recorder, like recorded speech. Her mind was like a narrow strip of sound tape: it preserved every little thing, every bit of background noise. Every syllable stuck to it the way a fly does to flypaper. You say it: it stays there. Maybe all women have a spool of tape inside them like that. And maybe, once in their lives, they find just the right set of equipment, one that catches their voices just so, and then they say everything they’ve been saying to themselves, inside themselves, all those years … It’s quite a fashion item now, the recorder, and women soon catch on to fashion. Sweetheart quickly extracted the important information from the stuff the gentry used to chat about in their own secret language, the kind of language only the invited and members of the family spoke. It’s like the way only Gypsies understand Romany, the horse dealers and the guys in caravans. The gentry had their own self-made language too. It’s like not saying what you really think but doing a kind of dance around it while smiling sweetly all the time. The times people like us curse, they keep quiet. And they eat different stuff. And they get rid of it differently too, not like us proles. But Sweetheart saw all this and was a quick learner. By the time she met me, she could have been a professor at some institution where they teach civilization to the spiritually deprived. From the moment she started scrubbing out the john she learned everything from the gentry, things she could never have dreamt of in the ditch. Believe it or not, it turned out that later she had not only jewels, not only furs, but her own nail-polish remover. What’s up? You don’t believe me? I tell it as it is. Mind you, she herself spoke about it in an embarrassed kind of way, as if the deal weren’t quite straight.

She paid attention to everything; she was like a sparrow that pecks up grains in horseshit. That was till she met the bald guy, some kind of writer, who was highbrow, like the big shots here in the bar, but in a different way. He was the sort of writer who didn’t want to write anymore. And some of the things he said got under Sweetheart’s skin — they excited her. She told me in a shaky voice that she had never slept with him, that they only had soul-to-soul chats, that’s all. It might have been so, I guess, otherwise she wouldn’t have followed him to Rome. The clown must have given her some ideas that made her feel a little giddy. He rambled on about how there was something that couldn’t simply be demanded at the barricades or extorted by threatening to bomb people. It was something really extra, like the shivers you get when you’re at it in bed. And when it comes to things like that, a prole like me begins to suspect that it’s pointless having every bargain going, that there’s no real happiness to be got till he’s wrestled some special magic from the old master’s fist.

It was something like that, she was saying. Sweetheart couldn’t really understand it herself, but I saw how it excited her. And now, much later, I myself am scratching my head trying to work out what it is that bugs us all. The stuff the bourgeois have that still remains to get. It’s hard to get, of course, because the bastards have taken good care to hide it. My insides itch when I think of it. There was a time when only the upper classes allowed themselves to suffer from nerves. But nowadays I see how nervous a guy in jeans gets when someone different from him comes and sits next to him on the subway. Or at the movies. Anywhere. He gets nervous, makes sure he has no body contact, and gives his neighbor — so different from himself — sidelong glances. He suspects that he is not as important as that other guy, the one next to him, the one with the pressed clothes and spectacles. It’s not the guy’s manner that gets to him — I mean, I learned that a long time ago, and I’m as well-mannered and as correct in my behavior as the newly elected chairman of the local council. It’s something else, the devil knows what, whoever invented it.

Sweetheart quickly learned everything you need for good manners. But the bald guy said something to her that wouldn’t let her be. Right down to when it seemed it wasn’t her speaking. It was someone else speaking through her, the way someone plays an instrument, a violin or a piano. The music is what comes out. When this idiot half-ass scribbler disappeared from her life, from our lovely Budapest, she couldn’t just let him go, so she followed him … Eventually she confessed that he’d died there in Rome, among the statues, in the very hotel, in the very bed in the very room where we were sleeping, that’s when we weren’t making hay. That’s women for you. Take it from me, buddy, listen to experience. They’ll follow whoever they’ve really set their eyes on, providing they haven’t already slept with them. They get all screwed up and twisted with frustration. They are set on the idea that the guy they want should become a part of them. They visit the cemetery and get upset when they see someone else’s flowers on the grave of the poor faithless departed. All because a second-rate poet tells them there’s something better in the world than grub and booze. What is it? They call it “culture.” And the clown goes on to say this culture thing is all a kind of reflex.

Have you any idea what that is? Neither of us really got it: not her, not me. Afterwards I couldn’t help looking it up in the dictionary … I actually took a walk down to the library and looked up “reflex.” I thought about it, I turned it over and over in my mind till I was quite sick of it, but ended no wiser. It was compulsive, like when someone’s constantly touching their nose to check it’s still there … The dictionary said there was the learned kind and the inherited kind … you ever heard of such a thing?

But that’s the shit with culture, you need it for status too now. I can’t see why people sweat tears over it, because it’s not like it’s a secret anymore. It’s all there in the big encyclopedias. You just take the book from the shelf and there you are, you got culture. So what is it? Oh yes, it’s a reflex too. Look, I’m a simple guy, as you know. A modest man. So I’m telling you straight, I am genuinely cultured. Just look at me! I know I don’t play the drums anymore, but I still got reflexes … Sometimes, when I’m at home with my Irish widow — she’s religious — I take out the drums and I drum like I see on TV, like that black preacher when he’s whipping up his flock. The widow grows dreamy then, leans her head on my shoulder, and her breath comes short until she too gets the reflex. Nobody could say of me I don’t have a reflex … So am I still a prole? Is there something left for me to take from the gentry that I haven’t yet taken? Something they don’t want to give me? … You and I saw the Commies up close, didn’t we? They can do their song and dance about what it will be like when everything belongs to the masses, the people. The union guys here have worked it out that they get a better deal here with Count Rockefeller and Prince Ford than they’d get from the fruits of their socialist labor. The pay’s better. We know by now that it’s all talk and big words. Is it possible, then, that the class war is still not over? Is there anything the bourgeois has tucked away from us? And should a prole lose his hair over that?

Wait a moment, I see the lady is crying. I can’t bear to look at her when her eyes are full of tears but her mouth is grinning. I must look after the embalmer too … look how enviously he’s looking at her, because she’s got that holy smile without the use of paraffin.

Look, this is what she looked like the moment before she got on the plane without a return ticket. Go on, have a good look. I look at it sometimes myself.

One evening there was someone else who was looking at her. Year ago, about midnight, when the place was almost empty, these two customers came in. The play in the theater next door had just failed, because it was all talk, all philosophy. They arrived about midnight, they sat here where you’re now sitting. They sat opposite the shelves where we keep the goods. And they looked at the photographs.

They were quiet drinkers. Refined types. You could see they were classy guys with proper reflexes. But you could also see they were drawing their pensions. It’s the kind of thing you immediately notice. Three-eighty a month, plus sickness benefit. One had snow-white hair like Father Christmas. The other had sideburns, like he’d still fancy a good time, but could no longer afford it, all he could afford being a bit of extra hair on the side of his head. I wasn’t really listening to them, but they were speaking a different version of English from the rest … they spoke like they hadn’t grown up with English but learned it. But they’d learned it not here in the U.S.A. but in England. Both wore glasses and well-traveled suits. I noticed that Santa’s sleeves were longer than they should be, because they weren’t made to measure for him, he’d bought the jacket cheap, off the peg at a thrift store — I guessed he hadn’t paid more than two Lincolns for them. All the same, they were nice guys, by which I mean they had no money.

But they went through their bludimeris like there was no tomorrow. They chatted away quietly. I half-heard them discussing the fact that in a country as wealthy as America very few people were happy. I pricked up my ears then, because I myself had formed that impression. That’s hard to see when you’re new here, and from over the water, but once you get used to it and become a regular Joe, like me, well, you get to thinking about it too, and soon there I am stroking my chin as if I’d forgotten to shave. Because, no good denying it, here where people have everything they need for the good life, it’s as if happiness — I mean real, joyful, ear-to-ear-grinning happiness — simply escaped them. Over at Macy’s nearby you can really buy anything you need in this world. You can even get a lighter that never needs new fuel. It comes in a case. But you can’t buy happiness, not even in the drugs department.

That’s what the two customers were saying. Actually it was the one with the sideburns doing all the talking, Santa just nodded. And as they grew ever more absorbed in their philosophizing it was suddenly like hearing Sweetheart’s voice. That last night she was saying something about how culture and happiness were the same thing … or maybe that’s what her scribbler hero said. I didn’t understand it then, I don’t really understand it even now, but when the two old guys started talking I remembered her words. I listened in discreetly.

They didn’t spend a long time on the subject. The one with the sideburns happened to mention, sort of casually, that there was a lot of amusement in this great country, but pure joy, the joy that comes straight from the heart, was rare. When I think back to that now, it seems the joy is going out of Europe, but here, in New York, it’s as if it hadn’t caught on in the first place. The devil knows why! But he couldn’t have understood it, either — the highbrow, I mean; he must have been an educated man — because he pulled a face and said the best thing would be if the government put up people’s pensions, then they’d have something to be happy about. On that they agreed. Then he paid and left. Santa remained, ordered one more, and lit a butt. When I offered him a light, he pointed at the photograph with his thumb and asked me in Hungarian, but casually, as if getting in on a conversation that had been going some time, “Were you there when she died?”

I leaned on the counter with both hands. I thought I was going to collapse. I looked at him hard. I recognized him. It was her husband.

I tell you, I’m not ashamed of it … My heart beat in my chest like someone was drumming in there. But then I took a deep breath and simply told him I wasn’t there. At dawn, when I returned from the bar, her face was still warm, but she didn’t say anything.

He nodded graciously, as if it was what he expected. He asked me questions in a low voice and smiled now and then. He asked if money was short and whether the jewels saw her through to the end. I assured him she hadn’t a care in the world, because I was there looking after her. He noted this, and nodded like a priest at confessional who listens through to everything, then offers you three Our Fathers. He would like to know, he said, but always polite and friendly-like, if she had a decent funeral, with everything necessary. I answered him obediently, but all the time I was clenching my fist. But he carried on in exactly the same voice.

I never discovered, not then, not later, how he found me, how he knew I was working there. How did he come by the details, the hotel, the jewels? … I’d never seen him in the bar before. Later I went to the Hungarian quarter on the right bank and asked people, but no one had heard of him. But he knew all there was to know about me, even the fact that my performing name was Ede. I knew that because he asked, again perfectly friendly, “And are you happy, Ede?”

Like an old acquaintance. No, not like that … Like a boss meeting an employee, as if he were still in the chair and me under it. I answered politely. But as I told you, I was clenching my fists all the time. Because it was dawning on me that someone had grassed me up. You know, the way he spoke so quietly. He was so polite, so natural. As if I weren’t even worth screaming at. He could have called me names, what would I have cared? He spoke to me like we weren’t on opposite sides. That’s why I felt so angry, that’s why my fists were clenched. Because if he screamed at me, shouting “I know everything, now talk!”—well, we would have been equals. If he said, “Look here, Ede, I’m long retired, but I’m still the doctor and you the patient,” well, I’d have answered him as best I could. If he had said, “I played the fool with that woman, but that was a long time ago and it doesn’t matter anymore — tell me how she died,” I’d have muttered something like “Sorry, nothing I could do, that’s how it was.” If he hits me, fine, I hit him back. We may roll around on the deck a little while the boss rings the cops and they take both of us away; that would have been fine too, it would have been gentlemanly. But this quiet chat in the crazy enormous world, here in the bar … it made the blood rush to my head. Because such quiet words counted as offense in our situation. I felt my fingers itching and my gorge rising.

He took a Lincoln from his pocket. I could see his hand was trembling. I started closing up the till. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t hurry me. He leaned on the counter and winked, as if he had had one more than was befitting a gentlemen of his standing. And he started smiling, a saintly kind of smile.

I looked him over carefully out of the side of my eye. You could see he was at the end of the road. Old clothes, a shirt he’d clearly been wearing for days, and those glassy eyes behind the glasses. It didn’t need careful examination to see that this man, who had to be addressed as “Doctor”—that’s what I remember — who after the siege on the Danube embankment had left her standing there, as if she weren’t the woman he’d gone crazy over, but someone who once worked for him that he had no more use for — this man was now strictly lower-class. And he still thinks he’s superior? I could feel the gorge rising in my throat and had to keep swallowing. I was all worked up inside like I’d never been. If this big shot left the bar now without confessing that the game was up and that it was me who had come out on top … You understand? I was afraid there’d be trouble. He gave me the Lincoln.

“It’s for three,” he said. He took his glasses off and polished them. He stared straight ahead in that shortsighted way. The bill said three-sixty. I handed back one-forty. He waved me away.

“Keep it, Ede. It’s yours.”

This was it. The flashpoint! But he wasn’t looking at me, he was trying to stand up. That wasn’t too easy for him, and he had to clutch at the counter. I looked at the one-forty in my palm and wondered whether to throw it in his face. But I couldn’t speak. Eventually, after a good deal of trouble, he managed to straighten up.

“You parked far away, Doctor?” I asked.

He shook his head and gave a smoker’s cough.

“I don’t have a car. I’ll use the subway.”

I answered him as firmly as I could.

“Mine’s parked nearby. It’s new. I’ll drive you home.”

“No,” he hiccupped. “The subway is fine. Takes me right home.”

“Now you listen to me, buddy!” I bellowed at him. “I’ll drive you home in my new car! Me, the stinking prole.”

I came out from behind the counter and took a step toward him. If he refuses, I thought, I’ll knock his teeth out. Because, in the end, you just have to.

It was like the cat got his tongue. He squinted up at me.

“Okay,” he said, and nodded. “Take me home, you stinking prole.”

I put my arms around him and helped him through the door, the comradely way only men know, the kind of men who’ve slept with the same woman. Now that’s real democracy for you.

He got out at One Hundredth, just before the Arab quarter. He disappeared, like concrete in the river. I never saw him again.

Here come the writers. You’d best clear off — quick, that way, to the left. There might be a labor-camp vet from the old country among them … No harm in being careful. Call in again at the end of the week. And mind to steer well clear of the cement trade.

Welcome, gentlemen. You are served, sir!